44 I did not take temporary editorship of an agricultural paper without misgivings. Neither would a landsman take command of a ship without misgivings. But I was in circumstances that made the salary an object. The regular editor of the paper was going off for a holiday, and I accepted the terms he offered, and took his place. The sensation of being at work again was luxurious, and I wrought all the week with unflagging pleasure. We went to press, and I waited a day with some solicitude, to see whether my effort was going to attract any notice. As I left the office, toward sundown, a group of men and boys at the foot of the stairs dispersed with one impulse, and gave me passageway, and I heard one or two of them say, That's him! I was naturally pleased by this incident. The next morning I found a similar group at the foot of the stairs, and scattering couples and individuals standing here and there in the street and over the way, watching me with interest. The group separated and fell back as I approached, and I heard a man say, Look at his eye! I pretended not to observe the notice I was attracting, but secretly I was pleased with it, and was proposing to write an account of it to my aunt. I went up the short flight of stairs and heard cheery voices and a ringing laugh as I drew near the door, which I opened, and caught a glimpse of two young, rural-looking men whose faces blanched and lengthened when they saw me, and then they both plunged through the window with a great crash. I was surprised. In about half an hour an old gentleman with a flowing beard and a fine but rather austere face entered, and sat down at my invitation. He seemed to have something on his mind. He took off his hat, and set it on the floor, and got out of it a red silk handkerchief and a copy of our paper. He put the paper on his lap, and while he polished his spectacles with his handkerchief he said, Are you the new editor? I said I was. Have you ever edited an agricultural paper before? No, I said. This is my first attempt. Very likely. Have you had any experience in agriculture practically? No, I believe I have not. Some instinct told me so, said the old gentleman, putting on his spectacles and looking over them at me with asperity, while he folded his paper into a convenient shape. I wish to read you what must have made me have that instinct. It was this editorial. See if it was you that wrote it. Turnips should never be pulled. It injures them. It is much better to send a boy up and let him shake the tree. Now, what do you think of that? For I really suppose you wrote it. Think of it. Why, I think it is good. I think it is sense. I have no doubt that every year millions and millions of bushels of turnips are spoiled in this township alone, by being pulled in a half-ripe condition, when if they had sent a boy up to shake the tree, shake your grandmother. Turnips don't grow on trees. Oh, they don't, don't they? Well, who said they did? The language was intended to be figurative. Holy figurative! Anybody that knows anything will know that I meant that the boy should shake the vine. Then this old person got up and tore his paper all into small shreds and stamped on them, and broke several things with his cane, and said I did not know as much as a cow, and then went out and banged the door after him, and in short acted in such a way that I fancied he was displeased about something. But not knowing what the trouble was, I could not be any help to him. Pretty soon after this a long cadaverous creature, with lanky locks hanging down to his shoulders, and a week's stubble, bristling from the hills and valleys of his face, darted within the door, and halted, motionless, with finger on lip, and head and body bent in listening attitude. No sound was heard. Still he listened. No sound. Then he turned the key in the door, and came elaborately tiptoeing toward me till he was within long reaching distance of me when he stopped, and after scanning my face with intense interest for a while, drew a folded copy of our paper from his bosom, and said, There! You wrote that? Read it to me! Quick! Relieve me! I suffer!" I read as follows, and as the sentences fell from my lips I could see the relief come, I could see the drawn muscles relax, and the anxiety go out of the face, and rest and peace steal over the features like the merciful moonlight over a desolate landscape. Guano is a fine bird, but great care is necessary in rearing it. It should not be imported earlier than June or later than September. In the winter it should be kept in a warm place, where it can hatch out its young. It is evident that we are to have a backward season for grain, therefore it will be well for the farmer to begin setting out his corn stalks and planting his buckwheat cakes in July, instead of August. Concerning the pumpkin, this berry is a favorite with the natives of the interior of New England, who prefer it to the gooseberry for the making of fruit-cake, and who likewise give it the preference over the raspberry for feeding cows, as being more filling and fully as satisfying. The pumpkin is the only escalant of the orange family that will thrive in the north, except the gourd and one or two varieties of the squash. But the custom of planting it in the front yard with the shrubbery is fast going out of vogue, for it is now generally conceded that the pumpkin as a shade-tree is a failure. Now, as the warm weather approaches and the ganders begin to spawn, the excited listener sprang toward me to shake hands and said, There, there, that will do. I know I am all right now, because you have read it just as I did, word for word. But, stranger, when I first read it this morning I said to myself, I never, never believed it before. Notwithstanding, my friends kept me under watch so strict, but now I believe I am crazy, and with that I fetched a howl that you might have heard two miles and started out to kill somebody, because, you know, I knew it would come to that sooner or later, and so I might as well begin. I read one of them paragraphs over again so as to be certain, and then I burned my house down and started. I have crippled several people, and have got one fellow up a tree, where I can get him if I want him. But I thought I would call in here as I passed along and make the thing perfectly certain, and now it is certain, and I tell you it is lucky for the chap that is in the tree. I should have killed him, sure, as I went back. Goodbye, sir, goodbye. You have taken a great load off my mind. My reason has stood the strain of one of your agricultural articles, and I know that nothing can ever unseat it now. Goodbye, sir." I felt a little uncomfortable about the cripplings and arsons this person had been entertaining himself with, for I could not help feeling remotely accessory to them. But these thoughts were quickly banished, for the regular editor walked in. I thought to myself, now, if you had gone to Egypt as I recommended you to, I might have had a chance to get my hand in, but you wouldn't do it, and here you are. I sort of expected you. The editor was looking sad and perplexed and dejected. He surveyed the wreck which that old rioter and those two young farmers had made, and then said, This is a sad business, a very sad business. There is the mucilage bottle broken, and six panes of glass, and a spittoon, and two candlesticks. But that is not the worst. The reputation of the paper is injured, and permanently I fear. True, there never was such a call for the paper before, and it never sold such a large addition or sword to such celebrity. But does one want to be famous for lunacy, and prosper upon the infirmities of his mind? My friend, as I am an honest man, the street out here is full of people, and others are roosting on the fences, waiting to get a glimpse of you, because they think you are crazy, and well, they might, after reading your editorials. They are a disgrace to journalism. Why, what put it into your head that you could edit a paper of this nature? You do not seem to know the first rudiments of agriculture. You speak of a furrow and a harrow as being the same thing. You talk of the molting season for cows, and you recommend the domestication of the pole-cat on account of its playfulness and its excellence as a ratter. Your remark that clams will lie quiet if music be played to them was superfluous, entirely superfluous. Nothing disturbs clams. Clams always lie quiet. Clams care nothing whatever about music. Ah, heavens and earth, friend, if you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life you could not have graduated with higher honor than you could today. I never saw anything like it. Your observation that the horse-chestnut has an article of commerce is steadily gaining in favor is simply calculated to destroy this journal. I want you to throw up your situation and go. I want no more holiday. I could not enjoy it if I had it. Certainly not with you in my chair. I would always stand in dread of what you might be going to recommend next. It makes me lose all patience every time I think of your discussing oyster beds under the head of landscape gardening. I want you to go. Nothing on earth could persuade me to take another holiday. Oh, why didn't you tell me you didn't know anything about agriculture? Tell you. You corn stalk. You cabbage.  It's the first time I ever heard such an unfeeling remark. I tell you I have been in the editorial business going on fourteen years, and it is the first time I ever heard of a man's having to know anything in order to edit a newspaper. You, turnip. Who write the dramatic critiques for the second rate papers? Why, a parcel of promoted shoemakers and apprentice apothecaries who know just as much about good acting as I do about good farming and no more. Who review the books? People who never wrote one. Who do up the heavy leaders on finance? Parties who have had the largest opportunities for knowing nothing about it. Who criticise the Indian campaigns? Gentlemen who do not know a war-woop from a wigwam and who never have had to run a foot-race with a tomahawk or pluck arrows out of the several members of their families to build the evening campfire with. Who write the temperance appeals and clamour about the flowing bowl? Folks who will never draw another sober breath till they do it in the grave. Who edit the agricultural papers? You, yam. Men as a general thing who fail in the poetry line, yellow-coloured novel line, sensation, drama line, city editor line, and finally fall back on agriculture as a temporary reprieve from the poor house. You try to tell me anything about the newspaper business. Sir, I have been through it from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less the man knows, the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands. Heaven knows if I had but been ignorant instead of cultivated and impudent instead of diffident, I could have made a name for myself in this cold, selfish world. I take my leave, sir. Since I have been treated as you have treated me, I am perfectly willing to go. But I have done my duty. I have fulfilled my contract as far as I was permitted to do it. I said I could make your paper of interest to all classes and I have. I said I could run your circulation up to twenty thousand copies, and if I had had two more weeks I'd have done it, and I'd have given you the best class of readers that ever an agricultural paper had—not a farmer in it, nor a solitary individual who could tell a watermelon tree from a peach vine to save his life.  