will be found to be identical with the one published in the Galaxy, I will pay to that agent $500 cash. Moreover, if at any specified time I fail to produce at the same place a copy of the London Saturday review of October 8th, containing a lengthy criticism upon the Innocence Abroad, entirely different in every paragraph and sentence from the one I published in the Galaxy, I will pay to the Inquirer agent another $500 cash. I offer Sheldon and Company publishers 500 Broadway, New York, as my backers. Anyone in New York authorized by the Inquirer will received prompt attention. It is an easy and profitable way for the Inquirer people to prove that they have not uttered a pitiful, deliberate falsehood in the above paragraphs. Will they swallow that falsehood ignominiously, or will they send an agent to the Galaxy office? I think the Cincinnati Inquirer must be edited by children. End of Section 31. This is Section 32 of the $30,000 bequest and other stories by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. A letter to the Secretary of the Treasury, Riverdale on the Hudson, October 15, 1902. The Honorable, the Secretary of the Treasury, Washington, D.C. Sir, prices for the customary kinds of winter fuel having reached an altitude which puts them out of the reach of literary persons in straightened circumstances, I desire to place with you the following order. Forty-five tons best old dry government bonds, suitable for furnace, gold, seven percent, 1864 preferred. Twelve tons early greenbacks, range, size, suitable for cooking. Eight barrels seasoned, twenty-five and fifty-cent postal currency, vintage of 1866, eligible for kindlings. Please deliver with all convenient dispatch at my house in Riverdale at lowest rates for spot cash, and send bill to your obliged servant, Mark Twain, who will be very grateful and will vote right. Amended Obituaries To the Editor Sir. I am approaching seventy. It is in sight. It is only three years away. Necessarily I must go soon. It is but matter of course wisdom, then, that I should begin to set my worldly house in order now, so that it may be done calmly and with thoroughness, in place of waiting until the last day, and as we have often seen, the attempt to set both houses in order at the same time has been marred by the necessity for haste, and by the confusion and waste of time arising from the inability of the notary and the ecclesiastic to work together harmoniously, taking turn about and giving each other friendly assistance, not perhaps in fielding, which could hardly be expected, but at least in the minor offices of keeping game and umpiring, by consequence of which conflict of interests and absence of harmonious action, a draw has frequently resulted where this ill fortune could not have happened if the houses had been set in order one at a time and hurry avoided by beginning in season, and giving to each the amount of time fairly and justly proper to it. In setting my earthly house in order I find it of moment that I should attend in person to one or two matters, which men in my position have long had the habit of leaving wholly to others, with consequences often most regrettable. I wish to speak of only one of these matters at this time—obituaries. Of necessity an obituary is a thing which cannot be so judiciously edited by any hand as by that of the subject of it. In such a work it is not the facts that are of chief importance, but the light which the obituaris shall throw upon them, the meaning which he shall dress them in, the conclusions which he shall draw from them, and the judgments which he shall deliver upon them. The verdicts, you understand. That is the danger line. In considering this matter in view of my approaching change it has seemed to me wise to take such measures as may be feasible to acquire, by courtesy of the press, access to my standing obituaries, with the privilege, if this is not asking too much, of editing, not their facts, but their verdicts. This not for the present profit, further than as concerns my family, but as a favorable influence usable on the other side, where there are some who are not friendly to me. With this explanation of my motives I will now ask you of your courtesy to make an appeal for me to the public press. It is my desire that such journals and periodicals as have obituaries of me lying in their pigeon-holes, with a view to sudden use some day, will not wait longer, but will publish them now, and kindly send me a marked copy. My address is simply New York City. I have no other that is permanent and not transient. I will correct them, not the facts, but the verdicts, striking out such clauses as could have a deleterious influence on the other side, and replacing them with clauses of a more judicious character. I should of course expect to pay double rates for both the omissions and the substitutions, and I should also expect to pay quadruple rates for all obituaries which prove to be rightly and wisely worded in the originals, thus requiring no commendations at all. It is my desire to leave these amended obituaries neatly bound behind me as a perennial consolation and entertainment to my family, and as an heirloom, which shall have a mournful but definite commercial value for my remote posterity. I beg, sir, that you will insert this advertisement, one T-E-O-W, agate, inside, and send the bill to, yours very respectfully, Mark Twain. P.S., for the best obituary, one suitable for me to read in public and calculate it to inspire regret, I desire to offer a prize consisting of a portrait of me done entirely by myself and penned an ink without previous instructions. The ink warranted to be the kind used by the very best artists. End of Section 32. Someone has revealed to the Tribune that I once suggested to Reverend Thomas K. Beecher of Elmira, New York, that we get up a monument to Adam and that Mr. Beecher favored the project. There is more to it than that. The matter started as a joke, but it came somewhat near to materializing. It is long ago, thirty years, Mr. Darwin's descent of man had been in print five or six years, and the storm of indignation raised by it was still raging in pulpits and periodicals. In tracing the genesis of the human race back to its sources Mr. Darwin had left Adam out altogether. We had monkeys and missing links and plenty of other kinds of ancestors, but no Adam. Jesting with Mr. Beecher and other friends in Elmira, I said there seemed to be a likelihood that the world would discard Adam and accept the monkey and that in the course of time Adam's very name would be forgotten in the earth. Therefore this calamity ought to be averted. A monument would accomplish this and Elmira ought not to waste this honorable opportunity to do Adam a favor and herself a credit. Then the unexpected happened. Two bankers came forward and took hold of the matter, not for fun, not for sentiment, but because they saw in the monument certain commercial advantages for the town. The project had seemed gently humorous before, it was more than that now, with this stern business gravity injected into it, the bankers discussed the monument with me. We met several times. They proposed an indestructible memorial to cost twenty-five thousand dollars. The insane oddity of a monument set up in a village to preserve a name that would outlast the hills and the rocks without any such help would advertise Elmira to the ends of the earth and draw custom. It would be the only monument on the planet to Adam, and in the matter of interest and impressiveness could never have a rival until somebody should set up a monument to the Milky Way. People would come from every corner of the globe and stop off to look at it. No tour of the world would be complete that left out Adam's monument. Elmira would be a mecca. There would be pilgrim ships at pilgrim rates, pilgrim specials on the continent's railways. Libraries would be written about the monument. Every tourist would kodak it. Models of it would be for sale everywhere in the earth. Its form would become as familiar as the figure of Napoleon. One of the bankers subscribed five thousand dollars, and I think the other one subscribed half as much, but I do not remember with certainty now whether that was the figure or not. We got designs made. Some of them came from Paris. In the beginning, as a detail of the project when it was yet a joke, I had framed a humble and beseeching and preferred petition to Congress begging the government to build the monument as a testimony of the great Republic's gratitude to the father of the human race and as a token of her loyalty to him in this dark day of his humiliation when his older children were doubting him and deserting him. It seemed to me that this petition ought to be presented now. It would be widely and feelingly abused and ridiculed and cursed, and would advertise our scheme and make our ground floor stock go off briskly. So I sent it to General Joseph R. Hawley, who was then in the house, and he said he would present it, but he did not do it. I think he explained that when he came to read it he was afraid of it. It was too serious, too gushy, too sentimental. The house might take it for earnest. We ought to have carried out our monument scheme. We could have managed it without any great difficulty, and O'Meira would now be the most celebrated town in the universe. Very recently I began to build a book in which one of the minor characters touches incidentally upon a project for a monument to Adam, and now the Tribune has come upon a trace of the forgotten jest of thirty years ago. Apparently mental telegraphy is still in business. It is odd, but the freaks of mental telegraphy are usually odd. A humane word from Satan. The following letter, signed by Satan and purporting to come from him, we have reason to believe, was not written by him, but by Mark Twain, editor. To the editor of Harper's Weekly. Dear Sir and Kinsman, let us have done with this frivolous talk. The American Board accepts contributions from me every year. Then why shouldn't it from Mr. Rockefeller? In all the ages, three-fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience money, as my books will show. Then what becomes of the sting when that term is applied to Mr. Rockefeller's gift? The American Board's trade is financed mainly from the graveyards. Bequests, you understand, conscience money. Confession of an old crime and deliberate perpetration of a new one, for deceased contribution, is a robbery of his heirs. Shall the Board decline bequests, because they stand for one of these offenses every time and generally for both? Allow me to continue. The charge most persistently and resentfully and remorselessly dwelt upon is that Mr. Rockefeller's contribution is incurably tainted by perjury. Perjury proved against him in the courts. It makes a smile down in my place. Because there isn't a rich man in your vast city who doesn't perjure himself every year before the tax board. They are all caked with perjury, many layers thick. Iron cloud, so to speak. If there is one that isn't, I desire to acquire him for my museum, and will pay dinosaur rates. Will you say it isn't infraction of the law, but only annual evasion of it? Comfort yourselves with that nice distinction, if you like, for the present. But by and by when you arrive I will show you something interesting, a whole hellful of evaders. Sometimes a frank lawbreaker turns up elsewhere, but I get those others every time. To return to my muttons, I wish you to remember that my rich perjurers are contributing to the American Board with frequency. It is money filched from the sworn-off personal tax. Therefore it is the wages of sin. Therefore it is my money. Therefore it is I that contributed. And finally, it is therefore, as I have said, since the Board daily accepts contributions from me, why should it decline them from Mr. Rockefeller, who is as good as I am, let the courts say what they may. Satan. End of Section 33. This is Section 34 of the $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Introduction to the New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English by Pedro Carolina. In this world of uncertainties there is, at any rate, one thing which may be pretty confidently set down as a certainty, and that is that this celebrated little phrase book will never die while the English language lasts. Its delicious unconscious ridiculousness and its enchanting naivete are as supreme and unapproachable in their way as our Shakespeare's sublimities. What so ever is perfect in its kind, in literature, is imperishable. Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book. Nobody can imitate it successfully. Nobody can hope to produce its fellow. It is perfect. It must and will stand alone. Its immortality is secure. It is one of the smallest books in the world, but few big books have received such wide attention, and been so much pondered by the grave and learned, and so much discussed and written about by the thoughtful, the thoughtless, the wise, and the foolish. Long notices of it have appeared, from time to time, in the great English reviews, and in erudite and authoritative philological periodicals. And it has been laughed at, danced upon, and tossed in a blanket by nearly every newspaper and magazine in the English-speaking world. Every scribbler, almost, has had his little fling at it, at one time or another. I had mine fifteen years ago. The book gets out of print, every now and then, and one ceases to hear of it for a season, but presently the nations and near and far colonies of our tongue and lineage call for it once more, and once more it issues from some London or Continental or American press, and runs a new course around the globe, wafted on its way by the wind of a world's laughter. Many persons have believed that this book's miraculous stupidities were studied and disingenuous, but no one can read the volume carefully through and keep that opinion. It was written in serious good faith and deep earnestness by an honest and upright idiot who believed he knew something with the English language and could impart his knowledge to others. The amplest proof of this crops out somewhere or other upon each and every page. There are sentences in the book which could have been manufactured by a man in his right mind, and with an intelligent and deliberate purpose to seem innocently ignorant, but there are other sentences and paragraphs which no mere pretended ignorance could ever achieve, nor yet even the most genuine and comprehensive ignorance when unbacked by inspiration. It is not a fraud who speaks in the following paragraph of the author's preface, but a good man, an honest man, a man whose conscience is at rest, a man who believes he has done a high and worthy work for his nation and his generation, and is well pleased with his performance. We expect, then, who the little book, for the care what we wrote him and for her typographical correction, that may be worth the acceptation of the studious persons and especially of the youth at which we dedicate him particularly. One cannot open this book anywhere and not find richness to prove that this is true. I will open it at random and copy the page I happen to stumble upon. Here is the result. Dialogue 16. For to see the town. Anathony go to a company they gentiles men, do they see the town. We want to see all that is it. Remarkable here. Come with me, if you please. I shall not forget nothing what come to merit your attention. Here we are near to Cathedral. Will you come in there? We will first to see him in outside, after we shall go in there for to look the interior.  