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Sketches New and Old

by Mark Twain · English · Gutenberg #3189 · 573,372 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Sketches New and Old

Author: Mark Twain


        
Release date: June 27, 2004 [eBook #3189]
                Most recently updated: February 23, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3189

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCHES NEW AND OLD ***




Produced by David Widger








SKETCHES NEW AND OLD

By Mark Twain



CONTENTS:

  Preface
  My Watch
  Political Economy
  The Jumping Frog
  Journalism In Tennessee
  The Story Of The Bad Little Boy
  The Story Of The Good Little Boy
  A Couple Of Poems By Twain And Moore
  Niagara
  Answers To Correspondents
  To Raise Poultry
  Experience Of The Mcwilliamses With Membranous Croup
  My First Literary Venture
  How The Author Was Sold In Newark
  The Office Bore
  Johnny Greer
  The Facts In The Case Of The Great Beef Contract
  The Case Of George Fisher
  Disgraceful Persecution Of A Boy
  The Judges “Spirited Woman”
   Information Wanted
  Some Learned Fables, For Good Old Boys And Girls
  My Late Senatorial Secretaryship
  A Fashion Item
  Riley-Newspaper Correspondent
  A Fine Old Man
  Science Vs. Luck
  The Late Benjamin Franklin
  Mr. Bloke's Item
  A Medieval Romance
  Petition Concerning Copyright
  After-Dinner Speech
  Lionizing Murderers
  A New Crime
  A Curious Dream
  A True Story
  The Siamese Twins
  Speech At The Scottish Banquet In London
  A Ghost Story
  The Capitoline Venus
  Speech On Accident Insurance
  John Chinaman In New York
  How I Edited An Agricultural Paper
  The Petrified Man
  My Bloody Massacre
  The Undertaker's Chat
  Concerning Chambermaids
  Aurelia's Unfortunate Young Man
  “After” Jenkins
  About Barbers
  “Party Cries” In Ireland
  The Facts Concerning The Recent Resignation
  History Repeats Itself
  Honored As A Curiosity
  First Interview With Artemus Ward
  Cannibalism In The Cars
  The Killing Of Julius Caesar “Localized”
   The Widow's Protest
  The Scriptural Panoramist
  Curing A Cold
  A Curious Pleasure Excursion
  Running For Governor
  A Mysterious Visit




PREFACE

I have scattered through this volume a mass of matter which has never
been in print before (such as “Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and
Girls,” the “Jumping Frog restored to the English tongue after martyrdom
in the French,” the “Membranous Croup” sketch, and many others which I
need not specify): not doing this in order to make an advertisement of
it, but because these things seemed instructive.

HARTFORD, 1875.
                                             MARK TWAIN.






SKETCHES NEW AND OLD




MY WATCH--[Written about 1870.]

AN INSTRUCTIVE LITTLE TALE

My beautiful new watch had run eighteen months without losing or gaining,
and without breaking any part of its machinery or stopping.  I had come
to believe it infallible in its judgments about the time of day, and to
consider its constitution and its anatomy imperishable.  But at last, one
night, I let it run down.  I grieved about it as if it were a recognized
messenger and forerunner of calamity.  But by and by I cheered up, set
the watch by guess, and commanded my bodings and superstitions to depart.
Next day I stepped into the chief jeweler's to set it by the exact time,
and the head of the establishment took it out of my hand and proceeded to
set it for me.  Then he said, “She is four minutes slow-regulator wants
pushing up.”  I tried to stop him--tried to make him understand that the
watch kept perfect time.  But no; all this human cabbage could see was
that the watch was four minutes slow, and the regulator must be pushed up
a little; and so, while I danced around him in anguish, and implored him
to let the watch alone, he calmly and cruelly did the shameful deed.  My
watch began to gain.  It gained faster and faster day by day.  Within the
week it sickened to a raging fever, and its pulse went up to a hundred
and fifty in the shade.  At the end of two months it had left all the
timepieces of the town far in the rear, and was a fraction over thirteen
days ahead of the almanac.  It was away into November enjoying the snow,
while the October leaves were still turning.  It hurried up house rent,
bills payable, and such things, in such a ruinous way that I could not
abide it.  I took it to the watchmaker to be regulated.  He asked me if I
had ever had it repaired.  I said no, it had never needed any repairing.
He looked a look of vicious happiness and eagerly pried the watch open,
and then put a small dice-box into his eye and peered into its machinery.
He said it wanted cleaning and oiling, besides regulating--come in a
week.  After being cleaned and oiled, and regulated, my watch slowed down
to that degree that it ticked like a tolling bell.  I began to be left by
trains, I failed all appointments, I got to missing my dinner; my watch
strung out three days' grace to four and let me go to protest;
I gradually drifted back into yesterday, then day before, then into last
week, and by and by the comprehension came upon me that all solitary and
alone I was lingering along in week before last, and the world was out of
sight.  I seemed to detect in myself a sort of sneaking fellow-feeling
for the mummy in the museum, and a desire to swap news with him.  I went
to a watchmaker again.  He took the watch all to pieces while I waited,
and then said the barrel was “swelled.”  He said he could reduce it in
three days.  After this the watch averaged well, but nothing more.  For
half a day it would go like the very mischief, and keep up such a barking
and wheezing and whooping and sneezing and snorting, that I could not
hear myself think for the disturbance; and as long as it held out there
was not a watch in the land that stood any chance against it.  But the
rest of the day it would keep on slowing down and fooling along until all
the clocks it had left behind caught up again.  So at last, at the end of
twenty-four hours, it would trot up to the judges' stand all right and
just in time.  It would show a fair and square average, and no man could
say it had done more or less than its duty.  But a correct average is
only a mild virtue in a watch, and I took this instrument to another
watchmaker.  He said the king-bolt was broken.  I said I was glad it was
nothing more serious.  To tell the plain truth, I had no idea what the
king-bolt was, but I did not choose to appear ignorant to a stranger.
He repaired the king-bolt, but what the watch gained in one way it lost
in another.  It would run awhile and then stop awhile, and then run
awhile again, and so on, using its own discretion about the intervals.
And every time it went off it kicked back like a musket.  I padded my
breast for a few days, but finally took the watch to another watchmaker.
He picked it all to pieces, and turned the ruin over and over under his
glass; and then he said there appeared to be something the matter with
the hair-trigger.  He fixed it, and gave it a fresh start.  It did well
now, except that always at ten minutes to ten the hands would shut
together like a pair of scissors, and from that time forth they would
travel together.  The oldest man in the world could not make head or tail
of the time of day by such a watch, and so I went again to have the thing
repaired.  This person said that the crystal had got bent, and that the
mainspring was not straight.  He also remarked that part of the works
needed half-soling.  He made these things all right, and then my
timepiece performed unexceptionably, save that now and then, after
working along quietly for nearly eight hours, everything inside would let
go all of a sudden and begin to buzz like a bee, and the hands would
straightway begin to spin round and round so fast that their
individuality was lost completely, and they simply seemed a delicate
spider's web over the face of the watch.  She would reel off the next
twenty-four hours in six or seven minutes, and then stop with a bang.
I went with a heavy heart to one more watchmaker, and looked on while he
took her to pieces.  Then I prepared to cross-question him rigidly, for
this thing was getting serious.  The watch had cost two hundred dollars
originally, and I seemed to have paid out two or three thousand for
repairs.  While I waited and looked on I presently recognized in this
watchmaker an old acquaintance--a steamboat engineer of other days, and
not a good engineer, either.  He examined all the parts carefully, just
as the other watchmakers had done, and then delivered his verdict with
the same confidence of manner.

He said:

“She makes too much steam-you want to hang the monkey-wrench on the
safety-valve!”

I brained him on the spot, and had him buried at my own expense.

My uncle William (now deceased, alas!) used to say that a good horse was,
a good horse until it had run away once, and that a good watch was a good
watch until the repairers got a chance at it.  And he used to wonder what
became of all the unsuccessful tinkers, and gunsmiths, and shoemakers,
and engineers, and blacksmiths; but nobody could ever tell him.






POLITICAL ECONOMY

     Political Economy is the basis of all good government.  The wisest
     men of all ages have brought to bear upon this subject the--

[Here I was interrupted and informed that a stranger wished to see me
down at the door.  I went and confronted him, and asked to know his
business, struggling all the time to keep a tight rein on my seething
political-economy ideas, and not let them break away from me or get
tangled in their harness.  And privately I wished the stranger was in the
bottom of the canal with a cargo of wheat on top of him.  I was all in a
fever, but he was cool.  He said he was sorry to disturb me, but as he
was passing he noticed that I needed some lightning-rods.  I said, “Yes,
yes--go on--what about it?”  He said there was nothing about it, in
particular--nothing except that he would like to put them up for me.
I am new to housekeeping; have been used to hotels and boarding-houses
all my life.  Like anybody else of similar experience, I try to appear
(to strangers) to be an old housekeeper; consequently I said in an
offhand way that I had been intending for some time to have six or eight
lightning-rods put up, but--The stranger started, and looked inquiringly
at me, but I was serene.  I thought that if I chanced to make any
mistakes, he would not catch me by my countenance.  He said he would
rather have my custom than any man's in town.  I said, “All right,” and
started off to wrestle with my great subject again, when he called me
back and said it would be necessary to know exactly how many “points” I
wanted put up, what parts of the house I wanted them on, and what quality
of rod I preferred.  It was close quarters for a man not used to the
exigencies of housekeeping; but I went through creditably, and he
probably never suspected that I was a novice.  I told him to put up eight
“points,” and put them all on the roof, and use the best quality of rod.
He said he could furnish the “plain” article at 20 cents a foot;
“coppered,” 25 cents; “zinc-plated spiral-twist,” at 30 cents, that would
stop a streak of lightning any time, no matter where it was bound, and
“render its errand harmless and its further progress apocryphal.”  I said
apocryphal was no slouch of a word, emanating from the source it did,
but, philology aside, I liked the spiral-twist and would take that brand.
Then he said he could make two hundred and fifty feet answer; but to do
it right, and make the best job in town of it, and attract the admiration
of the just and the unjust alike, and compel all parties to say they
never saw a more symmetrical and hypothetical display of lightning-rods
since they were born, he supposed he really couldn't get along without
four hundred, though he was not vindictive, and trusted he was willing to
try.  I said, go ahead and use four hundred, and make any kind of a job
he pleased out of it, but let me get back to my work.  So I got rid of
him at last; and now, after half an hour spent in getting my train of
political-economy thoughts coupled together again, I am ready to go on
once more.]

     richest treasures of their genius, their experience of life, and
     their learning.  The great lights of commercial jurisprudence,
     international confraternity, and biological deviation, of all ages,
     all civilizations, and all nationalities, from Zoroaster down to
     Horace Greeley, have--

[Here I was interrupted again, and required to go down and confer further
with that lightning-rod man.  I hurried off, boiling and surging with
prodigious thoughts wombed in words of such majesty that each one of them
was in itself a straggling procession of syllables that might be fifteen
minutes passing a given point, and once more I confronted him--he so calm
and sweet, I so hot and frenzied.  He was standing in the contemplative
attitude of the Colossus of Rhodes, with one foot on my infant tuberose,
and the other among my pansies, his hands on his hips, his hat-brim
tilted forward, one eye shut and the other gazing critically and
admiringly in the direction of my principal chimney.  He said now there
was a state of things to make a man glad to be alive; and added, “I leave
it to you if you ever saw anything more deliriously picturesque than
eight lightning-rods on one chimney?”  I said I had no present
recollection of anything that transcended it.  He said that in his
opinion nothing on earth but Niagara Falls was superior to it in the way
of natural scenery.  All that was needed now, he verily believed, to make
my house a perfect balm to the eye, was to kind of touch up the other
chimneys a little, and thus “add to the generous 'coup d'oeil' a soothing
uniformity of achievement which would allay the excitement naturally
consequent upon the 'coup d'etat.'”  I asked him if he learned to talk
out of a book, and if I could borrow it anywhere?  He smiled pleasantly,
and said that his manner of speaking was not taught in books, and thatnothing
but familiarity with lightning could enable a man to handle his
conversational style with impunity.  He then figured up an estimate, and
said that about eight more rods scattered about my roof would about fix
me right, and he guessed five hundred feet of stuff would do it; and
added that the first eight had got a little the start of him, so to
speak, and used up a mere trifle of material more than he had calculated
on--a hundred feet or along there.  I said I was in a dreadful hurry,
and I wished we could get this business permanently mapped out, so that I
could go on with my work.  He said, “I could have put up those eight
rods, and marched off about my business--some men would have done it.
But no; I said to myself, this man is a stranger to me, and I will die
before I'll wrong him; there ain't lightning-rods enough on that house,
and for one I'll never stir out of my tracks till I've done as I would be
done by, and told him so.  Stranger, my duty is accomplished; if the
recalcitrant and dephlogistic messenger of heaven strikes your--”
 “There, now, there,” I said, “put on the other eight--add five hundred
feet of spiral-twist--do anything and everything you want to do; but calm
your sufferings, and try to keep your feelings where you can reach them
with the dictionary.  Meanwhile, if we understand each other now, I will
go to work again.”

I think I have been sitting here a full hour this time, trying to get
back to where I was when my train of thought was broken up by the
lastinterruption; but I believe I have accomplished it at last, and may
venture to proceed again.]

     wrestled with this great subject, and the greatest among them have
     found it a worthy adversary, and one that always comes up fresh and
     smiling after every throw.  The great Confucius said that he would
     rather be a profound political economist than chief of police.
     Cicero frequently said that political economy was the grandest
     consummation that the human mind was capable of consuming; and even
     our own Greeley had said vaguely but forcibly that “Political--

[Here the lightning-rod man sent up another call for me.  I went down in
a state of mind bordering on impatience.  He said he would rather have
died than interrupt me, but when he was employed to do a job, and that
job was expected to be done in a clean, workmanlike manner, and when it
was finished and fatigue urged him to seek the rest and recreation he
stood so much in need of, and he was about to do it, but looked up and
saw at a glance that all the calculations had been a little out, and if a
thunder-storm were to come up, and that house, which he felt a personal
interest in, stood there with nothing on earth to protect it but sixteen
lightning-rods--“Let us have peace!” I shrieked.  “Put up a hundred and
fifty!  Put some on the kitchen!  Put a dozen on the barn!  Put a couple
on the cow!  Put one on the cook!--scatter them all over the persecuted
place till it looks like a zinc-plated, spiral-twisted, silver-mounted
canebrake!  Move!  Use up all the material you can get your hands on, and
when you run out of lightning-rods put up ramrods, cam-rods, stair-rods,
piston-rods--anything that will pander to your dismal appetite for
artificial scenery, and bring respite to my raging brain and healing to
my lacerated soul!”  Wholly unmoved--further than to smile sweetly--this
iron being simply turned back his wrist-bands daintily, and said he would
now proceed to hump himself.  Well, all that was nearly three hours ago.
It is questionable whether I am calm enough yet to write on the noble
theme of political economy, but I cannot resist the desire to try, for it
is the one subject that is nearest to my heart and dearest to my brain of
all this world's philosophy.]

     economy is heaven's best boon to man.”  When the loose but gifted
     Byron lay in his Venetian exile he observed that, if it could be
     granted him to go back and live his misspent life over again, he
     would give his lucid and unintoxicated intervals to the composition,
     not of frivolous rhymes, but of essays upon political economy.
     Washington loved this exquisite science; such names as Baker,
     Beckwith, Judson, Smith, are imperishably linked with it; and even
     imperial Homer, in the ninth book of the Iliad, has said:

                    Fiat justitia, ruat coelum,
                    Post mortem unum, ante bellum,
                    Hic jacet hoc, ex-parte res,
                    Politicum e-conomico est.

     The grandeur of these conceptions of the old poet, together with the
     felicity of the wording which clothes them, and the sublimity of the
     imagery whereby they are illustrated, have singled out that stanza,
     and made it more celebrated than any that ever--

[“Now, not a word out of you--not a single word.  Just state your bill
and relapse into impenetrable silence for ever and ever on these
premises.  Nine hundred, dollars?  Is that all?  This check for the
amount will be honored at any respectable bank in America.  What is that
multitude of people gathered in the street for?  How?--'looking at the
lightning-rods!'  Bless my life, did they never see any lightning-rods
before?  Never saw 'such a stack of them on one establishment,' did I
understand you to say?  I will step down and critically observe this
popular ebullition of ignorance.”]

THREE DAYS LATER.--We are all about worn out.  For four-and-twenty hours
our bristling premises were the talk and wonder of the town.  The
theaters languished, for their happiest scenic inventions were tame and
commonplace compared with my lightning-rods.  Our street was blocked
night and day with spectators, and among them were many who came from
the country to see.  It was a blessed relief on the second day when a
thunderstorm came up and the lightning began to “go for” my house, as the
historian Josephus quaintly phrases it.  It cleared the galleries, so to
speak.  In five minutes there was not a spectator within half a mile of
my place; but all the high houses about that distance away were full,
windows, roof, and all.  And well they might be, for all the falling
stars and Fourth-of-July fireworks of a generation, put together and
rained down simultaneously out of heaven in one brilliant shower upon one
helpless roof, would not have any advantage of the pyrotechnic display
that was making my house so magnificently conspicuous in the general
gloom of the storm.

By actual count, the lightning struck at my establishment seven
hundred and sixty-four times in forty minutes, but tripped on one of
those faithful rods every time, and slid down the spiral-twist and shot
into the earth before it probably had time to be surprised at the way the
thing was done. And through all that bombardment only one patch of slates
was ripped up, and that was because, for a single instant, the rods in
the vicinity were transporting all the lightning they could possibly
accommodate.  Well, nothing was ever seen like it since the world began.
For one whole day and night not a member of my family stuck his head out
of the window but he got the hair snatched off it as smooth as a
billiard-ball; and; if the reader will believe me, not one of us ever
dreamt of stirring abroad.  But at last the awful siege came to an
end-because there was absolutely no more electricity left in the clouds
above us within grappling distance of my insatiable rods.  Then I sallied
forth, and gathered daring workmen together, and not a bite or a nap did
we take till the premises were utterly stripped of all their terrific
armament except just three rods on the house, one on the kitchen, and one
on the barn--and, behold, these remain there even unto this day.  And
then, and not till then, the people ventured to use our street again.
I will remark here, in passing, that during that fearful time I did not
continue my essay upon political economy.  I am not even yet settled
enough in nerve and brain to resume it.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.--Parties having need of three thousand two
hundred and eleven feet of best quality zinc-plated spiral-twist
lightning-rod stuff, and sixteen hundred and thirty-one silver-tipped
points, all in tolerable repair (and, although much worn by use, still
equal to any ordinary emergency), can hear of a bargain by addressing
the publisher.






THE JUMPING FROG [written about 1865]

IN ENGLISH.  THEN IN FRENCH.  THEN CLAWED BACK INTO A CIVILIZED LANGUAGE
ONCE MORE BY PATIENT, UNREMUNERATED TOIL.

Even a criminal is entitled to fair play; and certainly when a man who
has done no harm has been unjustly treated, he is privileged to do his
best to right himself.  My attention has just been called to an article
some three years old in a French Magazine entitled, 'Revue des Deux
Mondes' (Review of Some Two Worlds), wherein the writer treats of “Les
Humoristes Americaines” (These Humorists Americans).  I am one of these
humorists American dissected by him, and hence the complaint I am making.

This gentleman's article is an able one (as articles go, in the French,
where they always tangle up everything to that degree that when you start
into a sentence you never know whether you are going to come out alive or
not).  It is a very good article and the writer says all manner of kind
and complimentary things about me--for which I am sure I thank him with all
my heart; but then why should he go and spoil all his praise by one
unlucky experiment?  What I refer to is this: he says my Jumping Frog is
a funny story, but still he can't see why it should ever really convulse
any one with laughter--and straightway proceeds to translate it into
French in order to prove to his nation that there is nothing so very
extravagantly funny about it.  Just there is where my complaint
originates.  He has not translated it at all; he has simply mixed it all
up; it is no more like the Jumping Frog when he gets through with it than
I am like a meridian of longitude.  But my mere assertion is not proof;
wherefore I print the French version, that all may see that I do not
speak falsely; furthermore, in order that even the unlettered may know my
injury and give me their compassion, I have been at infinite pains and
trouble to retranslate this French version back into English; and to tell
the truth I have well-nigh worn myself out at it, having scarcely rested
from my work during five days and nights.  I cannot speak the French
language, but I can translate very well, though not fast, I being
self-educated.  I ask the reader to run his eye over the original English
version of the Jumping Frog, and then read the French or my
retranslation, and kindly take notice how the Frenchman has riddled the
grammar.  I think it is the worst I ever saw; and yet the French are
called a polished nation.  If I had a boy that put sentences together as
they do, I would polish him to some purpose.  Without further
introduction, the Jumping Frog, as I originally wrote it, was as follows
[after it will be found the French version, and after the latter my
retranslation from the French]




THE NOTORIOUS JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY [Pronounced Cal-e-va-ras]

In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the
East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired
after my friend's friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to do, and I
hereunto append the result.  I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas W.
Smiley is a myth that my friend never knew such a personage; and that he
only conjectured that if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him
of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me to death
with some exasperating reminiscence of him as long and as tedious as it
should be useless to me.  If that was the design, it succeeded.

