 This is Section 31 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 31, Territorial Enterprise, February 1868. Territorial Enterprise, February 18, 1868. Mark Twain's Letters from Washington, No. 5. Washington, January 11, 1868. The Political Stinkpots Opened. They are opened, and awful is the smell thereof. Millions of politicians have suddenly begun to prait with unprecedented energy, even for their tribe, and they foul all the air with their corrupt and suffocating breath. It is all about Reconstruction. The truth is that the more Congress reconstructs, the more the South goes to pieces. But Congress is in for it now, and goes bravely on, hoping at last to get the Reconstruction bull where they can hold him. Every morning after breakfast, Congress passes a brand new Reconstruction Act. After luncheon, they amend it, and put some Constitution in it. When it is time to go to dinner, they repeal it, and get ready to start fresh in the morning. If they keep on stacking up talent on Reconstruction as they have been doing, they will run out of material before they get their great mission accomplished. You see, they started in to build a good, substantial Reconstruction house, but there were some sandy places under it which did not look well. They thought maybe they might not be as risky as they looked, however, and concluded to chance them. But it was not a good idea. The house was hardly built before one corner began to sink a little, and they had to jackscrew it up and put in an amendment prop. Then another corner began to sink, and they had to put in a similar prop there. Next, the chimney began to lean, and they had to prop that mighty quick with a powerful brace. Right away the kitchen began to cave in and the gable end to bulge out, and immediately some more jackscrews and braces had to be called in to use. It is a nice new house, but some part of it lets down every day, and has to be fixed. Till at last we have the curious spectacle of a mansion bright with new paint and dazzling with gilding, looking bleary and bloated, limber and leaning and bulging in all directions, and with unpainted and unsightly spars and braces canted against it and straddling about every which way. An allegorical, elegant gentleman of the first water, and most fashionable attire, drunk as a piper, subjugated, demoralized and gone in generally, reeling home on crutches enough for six. Such is the new house, and such the efforts made to save it. And of course it never rains but it pours. In the midst of all this vexation along comes the grand jury, otherwise the Supreme Court, to examine it, and the owners and builders in fancy already hear the disastrous fiat. Gentlemen, she won't do. She will have to come down. There is too much sand and not enough constitution under her. I am not writing a political article. I am not trying to write a palatable article. I am merely writing the truth, simply photographing a straight-out fact. Thaddeus Stevens and many other prominent Republicans have said all along that the Reconstruction Acts were outside the Constitution. Congress itself has said it, yet they still go on trying to patch up that old house with that fatal defect in it, instead of wisely pulling it down and doing all over again and doing it right. The defect looked small at first, and Congress seems to have thought that it could not amount to a great deal, and yet, patch and repair and improve as they will, that little defect invariably obtrudes itself again and disarranges everything. It reminds me of a circumstance. That great Claflin House in New York sold forty millions of dollars worth of goods in the year 1866. I visited their immense establishment in January 67 to see its wonders, and found the head bookkeeper in a sweat. I asked what the matter was. He said that for two terrible days he and his forty-eight sub-bookkeepers had been turning themselves gray with anxiety chasing a ten-cent piece through a cartload of ledgers. There was a discrepancy of ten cents in the cash amount for the year. The awful cash amount wouldn't balance. I just said indignantly, well, that is about the smallest piece of business I ever heard of. Here, I'll give you ten cents myself. You and Claflin go to bed and get some rest." But he smiled a green, despairing, ghastly smile and shook his head. He said that wasn't the idea. It wasn't the ten cents they cared for, but the terrible truth that that miserable trifle might stand for millions of dollars. Until that defect was hunted out and rectified, they couldn't tell whether they had lost millions or made them. The cash books, he said, must balance. It is just the idea with reconstruction. There is a trifling discrepancy somewhere, and nothing is safe about the building till it shall be routed out. There is ten cents worth of Constitution lacking in it somewhere, and there will be no security, no salvation for it till the thing is rectified. There is no use trying to tinker it up. The builders must go straight through the edifice and never rest till its accounts balance with the cash book of the Constitution. I wrote that speech for a Democratic member of Congress, but he couldn't pay me anything but whiskey, and so we couldn't trade. I said I would rather confer it on a good Republican newspaper as a fair and honest exhibit of the Democratic side of the most exciting question before the nation, to the end that Republicans might have a chance to read both sides and thereby better inform themselves. But Congress is worried. A decision rendered by the Supreme Court, rendered some time ago, seemed plainly to indicate that five of the judges considered the Reconstruction Acts unconstitutional against three who believed the opposite. The famous McCartle case threatens to bring the constitutionality of those acts to attest before the court right away, and Congress today proposes to do what it can to circumvent the disaffected five by passing a bill ordaining that the concurrence of six of the judges shall be necessary to constitute a decision in all cases involving constitutional questions. But unhappily Congress did not make the Supreme Court, and doubtless it will transpire that it has about as much jurisdiction over its affairs as it has over the weather. The court makes its own rules and is entirely independent of Congress. Its custom is to decide by a majority vote, and if it chooses will no doubt continue to do so. If McCartle gains his case, Negro suffrage and the Reconstruction Acts will be dissipated into thin air for the present. No wonder Congress is troubled. It fears that if it can't fix things so as to enable three judges to out-vote five it will have to go to work and build that Reconstruction House all over again from cellar to roof. Isn't it a splendid sensation? The principal Republican papers are growling savagely at Congress for getting itself into this scrape by its innocent stupidity. Republicans both in and outside claim that though the Reconstruction Acts and the proposed bill to prescribe rules for the judges are a little unconstitutional, they are necessities. The state of the country demands them. That if the rebels were admitted to power they would hang union men upon any and every pretext or upon none at all. That to admit them to power, unreconstructed and unrestrained, would be to acknowledge that the war for the union was an iniquity, a crime. General Sheridan says he is interested in this business. If the war was wrong he thinks he is a particularly bad murderer. I suppose he had a chance to be. He was in eighty-four battles and had a hand in a good deal of killing. He says if he was in the right he would like it if Congress would go ahead and so decide it. If he was in the wrong and was only a murderer he would like to know that also. He is satisfied of one thing, that he cannot live under rebel rule, and thinks, from at least a military point of view, that the rebel conquered have no right to dictate to the victors, no right to say under what terms they will come in. These men say that everything that stands in the way must go to the wall. If the Supreme Court obstructs the regeneration of Rebellum it must go too. This would be good enough reasoning, possibly, but for one thing. The President will veto the bill making rules for the judges, and it can hardly be passed over his veto. And even if it were, the Court would simply annull it, and then no doubt go on and annull the Reconstruction Acts by the Liberation of McCartle. A telegraphic report today says that General Mead has suspended the Governor and Treasurer of Georgia from office, and this has created great rejoicing among Republicans here, so the political cauldron boils, let her boil. It is believed that Secretary Stanton will be reinstated in the War Office within a few days, whether the President likes it or not. Congress is on its metal now. Stanton, the President, Treasury Frauds, Reconstruction. It has a good deal of business on its hands, but it is fighting furiously at last. Even Wendell Phillips ought to be satisfied now. How the cauldron does boil. Let her boil. Stuart's Speech It is the fashion now to write speeches. Congressman Brooks said at the Press Banquet last night that the day of eloquence is over in America, killed by newspapers, telegraphs, and phonographers. No man has a chance to carefully write out a speech for publication now after it has been delivered. It is forever too late. The shorthanders have got it. The telegraph has flashed it to the ends of the earth. The Daily Press has petrified it into print with all its imperfections before the words were cold upon his lips. She said that Webster and Clay could not be orators now. Their crude extemporaneous efforts would appall them in print, and they would fall into the safer new fashion and write cold, glittering, chastely worded sentences that could warm no listener into enthusiasm when he heard them. Mr. Stuart has written, and written carefully, an elaborate speech upon the mining interests of the Pacific Coast. It is by far the best and the ablest effort of the kind that ever has seen the light in this region. If he never does anything else to be proud of while he lives, this ought to be sufficient to satisfy him. It ought to be sufficient to kill him too, for I never knew a man to do his constituents a great service or do his whole duty by them honestly and well, that they didn't put him on the shelf and send some ass to represent them that was of no use whatever under God Almighty's heaven, but to get up and blat about niggers and politics and American flags and other bosh that he didn't know any more about than a bull knows about mathematics. California has shelved Conniss and served him right. He worked too hard for her interests. He was too faithful to his trust. He was too good and too tireless a servant. Mr. Stewart, is the only man that ever stood in either House of Congress that knows all about mines and mining, knows it from A to Z, knows it in all its needs, in all its possibilities, in all its details. He knows what laws are wanted to nurture and protect and endow it with prosperity and he knows how to frame them. He sees into his subject with a sureer and clearer vision than any man on this coast, it would be safe to say, or upon yours either. I was satisfied of this before. I know it now after reading his speech. But it will do this for him. It will show his constituents that they have sent a man here who knows his business to a fraction and exactly the man they need here to keep Congress from eternally impoverishing them by passing absurd laws to cripple mining and disgust every man engaged in it, and then you will send some brainless idiot here, some quacking numbskull, some bladder of wind that some browsing elephant in the inscrutable providence of God ought to step on and burst. That is what you will do. If I were in Nevada next fall I wouldn't want anything better than to take stump for Stewart and narrate it to you. Can a man put a bill through the Congress like Stewart's that freed your minds from government ownership and opened the markets of the world for their sale? Dare a man to do so priceless a service as that for his people, and ever hope to see the United States again? Not