The chasing of all they figures is astonishing indeed. The cupula and the nave are not less curious to see. What is this palace how I see yonder? It is the town hall. And this tower here at this side? It is the observatory. The bridge is very fine. It have ten arches and is constructed of free stone. The streets are very laid out by line and two paved. What is the circuit of this town? Two leagues. There is it also hospitals here? It not fail them. What are then the edifices the worthest to have seen? It is the arson hall. The spectacles hall. The kushum house. And the purse. We are going to see the others monuments such that the public pawnbrokers office. The plants gardens. The money offices. The library. That it shall be for another day. We are tired. Dialogue seventeen. To inform one self of a person. How is that gentleman who did speak by and by is a German? I did think him Englishman. He is of the Saxony side. He speak the French very well. Tough he is German. He speaks so much well Italian, French, Spanish, and English that among the Italians they believe him Italian. He speak the French as the Frenches themselves. The Spanish's men believe him Spanishing. And the English's Englishman. It is difficult to enjoy well so much several languages. The last remark contains a general truth. But it ceases to be a truth when one contracts it and applies it to an individual. Provided that that individual is the author of this book, Senor Pedro Carolino, I am sure I should not find it difficult to enjoy well so much several languages, or even a thousand of them, if he did the translating for me from the originals into his ostensible English. End of Section 34 This is Section 35 of The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Advice to little girls Good little girls ought not to make mouths at their teachers for every trifling offence. This retaliation should only be resorted to under peculiarly aggravated circumstances.  You ought never to take your little brother's chewing-gum away from him by main force. It is better to rope him in with the promise of the first two dollars and a half you find floating down the river on a grindstone, in the artless simplicity natural to this time of life he will regard it as a perfectly fair transaction. In all ages of the world this eminently plausible fiction has lured the obtuse infant to financial ruin and disaster. If at any time you find it necessary to correct your brother, do not correct him with mud, never on any account throw mud at him because it will spoil his clothes. It is better to scald him a little, for then you obtain desirable results. You secure his immediate attention to the lessons you are inculcating, and at the same time your hot water will have a tendency to move impurities from his person and possibly the skin in spots.  It is better and more becoming to intimate that you will do as she bids you and then afterward act quietly in the matter according to the dictates of your best judgment. You should ever bear in mind that it is to your kind parents that you are indebted for your food and your nice bed and for your beautiful clothes and for the privilege of staying home from school when you let on that you are sick.  Good little girls always show marked deference for the aged. You ought never to sass old people unless they sass you first. In Philadelphia they have a custom which it would be pleasant to see adopted throughout the land. It is that of appending to published death notices a little verse or two of comforting poetry. Anyone who is in the habit of reading the daily Philadelphia ledger must frequently be touched by these plaintive tributes to extinguished worth. In Philadelphia the departure of a child is a circumstance which is not more surely followed by a burial than by the accustomed solaceing poetry in the public ledger. In that city death loses half its terror because the knowledge of its presence comes thus disguised in the sweet drapery of verse. For instance, in a late ledger I find the following. I change the surname. Died. Hawks. On the seventeenth instant Clara, the daughter of Ephraim and Laura Hawks, aged twenty-one months and two days.  No kisses drop upon my cheek, these lips are sealed to me. Dear Lord, how could I give Clara up to any but to thee? A child thus mourned could not die wholly discontented. From the ledger of the same date I make the following extract merely changing the surname as before. Becket. On Sunday morning, nineteenth instant, John Peay, infant son of George and Julia Becket, aged one year, six months and fifteen days.  No kisses drop upon my cheek, these lips are sealed to me. Dear Lord, how could I give Johnny up to any but to thee? The similarity of the emotion as produced in the mourners in these two instances is remarkably evidenced by the singular similarity of thought which they experienced and the surprising coincidence of language used by them to give it expression. In the same journal of the same date I find the following, surname suppressed as before. Wagner. On the tenth, inst. Ferguson G., the son of William L. and Martha Teresa Wagner, aged four weeks and one day.  No kisses drop upon my cheek, these lips are sealed to me. Dear Lord, how could I give Ferguson up to any but to thee? It is strange what power the reiteration of an essentially political thought has upon one's feelings. When we take up the ledger and read the poetry about little Clara, we feel an unaccountable depression of the spirits. When we drift further down the column and read the poetry about little Johnny, the depression of spirits acquires an added emphasis, and we experience tangible suffering. When we saunter along down the column further still and read the poetry about little Ferguson, the word torture but vaguely suggests the anguish that rends us. In the ledger, same copy referred to above, I find the following, I alter surname as usual. Welch, on the fifth, inst, Mary C. Welch, wife of William B. Welch, and daughter of Catherine and George W. Markland, in the twenty-ninth year of her age.  Farewell husband, children dear, serve thy God with filial fear, and meet me in the land above, where all is peace and joy and love. What could be sweeter than that? No collection of salient facts, without reduction to tabular form, could be more succinctly stated than is done in the first stanza by the surviving relatives, and no more concise and comprehensive program of farewells, post mortuary general orders, etc., could be framed in any form than is done in verse, by deceased, in the last stanza. These things insensibly make us wiser and tenderer, and better. Another extract. Ball, on the morning of the fifteenth, inst, Mary E., and daughter of John and Sarah F. Ball. Tis sweet to rest in lively hope that when my change shall come angels will hover round my bed to waft my spirit home. The following is apparently the customary form for heads of families. Burns, on the twentieth inst. Michael Burns, aged forty years. Dearest father, thou hast left us. Here thy loss we deeply feel. But tis God that has bereft us, he can all our sorrows heal. Funeral, two o'clock, sharp. There is something very simple and pleasant about the following, which, in Philadelphia, seems to be the usual form for consumptives of long standing. It deplores four distinct cases in the single copy of the ledger, which lies on the Memoranda editorial table. Bromley, on the twenty-ninth inst. of consumption. Philip Bromley, in the fiftieth year of his age. Affliction soar long time he bore. Physicians were in vain, till God at last did hear him mourn and eased him of his pain. That friend whom death from us has torn, we did not think so soon to part. An anxious care now sinks the thorn still deeper in our bleeding heart. This beautiful creation loses nothing by repetition. On the contrary, the oftener one sees it in the ledger, the more grand and awe-inspiring it seems. With one more extract I will close. Dobel, on the fourth inst. Samuel Pervel Worthington Dobel, aged four days. Our little Sammy's gone. His tiny spirits fled.  A tear within a father's eye, a mother's aching heart, can only tell the agony how hard it is to part. Could anything be more plaintive than that without requiring further concessions of grammar? Could anything be likely to do more toward reconciling deceased to circumstances and making him willing to go? Perhaps not. The power of song can hardly be estimated. There is an element about some poetry which is able to make even physical suffering and death cheerful things to contemplate and consummation to be desired. This element is present in the mortuary poetry of Philadelphia degree of development. The custom I have been treating of is one that should be adopted in all the cities of the land. It is said that once a man of small consequence died, and the reverent T. K. Beecher was asked to preach the funeral sermon—a man who abhors the louding of people, either dead or alive, except in dignified and simple language, and then only for merits which they actually possessed or possess, not merits which they merely ought to have possessed. The friends of the deceased got up a stately funeral. They must have had misgivings that the corpse might not be praised strongly enough, for they prepared some manuscript headings and notes in which nothing was left unsaid on that subject that a fervid imagination and an unabridged dictionary could compile, and these they handed to the minister as he entered the pulpit. They were merely intended as suggestions, and so the friends were filled with consternation when the minister stood in the pulpit and proceeded to read off the curious odds and ends in ghastly detail and in a loud voice, and their consternation solidified to petrification when he paused at the end, contemplated the multitude reflectively, and then said impressively, The man would be a fool who tried to add anything to that. Let us pray. And with the same strict adhesion to truth it can be said that the man would be a fool who tried to add anything to the following transcendent obituary poem. There is something so innocent, so guileless, so complacent, so unearthly serene, and so satisfied about this peerless hogwash that the man must be made of stone who can read it without a dulcet ecstasy creeping along his backbone and quivering in his marrow. There is no need to say that this poem is genuine and in earnest for its proofs are written all over its face. An ingenious scribbler might imitate it after a fashion, but Shakespeare himself could not counterfeit it. It is noticeable that the country editor who published it did not know that it was a treasure, and the most perfect thing of its kind that the storehouses and museums of literature could show. He did not dare to say no to the dread poet, for such a poet must have been something of an apparition. But he just shoveled it into his paper, anywhere that came handy, and felt ashamed, and put that disgusted, published by request, over it, and hoped that his subscribers would overlook it or not feel an impulse to read it. Published by request. Lines. Composed on the death of Samuel and Catherine Belknap's children by M. A. Glaze. Friends and neighbors all draw near and listen to what I have to say, and never leave your children dear when they are small and go away. But always think of that sad fate that happened in year of sixty-three. Four children with a house did burn. Think of their awful agony. Their mother, she had gone away, and left them there alone to stay.   Their father, he to war, had gone, and on the battlefield was slain. And little did he think when he went away, but what on earth they would meet again. The neighbors often told his wife not to leave his children there unless she got some one to stay, and of the little ones take care. The oldest he was years not six, and the youngest only eleven months old, but often she had left them there alone, as by the neighbors I have been told. How can she bear to see the place where she so often has left them there without a single one to look to them, or of the little ones to take good care? Oh, can she look upon the spot where under their little burnt bones lay, but what she thinks she hears them say, twas God had pity, and took us on high. And there may she kneel down and pray, and ask God her to forgive, and she may lead a different life while she on earth remains to live. Her husband and her children too, God has took from pain and woe. May she reform and mend her ways, that she may also to them go. And when it is God's holy will, oh, may she be prepared to meet her God, and friends in peace, and leave this world of care. The man in the ticket office said, Have an accident insurance ticket also? No, I said, after studying the matter over a little. No, I believe not. I am going to be travelling by rail all day to-day. However, to-morrow I don't travel. Give me one for to-morrow. The man looked puzzled, he said. But it is for accident insurance, and if you're going to travel by rail, if I am going to travel by rail, I shan't need it. Lying at home in bed is the thing I am afraid of. I had been looking into this matter. Last year I travelled 20,000 miles, almost entirely by rail. The year before I travelled over 25,000 miles, half by sea and half by rail, and the year before that I travelled in the neighbourhood of 10,000 miles, exclusively by rail. I suppose if I put in all the little odd journeys here and there, I may say that I have travelled 60,000 miles during the three years I have mentioned, and never had an accident. For a good while, I said to myself every morning, now I have escaped thus far, and so the chances are just that much increase that I shall catch it this time. I will be shrewd and buy an accident ticket. And to a dead moral certainty I drew a blank, and went to bed that night without a joint started or a bone splintered. I got tired of that sort of daily bother, and fell to buying accident tickets that were good for a month. I said to myself, a man can't buy thirty blanks in one bundle. But I was mistaken. There was never a prize in the lot. I could read of railway accidents every day. The newspaper atmosphere was foggy with them. But somehow they never came my way. I found I had spent a good deal of money in the accident business, and had nothing to show for it. My suspicions were aroused, and I began to hunt around for somebody that had won in this lottery. I found plenty of people who had invested, but not an individual had ever had an accident or made a cent. I stopped buying accident tickets, and went to ciphering. The result was astounding. The peril lay not in travelling, but in staying at home. I hunted up statistics, and was amazed to find that after all the glaring newspaper