How should libertarians think about privacy? Privacy is obviously something that we prize very highly and we certainly sense that today privacy is very threatened But what are the ways philosophically to think about it? What are the structures in our thinking that we should use as libertarians about privacy? I'm not really going to answer the question. How should libertarians think about privacy? I'm just going to tell you what I think about privacy. You can decide for yourself whether you want to use it The first thing to do is define the subject matter. What is privacy? Privacy is a little bit like democracy. It's a word that people use for a whole host of good values So let's unpack what the values are that people are talking about when they use the word privacy There are about five or six and I'm going to focus on just one. That's the control sense But people use the word privacy For example to refer to autonomy recall it in the 1970s the Supreme Court cases about abortion Roe v. Wade Talked in terms of privacy, but of course, that's autonomy. That's in that in that case a woman's right to choose arguably What kinds of medical procedures she has what what her family planning situation is? That's one sense of privacy But it's not the one I'm going to focus on today Another is seclusion in the Olmstead case back in the late 20s Justice Brandeis talked about privacy as quote unquote the right to be let alone and just a few years ago The Federal Trade Commission instituted a do not call policy that was immensely popular Because people were so angry about getting telephone calls at home during the dinner hour They were interested in seclusion. That is being left alone by other people. Well, that's one version of privacy, too Another is personal security They're probably familiar with the the concept of identity fraud or often called identity theft People deal with that as a privacy problem We talked about the privacy problem when really the problem is people using your identity to defraud Financial services providers in the process. They give you a terrible financial reputation and ruin your credit score That privacy problem is really about personal financial security and personal reputational security There are also examples that are slightly gruesome where murders have happened Because people have gotten access to personal information about others their addresses There was a man named Lee and Liam you and some years ago Who stalked a girl at his high school for years and years and then went to a data provider to find out her address? He went to her home and killed her there an actress named Rebecca Schaefer out in California Was killed by a stalker after he got her address from the California Department of Motor Vehicles went to her house after that States across the country and the federal government passed all passed laws called drivers privacy protection acts Because they saw personal information being used to actually physically harm people Well, that's a dimension of privacy to or a privacy value personal security There's a dimension of privacy that you might call dignity or Anti-objectification That's people. It's more of a European sense of the word privacy And it's an anti-commercial sense in a way because it's people who don't like to be objectified commercially If you're just a target of marketing if people are collecting information about you for marketing purposes That offends that offends what they call their sense of privacy a Dignity dimension of privacy. Of course, there's fairness Sometimes when information about you is available widely It's used to make decisions that are wrong and people will talk about that as a privacy problem The Fair Credit Reporting Act is an example of a federal statute that's supposed to fix this problem It hasn't necessarily done so But that so many people think of as a privacy law because it controls information in the uses of information So that good decision-making happens It relies on one having good data about people and a well-tuned algorithm when we're talking about computers and technology That's kind of a privacy idea, too The main sense of privacy in the in the version of privacy that I think is strongest is the control sense of privacy Alan Weston in a great book called Privacy and Freedom in 1967 called privacy the claim of individuals or groups or Institutions to determine for themselves when how and to what extent information about them is communicated to others He went into a lot of the anthropology of privacy and I was really interested by his book because he wrote about the Toreg tribe Which is a tribe in Northern Africa? Fascinating in many respects because it's a Muslim tribe in which men wear veils They're called les en bleu the blue men because their their clothing is very dark blue And I don't actually actually comes off on their skin and terms in blue But the men in the society wear veils across their faces and there was anthropological study of how they wore their veils up high for Formal purposes down low among friends not at all among non Toreg people This is a way in precision of how they shared and withheld information based on specific social circumstances and thinking about privacy in terms of anthropology is really helpful actually because because we can think of our own use of clothing When do we where do we put our hemlines? How do we wear our shirt? What's the nature of the fabric we put on do we wear a hat or not when we wear a hat? Do we wear it high or low? These are all signals. It's information sharing and information withholding Sometimes we tell fibs to other people white lies Sometimes we withhold information altogether from people who might be interested in it These are common common social behaviors, and it's all part of privacy protection Even the spaces that we live in are designed for information sharing and withholding think about the layout of your house The bedrooms are apart from the common rooms and that's simply so that what happens in the bedroom can be relatively private to others Sometimes parents will choose the location of their room versus the children's rooms for distance so that they can get good sleep or Proximity so that they can make sure that the kids aren't sneaking out at night All this information sharing withholding is kind of the sociology or the anthropology of privacy And it's important I think to understand that privacy is important definitionally for our lives What we share with others defines us to them what we withhold it from me from others Also defines us as to them if we can't control information about ourselves We can't define ourselves instead. We're defined by some someone or something else and that's part of why privacy is so important socially and anthropologically The definition that I use of privacy is a little bit more precise than Alan Weston's and a little bit more legalistic I Think of privacy as the subjective condition that people enjoy when they have the power to protect information about themselves And when they use this power consistent with their interests and values Let me parse that out a little bit because it's a little bit complicated First privacy is a subjective condition. That is something that we define for ourselves It's not something that someone an outsider can say we have or we do not have that would be objective I decide for me what I want to share and what I want to withhold from others Think of some common examples of information that people treat as private very commonly medical information It is sometimes extremely private, but you can easily find Alternatives to privacy that people choose for example, they'll write about or even put up pictures of Surgeries that are very intimate or medical treatments. They've undergone They get some social benefit from sharing information about themselves and of course many medical Conditions are obvious just from the looking at them. So if we say categorically Objectively that medical information is inherently private. We're making mistake It's private to some people and other people actually benefit from sharing it or can't keep it private as a matter of physics Political information is another one where the subjectivity is is particularly clear to us a lot of people Good for them. Don't really want to talk about politics.  You decide whether or not you want to share it with other people So privacy is subjective that means by the way that Regulators can't decide what privacy Americans should have now They can certainly try to generalize about the kind of privacy we should have and they'll often be relatively accurate But they'll be wrong very often to and freeze in place values that might be continually changing with with just the ongoing rollout of history or with changes in technology The next part of that definition of privacy that's important to understand is power to control information That basically goes to the legal environment Do you have the power to control information about yourself or do you not? The law has dual conflicting effects on your power to control information Many laws do protect your power to control information for example when you go into your home Close the door and draw the blinds You've obscured information from the outside world. You've obscured you've prevented photons from traveling through your through your windows or walls outside so others can observe you and You've barred others from coming into your house The law backs you up and doing that the law of property does Because people can't come into your house without violating your property rights They trespass if they come in and observe what happens There's how common law like property helps protect privacy and backs up your choices to protect information about yourself Another law that does the same is the law of battery Every morning most of us put on some clothes before we go out in the world We do this for a number of reasons one is obviously temperature control You want to stay warm, but we also do it because we want to obscure the appearance of our bodies from others It's a very strong custom and most people harbor that custom as a personal desire to obscure from others what they see The law of battery means that when we go outside wearing clothes into the public Nobody can come up to us and take those clothes off of us and reveal What we meant to hide from others. There's another good example. Our law simply backs up our privacy protecting decisions There are many laws and we're getting into the realm of legislation here that do the opposite That is that prevent us from protecting information about ourselves for example Laws that are meant to legislation and programs that are meant to provide benefits to people often have very substantial privacy costs Let's say you've invited the government to provide Financial support to everybody in