while republics are ungrateful, I reckon, and a clattering tongue with a piece of an idiot hung to it can be found in his place. You are hearing me toot my horn." Mark Twain. Real Enterprise, February 19, 1868. Mark Twain in New York. Special Correspondence of the Enterprise. Number 6. New York, January 20. I have run up here every now and then to get rid of the dullness of Washington, but I cannot tarry long, for I have to clear out again to keep from being crazed by the terrible activity of New York. They complain that New York is exceedingly dull now, and so it must be compared to the bewildering energy it displays in its busiest seasons, but even as it is now, it is able to make provincial brains grow dizzy with its noise and bustle and excitement. It is a wonderful city. Two persons died last night of hunger, cold, and exposure. They were people who could get nothing to do, and could not make a living begging. The bodies were displayed at the morgue today, and among the idle spectators was a man who has nothing in life to accomplish but the spending of four hundred thousand dollars a year. I was in a tenement house yesterday which contained two hundred persons, all crowded together in little cramped chambers, where was lack of everything but dirt and rags. There were remnants of hats for window-panes, doors hung by one hinge, fragments of quilts and blankets bestowed in corners, did duty as beds. There were a few battered pots and pans, but nothing to cook in them, and no fire to do it with, either. There was occasionally a broken chair and part of a table, but as a general thing these rooms were not so sumptuously furnished. There were small ridges of snow on some of the floors. It had blown in through cracks and broken windows. The human occupants were cadaverous and pale, hollow-eyed and savage with hunger, or dumb with a misery that was next of kin to despair. One woman with five children—it is proper to call her a woman, I suppose, though she would have averaged very well, as rags all through—said she washed for a living formerly, but she got sick and lost her custom. Then she peddled apples and oranges until a general financial crisis that prostrated all commerce and broke up many a staunch old firm reduced her to peanuts. But trouble still followed her. An investment of four dollars at the very top of the market, followed immediately by an unusual business depression, compelled a sacrifice of the whole venture, and she went to protest. She retired from commerce, a bankrupt. She struggled on, doing what she could to make a livelihood by begging, but she was very nearly discouraged. For twenty-four hours she had not eaten, she swore to it. One of the philanthropists in our party advanced funds enough to set her up in business again. There was want and suffering all about us. There was a man there, a poor decrepit starvelling of sixty, who had been the clown in a circus in his palmy days, had been royally tricked out in paint and brilliant spangles and ribbons and gold lace. Instead of the gunny sack he wore about his shoulders now and the shredded latticework of rags that hung about his legs, he had been the admiration of the schoolboys, had been the man of all men they envied most and most long to be like, but nobody envied him now. Nobody admired him. The day of his greatness was over. He mentioned it with feeling, and sighed when he spoke of it. He told how the audience used to applaud when he capered into the ring and made his bow. He said he was the star of the troupe, and his name alone on the bills was a sufficient guarantee for a full house. He compared himself with the celebrated clowns, messers so and so, whom he had not heard of before, and pointed out wherein he had been superior to them. Then he piped out some executable jokes in the old familiar clownish way. I was not aware before that they were so old. Then told how boisterous the laughter and applause used to be. The fact is he had forgotten for the moment that he was a mendicant, and imagined himself a clown again in the zenith of his glory. He even got so carried away with his happy reminiscences as to attempt his favourite comic song for us, but his poor, reedy falsetto broke down and his splendid daydream vanished. He was an unspangled mendicant again. He told how he came down gradually but surely from the dizzy height of his prosperity to be a magic lantern-exhibitor, then a doorkeeper, then a Roman soldier in a theatre, then a mere soup, afterwards a vendor of cheap soap and ballads, and finally a rag-picker and a searcher after old bones and broken bottles. He was hungry, but he was not thinking of that. He was cold, but he was not thinking of that either. His friends were all gone years ago, and it was plain that he had no home, but none of these things stood first in his mind. All he wanted was to shine once more in the ring, in glittering spangles, and get off some more of those infernal jokes, and hear the blessed music of applause, and then die. But we could not give him an engagement as we had no circus, and so we left him to his want, his rags, and his dreams. There was a girl in that house, about fourteen years old, who supported her father and mother, and two young sisters by her work. She sold newspapers about the streets in the daytime, and played the tambourine and collected the pennies for an organ grinder at night. She was prosperous and full of ambition. She reveled in her gorgeous dreams, and dared to look forward to a day when she should rise to the dignity of peanuts and have a regular stand on the corner. This girl had a good deal of human nature about her, straightened as her circumstances were she kept a Sunday dress, a dress that must have cost as much as three or four dollars years ago when it was new. She took it down from a nail and showed it to us. She had had a waterfall once, she said, but the rats got it. There was considerable human nature in some of those small children, too. They got out some rusty rag dolls, wretched affairs with arms pulled out and features defaced, and bran oozing from their legs. They got these melancholy monstrosities out and flourished them about, where we could admire them, but pretending all the while that they had no such end in view, and were even unconscious that those dolls were in any respect proper objects of admiration. I have seen other children go through the same fraudulent performance with costlier playthings, pretending all the while that they were not courting notice and commendation. Ah! the want and suffering that we saw yesterday! We passed from the tenement house to a mansion uptown where one of our party had a call to make, and there we saw human misery in its saddest form. Here was a poor devil living in a vast brown stone front, whose income had suddenly come toppling down from six thousand a month to four. He was consequently in deep distress, and all that he said was touched with melancholy. Trouble never come single-handed. One of his finest horses had gone lame, and his most precious dog was very sick and like to die. His champagne and his sherry did not suit his taste, and his tailor was so slow with his work as to drive him to the verge of distraction sometimes. This heart, bowed down by weight of woe, wrought upon my sympathies as suffering never did before, and yet no man can fully appreciate misery like his until he has tried it. Unhappily I had never tried it, and I was obliged to compassionate him only in a degree far inferior to the magnitude of his grief. The ex-clown suffered, but I could not see that he suffered as much as this man. But this distressing subject suggests a fact. In this city, with its scores of millionaires, there are today a hundred thousand men out of employment. It is an item of threatening portent. Many apprehend bread riots, and certainly there is serious danger that they may occur. If this army of men had a leader, New York would be in an unenviable situation. It has been proposed in the legislature to appropriate five hundred thousand dollars to the relief of New York poor, but of course the thing is cried down by everybody. The money would never get further than the pockets of a gang of thieving politicians. They would represent the poor to the best of their ability, and there the state's charity would stop. New York is always bustling and lively, but there are degrees in even its liveliness. In that network of great business streets that occupies the section between Broadway and the Brooklyn Ferries, and the City Hall and Castle Garden, one may cross and recross the thoroughfares now, with hardly a fear of being run over, and may make a reasonable progress along pavement still crowded, but not crammed. But a year ago it was so different. To attempt to cross one of those streets then, with its long array of mast and struggling vehicles, was to take your life in your own hands, and to get anywhere on foot along the sidewalks necessitated an exasperating elbow fight for the whole distance you wished to go. They used to talk of dull times, then. What do you think of it now? Mark Twain. Territorial Enterprise February 27, 1868. Mark Twain's Letters from Washington. Number 7. Washington, January 30, 1868. More Westernism Sergeant Gilbert H. Bates of Wisconsin is the last candidate for pedestrian notoriety. He has made a bet that he will walk alone, unarmed, without a scent in his pocket, and bearing aloft the American flag through the late Southern Confederacy from Vicksburg to Washington. He is already on his way, and the telegraph is noting his progress. The mayor and a large portion of the population of Vicksburg ushered him out of that city with a grand demonstration. He proposes to sell photographs of himself at twenty-five cents apiece, all along his route, and convert the proceeds into a fund to be devoted to the aid and comfort of widows and orphans of soldiers who fought in the late war, irrespective of flag or politics. And then, I suppose, when he gets a good round sum together for the widows and orphans, he will hang up his flag and go and have a champagne blowout. I don't believe in people who collect money for benevolent purposes and don't charge for it. I don't have full confidence in people who walk a thousand miles for the benefit of widows and orphans and don't get a cent for it. I question the uprightness of people who peddle their own photographs anyhow whether they carry flags or not. In my opinion, a man might as well start his name with an initial, and spell his middle name out, and hope to be virtuous. But this fellow will get more black eyes down there among those unconstructed rebels than he can ever carry along with him without breaking his back. I expect to see him coming into Washington some day on one leg, and with one eye out, and an arm gone. He won't amount to more than an interesting relic by the time he gets here, and then he will have to hire out for a sign for the anatomical museum. Those fellows down there have no sentiment in them. They won't buy his picture. They will be more likely to take his scalp. Now the next ass, that turns up, will be wanting to carry a Confederate flag through the north. And wouldn't he have a cheerful time of it? What a pity it is that that insufferable fool George Francis Trane did not think of that. He would have tried it in a minute, and got hanged, and it would have been a blessing to the country. It would have transferred that tiresome gab of his to the other world, and from that time forward there never would have been any peace in hell any more. When the English found what a poor, clattering frog they had flattered with imprisonment, they were ashamed of themselves, and turned him loose. Ever since then he has been squandering his substance and sending bombastic telegrams over here about his suing the British crown for pounds five hundred thousand, money enough to buy a sane man with, and about his protesting officially against this, that, and the other thing, and about Darby, threatening boastfully, but trembling at such a sputtering bladder of gas as Trane, and about his going to stump Ireland. Was there ever such a word of egotism stuffed into one carcass before? Surely there is no room left in him for bowels. Do