headlines concerning railroad disasters, less than three hundred people had really lost their lives by those disasters in the preceding twelve months. The Erie Road was set down as the most murderous in the list. It had killed forty-six, or twenty-six I do not exactly remember which, but I know the number was double that of any other road. But the fact straightway suggested itself that the Erie was an immensely long road and did more business than any other line in the country, so the double number of killed ceased to be matter for surprise. By further figuring it appeared that between New York and Rochester the Erie ran eight passenger trains each way every day, sixteen altogether, and carried a daily average of six thousand persons, that is about a million in six months, the population of New York City. Well, the Erie kills from thirteen to twenty-three persons of its million in six months, and in the same time thirteen thousand of New York's million die in their beds. My flesh crept, my hair stood on end. This is appalling, I said. The danger isn't in traveling by rail, but in trusting to those deadly beds. I will never sleep in a bed again. I had figured on considerably less than one half the length of the Erie Road. It was plain that the entire road must transport at least eleven or twelve thousand people every day. There are many short roads running out of Boston that do fully half as much, a great many such roads. There are many roads scattered about the union that do a prodigious passenger business. Therefore, it was fair to presume that an average of two thousand five hundred passengers a day for each road in the country would be about correct. There are eight hundred and forty-six railway lines in our country, and eight hundred and forty-six times two thousand five hundred are two million one hundred and fifteen thousand. So the railways of America move more than two millions of people every day, six hundred and fifty millions of people a year without counting the Sundays. They do that, too, there is no question about it, though where they get the raw material is clear beyond the jurisdiction of my arithmetic, where I have hunted the census through and through, and I find that there are not that many people in the United States by a matter of six hundred and ten millions at the very least. They must use some of the same people over again likely. San Francisco is one-eighth as populous as New York. There are sixty deaths a week in the former, and five hundred a week in the latter if they have luck. That is three thousand one hundred and twenty deaths a year in San Francisco, and eight times as many in New York, say about twenty-five thousand or twenty-six thousand. The health of the two places is the same. So we will let it stand as a fair presumption that this will hold good all over the country, and that consequently twenty-five thousand out of every million of people we have must die every year. That amounts to one-fortieth of our total population.  Out of this million, ten or twelve thousand are stabbed, shot, drowned, hanged, poisoned, or meet a similarly violent death in some other popular way, such as perishing by kerosene lamp and hoop skirt conflagrations, getting buried in coal mines, falling off housetops, breaking through church or lecture room floors, taking patent medicines or committing suicide in other forms. The eerie railroad kills twenty-three to forty-six. The other eight hundred and forty-five railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each, and the rest of that million, amounting in the aggregate to that appalling figure of nine hundred and eighty-seven thousand six hundred and thirty-one corpses, die naturally in their beds. You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds. The railroads are good enough for me, and my advice to all people is don't stay at home any more than you can help. But when you have got to stay at home a while, buy a package of those insurance tickets and sit up nights. You cannot be too cautious. One can see now why I answered that ticket agent in the manner recorded at the top of this sketch. The moral of this composition is that thoughtless people grumble more than is fair about railroad management in the United States, when we consider that every day and night of the year full fourteen thousand railway trains of various kinds, freighted with life and armed with death, go thundering over the land, the marvel is not that they kill three hundred human beings in a twelve month, but that they do not kill three hundred times three hundred. End of section thirty-six. This is section thirty-seven of the thirty thousand dollar bequest and other stories by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Portrait of King William the Third. I never can look at those periodical portraits in the Galaxy magazine without feeling a wild, tempestuous ambition to be an artist. I have seen thousands and thousands of pictures in my time, acres of them here, and leagues of them in the galleries of Europe, but never any that moved me as these portraits do. There is a portrait of Monsignor Capell in the November number. Now could anything be sweeter than that? And there was Bismarcks in the October number. Who can look at that without being purer and stronger and nobler for it? And Thurlow Weed's picture in the September number. I would not have died without seeing that. No, not for anything this world can give. But look back still further and recall my own likeness as printed in the August number. If I had been in my grave a thousand years when that appeared, I would have got up and visited the artist. I sleep with all these portraits under my pillow every night, so that I can go on studying them as soon as the day dawns in the morning. I know them all as thoroughly as if I had made them myself. I know every line and mark about them. Sometimes, when company are present, I shuffle the portraits all up together and then pick them out one by one and call their names without referring to the printing on the bottom. I seldom make a mistake. Never when I am calm. I have had the portraits framed for a long time, waiting till my aunt gets everything ready for hanging them up in the parlor. But first one thing and then another interferes, and so the thing is delayed. Once, she said, they would have more of the peculiar kind of light they needed in the attic, the old Simpleton. It is as dark as a tomb up there. But she does not know anything about art, and so she has no reverence for it. When I showed her my map of the fortifications of Paris, she said it was rubbish. Well, from nursing those portraits so long I have come at last to have a perfect infatuation for art. I have a teacher now, and my enthusiasm continually and tumultuously grows as I learn to use, with more and more facility, the pencil, brush, and graver. I am studying under de Melville, the house and portrait painter. His name was Smith when he lived in the West. He does any kind of artist work a body wants, having a genius that is universal, like Michael Angelo resembles that great artist in fact.  I have been studying under de Melville several months now. The first month I painted fences and gave general satisfaction. The next month I whitewashed a barn. The third, I was doing tin roofs. The fourth, common signs. The fifth, statuary to stand before cigar shops. This present month is only the sixth, and I am already in portraits. The humble offering which accompanies these remarks, see figure. The portrait of his Majesty William III, King of Prussia, is my fifth attempt in portraits, and my greatest success. It has received unbounded praise from all classes of the community, but that which gratifies me most is the frequent and cordial verdict that it resembles the galaxy portraits. Those were my first love, my earliest admiration, the original source and incentive of my art ambition. Whatever I am in art today, I owe to these portraits. I ask no credit for myself, I deserve none, and I never take any either. Many a stranger has come to my exhibition, for I have had my portrait of King William on exhibition at one dollar a ticket, and would have gone away blessing me if I had let him, but I never did. I always stated where I got the idea. King William wears large bushy side whiskers, and some critics have thought that this portrait would be more complete if they were added, but it was not possible. There was not room for side whiskers and epaulettes both, and so I let the whiskers go and put in the epaulettes for the sake of style. That thing on his hat is an eagle, the Prussian eagle. It is a national emblem. When I say hat I mean helmet, but it seems impossible to make a picture of a helmet that a body can have confidence in. I wish kind friends everywhere would aid me in my endeavor to attract a little attention to the galaxy portraits. I feel persuaded it can be accomplished, if the course to be pursued be chosen with judgment. I write for that magazine all the time, and so do many abler men. And if I can get these portraits into universal favor, it is all I ask. The reading matter will take care of itself. Commendations of the portrait. There is nothing like it in the Vatican. Pius IX. It has none of that vagueness, that dreamy spirituality about it, which many of the first critics of Arkansas have objected to in the Murillo School of Art. Ruskin. The expression is very interesting, J. W. Titian. Keeps a macaroni store in Venice at the old family stand. It is the neatest thing in still life I have seen for years, Rosa Bonheur. The smile may be almost called unique, Bismarck. I never saw such character portrayed in a picture face before, de Melville. There is a benign and simplicity about the execution of this work which warms the heart toward it as much, full as much, as it fascinates the eye. Lancer. One cannot see it without longing to contemplate the artist, Frederick William. Send me the entire edition, together with a plate and the original portrait, and name your own price, and would you like to come over and stay a while with Napoleon at Ville Helmhosa? It shall not cost you ascent. William III. End of Section 37 This is Section 38 of the $30,000 request and other stories by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Does the race of man love a lord? Often, a quite assified remark becomes sanctified by use and petrified by custom. It is then a permanency, its term of activity, a geologic period. The day after the arrival of Prince Henry, I met an English friend, and he rubbed his hands and broke out with a remark that was charged to the brim with joy, joy that was evidently a pleasant salve to an old sore place. Many a time I've had to listen without retort to an old saying that is irritatingly true, and until now seem to offer no chance for a return jive. An English man does dearly love a lord, but after this I shall talk back and say, how about the Americans?  The man that first says it thinks he has made a discovery. The man he says it to thinks the same. It departs on its travels, is received everywhere with admiring acceptance, and not only as a piece of rare and acute observation, but as being exhaustively true and profoundly wise. And so it presently takes its place in the world's list of recognized and established wisdoms, and after that no one thinks of examining it to see whether it is really entitled to its high honors or not. I call to mind instances of this in two well-established proverbs, whose dullness is not surpassed by the one about the Englishman and his love for a lord. One of them records the Americans' adoration of the Almighty Dollar. The other, the American millionaire girl's ambition to trade cash for a title, with a husband thrown in. It isn't merely the American that adores the Almighty Dollar, it is the human race. The human race has always adored the hat full of shells, or the bale of calico, or the half-bushel of brass rings, or the handful of steel fish-hooks, or the houseful of black wives, or the Zareba full of cattle, or the two score camels and asses, or the factory, or the farm, or the block of buildings, or the railroad bonds, or the bank stock, or the hoarded cash, or anything that stands for wealth and consideration and independence, and can secure to the possessor that most precious of all things another man's envy. It was a dull person that invented the idea that the Americans' devotion to the Dollar is more strenuous than another's. Rich American girls do buy titles, but they did not invent that idea. It had been worn threadbare several hundred centuries before America was discovered. European girls still exploited as briskly as ever, and when a title is not to be had for the money in hand, they buy the husband without it. They must put up the dot, or there is no trade. The commercialization of brides is substantially universal, except in America. It exists with us to some little extent, but in no degree approaching a custom. The Englishman dearly loves a lord. What is the soul and source of this love? I think the thing could be more correctly worded. The human race dearly envies a lord. That is to say, it envies the lord's place. Why? On two accounts, I think. It's power and it's conspicuousness. Where conspicuousness carries with it a power which, by the light of our own observation and experience, we are able to measure and comprehend, I think our envy of the possessor is as deep and as passionate as is that of any other nation. No one can care less for a lord than the back woodsman, who has had no personal contact with lords, and has seldom heard them spoken of. But I will not allow that any Englishman has a profounder envy of a lord than has the average American who has lived long years in a European capital and fully learned how immense is the position the lord occupies. Of any ten thousand Americans who eagerly gather at vast inconvenience to get a glimpse of Prince Henry, all but a couple of hundred will be there out of an immense curiosity. They are burning up with desire to see a personage who is so much talked about. They envy him. But it is conspicuousness they envy mainly, not the power that is lodged in his royal quality and position, for they have but a vague and spectral knowledge and appreciation of that. Through their environment and associations they have been accustomed to regard such things lightly, and as not being very real. Consequently they are not able to value them enough to consumingly envy them. But whenever an American or other human being is in the presence for the first time of a combination of great power and conspicuousness, which he thoroughly understands and appreciates, his eager curiosity and pleasure will be well sodden with that other passion, envy, whether he suspects it or not. At any time, on any day, in any part of America, you can confer a happiness upon any passing stranger by calling his attention to any other passing stranger and saying, Do you see that gentleman going along there? It is Mr. Rockefeller. Watch his eye. It is a combination of power and conspicuousness which the man understands. When we understand rank, we always like to rub against it. When a man is conspicuous, we