I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by the bar-room stove of the
dilapidated tavern in the decayed mining camp of Angel's, and I noticed
that he was fat and bald-headed, and had an expression of winning gentleness
and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance.  He roused up, and gave me
good day.  I told him that a friend of mine had commissioned me to make
some inquiries about a cherished companion of his boyhood named Leonidas
W. Smiley--Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, a young minister of the Gospel, who
he had heard was at one time resident of Angel's Camp.  I added that if
Mr. Wheeler could tell me anything about this Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley,
I would feel under many obligations to him.

Simon Wheeler backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his
chair, and then sat down and reeled off the monotonous narrative which
follows this paragraph.  He never smiled, he never frowned, he never
changed his voice from the gentle flowing key to which he tuned his
initial sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of
enthusiasm; but all through the interminable narrative there ran a vein
of impressive earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that,
so far from his imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny
about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter, and admired
its two heroes as men of transcendent genius in 'finesse.'  I let him go
on in his own way, and never interrupted him once.

“Rev. Leonidas W.  H'm, Reverend Le--well, there was a feller here, once
by the name of Jim Smiley, in the winter of '49--or maybe it was the
spring of '50--I don't recollect exactly, somehow, though what makes me
think it was one or the other is because I remember the big flume warn't
finished when he first come to the camp; but anyway, he was the
curiousest man about always betting on anything that turned up you ever
see, if he could get anybody to bet on the other side; and if he couldn't
he'd change sides.  Any way that suited the other man would suit HIM--any
way just so's he got a bet, he was satisfied.  But still he was lucky,
uncommon lucky; he most always come out winner.  He was always ready and
laying for a chance; there couldn't be no solit'ry thing mentioned but
that feller'd offer to bet on it, and take ary side you please, as I was
just telling you.  If there was a horse-race, you'd find him flush or
you'd find him busted at the end of it; if there was a dog-fight, he'd
bet on it; if there was a cat-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a
chicken-fight, he'd bet on it; why, if there was two birds setting on a
fence, he would bet you which one would fly first; or if there was a
camp-meeting, he would be there reg'lar to bet on Parson Walker, which he
judged to be the best exhorter about here, and so he was too, and a good
man.  If he even see a straddle-bug start to go anywheres, he would bet
you how long it would take him to get to--to wherever he was going to,
and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle-bug to Mexico but
what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the
road.  Lots of the boys here has seen that Smiley, and can tell you about
him.  Why, it never made no difference to him--he'd bet on any thing--the
dangdest feller.  Parson Walker's wife laid very sick once, for a good
while, and it seemed as if they warn't going to save her; but one morning
he come in, and Smiley up and asked him how she was, and he said she was
considerable better--thank the Lord for his inf'nite mercy--and coming on
so smart that with the blessing of Prov'dence she'd get well yet; and
Smiley, before he thought, says, 'Well, I'll resk two-and-a-half she
don't anyway.'

“Thish-yer Smiley had a mare--the boys called her the fifteen-minute nag,
but that was only in fun, you know, because of course she was faster than
that--and he used to win money on that horse, for all she was so slow and
always had the asthma, or the distemper, or the consumption, or something
of that kind.  They used to give her two or three hundred yards' start,
and then pass her under way; but always at the fag end of the race she
get excited and desperate like, and come cavorting and straddling up,
and scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and
sometimes out to one side among the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-e dust
and raising m-o-r-e racket with her coughing and sneezing and blowing her
nose--and always fetch up at the stand just about a neck ahead, as near
as you could cipher it down.

“And he had a little small bull-pup, that to look at him you'd think he
warn't worth a cent but to set around and look ornery and lay for a
chance to steal something.  But as soon as money was up on him he was a
different dog; his under-jaw'd begin to stick out like the fo'castle of
a steamboat, and his teeth would uncover and shine like the furnaces.
And a dog might tackle him and bully-rag him, and bite him, and throw him
over his shoulder two or three times, and Andrew Jackson--which was the
name of the pup--Andrew Jackson would never let on but what he was
satisfied, and hadn't expected nothing else--and the bets being doubled
and doubled on the other side all the time, till the money was all up;
and then all of a sudden he would grab that other dog jest by the j'int
of his hind leg and freeze to it--not chaw, you understand, but only just
grip and hang on till they throwed up the sponge, if it was a year.
Smiley always come out winner on that pup, till he harnessed a dog once
that didn't have no hind legs, because they'd been sawed off in a
circular saw, and when the thing had gone along far enough, and the money
was all up, and he come to make a snatch for his pet holt, he see in a
minute how he'd been imposed on, and how the other dog had him in the
door, so to speak, and he 'peared surprised, and then he looked sorter
discouraged-like and didn't try no more to win the fight, and so he got
shucked out bad.  He give Smiley a look, as much as to say his heart was
broke, and it was his fault, for putting up a dog that hadn't no hind
legs for him to take holt of, which was his main dependence in a fight,
and then he limped off a piece and laid down and died.  It was a good
pup, was that Andrew Jackson, and would have made a name for hisself if
he'd lived, for the stuff was in him and he had genius--I know it,
because he hadn't no opportunities to speak of, and it don't stand to
reason that a dog could make such a fight as he could under them
circumstances if he hadn't no talent. It always makes me feel sorry when
I think of that last fight of his'n, and the way it turned out.

“Well, thish-yer Smiley had rat-tarriers, and chicken cocks, and tomcats
and all them kind of things, till you couldn't rest, and you couldn't
fetch nothing for him to bet on but he'd match you.  He ketched a frog
one day, and took him home, and said he cal'lated to educate him; and so
he never done nothing for three months but set in his back yard and learn
that frog to jump. And you bet you he did learn him, too. He'd give him a
little punch behind, and the next minute you'd see that frog whirling in
the air like a doughnut--see him turn one summerset, or maybe a couple,
if he got a good start, and come down flat-footed and all right, like a
cat. He got him up so in the matter of ketching flies, and kep' him in
practice so constant, that he'd nail a fly every time as fur as he could
see him. Smiley said all a frog wanted was education, and he could do
'most anything--and I believe him.  Why, I've seen him set Dan'l Webster
down here on this floor--Dan'l Webster was the name of the frog--and sing
out, 'Flies, Dan'l, flies!' and quicker'n you could wink he'd spring
straight up and snake a fly off'n the counter there, and flop down on the
floor ag'in as solid as a gob of mud, and fall to scratching the side of
his head with his hind foot as indifferent as if he hadn't no idea he'd
been doin' any more'n any frog might do. You never see a frog so modest
and straightfor'ard as he was, for all he was so gifted.  And when it
come to fair and square jumping on a dead level, he could get over more
ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you ever see.
Jumping on a dead level was his strong suit, you understand; and when it
come to that, Smiley would ante up money on him as long as he had a red.
Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he might be, for fellers
that had traveled and been everywheres all said he laid over any frog
that ever they see.

“Well, Smiley kep' the beast in a little lattice box, and he used to
fetch him down-town sometimes and lay for a bet.  One day a feller
--a stranger in the camp, he was--come acrost him with his box, and says:

“'What might it be that you've got in the box?'

“And Smiley says, sorter indifferent-like, 'It might be a parrot, or it
might be a canary, maybe, but it ain't--it's only just a frog.'

“And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round
this way and that, and says, 'H'm--so 'tis.  Well, what's HE good for.

“'Well,' Smiley says, easy and careless, 'he's good enough for one thing,
I should judge--he can outjump any frog in Calaveras County.

“The feller took the box again, and took another long, particular look,
and give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate,  'Well,' he says,
'I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other
frog.'

“'Maybe you don't,' Smiley says.  'Maybe you understand frogs and maybe
you don't understand 'em; maybe you've had experience, and maybe you
ain't only a amature, as it were.  Anyways, I've got my opinion, and I'll
resk forty dollars the he can outjump any frog in Calaveras County.'

“And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad-like, 'Well,
I'm only a stranger here, and I ain't got no frog; but if I had a frog,
I'd bet you.

“And then Smiley says, 'That's all right--that's all right if you'll hold
my box a minute, I'll go and get you a frog.'  And so the feller took the
box, and put up his forty dollars along with Smiley's, and set down to
wait.

“So he set there a good while thinking and thinking to himself and then
he got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a teaspoon and
filled him full of quail-shot--filled him pretty near up to his chin--and
set him on the floor.  Smiley he went to the swamp and slopped around in
the mud for a long time, and finally he ketched a frog, and fetched him
in, and give him to this feller and says:

“'Now, if you're ready, set him alongside of Dan'l, with his fore paws
just even with Dan'l's, and I'll give the word.' Then he says,
'One-two-three--git' and him and the feller touches up the frogs from
behind, and the new frog hopped off lively but Dan'l give a heave, and
hysted up his shoulders--so-like a Frenchman, but it warn't no use--he
couldn't budge; he was planted as solid as a church, and he couldn't no
more stir than if he was anchored out.  Smiley was a good deal surprised,
and he was disgusted too, but he didn't have no idea what the matter was
of course.


“The feller took the money and started away; and when he was going out at
the door, he sorter jerked his thumb over his shoulder--so--at Dan'l, and
says again, very deliberate, 'Well,' he says, 'I don't see no p'ints about
that frog that's any better'n any other frog.'

“Smiley he stood scratching his head and looking down at Dan'l a long
time, and at last he says, 'I do wonder what in the nation that frog
throw'd off for--I wonder if there ain't something the matter with him
--he 'pears to look mighty baggy, somehow.'  And he ketched Dan'l by the
nap of the neck, and hefted him, and says, 'Why blame my cats if he don't
weigh five pound!' and turned him upside down and he belched out a double
handful of shot.  And then he see how it was, and he was the maddest man
--he set the frog down and took out after that feller, but he never
ketched him.  And--”

[Here Simon Wheeler heard his name called from the front yard, and got up
to see what was wanted.]  And turning to me as he moved away, he said:
“Just set where you are, stranger, and rest easy--I ain't going to be
gone a second.”

But, by your leave, I did not think that a continuation of the history of
the enterprising vagabond Jim Smiley would be likely to afford me much
information concerning the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and so I started
away.

At the door I met the sociable Wheeler returning, and he buttonholed me
and recommenced:

“Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn't have no
tail, only just a short stump like a bannanner, and--”

However, lacking both time and inclination, I did not wait to hear about
the afflicted cow, but took my leave.


Now let the learned look upon this picture and say if iconoclasm can
further go:

[From the Revue des Deux Mondes, of July 15th, 1872.]

          .......................


LA GRENOUILLE SAUTEUSE DU COMTE DE CALAVERAS

“--Il y avait, une fois ici un individu connu sous le nom de Jim Smiley:
c'était dans l'hiver de 49, peut-être bien au printemps de 50, je ne me
reappelle pas exactement.  Ce qui me fait croire que c'était l'un ou
l'autre, c'est que je me souviens que le grand bief n'était pas achevé
lorsqu'il arriva au camp pour la premiére fois, mais de toutes facons il
était l'homme le plus friand de paris qui se pût voir, pariant sur tout
ce qui se présentait, quand il pouvait trouver un adversaire, et, quand
n'en trouvait pas il passait du côté opposé.  Tout ce qui convenait à
l'autre lui convenait; pourvu qu'il eût un pari, Smiley était satisfait.
Et il avait une chance! une chance inouie:  presque toujours il gagnait.
It faut dire qu'il était toujours prêt à s'exposer, qu'on ne pouvait
mentionner la moindre chose sans que ce gaillard offrît de parier
là-dessus n'importe quoi et de prendre le côte que l'on voudrait, comme
je vous le disais tout à l'heure.  S'il y avait des courses, vous le
trouviez riche ou ruiné à la fin; s'il y avait un combat de chiens, il
apportait son enjeu; il l'apportait pour un combat de chats, pour un
combat de coqs;--parbleu! si vous aviez vu deux oiseaux sur une haie il
vous aurait offert de parier lequel s'envolerait le premier, et s'il y
aviat 'meeting' au camp, il venait parier régulièrement pour le curé
Walker, qu'il jugeait être le meilleur prédicateur des environs, et qui
l'était en effet, et un brave homme.  Il aurait rencontré une punaise de
bois en chemin, qu'il aurait parié sur le temps qu'il lui faudrait pour
aller où elle voudrait aller, et si vous l'aviez pris au mot, it aurait
suivi la punaise jusqu'au Mexique, sans se soucier d'aller si loin, ni du
temps qu'il y perdrait.  Une fois la femme du curé Walker fut très malade
pendant longtemps, il semblait qu'on ne la sauverait pas; mais un matin le
curé arrive, et Smiley lui demande comment ella va et il dit qu'elle est
bien mieux, grâce a l'infinie miséricorde tellement mieux qu'avec la
bénédiction de la Providence elle s'en tirerait, et voilá que, sans y
penser, Smiley répond:--Eh bien! je gage deux et demi qu'elle mourra tout
de même.

“Ce Smiley avait une jument que les gars appelaient le bidet du quart
d'heure, mais seulement pour plaisanter, vous comprenez, parce que, bien
entendu, elle était plus vite que ca!  Et il avait coutume de gagner de
l'argent avec cette bête, quoi-qu'elle fût poussive, cornarde, toujours
prise d'asthme, de coliques ou de consomption, ou de quelque chose
d'approchant. On lui donnait 2 ou 300 'yards' au départ, puis on la
dépassait sans peine; mais jamais à la fin elle ne manquait de
s'échauffer, de s'exaspérer et elle arrivait, s'écartant, se défendant,
ses jambes grêles en l'air devant les obstacles, quelquefois les évitant
et faisant avec cela plus de poussière qu'aucun cheval, plus de bruit
surtout avec ses éternumens et reniflemens.---crac! elle arrivait donc
toujours première d'une tête, aussi juste qu'on peut le mesurer.  Et il
avait un petit bouledogue qui, à le voir, ne valait pas un sou; on aurait
cru que parier contre lui c'était voler, tant il était ordinaire; mais
aussitôt les enjeux faits, il devenait un autre chien.  Sa mâchoire
inférieure commencait à ressortir comme un gaillard d'avant, ses dents se
découvcraient brillantes commes des fournaises, et un chien pouvait le
taquiner, l'exciter, le mordre, le jeter deux ou trois fois par-dessus
son épaule, André Jackson, c'était le nom du chien, André Jackson prenait
cela tranquillement, comme s'il ne se fût jamais attendu à autre chose,
et quand les paris étaient doublés et redoublés contre lui, il vous
saisissait l'autre chien juste à l'articulation de la jambe de derrière,
et il ne la lâchait plus, non pas qu'il la mâchât, vous concevez, mais il
s'y serait tenu pendu jusqu'à ce qu'on jetât l'éponge en l'air, fallût-il
attendre un an.  Smiley gagnait toujours avec cette bête-là;
malheureusement ils ont fini par dresser un chien qui n'avait pas de
pattes de derrière, parce qu'on les avait sciées, et quand les choses
furent au point qu'il voulait, et qu'il en vint à se jeter sur son
morceau favori, le pauvre chien comprit en un instant qu'on s'était moqué
de lui, et que l'autre le tenait.  Vous n'avez jamais vu personne avoir
l'air plus penaud et plus découragé; il ne fit aucun effort pour gagner
le combat et fut rudement secoué, de sorte que, regardant Smiley comme
pour lui dire:--Mon coeur est brisé, c'est ta faute; pourquoi m'avoir
livré à un chien qui n'a pas de pattes de derrière, puisque c'est par là
que je les bats?--il s'en alla en clopinant, et se coucha pour mourir.
Ah! c'était un bon chien, cet André Jackson, et il se serait fait un nom,
s'il avait vécu, car il y avait de l'etoffe en lui, il avait du génie,
je la sais, bien que de grandes occasions lui aient manqué; mais il est
impossible de supposer qu'un chien capable de se battre comme lui,
certaines circonstances étant données, ait manqué de talent.  Je me sens
triste toutes les fois que je pense à son dernier combat et au dénoûment
qu'il a eu.  Eh bien! ce Smiley nourrissait des terriers à rats, et des
coqs combat, et des chats, et toute sorte de choses, au point qu'il était
toujours en mesure de vous tenir tête, et qu'avec sa rage de paris on
n'avait plus de repos. Il attrapa un jour une grenouille et l'emporta
chez lui, disant qu'il prétendait faire son éducation; vous me croirez si
vous voulez, mais pendant trois mois il n'a rien fait que lui apprendre à
sauter dans une cour retirée de sa maison. Et je vous réponds qu'il avait
reussi.  Il lui donnait un petit coup par derrière, et l'instant d'après
vous voyiez la grenouille tourner en l'air comme un beignet au-dessus de
la poêle, faire une culbute, quelquefois deux, lorsqu'elle était bien
partie, et retomber sur ses pattes comme un chat.  Il l'avait dressée
dans l'art de gober des mouches, er l'y exercait continuellement, si bien
qu'une mouche, du plus loin qu'elle apparaissait, était une mouche
perdue. Smiley avait coutume de dire que tout ce qui manquait à une
grenouille, c'était l'éducation, qu'avec l'éducation elle pouvait faire
presque tout, et je le crois.  Tenez, je l'ai vu poser Daniel Webster là
sur se plancher,--Daniel Webster était le nom de la grenouille,--et lui
chanter: Des mouches! Daniel, des mouches!--En un clin d'oeil, Daniel
avait bondi et saisi une mouche ici sur le comptoir, puis sauté de
nouveau par terre, où il restait vraiment à se gratter la tête avec sa
patte de derrière, comme s'il n'avait pas eu la moindre idée de sa
superiorité.  Jamais vous n'avez grenouille vu de aussi modeste, aussi
naturelle, douee comme elle l'était!  Et quand il s'agissait de sauter
purement et simplement sur terrain plat, elle faisait plus de chemin en
un saut qu'aucune bete de son espèce que vous puissiez connaître. Sauter
à plat, c'était son fort! Quand il s'agissait de cela, Smiley entassait
les enjeux sur elle tant qu'il lui, restait un rouge liard. Il faut le
reconnaitre, Smiley était monstrueusement fier de sa grenouille, et il en
avait le droit, car des gens qui avaient voyagé, qui avaient tout vu,
disaient qu'on lui ferait injure de la comparer à une autre; de facon que
Smiley gardait Daniel dans une petite boîte a claire-voie qu'il emportait
parfois à la Ville pour quelque pari.

“Un jour, un individu étranger au camp l'arrête aver sa boîte et lui
dit:--Qu'est-ce que vous avez donc serré là dedans?

“Smiley dit d'un air indifférent:--Cela pourrait être un perroquet ou un
serin, mais ce n'est rien de pareil, ce n'est qu'une grenouille.

“L'individu la prend, la regarde avec soin, la tourne d'un côté et de
l'autre puis il dit.--Tiens! en effet!  A quoi estelle bonne?

“--Mon Dieu! répond Smiley, toujours d'un air dégagé, elle est bonne pour
une chose à mon avis, elle peut battre en sautant toute grenouille du
comté de Calaveras.

“L'individu reprend la boîte, l'examine de nouveau longuement, et la rend
à Smiley en disant d'un air délibéré:--Eh bien! je ne vois pas que cette
grenouille ait rien de mieux qu'aucune grenouille.

“--Possible que vous ne le voyiez pas, dit Smiley, possible que vous vous
entendiez en grenouilles, possible que vous ne vous y entendez point,
possible que vous avez de l'expérience, et possible que vous ne soyez
qu'un amateur.  De toute manière, je parie quarante dollars qu'elle
battra en sautant n'importe quelle grenouille du comté de Calaveras.

“L'individu réfléchit une seconde et dit comme attristé:--Je ne suis
qu'un étranger ici, je n'ai pas de grenouille; mais, si j'en
avais une, je tiendrais le pari.

“--Fort bien! répond Smiley.  Rien de plus facile. Si vous voulez tenir
ma boîte une minute, j'irai vous chercher une grenouille.--Voilà donc
l'individu qui garde la boîte, qui met ses quarante dollars sur ceux de
Smiley et qui attend.  Il attend assez longtemps, réflechissant tout
seul, et figurez-vous qu'il prend Daniel, lui ouvre la bouche de force at
avec une cuiller à thé l'emplit de menu plomb de chasse, mais l'emplit
jusqu'au menton, puis il le pose par terre.  Smiley pendant ce temps
était à barboter dans une mare.  Finalement il attrape une grenouille,
l'apporte à cet individu et dit:--Maintenant, si vous êtes prêt, mettez-la
tout contra Daniel, avec leurs pattes de devant sur la même ligne, et je
donnerai le signal; puis il ajoute:--Un, deux, trois, sautez!