you know that that idiot is aspiring to the presidency of the United States? He honestly is. He said in a farewell speech on Shipport as he left New York a speech slobbering adulation and nauseating bunkum over half a dozen Irishmen out of business that in due time he would be the people's president. However, the same God that made George Francis Trane made also the mosquitoes and the rats, and in his infinite wisdom he knows what he did it for. Human beings don't, though. Trane established a newspaper in New York, The Revolution, to keep his notoriety alive while he wagged his ears in Europe. Last week in New York I saw six young girls walking up Broadway in single file, arrayed in showy uniform dresses of red merino with white bodies, and on their heads they wore blue caps, red, white, and blue. Do you observe? And each girl had a belt about her waist with revolution painted on it, and had also a bundle of revolution newspapers under her arm. Isn't that absurdity just like Trane? I suppose that paper will advocate female suffrage, free love, miscegenation, burglary, arson, spiritualism, southern superiority, and general compounding with sin on earth and repudiation of damnation hereafter. When they speak contemptuously of worthless fussy people in England, they call them baggage. They have applied this happy epithet to Trane. So are blowing, shrieking, ranting, lightning express has degenerated into a poor, homely, inconsequential baggage train after all. Judge McCorkle. They report that this homely old friend of mine, this ancient denison of California, Nevada, the wrinkled, aged, knock-kneed, ring-boned, and spavoned old warhorse of the plains, is to be married shortly to a handsome young Ohio widow worth three hundred thousand dollars. Well, what is the world coming to anyhow? If any man had told me a week ago that any woman in her right mind and under seventy would be willing to marry that old fossil, that old tunnel, that old dilapidated quartz mill, I would never, never have believed it. He is a splendid man, you know, but then he must be as much as ninety two or ninety three years old. He is one of my nearest personal friends, but what of that? I would remain a bachelorous century before I would marry such a rusty, used-up old arastra as he is. I have always considered that I ought to fairly expect to marry about seventeen thousand dollars, but I think differently now. If Mr. McCorkle ranges at three hundred thousand in the market, I will raise my bargain to about a million and a half. Impeachment. It is on hand again. Congress has said it is going to boss this government in spite of everything and everybody, and it is keeping its word. It has held its grip now for more than a month, without ever flinching, and so it is forcing from the people that respect which Pluck always inspires, whether it be displayed by one man or a multitude. It has never given up its impeachment scheme, but foiled in one attempt it straight away assays another. The new bill, just introduced into the Senate by Mr. Edmunds of Vermont, proposes to get rid of the obnoxious president on easy terms. It simply provides that when a civil officer is arraigned before the Senate on articles of impeachment preferred by the House, said officer shall be suspended from service pending the examination of his case. The examination of Mr. Johnson's case, so arraigned, would never take place at all. He would remain harmlessly suspended until his duly elected successor arrived at the White House on the fourth of next March. It is specified in the bill that the army, if necessary, shall enforce such suspension. No one can tell, of course, what this measure may result in, but it is possible that through Ed, Congress may yet gain its point and tie the hands of the President. Harry Worthington has been nominated for U.S. District Judge for Nebraska and henceforth will cease to decimate the Indians with his short rations, but he performed good service for his country while he remained in the Indian feeding department of the government. He started out to unfit a couple of tribes for the war-path, and I think he must have done it, for no man has ever heard of them since. Works like those are bound to receive the reward at the hands of a grateful nation. He is a judge now, or rather I trust he soon will be, and can rest upon his Indian laurels and grant injunctions and hang people. It is good to be a judge. The New York Papers say Harry Worthington used to be a U.S. Senator from California, but I guess that is a mistake, isn't it? But New York Papers don't know everything. And speaking of Western people, I will mention that C. H. Webb, in Igo, arrived here for a short sojourn today. He is going to do up fashions and such matters for Harper's Bazaar and the Tribune I hear. This town seems to me to be pretty well stocked with California newspaper men, and so is New York, and all at work, too, which is flattering, certainly, considering the number of idle pens there are. I am on the Tribune staff yet, and also on the regular staff of the New York Herald, and likewise that of the Chicago Republican. I think the boys are all satisfied with their Eastern positions and with Eastern pay, and I am sure ought to be. They treat us houseless strangers well in the East. Thomas Nast, the clever artist of Harper's Weekly, is exhibiting a collection of great caricatures of national subjects in New York, and wants me to do the lecturing for his show. I would, if I hadn't so many irons in the fire. I would like it right well for a change, but then changes are risky. I must hunt around for a handsome Pacific coaster to take the birth, because I suppose it is personal loveliness Nast is after. Mormonism Mr. Hooper, delegate from Utah, is to have the seat in the House of Representatives contested by Mr. McGrockty. The papers in the case cover the whole ground of the legality of the government of that territory as administered by the Mormons. This is said to furnish the first occasion for bringing the whole question of Mormon laws and authority properly before Congress. I suppose we may look for a general ventilation now of the Happy Civil and Religious Code, which permits a man to marry a whole family, grandmother and all, if it is particularly fancy stock, or if he can't make up his mind which of the ladies he likes best. Pardon Todd's has been nominated for the post of Indian agent of Utah. That is the homeliest of all the homely Puritan names I have stumbled on yet, except that of famous Praise God bare-bone. How could a man write an obituary on Pardon Todd's if he died without making it intensely funny? That man will never survive his mission. The Indians will put up with a good deal, but they will never put up with an agent with a name like that. Toddie, you are going to get scalped. That is what is in store for you." Mark Twain. Related item that Mark Twain wrote for the New York Tribune on George Francis Train. The New York Tribune, January 22, 1868. Information Wanted. To the editor of the Tribune. Sir, if you can, I wish you would give me some information of a man by the name of George Francis Train. It is for an uncle of mine that I want it. My uncle has had a pretty hard time of it, and if any man does deserve sympathy, and if any man would appreciate that sympathy, it is he. He is in the decline of life and he wants to be quiet, but you know he tried while Russia, and the bears ousted him, and then he tried St. Thomas, and the earthquakes ousted him. And so he hung up his fiddle, so to speak, and concluded he would wait and look around a while till the government bought some more property. And while he was waiting, somebody recommended him to hunt up this gentleman Mr. Train. They said Mr. Train was a slow, quiet sort of a body, and had no isms or curious notions about him, and that he was going over to the old country to buy Ireland for those persons they call the Fenyans. They said he was very popular with the English government, and that if the English government would sell to anybody they would to Mr. Train. They said that if Mr. Train concluded to take it, my uncle have an excellent chance to buy into a quiet locality in Cork, or Tipperary, or one of those calm religious regions there, by speaking to him early. So my uncle went after Mr. Train. But he was building a couple of railroads out west somewhere, and before my uncle got there he had finished those railroads and was making democratic speeches in the east. It was a considerable disappointment, but my uncle always had a great idea of doing business with a slow, quiet man, and so he came east. But he came the last part of the journey in a canal about it being his nature to prefer quiet and safety to speed, and so he missed that man again. Mr. Train had got the Democratic Party reorganized and all straight, and was out in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, clearing off a place, and driving away the buffaloes, so that he could build a metropolis there. But my uncle went in an ox wagon, and he missed that man again. Mr. Train had finished that metropolis and paved it with the Nicholson Pavement, and started a couple of daily newspapers, and was gone east again, with another lady, to lecture on female suffrage. It was a little discouraging, but my relative rested about a week and started after him again. He caught him this time, because Mr. Train had sprained his ankle and was obliged to remain quiet until he could get the leg removed and a reliable patent wooden one put on in its place that could not sprain. So he mentioned his business to Mr. Train, and he replied, "'You are all right, sir. Put your trust in me. I'll buy Ireland, and you shall have as good a chance as any man. I am going to sail right away. You will hear about me as soon as I touch the emerald shores. I shall get out some advertisements and make my presence known. I make no pretensions, but you will see pretty soon that I shall be heartily welcomed there, and promptly cared for." Since that time my uncle has not heard of Mr. Train. He has confidence in him, but he thinks that maybe he is too quiet a man to make much of a stir, and has not been heard of on that account. But have you heard anything of Mr. Train? Do you know if he got out any advertisements? And do you know if they received him heartily there, and more especially if they took care of him? This last is the main thing with my relative. If they took care of Mr. Train, it is all he cares for. He has said to me repeatedly that all that he is afraid of is that he has been neglected and not taken care of. If he were to hear that Mr. Train is there, in a strange land, without any place to stay, it would nearly break his heart. If you could only inform us that Mr. Train is safe, and has been received hospitably, and has a good tranquil place to board in, suitable to a quiet man like him, it would be a great comfort to the old man. CHAPTER VIII. Washington, February 5, 1868. Office Hunting. Another man has arrived here, who comes to get the birth of Postmaster of San Francisco. This makes thirty-seven. The new applicant is not posted in office seeking. He has not had a ripe experience. He is a good enough man, and may get the place, but it will cost him more trouble and vexation than he is promising himself, no doubt. He says he can't see that there is anything to be done, but get the President to appoint and the Senate to ratify. Certainly, that is all, truly enough. It was all that was to be accomplished by the thirty-six. He says he means to show the President what the Pacific Coast papers say about him, and he means also to tell him all about how the Post Office has here to fore been managed, and how he would improve that management the moment he got into office. But he don't say he would swear by Andrew Johnson and Labor for his behest alone, which is much more important. And he don't take into consideration that the moment he gets the President in his favor, the Senate will be down on him for it, and that if he gains the Senate's affections first, the President will be down on him. He only proposes to stay here a week. He says he don't care anything about making an extended stay in Washington. He only wants to get the appointment, and