always want to see him. Also, if he will pay us an attention, we will manage to remember it. Also, we will mention it now and then casually, sometimes to a friend, or if a friend is not handy, we will make out with a stranger. Well, then, what is rank and what is conspicuousness? At once we think of kings and aristocracies and of worldwide celebrities in soldierships, the arts, letters, etc., and we stop there. But that is a mistake. Rank holds its court and receives its homage on every round of the ladder from the emperor down to the rat-catcher, and distinction also exists on every round of the ladder and commands its due of deference and envy. To worship rank and distinction is the dear and valued privilege of all the human race, and it is freely and joyfully exercised in democracies as well as in monarchies and even, to some extent, among those creatures whom we impertently call the lower animals. For even they have some poor little vanities and foibles, though in this manner they are paupers as compared to us. A Chinese emperor has the worship of his four hundred millions of subjects, but the rest of the world is indifferent to him. A Christian emperor has the worship of his subjects and of a large part of the Christian world outside of his domains, but he is a matter of indifference to all China. A king, class A, has an extensive worship. A king, class B, has a less extensive worship. Class C, class D, class E, get a steadily diminishing share of worship. Class L, Sultan of Zanzibar, class P, Sultan of Zulu, and class W, half king of Samoa. Get no worship at all outside their own little patch of sovereignty. Take the distinguished people along down. Each has his group of homage-payers. In the navy there are many groups. They start with the secretary and the admiral, and go down to the quartermaster and below. For there will be groups among the sailors, and each of these groups will have a tar who is distinguished for his battles, or his strength, or his daring, or his profanity, and is admired and envied by his group. The same with the army, the same with the literary and journalistic craft, the publishing craft, the cod fishery craft, standard oil, U.S. steel, the class A hotel, and the rest of the alphabet in that line, the class A prize-fighter, and the rest of the alphabet in his line. Clear down to the lowest and obscurest six-boy gang of little gammons, with its one boy that can thrash the rest, and to whom he is king of Samoa, bottom of the royal race, but looked up to with the most ardent admiration and envy. There is something pathetic and funny and pretty about this human race's fondness for contact with power and distinction, and for the reflected glory it gets out of it. The king, class A, is happy in the state banquet, and the military show, which the emperor provides for him, and he goes home and gathers the queen and the princelings around him in the privacy of the spare room, and tells them all about it, and says, His Imperial Majesty put his hand upon my shoulder in the most friendly way, just as friendly and familiar, oh, you can't imagine it, and everybody's seeing him do it, charming, perfectly charming. The king, class G, is happy in the cold collation, and the police parade provided for him by the king, class B, and goes home and tells the family all about it, and says, And his Majesty took me into his own private cabinet for a smoke and a chat, and there we sat just as sociable and talking away and laughing and chatting, just the same as if we had been born in the same bunk, and all the servants in the anti-room could see us doing it. Oh, it was too lovely for anything. The king, class Q, is happy in the modest entertainment furnished him by the king, class M, and goes home and tells the household about it, and is as grateful and joyful over it as were his predecessors in the gaudier attentions that had fallen to their larger lot. Emperors, kings, artisans, peasants, big people, little people, at the bottom we are all alike and all the same, all just alike on the inside, and when our clothes are off, nobody can tell which of us is which. We are unanimous in the pride we take in good and genuine compliments paid us, and distinctions conferred upon us in attentions shown. There is not one of us from the emperor down, but is made like that. Do I mean attentions shown us by the guest? No, I mean simply flattering attentions. Let them come once they may. We despise no source that can pay us a pleasing attention. There is no source that is humble enough for that. You have heard a dear little girl say to a frowsy and disreputable dog, he came right to me and let me pat him on the head and he wouldn't let the others touch him. And you have seen her eyes dance with pride in that high distinction. You have often seen that. If the child were a princess, would that random dog be able to confer the like glory upon her with his pretty compliment? Yes, and even in her mature life and seated upon a throne she would still remember it, still recall it, still speak of it with frank satisfaction. That charming and lovable German princess and poet Carmen Silva, Queen of Romania, remembers yet that the flowers of the woods and fields flocked to her when she was a girl, and she sets it down in her latest book, and that the squirrels conferred upon her and her father the valued compliment of not being afraid of them, and once one of them holding a nut between its sharp little teeth ran right up against my father. It has the very note of, he came right to me and let me pat him on the head and when it saw itself reflected in his boot it was very much surprised, and stopped for a long time to contemplate itself in the polished leather. Then it went its way. And the birds! She still remembers with pride that they came boldly into my room, when she had neglected her duty and put no food on the window sill for them. She knew all the wild birds and forgets the royal crown on her head to remember with pride that they knew her, also that the wasp and the bee were personal friends of hers, and never forgot that gracious relationship to her injury. Never have I been stung by a wasp or a bee! And here is that proud note again that sings in that little child's elation in being singled out among all the company of children for the random dogs honor conferring attentions. Even in the very worst summer for wasps, when in lunching out of doors our table was covered with them and everyone else was stung, they never hurt me. When a queen whose qualities of mind and heart and character are able to add distinction to so distinguished a place as a throne, remembers with grateful exaltation after thirty years, honors and distinctions conferred upon her by the humble, wild creatures of the forest, we are helped to realize that complimentary attentions, homage, distinctions, are of no cast, but are above all cast, that they are a nobility conferring power apart. We all like these things. When the gate guard at the railway station passes me through unchallenged and examines other people's tickets, I feel as the king, Class A, felt when the emperor put the imperial hand on his shoulder, everybody seeing him do it, and as the child felt when the random dog allowed her to pat his head and ostracize the others, and as the princess felt when the wasps spared her and stung the rest, and I felt just so, four years ago in Vienna, and remember it yet, when the helmeted police shut me off with fifty others from his street which the emperor was to pass through, and the captain of the squad turned and saw the situation and said indignantly to that guard, Can't you see it is the Herr Mark Twain? Let him through! It was four years ago, but it will be four hundred before I forget the wind of self complacency that rose in me, and strained my buttons when I mark the deference for me evoked in the faces of my fellow rabble, and noted, mingled with it, a puzzled and resentful expression which said as plainly as speech could have worded it, and who in the nation is the Herr Mark Twain? How many times in your life have you heard this boastful remark? I stood as close to him as I am to you. I could have put out my hand and touched him. We've all heard it many and many a time. It was a proud distinction to be able to say those words. It brought Envy to the speaker, a kind of glory, and he basked in it and was happy through all his veins. And who was it he stood so close to? The answer would cover all the grades. Sometimes it was a king. Sometimes it was a renowned highwayman. Sometimes it was an unknown man killed in an extraordinary way and made suddenly famous by it. Always it was a person who was, for the moment, the subject of public interest of a village. I was there and I saw it myself. That is a common and Envy-compelling remark. It can refer to a battle, to a hanging, to a coronation, to the killing of jumbo by the railway train, to the arrival of Jenny Lind at the battery, to the meeting of the President and Prince Henry, to the chase of a murderous maniac, to the disaster in the tunnel, to the explosion in the subway, to a remarkable dogfight, to a village church struck by lightning. It will be said more or less casually by everybody in America who has seen Prince Henry do anything or try to. The man who was absent and didn't see him do anything will scoff. It is his privilege, and he can make capital out of it too. He will seem, even to himself, to be different from other Americans, and better, as his opinion of his superior Americanism grows and swells and concentrates and coagulates, he will go further and try to belittle the distinction of those that saw the Prince do things, and will spoil their pleasure in it if he can. My life has been embittered by that kind of person. If you are able to tell of a special distinction that has fallen to your lot, it gravels them. They cannot bear it, and they try to make believe that the thing you took for a special distinction was nothing of the kind, and was meant in quite another way. Once I was received in private audience by an emperor. Last week I was telling a jealous person about it, and I could see him wince under it, see him bite, see him suffer. I revealed the whole episode to him with considerable elaboration and nice attention to detail. When I was through, he asked me what had impressed me most. I said, His Majesty's delicacy! They told me to be sure and back out from the presence, and find the doorknob as best I could. It was not allowable to face around. Now the emperor knew it would be a difficult ordeal for me because of lack of practice, and so, when it was time to part, he turned, with exceeding delicacy, and pretended to fumble with things on his desk, so I could get out in my own way without his seeing me. It went home. It was vitriol. I saw the envy and disgruntlement rise in the man's face. He couldn't keep it down. I saw him try to fix up something in his mind to take the bloom off that distinction. I enjoyed that, for I judged that he had his work cut out for him. He struggled along inwardly for quite a while, and then he said, with a manner of a person who has to say something and hasn't anything relevant to say, you said he had a handful of special brand cigars on the table? Yes. I never saw anything to match them. I had him again. He had to fumble around in his mind as much as another minute before he could play. Then he said in as mean a way as I ever heard a person say anything. He could have been counting the cigars, you know. I cannot endure a man like that. It is nothing to him how unkind he is, so long as he takes the bloom off. It is all he cares for. An English man, or other human being, does dearly love a Lord, or other conspicuous person. It includes us all. We love to be noticed by the conspicuous person. We love to be associated with such or with a conspicuous event, even in a seventh-rate fashion, even in the forty-seventh, if we cannot do better. This accounts for some of our curious tastes and mementos. It accounts for the large private trade in the Prince of Wales Hare, which chambermaids were able to drive in that article of commerce when the Prince made the tour of the world in the long ago. Hare, which probably did not always come from his brush, since enough of it was marketed to refurnish a bald comet. It accounts for the fact that the rope which lynches a negro in the presence of ten thousand Christian spectators is saleable five minutes later at two dollars an inch. It accounts for the mournful fact that a royal personage does not venture to wear buttons on his coat in public. We do love a Lord, and by that term I mean any person whose situation is higher than our own. The Lord of the group, for instance, a group of peers, a group of millionaires, a group of hoodlums, a group of sailors, a group of newsboys, a group of saloon politicians, a group of college girls. No royal person has ever been the object of a more delirious loyalty and slavish adoration than is paid by the vast timony herd to its squalid idol in wantage. There is not a bifurcated animal in that menagerie that would not be proud to appear in a newspaper picture in his company. At the same time there are some in that organization who would scoff at the people who have been daily pictured in the company with Prince Henry, and would say vigorously that they would not consent to be photographed with him—a statement which would not be true in any instance. There are hundreds of people in America who would frankly say to you that they would not be proud to be photographed in a group with the Prince, if invited, and some of these unthinking people would believe it when they said it. Yet in no instance would it be true. We have a large population, but we have not a large enough one by several millions to furnish that man. He has not yet been begotten, and in fact he is not begettable. You may take any of the printed groups, and there isn't a person in the dim background who isn't visibly trying to be vivid. If it is a crowd of ten thousand, ten thousand proud, untamed Democrats, horny-handed sons of toil and of politics and of fliers of the eagle, there isn't one who is trying to keep out of range. There isn't one who isn't plainly meditating a purchase of the paper in the morning, with the intention of hunting himself out in the picture, and framing and keeping it, if he shall find so much of his person in it as his starboard ear. We all love to get some of the drippings of conspicuousness, and we will put up with a single humble drip if we can't get any more. We may pretend otherwise in conversation, but we can't pretend it to ourselves privately, and we don't. We do confess in public that we are the noblest work of God being moved to it by long habit and teaching and superstition, but deep down in the secret places of our souls we recognize that, if we are the noblest work, the less said about it the better. We of the North poke fun at the South for its fondness of titles, a fondness for titles pure and simple regardless of whether they are genuine or pinch back. We forget that whatever a Southerner likes the rest of the human race likes, and that there is no law of predilection lodged in one people that is absent from another people. There is no variety in the human race. We are all children, all children of the one atom, and we love toys. We can soon acquire that Southern disease if someone will give it a start. It already has a start, in fact. I have been personally acquainted with over eighty-four thousand persons who, at one time or another in their lives, have served for a year or two on the staffs of our multitudinous governors, and through that fatality have been generals temporarily and colonels temporarily and judge advocates temporarily. But I have known only nine among them who could be hired to let the title go when it ceased to be legitimate. I know thousands and thousands of governors who ceased to be governors a way back in the last century, but I am acquainted with only three who would answer your letter if you failed to call them governor in it. I know acres and acres of men who have done time in a legislature in prehistoric days, but among them is not half an acre whose resentment you would not raise if you addressed them as mister instead of honorable. The first thing a legislature does is to convene in an impressive legislative attitude and get itself photographed. Each member frames his copy and takes it to the woods and hangs it up in the most aggressively conspicuous place in his house. And if you visit the house and fail to inquire what that accumulation is, the conversation will be brought around to it by that a four-time legislator, and he will show you a figure in it which in the course of years he has almost obliterated with the smut of his finger marks and say with a solemn joy, It's me! Have you ever seen a country congressman enter the hotel breakfast room in Washington with his letters and sit at his table and let on to read them and wrinkle his brows and frowns, statesman-like, keeping a furtive watch out over his glasses all the while to see if he is being observed and admired, those same old letters which he fetches in every morning? Have you seen it? Have you seen him show off?  