“Lui et l'individu touchent leurs grenouilles par derrière, et la
grenouille neuve se met à sautiller, mais Daniel se soulève lourdement,
hausse les épaules ainsi, comme un Francais; à quoi bon? il ne pouvait
bouger, il était planté solide comma une enclume, il n'avancait pas plus
que si on l'eût mis à l'ancre. Smiley fut surpris et dégoûté, mais il ne
se doutait pas du tour, bien entendu.  L'individu empoche l'argent, s'en
va, et en s'en allant est-ce qu'il ne donna pas un coup de pouce
par-dessus l'épaule, comma ca, au pauvre Daniel, en disant de son air
délibéré:--Eh bien! je ne vois pas qua cette grenouille ait rien de muiex
qu'une autre.

“Smiley se gratta longtemps la tête, les yeux fixés sur Daniel; jusqu'à
ce qu'enfin il dit:--Je me demande comment diable il se fait que cette
bête ait refusé . . . Est-ce qu'elle aurait quelque chose? . . . On
croirait qu'elle est enfleé.

“Il empoigne Daniel par la peau du cou, le souléve et dit:--Le loup me
croque, s'il ne pèse pas cinq livres.

“Il le retourne, et le malheureux crache deux poignées de plomb.  Quand
Smiley reconnut ce qui en était, il fut comme fou.  Vous le voyez d'ici
poser sa grenouille par terra et courir aprés cet individu, mais il ne le
rattrapa jamais, et ....”


[Translation of the above back from the French:]

THE FROG JUMPING OF THE COUNTY OF CALAVERAS

It there was one time here an individual known under the name of Jim
Smiley; it was in the winter of '89, possibly well at the spring of '50,
I no me recollect not exactly.  This which me makes to believe that it
was the one or the other, it is that I shall remember that the grand
flume is not achieved when he arrives at the camp for the first time, but
of all sides he was the man the most fond of to bet which one have seen,
betting upon all that which is presented, when he could find an
adversary; and when he not of it could not, he passed to the side
opposed.  All that which convenienced to the other to him convenienced
also; seeing that he had a bet Smiley was satisfied.  And he had a
chance! a chance even worthless; nearly always he gained.  It must to say
that he was always near to himself expose, but one no could mention the
least thing without that this gaillard offered to bet the bottom, no
matter what, and to take the side that one him would, as I you it said
all at the hour (tout à l'heure).  If it there was of races, you him find
rich or ruined at the end; if it, there is a combat of dogs, he bring his
bet; he himself laid always for a combat of cats, for a combat of cocks
--by-blue!  If you have see two birds upon a fence, he you should have
offered of to bet which of those birds shall fly the first; and if there
is meeting at the camp (meeting au camp) he comes to bet regularly for
the curé Walker, which he judged to be the best predicator of the
neighborhood (prédicateur des environs) and which he was in effect, and a
brave man.  He would encounter a bug of wood in the road, whom he will
bet upon the time which he shall take to go where she would go--and if
you him have take at the word, he will follow the bug as far as Mexique,
without himself caring to go so far; neither of the time which he there
lost.  One time the woman of the cure Walker is very sick during long
time, it seemed that one not her saved not; but one morning the cure
arrives, and Smiley him demanded how she goes, and he said that she is
well better, grace to the infinite misery (lui demande comment elle va,
et il dit qu'elle est bien mieux, grâce a l'infinie miséricorde) so much
better that with the benediction of the Providence she herself of it
would pull out (elle s'en tirerait); and behold that without there
thinking Smiley responds: “Well, I gage two-and-half that she will die
all of same.”

This Smiley had an animal which the boys called the nag of the quarter of
hour, but solely for pleasantry, you comprehend, because, well
understand, she was more fast as that! [Now why that exclamation?--M. T.]
And it was custom of to gain of the silver with this beast,
notwithstanding she was poussive, cornarde, always taken of asthma, of
colics or of consumption, or something of approaching.  One him would
give two or three hundred yards at the departure, then one him passed
without pain; but never at the last she not fail of herself échauffer,
of herself exasperate, and she arrives herself écartant, se defendant,
her legs greles in the air before the obstacles, sometimes them elevating
and making with this more of dust than any horse, more of noise above
with his eternumens and reniflemens--crac! she arrives then always first
by one head, as just as one can it measure.  And he had a small bulldog
(bouledogue!) who, to him see, no value, not a cent; one would believe
that to bet against him it was to steal, so much he was ordinary; but as
soon as the game made, she becomes another dog.  Her jaw inferior
commence to project like a deck of before, his teeth themselves discover
brilliant like some furnaces, and a dog could him tackle (le taquiner),
him excite, him murder (le mordre), him throw two or three times over his
shoulder, André Jackson--this was the name of the dog--André Jackson
takes that tranquilly, as if he not himself was never expecting other
thing, and when the bets were doubled and redoubled against him, he you
seize the other dog just at the articulation of the leg of behind, and he
not it leave more, not that he it masticate, you conceive, but he himself
there shall be holding during until that one throws the sponge in the
air, must he wait a year.  Smiley gained always with this beast-là;
unhappily they have finished by elevating a dog who no had not of feet of
behind, because one them had sawed; and when things were at the point
that he would, and that he came to himself throw upon his morsel
favorite, the poor dog comprehended in an instant that he himself was
deceived in him, and that the other dog him had.  You no have never seen
person having the air more penaud and more discouraged; he not made no
effort to gain the combat, and was rudely shucked.

Eh bien! this Smiley nourished some terriers à rats, and some cocks of
combat, and some cats, and all sorts of things; and with his rage of
betting one no had more of repose.  He trapped one day a frog and him
imported with him (et l'emporta chez lui) saying that he pretended to
make his education.  You me believe if you will, but during three months
he not has nothing done but to him apprehend to jump (apprendre à sauter)
in a court retired of her mansion (de sa maison).  And I you respond that
he have succeeded.  He him gives a small blow by behind, and the instant
after you shall see the frog turn in the air like a grease-biscuit, make
one summersault, sometimes two, when she was well started, and refall
upon his feet like a cat.  He him had accomplished in the art of to
gobble the flies (gober des mouches), and him there exercised continually
--so well that a fly at the most far that she appeared was a fly lost.
Smiley had custom to say that all which lacked to a frog it was the
education, but with the education she could do nearly all--and I him
believe.  Tenez, I him have seen pose Daniel Webster there upon this
plank--Daniel Webster was the name of the frog--and to him sing, “Some
flies, Daniel, some flies!”--in a flash of the eye Daniel had bounded
and seized a fly here upon the counter, then jumped anew at
the earth, where he rested truly to himself scratch the head with his
behind foot, as if he no had not the least idea of his superiority.
Never you not have seen frog as modest, as natural, sweet as she was.
And when he himself agitated to jump purely and simply upon plain earth,
she does more ground in one jump than any beast of his species than you
can know.  To jump plain-this was his strong.  When he himself agitated
for that, Smiley multiplied the bets upon her as long as there to him
remained a red.  It must to know, Smiley was monstrously proud of his
frog, and he of it was right, for some men who were traveled, who had all
seen, said that they to him would be injurious to him compare, to another
frog.  Smiley guarded Daniel in a little box latticed which he carried
bytimes to the village for some bet.

One day an individual stranger at the camp him arrested with his box and
him said:

“What is this that you have them shut up there within?”

Smiley said, with an air indifferent:

“That could be a paroquet, or a syringe (ou un serin), but this no is
nothing of such, it not is but a frog.”

The individual it took, it regarded with care, it turned from one side
and from the other, then he said:

“Tiens! in effect!--At what is she good?”

“My God!” respond Smiley, always with an air disengaged, “she is good for
one thing, to my notice (à mon avis), she can batter in jumping (elle peut
battre en sautant) all frogs of the county of Calaveras.”

The individual retook the box, it examined of new longly, and it rendered
to Smiley in saying with an air deliberate:

“Eh bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each
frog.”  (Je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait rien de mieux qu'aucune
grenouille.) [If that isn't grammar gone to seed, then I count myself no
judge.--M.  T.]

“Possible that you not it saw not,” said Smiley, “possible that you--you
comprehend frogs; possible that you not you there comprehend nothing;
possible that you had of the experience, and possible that you not be but
an amateur.  Of all manner (De toute manière) I bet forty dollars that
she batter in jumping no matter which frog of the county of Calaveras.”

The individual reflected a second, and said like sad:

“I not am but a stranger here, I no have not a frog; but if I of it had
one, I would embrace the bet.”

“Strong well!” respond Smiley; “nothing of more facility.  If you will
hold my box a minute, I go you to search a frog (j'irai vous chercher).”

Behold, then, the individual, who guards the box, who puts his forty
dollars upon those of Smiley, and who attends (et qui attend).  He
attended enough long times, reflecting all solely.  And figure you that
he takes Daniel, him opens the mouth by force and with a teaspoon him
fills with shot of the hunt, even him fills just to the chin, then he him
puts by the earth.  Smiley during these times was at slopping in a swamp.
Finally he trapped (attrape) a frog, him carried to that individual, and
said:

“Now if you be ready, put him all against Daniel with their before feet
upon the same line, and I give the signal”--then he added: “One, two,
three--advance!”

Him and the individual touched their frogs by behind, and the frog new
put to jump smartly, but Daniel himself lifted ponderously, exalted the
shoulders thus, like a Frenchman--to what good? he not could budge, he
is planted solid like a church, he not advance no more than if one him had
put at the anchor.

Smiley was surprised and disgusted, but he no himself doubted not of the
turn being intended (mais il ne se doutait pas du tour, bien entendu).
The individual empocketed the silver, himself with it went, and of it
himself in going is it that he no gives not a jerk of thumb over the
shoulder--like that--at the poor Daniel, in saying with his air
deliberate--(L'individu empoche l'argent, s'en va et en s'en allant
est-ce qu'il ne donne pas un coup de pouce par-dessus l'épaule, comme ça,
au pauvre Daniel, en disant de son air délibéré):

“Eh bien! I no see not that that frog has nothing of better than another.”

Smiley himself scratched longtimes the head, the eyes fixed upon Daniel,
until that which at last he said:

“I me demand how the devil it makes itself that this beast has refused.
Is it that she had something?  One would believe that she is stuffed.”

He grasped Daniel by the skin of the neck, him lifted and said:

“The wolf me bite if he no weigh not five pounds:”

He him reversed and the unhappy belched two handfuls of shot (et le
malheureux, etc.).  When Smiley recognized how it was, he was like mad.
He deposited his frog by the earth and ran after that individual, but he
not him caught never.


Such is the Jumping Frog, to the distorted French eye.  I claim that I
never put together such an odious mixture of bad grammar and delirium
tremens in my life.  And what has a poor foreigner like me done, to be
abused and misrepresented like this?  When I say, “Well, I don't see no
p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog,” is it kind,
is it just, for this Frenchman to try to make it appear that I said, “Eh
bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each frog”?
I have no heart to write more.  I never felt so about anything before.

HARTFORD, March, 1875.






JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE--[Written about 1871.]

     The editor of the Memphis Avalanche swoops thus mildly down upon a
     correspondent who posted him as a Radical:--“While he was writing
     the first word, the middle, dotting his i's, crossing his t's, and
     punching his period, he knew he was concocting a sentence that was
     saturated with infamy and reeking with falsehood.”--Exchange.

I was told by the physician that a Southern climate would improve my
health, and so I went down to Tennessee, and got a berth on the Morning
Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop as associate editor.  When I went on
duty I found the chief editor sitting tilted back in a three-legged chair
with his feet on a pine table.  There was another pine table in the room
and another afflicted chair, and both were half buried under newspapers
and scraps and sheets of manuscript.  There was a wooden box of sand,
sprinkled with cigar stubs and “old soldiers,” and a stove with a door
hanging by its upper hinge.  The chief editor had a long-tailed black
cloth frock-coat on, and white linen pants.  His boots were small and
neatly blacked.  He wore a ruffled shirt, a large seal-ring, a standing
collar of obsolete pattern, and a checkered neckerchief with the ends
hanging down.  Date of costume about 1848.  He was smoking a cigar, and
trying to think of a word, and in pawing his hair he had rumpled his
locks a good deal.  He was scowling fearfully, and I judged that he was
concocting a particularly knotty editorial.  He told me to take the
exchanges and skim through them and write up the “Spirit of the Tennessee
Press,” condensing into the article all of their contents that seemed of
interest.

I wrote as follows:

                    SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS

     The editors of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake evidently labor under a
     misapprehension with regard to the Ballyhack railroad.  It is not
     the object of the company to leave Buzzardville off to one side.
     On the contrary, they consider it one of the most important points
     along the line, and consequently can have no desire to slight it.
     The gentlemen of the Earthquake will, of course, take pleasure in
     making the correction.

     John W. Blossom, Esq., the able editor of the Higginsville
     Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom, arrived in the city
     yesterday.  He is stopping at the Van Buren House.

     We observe that our contemporary of the Mud Springs Morning Howl has
     fallen into the error of supposing that the election of Van Werter
     is not an established fact, but he will have discovered his mistake
     before this reminder reaches him, no doubt.  He was doubtless misled
     by incomplete election returns.

     It is pleasant to note that the city of Blathersville is endeavoring
     to contract with some New York gentlemen to pave its well-nigh
     impassable streets with the Nicholson pavement.  The Daily Hurrah
     urges the measure with ability, and seems confident of ultimate
     success.

I passed my manuscript over to the chief editor for acceptance,
alteration, or destruction.  He glanced at it and his face clouded.  He
ran his eye down the pages, and his countenance grew portentous.  It was
easy to see that something was wrong.  Presently he sprang up and said:

“Thunder and lightning! Do you suppose I am going to speak of those
cattle that way?  Do you suppose my subscribers are going to stand such
gruel as that?  Give me the pen!”

I never saw a pen scrape and scratch its way so viciously, or plow
through another man's verbs and adjectives so relentlessly.  While he was
in the midst of his work, somebody shot at him through the open window,
and marred the symmetry of my ear.

“Ah,” said he, “that is that scoundrel Smith, of the Moral Volcano--he
was due yesterday.”  And he snatched a navy revolver from his belt and
fired--Smith dropped, shot in the thigh.  The shot spoiled Smith's aim,
who was just taking a second chance and he crippled a stranger.  It was
me.  Merely a finger shot off.

Then the chief editor went on with his erasure; and interlineations.
Just as he finished them a hand grenade came down the stove-pipe, and the
explosion shivered the stove into a thousand fragments.  However, it did
no further damage, except that a vagrant piece knocked a couple of my
teeth out.

“That stove is utterly ruined,” said the chief editor.

I said I believed it was.

“Well, no matter--don't want it this kind of weather.  I know the man
that did it.  I'll get him.  Now, here is the way this stuff ought to be
written.”

I took the manuscript.  It was scarred with erasures and interlineations
till its mother wouldn't have known it if it had had one.  It now read as
follows:

                    SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS

     The inveterate liars of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake are evidently
     endeavoring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous people another
     of their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to that most
     glorious conception of the nineteenth century, the Ballyhack
     railroad.  The idea that Buzzardville was to be left off at one side
     originated in their own fulsome brains--or rather in the settlings
     which they regard as brains.  They had better swallow this lie if
     they want to save their abandoned reptile carcasses the cowhiding
     they so richly deserve.

     That ass, Blossom, of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of
     Freedom, is down here again sponging at the Van Buren.

     We observe that the besotted blackguard of the Mud Springs Morning
     Howl is giving out, with his usual propensity for lying, that Van
     Werter is not elected.  The heaven-born mission of journalism is to
     disseminate truth; to eradicate error; to educate, refine, and
     elevate the tone of public morals and manners, and make all men more
     gentle, more virtuous, more charitable, and in all ways better, and
     holier, and happier; and yet this blackhearted scoundrel degrades
     his great office persistently to the dissemination of falsehood,
     calumny, vituperation, and vulgarity.

     Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement--it wants a jail and a
     poorhouse more.  The idea of a pavement in a one-horse town composed
     of two gin-mills, a blacksmith shop, and that mustard-plaster of a
     newspaper, the Daily Hurrah!  The crawling insect, Buckner, who
     edits the Hurrah, is braying about his business with his customary
     imbecility, and imagining that he is talking sense.


“Now that is the way to write--peppery and to the point.  Mush-and-milk
journalism gives me the fan-tods.”

About this time a brick came through the window with a splintering crash,
and gave me a considerable of a jolt in the back.  I moved out of range
--I began to feel in the way.

The chief said, “That was the Colonel, likely.  I've been expecting him
for two days.  He will be up now right away.”

He was correct.  The Colonel appeared in the door a moment afterward with
a dragoon revolver in his hand.

He said, “Sir, have I the honor of addressing the poltroon who edits this
mangy sheet?”

“You have.  Be seated, sir.  Be careful of the chair, one of its legs is
gone.  I believe I have the honor of addressing the putrid liar, Colonel
Blatherskite Tecumseh?”

“Right, Sir.  I have a little account to settle with you.  If you are at
leisure we will begin.”

“I have an article on the 'Encouraging Progress of Moral and Intellectual
Development in America' to finish, but there is no hurry.  Begin.”

Both pistols rang out their fierce clamor at the same instant.  The chief
lost a lock of his hair, and the Colonel's bullet ended its career in the
fleshy part of my thigh.  The Colonel's left shoulder was clipped a
little.  They fired again.  Both missed their men this time, but I got my
share, a shot in the arm.  At the third fire both gentlemen were wounded
slightly, and I had a knuckle chipped.  I then said, I believed I would
go out and take a walk, as this was a private matter, and I had a
delicacy about participating in it further.  But both gentlemen begged me
to keep my seat, and assured me that I was not in the way.

They then talked about the elections and the crops while they reloaded,
and I fell to tying up my wounds.  But presently they opened fire again
with animation, and every shot took effect--but it is proper to remark
that five out of the six fell to my share.  The sixth one mortally
wounded the Colonel, who remarked, with fine humor, that he would have to
say good morning now, as he had business uptown.  He then inquired the
way to the undertaker's and left.

The chief turned to me and said, “I am expecting company to dinner, and
shall have to get ready.  It will be a favor to me if you will read proof
and attend to the customers.”

I winced a little at the idea of attending to the customers, but I was
too bewildered by the fusillade that was still ringing in my ears to
think of anything to say.

He continued, “Jones will be here at three--cowhide him.  Gillespie will
call earlier, perhaps--throw him out of the window.  Ferguson will be
along about four--kill him.  That is all for today, I believe.  If you
have any odd time, you may write a blistering article on the police--give
the chief inspector rats.  The cowhides are under the table; weapons in
the drawer--ammunition there in the corner--lint and bandages up there in
the pigeonholes.  In case of accident, go to Lancet, the surgeon,
downstairs.  He advertises--we take it out in trade.”

He was gone.  I shuddered.  At the end of the next three hours I had been
through perils so awful that all peace of mind and all cheerfulness were
gone from me.  Gillespie had called and thrown me out of the window.
Jones arrived promptly, and when I got ready to do the cowhiding he took
the job off my hands.  In an encounter with a stranger, not in the bill
of fare, I had lost my scalp.  Another stranger, by the name of Thompson,
left me a mere wreck and ruin of chaotic rags.  And at last, at bay in
the corner, and beset by an infuriated mob of editors, blacklegs,
politicians, and desperadoes, who raved and swore and flourished their
weapons about my head till the air shimmered with glancing flashes of
steel, I was in the act of resigning my berth on the paper when the chief
arrived, and with him a rabble of charmed and enthusiastic friends.  Then
ensued a scene of riot and carnage such as no human pen, or steel one
either, could describe.  People were shot, probed, dismembered, blown up,
thrown out of the window.  There was a brief tornado of murky blasphemy,
with a confused and frantic war-dance glimmering through it, and then all
was over.  In five minutes there was silence, and the gory chief and I
sat alone and surveyed the sanguinary ruin that strewed the floor around
us.

He said, “You'll like this place when you get used to it.”

I said, “I'll have to get you to excuse me; I think maybe I might write
to suit you after a while; as soon as I had had some practice and learned
the language I am confident I could.  But, to speak the plain truth, that
sort of energy of expression has its inconveniences, and a man is liable
to interruption.