look around the great public buildings a little, and then he is off. They told him a story yesterday, but I do not know whether he saw the point of it or not. It was a little story that has been related with great spirit many thousands of times to office-seekers and claim-hunters who were only going to tarry a few days in Washington. It was about the man who stopped at Gadsby's. It was a long time ago, thirty long years ago, when Gadsby's was the great hotel. It was snowing. A gentleman in the very prime of life drove gallantly up to Gadsby's with a spanking coach and four. The servants ran out to put up his horses, but he said no, he was only going to stop an hour, and was going right on again. He only wished to get a little claim cashed at one of the departments, and so he blanketed his horses and hitched them and went away. A week after that he was still in Washington. He sold one of the horses. After a month or two had rolled by, he sold another. He said he did not wish to part with the others because he was going back home as soon as his claim was cashed. Another month or two elapsed, and he sold the carriage and bought a light two-horse buggy with a small part of the money. About four months after that he sold one of the remaining horses, and after another month or so had gone by, he sold the buggy and bought a saddle. He said he could ride horseback well enough, considering that the roads were likely to be good enough for a week or two to come. But the lingering weeks dragged by, and finally he sold the saddle and concluded to ride bareback. At last, at last, he sold the other horse, and said that when his claim settled he would walk. He is seventy years old now, poor old man, and his hair is white, his clothes are thread-bear, and his head is bowed with many troubles. But he says it is not for long, he is only waiting a little while to get his claim settled, and then he is going home to see his people again and be happy. I think number thirty-seven had better tie his horses up at Gatsby's. Mrs. Lincoln. It is reported that Mrs. Lincoln, long threatened with insanity, has really fallen a victim to it at last. The information comes by private letters from Chicago. She is said to be living in a house which is empty of furniture, she having sold it all. She labors under the delusion that she is going to come to want, and she sells everything she can lay her hands on. She is under guard of two old men. It is to be hoped that now, at least, this most unfortunate woman will be spared the pitiless slanders that have assailed her ever since she first entered the White House, and which even the crushing affliction of the murder of her husband was only sufficient to check for a little while. Can it be possible that she is deserted by her friends and left to the sole charge of two old men? She whose friendship was so precious and whose society was so coveted a few years ago, when a good word from her was half an aspiring man's ambition gained— Felix O'Burn. I was striding up Broadway in the face of a driving snowstorm the other evening in New York, when a man seized me by the hand with a crushing grip and said, How are you, Mark? I said I was well enough. It was the weather that most invited solicitude. He said he was very, very glad to see me. I intimated that I was saturated with felicity to see him. But all the time I was wondering who the mischief the fellow was. He said he had always remembered me for saying a merciful word in print for him, when he was being so sorely hunted by the press of San Francisco. I never recollected saying a merciful word for anybody, and so I was still in suspense. Finally, he said he wished I would call and see him at his offices. Offices sounded sumptuous, and I warmed to him. He was dealing in steamships, that is, he was engaged in furnishing compliments of passengers to them. Any business I might happen to have with the great steamer lines he would be happy to conduct for me. I knew the chirping voice then. I remembered the complacent countenance. I recalled the cheerful spirit that never yet had been bowed down by any possible weight of woe. I recognized the royal presence that always, by a destiny, clad in the outward semblance of poverty, was yet always a millionaire within. Felix O'Bern. Who else in all the world would be smiling so blithely out from a gallant costume in ruins, and chirping about his offices and his steamships? Nothing can crush Felix O'Bern finally and conclusively. Truth and Felix O'Bern, crushed to earth, will rise again. Thus there is a marked similarity between truth and Felix O'Bern. I hereby locate a discovery claim of four hundred feet on this fact. Felix arrives on the Pacific Coast in poverty. Shortly he is the honored contributor to Victoria newspapers and the guest of governors. Next he turns up in San Francisco, poor and accused of a grave offense against the laws. He is wearing diamonds next, and wielding a mighty influence in politics. Crushed again, degraded, disgraced, he disappears from public life, and it is discovered that the notes he gave for clothing and the baggage he left at first-rate hotels are equally fanciful as to value. Suspected by the police, worried by landlords of low boarding-houses, snubbed at third-rate free lunches, he blooms out all at once in a bright new uniform as a lieutenant in the Eighth California Volunteers. When the mystery of the transformation is solved, it transpires that poor, despised, and shunned the tireless energies of the man have been at work, steady, and serenely as ever, and characteristically their aim was high. Let Felix's body be where it would, his soul was always in the clouds. It transpires that he has procured his soldierly position by means of a petition to the Governor, signed by a number of the foremost gentlemen of San Francisco. The confidence, the persistence, the effrontery, and the dazzling successes of this man were bound to provoke some admiration in any soul but an infinitesimally mean one. But the newspaper showed Felix up immediately, and it was plain to be seen that he was hardly the man to augment the respectability of the military service. He had the glory of a public military trial, though, and the distinction of being the head and front of the chief sensation of San Francisco for nine days in print, and the principal lion on the street when he went forth to show his uniform. Then he was dismissed, and forthwith sank down, down, down. Clear out of sight. He was out of sight a good while, and also out of mind. But not to stay. The first bubble that rose from the vasty depths of Fenianism brought Felix to the surface. He wrote. He lectured. He stumped the State. He aspired to lead the movement, and lo! In the fullness of time he bloomed again, this time as High Chief Editor of the Irish People newspaper. His career was brief, but gorgeous. The Fenians got after him, and so did his subscribers. His creditors assaulted him again. He was busted. The waves of oblivion swept over him once more. He ceased to be talked about or even remembered. He sailed for the East, glorified with a parting blast from all the newspapers. After many days we heard of him achieving a precarious living by adventurous ways, unknown, uncorted, poverty-stricken. But so surely as the sun rises out of the night, so surely Felix O'Burn blazes up out of obscurity in his appointed seasons. The news came that he was gone to Ireland, a lordly commissioner empowered to disperse three millions of dollars among the Fenians. Everybody said, Alas! for the Fenians! He was in the States again, when we heard of him next, with his periodical poverty upon him, and next he was stumping the State of New York for a great political organization and spending its money with a lavish hand, for Felix was always free with money of his own, and just as free with it when it belongs to his friends. And afterwards we heard of him dining with the President of the United States and the great officers of the government, a trusted advisor in the national policy. And next he was leaving his baggage behind him again at the hotels and disappointing landlords as to the quality of its contents. His next year's career was more damaging to his good name than any that had gone before, perhaps, but it is not necessary to give the particulars of it. He is in the mire of poverty once more now, as to his body, but his regal soul dwells in offices, and hath dealings with no meaner matters than the nation's great steamship lines. But be patient, the Phoenix O'Burn will rise from his ashes yet again and perch upon the temple of fame. That restless brain of his, so prolific in invention, and those busy hands of his, so cunning in execution, will create new surprises for the public and a new celebrity and prosperity for himself. What a mind of splendid talent is in this man! What industry! What hopefulness! What perseverance! What ingenuity! Phoenix would have been a power in the land if his rare intellectual forces had been under the guiding control of principle. The lack of that one quality is his ruin. If I had any principle to spare, I would give it to him as cheerfully as to any man, for I bear him no malice. Stewart's Speech Senator Stewart made a long speech and a very able one on the vexed question of Reconstruction a couple of days ago. It is highly praised by Republicans. The whole speech was good, but one of the happiest points in it, perhaps, was towards its close, where he turned a favorite Democratic wine against that party and sang its own tune to it with a different style of words. I speak of that everlasting wine about conciliating the South, if there were not rather a properer call to conciliate the North. The North must suffer all the exasperating distresses of a war brought on by the South, yet stand by and see the fact that she can have anything to be conciliated about coolly ignored. I insert a paragraph from the speech. Again, we are appealed to, to conciliate the South. What further concessions are we called upon to make? Have we not tried conciliation from the foundation of the Have we not sacrificed justice and humanity to appease the vile passions, prejudice, and tyranny of slave-holders long enough? Are not our statute-books black with enactments to rivet the bonds of the slave? Are not the reports of the highest judicial tribunal disfigured with elaborate defenses of slave-holders' pretensions? Have we not submitted long enough to be slave-catchers for the South? Have we not bowed low enough in the dust in vain attempts to allay their royal displeasure? And after all this were we not required to make a sacrifice of life and property unparalleled in modern history to restrain the wrath of these haughty rebels engendered only by the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States? When I reflect upon the crimes committed because of his first election, and when I reflect upon the matter of his death because of his second election, and the fearful results that have followed the commission of that crime, I sometimes feel that the power of conciliation was then exhausted. Continuing the subject, the senator launches the following pregnant paragraph at the conciliation-sreaking democracy. It puts the matter altogether in a new light, and shows that the North has a little unsettled conciliation bill itself that needs liquidation. But we did not stop at the death of Abraham Lincoln. We tried further measures of conciliation, and offered oblivion for the past and a full restoration in the Union on terms so liberal and magnanimous as to astonish the civilized world, and were again repulsed and defied. And still the Democratic Party asks us to conciliate their rebel friends. They say it is impossible to harmonize the conflicting opinions in this country without conciliation. Let loyalty then be conciliated. Let something be done to soothe the bereaved and sorrow stricken in the North. The passions of the human heart are not monopolized by those who sought to destroy the government. Let the rebels make some atonement for the barbarities of Andersonville and Libby prison. Let them at least give a pledge in the shape of a constitutional amendment that the widows and orphans of those who have