That is the ex-congressman, the poor fellow whose life has been ruined by a two-year taste of glory and a fictitious consequence, who has been superseded and ought to take his heartbreak home and hide it, but cannot tear himself away from the scene of his lost little grandeur, and so he lingers and still lingers year after year, unconsidered, sometimes snubbed, ashamed of his fallen estate, and valiantly trying to look otherwise, dreary and depressed, but counterfeiting breeziness and gaiety, pailing with chummy familiarity, which is not always welcomed, the more fortunate who are still in place and were once his mates. Have you seen him? He clings piteously to the one little shred that is left of his departed distinction, the privilege of the floor, and works it hard and gets what he can out of it. That is the saddest figure I know of. Yes, we do so love our little distinctions, and then we loftily scoff at a prince for enjoying his larger ones, forgetting that if we only had his chance, ah, Senator is not a legitimate title. A Senator has no more right to be addressed by it than have you or I, but in the several state capitals and in Washington there are five thousand Senators who take very kindly to that fiction, and who purr gratefully when you call them by it, which you may do quite unrebuted. Then those same Senators smile at the self-constructed Majors and Generals and Judges of the South. Indeed, we do love our distinctions, and get them how we may, and we work them for all they are worth. In prayer we call ourselves Worms of the Dust, but it is only on a sort of tacit understanding that the remark shall not be taken at par. We, Worms of the Dust! Oh, no, we are not that, except, in fact, and we do not deal much in fact when we are contemplating ourselves. As a race we do certainly love a Lord, let him be croaker, or a duke, or a prize-fighter, or whatever other person it shall chance to be the head of our group. Many years ago I saw a greasy youth in overall standing by the herald office with an expectant look in his face. Soon a large man passed out and gave him a pat on the shoulder. That was what the boy was waiting for, the large man's notice. The pat made him proud and happy, and the exaltation inside of him shone out through his eyes, and his mates were there to see the pat and envy it, and wish they could have had that glory. The boy belonged down-seller in the press room. The large man was king of the upper floors, foreman of the composing room. The light in the boy's face was worship. The foreman was his lord, head of his group. The pat was an accolade. It was as precious to the boy, as it would have been if he had been an aristocrat's son, and the accolade had been delivered by his sovereign with a sword. The quintessence of the honor was all there. There was no difference in values. In truth, there was no difference present except an artificial one—clothes. All the human race loves a lord, that is, loves to look upon or be noticed by the possessor of power or conspicuousness, and sometimes animals, born to better things and higher ideals, descend to man's level in this matter. In the Jaqueline de Plante, I have seen a cat that was so vain of being the personal friend of an elephant, that I was ashamed of her." End of Section 38 This is Section 39 of the $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Extracts from Adam's Diary. Monday. This new creature with long hair is a good deal in the way. It is always hanging around and following me about. I don't like this. I am not used to company. I wish it would stay with the other animals. Cloudy today, wind in the east, think we shall have rain. We? Where did I get that word? I remember now. The new creature uses it. Tuesday. Been examining the great waterfall. It is the finest thing on the estate, I think. The new creature calls it Niagara Falls. Why, I am sure I do not know. Says it looks like Niagara Falls. That is not a reason. It is mere waywardness and imbecility. I get no chance to name anything myself. The new creature names everything that comes along before I can get in a protest. And always that same pretext is offered. It looks like the thing. There is a dodo, for instance. Says the moment one looks at it, one sees at a glance that it looks like a dodo. It will have to keep that name, no doubt. It wearies me to fret about it and it does no good anyway. Do-do. It looks no more like a do-do than I do. Wednesday. Built me a shelter against the rain, but could not have it to myself in peace. The new creature intruded. When I tried to put it out, it shed water out of the holes it looks with and wiped it away with the back of its paws and made a noise such as some of the other animals make when they are in distress. I wish it would not talk. It is always talking. That sounds like a cheap fling at the poor creature, a slur, but I do not mean it so. I have never heard the human voice before, and any new and strange sound intruding itself here upon the solemn hush of these dreaming solitudes offends my ear and seems a false note. And this new sound is so close to me it is right at my shoulder, right at my ear, first on one side and then on the other, and I am used only to sounds that are more or less distant from me. Friday. The naming goes recklessly on in spite of anything I can do. I had a very good name for the estate, and it was musical and pretty—Garden of Eden. Privately I continue to call it that, but not any longer publicly. The new creature says that it is all woods and rocks and scenery, and therefore has no resemblance to a garden, says it looks like a park and does not look like anything but a park. Consequently, without consulting me, it has been new-named Niagara Falls Park. This is sufficiently high-handed, it seems to me, and already there is a sign up. Keep off the grass. My life is not as happy as it was. Saturday. The new creature eats too much fruit. We are going to run short, most likely. We again. That is its word, mine too, now, from hearing it so much. Good deal of fog this morning. I do not go out in the fog myself. This new creature does. It goes out in all weathers and stumps right in with its muddy feet and talks. It used to be so pleasant and quiet here. Sunday. Pulled through. This day is getting to be more and more trying. It was selected and set apart last November as a day of rest. I had already six of them per week before. This morning found the new creature trying to clawed apples out of that forbidden tree. Monday. The new creature says its name is Eve. That is all right. I have no objections. Says it is to call it by when I wanted to come. I said it was superfluous, then. The word evidently raised me in its respect, and indeed it is a large, good word, and will bear repetition. It says it is not an it. It is a she. This is probably doubtful, yet it is all one to me. What she is were nothing to me if she would but go by herself and not talk. Tuesday. She has littered the whole estate with execrable names and offensive signs. This way to the whirlpool. This way to Goat Island. Cave of the Winds. This way. She says this park would make a tidy summer resort if there was any custom for it. Summer resort. Another invention of hers. Just words. Without any meaning. What is a summer resort? But it is best not to ask her. She has such a rage for explaining. Friday. She has taken to besieging me to stop going over the falls. What harm does it do? Says it makes her shudder. I wonder why. I have always done it. Always liked the plunge and coolness. I supposed it was what the falls were for. They have no other use than I can see, and they must have been made for something. She says they were only made for scenery like the rhinoceros and the mastodon. I went over the falls in a barrel, not satisfactory to her. Went over in a tub, still not satisfactory. Swam the whirlpool and the rapids in a fig leaf suit. It got much damaged. Hence tedious complaints about my extravagance. I am too much hampered here. What I need is a change of scene. Saturday. I escaped last Tuesday night and travelled two days and built me another shelter in a secluded place and obliterated my tracks as well as I could. But she hunted me out by means of a beast which she has tamed and calls a wolf, and came making that pitiful noise again and shedding that water out of the places she looks with. I was obliged to return with her, but will presently emigrate again when occasion offers. She engages herself in many foolish things, among others, to study out why the animals, called lions and tigers, live on grass and flowers, when, as she says, the sort of teeth they wear would indicate that they were intended to eat each other. This is foolish, because to do that would be to kill each other, and that would introduce what, as I understand, is called death. And death, as I have been told, has not yet entered the park, which is a pity on some accounts. Monday. Pulled through. Monday. I believe I see what the week is for. It is to give time to rest up from the weariness of Sunday. It seems a good idea. She has been climbing that tree again. Clotted her out of it. She said nobody was looking. Seems to consider that a sufficient justification for chancing any dangerous thing. Told her that. The word justification moved her admiration, and envy too, I thought. It is a good word. Tuesday. She told me she was made out of a rib taken from my body. This is at least doubtful, if not more than that. I have not missed any rib. She is in much trouble about the buzzard. Says grass does not agree with it. Is afraid she can't raise it. Thinks it was intended to live on decayed flesh. The buzzard must get along the best it can with what is provided. We cannot overturn the whole scheme to accommodate the buzzard. Saturday. She fell in the pond yesterday when she was looking at herself in it, which she is always doing. She nearly strangled and said it was most uncomfortable. This made her sorry for the creatures which live in there, which she calls fish, for she continues to fasten names on to things that don't need them and don't come when they are called by them, which is a matter of no consequence to her.  So she got a lot of them out and brought them in last night and put them in my bed to keep warm. But I have noticed them now and then all day, and I don't see that they are any happier there than they were before. Only quieter. When night comes I shall throw them outdoors. I will not sleep with them again, for I find them clammy and unpleasant to lie among when a person hasn't anything on. Sunday. Pulled through. Tuesday. She has taken up with a snake now. The other animals are glad, for she was always experimenting with them and bothering them. And I am glad because the snake talks, and this enables me to get a rest. Friday. She says the snake advises her to try the fruit of the tree, and says the result will be a great and fine and noble education. I told her there would be another result, too. It would introduce death into the world. That was a mistake. It had been better to keep the remark to myself. It only gave her an idea. She could save the sick, buzzard, and furnish fresh meat to the despondent lions and tigers. I advised her to keep away from the tree. She said she wouldn't. I foresee trouble. We'll emigrate. Wednesday. I have had a variegated time. I escaped last night, and rode a horse all night as fast as he could go, hoping to get clear of the park and hide in some other country before the trouble should begin. But it was not to be. About an hour after sun-up, as I was riding through a flowery plain where thousands of animals were grazing, slumbering, or playing with each other, according to their want. All of a sudden they broke into a tempest of frightful noises, and in one moment the plain was a frantic commotion and every beast was destroying its neighbor. I knew what it meant. Eve had eaten that fruit, and death was coming to the world. The tigers ate my horse, paying no attention when I ordered them to desist, and they would have eaten me if I had stayed, which I didn't, but went away in much haste. I found this place outside the park and was fairly comfortable for a few days, but she has found me out. Found me out, and has named the place Tana Wanda, says it looks like that. In fact, I was not sorry she came for—there are but meager pickings here, and she brought some of those apples. I was obliged to eat them, I was so hungry. It was against my principles, but I find that principles have no real force except when one is well fed. She came curtained in boughs and bunches of leaves, and when I asked her what she meant by such nonsense, and snatched them away and threw them down, she tittered and blushed. I have never seen a person titter and blush before, and to me it seemed unbecoming and idiotic. She said I would soon know how it was myself. This was correct. Hungry as I was, I laid down the apple half-eaten, certainly the best one I ever saw, considering the lateness of the season, and arrayed myself in the discarded boughs and branches, and then spoke to her with some severity and ordered her to go and get some more and not make a spectacle of herself. She did it, and after this we crept down to where the wild-beast battle had been and collected some skins, and I made her patch together a couple of suits proper for public occasions. They are uncomfortable, it is true, but stylish, and that is the main point about clothes. I find she is a good deal of a companion. I see I should be lonesome and depressed without her, now that I have lost my property. Another thing, she says, it is ordered that we work for our living hereafter. She will be useful. I will superintend. Ten days later. She accuses me of being the cause of our disaster. She says, with a parent's sincerity and truth, that the serpent assured her that the forbidden fruit was not apples, it was chestnuts. I said I was innocent then, for I had not eaten any chestnuts. She said the serpent informed her that chestnut was a figurative term, meaning an aged and moldy joke. I turned pale at that, for I have made many jokes to pass the weary time, and some of them could have been of that sort, though I had honestly supposed that they were new when I made them. She asked me if I had made one just at the time of the catastrophe. I was obliged to admit that I had made one to myself, though not allowed. It was this. I was thinking about the falls, and I said to myself, how wonderful it is to see that vast body of water tumble down there. Then in an instant a bright thought flashed into my head, and I let it fly, saying, it would be a deal more wonderful to see it tumble up there.  