Adios! I then left. Now, to show how really hard it is to foist a moral or a truth upon an unsuspecting public through a burlesque without entirely and absurdly missing one's mark, I will here set down two experiences of my own in this thing. In the fall of 1862 in Nevada and California the people got to running wild about extraordinary petrifactions and other natural marvels. One could scarcely pick up a paper without finding in it one or two glorified discoveries of this kind.  I was a brand new local editor in Virginia City, and I felt called upon to destroy this growing evil. We all have our benignant, fatherly moods at one time or another, I suppose. I chose to kill the petrifaction mania with a delicate—a very delicate—satire. But maybe it was altogether too delicate for nobody ever perceived the satire part of it at all. I put my scheme in the shape of the discovery of a remarkably petrified man. I had had a temporary falling out with Mr. Blank, the new coroner and justice of the peace of Humboldt, and thought I might as well touch him up a little at the same time and make him ridiculous and thus combine pleasure with business. So I told, impatient, belief-compelling detail, all about the finding of a petrified man at gravely Ford, exactly a hundred and twenty miles over a breakneck mountain trail from where Blank lived. How all the savants of the immediate neighbourhood had been to examine it! It was notorious that there was not a living creature within fifty miles of there except a few starving Indians, some crippled grasshoppers, and four or five buzzards out of meat and too feeble to get away. How those savants all pronounced the petrified man to have been in a state of complete petrification for over ten generations! And then, with a seriousness that I ought to have been ashamed to assume, I stated that as soon as Mr. Blank heard the news, he summoned a jury, mounted his mule, and posted off with noble reverence for official duty on that awful five days' journey through alkali, sagebrush, peril of body, and imminent starvation to hold an inquest on this man that had been dead and turned to everlasting stone for more than three hundred years. And then, my hand being in, so to speak, I went on, with the same unflinching gravity, to state that the jury returned a verdict that deceased came to his death from protracted exposure. This only moved me to higher flights of imagination, and I said that the jury, with that charity so characteristic of pioneers, then dug a grave, and were about to give the petrified man Christian burial, when they found that for ages a limestone sediment had been trickling down the face of the stone against which he was sitting, and this stuff had run under him and cemented him fast to the bedrock, that the jury, they were all silver miners, canvassed the difficulty a moment, and then got out their powder and fuse, and proceeded to drill a hole under him in order to blast him from his position, when Mr. Blank, with that delicacy so characteristic of him, forbade them, observing that it would be little less than sacrilege to do such a thing. From beginning to end the petrified man's squib was a string of roaring absurdities, albeit they were told with an unfair pretense of truth that even imposed upon me to some extent, and I was in some danger of believing in my own fraud. But I really had no desire to deceive anybody, and no expectation of doing it. I depended on the way the petrified man was sitting to explain to the public that he was a swindle. Yet I purposely mixed that up with other things hoping to make it obscure. And I did. I would describe the position of one foot, and then say his right thumb was against the side of his nose, then talk about his other foot, and presently come back and say the fingers of his right hand were spread apart, then talk about the back of his head a little, and return and say the left thumb was hooked into the right little finger, then ramble off about something else, and by and by drift back again and remark that the fingers of the left hand were spread like those of the right. But I was too ingenious. I mixed it up rather too much, and so all that description of the attitude as a key to the humbuggery of the article was entirely lost, for nobody but me ever discovered and comprehended the peculiar and suggestive position of the petrified man's hands. As a satire on the petrified mania, or anything else, my petrified man was a disheartening failure. For everybody received him in innocent good faith, and I was stunned to see the creature I had begotten, to pull down the wonder business with, and bring derision upon it, calmly exalted to the grand chief place in the list of the genuine marvels our Nevada had produced. I was so disappointed at the curious miscarriage of my scheme that at first I was angry, and did not like to think about it. But by and by, when the exchanges began to come in with the petrified man copied and guilelessly glorified, I began to feel a soothing secret satisfaction, and as my gentlemen's field of travels broadened, and by the exchanges I saw that he steadily and implacably penetrated territory after territory, state after state, and land after land, till he swept the great globe and culminated in sublime and unimpeached legitimacy in the august London Lancet, my cup was full, and I said I was glad I had done it. I think that for about eleven months, as nearly as I can remember, Mr. Blank's daily mailbag continued to be swollen by the addition of half a bushel of newspapers, hailing from many climbs with the petrified man in them, marked around with a prominent belt of ink. I sent them to him, I did it for spite, not for fun. He used to shovel them into his backyard and curse, and every day during all those months the miners, his constituents, for miners never quit joking a person when they get started, would call on him and ask if he could tell them where they could get hold of a paper with the petrified man in it. He could have accommodated a continent with them. I hated Blank in those days, and these things pacified me and pleased me. I could not have gotten more real comfort out of him without killing him. The other burlesque I have referred to was my fine satire upon the financial expedience of cooking dividends, a thing which became shamefully frequent on the Pacific coast for a while. Once more, in my self-complacent simplicity, I felt that the time had arrived for me to rise up and be a reformer. I put this reformatory satire in the shape of a fearful massacre at Empire City. The San Francisco papers were making a great outcry about the iniquity of the Danish silver mining company, whose directors had declared a cooked or false dividend for the purpose of increasing the value of their stock so that they could sell out at a comfortable figure and then scramble from under the tumbling concern. And while abusing the Danish, those papers did not forget to urge the public to get rid of all their silver stocks and invest in sound and safe San Francisco stocks such as the Spring Valley Water Company, etc. But right at this unfortunate juncture, behold, the Spring Valley cooked a dividend too.   And, I said slyly, at the bottom, that the sudden madness of which this melancholy massacre was the result, had been brought about by his having allowed himself to be persuaded by the California papers to sell his sound and lucrative Nevada silver stocks, and buy into Spring Valley just in time to get cooked along with that company's fancy dividend and sink every cent he had in the world. It was a deep, deep satire and most ingeniously contrived, but I made the horrible detail so carefully and conscientiously interesting that the public devoured them greedily and wholly overlooked the following distinctly stated facts to it. The murderer was perfectly well known to every creature in the land as a bachelor, and consequently he could not murder his wife and nine children. He murdered them in his splendid dressed stone mansion, just in the edge of the great pine forest between Empire City and Dutch Knicks. There wasn't a solitary tree within fifteen miles of either place. And finally it was patent and notorious that Empire City and Dutch Knicks were one in the same place and contained only six houses anyhow, and consequently there could be no forest between them. And on top of all these absurdities I stated that this diabolical murderer, after inflicting a wound upon himself that the reader ought to have seen would kill an elephant in the twinkling of an eye, jumped on his horse and rode four miles, waving his wife's reeking scalp in the air, and thus performing entered Carson City with tremendous ecla, and dropped dead in front of the chief saloon, the envy and admiration of all beholders. Well, in all my life I never saw anything like the sensation that little satire created. It was the talk of the town. It was the talk of the territory. Most of the citizens dropped gently into it at breakfast, and they never finished their meal. There was something about those minutely faithful details that was a sufficing substitute for food. Few people, that were able to read, took food that morning. Dan and I, Dan was my repertorial associate, took our seats on either side of our customary table in the Eagle Restaurant, and as I unfolded the shred they used to call a napkin in that establishment, I saw at the next table two stalwart innocents with that sort of vegetable dandruff sprinkled about their clothing, which was the sign and evidence that they were in from the truckie with a load of hay. The one facing me had the morning paper folded to a long, narrow strip, and I knew, without any telling, that that strip represented the column that contained my pleasant financial satire. From the way he was excitedly mumbling, I saw that the heedless son of a haymo was skipping with all his might in order to get to the bloody details as quickly as possible, and so he was missing the guide-boards I had set up to warn him that the whole thing was a fraud.   Then he broke into a disjointed checking-off of the particulars, his potato cooling in mid-air, meantime, and his mouth making a reach for it occasionally, but all was bringing up suddenly against a new and still more direful performance of my hero. At last he looked his stunned and rigid comrade impressively in the face and said, with an expression of concentrated awe, Jim! He bialled his baby, and he took the old woman's scalp, cussed if I want any breakfast, and he laid his lingering potato reverently down, and he and his friend departed from the restaurant empty, but satisfied. He never got down to where the satire part of it began. Nobody ever did. They found the thrilling particular sufficient. To drop in with a poor little moral at the fag end of such a gorgeous massacre was like following the expiring sun with a candle, and hoped to attract the world's attention to it. The idea that anybody could ever take my massacre for a genuine occurrence never once suggested itself to me, hedged about as it was by all those tell-tale absurdities and impossibilities concerning the great pine forest, the dressed stone mansion, etc. But I found out then, and never have forgotten since, that we never read the dull explanatory surroundings of marvelously exciting things when we have no occasion to suppose that some irresponsible scribbler is trying to defraud us. We skip all that, and hasten to revel in the blood-curdling particulars and be happy. End of Chapter 46 This is Chapter 47 of Sketches New and Old. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain, Chapter 47 The Undertaker's Chat Now, that corpse, said the Undertaker, patting the folded hands of deceased, approvingly, was a brick. Every way you took him, he was a brick. He was so real, accommodating, and so modest-like, and simple in his last moments. Friends wanted a metallic burial-case. Nothing else would do. I couldn't get it. There weren't going to be time. Anybody could see that. Corpse said, never mind. Shake him up some kind of a box. He could stretch out uncomfortable. He weren't particular about the general style of it. Said he went more on room than style. Anyway, in a last final container. Friends wanted a silver door plate on the coffin, signifying who he was and where he was from. Now, you know a fellow couldn't rouse out such a galey thing as that in a little country town like this. What did the corpse say? Corpse said, whitewash his old canoe and dob his address and general destination onto it, with a blacking brush and a stencil plate, along with a verse from some likely him or other, and pint him for the tomb, and mark him COD, and just let him flicker. He weren't distressed any more than you be. On the contrary, just as calm and collected as a hearse-horse. Said he judged that, where he was going to, a body would find it considerable better to attract attention by a picturesque moral character than a natty burial-case with a swell door plate on it. Splendid man he was. I'd rather do for a corpse like that and any I've tackled in seven years. There's some satisfaction in burying a man like that. You feel that what you're doing is appreciated. Lord bless you, so he's got planted before he spied. He was perfectly satisfied. Said his relations meant well, perfectly well, but all them preparations was bound to delay the thing more or less, and he didn't wish to be kept laying round. You never see such a clear head as what he had, and so calm and so cool. Just a hunk of brains. That is what he was. Perfectly awful. It was a ripened distance from one end of that man's head to Tether. Often, and over again, he's had brain fever raging in one place, and the rest of the pile didn't know anything about it, didn't affect it any more than an engine insurrection in Arizona affects the Atlantic states.  He was the most down on style of any remains I ever struck. A beautiful, simple-minded creature. It was what he was. You can depend on that. He was just set on having things the way he wanted them, and he took a solid comfort in laying his little plans. He had me measure him and take a whole raft of directions. Then he had the minister stand up behind a long box with a table, cloth over it to represent the coffin, and read his funeral sermon, saying, Angkor, Angkor, at the good places, and making him scratch out every bit of brag about him, and all the highfalutin, and then he made them trot out the choir, so he could help them pick out the tunes for the occasion, and he got them to sing Pop Goes the Weasel, because he'd always liked that tune when he was downhearted and solemn music made him sad, and when they sung that with tears in their eyes, because they all loved him, and his relations grieving around, he just laid there as happy as a bug, and tried to beat time and showing all over how much he enjoyed it, and presently he got worked up and excited and tried to join in, for, mind you, he was pretty proud of his abilities in the singing-line, but the first time he opened his mouth and was just going to spread himself, his breath took a walk. I never see a man snuffed out so sudden. It was a great loss, a powerful loss to this poor little one-horse town. Well, well, well, I ain't got time to be plavoring along here. Got to nail on the lid and mosey along with him, and, if you'll just give me a lift, we'll skeet him into the hearse and meander along. Relations bound to have it so. Don't pay no attention to dying in junctions, minute a corpse is gone. But if I had my way, if I didn't respect his last wishes and tow him behind the hearse, I'll be cussed.  He cracked his whip and went lumbering away with his ancient ruin of a hearse, and I continued my walk with a valuable lesson learned that a healthy and wholesome cheerfulness is not necessarily impossible to any occupation. The lesson is likely to be lasting, for it will take many months to obliterate the memory of the remarks and circumstances that impressed it. CHAPTER 48 CONCERNING CHAMBERMADES Against all chambermaids of whatsoever age or nationality I launch the curse of Bacheloredome, because they always put the pillows at the opposite end of the bed from the gas burner, so that while you read and smoke before sleeping, as is the ancient and honored custom of bachelors, you have to hold your book aloft in an uncomfortable position to keep the light from dazzling your eyes. When they find the pillows removed to the other end of the bed in the morning, they receive not the suggestion in a friendly spirit, but, glorying in their absolute sovereignty and unpitying your helplessness, they make the bed just as it was originally, and gloat in secret over the pang, their tyranny will cause you. Always after that, when they find you have transposed the pillows, they undo your work, and thus defy and seek to embitter the life that God has given you. If they cannot get the light in an inconvenient position any other way, they move the bed.  They do it on purpose. If you want the spittoon in a certain spot, where it will be handy, they don't, and so they move it. They always put your other boots into inaccessible places. They chiefly enjoy depositing them, as far under the bed as the wall will permit. It is because this compels you to get down in an undignified attitude and make wild sweeps for them in the dark with the bootjack and swear. They always put the matchbox in some other place.  This is to cause you to break that glass thing groping in the dark and get yourself into trouble. They are forever and ever moving the furniture. When you come in in the night, you can calculate on finding the bureau where the wardrobe was in the morning.  This will disgust you. They like that. No matter where you put anything, they are not going to let it stay there. They will take it and move it the first chance they get. It is their nature. And besides, it gives them pleasure to be mean and contrary this way. They would die if they couldn't be villains.  If there is any one particular old scrap that you are more down on than any other, and which you are gradually wearing your life out trying to get rid of, you may take all the pains you possibly can in that direction, but it won't be of any use, because they will always fetch that old scrap back and put it in the same old place again every time. It does them good. And they use up more hair oil than any six men, if charged with perloining the same, they lie about it. What do they care about a hereafter? Absolutely nothing. If you leave the key in the door for convenience's sake, they will carry it down to the office and give it to the clerk. They do this under the vile pretense of trying to protect your property from thieves, but actually they do it because they want to make you tramp back downstairs after it, when you come home tired, or put you to the trouble of sending a waiter for it, which waiter will expect you to pay him something, in which case I suppose the degraded creatures divide. They keep always trying to make your bed before you get up, thus destroying your rest and inflicting agony upon you, but after you get up they don't come any more till next day. They do all the mean things they can think of, and they do them just out of pure cussetness and nothing else. Chamber maids are dead to every human instinct. If I can get a bill through the legislature abolishing chamber maids, I mean to do it. This is Chapter 49 of Sketches New and Old. This Liebervox recording is in the public domain. Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain, Chapter 49 Aurelia's Unfortunate Young Man. Written about 1865. The facts in the following case came to me by letter from a young lady who lives in the beautiful city of San Jose. She is perfectly unknown to me, and simply signs herself Aurelia Maria, which may possibly be a fictitious name. But no matter, the poor girl is almost heartbroken by the misfortunes she has undergone, and so confused by the conflicting councils of misguided friends and insidious enemies that she does not know what course to pursue in order to extricate herself from the web of difficulties in which she seems almost hopelessly involved. In this dilemma she turns to me for help, and supplicates for my guidance and instruction with a moving eloquence that would touch the heart of a statue. Here her sad story. She says that when she was sixteen years old she met and loved, with all the devotion of a passionate nature, a young man from New Jersey named Williamson Breckenridge Carruthers, who was some six years her senior. They were engaged, with the free consent of their friends and relatives, and for a time it seemed as if their career was destined to be characterized by an immunity from sorrow beyond the usual lot of humanity. But at last the tide of fortune turned.  Aurelia thought to break off the engagement at first, but pity for her unfortunate lover caused her to postpone the marriage day for a season and give him another trial. The very day before the wedding was to have taken place, Breckenridge, while absorbed in watching the flight of a balloon, walked into a well and fractured one of his legs, and it had to be taken off above the knee. Again Aurelia was moved to break the engagement, but again love triumphed, and she set the day forward and gave him another chance to reform. And again Miss Fortune overtook the unhappy youth. He lost one arm by the premature discharge of a Fourth of July cannon, and within three months he got the other pulled out by a carding machine. Aurelia's heart was almost crushed by these latter calamities. She could not but be deeply grieved to see her lover passing from her by piecemeal, feeling, as she did, that he could not last forever under this disastrous process of reduction, yet knowing of no way to stop its dreadful career, and in her tearful despair she almost regretted, like brokers who hold on and lose, that she had not taken him at first before he had suffered such an alarming depreciation. Still her brave soul bore her up, and she resolved to bear with her friend's unnatural disposition yet a little longer. Again the wedding-day approached, and again disappointment overshadowed it. Carruthers fell ill with the Aerosipilus, and lost the use of one of his eyes entirely. The friends and relatives of the bride, considering that she had already put up with more than could reasonably expect it of her, now came forward and insisted that the match should be broken off. But after wavering awhile Aurelia, with a generous spirit which did her credit, said she had reflected calmly upon the matter, and could not discover that