a community and part of that policy is that no one should fall below a certain level Below average support average income in the community If you want to implement that policy what you have to do is know the income of everybody in the community And so the cost the privacy cost of that Beneficial program is to collect information about the financial wherewithal of everybody in the community Let's say that a government program also wants to provide health care in the community The program has to know about the health care Certainly of the beneficiaries of the program and often also of others in the community so that it can provide the appropriate health care I'm fond of saying and it's not too unfair that the helping hand of government strips away privacy before it goes to work Of course, there are many other laws that strip away privacy Administration of the income tax for example makes it impossible for you To withhold from the government how much your income is it makes it impossible for you to withhold if you want to get your tax deductions Your housing situation Children charitable benefits medical expenses and many many other dimensions of your life This is the law stripping away privacy and making you unable to protect information about yourself There are many more examples, but the third part of this definition is really the hard part and That's exercise of control over information about yourself. That's consistent with your interests and values Now people develop their privacy interests myriad ways through experience Their their parents teach them things They're cultural they're all many many dimensions to the privacy values that we all hold But how we exercise them is sometimes difficult. We know how to do it in the real world That is putting on clothing. There are lots of customs. We have they were quite familiar with it, but we're good at But in the online environment, it's very hard to do it because it's an all-new world We actually don't understand how information moves in the online environment So we don't know how to put on digital clothes as it were the IP address that your computer has is Signaled to anyone any website that you visit Did you know that do you know that they collect it? Do you know that they can share it with anybody else and among all the collectors of this information? They can kind of figure out what you're all about Same with cookies cookies are a short script that your browser will collect and store on your computer It'll share the fact that you visited a website before This is often very helpful and it helps the website customize its products for you You see something that's interesting to you the first time you go there but the cookie will also serve as a tracking mechanism that tells that website about you and Allows the website holder to tell others about you add networks use cookies to track you across multiple websites You should just know about this and decide for yourself whether you want to be sharing information like this They're cookie controls in the major browsers and the other technologies coming online all the time to help you Control this information in the online environment, but most people still don't know how and haven't done much about it That's the big problem in the future going forward as technology continues to roll out We'll all struggle with how to protect privacy in this essentially new environment It's worth talking about these things in in technical terms We're very much used to photons and sound waves and even particulates how to control information We might not be Specifically thinking in terms of photons and sound waves But we know that if we want to want people to not see something we cover it up Literally stop photons from bouncing off it or stop photons from arriving at the eyes of others If we want not to be heard we lower our voices and that prevents sound waves from reaching the person or people That we don't want to hear things. How do you do that in the digital environment with sensors all around you? Sensors in being your phone your credit card and lots of other technologies that you use those sensors are sending information out to others And you don't know exactly where it's going so you don't know what to do and you don't know what the consequences are of it We're all going to learn about this stuff over the coming years decades and generations We're into the real key threats to privacy already and I think the number one threat to privacy is probably ignorance It's just not knowing where information goes We're pretty good at protecting privacy like I said here in the real world to meet space as the techies like to call it But in the online environment, it's very hard to protect information Privacy is really a product of personal responsibility That is taking charge of information about yourself Figuring out how these technologies work talking to other people Learning about their consequences and deciding for yourself what information you want to share and what information you don't want to share Be a good consumer be a smart user of technology Sometimes you should refuse to do things because of their privacy costs I do and I give myself lots of inconvenience that way But I feel I feel good having taken control of my personal information and protected my privacy you can do the same Government surveillance of course is one of the other major threats to privacy Now that's the idea and it's a simple one The government wants to find out specific things about you and specific things about people It's certainly something we call on government to do in the context of legitimate law enforcement So there's no argument that government surveillance should be banned entirely But government surveillance is a key threat to privacy and it's a threat that's growing again as we emerge into this high-tech environment The technology Allows much more to be collected than ever before it's put into digital form that that makes it easy to copy to Transfer to store for extremely long period of time and then to share widely if that's the interest of anybody government surveillance is Generally subject to the Fourth Amendment though the Fourth Amendment has gotten very weak over time It's not up to the task currently under Supreme Court doctrine to really protect us But we have to be aware all the time as most people are that surveillance is a real and genuine threat to privacy a Second threat that many people won't recognize so easily is Administrative collection of information. I talked about the helping hand of government stripping away privacy before it goes to work That problem has grown greater and greater both with the growth of government and with the growth of technology with the increase of technology Because government agencies now collect more information than they used to and they're also more able to keep it and share it and use it more than ever Their dossier building capability is is greater than ever before and still growing That's a threat to our privacy, of course the growth of government and the growth of the capability of government to collect and store information It's worth recognizing Another layer of privacy threat that I've called anti privacy law and regulation That's law and regulation that prevents you from protecting privacy There are examples of varying stripes The US government was was a principal opponent of the use of encryption a few years back maybe more than a decade now Encryption is a way of protecting information that's in transit or in storage By essentially scrambling it using a mathematical algorithm So that it would be very very hard for somebody else to get access to what you've put in your communication The government opposed encryption because it would have hindered some of its law enforcement But in some not having access to encryption for all people communicating and storing data would actually have reduced our privacy and reduced our security eventually the government Gave way on this essentially it couldn't stop encryption because it was talking about stopping ideas algorithms math But here the here's an example where the government was an opponent of privacy protection that people could use to protect themselves Another example that's worth just knowing about is what's called the E911 mandate several years ago As cell phones were just becoming popular the federal government decided through the Federal Communications Commission That people should be able to have 911 service on their mobile telephones well ordinary 911 service works by Telling the operator that you dial on 911 where your phone is That's not so easy to do when your phone is mobile and the not E911 requirement Required telephone service providers mobile phone providers to figure out where you were in case you made a 911 call Of course mobile phone companies have to know where your phone is in order to to communicate with your phone But this process got more precise and was speeded along by the E911 mandate It helps in the name of protecting people It helped undo privacy and location information at an early stage in the development of the mobile phone and that technology There are many more examples not just in the technology area Take the tax treatment of health benefits current law Gives a tax advantage to employers for providing health insurance as a As part of the the payment that that workers get rather than just giving all the money to the workers so that the worker can buy his or her health insurance on their own What does that do it puts the employer in a position of knowing about the health insurance benefits and Often the health status of the employee Really, it should be none of the employer's business But so often employers are deeply engaged and involved in the provision of health care that they actually know health information that they really probably shouldn't Then of course you can think about the anti-privacy Infrastructure that government has helped create over years and a good example is the social security number The social security number was created shortly after the Social Security Act was passed And it was created just to administer the social security program But very quickly the federal government began adopting the social security number for more uses including tracking the sale of bonds if my memory serves and later for tax identification now The social security number and older people have a card that says not for identification purposes more and more in the late 60s and early 70s was used for financial transactions and essentially pushed out into the private sector Which rapidly adopted it for purposes of credit reporting and other financial services and now just about everything Hinges on the use of the social security number. What you have there is a national identifier That is an identifier that tells computers how to track