 I published my map of the fortifications of Paris in my own paper a fortnight ago, but am obliged to reproduce it in the galaxy to satisfy the extraordinary demand for it which has arisen in military circles throughout the country. General Grant's outspoken commendation originated this demand, and General Sherman's fervent endorsement added fuel to it. The result is that tons of these maps have been fed to the suffering soldiers of our land, but without a veil. They hunger still. We will cast the galaxy into the breach and stand by and await the effect. The next Atlantic mail will doubtless bring news of a European frenzy for the map. It is reasonable to expect that the siege of Paris will be suspended till a German translation of it can be forwarded—it is now in preparation—and that the defence of Paris will likewise be suspended to await the reception of the French translation, now progressing under my own hands and likely to be unique. King William's high praise of the map and Napoleon's frank enthusiasm concerning its execution will ensure its prompt adoption in Europe as the only authoritative and legitimate exposition of the present military situation. It is plain that if the Prussians cannot get into Paris with the facilities afforded by this production of mine, they ought to deliver the enterprise into abler hands. Others to me keep insisting that this map does not explain itself. One person came to me with bloodshot eyes and an aroused look about him, and shook the map in my face and said he believed I was some kind of idiot. I have been bust a good deal by other quick-tempered people like him, who came with similar complaints. Now therefore I yield willingly, and for the information of the ignorant, will briefly explain the present military situation as illustrated by the map. Part of the Prussian forces, under Prince Frederick William, are now boarding at the farmhouse in the margin of the map. There is nothing between them and Vincennes but a rail fence in bad repair. Any corporal can see at a glance that they have only to burn it, pull it down, crawl under, climb over, or walk around it, just as the commander-in-chief shall elect. Every portion of the Prussian forces are at Podunk, under Von Moltke. They have nothing to do but float down the river Seine on a raft and scale the walls of Paris, let the worshippers of that overrated soldier believe in him still, and abide the result, for me, I do not believe he will ever think of a raft. At Omaha and the High Bridge are vast masses of Prussian infantry, and it is only fair to say that they are likely to stay there, as that figure of a window-sash between them stands for a brewery. A way up out of sight over the top of the map is the fleet of the Prussian Navy, ready at any moment to come caverting down the eerie canal, unless some new iniquity of an unprincipled legislature shall put up the tolls, and so render it cheaper to walk. To me it looks as if Paris is in a singularly close place. She never was situated before as she is in this map. Mark Twain. To the reader. The accompanying map explains itself. The idea of this map is not original with me, but is borrowed from the Tribune and the other great metropolitan journals. I claim no other merit for this production, if I may so call it, than that it is accurate. The main blemish of the city paper maps, of which it is an imitation, is that in them more attention seems paid to artistic picturesqueness than geographical reliability. In as much as this is the first time I ever tried to draft and engrave a map, or attempt anything in the line of art at all, the commendations the work has received and the admiration it has excited among the people have been very grateful to my feelings, and it is touching to reflect that by far the most enthusiastic of these praises have come from people who know nothing at all about art. By an unimportant oversight I have engraved the map so that it reads wrong end first, except to left-handed people. I forgot that in order to make it right in print it should be drawn and engraved upside down. However, let the student who desires to contemplate the map stand on his head or hold it before her looking-glass. That will bring it right. The reader will comprehend at a glance that that piece of river with the high bridge over it got left out to one side by reason of a slip of the engraving tool which rendered it necessary to change the entire course of the river Rhine, or else spoil the map. After having spent two days in digging and gouging at the map I would have changed the course of the Atlantic Ocean before I would have lost so much work. I never had so much trouble with anything in my life as I did with this map. I had heaps of little fortifications scattered all around Paris at first, but every now and then my instruments would slip and fetch away whole miles of batteries and leave the vicinity as clean as if the Prussians had been there. The reader will find it well to frame this map for future reference so that it may aid in extending popular intelligence and dispelling the widespread ignorance of the day. Mark Twain. Official Commendations. It is the only map of the kind I ever saw, U.S. Grant. It places the situation in an entirely new light. Bismarck. I cannot look upon it without shedding tears. Brigham Young. It is very nice, large print. Napoleon. My wife was for years afflicted with freckles, and though everything was done for her relief that could be done, all was in vain. But sir, since her first glance at your map they have entirely left her. She has nothing but convulsions now, J. Smith. If I had had this map I could have got out of Metz without any trouble. Bazaine. I have seen great many maps in my time, but none that this one reminds me of Troshu. It is but fair to say that in some respects it is a truly remarkable map, W.T. Sherman. I said to my son, Frederick William, if you could only make a map like that I would be perfectly willing to see you die, even anxious. William