Breckenridge was to blame. So she extended the time once more, and he broke his other leg. It was a sad day for the poor girl when she saw the surgeons reverently bearing away the sack whose uses she had learned by previous experience, and her heart told her the bitter truth, that some more of her lover was gone. She felt that the field of her affections was growing more and more circumscribed every day, but once more she frowned down her relatives and renewed her betrothal. Shortly before the time set for the nuptials another disaster occurred. There was but one man scalped by the Owens River Indians last year. That man was Williamson Breckenridge Carruthers of New Jersey. He was hurrying home with happiness in his heart when he lost his hair forever, and in that hour of bitterness he almost cursed the mistaken mercy that had spared his head. At last Aurelia is in serious perplexity as to what she ought to do. She still loves her Breckenridge, she writes, with truly womanly feeling. She still loves what is left of him, but her parents are bitterly opposed to the match, because he has no property and is disabled from working, and she has not sufficient means to support both comfortably. Now, what should she do? She asked with painful and anxious solicitude. It is a delicate question. It is one which involves the life-long happiness of a woman and that of nearly two-thirds of a man, and I feel that it would be assuming too great a responsibility to do more than make a mere suggestion in the case. How would it do to build to him? If Aurelia can afford the expense, let her furnish her mutilated lover with wooden arms and wooden legs, and a glass eye and a wig, and give him another show. Give him ninety days without grace, and if he does not break his neck in the meantime, marry him and take the chances. It does not seem to me that there is much risk anyway, Aurelia, because if he sticks to his singular propensity for damaging himself every time he sees a good opportunity, his next experiment is bound to finish him, and then you are safe, married or single. If married, the wooden legs and such other valuables as he may possess revert to the widow, and you see you sustain no actual loss save the cherished fragment of a noble but most unfortunate husband, who honestly strove to do right, but whose extraordinary instincts were against him. Try it, Maria. I have thought the matter over carefully and well, and it is the only chance I see for you. It would have been a happy conceit on the part of Carothers if he had started with his neck, and broken that first. But since he has seen fit to choose a different policy and string himself out as long as possible, I do not think we ought to up-brave him for it, if he has enjoyed it. We must do the best we can under the circumstances, and try not to feel exasperated at him. A grand affair of a ball, the pioneers, came off at the Occidental some time ago. The following notes of the costumes worn by the bells of the occasion may not be uninteresting to the general reader, and Jenkins may get an idea therefrom. Mrs. W. M. was attired in an elegant pâté de foie gras, made expressly for her, and was greatly admired. Miss S. had her hair done up. She was the center of attraction for the gentleman and the envy of all the ladies. Mrs. G. W. was tastefully dressed in a tout ensemble, and was greeted with deafening applause wherever she went. Mrs. C. N. was superbly arrayed in white kid gloves. Her modest and engaging manner accorded well with the unpretending simplicity of her costume, and caused her to be regarded with absorbing interest by everyone. The charming Miss M. M. B. appeared in a thrilling waterfall, whose exceeding grace and volume compelled the homage of pioneers and emigrants alike, how beautiful she was. The queenly Mrs. L. R. was attractively attired in her new and beautiful false teeth, and the bonjour effect they naturally produced was heightened by her enchanting and well-sustained smile. Miss R. P., with that repugnance to ostentation in dress, which is so peculiar to her, was attired in a simple white lace collar fastened with a neat pearl-button solitaire. The fine contrast between the sparkling vivacity of her natural optic and the steadfast attentiveness of her placid glass eye was the subject of general and enthusiastic remark. Miss C. L. B. had her fine nose elegantly enameled, and the easy grace with which she blew it from time to time marked her as a cultivated and accomplished woman of the world. Its exquisitely modulated tone excited the admiration of all who had the happiness to hear it. END OF CHAPTER XVI All things change, except barbers, the ways of barbers and the surroundings of barbers. These never change. What one experiences in a barbers' shop the first time he enters one is what he always experiences in barbers' shops afterward till the end of his days. I got shaved this morning, as usual. A man approached the door from Jones Street as I approached it from Maine, a thing that always happens. I hurried up, but it was of no use. He entered the door one little step ahead of me, and I followed in on his heels and saw him take the only vacant chair, the one presided over by the best barber. It always happened so. I sat down hoping that I might fall heir to the chair belonging to the better of the remaining two barbers, for he had already begun combing his man's hair, while his comrade was not yet quite done rubbing up and oiling his customer's locks. I watched the probabilities with strong interest. When I saw that number two was gaining on number one, my interest grew to solicitude. When number one stopped a moment to make change on a bath ticket for a newcomer and lost ground in the race, my solicitude rose to anxiety. When number one caught up again, and both he and his comrade were pulling the towels away and brushing the powder from their customer's cheeks, and it was about an even thing, which one would say next first, my very breath stood still with the suspense. But when at the culminating moment number one stopped to pass a comb a couple of times through his customer's eyebrows, I saw that he had lost the race by a single instant, and I rose indignant and quitted the shop to keep from falling into the hands of number two, for I have none of that enviable firmness that enables a man to look calmly into the eyes of a waiting barber and tell him he will wait for his fellow barber's chair. I stayed out fifteen minutes and then went back, hoping for better luck. Of course all the chairs were occupied now, and four men sat waiting, silent, unsociable, distraught, and looking bored, as men always do who are waiting their turn in a barber's shop. I sat down in one of the iron-armed compartments of an old sofa, and put in the time for a while reading the framed advertisements of all sorts of quack-nostrums for dying and coloring the hair. Then I read the greasy names on the private bay rum bottles, read the names and noted the numbers on the private shaving cups in the pigeon-holes, studied the stained and damaged cheap prints on the walls of battles, early presidents, and voluptuous recumbent sultanas, and the tiresome and everlasting young girl putting her grandfather's spectacles on, execrated in my heart the cheerful canary and the distracting parrot that few barber shops are without. Finally I searched out the least dilapidated of last year's illustrated papers that littered the foul center-table, and conned their unjustifiable misrepresentations of old, forgotten events. At last my turn came. A voice said, next, and I surrendered to— Number two, of course. It always happens so. I said meekly that I was in a hurry, and it affected him as strongly as if he had never heard it. He shoved up my head and put a napkin under it. He plowed his fingers into my collar and fixed a towel there. He explored my hair with his claws and suggested that it needed trimming. I said I did not want it trimmed. He explored again and said it was pretty long for the present style.  It needed it behind especially. I said I had had it cut only a week before. He yearned over it reflectively a moment and then asked, with a disparaging manner, who cut it? I came back at him promptly with a— You did! I had him there. Then he fell to stirring up his lather and regarding himself in the glass, stopping now and then to get close and examine his chin critically or inspect a pimple. Then he lathered one side of my face thoroughly and was about to lather the other when a dog-fight attracted his attention and he ran to the window and stayed and saw it out, losing two shillings on the result in bets with the other barbers, a thing which gave me great satisfaction. He finished lathering and then began to rub in the suds with his hand. He now began to sharpen his razor on an old suspender and was delayed a good deal on account of a controversy about a cheap masquerade ball he had figured at the night before in red cambrick and bogus ermine as some kind of a king. He was so gratified with being chaffed about some damsel whom he had smitten with his charms that he used every means to continue the controversy by pretending to be annoyed at the chaffings of his fellows. This matter begot more surveying of himself in the glass and he put down his razor and brushed his hair with elaborate care, plastering an inverted arch of it down on his forehead, accomplishing an accurate part behind and brushing the two wings forward over his ears with nice exactness. In the meantime the lather was drying on my face and apparently eating into my vitals. Now he began to shave, digging his fingers into my countenance to stretch the skin and bundling and tumbling my head this way and that as convenience in shaving demanded. As long as he was on the tough sides of my face I did not suffer, but when he began to rake and rip and tug at my chin the tears came. He now made a handle of my nose to assist him shaving the corners of my upper lip and it was by this bit of circumstantial evidence that I discovered that a part of his duties in the shop was to clean the kerosene lamps. I had often wondered in an indolent way whether the barbers did that or whether it was the boss. About this time I was amusing myself trying to guess where he would be most likely to cut me this time, but he got ahead of me and sliced me on the end of the chin before I had got my mind made up. He immediately sharpened his razor, he might have done it before. I did not like a close shave and would not let him go over me a second time. I tried to get him to put up his razor, dreading that he would make for the side of my chin my pet tender spot, a place which a razor cannot touch twice without making trouble. But he said he only wanted to just smooth off one little roughness and in the same moment he slipped his razor along the forbidden ground and the dreaded pimple signs of a close shave rose up smarting and answered to the call.  Then he dried it by slapping with the dry part of the towel, as if a human being ever dried his face in such a fashion. But a barber seldom rubs you like a Christian.   