you Names don't work so well because so many names repeat themselves over time throughout a large country like ours But a number like the SSN serves as a national identifier and makes it easier for governments and corporations To know exactly who they're dealing with every time they do deal with you Whether they have any business knowing who you are or not And so it's part of the infrastructure the information infrastructure that builds databases about us for use by governments And by corporations sometimes for our benefit and sometimes not I've talked a lot about the changes in technology and how they affect privacy And that's the most important thing to understand going forward Digitization is the abstraction of analog information like photons and sound waves and letters and numbers and symbols Into ones and zeros and the ones and zeros make it very easy to store information Make it very easy to copy information Mary very easy to process information in new ways including data mining Data mining is the idea of finding new patterns in data that allow you to predict more accurately. What's coming in the future? There are lots of good uses for data mining and some that aren't so good But the power of this abstraction the power of digitization of ones and zeros is something that will affect privacy Profoundly and it's important to pay attention to that going forward Make yourself aware of all the sensors that you're using for example your credit card your phone your computer These are all sensors that are feeding databases of information often for the better, but not always for the better There are several upshots from digitization One that I think is important to privacy is that government surveillance is easier than ever We are pouring data about ourselves out into databases often privately held But many of them are publicly held and the government can access and this is important to realize government can often access the privately held data Fourth amendment doctrine currently holds that information shared with a third party Isn't something that we have a fourth amendment interest in so our bank records having been shared We can't claim fourth amendment rights in perhaps our Communications online having been provided to a third party your ISP and your email service provider Aren't subject to fourth amendment protections that we can enforce These are serious problems and the third party doctrine is probably the most troubling part of fourth amendment law right now Given that in today's technological era. We're moving all kinds of personal information about ourselves through third parties sharing that information Giving up our fourth amendment rights the court might say Privacy is an essential part of exercising your liberty, but it's not a right It's something that you create in the shelter of other rights like the fourth amendment And as I said the fourth amendment is under siege these days and it's weakened compared compared to the technological context We're living in Ultimately if you want privacy You're going to have to protect it yourself And you should call on your neighbors and the businesses that you deal with to help you protect your privacy. I Hope that what I've said today is helpful and you're thinking Maybe this is the way libertarians should think about privacy certainly is the way I think about privacy


Section XXVIII of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part VII, 1920 through 1924. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. July XIII, 1924, Mark Twain's broad German grin. New translations have helped to restore a lost sense of humor. By Ulrich Steindorff. I remember my first college vacations when I went to Berlin to see my grandmother. She was then in her seventies, a wise old lady, never without some book she lived in and talked about. I talked about Whitman, but she smiled, opened the book she had in her lap, looked over her glasses and asked me, Do you know Mark Twain? It was one of his sketches, she read to me, and from that very hour Mark Twain has been my mentor. I had not known Mark Twain's stories before that time. He had his following in Germany as everywhere, but his works had never had the popularity they deserved. People read his sketches, knew particularly the German parts of a tramp abroad. In every library there was Tom Sawyer and there was also Huckleberry Finn, but they did not mean anything to the youth. Mark Twain says in his preface to Tom Sawyer, Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try pleasantly to remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in. German adults never did shun these books, but German boys and girls were not their readers. Ten years after my first acquaintance with Mark Twain's sketches, I read his Tom Sawyer first in English. It was in the year of 1912, the same year in which my first translation, Kipling's Plain Tales, appeared. Now for the first time I understood why Mark Twain had not acquired a true popularity. Translation, he's always a treason, says Okakuru Kakuso in his Book of Tea, quoting the observance of a Ming author, and can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade. All the threads are there, but not the subtlety of colour or design. Aside from the fact that the German translations of Mark Twain's works missed many threads, he had woven together, and that the original colour of his humour had faded and the subtle design had been reversed into mere caricature, time was against the American classic. Average German adults of that period, grounded in veneration for monarchism, were unable to appreciate the Gospel of Democracy. They either would or could not understand Mark Twain's smiling philosophy, or his satiric mockery, or his relieving laughter. And in keeping with that attitude, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, these potential free citizens of a free country, could not appeal to such parents as playmates for their children. But history helped Mark Twain to enjoy the popularity pre-war Germany had refused, when, by the revolution of 1918, democracy replaced Kaiserism, and consequently the spirit of military instruction ceded to the spirit of a true liberal education, there was no doubt in my mind that Mark Twain would replace, with a few years, the old-fashioned juvenile authors. Already at the end of the year 1918, I decided to do modernized translations of Mark Twain's books, intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls. The adventures of Tom Sawyer, and the adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I knew what was at stake. I knew what prejudices I had to overcome. Publishing business is business, and Mark Twain had never been a bestseller in Germany. Almost two years passed before I struck a publishing house, which recognized the chance, and shared my enthusiasm, for reviving Mark Twain's works. It was Ulzthain's, publishers of Germany's best-known liberal newspapers, Voicesitz-Eitl, and Berliner Morgenpost, as well as of numerous novels and fictions of all periods, which started the enterprise. During the summer of 1921, Tom Sawyer appeared. But already some months before, when the publication was announced at the Spring Fair of Leipzig, where the booksellers of all Germany meet an order for Christmas, it became evident that Tom Sawyer's adventures would outstrip all its competitors in the market for juvenile books. Maybe it was the unusual cover bearing the colored scene of Tom Sawyer painting the fence that attracted more buyers than an old-fashioned edition had done, but whatever the reason, the slumbering interest in the American classic awoke. When half a year later the adventures of Huckleberry Finn followed Tom Sawyer, there were about 50,000 German boys and girls waiting for the new Mark Twain. Publishers in this country may not be satisfied with a circulation of 50,000 copies, but in Germany a first edition of that number means unheard of popularity. During the years 1922 and 1923, one edition of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn followed the other. Until today Mark Twain is the pet author of all German youth. About 250,000 copies now are circulating, and there is scarcely a boy or a girl to whom the two American lads are not their best playmates. The children's enthusiasm awoke the interest of the adults. The popularity Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn had achieved was reflected in the popularity of other works of Mark Twain. At intervals of about six months, Ulsteins published my translations of A Tramp Abroad, roughing it, and, finally, selections of Mark Twain's sketches, Punch Brother Punch, as well as The Speech on Babies, were literally hits. And copies of these three books also are in the hands of about a quarter of a million of German readers. The year 1923 was a Mark Twain year in Germany, as published as the year 1924 may see a recredescence of his glory all over this country. The books were printed on the cheapest of paper and bound into cheapest cardboard. A kind of manufacturing this country would scarcely appreciate, but people over there could buy a copy for fifty cents. During the years after the German Revolution, books were the only presents which people of the former wealthy middle classes could give each other. St. Nicholas was a bookseller's clerk, and boys and girls learned to enjoy his gifts just as we had once enjoyed the most expensive playthings. When Quakers came to Germany and started their relief work, when American Mercy saved millions and millions of German children from starving, many hundreds of thousands of that youth wondered from what sort of paradise beyond the sea those angels came with their load of manna. Once the country of Indian fights, America now changed into the Promised Land. What Quakers have done and continue to do for the bodily health of the new German generation will not be forgotten. On the other hand, that same generation had been starving spiritually, thirsty for a smile, and hungry for another sort of food which only a poet's hand might offer. Again it was an American who helped them out of darkness by richness of his beaming imagination. Mark Twain's relieving laughter made them smile again just as the sun did with Tom Sawyer and Becky when after days in the cave Tom glimpsed a far-off speck that looked like daylight. Mark Twain's works produced a gladness all over Germany by the sunshine of his humor. German boys and girls recognized very soon that Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as well as Becky Thatcher were the children of a new world, the way they played and talked, the way their parents and their teachers treated them, the independence and self-control on the one hand and on the other the true democratic equality were bound to make a mighty impression on the first generation of the new German Republic. For that reason Mark Twain may be considered a preceptor Germaniae. Mark Twain reopened the fountain of humor which had almost dried up in Germany, but his humor is far from being witticism. He followed the lesson of Shakespeare. To be a humorist was not to be a joker, but to be a philosopher smiling at the world around him and laughing with it. Mark Twain saw most of this earth and no region of human heart was unknown to him. All pain and all joy, all heights and all depths he had experienced, but he remembered always the eternal sun shining behind the clouds. Sometimes he split the mist coldly and mercilessly, but he did it by love. The true humorist sees the world as it is, but his wisdom is one of exaggeration. Mark Twain has often been blamed for his exaggerations, as well blame a microscope for exaggerating and unfolding realities never seen before. The eyes of Mark Twain have been such a microscope, and all variety of human nature he saw and visualized to an admiring world is truth. Mark Twain's truth belongs to all nations. His Tom Sawyer is as international as Shakespeare's false staff of Cervantes Don Quixote. The old Germany may have shrunk from Mark Twain's magic mirror. The new Germany is laughing before it. End of Section 28, July 13, 1924. Mark Twain's Broad German Grin. Read by John Greenman. Section 29 of Mark Twain in the New York Times Part 7, 1920 through 1924. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. July 26, 1924. Mark Twain matched German's invention.  By T. R. Ibarra. Copyright 1924. By the New York Times Company. By wireless to the New York Times. Berlin, July 25. Mark Twain would rather have been an inventor than a writer, declares a German who, when he was a child, once saw and heard America's great humorist. The latter visited the home of this German's father during his trip to Germany, and the two got to talking about themselves in a weird hodgepodge of English and German, while the little son of Mark Twain's host, who had read Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer until he nearly knew them by heart, listened in breathless silence. Once I invented a combination lamp and cooking stove, said Mark Twain's host. The humorist promptly replied, Once I invented a collar that needed no collar button, and also a vest which enabled the wearer to do away with suspenders. From Mark Twain's tone, as he spoke, says the German who heard him, one could easily see he was prouder of these inventions than of his books. So Jovial was Twain throughout the visit, continues the German, that nobody could have guessed he had just lost the entire fortune amassed from his writings, and had been obliged at the age of fifty-six to begin all over again. End of Section 29, July 26, 1924, Mark Twain matched German's invention, read by John Greenman. Section 30 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 7, 1920 through 1924. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. August 10, 1924. Mark Twain's former home still remains a landmark. Famous Fifth Avenue House will be preserved by present owner. Property in same family for two centuries. Irving stayed there. By Howard A. Lamb There is one landmark of little old New York that may still laugh at the assaults of time and apartment house builders. It has been finally decided that the residence at 21 Fifth Avenue, corner of Ninth Street, of worldwide interest because it has been the home of both Washington Irving and Mark Twain, is not going to be torn down. Not as long as the present owner, Edward Renwick Whittingham, lawyer of Two Rector Street, is alive, and he is still a very young man. Sentiment is regarded as a rare thing these days, and getting rarer, especially along Fifth Avenue. But it is nothing else but sentiment and family pride that have made Mr. Whittingham cold to the entreaties of hotel and apartment house operators, and resolved to make the quaint house his home as long as he lives. Other old houses in the neighborhood are vanishing almost overnight to make room for towering apartment buildings, but there are enough left to give the Washington Square neighborhood an atmosphere of its own, and Mr. Whittingham would like to see it perpetuated. Diagonally across the street from Mr. Whittingham's property, for instance, is the house built by Henry Brevoort. On February 24, 1840, the first masked ball ever given in New York was held there. It was marked by the elopement of Matilda Barkley, daughter of the British consul, with a South Carolina youth, regarded as a great scandal in that day. The house is now owned by Mrs. George F. Baker, Jr., herself a descendant of the Brevoorts. Adjacent to 21 Fifth Avenue is the old home of Dr. E. L. Partridge, with a line of the old Randall Farm going through it, from which an underground passage used to lead to the Brevoort Hotel, the first hotel on Fifth Avenue, a block away as the former home of Charles A. Dana of the Sun. Mr. Whittingham's property, a part of the old Brevoort farm, has been longer in the hands of one family than any other in New York, two hundred and fifty years. The young lawyer feels that it would be almost a sacrilege to let it go. He is unmarried, however, and is not occupying it at the present time. The Brevoort farm belonged originally to Bastian Ellis, who received it December 18, 1667, from Richard Nichols, the first English governor of New York. It passed from Ellis to his son-in-law John Hendrick Brevoort in 1701, and has been in the Brevoort family ever since. The original owner of the present house was James Renwick, great-grandfather of Mr. Whittingham, for thirty years ahead of the Natural Science Department of King's College. He died in 1862. To the Renwick family belongs the honour of establishing a line of regular sailing vessels between this country and England. William Renwick was interested with Alexander Hamilton and others in founding the Bank of New York in 1784. Spare Room for Irving Mrs. James Renwick was Margaret Ann Brevoort, daughter of Hendrick Brevoort, the stubborn old knickerbocker who put the bend in Broadway because he would not let it go through his cherry orchard. He also prevented the opening of Eleventh Street through his property because it would run too close to his house, which stood on the present site of Grace Church. Professor Renwick was a close friend of Washington Irving. He travelled with Irving in England when Irving was writing Bracebridge Hall and also accompanied him on trips over the continent. It was because of this comradeship that Professor Renwick set aside the middle room on the second floor as a spare bedroom for the author of Rip Van Winkle to use whenever he came to town from his home at Sunnyside up the Hudson. James A. Renwick, Professor Renwick's grandson and his cousin, Mrs. Bessie Whittingham, held the property between them until last August when Mrs. Whittingham's son, Edward, obtained sole possession. The apartment in the basement is now occupied by Dr. Robert H. Kahn, who moved into the building when Mark Twain and his family left and for many years used the entire premises. He had known the Clemens family for years. At his country home he still keeps the orchestral with which Twain entertained himself in the Fifth Avenue House playing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and other compositions of which he was fond. The house itself, now almost a century old, was designed by the original owner's son, James Renwick Jr., the architect who drew the plans for several churches in the same neighborhood, the Church of the Ascension, the First Presbyterian Church, and Grace Church, as well as some of the buildings at Vassar College and the Smithsonian Institution. There is an ecclesiastical suggestion about the windows of the house, which are gracefully rounded at the top, and the rooms are of stately proportions. It was built shortly after the opening of Fifth Avenue and was the first one on the block. Mark Twain moved in during the fall of 1904 and remained until the summer of 1908 when he occupied Stormfield, just built for him at Redding, Connecticut. There he died April 21, 1910, aged 74. Dictated in bed Albert Bigelow Payne, Twain's biographer, lived in the house for a while to help carry on his work. Mark continued to indulge a weakness for doing his literary work in bed, dictating his biographical notes to Payne's stenographer as he lay voluptuously under the blankets and garbed in a handsome silk dressing gown of rich Persian pattern propped against the snowy pillows. Clemens was passionately fond of billiards and when Mrs. H. H. Rogers presented him with a handsome billiard table he converted one of the bedrooms into a billiard room. With Payne he played the game at every opportunity. George Harvey and Peter Finley Dunn were occasional opponents and Mr. and Mrs. Martin W. Littleton, who lived nearby, came over for an occasional three-handed game in the evening. Littleton was then engaged in the defense of Harry Thaw on trial for the murder of Stanford White and used to entertain Clemens with interesting side lights of the day's developments in court. Occasionally Clemens was the center of interest at small dinners given at the Brevard Hotel, a step from his own door, and his home became the meeting place of some of the shining literary lights of the day. To his dinners came, in addition to George Harvey and Peter Finley Dunn, Dean Howells, Augustus Thomas, whose play The Witching Hour was then at the height of its success, and Brander Matthews. Mark Twain was a conspicuous figure in the Washington Square neighborhood. He was a man whose personality naturally dominated the crowd about him. The white suit he always wore and his bushy crown of silver hair would have attracted attention even if he were not famous for other things. At times he went out for a stroll with General Dan Sickles, then in his eighties, and handicapped by a wooden leg, who lived in a mansion across the street. He bought his cigars from Joe Isaacs, who died in New York this summer. Isaacs kept his store in a corner of Alexander McClellan's Roadhouse at the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and Eleventh Street, torn down in 1912. Here the bra scott served fine old musty ale and mutton pies that won him a steady reputation for forty-two years. Liked Cheap Cigars McClellan's was the resort of gentlemen, where men like Chester A. Arthur and William Travers Jerome out for a cutter ride on a frosty night might drop in for a nip of spiced rum. Even Theodore Roosevelt, then police commissioner and at grips with the saloon power, was obliged to tell old Alec, who is still Hale and Hardy, by the way, that he conducted a model drinking-place. Clemence's taste ran to strong black cigars, rather than to liquid refreshments, so that he seldom stopped at Alec's hospitable place. The cheaper the