III. The Galaxy, November 1870, Memoranda, by Mark Twain. Goldsmith's friend abroad again, continued. Note. No experience is set down in the following letters which had to be invented. Fancy is not needed to give variety to a Chinaman sojourn in America. Plain fact is amply sufficient. Letter V. San Francisco, 18 Blank. You will remember that I had just been thrust violently into a cell in the city prison when I wrote last. I stumbled and fell on someone. I got a blow and a curse, and on top of these a kick or two and a shove. In a second or two it was plain that I was in a nest of prisoners and was being passed round. For the instant I was knocked out of the way of one I fell on the head or heels of another and was promptly ejected, only to land on a third prisoner and get a new contribution of kicks and curses and a new destination. I brought up, at last, in an unoccupied corner, very much battered and bruised and sore, but glad enough to be let alone for a little while. I was on the flagstones, for there was no furniture in the den except a long broad board, or combination of boards, like a barn door, and this bed was accommodating five or six persons, and that was its full capacity. They lay stretched side by side, snoring, when not fighting. One end of the board was four inches higher than the other, and so the slant answered for a pillow. There were no blankets, and the night was a little chilly. The nights are always a little chilly in San Francisco, though never severely cold. The board was a deal more comfortable than the stones, and occasionally some flagstone plebeian like me would try to creep to a place on it, and then the aristocrats would hammer him good and make him think a flag pavement was a nice enough place after all. I lay quiet in my corner, stroking my bruises and listening to the revelations the prisoners made to each other, and to me, for some that were near me talked to me a good deal. I had long had an idea that Americans, being free, had no need of prisons, which are a contrivance of despots for keeping restless patriots out of mischief. So I was considerably surprised to find out my mistake. Ours was a big general cell, it seemed, for the temporary accommodation of all comers whose crimes were trifling. During us there were two Americans, two greasers, Mexicans, a Frenchman, a German, four Irishmen, a Chilean, and, in the next cell, only separated from us by a grating, two women, all drunk and all more or less noisy. And as night fell and advanced they grew more and more discontented and disorderly, occasionally shaking the prison bars and glaring through them at the slowly pacing officer, and cursing him with all their hearts. The two women were nearly middle-aged, and they had only had enough liquor to stimulate instead of stupify them. Consequently they would fondle and kiss each other for some minutes, and then fall to fighting and keep it up till they were just two grotesque tangles of rags and blood, and tumbled hair. Then they would rest awhile and pant and swear. While they were affectionate they always spoke of each other as ladies, but while they were fighting, strumpet was the mildest name they could think of, and they could only make that do by tacking some sounding profanity to it. In their last fight, which was toward midnight, one of them bit off the other's finger, and then the officer interfered and put the greaser into the dark cell to answer for it, because the woman that did it laid it on him, and the other woman did not deny it, because, as she said afterward, she wanted another crack at the hussy when her finger quit hurting, and so she did not want her removed. By this time those two women had mutilated each other's clothes to that extent that there was not sufficient left to cover their nakedness. I found that one of these creatures had spent nine years in the county jail, and that the other one had spent about four or five years in the same space. They had done it from choice. As soon as they were discharged from captivity, they would go straight and get drunk, and then steal some trifling thing while an officer was observing them. That would entitle them to another two months in jail, and there they would occupy clean, airy apartments, and have good food in plenty, and being at no expense at all. They could make shirts for the clothiers at half a dollar apiece, and thus keep themselves in smoking tobacco and such other luxuries as they wanted. When the two months were up, they would go just as straight as they could walk to Mother Leonard's and get drunk, and from there to Kearney Street and steal something, and thence to the city prison, and next day back to the old quarters in the county jail again. One of them had really kept this up for nine years, and the other four or five, and both said they meant to end their days in that prison. Note the former of the two did, Ed Mem. Many both these creatures fell upon me, while I was dozing with my head against their grating, and battered me considerably because they discovered that I was a Chinaman, and they said I was a bloody interloping loafer come from the devil's own country to take the bread out of decent papal's mouths, and put down the wages for work when it was all a Christian could do to cape body and soul together as it was. Loafer means one who will not work. Letter Six San Francisco, 18 Blank Dear Ching Fu, to continue, the two women became reconciled to each other again through the common bond of interest and sympathy created between them by pounding me in partnership, and when they had finished me they fell to embracing each other again and swearing more eternal affection like that which had subsisted between them all the evening, barring occasional interruptions. They agreed to swear the finger-biting on the greaser in open court, and get him sent to the penitentiary for the crime of mayhem. Another of our country was a boy of fourteen who had been watched for some time by officers and teachers, and repeatedly