fallen shall not be robbed of their pensions by repudiation of the federal debt through the instrumentality of rebel votes. Let the world see by their conduct and bearing that they were not victorious in the war, and do not propose to humiliate our soldiers or make loyalty odious. Let the rebel press cease to discharge its venom in vile abuse of everything sacred to justice and honor. When force is agitated, let the strong be conciliated. When the President betrays his party and, as he tells us, liberates much upon the very serious and important question of resistance to the laws for the restoration of the Union, let the scarred veterans of Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan be conciliated. Let those conservatives who cry, Keep the peace, conciliate an insulted and outraged people. Those who suppress the rebellion will secure the fruits of victory, peaceably if they can, forcibly if they must. But those who believe the people are actuated only by prejudice of race against race re-echo the rebel war cry of negro equality, negro supremacy, and bend the pregnant hinges of the knee to haughty rebels for office and power. But let them take warning that they will fall where Buchanan fell, that they will not only merit but receive the contempt of mankind. Mr. Exdel, member of the House from California, has also placed himself on record upon reconstruction, in a brief speech a day or two ago, on the democratic side of the question, and Senator Nye on the Republican. Mark Twain. Territorial Enterprise, March 7, 1868. Mark Twain's Letters from Washington, No. 9. Special Correspondence of the Enterprise. Washington, February 1868. Washington Rascality. Right here, in this heart and home and fountain-head of law, in this great factory, where are forged those rules that create good order and compel virtue and honesty in the other communities of the land, rascality achieves its highest perfection. Here rewards are conferred for conniving at dishonesty, but never for exposing it. I know several cases that come under this head. Persons who have lived here longer and are better acquainted know of a great many. I meet a man in the avenue sometimes whose history most residents of the city are acquainted with. He was a clerk of high grade in one of the departments, but he was a stranger and had no rules of action for his guidance, except some effete maxims of integrity picked up in Sunday school, that snare to the feet of the unsophisticated, and some unpractical moral wisdom instilled into him by his mother, who meant well, poor soul, but whose teachings were morally bound to train up her boy for the poor house. Well, nobody told this stranger how he ought to conduct himself, and so he went on following up those old maxims of his and acting so strangely in consequence that the other clerks began to whisper and nod and exchange glances of commiseration, for they thought that his mind was not right, that his brain had been touched by sorrow or hard fortune or something. They observed that he never stole anything. By and by they noticed that people who came to bribe him went away with an expression of disappointment in their faces. Finally it became apparent that he worked very hard and performed his tasks well and never shirked. Then they grew a little afraid of him. They said he was very quiet and peaceable, but then there was no telling when a lunatic was going to get one of those spells on him and scalp somebody. Finally the young man caught the high-grand sachem of a great bureau perpetrating a flagrant swindle on the government. What did he do? Call for a division of the proceeds like an intelligent being? No. He went like an ignorant, besotted ass, and told the Secretary of the Department. The Secretary of the Department said he would look into the matter, and added, by the way, what business is it of yours? And the next thing the foolish young man knew, he found himself discharged and the intelligent sachem promoted. Then he went and told the Senators from the State all about it and asked them to get him another place, and they told him very properly that he had ruined himself and that the official doors would all be closed against him now. He soon found out that that was the truth. He soon found out that you can't educate a boy in a Sunday school so as to make him useful to his country. That young man is idle to this day. Nobody has tried harder to get employment than he, but they all know his story, and they always refuse him. Everybody shuns him because everybody knows he is afflicted with a loathsome leprosy, the strange, foreign leprosy of honesty. And they are afraid they might catch it. There isn't any danger, maybe, but then they don't like to take any chances. Why, no one would ever imagine the absurdities that Imbasil was guilty of before he discovered what a mistake his education had been. When he found out that they admit bad women into private rooms in one of the departments at all hours of the night, he went and told people about it, as if he had discovered some great thing. He was always carrying around some old stale piece of news like that. And when he found out that in the basement of another department they feed and lodge and pay salaries to 120 New York election sharps who do nothing in the world, and that their names are sent down in the record books, not as Michael O'Flaherty, Dennis O'Flanigan, Patrick O'Doherty, and so on, but always simply as fire and lights. He went and told that also. And when he learned that one of the heads of the printing bureau hires bindery girls with a special reference to their unchastity, and that it was proved by government investigation, and duly published in a book that he sometimes sleeps with two of them at a time, and has the free run of his harem to choose from, and that he flourishes around Washington, now the best-dressed and gallantist officer the government has, he even thought that trifle a matter of sufficient importance to run around and talk about, why when the tice-meter was covertly foisted upon the public by the government, and every distiller in America, peremptorily commanded to come forward and buy one at from $600 to $1,500, when a better machine could have been furnished for just half the money, he said he believed there was a ten million dollar swindle behind all that, and that certain high officials were privy to it, and reaping a vast profit from it, which was no doubt true as gospel, but where is the wisdom in talking about these dangerous topics? I stopped in at a fine boarding-house last night to see a friend, when the landlady came in to collect her bill. She mentioned the fact that she had two handsomely furnished apartments which she would like to rent to someone. I said I knew of several senators and congressmen who would be glad to have them. She said she would not venture to risk that kind of people. I thought she was jesting, but she was not. A gent of a senator had called and engaged those rooms for him two months before he was to arrive, with the understanding that he was to occupy them during the whole session. He came and said they were perfectly satisfactory. After a while he wanted some more furniture added, which was done at a cost of $200. He stayed two months, said he was still perfectly satisfied with the apartments and could have no desire to leave them, but for the fact that some friends had taken up their residence in another part of the town and he wished to be near them. So he was going to move. He did not deny that the agent's contract was duly authorized, but he said, Have you any writing to show for it? She hadn't. He said, Well, and left. The law does not permit members of congress to be sued, so there was no redress. The breached contract had to remain breached. She rented the rooms to a territorial delegate, but refused to let him have them unless he would take them for the remainder of the session, because she had a chance at the moment to rent them to a gentleman for a month or two, and she would rather have a gentleman than a congressman because congressmen kept such late hours and burned so much fuel and gas. He occupied the rooms twenty-four hours, expressed himself entirely pleased with them, but had found lodgings which were cheaper and would do him as well. And he moved. He moved first, when nobody was watching, and said that afterward. He did not deny his contract either, but refused to fulfill it or give any redress. The law cannot touch the delegate. Isn't this a curious state of things? Isn't it refreshing to see men break laws so coolly whose sole business is law-making? I wonder if all the congressmen are so unreliable. If they are, I think I could subscribe to this landlady's suggestive remark that it is pleasanter to have a gentleman around than a congressman. I said I would be glad to have her general opinion of Washington probity, and she said her opinion was that it did not exist in a very great degree. She believed that the whole city was polluted with peculation and all other forms of rascality, debauched and demoralized by the whole sale dishonesty that prevails in every single department of the Washington government, great and small. She said that false weights were used in the market, the grocery stores, the butcher shops, and all such places. The meat a butcher sells you for seven pounds can never be persuaded to weight more than five and a half in your kitchen scales at home. A grocer's pound of butter usually weights only three-quarters in scales that are unconscious and have no motive to deceive. They paint rocks and add them to your coal. They put sand in your sugar, lime in your flour, water in your milk, turpentine in your whiskey, clothes, pins in your sausages, turnips in your canned peaches. They will rather cheat you out of ten cents than make a dollar out of you by honest dealing. That was her opinion. What little I have seen of Washington in the short time I have been here leads me to think it must be correct. THE DELEGATION Senator Nye is absent temporarily. I see by the telegrams that he was to be one of the speakers at a grand, grand mass meeting at Cooper Institute a night or two ago. Mr. Ashley is attending to his duties as usual in the house. Senator Stewart is working hard, on Nevada matters of various kinds particularly, and on everything of importance that comes before the Senate in a general way. He is about the hardest working man in Congress, I believe. Mr. Stewart has just reported back from committee a bill to straighten out all the public land entanglements in Nevada which will place Nevada's lands in such a shape that she can handle them with facility instead of finding her hands constantly tied by disabling rulings of the Interior Department. Stewart's School of Mines has received high commendations from all persons interested in mining interests and there appears to be no opposition to it of consequence in Congress. It is very likely to pass shortly. Somebody got up a counter-bill to establish a Bureau of Mines in Washington instead and put it under the control of that poor, decrepit bald-headed, played out anti-Diluvian old red sandstone formation which they call the Smithsonian Institute. What the mischief would that drowsing old national ass do with as live a thing as a mining interest? Just as usual it would go after the Paleozoic formation, and if it found out there wasn't any Paleozoic formation about first-class mines, it wouldn't ever care a cent about those mines. It is a cussed old Paleozoic formation itself and has no business going around her in its shroud among living men at this day of the world. Its Bureau of Mines died early. Mines! The idea of the Smithsonian Institute meddling with mines, and with shafts and tunnels and whims, and with swarms of workmen, and with the stir and bustle and blasphemy of teamsters, and with steam engines and the clatter and crash of desperate forty-stamp mills, the idea of a toothless old grandmother going to war. Read what it is that this venerable Paleozoic formation is worrying itself about now from its last annual report. Questions in Issue 1. What classifications may be adopted for the discoveries made in Belgium and neighboring countries of the Roman style objects