cigars, the better he liked them, but he probably bought so many that Isaacs considered him a welcome customer. It must have been Clemence himself who remarked that he smoked constantly, loathed exercise, and had no other regularity of habits. He often received presents of the most expensive imported cigars, but he never smoked them. He handed them out to his friends and callers. Once he passed an English briar root pipe to Paine and said, I'd like to have you smoke that a year or two, and when it gets so you can't stand it, maybe it will suit me. On pleasant days Mark Twain liked to stroll up Fifth Avenue, sometimes as far as the Carnegie Home, on 92nd Street, and come back on the electric stage, from which he could enjoy the panorama while he smoked without interference. At times he turned at 59th Street, rested at the Plaza Hotel, or sat on a bench in Central Park. On Sunday mornings he would time his return to see the crowds leaving the churches. He liked the throng. The homage of the multitude was dear to him, not because he loved adulation for its own sake, but because his heart was big enough to fully appreciate the tribute of a people's affection. Children loved him. It was the most precious reward of his life, the final harvest, says Paine, and he had the courage to claim it. Children were as fond of Clemens as he was of them. Frequently on his walks he got no further than Madison Square Park, than the centre of a fine residence section, because the youngsters, sometimes accompanied by their nurses, would beg him to sit down on a bench and tell them stories. This he would do for an hour or two, reading from Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, or making up tales as he went along.  As I remember Mr. Clemens, she said the other day, he was a strange man, always alone, always thoughtful. We children adored him. The stories he told me became the subject of my dreams.  But in spite of brilliant dinners, hosts of friends, material prosperity, and the love of people all over the world, the four years Mark Twain lived at 21 Fifth Avenue were some of the loneliest and most miserable of his life. The loss of his wife was an uncontrollable sorrow. Bernard Shaw had linked him with Edgar Allan Poe to outstanding literary geniuses of America and had compared his works from a historical standpoint with those of Voltaire. But Clemens felt that he had accomplished little except to amuse people. He was submerged in a pessimistic philosophy and died a disappointed man. End of Section 30, August 10, 1924, Mark Twain's former home still remains a landmark. Read by John Greenman. Section 31 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 7, 1920 through 1924. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. October 15, 1924. A unique autobiography. In the two volumes of Mark Twain's autobiography, which the Harper's are bringing out, we have a work out of the ordinary in many senses. The scheme of the writing is such as it never entered the head of another man to conceive. It is without order, chronological or other, shows very little feeling for division or proportion of subjects, is absolutely hit or miss in method and effect, yet it makes, for the most part, entertaining reading. Mark Twain, apparently of his own volition, various scraps of reminiscence. He did this at long intervals of time and seemed to fall out of the whim of going on with the task of an autobiography at all. But some of his friends and literary advisers pitched upon the idea of pinning him down during his customary mornings in bed or while walking about his room and inducing him to dictate whatever came into his mind out of an interesting past. The whole product is thus uncoordinated and sprawling, but goes extremely well with the haphazard and discursive mood which so often became predominant in Mark Twain during his later years. An amusing aspect of this lack of plan in his autobiography is that Mark Twain came to delight in it and to praise it as a wonderful literary invention. At first he was averse to attempting anything of the sort without that nothing could be done with it. But little by little his distaste was overcome and toward the end we find him triumphantly arguing with Mr. Howells that this way of writing and autobiography was the best that had ever been devised and would ensure a multitude of readers for years to come. He felt sure that what enthralled and absorbed him at any given moment would be certain to come to others with a spontaneity and verve that could not be commanded in an ordered narrative. The result was a mass of unrelated and disjointed recollections, the author often breaking off at a word or giving first place to some new idea which crowded out the old one that he was perfectly ready to drop. Yet somehow the volumes succeed in recalling vividly Mark Twain in habit as he was. The autobiography of his abounds in the rough humor of exaggeration of which he was so fond, yet it occasionally embalms, as in the characterization of his mother and of his wife, some of that delicate sentiment and nice perception exquisitely expressed with which his writings have made all familiar. There is also a record of many personal contacts and experiences which go to making the full picture of his life. Occasionally too the book gives fresh revelations of Mark Twain's independence of character and of judgment, together with his capacity for moral indignation. His autobiography may be formless, but it is very much alive. The one thing which he cannot reproduce is the impenetrable mask which he was able to make his face assume with the hesitant drawl signalizing his approach to witticisms and to the orson-like utterances with which he delighted to flutter the dove-coats in private conversation and at public meetings. Ender Section 31 October 15th 1924 A Unique Autobiography Read by John Greenman Section 32 of Mark Twain in The New York Times Part 7 1920-1924 This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman with help from Eberhard Schneider. October 19th 1924 Mirror of the heart and mind of a great American. Two volumes of an intimate autobiography published fourteen years after Mark Twain's death, a review by H. I. Brock. Mark Twain's Autobiography, with an introduction by Albert Bigelow Payne, two volumes New York, Harper & Brothers. It should be observed in the first place that the thing to do with Mark Twain's autobiography is to read it, not to write about it. All the commentary really needed has been furnished by Samuel M. Sick, Clemens himself speaking as he says from The Grave, distilling an enriched and ennobled essence of himself in which his virtues and his faults are equally preserved and mellowed. I intend, he writes, that this autobiography shall become a model for all future autobiographies when it is published after my death, and I also intend that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its form and method. A form and method whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along like contact of flint and steel. Moreover, this autobiography of mine does not select from my life its showy episodes, but deals merely in the common experiences which go to make up the life of the average human being. So indeed it does, even while it presents the autobiographer with an extraordinary human being both in himself and in the presentation of those common experiences. It is a deliberate system, he adds, and the law of the system is that I shall talk about the matter which for the moment interests me and cast it aside and talk about something else, the moment its interest for me is exhausted. The application of the system more or less unconscious at first, one suspects, covers with considerable gaps and intervals 40 active years, the years from 1870 to the death of the autobiographer in 1910. The first jotting relates to this father's aspirations as a landed proprietor of 75,000 acres of Tennessee lands bought for $400 down. Ten years are allowed to elapse and then come memorabilia of general grant with who, as the publisher of the general's memoirs, Mark Twain had close personal relations in 1885. In 1897 and for two years thereafter, writing far overseas in Vienna, he is chiefly concerned with vivid recollections of his boyhood in Dura. In 1904 he is residing in the vicinity of Florence for Mrs. Clemens' health's sake. He writes, therefore, autobiographically about Florentine villas. In 1906 he undertakes, with the aid of a stenographer furnished by his biographer, Albert Bigelopane, the systematic application by dictation of his unsystematic system. His text, or starting point for any particular day's dictation, is often taken from that morning's newspaper. But, true to his autobiographical creed, he doesn't always stick to the text. To quote from his editor, it was his custom to stay in bed until noon, and he remained there during most of the earlier dictations. Clad in a handsome dressing gown, propped against great snowy pillows. He loved this loose luxury and ease, and found it conducive to thought. On a little table beside him, where lay his cigars, papers, pipes, and various knick-knacks, shone a reading lamp, making more brilliant his rich coloring and the gleam of his shining hair. There you have the stage setting. But it was only so in his Fifth Avenue house. In the country in New Hampshire, and afterward at his own place Stormfield in Connecticut, the autobiography was dictated while he paced the veranda, clad in creamy white flannels and loose Morocco slippers. Whatever the setting, the autobiographical system was essentially the same. One result of the system in practice is that the interest of the reader is rarely, if ever exhausted. Another is an extraordinarily complete and rounded picture of the writer, in spite of the proposed jumble of his recollections, following a course which begins nowhere, follows no specific route, and can never reach an end. Well, I am alive. This model, which is to serve as a beacon to all future autobiographers, certainly owes something to earlier models, particularly to that masterpiece of imaginary autobiography, the life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentlemen. It is yet a vehicle admirably adapted to be the mirror of Mark Twain, and of the generation of which Mark Twain was sublimit, cynic, sentimentalist, blaspheming and loving with all his might, living with every keen sense of him and talking prodigiously. The keynote of Twain's extraordinary character and essential Americanism may be discovered in his vaunting price of ancestry and transparent pretense of making light of that pride. Back of the Virginian Clemenses is a dim procession of ancestors stretching back to Noah's time. According to tradition some of them were pirates, writes Mark, and confesses that in his time he has desired himself to be a pirate. But chiefest