“You see that yourself.  Vigorous writing is calculated to elevate the
public, no doubt, but then I do not like to attract so much attention as
it calls forth.  I can't write with comfort when I am interrupted so much
as I have been to-day.  I like this berth well enough, but I don't like
to be left here to wait on the customers.  The experiences are novel,
I grant you, and entertaining, too, after a fashion, but they are not
judiciously distributed.  A gentleman shoots at you through the window
and cripples me; a bombshell comes down the stove-pipe for your
gratification and sends the stove door down my throat; a friend drops in
to swap compliments with you, and freckles me with bullet-holes till my
skin won't hold my principles; you go to dinner, and Jones comes with his
cowhide, Gillespie throws me out of the window, Thompson tears all my
clothes off, and an entire stranger takes my scalp with the easy freedom
of an old acquaintance; and in less than five minutes all the blackguards
in the country arrive in their war-paint, and proceed to scare the rest
of me to death with their tomahawks.  Take it altogether, I never had
such a spirited time in all my life as I have had to-day.  No; I like
you, and I like your calm unruffled way of explaining things to the
customers, but you see I am not used to it.  The Southern heart is too
impulsive; Southern hospitality is too lavish with the stranger.  The
paragraphs which I have written to-day, and into whose cold sentences
your masterly hand has infused the fervent spirit of Tennesseean
journalism, will wake up another nest of hornets.  All that mob of
editors will come--and they will come hungry, too, and want somebody for
breakfast.  I shall have to bid you adieu.  I decline to be present at
these festivities.  I came South for my health, I will go back on the
same errand, and suddenly.  Tennesseean journalism is too stirring for
me.”

After which we parted with mutual regret, and I took apartments at the
hospital.






THE STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY--[Written about 1865]

Once there was a bad little boy whose name was Jim--though, if you will
notice, you will find that bad little boys are nearly always called James
in your Sunday-school books.  It was strange, but still it was true, that this
one was called Jim.

He didn't have any sick mother, either--a sick mother who was pious and
had the consumption, and would be glad to lie down in the grave and be at
rest but for the strong love she bore her boy, and the anxiety she felt
that the world might be harsh and cold toward him when she was gone.
Most bad boys in the Sunday books are named James, and have sick mothers,
who teach them to say, “Now, I lay me down,” etc., and sing them to sleep
with sweet, plaintive voices, and then kiss them good night, and kneel
down by the bedside and weep.  But it was different with this fellow.
He was named Jim, and there wasn't anything the matter with his mother
--no consumption, nor anything of that kind.  She was rather stout than
otherwise, and she was not pious; moreover, she was not anxious on Jim's
account.  She said if he were to break his neck it wouldn't be much loss.
She always spanked Jim to sleep, and she never kissed him good night; on
the contrary, she boxed his ears when she was ready to leave him.

Once this little bad boy stole the key of the pantry, and slipped in
there and helped himself to some jam, and filled up the vessel with tar,
so that his mother would never know the difference; but all at once a
terrible feeling didn't come over him, and something didn't seem to
whisper to him, “Is it right to disobey my mother?  Isn't it sinful to do
this?  Where do bad little boys go who gobble up their good kind mother's
jam?” and then he didn't kneel down all alone and promise never to be
wicked any more, and rise up with a light, happy heart, and go and tell
his mother all about it, and beg her forgiveness, and be blessed by her
with tears of pride and thankfulness in her eyes.  No; that is the way
with all other bad boys in the books; but it happened otherwise with this
Jim, strangely enough.  He ate that jam, and said it was bully, in his
sinful, vulgar way; and he put in the tar, and said that was bully also,
and laughed, and observed “that the old woman would get up and snort”
 when she found it out; and when she did find it out, he denied knowing
anything about it, and she whipped him severely, and he did the crying
himself.  Everything about this boy was curious--everything turned out
differently with him from the way it does to the bad Jameses in the
books.

Once he climbed up in Farmer Acorn's apple tree to steal apples, and the
limb didn't break, and he didn't fall and break his arm, and get torn by
the farmer's great dog, and then languish on a sickbed for weeks, and
repent and become good.  Oh, no; he stole as many apples as he wanted and
came down all right; and he was all ready for the dog, too, and knocked
him endways with a brick when he came to tear him.  It was very strange
--nothing like it ever happened in those mild little books with marbled
backs, and with pictures in them of men with swallow-tailed coats and
bell-crowned hats, and pantaloons that are short in the legs, and women
with the waists of their dresses under their arms, and no hoops on.
Nothing like it in any of the Sunday-school books.

Once he stole the teacher's penknife, and, when he was afraid it would be
found out and he would get whipped, he slipped it into George Wilson's
cap--poor Widow Wilson's son, the moral boy, the good little boy of the
village, who always obeyed his mother, and never told an untruth, and was
fond of his lessons, and infatuated with Sunday-school.  And when the
knife dropped from the cap, and poor George hung his head and blushed,
as if in conscious guilt, and the grieved teacher charged the theft upon
him, and was just in the very act of bringing the switch down upon his
trembling shoulders, a white-haired, improbable justice of the peace did
not suddenly appear in their midst, and strike an attitude and say,
“Spare this noble boy--there stands the cowering culprit!  I was passing
the school door at recess, and, unseen myself, I saw the theft
committed!”  And then Jim didn't get whaled, and the venerable justice
didn't read the tearful school a homily, and take George by the hand and
say such a boy deserved to be exalted, and then tell him to come and make his
home with him, and sweep out the office, and make fires, and run errands,
and chop wood, and study law, and help his wife do household labors, and
have all the balance of the time to play, and get forty cents a month, and
be happy.  No; it would have happened that way in the books, but didn't
happen that way to Jim.  No meddling old clam of a justice dropped in to
make trouble, and so the model boy George got thrashed, and Jim was glad
of it because, you know, Jim hated moral boys.  Jim said he was “down on
them milksops.”  Such was the coarse language of this bad, neglected boy.

But the strangest thing that ever happened to Jim was the time he went
boating on Sunday, and didn't get drowned, and that other time that he
got caught out in the storm when he was fishing on Sunday, and didn't get
struck by lightning.  Why, you might look, and look, all through the
Sunday-school books from now till next Christmas, and you would never
come across anything like this.  Oh, no; you would find that all the bad
boys who go boating on Sunday invariably get drowned; and all the bad
boys who get caught out in storms when they are fishing on Sunday
infallibly get struck by lightning.  Boats with bad boys in them always
upset on Sunday, and it always storms when bad boys go fishing on the
Sabbath.  How this Jim ever escaped is a mystery to me.

This Jim bore a charmed life--that must have been the way of it.  Nothing
could hurt him.  He even gave the elephant in the menagerie a plug of
tobacco, and the elephant didn't knock the top of his head off with his
trunk.  He browsed around the cupboard after essence-of peppermint, and
didn't make a mistake and drink aqua fortis.  He stole his father's gun
and went hunting on the Sabbath, and didn't shoot three or four of his
fingers off.  He struck his little sister on the temple with his fist
when he was angry, and she didn't linger in pain through long summer
days, and die with sweet words of forgiveness upon her lips that
redoubled the anguish of his breaking heart.  No; she got over it.  He
ran off and went to sea at last, and didn't come back and find himself
sad and alone in the world, his loved ones sleeping in the quiet
churchyard, and the vine-embowered home of his boyhood tumbled down and
gone to decay.  Ah, no; he came home as drunk as a piper, and got into
the station-house the first thing.

And he grew up and married, and raised a large family, and brained them
all with an ax one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and
rascality; and now he is the infernalest wickedest scoundrel in his
native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the
legislature.

So you see there never was a bad James in the Sunday-school books that
had such a streak of luck as this sinful Jim with the charmed life.






THE STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY--[Written about 1865]

Once there was a good little boy by the name of Jacob Blivens.  He always
obeyed his parents, no matter how absurd and unreasonable their demands
were; and he always learned his book, and never was late at
Sabbath-school.  He would not play hookey, even when his sober judgment
told him it was the most profitable thing he could do.  None of the other
boys could ever make that boy out, he acted so strangely.  He wouldn't
lie, no matter how convenient it was.  He just said it was wrong to lie,
and that was sufficient for him.  And he was so honest that he was simply
ridiculous.  The curious ways that that Jacob had, surpassed everything.
He wouldn't play marbles on Sunday, he wouldn't rob birds' nests, he
wouldn't give hot pennies to organ-grinders' monkeys; he didn't seem to
take any interest in any kind of rational amusement.  So the other boys
used to try to reason it out and come to an understanding of him, but
they couldn't arrive at any satisfactory conclusion.  As I said before,
they could only figure out a sort of vague idea that he was “afflicted,”
 and so they took him under their protection, and never allowed any harm
to come to him.

This good little boy read all the Sunday-school books; they were his
greatest delight.  This was the whole secret of it.  He believed in the
good little boys they put in the Sunday-school book; he had every
confidence in them.  He longed to come across one of them alive once;
but he never did.  They all died before his time, maybe.  Whenever he
read about a particularly good one he turned over quickly to the end to
see what became of him, because he wanted to travel thousands of miles
and gaze on him; but it wasn't any use; that good little boy always died
in the last chapter, and there was a picture of the funeral, with all his
relations and the Sunday-school children standing around the grave in
pantaloons that were too short, and bonnets that were too large, and
everybody crying into handkerchiefs that had as much as a yard and a half
of stuff in them.  He was always headed off in this way.  He never could
see one of those good little boys on account of his always dying in the
last chapter.

Jacob had a noble ambition to be put in a Sunday school book.  He wanted
to be put in, with pictures representing him gloriously declining to lie
to his mother, and her weeping for joy about it; and pictures
representing him standing on the doorstep giving a penny to a poor
beggar-woman with six children, and telling her to spend it freely, but
not to be extravagant, because extravagance is a sin; and pictures of him
magnanimously refusing to tell on the bad boy who always lay in wait for
him around the corner as he came from school, and welted him so over the
head with a lath, and then chased him home, saying, “Hi! hi!” as he
proceeded.  That was the ambition of young Jacob Blivens.  He wished to
be put in a Sunday-school book.  It made him feel a little uncomfortable
sometimes when he reflected that the good little boys always died.  He
loved to live, you know, and this was the most unpleasant feature about
being a Sunday-school-book boy.  He knew it was not healthy to be good.
He knew it was more fatal than consumption to be so supernaturally good
as the boys in the books were; he knew that none of them had ever been
able to stand it long, and it pained him to think that if they put him in
a book he wouldn't ever see it, or even if they did get the book out
before he died it wouldn't be popular without any picture of his funeral
in the back part of it.  It couldn't be much of a Sunday-school book that
couldn't tell about the advice he gave to the community when he was
dying.  So at last, of course, he had to make up his mind to do the best
he could under the circumstances--to live right, and hang on as long as
he could, and have his dying speech all ready when his time came.

But somehow nothing ever went right with the good little boy; nothing
ever turned out with him the way it turned out with the good little boys
in the books.  They always had a good time, and the bad boys had the
broken legs; but in his case there was a screw loose somewhere, and it
all happened just the other way.  When he found Jim Blake stealing
apples, and went under the tree to read to him about the bad little boy
who fell out of a neighbor's apple tree and broke his arm, Jim fell out
of the tree, too, but he fell on him and broke his arm, and Jim wasn't
hurt at all.  Jacob couldn't understand that.  There wasn't anything in
the books like it.

And once, when some bad boys pushed a blind man over in the mud, and
Jacob ran to help him up and receive his blessing, the blind man did not
give him any blessing at all, but whacked him over the head with his
stick and said he would like to catch him shoving him again, and then
pretending to help him up.  This was not in accordance with any of the
books.  Jacob looked them all over to see.

One thing that Jacob wanted to do was to find a lame dog that hadn't any
place to stay, and was hungry and persecuted, and bring him home and pet
him and have that dog's imperishable gratitude.  And at last he found one
and was happy; and he brought him home and fed him, but when he was going
to pet him the dog flew at him and tore all the clothes off him except
those that were in front, and made a spectacle of him that was

astonishing.  He examined authorities, but he could not understand the
matter.  It was of the same breed of dogs that was in the books, but it
acted very differently.  Whatever this boy did he got into trouble.  The
very things the boys in the books got rewarded for turned out to be about
the most unprofitable things he could invest in.

Once, when he was on his way to Sunday-school, he saw some bad boys
starting off pleasuring in a sailboat.  He was filled with consternation,
because he knew from his reading that boys who went sailing on Sunday
invariably got drowned.  So he ran out on a raft to warn them, but a log
turned with him and slid him into the river.  A man got him out pretty
soon, and the doctor pumped the water out of him, and gave him a fresh
start with his bellows, but he caught cold and lay sick abed nine weeks.
But the most unaccountable thing about it was that the bad boys in the
boat had a good time all day, and then reached home alive and well in the
most surprising manner.  Jacob Blivens said there was nothing like these
things in the books.  He was perfectly dumfounded.

When he got well he was a little discouraged, but he resolved to keep on
trying anyhow.  He knew that so far his experiences wouldn't do to go in
a book, but he hadn't yet reached the allotted term of life for good
little boys, and he hoped to be able to make a record yet if he could
hold on till his time was fully up.  If everything else failed he had his
dying speech to fall back on.

He examined his authorities, and found that it was now time for him to go
to sea as a cabin-boy.  He called on a ship-captain and made his
application, and when the captain asked for his recommendations he
proudly drew out a tract and pointed to the word, “To Jacob Blivens, from
his affectionate teacher.”  But the captain was a coarse, vulgar man, and
he said, “Oh, that be blowed! that wasn't any proof that he knew how to
wash dishes or handle a slush-bucket, and he guessed he didn't want him.”
 This was altogether the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to
Jacob in all his life.  A compliment from a teacher, on a tract, had
never failed to move the tenderest emotions of ship-captains, and open
the way to all offices of honor and profit in their gift, it never had in
any book that ever HE had read.  He could hardly believe his senses.

This boy always had a hard time of it.  Nothing ever came out according
to the authorities with him.  At last, one day, when he was around
hunting up bad little boys to admonish, he found a lot of them in the old
iron-foundry fixing up a little joke on fourteen or fifteen dogs, which
they had tied together in long procession, and were going to ornament
with empty nitroglycerin cans made fast to their tails.  Jacob's heart
was touched.  He sat down on one of those cans (for he never minded
grease when duty was before him), and he took hold of the foremost dog by
the collar, and turned his reproving eye upon wicked Tom Jones.  But just
at that moment Alderman McWelter, full of wrath, stepped in.  All the bad
boys ran away, but Jacob Blivens rose in conscious innocence and began
one of those stately little Sunday-school-book speeches which always
commence with “Oh, sir!” in dead opposition to the fact that no boy, good
or bad, ever starts a remark with “Oh, sir.”  But the alderman never
waited to hear the rest.  He took Jacob Blivens by the ear and turned him
around, and hit him a whack in the rear with the flat of his hand; and in
an instant that good little boy shot out through the roof and soared away
toward the sun, with the fragments of those fifteen dogs stringing after
him like the tail of a kite.  And there wasn't a sign of that alderman or
that old iron-foundry left on the face of the earth; and, as for young
Jacob Blivens, he never got a chance to make his last dying speech after
all his trouble fixing it up, unless he made it to the birds; because,
although the bulk of him came down all right in a tree-top in an
adjoining county, the rest of him was apportioned around among four
townships, and so they had to hold five inquests on him to find out
whether he was dead or not, and how it occurred.  You never saw a boy
scattered so.--[This glycerin catastrophe is borrowed from a floating
newspaper item, whose author's name I would give if I knew it.--M. T.]

Thus perished the good little boy who did the best he could, but didn't
come out according to the books.  Every boy who ever did as he did
prospered except him.  His case is truly remarkable.  It will probably
never be accounted for.






A COUPLE OF POEMS BY TWAIN AND MOORE--[Written about 1865]


                         THOSE EVENING BELLS

                           BY THOMAS MOORE

               Those evening bells! those evening bells!
               How many a tale their music tells
               Of youth, and home, and that sweet time
               When last I heard their soothing chime.

               Those joyous hours are passed away;
               And many a heart that then was gay,
               Within the tomb now darkly dwells,
               And hears no more those evening bells.

               And so 'twill be when I am gone
               That tuneful peal will still ring on;
               While other bards shall walk these dells,
               And sing your praise, sweet evening bells.


                         THOSE ANNUAL BILLS

                           BY MARK TWAIN

               These annual bills! these annual bills!
               How many a song their discord trills
               Of “truck” consumed, enjoyed, forgot,
               Since I was skinned by last year's lot!

               Those joyous beans are passed away;
               Those onions blithe, O where are they?
               Once loved, lost, mourned--now vexing ILLS
               Your shades troop back in annual bills!

               And so 'twill be when I'm aground
               These yearly duns will still go round,
               While other bards, with frantic quills,
               Shall damn and damn these annual bills!






NIAGARA [ Written about 1871.]

Niagara Falls is a most enjoyable place of resort.  The hotels are
excellent, and the prices not at all exorbitant.  The opportunities for
fishing are not surpassed in the country; in fact, they are not even
equaled elsewhere.  Because, in other localities, certain places in the
streams are much better than others; but at Niagara one place is just as
good as another, for the reason that the fish do not bite anywhere, and
so there is no use in your walking five miles to fish, when you can
depend on being just as unsuccessful nearer home.  The advantages of this
state of things have never heretofore been properly placed before the
public.

The weather is cool in summer, and the walks and drives are all pleasant
and none of them fatiguing.  When you start out to “do” the Falls you
first drive down about a mile, and pay a small sum for the privilege of
looking down from a precipice into the narrowest part of the Niagara
River.  A railway “cut” through a hill would be as comely if it had the
angry river tumbling and foaming through its bottom.  You can descend a
staircase here a hundred and fifty feet down, and stand at the edge of
the water.  After you have done it, you will wonder why you did it; but
you will then be too late.

The guide will explain to you, in his blood-curdling way, how he saw the
little steamer, Maid of the Mist, descend the fearful rapids--how first
one paddle-box was out of sight behind the raging billows and then the
other, and at what point it was that her smokestack toppled overboard,
and where her planking began to break and part asunder--and how she did
finally live through the trip, after accomplishing the incredible feat of
traveling seventeen miles in six minutes, or six miles in seventeen
minutes, I have really forgotten which.  But it was very extraordinary,
anyhow.  It is worth the price of admission to hear the guide tell the
story nine times in succession to different parties, and never miss a
word or alter a sentence or a gesture.

Then you drive over to Suspension Bridge, and divide your misery between
the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and
the chances of having the railway-train overhead smashing down onto you.
Either possibility is discomforting taken by itself, but, mixed together,
they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness.

On the Canada side you drive along the chasm between long ranks of
photographers standing guard behind their cameras, ready to make an
ostentatious frontispiece of you and your decaying ambulance, and your
solemn crate with a hide on it, which you are expected to regard in the
light of a horse, and a diminished and unimportant background of sublime
Niagara; and a great many people have the incredible effrontery or the
native depravity to aid and abet this sort of crime.

Any day, in the hands of these photographers, you may see stately

pictures of papa and mamma, Johnny and Bub and Sis, or a couple of country
cousins, all smiling vacantly, and all disposed in studied and
uncomfortable attitudes in their carriage, and all looming up in their
awe-inspiring imbecility before the snubbed and diminished presentment of
that majestic presence whose ministering spirits are the rainbows, whose
voice is the thunder, whose awful front is veiled in clouds, who was
monarch here dead and forgotten ages before this sackful of small
reptiles was deemed temporarily necessary to fill a crack in the world's
unnoted myriads, and will still be monarch here ages and decades of ages
after they shall have gathered themselves to their blood-relations, the
other worms, and been mingled with the unremembering dust.

There is no actual harm in making Niagara a background whereon to display
one's marvelous insignificance in a good strong light, but it requires a
sort of superhuman self-complacency to enable one to do it.
When you have examined the stupendous Horseshoe Fall till you are
satisfied you cannot improve on it, you return to America by the new
Suspension Bridge, and follow up the bank to where they exhibit the Cave
of the Winds.

Here I followed instructions, and divested myself of all my clothing, and
put on a waterproof jacket and overalls.  This costume is picturesque,
but not beautiful.  A guide, similarly dressed, led the way down a flight
of winding stairs, which wound and wound, and still kept on winding long
after the thing ceased to be a novelty, and then terminated long before
it had begun to be a pleasure.  We were then well down under the
precipice, but still considerably above the level of the river.

We now began to creep along flimsy bridges of a single plank, our persons
shielded from destruction by a crazy wooden railing, to which I clung
with both hands--not because I was afraid, but because I wanted to.
Presently the descent became steeper and the bridge flimsier, and sprays
from the American Fall began to rain down on us in fast increasing sheets
that soon became blinding, and after that our progress was mostly in the
nature of groping.  Now a furious wind began to rush out from behind the
waterfall, which seemed determined to sweep us from the bridge, and
scatter us on the rocks and among the torrents below.  I remarked that I
wanted to go home; but it was too late.  We were almost under the
monstrous wall of water thundering down from above, and speech was in
vain in the midst of such a pitiless crash of sound.