There, she said, with triumph, that is just it. The serpent mentioned that very just, and called it the first chestnut, and said it was co-evil with the creation. Alas, I am indeed to blame. Would that I were not witty, oh, that I never had that radiant thought. Next year. We have named it Cain. She caught it while I was up country trapping on the north shore of the Erie, caught it in the timber a couple of miles from our dugout, or it might have been four, she isn't certain which. It resembles us in some ways, and may be a relation. That is what she thinks. But this is an error in my judgment. The difference in size warrants the conclusion that it is a different and new kind of animal. A fish, perhaps. Though, when I put it in the water to sea, it sank, and she plunged in and snatched it out before there was opportunity for the experiment to determine the matter. I still think it is a fish. But she is indifferent about what it is, and will not let me have it to try. I do not understand this. The coming of the creature seems to have changed her whole nature and made her unreasonable about experiments. She thinks more of it than she does of any of the other animals, but is not able to explain why. Her mind is disordered. Everything shows it. Sometimes she carries the fish in her arms half the night when it complains, and wants to get to the water. At such times the water comes out of the places in her face that she looks out of, and she pats the fish on the back and makes soft sounds with her mouth to soothe it, and betrays sorrow and solicitude in a hundred ways. I have never seen her do like this with any other fish, and it troubles me greatly. She used to carry the young tigers around so, and play with them, before we lost our property. But it was only play. She never took on about them like this when their dinner disagreed with them. Sunday. She doesn't work Sundays, but lies around all tired out and likes to have the fish wallow over her, and she makes full noises to amuse it, and pretends to chew its paws, and that makes it laugh. I have not seen a fish before that could laugh. This makes me doubt. I have come to like Sunday myself, super intending all the weak tires of body, so there ought to be more Sundays. In the old days they were tough, but now they come handy. Wednesday. It isn't a fish. I cannot quite make out what it is. It makes curious devilish noises when not satisfied, and says goo-goo when it is. It is not one of us, for it doesn't walk. It is not a bird, for it doesn't fly. It is not a frog, for it doesn't hop. It is not a snake, for it doesn't crawl. I feel sure it is not a fish, though I cannot get a chance to find out whether it can swim or not. It merely lies around and mostly on its back, with its feet up. I have not seen any other animal do that before. I said I believed it was an enigma, but she only admired the word without understanding it. In my judgment it is either an enigma or some kind of a bug. If it dies I will take it apart and see what its arrangements are. I never had a thing perplex me so. Three months later. The perplexity augments instead of diminishing. I sleep but little. It has ceased from lying around and goes about on its four legs now, yet it differs from the other four-legged animals in that its front legs are unusually short. Consequently this causes the main part of its person to stick up uncomfortably high in the air, and this is not attractive. It is built much as we are, but its method of travelling shows that it is not of our breed. The short front legs and long hind ones indicate that it is of the kangaroo family, but it is a marked variation of that species, since the true kangaroo hops, whereas this one never does. Still it is a curious and interesting variety, and has not been catalogued before. As I discovered it, I have felt justified in securing the credit of the discovery by attaching my name to it, and hence have called it Kangaroo-domensis. It must have been a young one when it came, for it has grown exceedingly since. It must be five times as big now as it was then, and when discontented it is able to make from twenty-two to thirty-eight times the noise it made at first. Coercion does not modify this, but has the contrary effect. For this reason I discontinued the system. She reconciles it by persuasion, and by giving it things which she had previously told me she wouldn't give it. As already observed, I was not at home when it first came, and she told me she found it in the woods. It seems odd that it should be the only one, yet it must be so, for I have worn myself out these many weeks trying to find another one to add to my collection, and for this to play with. For surely then it would be quieter and we could tame it more easily. But I find none, nor any vestige of any, and strangest of all, no tracks. It has to live on the ground, it cannot help itself, therefore how does it get about without leaving a track? I have set a dozen traps, but they do no good. I catch all small animals except that one. Animals that merely go into the trap out of curiosity, I think, to see what the milk is there for. They never drink it. Three months later. The kangaroo still continues to grow, which is very strange and perplexing. I never knew one to be so long getting its growth. It has fur on its head now, not like kangaroo fur, but exactly like our hair, except that it is much finer and softer. And instead of being black, is red. I am like to lose my mind over the capricious and harassing developments of this unclassifiable zoological freak. If I could catch another one, but that is hopeless. It is a new variety and the only sample, this is plain. But I caught a true kangaroo and brought it in, thinking that this one, being lonesome, would rather have had that for company than have no kin at all, or any animal it could feel a nearness to, or get sympathy from in its forlorn condition here, among strangers who do not know its ways or habits, or what to do to make it feel that it is among friends. But it was a mistake. It went into such fits at the sight of the kangaroo that I was convinced it had never seen one before. I pity the poor, noisy little animal, but there is nothing I can do to make it happy. If I could tame it, but that is out of the question. The more I try, the worse I seem to make it. It grieves me to the heart to see it in its little storms of sorrow and passion. I wanted to let it go, but she wouldn't hear of it. That seemed cruel and not like her, and yet she may be right. It might be lonelier than ever, for since I cannot find another one, how could it? It is not a kangaroo. No. For it supports itself by holding to her finger, and thus goes a few steps on its hind legs, and then falls down. It is probably some kind of a bear, and yet it has no tail, as yet, and no fur, except upon its head. It still keeps on growing, that is a curious circumstance, for bears get their growth earlier than this. Bears are dangerous since our catastrophe, and I shall not be satisfied to have this one prowling about the place much longer without a muzzle on. I have offered to get her a kangaroo if she would let this one go, but it did no good. She is determined to run us into all sorts of foolish risks, I think. She was not like this before she lost her mind. A fortnight later I examined its mouth. There is no danger yet. It has only one tooth. It has no tail yet. It makes more noise now than it ever did before, and mainly at night. I have moved out, but I shall go over mornings to breakfast and see if it has more teeth. If it gets a mouthful of teeth it will be time for it to go, tail or no tail, for a bear does not need a tail in order to be dangerous. Four months later I have been off hunting and fishing a month, up in the region that she calls buffalo. I don't know why, unless it is because there are not any buffaloes there. Meantime the bear has learned to paddle around all by itself on its hind legs and says Papa and Mama. It is certainly a new species. This resemblance to words may be purely accidental, of course, and may have no purpose or meaning, but even in that case it is still extraordinary, and is a thing which no other bear can do. This imitation of speech taken together with general absence of fur and entire absence of tail sufficiently indicates that this is a new kind of bear. The further study of it will be exceedingly interesting. Meantime I will go off on a far expedition among the forests of the north and make an exhaustive search. There must certainly be another one somewhere and this one will be less dangerous when it has company of its own species. I will go straight away, but I will muzzle this one first. Three months later it has been a weary, weary hunt, yet I have had no success. In the meantime without stirring from the home estate she has caught another one. I never saw such luck. I might have hunted these woods a hundred years. I never would have run across that thing. Next day I have been comparing the new one with the old one, and it is perfectly plain that they are of the same breed. I was going to stuff one of them for my collection, but she is prejudiced against it for some reason or other, so I have relinquished the idea, though I think it is a mistake. It would be an irreparable loss to science if they should get away. The old one is tamer than it was and can laugh and talk like a parrot, having learned this, no doubt, from being with the parrot so much, and having the imitative faculty in a high developed degree. I shall be astonished if it turns out to be a new kind of parrot, and yet I ought not to be astonished, for it has already been everything else it could think of since those first days when it was a fish. The new one is as ugly as the old one was at first, has the same sulfur and raw meat complexion and the same singular head without any fur on it. She calls it Abel. Ten years later. They are boys. We found it out long ago. It was there coming in that small immature shape that puzzled us. We were not used to it. There are some girls now. Abel is a good boy, but if Cain had stayed a bear it would have improved him. After all these years I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning. It is better to live outside the garden with her than inside it without her. At first I thought she talked too much, but now I should be sorry to have that voice fall silent and pass out of my life. Blessed be the chestnut that brought us near together and taught me to know the goodness of her heart and the sweetness of her spirit. End of Section 39 This is Section 40 of the $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Eve's Diary translated from the original. Saturday. I am almost a whole day old now. I arrived yesterday. That is, as it seems to me. And it must be so, for if there was a day before yesterday I was not there when it happened, or I should remember it. It could be, of course, that it did happen and that I was not noticing. Very well. I will be very watchful now, and if any day before yesterday's happened I will make a note of it. It will be best to start right and not let the record get confused, for some instinct tells me that these details are going to be important to the historian some day. For I feel like an experiment. I feel exactly like an experiment. It would be impossible for a person to feel more like an experiment than I do, and so I am coming to feel convinced that that is what I am, an experiment, just an experiment, and nothing more. Then, if I am an experiment, am I the whole of it? No, I think not. I think the rest of it is part of it. I am the main part of it, but I think the rest of it has its share in the matter. Is my position assured or do I have to watch it and take care of it? The latter, perhaps. Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance is the price of supremacy. That is a good phrase, I think, for one so young. Everything looks better today than it did yesterday. In the rush of finishing up yesterday the mountains were left in a ragged condition, and some of the plains were so cluttered with rubbish and remnants that the aspects were quite distressing. Noble and beautiful works of art should not be subjected to haste, and this majestic new world is indeed a most noble and beautiful work, and certainly marvelously near to being perfect notwithstanding the shortness of the time. There are too many stars in some places and not enough in others, but that can be remedied presently no doubt.  