matter of pride is Geoffrey Clement, who helped to sentence Charles I to death. As a regicide he was greater than a king, and thereby has Mark been made vain. But for most of this ancestral pride, which may know more than Pubas be denied, he takes refuge behind the lovely frail figure of his mother and her slender, small body and her heart so large that everybody's grief and everybody's joys found welcome in it and hospitable accommodation. She it was who, to the day of her death, felt a strong interest in the whole world and everything and everybody in it, and in all her life never knew such a thing as half hearted interest in affairs and people or an interest which drew a line and left certain affairs and was indifferent to certain people. This friend of Satan, it is written from the grave, for is the archfiend not a sinner like the rest, she said, yet nobody prays for him. This friend of Satan was a most gentle spirit and an unstudied and unconscious pathos was her native speech. But one day in our village I saw a vicious devil of a Corsican, a common terror in the town, chasing his grown daughter past cautious male citizens with a heavy rope in his hands and declaring he would wear it out on her. My mother spread her door wide to the refugee and then, instead of closing and locking it after her, stood in it and stretched her arms across it, barring the way. The man swore, cursed, threatened her with the rope, but she did not flinch or show any sign of fear. She only stood straight and fine and lashed him, shamed him, derided him, defied him in tones not audible to the middle of the street, but audible to the man's conscience and dormant manhood. And he asked her pardon and gave her his rope, and said, with a most great and blasphemous oath, that she was the bravest woman he ever saw. And so went his way, without another word, and troubled her no more. Yet privately this gentle, bravest woman was no better than an aristocrat. She who had been named James Lampton came from Kentucky and was married in the Kentucky city of Lexington. Was proud that the Lampton's, now earls of Durham, had occupied the family lands for nine hundred years, that they were feudal lords of Lampton Castle and holding the highest position of ancestors of hers when the Norman conqueror came over to divert the Englishry. Son Mark pretended to jeer at this maternal pride in holding land nine hundred years. He said it was done with the friendly assistance of an entail, that she was merely descended from an entail, and might as well be proud of being descended from a mortgage. But nevertheless his son Mark perpetually recalling these Lampton's and rolling under his tongue their estate of belted earls. And he will never have done with the story of the one hundred thousand acres of Tennessee lands which his father held to found the family fortune. This Tennessee land intrudes into the proposed jumble of the model autobiography, like King Charles had in Mr. Dick's calligraphic memorials, which incidentally brings in again that pride-begetting regicide. Here is palpable pretext of the inner and spiritual grace of democracy. Nevertheless the subject conducts to an excellent admission. In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a boy, everybody was poor, but didn't know it, and everybody was comfortable and didn't know it. And there were grades of society, people of good family, people of unclassified family, people of no family. Everybody knew everybody and was affable to everybody. And nobody put on any visible heirs. Yet class lines were quite clearly drawn and the familiar social life of each class was restricted to that class.  Yet you perceive that the aristocratic taint was there. Mark connects the taint with the peculiar institution of slavery and the fact that the town's population had come from the slave states. But after all the proud lamptons of Lampton Castle did not come from slave states, nor did Geoffrey Clement, the regicide, proceed out of Barbary. Incidentally hereabouts is introduced the original of Colonel Mulberry Sellers, who was in fact a lampton of Kentucky and very proud of the lamptons of Durham. James, he was named, a cousin of the elder Mrs. Clemens, and floated all his days in a tinted mist of magnificent dreams. And here also, and cropping up anywhere in the narration, are vivid boyhood recollections. As of the night when Mark was fourteen and was to play bear at a costume party of his younger elders, he practised everything a bear could do and many things no bear could ever do with dignity, without his bear's disguise, and with no disguise whatever in fact, all innocent that two young ladies behind a screen were eagerly observing. A smothered burst of feminine snickers, betrayed the audience and during several weeks thereafter Mark could not look any young lady in the face. Not any at all, because the two behind the screen remained unidentified. It was only in Calcutta forty-seven years later that one of the culprits, old and grey-haired but very handsome, gleefully confessed. Then there was Uncle John's farm four miles from the village of Florida where Mark was born in 1835. It was a heavenly place for a boy. The house was a double log one with a spacious roof, roofed in, connecting it with the kitchen. In the summer the table was set in the middle of that shady and breezy floor, and the sumptuous meals—well, it makes me cry to think of them—fried chicken, roast pig, wild and tame turkeys, ducks and geese, venison just killed, squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, partridges, prairie chickens, wheat bread, hot rolls, hot cornpone, fresh corn boiled on the ear, succotash, butter beans, string beans, tomatoes, peas, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, buttermilk, sweet milk, clabber, watermelons, muskmelons, cantaloupes, all fresh from the garden, apple pie, peach pie, pumpkin pie, apple dumplings, peach cobbler. I can't remember the rest. What has been remembered is enough to indicate that folks on Uncle John's farm were at least comfortably fed and aptly provided with delectable varieties of hot bread of which Europe has remained so persistently ignorant, and which the North, because of not knowing how to make it properly, pretends to regard as bad for the insides. I can see the farm yet with perfect clearness. I can see all its belongings, all its details. The family room of the house with a trundle bed in one corner and a spinning wheel in another, a wheel whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the mournfulest of all sounds to me, and made me homesick and low-spirited, and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the dead. The vast fireplace piled high on winter's nights with flaming hickory logs from whose ends a sugary sap bubbled out, but did not go to waste, for we scraped it off and ate it. The lazy cat spread out on the rough hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the stems and blinking, my aunt in one chimney-corner knitting, my uncle in the other, smoking his corn-cob pipe, the slick and carpetless oak floor faintly mirroring the dancing flame tongues and freckled with black indentations where fire-coals had popped out and died a leisurely death. Half a dozen children romping in the background twilight, split bottom chairs here and there, some with rockers, a cradle out of service, but waiting with confidence. In the early cold mornings a snuggle of children in shirts and chemises occupying the hearthstones and procrastinating and could not bear to leave that comfortable place and go out on the windswept floor-space between the house and kitchen where the general tin basin stood and wash, along outside of the front fence ran the country road, dusty in the summertime and a good place for snakes. They liked to lie in it and sun themselves. When they were rattlesnakes or puff-adders we killed them. When they were black snakes or races or belonged to the fabled hoop-breed we fled without shame. When they were house snakes or garters we carried them home and put them in Aunt Batsy's work-basket for a surprise. For she was prejudiced against snakes and always when she took the basket in her lap and they began to climb out of it it disordered her mind. She never could seem to get used to them. Her opportunities went for nothing and she was always cold toward bats too and could not bear them and yet I think a bat is as friendly a bird as there is. My mother was Aunt Patsy's sister and had the same wild superstitions. A bat is beautifully soft and silky. I do not know any creature that is pleasanter to the touch or is more gentle for caressings if offered in the right spirit. I know all about these callioptera because our great cave three miles below Hannibal was multitudinously stocked with them and often I brought them home to amuse my mother with. It was easy to manage if it was a school day when I had ostensibly been to school and hadn't any bats. She was not a suspicious person but full of trust and confidence and when I said there is something in my coat pocket for you she would put her hand in but she always took it out again herself. I didn't have to tell her. It was remarkable the way she couldn't learn to like private bats. The more experience she had the more she could not change her views. There were swings made of bark stripped from hickory saplings. They usually broke when a child was forty feet in the air and this was why so many bones had to be mended each year. I had no ill luck myself but none of my cousins escaped. There were eight of them and at one time or another they broke fourteen arms among them but it cost next to nothing for the year worked by the year twenty five dollars for the whole family. Not to count that every old woman was a doctor and gathered her own medicines in the woods and know how to compound doses that would stir the vitals of a cast iron dog. The country school house stood in a clearing in the woods and was more or less regularly attended. Mark's first visit was at the age of seven. A strapping girl of fifteen in the customary sun bonnet and calico dress asked me if I used tobacco, meaning did I chew it? I said no. It roused her scorn. Mark confesses that he never could learn to chew tobacco though in the matter of smokes his capacity for evil varieties of the weed was notorious. Wheeling long nines were his favorite because he had acquired an affection for them when he was a cub pilot on the Mississippi. He said when a cigar costs four and a quarter or five cents I smoke it with confidence. Not without profit one might stray from this point to Clemens' description of a villa he knew near Florence a house built four hundred years ago for Cosmo the First and containing uncounted rooms not omitting a salon forty feet in each of three directions called the Great Sahara but it was well to skip