In another moment the guide disappeared behind the deluge, and, bewildered
by the thunder, driven helplessly by the wind, and smitten by the arrowy
tempest of rain, I followed.  All was darkness.  Such a mad storming,
roaring, and bellowing of warring wind and water never crazed my ears
before.  I bent my head, and seemed to receive the Atlantic on my back.
The world seemed going to destruction.  I could not see anything, the
flood poured down savagely.  I raised my head, with open mouth, and the
most of the American cataract went down my throat.  If I had sprung a
leak now I had been lost.  And at this moment I discovered that the
bridge had ceased, and we must trust for a foothold to the slippery and
precipitous rocks.  I never was so scared before and survived it.  But we
got through at last, and emerged into the open day, where we could stand
in front of the laced and frothy and seething world of descending water,
and look at it.  When I saw how much of it there was, and how fearfully
in earnest it was, I was sorry I had gone behind it.

The noble Red Man has always been a friend and darling of mine.  I love
to read about him in tales and legends and romances.  I love to read of
his inspired sagacity, and his love of the wild free life of mountain and
forest, and his general nobility of character, and his stately
metaphorical manner of speech, and his chivalrous love for the dusky
maiden, and the picturesque pomp of his dress and accoutrements.
Especially the picturesque pomp of his dress and accoutrements.  When I
found the shops at Niagara Falls full of dainty Indian beadwork, and
stunning moccasins, and equally stunning toy figures representing human
beings who carried their weapons in holes bored through their arms and
bodies, and had feet shaped like a pie, I was filled with emotion.
I knew that now, at last, I was going to come face to face with the noble
Red Man.

A lady clerk in a shop told me, indeed, that all her grand array of
curiosities were made by the Indians, and that they were plenty about the
Falls, and that they were friendly, and it would not be dangerous to
speak to them.  And sure enough, as I approached the bridge leading over
to Luna Island, I came upon a noble Son of the Forest sitting under a
tree, diligently at work on a bead reticule.  He wore a slouch hat and
brogans, and had a short black pipe in his mouth.  Thus does the baneful
contact with our effeminate civilization dilute the picturesque pomp
which is so natural to the Indian when far removed from us in his native
haunts.  I addressed the relic as follows:

“Is the Wawhoo-Wang-Wang of the Whack-a-Whack happy?  Does the great
Speckled Thunder sigh for the war-path, or is his heart contented with
dreaming of the dusky maiden, the Pride of the Forest?  Does the mighty
Sachem yearn to drink the blood of his enemies, or is he satisfied to
make bead reticules for the pappooses of the paleface?  Speak, sublime
relic of bygone grandeur--venerable ruin, speak!”

The relic said:


“An' is it mesilf, Dennis Hooligan, that ye'd be takin' for a dirty
Injin, ye drawlin', lantern-jawed, spider-legged divil!  By the piper
that played before Moses, I'll ate ye!”

I went away from there.

By and by, in the neighborhood of the Terrapin Tower, I came upon a
gentle daughter of the aborigines in fringed and beaded buckskin
moccasins and leggins, seated on a bench with her pretty wares about her.
She had just carved out a wooden chief that had a strong family
resemblance to a clothes-pin, and was now boring a hole through his
abdomen to put his bow through.  I hesitated a moment, and then addressed
her:

“Is the heart of the forest maiden heavy?  Is the Laughing Tadpole
lonely?  Does she mourn over the extinguished council-fires of her race,
and the vanished glory of her ancestors?  Or does her sad spirit wander
afar toward the hunting-grounds whither her brave Gobbler-of-the-
Lightnings is gone?  Why is my daughter silent?  Has she ought against
the paleface stranger?”

The maiden said:

“Faix, an' is it Biddy Malone ye dare to be callin' names?  Lave this, or
I'll shy your lean carcass over the cataract, ye sniveling blaggard!”

I adjourned from there also.

“Confound these Indians!” I said.  “They told me they were tame; but, if
appearances go for anything, I should say they were all on the warpath.”

I made one more attempt to fraternize with them, and only one.  I came
upon a camp of them gathered in the shade of a great tree, making wampum
and moccasins, and addressed them in the language of friendship:

“Noble Red Men, Braves, Grand Sachems, War Chiefs, Squaws, and High
Muck-a-Mucks, the paleface from the land of the setting sun greets you!
You, Beneficent Polecat--you, Devourer of Mountains--you, Roaring
Thundergust--you, Bully Boy with a Glass eye--the paleface from beyond
the great waters greets you all! War and pestilence have thinned your
ranks and destroyed your once proud nation.  Poker and seven-up, and a
vain modern expense for soap, unknown to your glorious ancestors, have
depleted your purses.  Appropriating, in your simplicity, the property of
others has gotten you into trouble.  Misrepresenting facts, in your
simple innocence, has damaged your reputation with the soulless usurper.
Trading for forty-rod whisky, to enable you to get drunk and happy and
tomahawk your families, has played the everlasting mischief with the
picturesque pomp of your dress, and here you are, in the broad light of
the nineteenth century, gotten up like the ragtag and bobtail of the
purlieus of New York.  For shame!  Remember your ancestors!  Recall their
mighty deeds!  Remember Uncas!--and Red jacket! and Hole in the Day!--and
Whoopdedoodledo!  Emulate their achievements!  Unfurl yourselves under my
banner, noble savages, illustrious guttersnipes--”

“Down wid him!”  “Scoop the blaggard!”  “Burn him!”  “Hang him!”
 “Dhround him!”

It was the quickest operation that ever was.  I simply saw a sudden flash
in the air of clubs, brickbats, fists, bead-baskets, and moccasins--a
single flash, and they all appeared to hit me at once, and no two of them
in the same place.  In the next instant the entire tribe was upon me.
They tore half the clothes off me; they broke my arms and legs; they gave
me a thump that dented the top of my head till it would hold coffee like
a saucer; and, to crown their disgraceful proceedings and add insult to
injury, they threw me over the Niagara Falls, and I got wet.

About ninety or a hundred feet from the top, the remains of my vest
caught on a projecting rock, and I was almost drowned before I could get
loose.  I finally fell, and brought up in a world of white foam at the
foot of the Fall, whose celled and bubbly masses towered up several inches
above my head.  Of course I got into the eddy.  I sailed round and
round in it forty-four times--chasing a chip and gaining on it--each
round trip a half-mile--reaching for the same bush on the bank forty-four
times, and just exactly missing it by a hair's-breadth every time.


At last a man walked down and sat down close to that bush, and put a pipe
in his mouth, and lit a match, and followed me with one eye and kept the
other on the match, while he sheltered it in his hands from the wind.
Presently a puff of wind blew it out.  The next time I swept around he
said:

“Got a match?”

“Yes; in my other vest.  Help me out, please.”

“Not for Joe.”

When I came round again, I said:

“Excuse the seemingly impertinent curiosity of a drowning man, but will
you explain this singular conduct of yours?”

“With pleasure.  I am the coroner.  Don't hurry on my account.  I can
wait for you.  But I wish I had a match.”

I said: “Take my place, and I'll go and get you one.”

He declined.  This lack of confidence on his part created a coldness
between us, and from that time forward I avoided him.  It was my idea,
in case anything happened to me, to so time the occurrence as to throw my
custom into the hands of the opposition coroner on the American side.

At last a policeman came along, and arrested me for disturbing the peace
by yelling at people on shore for help.  The judge fined me, but I had the
advantage of him.  My money was with my pantaloons, and my pantaloons
were with the Indians.

Thus I escaped.  I am now lying in a very critical condition.  At least I
am lying anyway---critical or not critical.  I am hurt all over, but I
cannot tell the full extent yet, because the doctor is not done taking
inventory.  He will make out my manifest this evening.  However, thus far
he thinks only sixteen of my wounds are fatal.  I don't mind the others.

Upon regaining my right mind, I said:

“It is an awful savage tribe of Indians that do the beadwork and
moccasins for Niagara Falls, doctor.  Where are they from?”


“Limerick, my son.”






ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS--[Written about 1865.]

“MORAL STATISTICIAN.”--I don't want any of your statistics; I took your
whole batch and lit my pipe with it.  I hate your kind of people.  You
are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much
his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he
wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal
practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking
coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of
wine at dinner, etc., etc., etc.  And you are always figuring out how
many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of
wearing expansive hoops, etc., etc., etc.  You never see more than one
side of the question.  You are blind to the fact that most old men in
America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they
ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and
survive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet
grow older and fatter all the time.  And you never try to find out how
much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking
in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would
save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost
in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking.  Of course you can
save money by denying yourself all the little vicious enjoyments for
fifty years; but then what can you do with it?  What use can you put it
to?  Money can't save your infinitesimal soul.  All the use that money
can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life;
therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment, where is the use
of accumulating cash?  It won't do for you to say that you can use it to
better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in
supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who
have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you
stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and
hungry.  And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor
wretch, seeing you in a good humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you;
and in church you are always down on your knees, with your eyes buried in
the cushion, when the contribution-box comes around; and you never give
the revenue officers a full statement of your income.  Now you know these
things yourself, don't you?  Very well, then what is the use of your
stringing out your miserable lives to a lean and withered old age?  What
is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you?  In
a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying
to seduce people into becoming as “ornery” and unlovable as you are
yourselves, by your villainous “moral statistics”?  Now I don't approve
of dissipation, and I don't indulge in it, either; but I haven't a
particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices, and so
I don't want to hear from you any more.  I think you are the very same
man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice of
smoking cigars, and then came back, in my absence, with your
reprehensible fireproof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor
stove.


“YOUNG AUTHOR.”--Yes, Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because
the phosphorus in it makes brain.  So far you are correct.  But I cannot
help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat--at least, not
with certainty.  If the specimen composition you send is about your fair
usual average, I should judge that perhaps a couple of whales would be
all you would want for the present.  Not the largest kind, but simply
good, middling-sized whales.


“SIMON WHEELER,” Sonora.--The following simple and touching remarks and
accompanying poem have just come to hand from the rich gold-mining region
of Sonora:

     To Mr. Mark Twain: The within parson, which I have set to poetry
     under the name and style of “He Done His Level Best,” was one among
     the whitest men I ever see, and it ain't every man that knowed him
     that can find it in his heart to say he's glad the poor cuss is
     busted and gone home to the States.  He was here in an early day,
     and he was the handyest man about takin' holt of anything that come
     along you most ever see, I judge.  He was a cheerful, stirrin'
     cretur, always doin' somethin', and no man can say he ever see him
     do anything by halvers.  Preachin was his nateral gait, but he
     warn't a man to lay back and twidle his thumbs because there didn't
     happen to be nothin' doin' in his own especial line--no, sir, he was a
     man who would meander forth and stir up something for hisself.  His
     last acts was to go his pile on “Kings-and” (calklatin' to fill, but
     which he didn't fill), when there was a “flush” out agin him, and
     naterally, you see, he went under.  And so he was cleaned out as you
     may say, and he struck the home-trail, cheerful but flat broke.  I
     knowed this talonted man in Arkansaw, and if you would print this
     humbly tribute to his gorgis abilities, you would greatly obleege
     his onhappy friend.

                    HE DONE HIS LEVEL BEST

                    Was he a mining on the flat--
                    He done it with a zest;
                    Was he a leading of the choir--
                    He done his level best.

                    If he'd a reg'lar task to do,
                    He never took no rest;
                    Or if 'twas off-and-on--the same--
                    He done his level best.

                    If he was preachin' on his beat,
                    He'd tramp from east to west,
                    And north to south-in cold and heat
                    He done his level best.

                    He'd yank a sinner outen (Hades),**
                    And land him with the blest;
                    Then snatch a prayer'n waltz in again,
                    And do his level best.

     **Here I have taken a slight liberty with the original MS.  “Hades”
      does not make such good meter as the other word of one syllable, but
     it sounds better.

                    He'd cuss and sing and howl and pray,
                    And dance and drink and jest,
                    And lie and steal--all one to him--
                    He done his level best.

                    Whate'er this man was sot to do,
                    He done it with a zest;
                    No matter WHAT his contract was,
                    HE'D DO HIS LEVEL BEST.

Verily, this man WAS gifted with “gorgis abilities,” and it is a
happiness to me to embalm the memory of their luster in these columns.
If it were not that the poet crop is unusually large and rank in
California this year, I would encourage you to continue writing, Simon
Wheeler; but, as it is, perhaps it might be too risky in you to enter
against so much opposition.


“PROFESSIONAL BEGGAR.”--NO; you are not obliged to take greenbacks at
par.


“MELTON MOWBRAY,” Dutch Flat.--This correspondent sends a lot of
doggerel, and says it has been regarded as very good in Dutch Flat.  I
give a specimen verse:

          The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,
          And his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold;
          And the sheen of his spears was like stars on the sea,
          When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.**

     **This piece of pleasantry, published in a San Francisco paper, was
     mistaken by the country journals for seriousness, and many and loud
     were the denunciations of the ignorance of author and editor, in not
     knowing that the lines in question were “written by Byron.”

There, that will do.  That may be very good Dutch Flat poetry, but it
won't do in the metropolis.  It is too smooth and blubbery; it reads like
buttermilk gurgling from a jug.  What the people ought to have is
something spirited--something like “Johnny Comes Marching Home.”  However,
keep on practising, and you may succeed yet.  There is genius in you, but
too much blubber.


     “ST. CLAIR HIGGINS.” Los Angeles.--“My life is a failure; I have
     adored, wildly, madly, and she whom I love has turned coldly from me
     and shed her affections upon another.  What would you advise me to
     do?”

You should set your affections on another also--or on several, if there
are enough to go round.  Also, do everything you can to make your former
flame unhappy.  There is an absurd idea disseminated in novels, that the
happier a girl is with another man, the happier it makes the old lover
she has blighted.  Don't allow yourself to believe any such nonsense as
that.  The more cause that girl finds to regret that she did not marry
you, the more comfortable you will feel over it.  It isn't poetical, but
it is mighty sound doctrine.


     “ARITHMETICUS.” Virginia, Nevada.--“If it would take a cannon-ball
     3 and 1/3 seconds to travel four miles, and 3 and 3/8 seconds to
     travel the next four, and 3 and 5/8 to travel the next four, and if
     its rate of progress continued to diminish in the same ratio, how
     long would it take it to go fifteen hundred million miles?”

I don't know.


“AMBITIOUS LEARNER,” Oakland.--Yes; you are right America was not
discovered by Alexander Selkirk.


     “DISCARDED LOVER.”--“I loved, and still love, the beautiful Edwitha
     Howard, and intended to marry her.  Yet, during my temporary absence
     at Benicia, last week, alas! she married Jones.  Is my happiness to
     be thus blasted for life? Have I no redress?”

Of course you have.  All the law, written and unwritten, is on your side.
The intention and not the act constitutes crime--in other words,
constitutes the deed.  If you call your bosom friend a fool, and intend
it for an insult, it is an insult; but if you do it playfully, and
meaning no insult, it is not an insult.  If you discharge a pistol
accidentally, and kill a man, you can go free, for you have done no
murder; but if you try to kill a man, and manifestly intend to kill him,
but fail utterly to do it, the law still holds that the intention
constituted the crime, and you are guilty of murder.  Ergo, if you had
married Edwitha accidentally, and without really intending to do it, you
would not actually be married to her at all, because the act of marriage
could not be complete without the intention.  And ergo, in the strict
spirit of the law, since you deliberately intended to marry Edwitha, and
didn't do it, you are married to her all the same--because, as I said
before, the intention constitutes the crime.  It is as clear as day that
Edwitha is your wife, and your redress lies in taking a club and
mutilating Jones with it as much as you can.  Any man has a right to
protect his own wife from the advances of other men.  But you have
another alternative--you were married to Edwitha first, because of your
deliberate intention, and now you can prosecute her for bigamy, in
subsequently marrying Jones.  But there is another phase in this
complicated case:  You intended to marry Edwitha, and consequently,
according to law, she is your wife--there is no getting around that; but
she didn't marry you, and if she never intended to marry you, you are not
her husband, of course.  Ergo, in marrying Jones, she was guilty of
bigamy, because she was the wife of another man at the time; which is all
very well as far as it goes--but then, don't you see, she had no other
husband when she married Jones, and consequently she was not guilty of
bigamy.  Now, according to this view of the case, Jones married a
spinster, who was a widow at the same time and another man's wife at the
same time, and yet who had no husband and never had one, and never had
any intention of getting married, and therefore, of course, never had
been married; and by the same reasoning you are a bachelor, because you
have never been any one's husband; and a married man, because you have a
wife living; and to all intents and purposes a widower, because you have
been deprived of that wife; and a consummate ass for going off to Benicia
in the first place, while things were so mixed.  And by this time I have
got myself so tangled up in the intricacies of this extraordinary case
that I shall have to give up any further attempt to advise you--I might
get confused and fail to make myself understood.  I think I could take up
the argument where I left off, and by following it closely awhile,
perhaps I could prove to your satisfaction, either that you never existed
at all, or that you are dead now, and consequently don't need the
faithless Edwitha--I think I could do that, if it would afford you any
comfort.


“ARTHUR AUGUSTUS.”--No; you are wrong; that is the proper way to throw a
brickbat or a tomahawk; but it doesn't answer so well for a bouquet; you
will hurt somebody if you keep it up.  Turn your nosegay upside down,
take it by the stems, and toss it with an upward sweep.  Did you ever
pitch quoits? that is the idea.  The practice of recklessly heaving
immense solid bouquets, of the general size and weight of prize cabbages,
from the dizzy altitude of the galleries, is dangerous and very
reprehensible.  Now, night before last, at the Academy of Music, just
after Signorina ____ had finished that exquisite melody, “The Last Rose of
Summer,” one of these floral pile-drivers came cleaving down through the
atmosphere of applause, and if she hadn't deployed suddenly to the right,
it would have driven her into the floor like a shinglenail.  Of course
that bouquet was well meant; but how would you like to have been the
target?  A sincere compliment is always grateful to a lady, so long as
you don't try to knock her down with it.


“YOUNG MOTHER.”--And so you think a baby is a thing of beauty and a joy
forever?  Well, the idea is pleasing, but not original; every cow thinks
the same of its own calf. Perhaps the cow may not think it so elegantly,
but still she thinks it nevertheless.  I honor the cow for it.  We all
honor this touching maternal instinct wherever we find it, be it in the
home of luxury or in the humble cow-shed.  But really, madam, when I
come to examine the matter in all its bearings, I find that the
correctness of your assertion does not assert itself in all cases.
A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded
as a thing of beauty; and inasmuch as babyhood spans but three short
years, no baby is competent to be a joy “forever.”  It pains me thus to
demolish two-thirds of your pretty sentiment in a single sentence; but
the position I hold in this chair requires that I shall not permit you to
deceive and mislead the public with your plausible figures of speech.
I know a female baby, aged eighteen months, in this city, which cannot
hold out as a “joy” twenty-four hours on a stretch, let alone “forever.”
 And it possesses some of the most remarkable eccentricities of character
and appetite that have ever fallen under my notice.  I will set down here
a statement of this infant's operations (conceived, planned, and carried
out by itself, and without suggestion or assistance from its mother or
any one else), during a single day; and what I shall say can be
substantiated by the sworn testimony of witnesses.

It commenced by eating one dozen large blue-mass pills, box and all; then
it fell down a flight of stairs, and arose with a blue and purple knot on
its forehead, after which it proceeded in quest of further refreshment
and amusement. It found a glass trinket ornamented with brass-work
--smashed up and ate the glass, and then swallowed the brass.
Then it drank about twenty drops of laudanum, and more than a dozen
tablespoonfuls of strong spirits of camphor.  The reason why it took no
more laudanum was because there was no more to take.  After this it lay
down on its back, and shoved five or six inches of a silver-headed
whalebone cane down its throat; got it fast there, and it was all its
mother could do to pull the cane out again, without pulling out some of
the child with it.  Then, being hungry for glass again, it broke up
several wine glasses, and fell to eating and swallowing the fragments,
not minding a cut or two.  Then it ate a quantity of butter, pepper,
salt, and California matches, actually taking a spoonful of butter, a
spoonful of salt, a spoonful of pepper, and three or four lucifer matches
at each mouthful. (I will remark here that this thing of beauty likes
painted German lucifers, and eats all she can get of them; but she
prefers California matches, which I regard as a compliment to our home
manufactures of more than ordinary value, coming, as it does, from one
who is too young to flatter.)  Then she washed her head with soap and
water, and afterward ate what soap was left, and drank as much of the
suds as she had room for; after which she sallied forth and took the cow
familiarly by the tail, and got kicked heels over head.  At odd times
during the day, when this joy forever happened to have nothing particular
on hand, she put in the time by climbing up on places, and falling down
off them, uniformly damaging her self in the operation.  As young as she
is, she speaks many words tolerably distinctly; and being plainspoken in
other respects, blunt and to the point, she opens conversation with all
strangers, male or female, with the same formula, “How do, Jim?” Not being
familiar with the ways of children, it is possible that I have
been magnifying into matter of surprise things which may not strike any
one who is familiar with infancy as being at all astonishing.  However, I
cannot believe that such is the case, and so I repeat that my report of
this baby's performances is strictly true; and if any one doubts it,
I can produce the child.  I will further engage that she will devour
anything that is given her (reserving to myself only the right to exclude
anvils), and fall down from any place to which she may be elevated
(merely stipulating that her preference for alighting on her head shall
be respected, and, therefore, that the elevation chosen shall be high
enough to enable her to accomplish this to her satisfaction).  But I find
I have wandered from my subject; so, without further argument, I will
reiterate my conviction that not all babies are things of beauty and joys
forever.