anterior to the Carlovingian era? Is the Ojival style to be considered as the natural and complete development of the Roman style? What is conclusively known respecting the different kinds of horseshoes found in Gallo-Roman mines and the manner of using them? Should churches be made to front toward the east? To determine the age of objects in Alex from their degree of elaboration? If they gave the dreaming institute supervision of our mines out there, it would spend the first twenty-five years prospecting for Gallo-Roman horseshoes. And the next twenty-five trying to find out how the Gallo-Romans of the rabbit-skin robe and the grasshopper diet used such jackass shoes as they might come across in abandoned shafts on the divide. Let her stick to her palozoic formation, that is her best hold. The question on the admission of Mr. Thomas of Maryland to a seat in the Senate has been the main subject of debate for some time now, next to Reconstruction. Thomas was always a rebel in opinion and sympathy, but as he couldn't go into the field himself, he gave his son a hundred dollars and started him to the Confederacy to join its armies. These things will in all probability send him back to his constituents minus his senatorial seat. Mr. Stewart has made two good speeches on the question. An extract from his last will not be out of place here. Mr. President, I do not wish to detain the Senate or to prolong this debate, but I desire to make a single remark. I wish to ask the Senate how this gentleman would appear if he were defending his property from a suit in the south for confiscation. They confiscated in the south the property of men who were loyal to this government. Now let me see where he would stand before a rebel court in such a case, or before a rebel Congress, if he were playing there for admission to a seat. Suppose he had moved over there and was elected to their Congress, and they had a rule preventing anyone who had been faithful to this government from taking a seat with them. What kind of a plea could he make then? Could he not remind them of the fact that when the war commenced he took his position with Jeff Davis, with Cobb, with Tombs, and the rest of them, that there was no power in this government to sustain itself, and so declared in a letter in which he resigned an important office, so as to give his endorsement to the movement they were about to inaugurate. Could he not say, I associated with your patriotic leaders? I was a friend in the darkest hour of the rebellion of Jeff. Davis. I, too, resigned a high office under the government of the United States to give aid and countenance to your movement. Could he not say that after the rebellion had been inaugurated, after he had resigned this high office, he went to Maryland, and there associated with rebels. That he gave them his moral support. That he denied any sympathy or aid to the Union men of this state. That he refused even to vote under the Yankee government. That he refused to take any of their oaths of loyalty. That he refused to recognize the late United States in any form. Could he not say further, I do more than that, being myself past the age to do military duty, I furnish my only son to aid you in gaining your independence, although poor I gave him one hundred dollars all the money I could raise to send him my only son to you to aid you in achieving your independence. Will you therefore take from me my property? Was I disloyal to you? Have I not aided you? Would not the argument be answerable. But it is said, by the senator from Pennsylvania, that we must tolerate differences of opinion. Sir, there are some differences of opinion that we cannot tolerate and will not tolerate. We will not tolerate any man in the opinion that this government has no power to maintain its own existence. We will not tolerate the opinion that the Union ought to be dissolved. We will not tolerate secession. We will not tolerate the opinion that secession is a constitution right. We fought against this doctrine, and we fought against those who acted upon it. The verdict of the war has established, if it has established any fact, that no such opinion shall exist in this country. The Postmaster. That candidate, for the Postmaster ship in San Francisco I spoke of in my last, has tied his horse up at Gadsby's. Well, I thought he would. Impeachment. It is dead for good now, I suppose. It promised so fairly two months ago that everybody boldly turned profit and said it would certainly succeed. But it didn't. Nobody's prophecies concerning Washington matters ever come out right. Isaiah himself would be a failure here. Honourable Thad Stevens, the bravest old ironclad in the capital, fought hard for impeachment, even when he saw that it could not succeed. He is not choice in his language when he speaks on this subject concerning his fellow committeemen and Congress generally. He simply says the whole tribe of them are damned cowards! It is the finest word painting any congressional topic has produced this session. Reciprocity. The Sandwich Island reciprocity treaty, having been reported back favorably from the Committee on Foreign Relations, remains now to be acted upon by the Senate. General McCook has visited every senator and talked with him, and almost all of them have expressed themselves satisfied with the treaty and willing to vote for it. As he has done, all he can possibly do for the treaty, and, as he is necessarily tired of Washington by this time, General McCook proposes to leave for San Francisco and the islands in the steamer of March 1. Miscellaneous. The man who is here contesting Honourable Mr. Hooper's seat as delegate from Utah is a Mr. McGroority, who was run for delegate as a practical joke. McGroority got one hundred and five votes, and Hooper got a little over fifteen thousand. This small discrepancy, don't worry McGroority, however. He says the fifteen thousand would have voted for him, but were afraid of the bishops of the church. The fact is, the contest will never come off. One hates to make a positive statement about Washington affairs, but I venture to make that one, because McGroority did not serve a notice of contest on Hooper within thirty days after the election, stating the grounds of the contest. United States law makes this imperative. Congress will hardly go behind its own acts. Therefore I have ventured to say that the contesting in Congress of this seat is a thing that will hardly get further than an inquiry by a committee and die. Hey! Hey! is somewhat cheaper than a week or two ago. It is now retailed at five cents per pound, and is to be had by the wagon load in this city at about seventy-five dollars or eighty dollars per ton. Several loads of hay of an excellent quality arrived here yesterday from St. Clair station on the overland route, territorial enterprise. In my time hay items were a great moral standby. I thought you might make some use of this one. I have known Dan DeQuil to follow a hay wagon all over town and write a new lie about it on every corner, and make twelve distinct items about the same wagon and fetch it from every locality in the territory of Nevada from which a hay wagon could by any possibility hail from. The driver's name might be stated correctly enough, in the first one, to be Smith, but the eleven aliases that marched their disastrous course through the succeeding ones infallibly caused that driver to be looked upon with the gravest suspicion forever after. Firewood is at present rather scarce. It sells in this city at twenty-five dollars per cord for washoe and thirty dollars for nut pine. It is a little cheaper, so businessmen say, to buy of the Chinese wood peddlers, territorial enterprise. In my time also, when the morning inquest failed and other matters were scarce, it was considered good and injurious prudence to fall back on wood. Wood is a subject that is able to stir the souls of any community. Wood is a thing that can always be safely elaborated. If I had all the woodpiles of my conscience that I stole from Daggett and Tom Fitch, with no other object than that Dan might discourse learnedly to the public about the damnable quality of the wood that was being imposed upon an outraged public by the satraps of Washoe Valley, I would be a happier man than I am. I do not know what satraps is, and I do not suppose that Dan knew what satraps was, either, but he always considered it to be a crusher, anyway. He always regarded it as a word to be resorted to only in the extremist emergencies. Rough. Several large quartz wagons upset yesterday on the road leading from this city to Gold Hill. But we heard of no accident to life or limb nor serious damage to any of the wagons. Territorial enterprise. I am just as well satisfied as I am of anything that that disaster never occurred. In my time it was never looked upon as any trick at all to turn over a lot of quartz wagons on the divide to fill out a local column with, to find a petrified man or break a stranger's leg or cave an imaginary mine or discover some dead Indians in a Gold Hill tunnel or massacre a family at Dutch Knicks were feats and calamities that we never hesitated about devising when the public needed matters of thrilling interest for breakfast. The seemingly tranquil enterprise office was a ghastly factory of slaughter, mutilation, and general destruction in those days. These old enterprise fabrications about wood and hay and suffering quartz wagons read more pleasantly to me now than any amount of poetry. And when I come across items about Jack Perry and Birdsall and Steve Gillis and those other highway robbers who practice upon unoffending traveling showmen on the divide, they are full of interest to me, especially if it appears that the parties have got into any trouble. I do not see their names often now, which encourages me to think they have pretty much all got into the penitentiary at last, maybe. I was at a banquet given to the honorable Society of Good Fellows last night, and it was a particularly cheerful affair. I mention this subject more particularly because I wish to introduce in this connection what I consider to be a genuine uncompromising and unmitigated first-rate notice. Let the Washington Express be your model in matters of this kind hereafter. The question being on the fourth regular toast. Fourth. Woman. All honor to woman, the sweetheart, the wife, the delight of the fireside by night and by day, who never does anything wrong in her life except when permitted to have her own way. To this toast the renowned, humorist and rightest, Mark Twain, responded, and it is superfluous to say that while he stood upon the floor declaiming for the fair divinities, all that banqueting crew laid down with laughter. His sliding scene, his trials and tribulations, those he had paid for, and not. His valentine, his sublime inspirations and humorous deductions, set the very table in a roar. He's a funny fellow and no mistake, and blessed indeed with the GF's with the honor of his company. There isn't anything very mild about that, is there? I hadn't adjust appreciation of how infernally funny I had been in that speech until I read that notice. I had an idea that the New York Herald and the Tribune had complimented me fully up to my desserts several times, but I guess not. I like the wild enthusiasm of the express better. It was a very, very jolly entertainment throughout. I observe one thing on this side that is as it should be. At such banquets as I have attended here and in New York, I noticed that among the regular toast they always had a couple for the Pacific Coast and the press of the Pacific, and that they gave them prominence. To the one last named, Lord Fairfax of the New Orleans Picayune responded in the happiest terms last night. Mark Twain. Territorial Enterprise March 13, 1868. Mark Twain's letters from Washington No. 10. Special Correspondence of the Enterprise. The Grand Coudeta. Washington, February 22. This birthday of Washington was historical before—it is doubly so now. Yesterday the news spread abroad over the town that the President had sent General Thomas to eject Secretary Stanton from the War Office and assume the duties of the post himself. It was an open defiance of Congress, a