to John Hay who even before he was Secretary of State was not afraid of Horace Greeley yet was not altogether brave for Hay and Twain being discovered together on a Sunday morning chatting as freely and gaily as if it had been a weekday by Mrs. Hay it was easily perceived that the bottom had fallen out of his valor no less than his vocabulary at the door he did not invite Twain to call again but said pathetically and apologetically she is very strict about Sunday thus proving that no courage is absolutely perfect. With his manner of speaking his mind and writing it and with his record as editor of the Virginia City Enterprise out in Nevada at a time when the duelo was strong with Western editors it is surprising that Mark confesses to but one duel and that only arranged not consummated. There was a challenge some pistol practice and not every effective fire by editor Clemens but a second's neat job in shooting off the head of a sparrow so terrified the rival faction that they declined to fight on any terms nevertheless Clemens had to flee the state as a duelist when I laid down my editorial pen he records I had four horse whippings and two duels coming to me as an editor retired and an autobiographer which is a kind of historian in active practice Mark Twain makes the discovery the discovery of the wide difference in interest between news and history that news is history in its first and best form its vivid and fascinating form and that history is the pale and tranquil reflection of it he observes that in his autobiography as at that stage it was being written by daily dictation he is mixing these two forms together all the time he is hoping by this method of procedure to secure the values of both because the autobiographical dictation dealing always with the thing that immediately interests him that thing is infallibly either something he has got by reading the inferno newspapers or by talking to somebody so he gets a fresh start from news every day wherever his history lands him in his own case at least the plan works for instance general Daniel E. Sickles arrives at 81 years January 16th 1906 Sickles lost a leg at Gettysburg which suggests the reflection that soldiers who have lost a leg in battle value the lost leg above the one that is left and Twain recalls walking across from his fifth avenue house down towards the square to Sickles house where the drawing room floors walls and ceilings are cluttered up and overlaid with lion skins tiger skins leopard skins elephant skins more animals more skins here and there and everywhere more and more skins it was as if a menagerie had undressed in the place at an earlier date on a bench in Washington Square Twain saw the most of Louis Stevenson RLS was most scantily furnished with flesh his clothes seem to fall into hollows as if there were nothing inside but the frame of a sculptor's statue between them they coined a new name submerged renown for the sort of author whose fame lives down in a deep water for what the reviewer says never finds its way down into those placid deeps nor the newspaper sneers nor any breath of the hands of slander blowing above down there they never hear of these things their idle maybe painted clay up there at the surface and fade and crumble and blow away there being much weather there but down below he is gold and adamant and indestructible the conversation arose because a bookseller had just told Stevenson that a man named Davis never heard of by the author of Treasure Island was the most read author in America down in the sunless region of eternal drudgery and starvation wages he found his readers by the millions Henry H. Rogers standard oil and steel magnate had been pioneering as a witness in Boston that reminded Mark of how this closest and most valued friend had saved his copyrights from being swallowed up in the wreck and ruin early in the nineties of Mark's publishing firm Charles L. Webster and Company it was a failure on a grand scale and it is familiar history that Mark went to work and paid his creditors cent for cent but it took time Rogers contrived the delay of ninety-six creditors only three or four insisted on their immediate pound of flesh I have never writes Mark resented their animosity except in my autobiography and even there not in spite not in malice but frankly and in only a brief chapter a chapter which can never wound them for I have confidence that they will be in hell before it is printed here Mark records his opinion that whatever lofty and charming and lovable thing it is to be a gentleman Henry H. Rogers could have sat for the portrait it was as his publisher chiefly that twain knew Ulysses S. Grant there is much about general grant in the autobiography especially during the time when the general was dying slowly and bravely of cancer one day twain brought a young sculptor Gerhardt to the general's house to correct from life a bust he had made from a photograph Gerhardt was admitted to the sick room the general was stretched out in a reclining chair with his feet supported upon an ordinary chair he was muffled up in dressing gowns and afghans with his black woolen skull cap on his head the ladies one was the general's wife took the skull cap off and began to discuss his nose and his forehead and they made him turn this way and that way and the other way to get different views and profiles of his features he took it all patiently and made no complaint twain is a hero worshipper of grant in spite of having been his publisher a clergyman disguised as Mr. N. reported that Grant in his last hours pressed his hand Mr. N's and delivered himself of this astounding remark thrice have I been in the shadow of the valley of death and thrice have I come out again says Marx succinctly general Grant never used flowers of speech and dead or alive he never could have uttered anything like that either as a quotation or otherwise but when Mark asked the general who originated the idea of the famous March to the sea whether it was himself or Sherman Grant said neither the enemy did it that time Mark had called upon the general who was not yet very ill with his little daughter Susie whose death in her early twenties supplies a moving chapter in the book and whose childish diary furnishes the text for many another chapter becomes the news peg upon which is lovingly hung the father's excursion into history Susie's spelling is frequently desperate but Mark who was the prize-speller of that school of his back in Hannibal, Missouri let's Susie's spelling stand I cannot bring myself to change any line or word of Susie's sketch of me Clemens writes for the child's diary set out to be and pretty fairly was a biography of her father at this point it is noted that in homes frequented by literary people lawyers judges professors the talk of the children is curious and funny musketry clatter of little words interrupted at intervals by the heavy artillery crash of a word of such imposing sound and size that it seems to shake the ground and rattle the windows and the father adds proudly as a child Susie had good fortune with her large words and employed many of them the Clemens children but not Susie seemed to have sworn vigorously upon occasion also but not in the language of their father whose supply of brimstone for utterance was not surprising in an ex-pilot of the Mississippi they borrowed their misplaced pieties from a little German maid who had to do the young thing's hair and when she was done exploded her thanks toward the sky in this form God's sight dank ich bin schon fertig mit dem gott verdammten ha mark says he is not quite brave enough to translate this but he does not shrink from setting down in cold type this I believe that the trade of critic in literature music and the drama is the most degraded of all trades and that it has no real value certainly no large value mark is thus by his words as by his deeds abundantly proclaimed a man of courage when Blaine was nominated against Cleveland he dared though a resident of Hartford at the time to announce his intention of voting for Cleveland on election day we went to the polls and consummated our hellish design one of the we was his friend the Reverend Joe tWitchell who by that act most seriously damaged himself with his congregation though he had been their pastor ever since the Civil War they were near dismissing tWitchell from his pulpit for his political heresy they didn't do it but it was a close call since then says mark he became persistent in voting right mark is then struck by the fact that in this country there are perhaps eighty thousand preachers not more than twenty of them are politically independent the rest cannot be politically independent they must vote the ticket of their congregation they do it and are justified the subject might be pursued followed into the green pastures with the sheep like folk that we are but as was broadly hinted in the beginning the only satisfactory way to deal with Mark Twain's autobiography is to read it when that is done what he has written about his wife Lavinia sick Langdon is worthy to set beside what he has written about his mother Mrs. Clemens is eloquently acknowledged a perfect character and helped me but marks heedlessness his easy way with the social proprieties distressed her he might anytime wear his arctics right into the east room at the White House after a polite dinner party he had always to be dusted off for social errors Mrs. Clemens and the children undertook to edit his manners as they did his manuscript it seems he endured the ordeal in each case cheerfully but this is a serious autobiography even if it has not been too seriously selected from in this place elder people who read it will be reminded of much that they have forgotten younger people will learn a lot about their elders including some quite famous and important persons and many that are neither end of section 32 October 19th 1924 mirror of the heart and mind of a great American read by John Greenman with help from Eberhard Schneider section 33 of Mark Twain in the New York Times Part 7 1920 through 1924 this LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman December 28 1924 Mark Twain's burglar now a devoted reader of man he robbed notice to the next burglar there is only plated wear in this house now and henceforth you will find it in that brass thing in the dining room over in the corner of the basket of kittens if you want the basket put the kittens in the brass thing do not make a noise it disturbs the family you will find rubbers in the front hall by that thing that has the umbrellas in it chiffon yay I think they call it or pergola or something like that please close the door when you go away very truly yours SL Clemens yes said a giant of a man with a heavy face and large powerful hands yes that little note was called forth by me it was written