Then he suggested a shampoo, and said my hair needed it badly, very badly. I observed that I shampooed it myself very thoroughly in the bath yesterday. I had him again. He next recommended some of Smith's hair glorifier, and offered to sell me a bottle. I declined. He praised the new perfume, Joan's Delight of the Toilet, and proposed to sell me some of that. I declined again. He tendered me a tooth-wash atrocity of his own invention, and when I declined offered to trade knives with me. He returned to business after the miscarriage of this last enterprise, sprinkled me all over, legs and all, greased my hair in defiance of my protest against it, rubbed and scrubbed a good deal of it out by the roots, and combed and brushed the rest, parting it behind and plastering the eternal inverted arch of hair down on my forehead, and then, while combing my scant eyebrows and defiling them with pomade, strung out an account of the achievements of a six-ounce black-and-tan terrier of his till I heard the whistles blow for noon, and knew I was five minutes too late for the train. Then he snatched away the towel, brushed it lightly about my face, passed his comb through my eyebrows once more, and gaily sang out, Next! This barber fell down and died of apoplexy two hours later. I am waiting over a day for my revenge. I am going to attend his funeral. CHAPTER 52 PARTY CRYS IN IRELAND Belfast is a peculiarly religious community. This may be said of the whole of the north of Ireland. About one half of the people are Protestants, and the other half Catholics. Each party does all it can to make its own doctrines popular and draw the affections of the irreligious toward them. One hears constantly of the most touching instances of this zeal. A week ago a vast concourse of Catholics assembled at Armagh to dedicate a new cathedral, and when they started home again the roadways were lined with groups of meek and lowly Protestants, who stoned them till all the region round about was marked with blood. I thought that only Catholics argued in that way, but it seems to be a mistake. Every man in the community is a missionary and carries a brick to admonish the airing with. The law has tried to break this up, but not with perfect success. It has decreed that irritating party cries shall not be indulged in, and that persons uttering them shall be fined forty shillings and costs, and so in the police court reports every day one sees these fines recorded. Last week a girl of twelve years old was fined the usual forty shillings and costs for proclaiming in the public streets that she was a Protestant.  One of Belfast's local jokes was very good. It referred to the uniform and inevitable fine of forty shillings and costs for uttering a party cry, and it is no economical fine for a poor man either, by the way.   The officers smell to fine, and formers get half. What's that you say?    Ah, be dead! You can finish it yourself! It's too expensive for me! I think the seditious disposition restrained by the economical instinct is finally put in that. End of Chapter 52 This is Chapter 53 of Sketches New and Old. This Lebervox recording is in the public domain. Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain, Chapter 53, The Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation, Written about 1867 Washington December 1867 I have resigned. The government appears to go on much the same, but there is a spoke out of its wheel, nevertheless. I was clerk of the Senate Committee on Concology, and I have thrown up the position. I could see the plainest disposition on the part of the other members of the government to debar me from having any voice in the consuls of the nation, and so I could no longer hold office and retain my self-respect. If I were to detail all the outrages that were heaped upon me during the six days that I was connected with the government in an official capacity, the narrative would fill a volume. They appointed me clerk of that Committee on Concology, and then allowed me no emmanuences to play billiards with. I would have borne that, lonesome as it was, if I had met with that courtesy from the other members of the Cabinet, which was my due. But I did not. Whenever I observed that the head of a department was pursuing a wrong course, I laid down everything and went and tried to set him right, as it was my duty to do. And I never was thanked for it in a single instance. I went, with the best intentions in the world, to the Secretary of the Navy, and said, Sir, I cannot see that Admiral Farragut is doing anything but skirmishing around there in Europe having a sort of picnic. Now, that may be all very well, but it does not exhibit itself to me in that light. If there is no fighting for him to do, let him come home. There is no use in a man having a whole fleet for a pleasure excursion. It is too expensive. Mind, I do not object to pleasure excursions for the naval officers, pleasure excursions that are in reason, pleasure excursions that are economical. Now, they might go down the Mississippi on a raft. You ought to have heard him storm. One would have supposed I had committed a crime of some kind. But I didn't mind.  I said that, for a tranquil pleasure excursion, there was nothing equal to a raft. Then the Secretary of the Navy asked me who I was, and when I told him I was connected with the government, he wanted to know in what capacity. I said that, without remarking upon the singularity of such a question coming as it did from a member of that same government, I would inform him that I was clerk of the Senate Committee on Concology. Then there was a fine storm. He finished by ordering me to leave the premises and give my attention strictly to my own business in future. My first impulse was to get him removed. However, that would harm others besides himself and do me no real good, and so I let him stay. I went next to the Secretary of War, who was not inclined to see me at all until he learned that I was connected with the government. If I had not been on important business, I suppose I could not have got in. I asked him for a light. He was smoking at the time. And then I told him I had no fault to find, with his defending the parole stipulations of General Lee and his comrades in arms, but that I could not approve of his method of fighting the Indians on the planes. I said he fought too scattering. He ought to get the Indians more together, get them together in some convenient place where he could have provisions enough for both parties, and then have a general massacre. I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run, because a half-massacred Indian may recover. But if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other. It undermines his constitution. It strikes at the foundation of his being. Sir, I said, the time has come when blood-curdling cruelty has become necessary, inflict soap and a spelling-book on every Indian that ravages the planes and let them die. The Secretary of War asked me if I was a member of the Cabinet, and I said I was. He inquired what position I held, and I said I was clerk of the Senate Committee on Concology. I was then ordered under arrest for contempt of court and restrained of my liberty for the best part of the day. I almost resolved to be silent, henceforward, and let the government get along the best way it could. But duty called, and I obeyed. I called on the Secretary of Treasury. He said, What will you have? The question threw me off my guard. I said, Rum punch. He said, If you have got any business here, sir, state it, and in as few words as possible. I then said that I was sorry he had seen fit to change the subject so abruptly, because such conduct was very offensive to me. But under the circumstances I would overlook the matter and come to the point. I now went into an earnest expostulation with him upon the extravagant length of his report. I said it was expensive, unnecessary, and awkwardly constructed. There were no descriptive passages in it, no poetry, no sentiment, no heroes, no plot, no pictures, not even woodcuts. Nobody would read it. That was a clear case. I urged him not to ruin his reputation by getting out a thing like that. If he ever hoped to succeed in literature he must throw more variety into his writings. He must beware of dry detail. I said that the main popularity of the Almanac was derived from its poetry and conundrums, and that a few conundrums distributed around through his treasury report would help the sale of it more than all the internal revenue he could put into it. I said these things in the kindest spirit, and yet the Secretary of the Treasury fell into a violent passion.   I said I would take my hat and go if I could not be treated with the respect due to my office, and I did go. It was just like a new author. They always think they know more than anybody else when they are getting out their first book. Nobody can tell them anything. During the whole time that I was connected with the government it seemed as if I could not do anything in an official capacity without getting myself into trouble. And yet I did nothing, attempted nothing, but what I conceived to be for the good of my country. The sting of my wrongs may have driven me to unjust and harmful conclusions, but it surely seemed to me that the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others of my confrars had conspired from the very beginning to drive me from the administration. I never attended but one Cabinet meeting while I was connected with the government. That was sufficient for me. The servant at the White House door did not seem disposed to make way for me until I asked if the other members of the Cabinet had arrived. He said they had, and I entered. They were all there, but nobody offered me a seat. They stared at me as if I had been an intruder. The President said, Well, sir, who are you? I handed him my card, and he read, The Honourable Mark Twain, clerk of the Senate Committee on Concology. Then he looked at me from head to foot as if he had never heard of me before. The Secretary of the Treasury said, This is the meddlesome ass that came to recommend me to put poetry and conundrums in my report as if it were an almanac. The Secretary of War said, It is the same visionary that came to me yesterday with a scheme to educate a portion of the Indians to death and massacre the balance. The Secretary of Navy said, I recognize this youth as the person who has been interfering with my business time and again during the week. He is distressed about Admiral Farragut's using a whole fleet for a pleasure excursion, as he terms it.  