     “ARITHMETICUS.” Virginia, Nevada.--“I am an enthusiastic student of
     mathematics, and it is so vexatious to me to find my progress
     constantly impeded by these mysterious arithmetical technicalities.
     Now do tell me what the difference is between geometry and
     conchology?”

Here you come again with your arithmetical conundrums, when I am
suffering death with a cold in the head.  If you could have seen the
expression of scorn that darkened my countenance a moment ago, and was
instantly split from the center in every direction like a fractured
looking-glass by my last sneeze, you never would have written that
disgraceful question.  Conchology is a science which has nothing to do
with mathematics; it relates only to shells.  At the same time, however,
a man who opens oysters for a hotel, or shells a fortified town, or sucks
eggs, is not, strictly speaking, a conchologist--a fine stroke of sarcasm
that, but it will be lost on such an unintellectual clam as you.  Now
compare conchology and geometry together, and you will see what the
difference is, and your question will be answered.  But don't torture me
with any more arithmetical horrors until you know I am rid of my cold.  I
feel the bitterest animosity toward you at this moment--bothering me in
this way, when I can do nothing but sneeze and rage and snort
pocket-handkerchiefs to atoms.  If I had you in range of my nose now
I would blow your brains out.






TO RAISE POULTRY

--[Being a letter written to a Poultry Society that had conferred a
complimentary membership upon the author.  Written about 1870.]

Seriously, from early youth I have taken an especial interest in the
subject of poultry-raising, and so this membership touches a ready
sympathy in my breast.  Even as a schoolboy, poultry-raising was a study
with me, and I may say without egotism that as early as the age of
seventeen I was acquainted with all the best and speediest methods of
raising chickens, from raising them off a roost by burning lucifer
matches under their noses, down to lifting them off a fence on a frosty
night by insinuating the end of a warm board under their heels.  By the
time I was twenty years old, I really suppose I had raised more poultry
than any one individual in all the section round about there.  The very
chickens came to know my talent by and by.  The youth of both sexes
ceased to paw the earth for worms, and old roosters that came to crow,
“remained to pray,” when I passed by.

I have had so much experience in the raising of fowls that I cannot but
think that a few hints from me might be useful to the society.  The two
methods I have already touched upon are very simple, and are only used in
the raising of the commonest class of fowls; one is for summer, the other
for winter.  In the one case you start out with a friend along about
eleven o'clock on a summer's night (not later, because in some states
--especially in California and Oregon--chickens always rouse up just at
midnight and crow from ten to thirty minutes, according to the ease or
difficulty they experience in getting the public waked up), and your
friend carries with him a sack.  Arrived at the henroost (your
neighbor's, not your own), you light a match and hold it under first one
and then another pullet's nose until they are willing to go into that bag
without making any trouble about it.  You then return home, either taking
the bag with you or leaving it behind, according as circumstances shall
dictate.  N. B.--I have seen the time when it was eligible and
appropriate to leave the sack behind and walk off with considerable
velocity, without ever leaving any word where to send it.

In the case of the other method mentioned for raising poultry, your
friend takes along a covered vessel with a charcoal fire in it, and you
carry a long slender plank.  This is a frosty night, understand.  Arrived
at the tree, or fence, or other henroost (your own if you are an idiot),
you warm the end of your plank in your friend's fire vessel, and then
raise it aloft and ease it up gently against a slumbering chicken's foot.
If the subject of your attentions is a true bird, he will infallibly
return thanks with a sleepy cluck or two, and step out and take up
quarters on the plank, thus becoming so conspicuously accessory before
the fact to his own murder as to make it a grave question in our minds as
it once was in the mind of Blackstone, whether he is not really and
deliberately committing suicide in the second degree.  [But you enter
into a contemplation of these legal refinements subsequently-- not then.]

When you wish to raise a fine, large, donkey-voiced Shanghai rooster, you
do it with a lasso, just as you would a bull. It is because he must be choked,
and choked effectually, too.  It is the only good, certain way,
for whenever he mentions a matter which he is cordially interested in,
the chances are ninety-nine in a hundred that he secures somebody else's
immediate attention to it too, whether it be day or night.

The Black Spanish is an exceedingly fine bird and a costly one.
Thirty-five dollars is the usual figure, and fifty a not uncommon price
for a specimen.  Even its eggs are worth from a dollar to a dollar and a
half apiece, and yet are so unwholesome that the city physician seldom or
never orders them for the workhouse.  Still I have once or twice procured
as high as a dozen at a time for nothing, in the dark of the moon.  The
best way to raise the Black Spanish fowl is to go late in the evening and
raise coop and all.  The reason I recommend this method is that, the
birds being so valuable, the owners do not permit them to roost around
promiscuously, but put them in a coop as strong as a fireproof safe and
keep it in the kitchen at night.  The method I speak of is not always a
bright and satisfying success, and yet there are so many little articles
of VERTU about a kitchen, that if you fail on the coop you can generally
bring away something else.  I brought away a nice steel trap one night,
worth ninety cents.

But what is the use in my pouring out my whole intellect on this subject?
I have shown the Western New York Poultry Society that they have taken to
their bosom a party who is not a spring chicken by any means, but a man
who knows all about poultry, and is just as high up in the most efficient
methods of raising it as the president of the institution himself.
I thank these gentlemen for the honorary membership they have conferred
upon me, and shall stand at all times ready and willing to testify my
good feeling and my official zeal by deeds as well as by this hastily
penned advice and information.  Whenever they are ready to go to raising
poultry, let them call for me any evening after eleven o'clock, and I shall be
on hand promptly.






EXPERIENCE OF THE McWILLIAMSES WITH MEMBRANOUS CROUP [Written about 1878.]

[As related to the author of this book by Mr. McWilliams, a pleasant New
York gentleman whom the said author met by chance on a journey.]

Well, to go back to where I was before I digressed to explain to you how
that frightful and incurable disease, membranous croup,[Diphtheria D.W.]
was ravaging the town and driving all mothers mad with terror, I called
Mrs. McWilliams's attention to little Penelope, and said:

“Darling, I wouldn't let that child be chewing that pine stick if I were
you.”

“Precious, where is the harm in it?”  said she, but at the same time
preparing to take away the stick--for women cannot receive even the most
palpably judicious suggestion without arguing it; that is, married women.

I replied:

“Love, it is notorious that pine is the least nutritious wood that a
child can eat.”

My wife's hand paused, in the act of taking the stick, and returned
itself to her lap.  She bridled perceptibly, and said:

“Hubby, you know better than that.  You know you do.  Doctors all say
that the turpentine in pine wood is good for weak back and the kidneys.”

“Ah--I was under a misapprehension.  I did not know that the child's
kidneys and spine were affected, and that the family physician had
recommended--”

“Who said the child's spine and kidneys were affected?”

“My love, you intimated it.”

“The idea!  I never intimated anything of the kind.”

“Why, my dear, it hasn't been two minutes since you said--”

“Bother what I said!  I don't care what I did say.  There isn't any harm
in the child's chewing a bit of pine stick if she wants to, and you know
it perfectly well.  And she shall chew it, too.  So there, now!”

“Say no more, my dear.  I now see the force of your reasoning, and I will
go and order two or three cords of the best pine wood to-day.  No child
of mine shall want while I--”

“Oh, please go along to your office and let me have some peace.  A body
can never make the simplest remark but you must take it up and go to
arguing and arguing and arguing till you don't know what you are talking
about, and you never do.”

“Very well, it shall be as you say.  But there is a want of logic in your
last remark which--”

However, she was gone with a flourish before I could finish, and had
taken the child with her.  That night at dinner she confronted me with a
face as white as a sheet:

“Oh, Mortimer, there's another!  Little Georgi Gordon is taken.”

“Membranous croup?”

“Membranous croup.”

“Is there any hope for him?”

“None in the wide world.  Oh, what is to become of us!”

By and by a nurse brought in our Penelope to say good night and offer the
customary prayer at the mother's knee.  In the midst of “Now I lay me
down to sleep,” she gave a slight cough!  My wife fell back like one
stricken with death.  But the next moment she was up and brimming with
the activities which terror inspires.

She commanded that the child's crib be removed from the nursery to our
bedroom; and she went along to see the order executed.  She took me with
her, of course.  We got matters arranged with speed.  A cot-bed was put
up in my wife's dressing room for the nurse.  But now Mrs. McWilliams
said we were too far away from the other baby, and what if he were to
have the symptoms in the night--and she blanched again, poor thing.

We then restored the crib and the nurse to the nursery and put up a bed
for ourselves in a room adjoining.

Presently, however, Mrs. McWilliams said suppose the baby should catch it
from Penelope?  This thought struck a new panic to her heart, and the
tribe of us could not get the crib out of the nursery again fast enough
to satisfy my wife, though she assisted in her own person and well-nigh
pulled the crib to pieces in her frantic hurry.

We moved down-stairs; but there was no place there to stow the nurse, and
Mrs. McWilliams said the nurse's experience would be an inestimable help.
So we returned, bag and baggage, to our own bedroom once more, and felt a
great gladness, like storm-buffeted birds that have found their nest
again.

Mrs. McWilliams sped to the nursery to see how things were going on
there.  She was back in a moment with a new dread.  She said:

“What CAN make Baby sleep so?”

I said:

“Why, my darling, Baby always sleeps like a graven image.”

“I know.  I know; but there's something peculiar about his sleep now.
He seems to--to--he seems to breathe so regularly.  Oh, this is
dreadful.”


“But, my dear, he always breathes regularly.”

“Oh, I know it, but there's something frightful about it now.  His nurse
is too young and inexperienced.  Maria shall stay there with her, and be
on hand if anything happens.”

“That is a good idea, but who will help YOU?”

“You can help me all I want.  I wouldn't allow anybody to do anything but
myself, anyhow, at such a time as this.”

I said I would feel mean to lie abed and sleep, and leave her to watch
and toil over our little patient all the weary night.  But she reconciled
me to it.  So old Maria departed and took up her ancient quarters in the
nursery.

Penelope coughed twice in her sleep.

“Oh, why don't that doctor come!  Mortimer, this room is too warm.  This
room is certainly too warm.  Turn off the register-quick!”

I shut it off, glancing at the thermometer at the same time, and
wondering to myself if 70 was too warm for a sick child.

The coachman arrived from down-town now with the news that our physician
was ill and confined to his bed.  Mrs. McWilliams turned a dead eye upon
me, and said in a dead voice:

“There is a Providence in it.  It is foreordained.  He never was sick
before.  Never.  We have not been living as we ought to live, Mortimer.
Time and time again I have told you so.  Now you see the result.  Our
child will never get well.  Be thankful if you can forgive yourself; I
never can forgive myself.”

I said, without intent to hurt, but with heedless choice of words, that I
could not see that we had been living such an abandoned life.

“Mortimer!  Do you want to bring the judgment upon Baby, too!”

Then she began to cry, but suddenly exclaimed:

“The doctor must have sent medicines!”

I said:

“Certainly.  They are here.  I was only waiting for you to give me a
chance.”

“Well do give them to me!  Don't you know that every moment is precious
now?  But what was the use in sending medicines, when he knows that the
disease is incurable?”

I said that while there was life there was hope.

“Hope!  Mortimer, you know no more what you are talking about than the
child unborn.  If you would--As I live, the directions say give one
teaspoonful once an hour!  Once an hour!--as if we had a whole year
before us to save the child in!  Mortimer, please hurry.  Give the poor
perishing thing a tablespoonful, and try to be quick!”

“Why, my dear, a tablespoonful might--”

“Don't drive me frantic!  .  .  .  There, there, there, my precious, my
own; it's nasty bitter stuff, but it's good for Nelly--good for mother's
precious darling; and it will make her well.  There, there, there, put
the little head on mamma's breast and go to sleep, and pretty soon--oh,
I know she can't live till morning!  Mortimer, a tablespoonful every
half-hour will--Oh, the child needs belladonna, too; I know she does--and
aconite.  Get them, Mortimer.  Now do let me have my way.  You know
nothing about these things.”

We now went to bed, placing the crib close to my wife's pillow.  All this
turmoil had worn upon me, and within two minutes I was something more
than half asleep.  Mrs. McWilliams roused me:

“Darling, is that register turned on?”

“No.”

“I thought as much.  Please turn it on at once.  This room is cold.”

I turned it on, and presently fell asleep again.  I was aroused once
more:

“Dearie, would you mind moving the crib to your side of the bed?  It is
nearer the register.”

I moved it, but had a collision with the rug and woke up the child.  I
dozed off once more, while my wife quieted the sufferer.  But in a little
while these words came murmuring remotely through the fog of my
drowsiness:

“Mortimer, if we only had some goose grease--will you ring?”

I climbed dreamily out, and stepped on a cat, which responded with a
protest and would have got a convincing kick for it if a chair had not
got it instead.

“Now, Mortimer, why do you want to turn up the gas and wake up the child
again?”

“Because I want to see how much I am hurt, Caroline.”

“Well, look at the chair, too--I have no doubt it is ruined.  Poor cat,
suppose you had--”

“Now I am not going to suppose anything about the cat.  It never would
have occurred if Maria had been allowed to remain here and attend to
these duties, which are in her line and are not in mine.”

“Now, Mortimer, I should think you would be ashamed to make a remark like
that.  It is a pity if you cannot do the few little things I ask of you
at such an awful time as this when our child--”

“There, there, I will do anything you want.  But I can't raise anybody
with this bell.  They're all gone to bed.  Where is the goose grease?”

“On the mantelpiece in the nursery.  If you'll step there and speak to
Maria--”

I fetched the goose grease and went to sleep again.  Once more I was
called:

“Mortimer, I so hate to disturb you, but the room is still too cold for
me to try to apply this stuff.  Would you mind lighting the fire?  It is
all ready to touch a match to.”

I dragged myself out and lit the fire, and then sat down disconsolate.

“Mortimer, don't sit there and catch your death of cold.  Come to bed.”

As I was stepping in she said:

“But wait a moment.  Please give the child some more of the medicine.”

Which I did.  It was a medicine which made a child more or less lively;
so my wife made use of its waking interval to strip it and grease it all
over with the goose oil.  I was soon asleep once more, but once more I
had to get up.

“Mortimer, I feel a draft.  I feel it distinctly.  There is nothing so
bad for this disease as a draft.  Please move the crib in front of the
fire.”

I did it; and collided with the rug again, which I threw in the fire.
Mrs. McWilliams sprang out of bed and rescued it and we had some words.
I had another trifling interval of sleep, and then got up, by request,
and constructed a flax-seed poultice.  This was placed upon the child's
breast and left there to do its healing work.

A wood-fire is not a permanent thing.  I got up every twenty minutes and
renewed ours, and this gave Mrs. McWilliams the opportunity to shorten
the times of giving the medicines by ten minutes, which was a great
satisfaction to her.  Now and then, between times, I reorganized the
flax-seed poultices, and applied sinapisms and other sorts of blisters
where unoccupied places could be found upon the child.  Well, toward
morning the wood gave out and my wife wanted me to go down cellar and get
some more.  I said:

“My dear, it is a laborious job, and the child must be nearly warm
enough, with her extra clothing.  Now mightn't we put on another layer of
poultices and--”

I did not finish, because I was interrupted.  I lugged wood up from below
for some little time, and then turned in and fell to snoring as only a
man can whose strength is all gone and whose soul is worn out.  Just at
broad daylight I felt a grip on my shoulder that brought me to my senses
suddenly.  My wife was glaring down upon me and gasping.  As soon as she
could command her tongue she said:

“It is all over!  All over!  The child's perspiring!  What shall we do?”

“Mercy, how you terrify me!  I don't know what we ought to do.  Maybe if
we scraped her and put her in the draft again--”

“Oh, idiot!  There is not a moment to lose!  Go for the doctor.
Go yourself.  Tell him he must come, dead or alive.”

I dragged that poor sick man from his bed and brought him.  He looked at
the child and said she was not dying.  This was joy unspeakable to me,
but it made my wife as mad as if he had offered her a personal affront.
Then he said the child's cough was only caused by some trifling
irritation or other in the throat.  At this I thought my wife had a mind
to show him the door.  Now the doctor said he would make the child cough
harder and dislodge the trouble.  So he gave her something that sent her
into a spasm of coughing, and presently up came a little wood splinter or
so.

“This child has no membranous croup,” said he.  “She has been chewing a
bit of pine shingle or something of the kind, and got some little slivers
in her throat.  They won't do her any hurt.”

“No,” said I, “I can well believe that.  Indeed, the turpentine that is
in them is very good for certain sorts of diseases that are peculiar to
children.  My wife will tell you so.”

But she did not.  She turned away in disdain and left the room; and since
that time there is one episode in our life which we never refer to.
Hence the tide of our days flows by in deep and untroubled serenity.

[Very few married men have such an experience as McWilliams's, and so the
author of this book thought that maybe the novelty of it would give it a
passing interest to the reader.]






MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE

I was a very smart child at the age of thirteen--an unusually smart
child, I thought at the time.  It was then that I did my first newspaper
scribbling, and most unexpectedly to me it stirred up a fine sensation in
the community.  It did, indeed, and I was very proud of it, too.  I was a
printer's “devil,” and a progressive and aspiring one.  My uncle had me
on his paper (the Weekly Hannibal Journal, two dollars a year in advance
--five hundred subscribers, and they paid in cordwood, cabbages, and
unmarketable turnips), and on a lucky summer's day he left town to be
gone a week, and asked me if I thought I could edit one issue of the
paper judiciously.  Ah! didn't I want to try!  Higgins was the editor on
the rival paper.  He had lately been jilted, and one night a friend found
an open note on the poor fellow's bed, in which he stated that he could
not longer endure life and had drowned himself in Bear Creek.  The friend
ran down there and discovered Higgins wading back to shore.  He had
concluded he wouldn't.  The village was full of it for several days,
but Higgins did not suspect it.  I thought this was a fine opportunity.
I wrote an elaborately wretched account of the whole matter, and then
illustrated it with villainous cuts engraved on the bottoms of wooden
type with a jackknife--one of them a picture of Higgins wading out into
the creek in his shirt, with a lantern, sounding the depth of the water
with a walking-stick.  I thought it was desperately funny, and was
densely unconscious that there was any moral obliquity about such a
publication.  Being satisfied with this effort I looked around for other
worlds to conquer, and it struck me that it would make good, interesting
matter to charge the editor of a neighboring country paper with a piece
of gratuitous rascality and “see him squirm.”

I did it, putting the article into the form of a parody on the “Burial of
Sir John Moore”--and a pretty crude parody it was, too.

Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously--not because they
had done anything to deserve, but merely because I thought it was my duty
to make the paper lively.

Next I gently touched up the newest stranger--the lion of the day, the
gorgeous journeyman tailor from Quincy.  He was a simpering coxcomb of
the first water, and the “loudest” dressed man in the state.  He was an
inveterate woman-killer.  Every week he wrote lushy “poetry” for the
journal, about his newest conquest.  His rhymes for my week were headed,
“To MARY IN H--l,” meaning to Mary in Hannibal, of course.  But while
setting up the piece I was suddenly riven from head to heel by what I
regarded as a perfect thunderbolt of humor, and I compressed it into a
snappy footnote at the bottom--thus: “We will let this thing pass, just
this once; but we wish Mr. J. Gordon Runnels to understand distinctly
that we have a character to sustain, and from this time forth when he
wants to commune with his friends in h--l, he must select some other
medium than the columns of this journal!”

The paper came out, and I never knew any little thing attract so much
attention as those playful trifles of mine.

For once the Hannibal Journal was in demand--a novelty it had not
experienced before.  The whole town was stirred.  Higgins dropped in with
a double-barreled shotgun early in the forenoon.  When he found that it
was an infant (as he called me) that had done him the damage, he simply
pulled my ears and went away; but he threw up his situation that night
and left town for good.  The tailor came with his goose and a pair of
shears; but he despised me, too, and departed for the South that night.
The two lampooned citizens came with threats of libel, and went away
incensed at my insignificance.  The country editor pranced in with a
war-whoop next day, suffering for blood to drink; but he ended by
forgiving me cordially and inviting me down to the drug store to wash
away all animosity in a friendly bumper of “Fahnestock's Vermifuge.”
 It was his little joke.  My uncle was very angry when he got back
--unreasonably so, I thought, considering what an impetus I had given the
paper, and considering also that gratitude for his preservation ought to
have been uppermost in his mind, inasmuch as by his delay he had so
wonderfully escaped dissection, tomahawking, libel, and getting his head
shot off.