kingly contempt for long-settled forms and customs, a reckless disregard of the law itself. It was the first time, in the history of the nation, that the Chief Magistrate had presumed to dismiss a cabinet officer without the consent of the Senate while that body was in session. The excitement was intense, and it steadily augmented as night approached. Hotels and saloons were crowded with men who moved restlessly about, talking vehemently and accompanying their words with emphatic gestures. The sidewalks were thronged with hurrying passengers, and everywhere the sound of trampling feet and a discord of angry voices was in the air. Old citizens remembered no night like this in Washington since Lincoln was assassinated. Strangely enough, the men who should have been most concerned about the storm were the only souls that rode serenely above it. Mr. Seward and the President sat at a state dinner in the White House, cheery and talkative among distraught and pensive guests. General Grant was at the theatre. Stanton made his bed in the peaceful war-office, and General Thomas capered gaily among fantastic massacres at a carnival fandango. Meanwhile the tempest swept the continent on the wings of the telegraph. The Senate sat at night, and multitudes flocked to the capital to stare and listen. The House resolved to make Saturday a working day for once, and both bodies decreed that for the first time since Washington's death Congress should transact business on the anniversary of his birthday. This morning impeachment was in everybody's mouth. Thomas's arrest was discussed in the streets and in the hotels. Stanton was lauded by Republicans for sleeping in the war-office and holding the political fortress and cursed by the Democrats. That honorable Judd and Schenck watched with him till three a.m., and that honorable Thayer remained all night, brought those gentlemen a fair share likewise of the praise and the blame. By nine o'clock, full three hours before the sitting of Congress, long processions of men and women were wending their way toward the capital in the nipping winter air, and all vacant spaces about the doors were packed with people waiting to get in. When I reached there at noon it was difficult to make one's way through the wide lobbies and passages so great was the throng. There was not a vacant seat in the galleries, and all the doorways leading to them were full of tiptoeing men and women with a swarm of anxious citizens at their backs, eagerly watching for such scanty crumbs of comfort as chance opportunities of glancing between their shoulders or under their arms. I went immediately to the reporters' gallery. It was about full, too, and excited doorkeepers and sentinels were challenging all comers and manfully resisting an assaulting party of men, women, and children who were the fathers, brothers, wives, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, schoolmates, admirers of editors, correspondence, reporters, members of Congress, cabinet officers, and the President of the United States, and consequently they demanded to know why they couldn't go into the reporters' gallery. That was it. Why couldn't they? Some people are unreasonable, and some don't know anything. These parties belong pretty exclusively to the one or the other of these classes. They were all, every one of them, going to have the doorkeeper discharged. They said so. Surely such exceedingly influential people would not threaten what they could not perform. But they did not get in. But others had got seats who were not strictly of the press, I suspect, twenty perhaps, among them several ladies. They were a good deal in the way, but they did not mind that. I was glad to see that it did not discommode them. The scene within was spirited. It was unusual, too. The great galleries presented a sea of eager animated faces. Above these more were amassed in the many doorways. Below, in the strong light, a few members walked nervously up and down, outside the rows of seats. A very few were writing, telegrams, no doubt. The great majority had their heads together in groups and couples, talking earnestly. In every countenance strong feeling was depicted. A member from Maine was making a speech about a patent cooking stove, but never a soul was listening to him. Some said the stove business was gotten up by the Democrats to stave off impeachment. Others said the radicals got it up to gain time and give the Reconstruction Committee a chance to make up its report. Everybody waited impatiently and watched the door sharply. They wanted to see that committee come. By and by Mr. Payne entered, and there was a buzz. But it was a disappointment. He only spoke a word to a colleague and went out again. The tiresome stove-man finished. It was a relief to the galleries, who somehow seemed to look upon this trifling about cooking stoves as a fraud upon themselves, and as sort of a front, as well, thrust forward as it was at a time when any idiot ought to know that impeachment was the order of the day. No committee yet. Something must be done. Motion to adjourn in honor of Washington. Amendment to read Washington's farewell address. Both were voted down. A's and A's called on both, and the long, tedious, monotonous calling of names and answering followed. The vote was no. Everybody knew what it would be before. Before the roll call was finished, Botwell came in, sensation. Afterwards, at intervals, Bingham, sensation. Payne, sensation. Several other committee men, and finally, Thad Stevens himself. Super extraordinary sensation. The haggard, cadaverous old man dragged himself to his place and sat down. There was a soul in his sunken eyes, but otherwise he was a corpse that was ready for the shroud. He held his precious impeachment papers in his hand, signed at last. In the eleventh hour his coveted triumph had come. Richelieu was not nearer the grave. Richelieu was not stirred up by a sterner pride when he came from his bed of death to crown himself with his final victory. The buzzing and whispering died out, and an impressive silence reigned in its stead. The speaker addressed the galleries in a clear voice that reached the farthest recesses of the house, and warned the great concourse that the slightest manifestation of approbation or disapprobation of anything about to be said would be followed by the instant expulsion of the offending person from the galleries. He read the rules, at some length upon the subject, and charged the sergeant of arms and his subordinates to perform their duty without hesitation or favor. Then Mr. Stevens rose up and in a voice which was feeble but yet distinctly audible because of the breathless stillness that hung over the great audience like a spell, he read the resolution that was to make plain the way for the impeachment of the President of the United States. The words that foreshadowed so mighty an event sent a thrill through the assemblage, but there was no manifestation of the emotion save in the sudden lighting of their countenances. They ventured upon no applause nor upon any expression of dissent. Mr. Brooks of New York took the floor and in a frenzied speech protested against impeachment and threatened civil war if the measure carried. Mr. Bingham made an able speech in favor of the movement. The ball was fairly open now, and speech followed speech from two in the afternoon until almost midnight. During all that time the galleries were filled with people, and their excited interest showed no symptoms of abatement. The house adjourned to meet at ten a.m. on Monday instead of at noon. It has been a tremendous day. The nation has seen few that were so filled with ominous signs and boatings of disaster. When it was moved today to read Washington's farewell address, Mr. Ingersoll inquired of a neighbor if it would not be more appropriate to read Andrew Johnson's farewell address. In this connection I will remark that the following was picked up in one of the lobbies. It was entitled, Andrew Johnson's Farewell Address. "'Soft you, a word or two before you go. I have done the state some damage, and they know it. No more of that, I pray you in your letters. When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, speak of me as I am. Some things extenuate. But set down not in malice. Then must you speak of one that ruled not wisely nor too well. Of one easily jealous, and, being wrought, perplexed in the extreme, did like the base Judean throw a pearl away, richer than all his tribe. How the delegations from the Pacific Coast will stand on impeachment, no man can tell till Monday. You know as well as I that the Oregon delegation will be likely to favour it, that the Nevada and California senators will be likely to favour it, that Ashley and Higby in the house will be likely to favour it, and Johnson and Axtel be apt to oppose. But these gentlemen cannot be seen tonight, and it would be hard to guess what effect the flood of telegrams may have that will roll in upon us to-morrow from all parts of the country." End of Section 32. This is Section 33 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 33, Territorial Enterprise, April, 1868. Territorial Enterprise, April 7, 1868. Mark Twain's Letters from Washington, No. 11. Washington, March 20, 1868. The Mining School. Dwinnell's Curious Resolution concerning Senator Stewart's proposed Mining School has reached here, and will be laid before Congress, and in all human probability will be tabled there. It is a funny document, take it as you will. It has two clauses in it that are especially entertaining, and would be still more so if they were sent to music. One of them proposes to exclude all foreigners from the school, which proposition is narrow enough in policy and ungenerous enough with all to have been resurrected from the Dark Ages. We that have benefited so much from the labors and discoveries of Europe's men of science, we that have to send to her so often for teachers, we that are as welcome in her great Mining Schools as her own citizens, and are freely according her privilege, which they enjoy and upon the same terms, ought to be ashamed of so selfish, so poor-spirited a measure as this. The Freiberg School is full of Americans. They will not be pleased to learn how America proposes to show her appreciation of open-handed German hospitality. Measures like dwindles are not the thing that made the Californian name a synonym for liberality and generosity. The other clause I have spoken of proposes to divide the revenue from the mines among a number of states and let them endow with it as many mining departments in as many colleges. The idea is threadbare and old. The Japanese astrologer, Professor Blake, who knows so much more than it is lawful for any one man to know, is here now, trying to get the revenues from the mining states conferred upon Columbia College for the establishing of a mining department in that institution. Two hundred and eighty other colleges are begging for the same revenues for the same purpose, and Dwinnell comes in at this late day with the same old impracticable idea. Why, even the poor, purr-blind, broken-winded, old, red, sandstone, paleozoic saurian? The Smithsonian Institute has awakened from its ancient dream of Roman horseshoes, Grecian funeral processions, and pre-Atomite ferns and turnips, and it wants the revenues to endow a mining bureau with. And why shouldn't the old drowser have its mining bureau to fossilize along with its mastodon jaw teeth, its Egyptian mummies, its pickled Indians, and its agricultural department that never raises anything? Why shouldn't it have it? And so save some old century plant of science from starvation by giving him the professorship. No greater good would be done by Dwinnell's diffusive process. Dwinnell should have gotten up something original anyhow. Even the intelligent contra-bands are ahead of him in this thing. A negro in a Mississippi convention wants the mining revenues to establish a mining bureau in his district school with, and has been making speeches on the subject. He says they have no mine, but they can build one for purposes of practical instruction as the czar has done in St. Petersburg. He says his shaft would be full of water most of the time, on