I said, Gentlemen, I perceive here a disposition to throw discredit upon every act of my official career. I perceive also a disposition to debar me from all voice in the councils of the nation. No notice whatever was sent to me today. It was only by the merest chance that I learned that there was going to be a cabinet meeting. But let these things pass. All I wish to know is, is this a cabinet meeting or is it not? The President said it was. Then, I said, let us proceed to business at once and not fritter away valuable time in unbecoming fault-findings with each other's official conduct. The Secretary of State now spoke up in his benignant way and said, Young man, you are laboring under a mistake. The clerks of the Congressional Committees are not members of the cabinet. Neither are the doorkeepers of the capital, strange as it may seem. Therefore, much as we could desire your more than human wisdom in our deliberations, we cannot lawfully avail ourselves of it. The councils of the nation must proceed without you. If disaster follows as follow full well it may, be it balm to your sorrowing spirit that by deed and voice you did what in you lay to avert it. You have my blessing. Farewell. These gentle words soothed my troubled breast and I went away. But the servants of a nation can know no peace. I had hardly reached my den in the capital and disposed my feet on the table like a representative when one of the senators on the concollogical committee came in, in a passion, and said, Where have you been all day? I observed that, if that was anybody's affair but my own, I had been to a cabinet meeting. To a cabinet meeting? I would like to know what business you had at a cabinet meeting. I said I went there to consult, allowing for the sake of argument that he was in any wise concerned in the matter. He grew insolent then, and ended by saying that he had wanted me for three days past to copy a report on bombshells, eggshells, clamshells, and I don't know what all, connected with concollogy, and nobody had been able to find me. This was too much. This was the feather that broke the clerical camel's back. I said, Sir, do you suppose that I am going to work for six dollars a day? If that is the idea, let me recommend the Senate Committee on Concollogy to hire somebody else. I am the slave of no faction.  Give me liberty or give me death. From that hour I was no longer connected with the government. Snubbed by the department, snubbed by the cabinet, snubbed at last by the chairman of a committee I was endeavouring to adorn. I yielded to persecution, cast far from me the perils and seductions of my great office, and forsook my bleeding country in the hour of her peril. But I had done the state some service, and I sent in my bill. The United States of America, in account with the Honourable Clerk of the Senate Committee on Concollogy, to consultation with Secretary of War, fifty dollars. To consultation with Secretary of Navy, fifty dollars. To consultation with Secretary of the Treasury, fifty dollars. Cabinet consultation, no charge. To mileage to and from Jerusalem via Egypt, Algiers, Gibraltar, and Cadiz. Fourteen thousand miles at twenty cents a mile, two thousand eight hundred dollars. To salary as clerk of Senate Committee on Concollogy, six days at six dollars per day, thirty six dollars. Total, two thousand nine hundred and eighty six dollars. Territorial delegates charge mileage both ways, although they never go back when they get here once. Why my mileage has denied me is more than I can understand. Not an item of this bill has been paid, except that trifle of thirty six dollars for clerkship salary. The Secretary of the Treasury, pursuing me to the last, drew his pen through all the other items, and simply marked in the margin, not allowed. So the dread alternative is embraced at last. Repudiation has begun. The nation is lost. I am done with official life for the present. Let those clerks who are willing to be imposed on remain. I know numbers of them in the departments who are never informed when there is to be a cabinet meeting, whose advice is never asked about war or finance or commerce, by the heads of the nation, any more than if they were not connected with the government, and who actually stay in their offices day after day and work. They know their importance to the nation, and they unconsciously show it in their bearing, and the way they order their sustenance at the restaurant. But they work. I know one who has to paste all sorts of little scraps from the newspapers into a scrapbook, sometimes as many as eight or ten scraps a day. He doesn't do it well, but he does it as well as he can. It is very fatiguing. It is exhausting to the intellect. Yet he only gets $1800 a year. With a brain like his, that young man could amass thousands and thousands of dollars in some other pursuit if he chose to do it. But no, his heart is with his country, and he will serve her as long as she has got a scrapbook left. And I know clerks that don't know how to write very well, but such knowledge as they possess they nobly lay at the feet of their country, and toil on and suffer for $2500 a year. What they write has to be written over again by other clerks sometimes. But when a man has done his best for his country, should his country complain? Then there are clerks that have no clerkships, and are waiting, and waiting, and waiting for a vacancy, waiting patiently for a chance to help their country out. And while they are waiting, they only get barely $2000 a year for it. It is sad. It is very, very sad. When a member of Congress has a friend who is gifted, but has no employment wherein his great powers may be brought to bear, he confers him upon his country and gives him a clerkship in a department. And there that man has to slave his life out, fighting documents for the benefit of a nation that never thinks of him, never sympathizes with him, and all for $2000 or $3000 a year. When I shall have completed my list of all the clerks in the several departments, with my statement of what they have to do and what they get for it, you will see that there are not half enough clerks, and that what there are do not get half enough pay. End of Chapter 53. History repeats itself. The following I find in a sandwich island paper which some friend has sent me, from that tranquil far-off retreat. The coincidence between my own experience and that here set down by the late Mr. Benton is so remarkable that I cannot forbear publishing and commenting upon the paragraph. The sandwich island paper says, How touching is this tribute of the late Honorable T. H. Benton to his mother's influence. My mother asked me never to use tobacco. I have never touched it from that time to the present day. She asked me not to gamble, and I have never gambled. I cannot tell who is losing in games that are being played. She admonished me, too, against liquor-drinking, and whatever capacity for endurance I have at present, and whatever usefulness I may have attained through life, I attribute to having complied with her pious and correct wishes. When I was seven years of age, she asked me not to drink, and then I made a resolution of total abstinence, and that I have adhered to it through all time I owe to my mother. I never saw anything so curious. It is almost an exact epitome of my own moral career, after simply substituting a grandmother for a mother. How well I remember my grandmother's asking me not to use tobacco! Good old soul! She said, You're at it again, are you? You welp!  I have never touched it at that hour of the morning from that time to the present day. She asked me not to gamble. She whispered and said, Put up those wicked cards this minute! Two pair and a jack you numbskull and the other fellows got a flush! I never have gambled from that day to this, never once, without a cold deck in my pocket. I cannot even tell who is going to lose in games that are being played unless I deal myself. When I was two years of age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a resolution of total abstinence, that I have adhered to it, and enjoyed the beneficent effects of it through all time I owe to my grandmother. I have never drunk a drop from that day to this, of any kind of water. If you get into conversation with a stranger in Honolulu and experience that natural desire to know what sort of ground you are treading on by finding out what manner of man your stranger is, strike out boldly and address him as captain. Watch him narrowly, and if you see by his countenance that you are on the wrong track, ask him where he preaches. It is a safe bet that he is either a missionary or captain of a whaler. I became personally acquainted with seventy-two captains and ninety-six missionaries. The captains and ministers form one half of the population. The third fourth is composed of common Kanakas and mercantile foreigners and their families, and the final fourth is made up of high officers of the Hawaiian government. And there are just about cats enough for three apiece all round. A solemn stranger met me in the suburbs one day and said, Good morning, your reverence. Preaching the stone church yonder, no doubt. No, I don't. I'm not a preacher. Really, I beg your pardon, captain. I trust you had a good season. How much oil? Oil. Why, what do you take me for? I'm not a whaler. Oh, I beg a thousand pardons, your excellency. A major general in the household troops, no doubt. Minister of the interior likely. A secretary of war. First gentleman of the bed-chamber. Commissioner of the royal. Stuff man. I'm not connected in any way with the government.  Then who the mischief are you? What the mischief are you? And how the mischief did you get here? And where in thunder did you come from? I'm only a private personage, an unassuming stranger. Lately arrived from America. No. Not a missionary. Not a whaler. Not a member of His Majesty's government. Not even a secretary of the navy. Ah! Heaven! It is too blissful to be true, alas. I do, but dream. And yet that noble, honest countenance. Those oblique, ingenuous eyes. That massive head. Incapable of—of anything. Your hand. Give me your hand, bright wave. Excuse these tears. For sixteen weary years I have yearned for a moment like this. And here his feelings were too much for him and he swooned away. I pity this poor creature from the bottom of my heart. I was deeply moved. I shed a few tears on him and kissed him for his mother. I then took what small change he had and shoved. End of Chapter 55 This is Chapter 56 of Sketches New and Old. This Liebervox recording is in the public domain. Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain, Chapter 56, First Interview with Artemis Ward. Written about 1870 I had never seen him before. He brought letters of introduction from mutual friends in San Francisco, and by invitation I breakfasted with him. It was almost religion, there in the silver mines, to proceed such a meal with whiskey cocktails. Artemis, with a true cosmopolitan instinct, always deferred to the customs of the country he was in, and so he ordered three of those abominations. Hingston was present. I said I would rather not drink a whiskey cocktail. I said it would go right to my head and confuse me so that I would be in a helpless tangle in ten minutes. I did not want to act like a lunatic before strangers, but Artemis gently insisted, and I drank the treasonable mixture under protest, and felt all the time that I was doing a thing I might be sorry for. In a minute or two I began to imagine that my ideas were clouded. I waited in great anxiety for the conversation to open with a sort of vague hope that my understanding would prove clear, after all, and my misgivings groundless. Artemis dropped an unimportant remark or two, and then assumed a look of superhuman earnestness, and made the following astounding speech. He said, Now, there is one thing I ought to ask you about, before I forget it. You have been here in Silverland, here in Nevada, two or three years, and, of course, your position on the daily press has made it necessary for you to go down in the mines and examine them carefully in detail, and, therefore, you know all about the Silver Mining business. Now, what I want to get at is, is, well, the way the deposits of ore are made, you know. For instance, now, as I understand it, the vein which contains the silver is sandwiched in between casings of granite and runs along the ground, and sticks up like a curb stone.  