But he softened when he looked at the accounts and saw that I had
actually booked the unparalleled number of thirty-three new subscribers,
and had the vegetables to show for it, cordwood, cabbage, beans, and
unsalable turnips enough to run the family for two years!






HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK--[Written about 1869.]

It is seldom pleasant to tell on oneself, but some times it is a sort of
relief to a man to make a confession.  I wish to unburden my mind now,
and yet I almost believe that I am moved to do it more because I long to
bring censure upon another man than because I desire to pour balm upon my
wounded heart. (I don't know what balm is, but I believe it is the
correct expression to use in this connection--never having seen any
balm.) You may remember that I lectured in Newark lately for the young
gentlemen of the-----Society?  I did at any rate.  During the afternoon
of that day I was talking with one of the young gentlemen just referred
to, and he said he had an uncle who, from some cause or other, seemed to
have grown permanently bereft of all emotion.  And with tears in his
eyes, this young man said, “Oh, if I could only see him laugh once more!
Oh, if I could only see him weep!”  I was touched.  I could never
withstand distress.

I said: “Bring him to my lecture.  I'll start him for you.”

“Oh, if you could but do it!  If you could but do it, all our family
would bless you for evermore--for he is so very dear to us.  Oh, my
benefactor, can you make him laugh? can you bring soothing tears to those
parched orbs?”

I was profoundly moved.  I said: “My son, bring the old party round.
I have got some jokes in that lecture that will make him laugh if there
is any laugh in him; and if they miss fire, I have got some others that
will make him cry or kill him, one or the other.”  Then the young man
blessed me, and wept on my neck, and went after his uncle.  He placed him
in full view, in the second row of benches, that night, and I began on
him.  I tried him with mild jokes, then with severe ones; I dosed him
with bad jokes and riddled him with good ones; I fired old stale jokes
into him, and peppered him fore and aft with red-hot new ones; I warmed
up to my work, and assaulted him on the right and left, in front and
behind; I fumed and sweated and charged and ranted till I was hoarse and
sick and frantic and furious; but I never moved him once--I never started
a smile or a tear!  Never a ghost of a smile, and never a suspicion of
moisture!  I was astounded.  I closed the lecture at last with one
despairing shriek--with one wild burst of humor, and hurled a joke of
supernatural atrocity full at him!

Then I sat down bewildered and exhausted.

The president of the society came up and bathed my head with cold water,
and said: “What made you carry on so toward the last?”

I said: “I was trying to make that confounded old fool laugh, in the
second row.”

And he said: “Well, you were wasting your time, because he is deaf and
dumb, and as blind as a badger!”

Now, was that any way for that old man's nephew to impose on a stranger
and orphan like me?  I ask you as a man and brother, if that was any way
for him to do?






THE OFFICE BORE--[Written about 1869]

He arrives just as regularly as the clock strikes nine in the morning.
And so he even beats the editor sometimes, and the porter must leave his
work and climb two or three pairs of stairs to unlock the “Sanctum” door
and let him in.  He lights one of the office pipes--not reflecting, perhaps,
that the editor may be one of those “stuck-up” people who would
as soon have a stranger defile his tooth-brush as his pipe-stem.  Then he
begins to loll--for a person who can consent to loaf his useless life
away in ignominious indolence has not the energy to sit up straight.

He stretches full length on the sofa awhile; then draws up to half
length; then gets into a chair, hangs his head back and his arms abroad,
and stretches his legs till the rims of his boot-heels rest upon the
floor; by and by sits up and leans forward, with one leg or both over the
arm of the chair.  But it is still observable that with all his changes
of position, he never assumes the upright or a fraudful affectation of
dignity.  From time to time he yawns, and stretches, and scratches
himself with a tranquil, mangy enjoyment, and now and then he grunts a
kind of stuffy, overfed grunt, which is full of animal contentment.  At
rare and long intervals, however, he sighs a sigh that is the eloquent
expression of a secret confession, to wit “I am useless and a nuisance,
a cumberer of the earth.”  The bore and his comrades--for there are
usually from two to four on hand, day and night--mix into the
conversation when men come in to see the editors for a moment on
business; they hold noisy talks among themselves about politics in
particular, and all other subjects in general--even warming up, after a
fashion, sometimes, and seeming to take almost a real interest in what
they are discussing.  They ruthlessly call an editor from his work with
such a remark as: “Did you see this, Smith, in the Gazette?” and proceed
to read the paragraph while the sufferer reins in his impatient pen and
listens; they often loll and sprawl round the office hour after hour,
swapping anecdotes and relating personal experiences to each other
--hairbreadth escapes, social encounters with distinguished men, election
reminiscences, sketches of odd characters, etc.  And through all those
hours they never seem to comprehend that they are robbing the editors of
their time, and the public of journalistic excellence in next day's
paper.  At other times they drowse, or dreamily pore over exchanges, or
droop limp and pensive over the chair-arms for an hour.  Even this solemn
silence is small respite to the editor, for the next uncomfortable thing
to having people look over his shoulders, perhaps, is to have them sit by
in silence and listen to the scratching of his pen.  If a body desires to
talk private business with one of the editors, he must call him outside,
for no hint milder than blasting-powder or nitroglycerin would be likely
to move the bores out of listening-distance.  To have to sit and endure
the presence of a bore day after day; to feel your cheerful spirits begin
to sink as his footstep sounds on the stair, and utterly vanish away as
his tiresome form enters the door; to suffer through his anecdotes and
die slowly to his reminiscences; to feel always the fetters of his
clogging presence; to long hopelessly for one single day's privacy; to
note with a shudder, by and by, that to contemplate his funeral in fancy
has ceased to soothe, to imagine him undergoing in strict and fearful
detail the tortures of the ancient Inquisition has lost its power to
satisfy the heart, and that even to wish him millions and millions and
millions of miles in Tophet is able to bring only a fitful gleam of joy;
to have to endure all this, day after day, and week after week, and month
after month, is an affliction that transcends any other that men suffer.
Physical pain is pastime to it, and hanging a pleasure excursion.






JOHNNY GREER

“The church was densely crowded that lovely summer Sabbath,” said the
Sunday-school superintendent, “and all, as their eyes rested upon the small
coffin, seemed impressed by the poor black boy's fate.  Above the
stillness the pastor's voice rose, and chained the interest of every ear
as he told, with many an envied compliment, how that the brave, noble,
daring little Johnny Greer, when he saw the drowned body sweeping down
toward the deep part of the river whence the agonized parents never could
have recovered it in this world, gallantly sprang into the stream, and,
at the risk of his life, towed the corpse to shore, and held it fast till
help came and secured it.  Johnny Greer was sitting just in front of me.
A ragged street-boy, with eager eye, turned upon him instantly, and said
in a hoarse whisper,

“'No; but did you, though?'

“'Yes.'

“'Towed the carkiss ashore and saved it yo'self?'

“'Yes.'

“'Cracky!  What did they give you?'

“'Nothing.'

“'W-h-a-t [with intense disgust]!  D'you know what I'd 'a' done?  I'd 'a'
anchored him out in the stream, and said, Five dollars, gents, or you
carn't have yo' nigger.'”






THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT--[Written about 1867.]

In as few words as possible I wish to lay before the nation what share,
howsoever small, I have had in this matter--this matter which has so
exercised the public mind, engendered so much ill-feeling, and so filled
the newspapers of both continents with distorted statements and
extravagant comments.

The origin of this distressful thing was this--and I assert here that
every fact in the following résumé can be amply proved by the official
records of the General Government.

John Wilson Mackenzie, of Rotterdam, Chemung County, New Jersey,
deceased, contracted with the General Government, on or about the 10th
day of October, 1861, to furnish to General Sherman the sum total of
thirty barrels of beef.

Very well.

He started after Sherman with the beef, but when he got to Washington
Sherman had gone to Manassas; so he took the beef and followed him there,
but arrived too late; he followed him to Nashville, and from Nashville to
Chattanooga, and from Chattanooga to Atlanta--but he never could overtake
him.  At Atlanta he took a fresh start and followed him clear through his
march to the sea.  He arrived too late again by a few days; but hearing
that Sherman was going out in the Quaker City excursion to the Holy Land,
he took shipping for Beirut, calculating to head off the other vessel.
When he arrived in Jerusalem with his beef, he learned that Sherman had
not sailed in the Quaker City, but had gone to the Plains to fight the
Indians.  He returned to America and started for the Rocky Mountains.
After sixty-eight days of arduous travel on the Plains, and when he had
got within four miles of Sherman's headquarters, he was tomahawked and
scalped, and the Indians got the beef.  They got all of it but one
barrel.  Sherman's army captured that, and so, even in death, the bold
navigator partly fulfilled his contract.  In his will, which he had kept
like a journal, he bequeathed the contract to his son Bartholomew W.
Bartholomew W.  made out the following bill, and then died:

     THE UNITED STATES

               In account with JOHN WILSON MACKENZIE, of New Jersey,
               deceased, .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .          Dr.

     To thirty barrels of beef for General Sherman, at $100, $3,000
     To traveling expenses and transportation .  .  .  .  .  14,000

               Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  $17,000
               Rec'd Pay't.


He died then; but he left the contract to Wm. J. Martin, who tried to
collect it, but died before he got through.  He left it to Barker J.
Allen, and he tried to collect it also.  He did not survive.  Barker J.
Allen left it to Anson G. Rogers, who attempted to collect it, and got
along as far as the Ninth Auditor's Office, when Death, the great
Leveler, came all unsummoned, and foreclosed on him also.  He left the
bill to a relative of his in Connecticut, Vengeance Hopkins by name, who
lasted four weeks and two days, and made the best time on record, coming
within one of reaching the Twelfth Auditor.  In his will he gave the
contract bill to his uncle, by the name of O-be-joyful Johnson.  It was
too undermining for Joyful.  His last words were: “Weep not for me--I am
willing to go.”  And so he was, poor soul.  Seven people inherited the
contract after that; but they all died.  So it came into my hands at
last.  It fell to me through a relative by the name of, Hubbard
--Bethlehem Hubbard, of Indiana.  He had had a grudge against me for a
long time; but in his last moments he sent for me, and forgave me
everything, and, weeping, gave me the beef contract.

This ends the history of it up to the time that I succeeded to the
property.  I will now endeavor to set myself straight before the nation
in everything that concerns my share in the matter.  I took this beef
contract, and the bill for mileage and transportation, to the President
of the United States.

He said, “Well, sir, what can I do for you?”

I said, “Sire, on or about the 10th day of October, 1861, John Wilson
Mackenzie, of Rotterdam, Chemung County, New Jersey, deceased, contracted
with the General Government to furnish to General Sherman the sum total
of thirty barrels of beef--”

He stopped me there, and dismissed me from his presence--kindly, but
firmly.  The next day I called on the Secretary of State.

He said, “Well, sir?”

I said, “Your Royal Highness: on or about the 10th day of October, 1861,
John Wilson Mackenzie of Rotterdam, Chemung County, New Jersey, deceased,
contracted with the General Government to furnish to General Sherman the
sum total of thirty barrels of beef--”

“That will do, sir--that will do; this office has nothing to do with
contracts for beef.”

I was bowed out.  I thought the matter all over and finally, the
following day, I visited the Secretary of the Navy, who said, “Speak
quickly, sir; do not keep me waiting.”

I said, “Your Royal Highness, on or about the 10th day of October, 1861,
John Wilson Mackenzie of Rotterdam, Chemung County, New Jersey, deceased,
contracted with the General Government to General Sherman the sum total
of thirty barrels of beef--”

Well, it was as far as I could get.  He had nothing to do with beef
contracts for General Sherman, either.  I began to think it was a curious
kind of government.  It looked somewhat as if they wanted to get out of
paying for that beef.  The following day I went to the Secretary of the
Interior.

I said, “Your Imperial Highness, on or about the 10th day of October--”

“That is sufficient, sir.  I have heard of you before.  Go, take your
infamous beef contract out of this establishment.  The Interior
Department has nothing whatever to do with subsistence for the army.”

I went away.  But I was exasperated now.  I said I would haunt them;
I would infest every department of this iniquitous government till that
contract business was settled.  I would collect that bill, or fall, as
fell my predecessors, trying.  I assailed the Postmaster-General;
I besieged the Agricultural Department; I waylaid the Speaker of the
House of Representatives.  They had nothing to do with army contracts for
beef.  I moved upon the Commissioner of the Patent Office.

I said, “Your August Excellency, on or about--”

“Perdition! have you got HERE with your incendiary beef contract, at
last?  We have nothing to do with beef contracts for the army, my dear
sir.”

“Oh, that is all very well--but somebody has got to pay for that beef.
It has got to be paid now, too, or I'll confiscate this old Patent Office
and everything in it.”

“But, my dear sir--”

“It don't make any difference, sir.  The Patent Office is liable for that
beef, I reckon; and, liable or not liable, the Patent Office has got to
pay for it.”

Never mind the details.  It ended in a fight.  The Patent Office won.
But I found out something to my advantage.  I was told that the Treasury
Department was the proper place for me to go to.  I went there.  I waited
two hours and a half, and then I was admitted to the First Lord of the
Treasury.

I said, “Most noble, grave, and reverend Signor, on or about the 10th day
of October, 1861, John Wilson Macken--”

“That is sufficient, sir.  I have heard of you.  Go to the First Auditor
of the Treasury.”

I did so.  He sent me to the Second Auditor.  The Second Auditor sent me
to the Third, and the Third sent me to the First Comptroller of the
Corn-Beef Division.  This began to look like business.  He examined his
books and all his loose papers, but found no minute of the beef contract.
I went to the Second Comptroller of the Corn-Beef Division.  He examined
his books and his loose papers, but with no success.  I was encouraged.
During that week I got as far as the Sixth Comptroller in that division;
the next week I got through the Claims Department; the third week I began
and completed the Mislaid Contracts Department, and got a foothold in the
Dead Reckoning Department.  I finished that in three days.  There was
only one place left for it now.  I laid siege to the Commissioner of Odds
and Ends.  To his clerk, rather--he was not there himself.  There were
sixteen beautiful young ladies in the room, writing in books, and there
were seven well-favored young clerks showing them how.  The young women
smiled up over their shoulders, and the clerks smiled back at them, and
all went merry as a marriage bell.  Two or three clerks that were reading
the newspapers looked at me rather hard, but went on reading, and nobody
said anything.  However, I had been used to this kind of alacrity from
Fourth Assistant Junior Clerks all through my eventful career, from the
very day I entered the first office of the Corn-Beef Bureau clear till I
passed out of the last one in the Dead Reckoning Division.  I had got so
accomplished by this time that I could stand on one foot from the moment
I entered an office till a clerk spoke to me, without changing more than
two, or maybe three, times.

So I stood there till I had changed four different times.  Then I said to
one of the clerks who was reading:

“Illustrious Vagrant, where is the Grand Turk?”

“What do you mean, sir? whom do you mean?  If you mean the Chief of the
Bureau, he is out.”

“Will he visit the harem to-day?”

The young man glared upon me awhile, and then went on reading his paper.
But I knew the ways of those clerks.  I knew I was safe if he got through
before another New York mail arrived.  He only had two more papers left.
After a while he finished them, and then he yawned and asked me what I
wanted.

“Renowned and honored Imbecile: on or about--”

“You are the beef-contract man.  Give me your papers.”

He took them, and for a long time he ransacked his odds and ends.
Finally he found the Northwest Passage, as I regarded it--he found the
long lost record of that beef contract--he found the rock upon which so
many of my ancestors had split before they ever got to it.  I was deeply
moved.  And yet I rejoiced--for I had survived.  I said with emotion,
“Give it me.  The government will settle now.”  He waved me back, and
said there was something yet to be done first.

“Where is this John Wilson Mackenzie?”  said he.

“Dead.”

“When did he die?”

“He didn't die at all--he was killed.”

“How?”

“Tomahawked.”

“Who tomahawked him?”

“Why, an Indian, of course.  You didn't suppose it was the superintendent
of a Sunday-school, did you?”

“No.  An Indian, was it?”

“The same.”

“Name of the Indian?”

“His name?  I don't know his name.”

“Must have his name.  Who saw the tomahawking done?”

“I don't know.”

“You were not present yourself, then?”

“Which you can see by my hair.  I was absent.

“Then how do you know that Mackenzie is dead?”

“Because he certainly died at that time, and I have every reason to believe
that he has been dead ever since.  I know he has, in fact.”

“We must have proofs.  Have you got the Indian?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, you must get him.  Have you got the tomahawk?”

“I never thought of such a thing.”

“You must get the tomahawk.  You must produce the Indian and the
tomahawk.  If Mackenzie's death can be proven by these, you can then go
before the commission appointed to audit claims with some show of getting
your bill under such headway that your children may possibly live to
receive the money and enjoy it.  But that man's death must be proven.
However, I may as well tell you that the government will never pay that
transportation and those traveling expenses of the lamented Mackenzie.
It may possibly pay for the barrel of beef that Sherman's soldiers
captured, if you can get a relief bill through Congress making an
appropriation for that purpose; but it will not pay for the twenty-nine
barrels the Indians ate.”

“Then there is only a hundred dollars due me, and that isn't certain!
After all Mackenzie's travels in Europe, Asia, and America with that
beef; after all his trials and tribulations and transportation; after the
slaughter of all those innocents that tried to collect that bill!  Young
man, why didn't the First Comptroller of the Corn-Beef Division tell me
this?”

“He didn't know anything about the genuineness of your claim.”

“Why didn't the Second tell me? why didn't the Third? why didn't all
those divisions and departments tell me?”

“None of them knew.  We do things by routine here.  You have followed the
routine and found out what you wanted to know.  It is the best way.
It is the only way.  It is very regular, and very slow, but it is very
certain.”

“Yes, certain death.  It has been, to the most of our tribe.  I begin to
feel that I, too, am called. Young man, you love the bright creature yonder with
the gentle blue eyes and the steel pens behind her ears--I see it in your soft
glances; you wish to marry her--but you are poor.  Here, hold out your hand--
here is the beef contract; go, take her and be happy! Heaven bless you, my
children!”

This is all I know about the great beef contract that has created so much
talk in the community.  The clerk to whom I bequeathed it died.  I know
nothing further about the contract, or any one connected with it.  I only
know that if a man lives long enough he can trace a thing through the
Circumlocution Office of Washington and find out, after much labor and
trouble and delay, that which he could have found out on the first day if
the business of the Circumlocution Office were as ingeniously
systematized as it would be if it were a great private mercantile
institution.






THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER

--[Some years ago, about 1867, when this was first published, few people
believed it, but considered it a mere extravaganza.  In these latter days
it seems hard to realize that there was ever a time when the robbing of
our government was a novelty.  The very man who showed me where to find
the documents for this case was at that very time spending hundreds of
thousands of dollars in Washington for a mail steamship concern, in the
effort to procure a subsidy for the company--a fact which was a long time
in coming to the surface, but leaked out at last and underwent
Congressional investigation.]

This is history.  It is not a wild extravaganza, like “John Wilson
Mackenzie's Great Beef Contract,” but is a plain statement of facts and
circumstances with which the Congress of the United States has interested
itself from time to time during the long period of half a century.

I will not call this matter of George Fisher's a great deathless and
unrelenting swindle upon the government and people of the United States
--for it has never been so decided, and I hold that it is a grave and
solemn wrong for a writer to cast slurs or call names when such is the
case--but will simply present the evidence and let the reader deduce his
own verdict.  Then we shall do nobody injustice, and our consciences
shall be clear.

On or about the 1st day of September, 1813, the Creek war being then in
progress in Florida, the crops, herds, and houses of Mr. George Fisher,
a citizen, were destroyed, either by the Indians or by the United States
troops in pursuit of them.  By the terms of the law, if the Indians
destroyed the property, there was no relief for Fisher; but if the troops
destroyed it, the Government of the United States was debtor to Fisher
for the amount involved.

George Fisher must have considered that the Indians destroyed the
property, because, although he lived several years afterward, he does not
appear to have ever made any claim upon the government.

In the course of time Fisher died, and his widow married again.
And by and by, nearly twenty years after that dimly remembered raid upon
Fisher's corn-fields, the widow Fisher's new husband petitioned Congress
for pay for the property, and backed up the petition with many
depositions and affidavits which purported to prove that the troops,
and not the Indians, destroyed the property; that the troops, for some
inscrutable reason, deliberately burned down “houses” (or cabins) valued
at $600, the same belonging to a peaceable private citizen, and alsodestroyed
various other property belonging to the same citizen.  But
Congress declined to believe that the troops were such idiots (after
overtaking and scattering a band of Indians proved to have been found
destroying Fisher's property) as to calmly continue the work of
destruction themselves; and make a complete job of what the Indians had
only commenced.  So Congress denied the petition of the heirs of George
Fisher in 1832, and did not pay them a cent.