just after a friend of mine and myself broke into Mark Twain's place stormfield he smiled at Mark Twain's now famous bit of fooling with a reminiscent air it was a long time ago he went on staring at nothing sixteen years he lapsed into silence do you remember much about it yes he replied calmly I remember it all right I got ten years in the Connecticut State prison for it after a pause he added with a chuckle it was that brass thing mentioned by Mark Twain in his little note to the next nocturnal visitor that made all the trouble that brass thing was a large brass bowl on the sideboard and when we tried to get the silver out my friend noticed it he was afraid we'd knock it off so he took it down carefully and laid it on the floor that was a bad move you see said the ex burglar in a matter of fact tone we didn't want to make any more noise than we could help anyway and when we tried to break into the sideboard it began to seem pretty risky so we decided to take the sideboard out we moved it down the road away and you what moved it out of the house and down the road he replied patiently the whole sideboard sure and when we got it out and away from the house we opened it that was all right but we went back after that to see what else we could find the faux pas we didn't get very far on that second trip my friend was moving around in a quiet sort of way when all of a sudden there came a terrific bang from the part of the room where he was it was that brass thing he had taken so carefully off the sideboard he had gone and stumbled over it in the dark where it lay on the floor well after that things began to happen and they happened fast somebody came down from upstairs and turned on a flashlight from the stair landing oh said this person but we didn't wait to answer politely we decided that it was about time to blow and we did that without losing any time we decided to get the early morning train away from those parts that was a bad move to there weren't very many people on it and we were a little conspicuous I guess you know how all those trains are everybody knows everybody else or pretty close to it but we were strangers however we didn't have much time to feel out of it on account of being strangers all of a sudden 12 men came into the car and the way they looked at us made us pretty sure they wanted to have us join them my friend ran to the other end of the car out through the door and jumped off the train it's a wonder he didn't break his neck that train must have been going about 50 miles an hour I didn't have much time to think about what had happened to him though those fellows made a beeline for me the first of them had a gun and it was pointed in my direction so I took out my own gun I had it right here like this in my right hand coat pocket I took it out and let fly with two or three shots towards the ceiling of the car I thought I might be able to scare them but I was fooled they were all old hands at that sort of thing one of them got close enough to hit me over the head with a blackjack right here is where he landed the ex burglar pushed back the hair from his forehead and showed a white scar just at the hair's edge his favorite author he hit me with it went on and then I got mad I grabbed hold of him and we started wrestle around in the aisle of the car I tripped him but he swung me around as we fell and landed on top of me he was a big man bigger than me he had me by the wrist but I was crazy by that time couldn't see what I was doing on account of the blood in my eyes I wriggled the gun around into something and pulled later I learned I had shot the policeman in the leg I say later because that's all I can remember until I found myself lying out on the embankment beside the train with handcuffs on then came the trial and I got ten years it was interesting to hear what Mark Twain had to say about my visit he said I scared away most of the servants and didn't get what I was after and that now I was in jail and that if I kept on I would go to Congress Albert Bigelow Payne in his biography of Mark Twain says Claude the butler fired a pistol after them the burglars to hasten their departure and Clemens wakened by the shots thought the family was opening champagne and went to sleep again one would expect that the Mark Twain burglars might have some feeling of bitterness in connection with any Mark Twain products but this is far from being the case the ex burglar is as a matter of fact a Mark Twain enthusiast he has read most of the author's writings and they remain his favorite books indeed the ex burglar was discovered through his coming to the establishment of Harper and Brothers to get the recently published autobiography of Mark Twain while he was getting it he modestly divulged the information that he had once paid the famous author an evening visit without invitation my visit to Mark Twain was the last such exploit I ever made he said not because I was a disappointed burglar as Mark Twain said for I took away all the silverware but because I have since come to the conclusion that crime doesn't pay the ex burglar has had further relations with the Clemens family since the unhappy episode which landed him in Connecticut State Prison for ten years but these relations have been of a far pleasanter sort since my release from prison some nine years ago he said I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting the only living member of Mark Twain's family Mrs. Clara Clemens Cabrilovich it is to the generosity and practical assistance of Mark Twain's talented daughter that I owe my real chance to make good and to become a useful and law abiding citizen and member of the society I hated and fought so long a deceptive burglar alarm Mark Twain had other encounters with burglars of one of these he writes the following episode in the autobiography that burglar alarm which Susie mentions led a gay and careless life and had no principles it was generally out of order at one point or another and there was plenty of opportunity because all the windows and doors in the house from the cellar up to the top floor were connected with it in its seasons of being out of order it could trouble us for only a very little while we quickly found out that it was fooling us and that it was buzzing its blood curdling alarm merely for its own amusement then we would shut it off and send to New York for the electrician there not being one in all Hartford in those days then when the repairs were finished we would set the alarm again and re-establish our confidence in it it never did any real business except upon one single occasion all the rest of its expensive career was frivolous and without purpose just that one time it performed its duty and its whole duty gravely seriously admirably it let fly about two o'clock one black and dreary March morning and I turned out promptly because I knew that it was not fooling this time the bathroom door was on my side of the bed I stepped in there turned up the gas looked at the annunciator turned off the alarm so far as the door indicated was concerned thus stopping the racket and then I came back to bed Mrs. Clemens said what was it I said it was the cellar door she said was it a burglar do you think yes I said of course it was do you suppose it was a Sunday school superintendent she said what do you suppose he wants probably after vegetables I said I suppose he wants jewelry but he is not acquainted with the house and he thinks it is in the cellar I don't like to disappoint a burglar whom I am not acquainted with and who has done me no harm but if he had had a common sagacity enough to inquire I could have told him we kept nothing down there but coal and vegetables still it may be that he is acquainted with this place and that what he really wants is coal and vegetables on the whole I think it is vegetables he is after she said are you going down to see no I said I could not be of any assistance let him select for himself then she said but suppose he comes up to the ground floor I said well that's all right we shall know it the minute he opens the door on that floor it will set off the alarm just then the terrific buzzing broke out again I said he has arrived I told you he would I know all about burglars and their ways they are systematic people I went into the bathroom to see if I was right and I was I shut off the dining room and stopped the buzzing and came back to bed my wife said what do you suppose he is after now value of the device I said I think he has got all the vegetables he wants and is coming up for the napkin rings and odds and ends for the wife and the children they all have families burglars have and they are always thoughtful of them always take a few necessities of life for themselves and the rest as tokens of remembrance for the family in taking them they do not forget us those very things represent tokens of his remembrance of us also we never get them again the memory of the attention remains embalmed in our hearts she said are you going down to see what it is he wants now no I said I am no more interested than I was before these are experienced people they know what they want I should be of no help to him I think he is after ceramics and bric-a-brac and such things if he knows the house he knows that that is all that he can find on the dining room floor she said suppose he comes up here I said that is all right he will give us notice she said what shall we do then I said climb out of the window she said well what is the use of a burglar alarm for us I said you have seen that it has been useful up to the present moment I have explained to you how it will be continuously useful after he comes up here that was the end of it he didn't ring any more alarms presently I said he is disappointed I think he has gone off with the vegetables and the bric-a-brac and I think he is dissatisfied his theory substantiated we went to sleep and at a quarter before eight morning I was out and hurrying for I was to take the 829 train for New York and I found the gas burning brightly full head all over the first floor my new overcoat was gone my old umbrella was gone my new patent leather shoes which I had never worn were gone the large which opened into the ombre at the rear of the house was standing wide I passed out through it and tracked the burglar down the hill through the trees tracked him without difficulty because he had blazed his progress with imitation silver napkin rings and my umbrella and various other things which he had disapproved of and I went back in triumph and proved to my wife that he was a disappointed burglar I had suspected he would be from the start and from his not coming up to our floor to get human beings enter section 33 December 28 1924 Mark Twain's burglar and end of Mark Twain in the New York Times Part 7 1920 through 1924 by Mark Twain read by John Greenman