It breaks my heart to think of it. There isn't another thing among the ornaments and decorations that is comparable to it for beauty and finish. It should have been fastened better, if we can only get it back again. But, of course, there is no telling where it went to. And besides, whoever gets it will hide it. I know it because I would do it myself. I believe I can be honest in all other matters, but I already begin to realize that the core and center of my nature is love of the beautiful, a passion for the beautiful, and that it would not be safe to trust me with a moon that belonged to another person and that person didn't know I had it. I could give up a moon that I found in the daytime because I should be afraid someone was looking. But, if I found it in the dark, I am sure I should find some kind of an excuse for not saying anything about it. For I do love moons. They are so pretty and so romantic. I wish we had five or six. I would never go to bed. I should never get tired lying on the moss bank and looking up at them. Stars are good, too. I wish I could get some to put in my hair. But I suppose I never can. You would be surprised to find how far off they are, for they do not look it. When they first showed last night I tried to knock some down with a pole, but it didn't reach, which astonished me. Then I tried clods till I was all tired out, but I never got one. It was because I am left-handed and cannot throw good. Even when I aimed at the one I wasn't after I couldn't hit the other one. Though I did make some close shots, where I saw the black blot of the clod sail right into the midst of the golden clusters forty or fifty times, just barely missing them, and if I could have held out a little longer, maybe I could have got one. So I cried a little, which was natural, I suppose, for one of my age, and after I was rested I got a basket and started for a place on the extreme rim of the circle where the stars were close to the ground, and I could get them with my hands, which would be better, anyway, because I could gather them tenderly, then, and not break them. But it was farther than I thought, and at last I had to give it up. I was so tired I couldn't drag my feet another step, and besides they were sore and hurt me very much. I couldn't get back home. It was too far and turning cold, but I found some tigers and nestled in among them, and was most adorably comfortable, and their breath was sweet and pleasant because they live on strawberries. I had never seen a tiger before, but I knew them in a minute by the stripes. If I could have one of those skins it would make a lovely gown. Today I am getting better ideas about distances. I was so eager to get hold of every pretty thing that I giddily grabbed for it, sometimes when it was too far off, and sometimes when it was but six inches away but seemed a foot, alas, with thorns between. I learned a lesson. Also I made an axiom all out of my own head, my very first one. The scratched experiment shuns the thorn. I think it is a very good one for one so young. I followed the other experiment around yesterday afternoon at a distance, to see what it might be for, if I could. But I was not able to make out. I think it is a man. I had never seen a man, but it looked like one, and I feel sure that that is what it is. I realize that I feel more curiosity about it than about any of the other reptiles.  When it stands, it spreads itself apart like a derrick. So I think it is a reptile, though it may be architecture. I was afraid of it at first, and started to run every time it turned around for I thought it was going to chase me. But by and by I found it was only trying to get away, so after that I was not timid any more, but tracked it along several hours, about twenty yards behind, which made it nervous and unhappy. At last it was a good deal worried and climbed a tree. I waited a long while, then gave it up and went home. Today the same thing over. I've got it up the tree again. Sunday. It is up there yet, resting apparently, but that is a subterfuge. Sunday isn't the day of rest, Saturday is appointed for that. It looks to me like a creature that is more interested in resting than in anything else. It would tire me to rest so much. It tires me just to sit around and watch the tree. I do wonder what it is for. I never see it do anything. They returned the moon last night and I was so happy. I think it is very honest of them. It slid down and fell off again, but I was not distressed. There is no need to worry when one has that kind of neighbors. They will fetch it back. I wish I could do something to show my appreciation. I would like to send them some stars, for we have more than we can use. I mean I, not we, for I can see that the reptile cares nothing for such things. It has low tastes and is not kind. When I went there yesterday evening in the gloaming, it had crept down and was trying to catch the little speckled fishes that play in the pool, and I had to clod it to make it go up the tree again and let them alone. I wonder if that is what it is for. Hasn't it any heart? Hasn't it any compassion for those little creatures? Can it be that it was designed and manufactured for such un-gentle work? It has the look of it. One of the clods took it back with the ear and it used language. It gave me a thrill for it was the first time I had ever heard speech except my own. I did not understand the words, but they seemed expressive. When I found it could talk I felt a new interest in it, for I love to talk. I talk all day and in my sleep too, and I am very interesting, but if I had another to talk to, I could be twice as interesting, and would never stop if desired. If this reptile is a man, it isn't an it, is it? That wouldn't be grammatical, would it? I think it would be he. I think so. In that case one would parse it with us. Nominative he. Dative him. Possessive hisn. Well, I will consider it a man and call it he until it turns out to be something else. This will be handier than having so many uncertainties. Next week Sunday. All the week I tagged around after him and tried to get acquainted. I had to do the talking because he was shy, but I didn't mind it. He seemed pleased to have me around, and I used the sociable we a good deal, because it seemed to flatter him to be included. Wednesday. We are getting along very well indeed now, and getting better and better acquainted. He does not try to avoid me any more, which is a good sign, and shows that he likes to have me with him. That pleases me, and I study to be useful to him in every way I can, so as to increase his regard. During the last day or two I have taken all the work of naming things off his hands, and this has been a great relief to him, for he has no gift in that line, and is evidently very grateful. He can't think of a rational name to save him, but I do not let him see that I am aware of his defect. Whenever a new creature comes along I name it before he has time to expose himself by an awkward silence. In this way I have saved him many embarrassments. I have no defect like this. The minute I set eyes on an animal I know what it is. I don't have to reflect a moment. The right name comes out instantly just as if it were an inspiration, as no doubt it is, for I am sure it wasn't in me half a minute before. I seem to know just by the shape of the creature and the way it acts what animal it is. When the dodo came along he thought it was a wildcat, I saw it in his eye, but I saved him, and I was careful not to do it in a way that could hurt his pride. I just spoke up in a quite natural way of pleasing surprise and not as if I was dreaming of conveying information and said, well, I do declare if there isn't the dodo. I explained without seeming to be explaining how I know it for a dodo, and although I thought maybe he was a little peaked that I knew the creature when he didn't, it was quite evident that he admired me. That was very agreeable, and I thought of it more than once with gratification before I slept. How little a thing can make us happy when we feel that we have earned it. Thursday, my first sorrow. Yesterday he avoided me and seemed to wish I would not talk to him. I could not believe it, and thought there was some mistake, for I loved to be with him and love to hear him talk, and so how could it be that he could feel unkind toward me when I had not done anything? But at last it seemed true. So I went away and sat lonely in the place where I first saw him the morning that we were made, and I did not know what he was, and was indifferent about him. But now it was a mournful place, and every little thing spoke of him, and my heart was very sore. I did not know why very clearly, for it was a new feeling. I had not experienced it before, and it was all a mystery, and I could not make it out. But when night came I could not bear the lonesomeness, and went to the new shelter which he has built to ask him what I had done that was wrong, and how I could mend it and get back his kindness again. But he put me out in the rain, and it was my first sorrow. Sunday. It is pleasant again now, and I am happy. But those were heavy days. I do not think of them when I can help it. I tried to get him some of those apples, but I cannot learn to throw straight. I failed, but I think the good intention pleased him. They are forbidden, and he says I shall come to harm. But so I come to harm through pleasing him. Why shall I care for that harm? Monday. This morning I told him my name, hoping it would interest him. But he did not care for it. It is strange. If he should tell me his name, I would care. I think it would be pleasanter in my ears than any other sound. He talks very little. Perhaps it is because he is not bright, and is sensitive about it, and wishes to conceal it.  It is in the heart that the values lie. I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches, and riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty. Although he talks so little, he has quite a considerable vocabulary. This morning he used a surprisingly good word. He evidently recognized himself that it was a good one, for he worked it in twice afterward, casually. It was good casual art. Still it showed that he possesses a certain quality of perception. Without a doubt that seed can be made to grow, if cultivated. Where did he get that word? I do not think I have ever used it. No. He took no interest in my name. I tried to hide my disappointment, but I suppose I did not succeed. I went away, and sat on the moss-bank with my feet in the water. It is where I go when I hunger for companionship, some one to look at, some one to talk to. It is not enough, that lovely white body painted there in the pool, but it is something, and something is better than utter loneliness. It talks when I talk. It is sad when I am sad. It comforts me with its sympathy. It says, Do not be downhearted, you poor friendless girl. I will be your friend. It is a good friend to me, and my only one. It is my sister. That first time that she forsook me, I shall never forget that. Never, never. My heart was led in my body. I said, She was all I had, and now she is gone. In my despair I said, Break my heart, I cannot bear my life any more, and hid my face in my hands, and there was no solace for me. And when I took them away, after a little, there she was again, white and shining and beautiful, and I sprang into her arms. That was perfect happiness. I had known happiness before, but it was not like this, which was ecstasy. I never doubted her afterward. Sometimes she stayed away, maybe an hour, maybe almost the whole day, but I waited and did not doubt. I said, She is busy, or she is gone on a journey, but she will come. And it was so, she always did. At night she would not come if it was dark, for she was a timid little thing. But if there was a moon she would come. I am not afraid of the dark, but she is younger than I am. She was born after I was. Many and many are the visits I have paid her. She is my comfort and my refuge when my life is hard, and it is mainly that. Tuesday. All the morning I was at work improving the estate, and I purposely kept away from him in the hope that he would get lonely and come. But he did not. At noon I stopped for the day and took my recreation by flitting all about with the bees and the butterflies and reveling in the flowers, those beautiful creatures that catch the smile of God out of the sky and preserve it. I gathered them and made them into wreaths and garlands, and clothed myself in them while I ate my luncheon, apples, of course. Then I sat in the shade and wished and wished. But he did not come. But no matter. Nothing would have come of it, for he does not care for flowers. He called them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that. He does not care for me. He does not care for flowers. He does not care for the painted sky at Eventide. Is there anything he does care for, except building shacks to coop himself up in from the good, clean rain, and thumping the melons and sampling the grapes, and fingering the fruit on the trees to see how those properties are coming along? I laid a dry stick on the ground and tried to bore a hole in it with another one in order to carry out a scheme that I had, and soon I got an awful fright. A thin, transparent, bluish film rose out of the hole, and I dropped everything and ran. I thought it was a spirit, and I was so frightened. But I looked back, and it was not coming, so I leaned against a rock and rested and panted, and let my limbs go on trembling until they got steady again. Then I crept warily back, alert, watching, and ready to fly if there was occasion, and when I was come near I parted the branches of a rose-bush and peeped through, wishing the man was about. I was looking so cunning and pretty, but the sprite was gone. I went there, and there was a pinch of delicate pink dust in the hole. I put my finger in to feel it, and said, ouch, and took it out again. It was a cruel pain. I put my finger in my mouth, and by standing first on one foot and then the other and grunting, I presently eased my misery. Then I was full of interest and began to examine. I was curious to know what the pink dust was. Suddenly the name of it occurred to me, though I had never heard of it before. It was fire. I was as certain of it as a person could be of anything in the world. So without hesitation I named it that. Fire. I had created something that didn't exist before. I had added a new thing to the world's uncountable properties. I realized this, and was proud of my achievement, and was going to run and find him and tell him about it, thinking to raise myself in his esteem. But I reflected and did not do it. No, he would not care for it. He would ask what it was good for and what could I answer, for if it was not good for something but only beautiful, merely beautiful. So I sighed and did not go. For it wasn't good for anything. It could not build a shack. It could not improve melons. It could not hurry a fruit-crop. It was useless. It was a foolishness and a vanity. And he would despise it and say cutting words. But to me it was not despicable. I said, Oh, you fire, I love you.  And was going to gather it to my breast, but refrained. Then I made another maxim out of my head, though it was so nearly like the first one that I was afraid it was only a plagiarism. The burnt experiment shuns the fire. I wrought again, and when I had made a good deal of fire dust, I emptied into a handful of dry brown grass intending to carry it home and keep it always and play with it. But the wind struck it, and it sprayed up and spat out at me fiercely, and I dropped it and ran. When I looked back, the blue spirit was towering up and stretching and rolling away like a cloud, and instantly I thought of the name of it, Smoke, though upon my word I had never heard of Smoke before. Soon brilliant yellow and red flares shot up through the Smoke, and I named them in an instant, Flames, and I was right, too, though these were the very first Flames that had ever been in the world. They climbed the trees, then flashed splendidly in and out of the vast and increasing volume of tumbling Smoke, and I had to clap my hands and laugh and dance in my rapture. It was so new and strange, and so wonderful and so beautiful. He came running, and stopped and gazed, and said not a word for many minutes. Then he asked me what it was. Ah, it was too bad that he should ask such a direct question. I had to answer it, of course, and I did. I said it was fire. If it annoyed him, that I should know, and he must ask, that was not my fault. I had no desire to annoy him. After a pause he asked, how did it come? Another direct question, and it also had to have a direct answer. I made it.  