We hear no more from them officially until 1848, sixteen years after
their first attempt on the Treasury, and a full generation after the
death of the man whose fields were destroyed.  The new generation of
Fisher heirs then came forward and put in a bill for damages.  The Second
Auditor awarded them $8,873, being half the damage sustained by Fisher.
The Auditor said the testimony showed that at least half the destruction
was done by the Indians “before the troops started in pursuit,” and of
course the government was not responsible for that half.

2.  That was in April, 1848.  In December, 1848, the heirs of George
Fisher, deceased, came forward and pleaded for a “revision” of their bill
of damages.  The revision was made, but nothing new could be found in
their favor except an error of $100 in the former calculation.  However,
in order to keep up the spirits of the Fisher family, the Auditor
concluded to go back and allow interest from the date of the first
petition (1832) to the date when the bill of damages was awarded.  This
sent the Fishers home happy with sixteen years' interest on $8,873--the
same amounting to $8,997.94.  Total, $17,870.94.

3.  For an entire year the suffering Fisher family remained quiet--even
satisfied, after a fashion.  Then they swooped down upon the government
with their wrongs once more.  That old patriot, Attorney-General Toucey,
burrowed through the musty papers of the Fishers and discovered one more
chance for the desolate orphans--interest on that original award of
$8,873 from date of destruction of the property (1813) up to 1832!
Result, $10,004.89 for the indigent Fishers.  So now we have: First,
$8,873 damages; second, interest on it from 1832 to 1848, $8,997.94;
third, interest on it dated back to 1813, $10,004.89.  Total, $27,875.83!
What better investment for a great-grandchild than to get the Indians to
burn a corn-field for him sixty or seventy years before his birth, and
plausibly lay it on lunatic United States troops?

4.  Strange as it may seem, the Fishers let Congress alone for five
years--or, what is perhaps more likely, failed to make themselves heard
by Congress for that length of time.  But at last, in 1854, they got a
hearing.  They persuaded Congress to pass an act requiring the Auditor to
re-examine their case.  But this time they stumbled upon the misfortune
of an honest Secretary of the Treasury (Mr. James Guthrie), and he
spoiled everything.  He said in very plain language that the Fishers were
not only not entitled to another cent, but that those children of many
sorrows and acquainted with grief had been paid too much already.

5.  Therefore another interval of rest and silence ensued--an interval
which lasted four years--viz till 1858.  The “right man in the right
place” was then Secretary of War--John B. Floyd, of peculiar renown!
Here was a master intellect; here was the very man to succor the
suffering heirs of dead and forgotten Fisher.  They came up from Florida
with a rush--a great tidal wave of Fishers freighted with the same old
musty documents about the same immortal corn-fields of their ancestor.
They straight-way got an act passed transferring the Fisher matter from
the dull Auditor to the ingenious Floyd.  What did Floyd do?  He said,
“IT WAS PROVED that the Indians destroyed everything they could before
the troops entered in pursuit.”  He considered, therefore, that what they
destroyed must have consisted of “the houses with all their contents, and
the liquor” (the most trifling part of the destruction, and set down at
only $3,200 all told), and that the government troops then drove them off
and calmly proceeded to destroy--

Two hundred and twenty acres of corn in the field, thirty-five acres of
wheat, and nine hundred and eighty-six head of live stock!  [What a
singularly intelligent army we had in those days, according to Mr. Floyd
--though not according to the Congress of 1832.]

So Mr. Floyd decided that the Government was not responsible for that
$3,200 worth of rubbish which the Indians destroyed, but was responsible
for the property destroyed by the troops--which property consisted of (I
quote from the printed United States Senate document):

                                             Dollars
     Corn at Bassett's Creek, ............... 3,000
     Cattle, ................................ 5,000
     Stock hogs, ............................ 1,050
     Drove hogs, ............................ 1,204
     Wheat, .................................   350
     Hides, ................................. 4,000
     Corn on the Alabama River, ............. 3,500

                         Total, .............18,104

That sum, in his report, Mr. Floyd calls the “full value of the property
destroyed by the troops.”

He allows that sum to the starving Fishers, TOGETHER WITH INTEREST FROM
1813.  From this new sum total the amounts already paid to the Fishers
were deducted, and then the cheerful remainder (a fraction under forty
thousand dollars) was handed to them, and again they retired to Florida in
a condition of temporary tranquillity.  Their ancestor's farm had now
yielded them altogether nearly sixty-seven thousand dollars in cash.

6.  Does the reader suppose that that was the end of it?  Does he suppose
those diffident Fishers were satisfied?  Let the evidence show.  The
Fishers were quiet just two years.  Then they came swarming up out of the
fertile swamps of Florida with their same old documents, and besieged
Congress once more.  Congress capitulated on the 1st of June, 1860, and
instructed Mr. Floyd to overhaul those papers again, and pay that bill.
A Treasury clerk was ordered to go through those papers and report to Mr.
Floyd what amount was still due the emaciated Fishers.  This clerk (I can
produce him whenever he is wanted) discovered what was apparently a
glaring and recent forgery in the papers; whereby a witness's testimony as
to the price of corn in Florida in 1813 was made to name double the
amount which that witness had originally specified as the price!  The
clerk not only called his superior's attention to this thing, but in
making up his brief of the case called particular attention to it in
writing.  That part of the brief never got before Congress, nor has
Congress ever yet had a hint of forgery existing among the Fisher papers.
Nevertheless, on the basis of the double prices (and totally ignoring the
clerk's assertion that the figures were manifestly and unquestionably a
recent forgery), Mr. Floyd remarks in his new report that “the testimony,
particularly in regard to the corn crops, DEMANDS A MUCH HIGHER ALLOWANCE
than any heretofore made by the Auditor or myself.”  So he estimates the
crop at sixty bushels to the acre (double what Florida acres produce),
and then virtuously allows pay for only half the crop, but allows two
dollars and a half a bushel for that half, when there are rusty old books
and documents in the Congressional library to show just what the Fisher
testimony showed before the forgery--viz., that in the fall of 1813 corn
was only worth from $1.25 to $1.50 a bushel.  Having accomplished this,
what does Mr. Floyd do next?  Mr. Floyd (“with an earnest desire to
execute truly the legislative will,” as he piously remarks) goes to work
and makes out an entirely new bill of Fisher damages, and in this new
bill he placidly ignores the Indians altogether-- puts no particle of the
destruction of the Fisher property upon them, but, even repenting him of
charging them with burning the cabins and drinking the whisky and
breaking the crockery, lays the entire damage at the door of the imbecile
United States troops down to the very last item!  And not only that, but
uses the forgery to double the loss of corn at “Bassett's Creek,” and
uses it again to absolutely treble the loss of corn on the “Alabama
River.”  This new and ably conceived and executed bill of Mr. Floyd's
figures up as follows (I copy again from the printed United States Senate
document):

      The United States in account with the legal representatives
                      of George Fisher, deceased.
                                                             DOL.C
1813.--To 550 head of cattle, at 10 dollars, ............. 5,500.00
       To 86 head of drove hogs, ......................... 1,204.00
       To 350 head of stock hogs, ........................ 1,750.00

       To 100 ACRES OF CORN ON BASSETT'S CREEK, .......... 6,000.00
       To 8 barrels of whisky, ...........................   350.00
       To 2 barrels of brandy, ...........................   280.00
       To 1 barrel of rum, ...............................    70.00
       To dry-goods and merchandise in store, ............ 1,100.00
       To 35 acres of wheat, .............................   350.00
       To 2,000 hides, ................................... 4,000.00
       To furs and hats in store, ........................   600.00
       To crockery ware in store, ........................   100.00
       To smith's and carpenter's tools, .................   250.00
       To houses burned and destroyed, ...................   600.00
       To 4 dozen bottles of wine, .......................    48.00
1814.--To 120 acres of corn on Alabama River, ............ 9,500.00
       To crops of peas, fodder, etc. .................... 3,250.00

                         Total, ..........................34,952.00

       To interest on $22,202, from July 1813
          to November 1860, 47 years and 4 months, .......63,053.68
       To interest on $12,750, from September
          1814 to November 1860, 46 years and 2 months, ..35,317.50

                         Total, ........................ 133,323.18

He puts everything in this time.  He does not even allow that the Indians
destroyed the crockery or drank the four dozen bottles of (currant) wine.
When it came to supernatural comprehensiveness in “gobbling,” John B.
Floyd was without his equal, in his own or any other generation.
Subtracting from the above total the $67,000 already paid to
George Fisher's implacable heirs, Mr. Floyd announced that the government
was still indebted to them in the sum of sixty-six thousand five hundred
and nineteen dollars and eighty-five cents, “which,” Mr. Floyd
complacently remarks, “will be paid, accordingly, to the administrator of
the estate of George Fisher, deceased, or to his attorney in fact.”

But, sadly enough for the destitute orphans, a new President came in just
at this time, Buchanan and Floyd went out, and they never got their
money.  The first thing Congress did in 1861 was to rescind the
resolution of June 1, 1860, under which Mr. Floyd had been ciphering.
Then Floyd (and doubtless the heirs of George Fisher likewise) had to
give up financial business for a while, and go into the Confederate army
and serve their country.

Were the heirs of George Fisher killed?  No.  They are back now at this
very time (July, 1870), beseeching Congress through that blushing and
diffident creature, Garrett Davis, to commence making payments again on
their interminable and insatiable bill of damages for corn and whisky
destroyed by a gang of irresponsible Indians, so long ago that even
government red-tape has failed to keep consistent and intelligent track
of it.

Now the above are facts.  They are history.  Any one who doubts it can
send to the Senate Document Department of the Capitol for H. R. Ex. Doc.
No. 21, 36th Congress, 2d Session; and for S. Ex. Doc. No. 106, 41st
Congress, 2d Session, and satisfy himself.  The whole case is set forth
in the first volume of the Court of Claims Reports.

It is my belief that as long as the continent of America holds together,
the heirs of George Fisher, deceased, will still make pilgrimages to
Washington from the swamps of Florida, to plead for just a little more
cash on their bill of damages (even when they received the last of that
sixty-seven thousand dollars, they said it was only one fourth what the
government owed them on that fruitful corn-field), and as long as they
choose to come they will find Garrett Davises to drag their vampire
schemes before Congress.  This is not the only hereditary fraud (if fraud
it is--which I have before repeatedly remarked is not proven) that is
being quietly handed down from generation to generation of fathers and
sons, through the persecuted Treasury of the United States.






DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY

In San Francisco, the other day, “A well-dressed boy, on his way to
Sunday-school, was arrested and thrown into the city prison for stoning
Chinamen.”

What a commentary is this upon human justice!  What sad prominence it
gives to our human disposition to tyrannize over the weak!  San Francisco
has little right to take credit to herself for her treatment of this poor
boy.  What had the child's education been?  How should he suppose it was
wrong to stone a Chinaman?  Before we side against him, along with
outraged San Francisco, let us give him a chance--let us hear the
testimony for the defense.

He was a “well-dressed” boy, and a Sunday-school scholar, and therefore
the chances are that his parents were intelligent, well-to-do people,
with just enough natural villainy in their composition to make them yearn
after the daily papers, and enjoy them; and so this boy had opportunities
to learn all through the week how to do right, as well as on Sunday.

It was in this way that he found out that the great commonwealth of
California imposes an unlawful mining-tax upon John the foreigner, and
allows Patrick the foreigner to dig gold for nothing--probably because
the degraded Mongol is at no expense for whisky, and the refined Celt
cannot exist without it.

It was in this way that he found out that a respectable number of the
tax-gatherers--it would be unkind to say all of them--collect the tax
twice, instead of once; and that, inasmuch as they do it solely to
discourage Chinese immigration into the mines, it is a thing that is much
applauded, and likewise regarded as being singularly facetious.

It was in this way that he found out that when a white man robs a
sluice-box (by the term white man is meant Spaniards, Mexicans,
Portuguese, Irish, Hondurans, Peruvians, Chileans, etc., etc.), they make
him leave the camp; and when a Chinaman does that thing, they hang him.

It was in this way that he found out that in many districts of the vast
Pacific coast, so strong is the wild, free love of justice in the hearts
of the people, that whenever any secret and mysterious crime is
committed, they say, “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall,” and
go straightway and swing a Chinaman.

It was in this way that he found out that by studying one half of each
day's “local items,” it would appear that the police of San Francisco
were either asleep or dead, and by studying the other half it would seem
that the reporters were gone mad with admiration of the energy, the
virtue, the high effectiveness, and the dare-devil intrepidity of that
very police-making exultant mention of how “the Argus-eyed officer
So-and-so” captured a wretched knave of a Chinaman who was stealing
chickens, and brought him gloriously to the city prison; and how “the
gallant officer Such-and-such-a-one” quietly kept an eye on the movements
of an “unsuspecting, almond-eyed son of Confucius” (your reporter is
nothing if not facetious), following him around with that far-off look of
vacancy and unconsciousness always so finely affected by that
inscrutable being, the forty-dollar policeman, during a waking interval,
and captured him at last in the very act of placing his hands in a
suspicious manner upon a paper of tacks, left by the owner in an exposed
situation; and how one officer performed this prodigious thing, and
another officer that, and another the other--and pretty much every one of
these performances having for a dazzling central incident a Chinaman
guilty of a shilling's worth of crime, an unfortunate, whose misdemeanor
must be hurrahed into something enormous in order to keep the public from
noticing how many really important rascals went uncaptured in the mean
time, and how overrated those glorified policemen actually are.

It was in this way that the boy found out that the legislature, being
aware that the Constitution has made America an asylum for the poor and
the oppressed of all nations, and that, therefore, the poor and oppressed
who fly to our shelter must not be charged a disabling admission fee,
made a law that every Chinaman, upon landing, must be vaccinated upon the
wharf, and pay to the state's appointed officer ten dollars for the
service, when there are plenty of doctors in San Francisco who would be
glad enough to do it for him for fifty cents.

It was in this way that the boy found out that a Chinaman had no rights
that any man was bound to respect; that he had no sorrows that any man
was bound to pity; that neither his life nor his liberty was worth the
purchase of a penny when a white man needed a scapegoat; that nobody
loved Chinamen, nobody befriended them, nobody spared them suffering when
it was convenient to inflict it; everybody, individuals, communities, the
majesty of the state itself, joined in hating, abusing, and persecuting
these humble strangers.

And, therefore, what could have been more natural than for this
sunny-hearted-boy, tripping along to Sunday-school, with his mind teeming
with freshly learned incentives to high and virtuous action, to say to
himself:

“Ah, there goes a Chinaman!  God will not love me if I do not stone him.”

And for this he was arrested and put in the city jail.

Everything conspired to teach him that it was a high and holy thing to
stone a Chinaman, and yet he no sooner attempts to do his duty than he is
punished for it--he, poor chap, who has been aware all his life that one
of the principal recreations of the police, out toward the Gold Refinery,
is to look on with tranquil enjoyment while the butchers of Brannan
Street set their dogs on unoffending Chinamen, and make them flee for
their lives.

--[I have many such memories in my mind, but am thinking just at present
of one particular one, where the Brannan Street butchers set their dogs
on a Chinaman who was quietly passing with a basket of clothes on his
head; and while the dogs mutilated his flesh, a butcher increased the
hilarity of the occasion by knocking some of the Chinaman's teeth down
his throat with half a brick.  This incident sticks in my memory with a
more malevolent tenacity, perhaps, on account of the fact that I was in
the employ of a San Francisco journal at the time, and was not allowed to
publish it because it might offend some of the peculiar element that
subscribed for the paper.]

Keeping in mind the tuition in the humanities which the entire “Pacific
coast” gives its youth, there is a very sublimity of incongruity in the
virtuous flourish with which the good city fathers of San Francisco
proclaim (as they have lately done) that “The police are positively
ordered to arrest all boys, of every description and wherever found, who
engage in assaulting Chinamen.”

Still, let us be truly glad they have made the order, notwithstanding its
inconsistency; and let us rest perfectly confident the police are glad,
too.  Because there is no personal peril in arresting boys, provided they
be of the small kind, and the reporters will have to laud their
performances just as loyally as ever, or go without items.

The new form for local items in San Francisco will now be: “The
ever-vigilant and efficient officer So-and-so succeeded, yesterday
afternoon, in arresting Master Tommy Jones, after a determined
resistance,” etc., etc., followed by the customary statistics and final
hurrah, with its unconscious sarcasm: “We are happy in being able to
state that this is the forty-seventh boy arrested by this gallant officer
since the new ordinance went into effect.  The most extraordinary
activity prevails in the police department.  Nothing like it has been
seen since we can remember.”






THE JUDGE'S “SPIRITED WOMAN”

“I was sitting here,” said the judge, “in this old pulpit, holding court,
and we were trying a big, wicked-looking Spanish desperado for killing
the husband of a bright, pretty Mexican woman. It was a lazy summer day,
and an awfully long one, and the witnesses were tedious.  None of us took
any interest in the trial except that nervous, uneasy devil of a Mexican
woman--because you know how they love and how they hate, and this one had
loved her husband with all her might, and now she had boiled it all down
into hate, and stood here spitting it at that Spaniard with her eyes;
and I tell you she would stir me up, too, with a little of her summer
lightning, occasionally.  Well, I had my coat off and my heels up,
lolling and sweating, and smoking one of those cabbage cigars the San
Francisco people used to think were good enough for us in those times;
and the lawyers they all had their coats off, and were smoking and
whittling, and the witnesses the same, and so was the prisoner.  Well,
the fact is, there warn't any interest in a murder trial then, because
the fellow was always brought in 'not guilty,' the jury expecting him to
do as much for them some time; and, although the evidence was straight
and square against this Spaniard, we knew we could not convict him
without seeming to be rather high-handed and sort of reflecting on every
gentleman in the community; for there warn't any carriages and liveries
then, and so the only 'style' there was, was to keep your private
graveyard.  But that woman seemed to have her heart set on hanging that
Spaniard; and you'd ought to have seen how she would glare on him a
minute, and then look up at me in her pleading way, and then turn and for
the next five minutes search the jury's faces, and by and by drop her
face in her hands for just a little while as if she was most ready to
give up; but out she'd come again directly, and be as live and anxious as
ever.  But when the jury announced the verdict--Not Guilty--and I told
the prisoner he was acquitted and free to go, that woman rose up till she
appeared to be as tall and grand as a seventy-four-gun ship, and says
she:

“'Judge, do I understand you to say that this man is not guilty that
murdered my husband without any cause before my own eyes and my little
children's, and that all has been done to him that ever justice and the
law can do?'
“'The same,' says I.

“And then what do you reckon she did?  Why, she turned on that smirking
Spanish fool like a wildcat, and out with a 'navy' and shot him dead in
open court!”

“That was spirited, I am willing to admit.”

“Wasn't it, though?” said the judge admiringly.

“I wouldn't have missed it for anything.  I adjourned court right on the
spot, and we put on our coats and went out and took up a collection for
her and her cubs, and sent them over the mountains to their friends.
Ah, she was a spirited wench!”






INFORMATION WANTED

                              “WASHINGTON, December 10, 1867.

“Could you give me any information respecting such islands, if any, as
the government is going to purchase?”

It is an uncle of mine that wants to know.  He is an industrious man and
well disposed, and wants to make a living in an honest, humble way, but
more especially he wants to be quiet.  He wishes to settle down, and be
quiet and unostentatious.  He has been to the new island St. Thomas, but
he says he thinks things are unsettled there.  He went there early with
an attache of the State Department, who was sent down with money to pay
for the island.  My uncle had his money in the same box, and so when they
went ashore, getting a receipt, the sailors broke open the box and took
all the money, not making any distinction between government money, which
was legitimate money to be stolen, and my uncle's, which was his own
private property, and should have been respected.  But he came home and
got some more and went back.  And then he took the fever.  There are
seven kinds of fever down there, you know; and, as his blood was out of
order by reason of loss of sleep and general wear and tear of mind, he
failed to cure the first fever, and then somehow he got the other six.
He is not a kind of man that enjoys fevers, though he is well meaning and
always does what he thinks is right, and so he was a good deal annoyed
when it appeared he was going to die.

But he worried through, and got well and started a farm.  He fenced it
in, and the next day that great storm came on and washed the most of it
over to Gibraltar, or around there somewhere.  He only said, in his
patient way, that it was gone, and he wouldn't bother about trying to
find out where it went to, though it was his opinion it went to
Gibraltar.

Then he invested in a mountain,

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