Anyway, you go down, and all the time this vein grows narrower when the casings come nearer or approach each other, you may say. That is, when they do approach, which, of course, they do not always do, particularly in cases where the nature of the formation is such that they stand apart wider than they otherwise would, and which geology has failed to account for, although everything in that science goes to prove that all things being equal, it would if it did not, or would not certainly if it did, and then, of course, they are. Do not you think it is? I said to myself, now, I just knew how it would be that whiskey cocktail has done the business for me. I don't understand any more than a clam. And then I said aloud, I, uh, I, that is, if you don't mind, would you, would you say that over again? I ought, oh, certainly, certainly. You see, I am very unfamiliar with the subject, and perhaps I don't present my case clearly, but I, no, no, no, no, no, you state it plain enough. But that cocktail has muddled me a little. But I will—no, I do understand for that matter. But I would get the hang of it all the better if you went over it again, and I'll pay better attention this time. He said, why, what I was after was this. Here he became even more fearfully impressive than ever, and emphasized each particular point by checking it off on his finger ends. This vein, or load, or ledge, or whatever you call it, runs along between two layers of granite, just the same as if it were a sandwich. Very well. Now, suppose you go down on that, say, a thousand feet, or maybe twelve hundred—it don't really matter—before you drift, and then you start your drifts, some of them across the ledge, and others along the length of it, where the Sulfurets—I believe they call them Sulfurets, though why they should, considering that, so far as I can see, the main dependence of a minor does not so lie, as some suppose, but in which it cannot be successfully maintained, wherein the same should not continue, while part and parcel of the same or not committed to either in the sense referred to, whereas under different circumstances, the most inexperienced among us could not detect it, if it were, or might overlook it, if it did, or scorn the very idea of such a thing, even though it were palpably demonstrated as such. Am I not right? I said sorrowfully. I feel ashamed of myself, Mr. Wood. I know I ought to understand you perfectly well, but you see that treacherous whiskey cocktail has got into my head, and now I cannot understand even the simplest proposition. I told you how it would be. Oh, don't mind it, don't mind it! The fault was my own, no doubt, though I did think it clear enough, for don't say a word. Clear.  But it's that confounded cocktail that has played the mischief. No. Now, don't say that. I'll begin it all over again, and don't now, for goodness sake. Don't do anything of the kind, because I tell you my head is in such a condition that I don't believe I could understand the most trifling question a man could ask me. Now, don't you be afraid. I'll put it so plain this time that you can't help but get the hang of it. We will begin at the very beginning, leaning far across the table with determined impressiveness wrought upon his every feature, and fingers prepared to keep tally of each point enumerated, and I, leaning forward with painful interest, resolved to comprehend or perish. You know the vein, the ledge, the thing that contains the metal, whereby it constitutes the medium between all other forces, whether of present or remote agencies, so brought to bear in favour of the former against the latter, or the latter against the former, or all, or both, or compromising the relative differences existing within the radius whence culminate the several degree of similarity to which I said, oh, hang my wooden head, it ain't any use. It ain't any use to try. I can't understand anything. The planer you get it, the more I can't get the hang of it. I heard a suspicious noise behind me, and turned in time to see Hingston dodging behind a newspaper, and quaking with a gentle ecstasy of laughter. I looked at Ward again, and he had thrown off his dread solemnity and was laughing also. Then I saw that I had been sold, that I had been made a victim of a swindle in the way of a string of plausibly worded sentences that didn't mean anything under the sun. Artemis Ward was one of the best fellows in the world, and one of the most companionable. It has been said that he was not fluent in conversation, but with the above experience in my mind, I differ. CHAPTER 57 Cannibalism in the Cars Written about 1867 I visited St. Louis lately, and on my way west, after changing cars at Terre Haute, Indiana, a mild, benevolent-looking gentleman of about forty-five, or maybe fifty, came in at one of the weigh stations and sat down beside me. We talked together pleasantly on various subjects for an hour, perhaps, and I found him exceedingly intelligent and entertaining. When he learned that I was from Washington, he immediately began to ask questions about various public men and about congressional affairs, and I saw very shortly that I was conversing with a man who was perfectly familiar with the ins and outs of political life at the Capitol, even to the ways and manners and customs of procedure of senators and representatives in the chambers of the National Legislature. Presently two men halted near us for a single moment, and one said to the other, "'Harris, if you'll do that for me, I'll never forget you, my boy!' My new comrades, I lighted pleasantly. The words had touched upon a happy memory, I thought. Then his face settled into thoughtfulness, almost into gloom. He turned to me and said, "'Let me tell you a story. Let me give you a secret chapter of my life—a chapter that has never been referred to by me since its events transpired. Listen patiently, and promise that you will not interrupt me.' I said I would not, and he related the following strange adventure, speaking sometimes with animation, sometimes with melancholy, but always with feeling and earnestness. The Strangers' Narrative On the 19th of December, 1853, I started from St. Louis on the evening train bound for Chicago. There were only twenty-four passengers, all told. There were no ladies and no children. We were in excellent spirits, and pleasant acquaintanceships were soon formed. The journey bad fare to be a happy one, and no individual in the party, I think, had even the vaguest presentment of the horrors we were soon to undergo. At eleven p.m. it began to snow hard. Shortly after leaving the small village of Weldon, we entered upon that tremendous prairie solitude that stretches its leagues on leagues of houseless dreariness far away toward the jubilee settlements. The winds, unobstructed by trees or hills or even vagrant rocks, whistled fiercely across the level desert, driving the falling snow before it like spray from the crested waves of a stormy sea. The snow was deepening fast, and we knew by the diminished speed of the train that the engine was plowing through it with steadily increasing difficulty. Indeed, it almost came to a dead halt sometimes in the midst of great drifts that piled themselves like colossal graves across the track. Conversation began to flag. Cheerfulness gave place to grave concern. The possibility of being imprisoned in the snow on the bleak prairie fifty miles from any house presented itself to every mind and extended its depressing influence over every spirit. At two o'clock in the morning I was aroused out of an uneasy slumber by the ceasing of all motion about me. The appalling truth flashed upon me instantly. We were captives in a snowdrift. All hands to the rescue. Every man sprang to a bay. Out into the wild night the pitchy darkness, the billowy snow, the driving storm, every soul leapt with the consciousness that a moment lost now might bring destruction to us all. Shovels, hands, boards, anything, everything that could displace snow was brought into instant requisition. It was a weird picture, that small company of frantic men fighting the banking snows, half in the blackest shadow and half in the angry light of the locomotives reflector. One short hour suffice to prove the utter uselessness of our efforts. The storm barricaded the track with a dozen drifts while we dug one away. And worse than this it was discovered that the last grand charge the engine had made upon the enemy had broken the four-and-aft shaft of the driving wheel, with a free track before us we should still have been helpless. We entered the car, wearied with labour and very sorrowful. We gathered about the stoves and gravely canvassed our situation. We had no provisions whatever. In this lay our chief distress. We could not freeze, for there was a good supply of wood in the tender. This was our only comfort. The discussion ended at last in accepting the disheartening decision of the conductor, these that it would be death for any man to attempt to travel fifty miles on foot through snow like that. We could not send for help. And even if we could it would not come, we must submit and await, as patiently as we might, sucker or starvation. I think the stoutest heart there felt a momentary chill when those words were uttered. Within the hour conversation subsided to a low murmur here and there about the car caught fitfully between the rising and falling of the blast. The lamps grew dim, and the majority of the castaways settled themselves among the flickering shadows to think, to forget the present if they could, to sleep if they might. The eternal night it surely seemed eternal to us, or its lagging hours away at last, and the cold gray dawn broke in the east. As the light grew stronger, the passengers began to stir and give signs of life one after another, and each in turn pushed his slouched hat up from his forehead, stretched his stiffened limbs, and glanced out of the windows upon the cheerless prospect. It was cheerless indeed, not a living thing visible anywhere, not a human habitation. Nothing but a vast white desert, uplifted sheets of snow, drifting hither and thither before the wind, a world of eddying flakes shutting out the firmament above. All day we moped about the cars, saying little, thinking much, another lingering dreary night and hunger. Another dawning, another day of silence, sadness, wasting hunger, hopeless watching for sucker that could not come. A night of restless slumber filled with dreams of feasting, wakings distressed with the gnawings of hunger. The fourth day came and went and the fifth, five days of dreadful imprisonment. A savage hunger looked out at every eye. There was in it a sign of awful import, the foreshadowing of a something that was vaguely shaping itself in every heart, a something which no tongue dared yet to frame into words. The sixth day passed, the seventh dawned upon as gaunt and haggard and hopeless a company of men as ever stood in the shadow of death. It must out now. That thing which had been growing up in every heart was ready to leap from every lip at last. Nature had been taxed to the utmost, she must yield. Richard H. Gaston of Minnesota, tall, cadaverous and pale, rose up. All knew what was coming. All prepared. Every emotion, every semblance of excitement was smothered. Only a calm, thoughtful seriousness appeared in the eyes that were