detected in enticing young girls from the public schools to the lodgings of gentlemen downtown. He had been furnished with lures in the form of pictures and books of a peculiar kind, and these he had distributed among his clients. There were likenesses of fifteen of these young girls on exhibition, only to prominent citizens and persons in authority it was said, though most people came to get a sight. At the police headquarters, but no punishment at all was to be inflicted on the poor little misses. The boy was afterwards sent into captivity at the House of Correction for some months, and there was a strong disposition to punish the gentleman who had employed the boy to entice the girls, but as that could not be done without making public the names of those gentlemen, and thus injuring them socially, the idea was finally given up. There was also in our cell that night a photographer, a kind of artist who makes likenesses of people with a machine, who had been for some time patching the pictured heads of well-known and respectable young ladies to the nude pictured bodies of another class of women. Then from this patched creation he would make photographs and sell them privately at high prices to rowdies and black guards, avering that these, the best young ladies of the city, had hired him to take their likenesses in that unclad condition. What a lecture the police judge read that photographer when he was convicted. He told him his crime was little less than an outrage. He abused that photographer till he almost made him sink through the floor, and then he fined him a hundred dollars, and he told him he might consider himself lucky that he didn't find him a hundred and twenty-five dollars. They are awfully severe on crimes here. About two or two-and-a-half hours after midnight of that first experience of mine in the city prison, such of us as we're dozing were awakened by a noise of beating and dragging and groaning, and in a little while a man was pushed into our den with a, There, damn you, soak there a spell!—and then the gate was closed and the officers went away again. The man, who was thrust among us, fell limp and helpless by the grating, just as anybody could reach him with a kick without the trouble of hitching along toward him or getting fairly up to deliver it, our people only grumbled at him and cursed him and called him insulting names for misery and hardship to not make their victims gentle or charitable toward each other. But as he neither tried humbly to conciliate our people nor swore back at them, his unnatural conduct created surprise, and several of the party crawled to him where he lay in the dim light that came through the grating and examined into his case. His head was very bloody and his wits were gone. After about an hour he sat up and stared around. Then his eyes grew more natural and he began to tell how that he was going along with a bag on his shoulder and a brace of policeman ordered him to stop, which he did not do, was chased and caught, beaten ferociously about the head on the way to the prison and after a rival there, and finally thrown into our den like a dog. And in a few seconds he sank down again and grew flighty of speech. One of our people was at last penetrated with something vaguely akin to compassion, maybe, for he looked out through the gratings at the guardian officer pacing to and fro and said, Say, Mickey, this shrimp's going to die! Stop your noise!" was all the answer he got. But presently our man tried it again. He drew himself to the gratings, grasping them with his hands, and looking out through them sat, waiting till the officer was passing once more and then said, Sweetness, you'd better mind your eye now, because you beets have killed this cuss. You've busted his head and he'll pass in his checks before sun-up. You better go for a doctor now, you bet you had. The officer delivered a sudden wrap on our man's knuckles with his club that sent him scampering and howling among the sleeping forms on the flagstones, and an answering burst of laughter came from the half-dozen policemen idling about the rail desk in the middle of the dungeon. But there was a putting of heads together out there presently, and a conversing in low voices, which seemed to show that our man's talk had made an impression, and presently an officer went away in a hurry and shortly came back with a person who entered our cell and felt the bruised man's pulse and threw the glare of a lantern on his drawn face, striped with blood and his glassy eyes, fixed and vacant. The doctor examined the man's broken head also and presently said, If you called me an hour ago I might have saved this man, maybe. Too late now! Then he walked out into the dungeon and the officer surrounded him, and they kept up a low and earnest buzzing of conversation for fifteen minutes, I should think, and then the doctor took his departure from the prison. Several of the officers now came in and worked a little with the wounded man, but toward daylight he died. It was the longest, longest night, and when the daylight came filtering reluctantly into the dungeon at last it was the grayest, dreariest, saddest daylight, and yet when an officer by and by turned off the sickly yellow gas flame, and immediately the gray of dawn became fresh and white, there was a lifting of my spirits that acknowledged and believed that the night was gone and straight away I fell to stretching my sore limbs, and looking about me with a grateful sense of relief and a returning interest in life. About me lay evidences that what seemed now a feverish dream and a nightmare was the memory of a reality instead. For on the boards lay four frowsy, ragged, bearded vagabonds snoring, one turned end for end, and resting an unclean foot in a ruined stocking on the hairy breast of a neighbor, the young boy was uneasy and lay moaning in his sleep, other forms lay half revealed and half concealed about the floor. In the furthest corner the gray light fell upon a sheet, whose elevations