account of the ground being swampy, but then mines have to have pumps anyhow, cannot be complete without them, and where would be the use of pumps if there were no water to pump? How like are the ideas of wise men? This fellow wants to exclude whites from the school. He is no more liberal with American whites than Dwinnell is with foreigners. They want a mining department in New Jersey. They haven't any mines either. They want it in Indiana, in Florida, and the icebergs of Maine. I suppose there are icebergs in Maine. I have never been there. They want it in Texas, and next the Indians and the Chinaman will be clamoring for it, no doubt. If this little revenue of a quarter of a million is to be divided up and frittered away as proposed by the resolution of Dwinnell, let the Mississippi contra-bands have a share to build a mine with. Surely a quarter of a million dollars ought to accomplish more good when divided up among a quarter of a million colleges than it could when concentrated in one school. The Smithsonian Institute makes a strong appeal in its usual lucid style, but I can only give an extract wherein it shows its peculiar competency in the matter of, God only knows not, reducing silver ores, maybe. Read. It has already been remarked that in these bipotendris, the disurion of the laminar cantoid, is preceded by the formation of a quadrilateral hexahedron, which is converted into superpalazoic spirals. Now, the same as the case in the disruption of all the other laminar dioramics, just as in the constricted unduloid, until the rupture of equilibrium occurs and thus, therefore, makes the welkin ring. Well, I should say so. I always had the same idea myself, but somehow I never could express it, you know. I knew, just as well as I knew anything, that it would fetch the welkin if I ever could get at it right, but then the hexahedron palazoic cantoids are always too many for me. For good moral, unexciting light literature for the home circle, commend me to the official documents of the Smithsonian Institute. Such unpracticable schemes as those proposed in the California Resolutions obstruct and delay legislation and accomplish no good. It would be much better to write congressmen and suggest amendments to pending bills than clog their way with memorials, which must be discussed in Congress in valuable time thereby lost. A Good Job in Danger. The firm of Kellogg, Houston, and Company, assayers of San Francisco, have been endeavouring to get an ingeniously worded bill through Congress to give them the monopoly of assaying and refining for the branch mint, and take that service entirely out of the hands of the mint. The prodigious job occupies small room in the bill, and is crushed into seeming insignificance by a great display of other matters of pretended importance, but it will probably fail. A large amount of lobbying has been done in its favour, but some prominent New York-Californian firms have protested so strongly against the measure that there is every reason to believe it will be killed. It is thought that the Committee will report in favour of taking the assaying and refining of gold and silver bullion away from the mint, and giving it to assayers generally. Whether this will improve matters or not remains to be seen. It is hardly likely that it will. Another One. The Goat Island scheme of the Western Pacific Railroad Company looks dubious. It promises to fail in the House. It proposes to give the company a portion of the Yerba Buena Island for a depot, with the condition that in time of war the government may take and occupy the premises and the buildings, as long as may be necessary, and pay the company such some as shall be fair and reasonable for such use and occupation. The House Committee are not disposed to report the measure favourably. Governmental Blasting. On the fifth day of November Guy Fox he did aspire to blow up kings and parliament with dreadful gunpowder. Four days ago, as everyone believed, a modern Guy Fox aspired to blow up capital and Congress with dreadful glycerin. But so far he has not succeeded. The news that one hundred and eighty pounds of glycerin had been stolen in New York and was doubtless then under the foundations of the capital set Washington in a flutter. It was enough glycerin to blow up the United States, let alone the capital. Sir Christopher Wren shook the massive walls and towers of old St. Paul's to pie with eighteen pounds of blasting powder. Then who would be willing to be in the District of Columbia when one hundred and eighty pounds of nitroglycerin were touched off? I sat at my window, five hundred yards from the capital, all day, and waited for the gorgeous show. In fancy I could see the vast dome shot suddenly toward the zenith, like a giant's helmet, and a chaos of shattered columns, tiles, and capitals whizzing after it, with here and there a senator going end over end among the fragments. The half of a representative gaining on a supreme judge with his legs stove up, a gallery full of niggers sailing toward the sun, mutilated lobbyists whistling aloft like rockets, but still hitched to chairman of committees by the buttonhole process, and a gallery of reporters chasing the general wreck through the air serene in the contemplation of so sublime an item. But the exhibition did not come off, postponed on account of the weather, maybe. Visitors to the capital that day fidgeted around uneasily for a few minutes and then left the building, and it was observed that when they walked through the lower corridors they walked very fast. Everyone looked uncomfortable, their speeches were rambling and disjointed, and the usual squabble over adjournment was omitted. There was some excuse for a scare. There are men in Washington who would blow up the capital fast enough if they could achieve an illustrious name, like Booth, by doing it, and be worshipped as Booth is worshipped. All they want is the nitroglycerin and the opportunity. A newspaper hint that the glycerin telegram was an advertising dodge helped to destroy belief in the blasting conspiracy, and the fact that several days have elapsed without disaster has about finished it. Impeachment A few days ago everybody was entirely satisfied that the President would be impeached and removed with all possible dispatch. Today nobody has a settled opinion about the matter. The Democrats do not howl about impeachment much now, a fact that awakens suspicion. Maybe they are satisfied that to martyr the President would make a vast amount of Democratic capital for the next election. Martyrdom is the coveted thing now, by everybody. The Republicans show a disposition to quit talking about the impeaching of a President on stern principle for a contemptuous violation of law and his oath of office. They show a disposition to drop the high moral ground that such a precedent must not be sent down to hamper posterity, and they already openly talk about the impolicy of impeaching. It would be curious to hear a court talking of the impolicy of convicting a man for murder in the first degree. This everlasting compelling of honesty, morality, justice, and the law to bend the knee to policy is the rottenest thing in a Republican form of government. It is cowardly, degraded, and mischievous, and in its own good time it will bring destruction upon this broad-shouldered fabric of ours. I believe the Prince of Darkness could start a branch hell in the District of Columbia, if he has not already done it, and carried on unimpeached by the Congress of the United States, even though the Constitution were bristling with articles forbidding hells in this country. And if there were monied offices in it, Congress would take stock in the concern, too, and in less than three weeks Fessenden and Washburn would fill it full of their poor relations. What a rotten, rotten, and unspeakable nasty concern this nest of departments is with its brainless battalions of congressional poor relation clerks and their bookkeeping pencil-sharpening strumpets. IN ABAYANCE M. H. Farley's confirmation as Surveyor General of California is still in abeyance in the Senate. He comes well-recommended, but laterally the Senate has been thinking more of impeachment than executive sessions. If Ross Brown could rush his ministership to China before the Senate right away, he might secure a confirmation. But if the matter is delayed, till Mr. Burlingame arrives, there will be chances against him. Mr. B's voice will have great weight, and his late letter to the State Department evidences that he has a man to suggest for the place. Dr. Wells, no doubt, the distinguished secretary to the China mission. The gentleman who came here to get the San Francisco Postmaster ship still keeps his horse-tide up at Gatsby's. I took a vast amount of trouble to secure that horse in that position for the future, because I thought Upton was to have the Postmaster ship. But it seems the President not only promised the gentleman I requested to go to him that he would cancel the horseman's appointment, but with aggravated generosity said he believed he would not appoint anybody at all for the present. That was drawing it unnecessarily fine. I think I must go and have a talk with the President, myself, like JBS and MAC and those other newspaper correspondents. Later. I, even I, have had a most important talk with the President this evening at the General Reception. I said, How is your health, Mr. President? And he said, It cannot be of any particular consequence to you, young man. I keep a doctor. How do you think that will be likely to affect the political complexion of the times? It will complicate things some, won't it? Mark Twain. Territorial Enterprise April 24, 1868. Written by Enterprise staff. Mark Twain. This celebrated humorist, after having visited the Holy Land and all the principal cities of the Old World, will again once more press his foot upon his native sagebrush this morning. We received the following telegram from him last night dated at Coburn's. I am doing well, having crossed one divide without getting robbed, anyway. Mark Twain. Owing to the dissatisfaction of many in regard to the smallness of the Hall, Athletic Hall, in which it was at first proposed that Mark should lecture, arrangements have been made by which the opera house is secured for this Monday and Tuesday nights, the web-sisters having very kindly given their consent to release the house to him for those two nights. This arrangement, having been made, he will not lecture on Saturday night as was advertised. He will have enough to do for three or four days to shake hands and swap yarns with his old friends. The box office will open on Monday from ten o'clock a.m. till four o'clock p.m., when seats may be secured for both nights. Territorial Enterprise late April, 1868. Written by Enterprise staff. Mark Twain we have a right to claim as a washu humorist, and claiming him let us not fail to do what we can to encourage him by showing him that we appreciate his efforts to amuse and instruct us. He comes back to us, after many wanderings by sea and land in foreign countries, with his mind and portfolio enriched with choice collections of fact and fancy gleaned in places holy and not holy. He is a living budget of not the jokes of all times, but of jokes upon all nations, suggested by their peculiarities of manners, customs, and appearance. We predict for him the most crowded and brilliant audience of the season. All who have ever seen or heard of Mark Twain and his genius as a brilliant descriptive writer, wit and humorist, and who has not, will desire to go with him aboard the Quaker City, carpet-bag in hand, and gaze on the sleek faces and heads of the pious pilgrims of the Holy Land, all as yet unafflicted with the wilting nausea of seasickness, and looking forward with godly and courageous eyes toward the sacred soil and cities of the country in which scriptures were born. All will wish to accompany Mark to Palestine and ramble with him among the musty old palaces, churches, and tombs. In short, all will wish to follow him wherever he goes. As his followers will be many, let those who do not desire to be left behind on the voyage, go early tomorrow and secure seats for the through-trip.