lately so wild. Gentlemen, it cannot be delayed longer. The time is at hand. We must determine which of us shall die to furnish food for the rest. Mr. John J. Williams of Illinois rose and said, Gentlemen, I nominate the Reverend James Sawyer of Tennessee. Mr. William R. Adams of Indiana said, I nominate Mr. Daniel Sloat of New York. Mr. Charles J. Langdon, I nominate Mr. Samuel A. Bowen of St. Louis. Mr. Sloat. Gentlemen, I desire to decline in favor of Mr. John A. Van Nostrom, Jr. of New Jersey. Mr. Gaston, if there be no objection, the gentleman's desire will be exceeded too. Mr. Van Nostrom objecting, the resignation of Mr. Sloat was rejected. The resignations of Mrs. Sawyer and Bowen were also offered and refused upon the same grounds. Mr. A. L. Bascom of Ohio, I move that the nominations now close, and that the House proceed to an election by ballot. Mr. Sawyer, Gentlemen, I protest earnestly against these proceedings. They are in every way irregular and unbecoming. I must beg to move that they be dropped at once, and that we elect a chairman of the meeting, and proper officers to assist him, and then we can go on with the business before us understandingly. Mr. Bell of Iowa. Gentlemen, I object. This is no time to stand upon forms and ceremonious observances. For more than seven days we have been without food. Every moment we lose an idle discussion increases our distress. I am satisfied with the nominations that have been made. Every gentleman present is, I believe, and I, for one, do not see why we should not proceed at once to elect one or more of them. I wish to offer a resolution. Mr. Gaston, it would be objected to and have to lie over one day under the rules, thus bringing about the very delay you wish to avoid. The gentleman from New Jersey. Mr. Van Nostrom. Gentlemen, I am a stranger among you. I have not sought the distinction that has been conferred upon me, and I feel a delicacy. Mr. Morgan of Alabama interrupting. I move the previous question. The motion was carried, and further debate shut off, of course. The motion to elect officers was passed, and under it Mr. Gaston was chosen Chairman, Mr. Blake Secretary, Mr. Holcomb, Dyer, and Baldwin, a committee on nominations, and Mr. R. M. Howland, purveyor, to assist the committee in making selections. A recess of half an hour was then taken, and some little caucusing followed. At the sound of the gavel the meeting reassembled, and the committee reported in favor of Messers George Ferguson of Kentucky, Lucian Herman of Louisiana, and W. Messick of Colorado as candidates. The report was accepted. Mr. Rogers of Missouri. Mr. President, the report being properly before the house now, I move to amend it by substituting for the name of Mr. Herman, that of Mr. Lucius Harris of St. Louis, who is well and honorably known to us all. I do not wish to be understood as casting the least reflection upon the high character and standing of the gentleman from Louisiana, far from it. I respect and esteem him as much as any gentleman here present possibly can. But none of us can be blind to the fact that he has lost more flesh during the week that we have lain here than any among us. None of us can be blind to the fact that the committee has been derelict in its duty, either through negligence or aggraver fault, in thus offering for our suffrages a gentleman who, however pure his own motives may be, has really less nutriment in him, the chair. The gentleman from Missouri will take his seat. The chair cannot allow the integrity of the committee to be questioned, saved by the regular course, under the rules. What action will the house take upon the gentleman's motion? Mr. Halliday of Virginia. I move to further amend the report by substituting Mr. Harvey Davis of Oregon for Mr. Messick. It may be urged by a gentleman that the hardships and privations of a frontier life have rendered Mr. Davis tough. But, gentlemen, is this a time to cavill at toughness? Is this a time to be fastidious concerning trifles? Is this a time to dispute about matters of paltry significance? No, gentlemen, bulk is what we desire. Substance! Wait! Bulk! These are the supreme requisites now, not talent, not genius, not education. I insist upon my motion. Mr. Morgan, excitedly. Mr. Chairman, I do most strenuously object to this amendment. The gentleman from Oregon is old, and furthermore is bulky only in bone, not in flesh. I ask the gentleman from Virginia if it is soup we want instead of solid sustenance. If he would delude us with shadows, if he would mock our suffering with an Oregonian specter, I ask him if he can look upon the anxious faces around him, if he can gaze into our sad eyes, if he can listen to the beating of our expectant hearts, and still thrust this famine-stricken fraud upon us. I ask him if he can think of our desolate state, of our past sorrows, of our dark future, and still unpityingly foist upon us this wreck, this ruin, this tottering swindle, this gnarled and blighted and sapless vagabond from Oregon's inhospitable shores. Never! Applause! The amendment was put to vote after a fiery debate, and lost. Mr. Harris was substituted on the First Amendment. The balloting then began. Five ballots were held without a choice. On the Sixth Mr. Harris was elected all voting for him but himself. It was then moved that his election should be ratified by acclamation, which was lost, in consequence of his again voting against himself. Mr. Radway moved that the House now take up the remaining candidates and go into an election for breakfast. This was carried. On the First Ballot there was a tie. Half the members favoring one candidate on account of his youth, and half favoring the other on account of his superior size. The President gave the casting vote for the latter, Mr. Messick. This decision created considerable dissatisfaction among the friends of Mr. Ferguson, the defeated candidate, and there was some talk of demanding a new ballot. But in the midst of it a motion to a juror was carried, and the meeting broke up at once. The preparations for supper diverted the attention of the Ferguson faction from the discussion of their grievances for a long time, and then, when they would have taken it up again, the happy announcement that Mr. Harris was ready drove all thought of it to the winds. We improvised tables by propping up the backs of car seats, and sat down with hearts full of gratitude to the finest supper that had blessed our vision for seven torturing days. How changed we were from what we had been a few short hours before! Hopeless, sad-eyed misery, hunger, feverish anxiety, desperation, then! Thankfulness, serenity, joy too deep for utterance, now! That I know was the cheeriest hour of my eventful life. The winds howled and blew the snow wildly about our prison house, but they were powerless to distress us any more. I liked Harris. He might have been better done, perhaps, but I am free to say that no man ever agreed with me better than Harris, or afforded me so large a degree of satisfaction. Messick was very well, though rather high-flavored, but for genuine nutritiousness and delicacy of fiber give me Harris. Messick had his good points. I will not attempt to deny it, nor do I wish to do it. But he was no more fitted for breakfast than a mummy would be, sir, not a bit. Lean! Why, bless me! And tough! Ah! He was very tough. You could not imagine it. You could never imagine anything like it. Do you mean to tell me that—do not interrupt me, please. After breakfast we elected a man by the name of Walker from Detroit for supper. He was very good. I wrote his wife so afterward. He was worthy of all praise. I shall always remember Walker. He was a little rare, but very good. And then the next morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to. Handsome, educated, refined, spoke several languages fluently. A perfect gentleman. He was a perfect gentleman and singularly juicy. For supper we had that Oregon patriarch, and he was a fraud. There is no question about it. Old, scraggly, tough—nobody can picture the reality. I finally said, gentlemen, you can do as you like, but I will wait for another election. And grimes of Illinois said, gentlemen, I will wait also. When you elect a man that has something to recommend him, I shall be glad to join you again. It soon became evident that there was general dissatisfaction with Davis of Oregon, and so to preserve the goodwill that had prevailed so pleasantly since we had had Harris, an election was called, and the result of it was that Baker of Georgia was chosen. He was splendid. Well, well, after that we had Doolittle and Hawkins and McElroy. There was some complaint about McElroy, because he was uncommonly short and thin. And Penrod, and two Smiths, and Bailey. Bailey had a wooden leg, which was clear loss, but he was otherwise good, and an Indian boy, and an organ grinder, and a gentleman by the name of Buckminster, a poor stick of a vagabond that wasn't any good for company and no account for breakfast. We were glad we got him elected before relief came. And so the blessed relief did come at last. Yes, it came one bright sunny morning just after election. John Murphy was the choice, and there never was a better, I am willing to testify. But John Murphy came home with us, in the train that came to succour us, and lived to marry the widow Harris. Relict of—relect of our first choice! He married her, and is happy and respected and prosperous yet. Ah, it was like a novel, sir. It was like a romance. This is my stopping place, sir. I must bid you good-bye. Any time that you make it convenient to tarry a day or two with me, I shall be glad to have you.  I have conceived an affection for you. I could like you as well as I liked Harris himself, sir. Good day, sir, and a pleasant journey. He was gone.  But in my soul I was glad he was gone. With all his gentleness of manner and his soft voice I shuddered whenever he turned his hungry eye upon me, and when I heard that I had achieved his perilous affection, and that I stood almost with the late Harris in his esteem, my heart fairly stood still. I was bewildered beyond description. I did not doubt his word, I could not question a single item in a statement so stamped with the earnestness of truth as his. But its dreadful details overpowered me and threw my thoughts into hopeless confusion. I saw the conductor looking at me. I said, Who is that man? He was a member of Congress once, and a good one. But he got caught in a snow-drift in the cars, and liked to have been starved to death. He got so frostbitten and frozen up generally, and used up for want of something to eat, that he was sick and out of his head two or three months afterward. He's all right now, only he is a monomaniac, and when he gets on that old subject he never stops till he has eaten up that whole carload of people he talks about. He would have finished the crowd by this time, only he had to get out here. He has got their names as Pat as ABC. When he gets them all eaten up, but himself, he always says, Then the hour for the usual election for breakfast having arrived, and there being no opposition, I was duly elected, after which, there being no objections offered, I resigned, thus I am here. I felt inexpressibly relieved to know that I had only been listening to the harmless vagaries of a madman, instead of the genuine experiences of a bloodthirsty cannibal.