He went to the edge of the burned place and stood looking down and said, What are these? Fire coals. He picked up one to examine it, but changed his mind and put it down again. Then he went away. Nothing interests him. But I was interested. There were ashes, gray and soft and delicate and pretty. I knew what they were at once, and the embers. I knew the embers, too. I found my apples, and raked them out, and was glad, for I am very young and my appetite is active. But I was disappointed. They were all burst open and spoiled, spoiled apparently. But it was not so. They were better than raw ones. Fire is beautiful. Someday it will be useful, I think. Friday. I saw him again for a moment, last Monday at nightfall, but only for a moment. I was hoping he would praise me for trying to improve the estate, for I had meant well and had worked hard. But he was not pleased and turned away and left me. He was also displeased on another account. I tried once more to persuade him to stop going over the falls. That was because the fire had revealed to me a new passion, quite new and distinctly different from love, grief, and those others which I had already discovered. Fear! And it is horrible. I wish I had never discovered it. It gives me dark moments. It spoils my happiness. It makes me shiver and tremble and shudder. But I could not persuade him, for he has not discovered fear yet, and so he cannot understand me. End of Section 40 This is Section 41 of the $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Extract from Adam's Diary Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl, and make allowances. She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity. The world is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy. She can't speak for delight when she finds a new flower. She must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to it, and pour out endearing names upon it. And she is colour mad, brown rocks, yellow sand, grey moss, green foliage, blue sky, the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains, the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing through the shredded cloud-rock, the star jewels glittering in the wastes of space. None of them is of any practical value so far as I can see, but because they have colour and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them. If she could quiet down and keep still a couple of minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that case I think I could enjoy looking at her. Indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realise that she is a quite remarkably comely creature, lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful, and once when she was standing marble white and sun drenched on a boulder, with her young head tilted back and her hand shaving her eyes, watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognised that she was beautiful. Monday noon. If there is anything on the planet that she is not interested in, it is not in my list. There are animals that I am indifferent to, but it is not so with her. She has no discrimination. She takes to all of them. She thinks they are all treasures. Every new one is welcome. When the mighty Brontosaurus came striding into camp, she regarded it as an acquisition. I considered it a calamity. That is a good sample of the lack of harmony that prevails in our views of things. She wanted to domesticate it. I wanted to make it a present of the homestead and move out. She believed it could be tamed by kind treatment and would be a good pet. I said a pet twenty-one feet high and eighty-four feet long would be no proper thing to have about the place, because even with the best intentions and without meaning any harm it could sit down on the house and mash it, or anyone could see by the look of its eye that it was absent minded. Still her heart was set upon having that monster and she couldn't give it up. She thought she could start a dairy with it and wanted me to help milk it, but I wouldn't. It was too risky. The sex wasn't right, and we hadn't any ladder, anyway. Then she wanted to ride it and look at the scenery. Thirty or forty feet of its tail was lying on the ground, like a fallen tree, and she thought she could climb it, but she was mistaken. When she got to the steep place it was too slick and down she came and would have hurt herself but for me. Was she satisfied now? No. Nothing ever satisfies her but demonstration. Untested theories are not in her line and she won't have them. It is the right spirit. I concede it. It attracts me. I feel the influence of it. If I were with her more I think I should take it up myself. Well, she had one theory remaining about this Colossus. She thought that if we could tame it and make him friendly we could stand in the river and use him for a bridge. It turned out that he was already plenty tame enough, at least as far as she was concerned. So she tried her theory, but it failed. Every time she got him properly placed in the river and went ashore to cross over him he came out and followed her around like a pet mountain, like the other animals. They all do that. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and today, all without seeing him, it is a long time to be alone. Still it is better to be alone than unwelcome. Friday. I had to have company. I was made for it, I think, so I made friends with the animals. They are just charming and they have the kindest disposition in the politest ways. They never look sour. They never let you feel that you are intruding. They smile at you and wag their tail, if they've got one. And they are always ready for a romp or an excursion or anything you want to propose. I think they are perfect gentlemen. All these days we have had such good times and it hasn't been lonesome for me ever. Lonesome? No, I should say not. Why, there's always a swarm of them around, sometimes as much as four or five acres. You can't count them. And when you stand on a rock in the midst and look out over the furry expanse it is so mottled and splashed and gay with color and frisking sheen and sun-flash and so rippled with stripes that you might think it was a lake. Only you know it isn't. And there's storms of sociable birds and hurricanes of whirring wings, and when the sun strikes all that feathery commotion you have a blazing up of all the colors you can think of. Enough to put your eyes out. We have made long excursions and I have seen a great deal of the world, almost all of it I think, and so I am the first traveller and the only one. When we are on the march it is an imposing sight, there's nothing like it anywhere. For comfort I ride a tiger or a leopard, because it is soft and has a round back that fits me, and because they are such pretty animals. And for long distance or for scenery I ride the elephant. He hoists me up with his trunk, but I can get off myself. When we are ready to camp he sits and I slide down the back way. The birds and animals are all friendly to each other and there are no disputes about anything. They all talk and they all talk to me. But it must be a foreign language, for I cannot make out a word they say. Yet they often understand me when I talk back, particularly the dog and the elephant. It makes me ashamed. It shows that they are brighter than I am, for I want to be the principal experiment myself, and I intend to be too. I have learned a number of things and am educated now, but I wasn't at first. I was ignorant at first. At first it used to vex me, because with all my watching I was never smart enough to be around when the water was running uphill. But now I do not mind it. I have experimented and experimented until now I know it never does run uphill, except in the dark. I know it does in the dark, because the pool never goes dry, which it would, of course, if the water didn't come back in the night. It is best to prove things by actual experiment, then you know. Whereas if you depend on guessing and supposing and conjecturing, you never get educated. Some things you can't find out. But you will never know you can't by guessing and supposing. No, you have to be patient and go on experimenting until you find out that you can't find out. And it is delightful to have it that way. It makes the world so interesting. If there wasn't anything to find out, it would be dull. Even trying to find out and not finding out is just as interesting as trying to find out and finding out, and I don't know but more so. The secret of the water was a treasure until I got it. Then the excitement all went away, and I recognized a sense of loss. By experiment I know that wood swims, and dry leaves, and feathers, and plenty of other things. Therefore, by all that cumulative evidence, you know that a rock will swim. But you have to put up with simply knowing it for there isn't any way to prove it, up to now. But I shall find a way, then that excitement will go. Such things make me sad, because by and by when I have found out everything there won't be any more excitements, and I do love excitement so. The other night I couldn't sleep for thinking about it. At first I couldn't make out what I was made for, but now I think it was to search out the secrets of this wonderful world and be happy, and thank the giver of it all for devising it. I think there are many things to learn yet, I hope so, and by economizing and not hurrying too fast I think they will last weeks and weeks. I hope so. When you cast up a feather it sails away on the air and goes out of sight. Then you throw up a clod and it doesn't. It comes down every time. I have tried it and tried it, and it is always so. I wonder why it is. Of course it doesn't come down, but why should it seem to? I suppose it is an optical illusion. I mean, one of them is. I don't know which one. It may be the feather. It may be the clod. I can't prove which it is. I can only demonstrate that one or the other is a fake, and let a person take his choice. By watching I know that the stars are not going to last. I have seen some of the best ones melt and run down the sky. Since one can melt, they can all melt. Since they can all melt, they can all melt the same night. That sorrow will come, I know it. I mean to sit up every night and look at them as long as I can keep awake, and I will impress those sparkling fields on my memory, so that by and by, when they are taken away, I can by my fancy restore those lovely myriads to the black sky, and make them sparkle again, and double them by the blur of my tears. After the fall. When I look back, the garden is a dream to me. It was beautiful, surpassingly beautiful, enchantingly beautiful. And now it is lost, and I shall not see it any more. The garden is lost, but I have found him and am content. He loves me as well as he can. I love him with all the strength of my passionate nature, and this, I think, is proper to my youth and sex. If I ask myself why I love him, I find I do not know, and do not really much care to know. So I suppose that this kind of love is not a product of reasoning and statistics, like one's love for other reptiles and animals. I think that this must be so. I love certain birds because of their song, but I do not love Adam on account of his singing. No, it is not that. The more he sings, the more I do not get reconciled to it. Yet I ask him to sing, because I wish to learn to like everything he is interested in. I am sure I can learn, because at first I could not stand it, and now I can. It sours the milk, but it doesn't matter. I can get used to that kind of milk. It is not on account of his brightness that I love him. No, it is not that. He is not to blame for his brightness, such as it is, for he did not make it himself. He is, as God made him, and that is sufficient. There was a wise purpose in it, that I know. In time it will develop, though I think it will not be sudden. And besides, there is no hurry. He is well enough just as he is. It is not on account of his gracious and considerate ways and his delicacy that I love him. No, he has lacks in this regard, but he is well enough just so, and is improving. It is not on account of his industry that I love him. No, it is not that. I think he has it in him, and I do not know why he conceals it from me. It is my only pain. Otherwise he is frank and open with me now. I am sure he keeps nothing from me but this. It grieves me that he should have a secret from me, and sometimes it spoils my sleep thinking of it, but I will put it out of my mind. It shall not trouble my happiness, which is otherwise full to overflowing. It is not on account of his education that I love him. No, it is not that. He is self-educated and does really know a multitude of things, but they are not so. It is not on account of his chivalry that I love him. No, it is not that. He told on me, but I do not blame him. It is a peculiarity of sex, I think, and he did not make his sex. Of course, I would not have told on him. I would have perished first. But that is a peculiarity of sex, too, and I do not take credit for it, for I did not make my sex. Then why is it that I love him? Merely because he is masculine, I think. At bottom he is good, and I love him for that, but I could love him without it.  I know it. It is a matter of sex, I think. He is strong and handsome, and I love him for that, and I admire him and am proud of him. But I could not love him without those qualities. If he were plain, I should love him. If he were a wreck, I should love him. And I would work for him, and slave over him, and pray for him, and watch by his bedside until I died. Yes, I think I love him merely because he is mine and is masculine. There is no other reason, I suppose, and so I think it is as I first said, that this kind of love is not a product of reasonings and statistics. It just comes. None knows whence, and cannot explain itself, and doesn't need to. It is what I think. But I am only a girl, the first that has examined this matter, and it may turn out that in my ignorance and inexperience I have not got it right. Forty Years Later It is my prayer, it is my longing, that we may pass from this life together, a longing which shall never perish from the earth, but shall have place in the heart of every wife that loves until the end of time, and it shall be called by my name. But if one of us must go first, it is my prayer that it shall be I, for he is strong, I am weak, I am not so necessary to him as he is to me. Life without him would not be life. How could I endure it? This prayer is also immortal, and will not cease from being offered up while my race continues. I am the first wife, and in the last wife I shall be repeated. At Eve's Grave Adam, wheresoever she was, there was Eden. End of Section 41 And End of the $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain Read by John Greenman