and depressions indicated the places of the dead man's face and feet and folded hands, and through the dividing bars one could discern the almost nude forms of the two exiles from the county jail twined together in a drunken embrace and soddened with sleep. By and by all the animals in all the cages awoke and stretched themselves, and exchanged a few cuffs and curses, and then began to clamor for breakfast. Breakfast was brought in at last, bread and beef steak on tin plates and black coffee and tin cups, and no grabbing allowed. And after several dreary hours of waiting after this we were all marched out into the dungeon and joined there by all manner of vagrants and vagabonds of all shades and colors and nationalities from the other cells and cages of the place. And pretty soon our whole menagerie was marched upstairs and locked fast behind a high railing in a dirty room with a dirty audience in it, and this audience stared at us, and at a man seated on high behind what they call a pulpit in this country, and at some clerks and other officials seated below him and waited. This was the police court. The court opened. Pretty soon I was compelled to notice that a culprit's nationality made for or against him in this court. Overwhelming proofs were necessary to convict an Irishman of crime, and even then his punishment amounted to little. Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Italians had strict and unprejudiced justice meted out to them in exact accordance with the evidence. Negroes were promptly punished, when there was the slightest preponderance of testimony against them. But China men were punished always, apparently. Now, this gave me some uneasiness I confess. I knew that this state of things must of necessity be accidental, because in this country all men were free and equal, and one person could not take to himself an advantage not accorded to all other individuals. I knew that, and yet in spite of it I was uneasy. And I grew still more uneasy when I found that any suckered and befriended refugee from Ireland or elsewhere could stand up before that judge and swear away the life or liberty or character of a refugee from China. But that, by the law of the land, the Chinaman could not testify against the Irishman. I was really and truly uneasy. But still my faith in the universal liberty that America accords and defends, and my deep veneration for the land that offered all distressed outcasts a home and protection was strong within me, and I said to myself that it would all come out right yet. Asun He. End of Section 120. This is Section 121 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 121, The Galaxy, November 1870, Part 2. The Galaxy, November 1870. Memoranda by Mark Twain. A reminiscence of the back settlements. Now that corpse, said the undertaker, patting the folded hands of deceased approvingly, was a brick. Every way you took him he was a brick. He was so real accommodating, and so modest-like, and simple in his last moments. Friends wanted metallic burial-case. Nothing else would do. I couldn't get it. There weren't going to be time. Anybody could see that. Corpse said, never mind. Shake him up. Some kind of a box he could stretch out and comfortable. He weren't particular about the general style of it. Said he went more on room than style, anyway, in a last final container. Friends wanted a silver door plate on the coffin, signifying who he was and where he was from. Now you know a fellow couldn't rouse out such a galey thing as that in a little country town like this. What did Corpse say? Corpse said, whitewash his old canoe and dob his address and general destination onto it, with a blacking brush and a stencil plate, along with a verse from some likely him or other, and paint him for the tomb, and mark him C.O.D., and just let him skip along. He weren't distressed any more than you be. On the contrary, just as calm and collected as a hearse-horse, said he judged that where he was going to a body would find it considerable better to attract attention by a picturesque moral character than a natty burial case with a swelled door plate on it. Splendid man he was. I'd rather do for a corpse like that than any I'd tackled in seven years. There's some satisfaction in burying a man like that. You feel that what you're doing is appreciated. Lord bless you, so's he's got planted before he spiled, he was perfectly satisfied. Said his relations meant well, perfectly well, but all them preparations was bound to delay the thing more or less, and he didn't wish to be kept laying round. You never see such a clear head as what he had, and so calm and so cool, just a hunk of brains, that is what he was. Perfectly awful. It was a ripened distance from one end of that man's head to the other. Often and over again, he's had brain fever arranging in one place, and the rest of the pile didn't know anything about it, didn't affect it any more than an engine insurrection in Arizona, affects the Atlantic states. Well, the relations, they wanted a big funeral. The corpse said he was down on flurry, didn't want any procession. Fill the hearse full of mourners, and get out a stern line and to him behind. He was the most down on style of any remains I ever struck. A beautiful, simple minded creature. It was what he was. You can depend on that. He was just set on having things the way he wanted them, and he took a solid comfort in laying his little plans. He had me measure him and take a whole raft of directions. Then he had the minister stand up behind a long box with a tablecloth over it, and read his funeral sermon, saying, Angor, Angor, at the good places, and making him scratch out every bit of brag about him, and all the highfalutin. Then he made them trot out the choirs, so he could help them pick out the tunes for the occasion, and he got them to sing Pop Goes the Weasel, because he'd always liked that tune when he was down-hearted, and solemn music made him sad, and when they sung that with tears in their eyes, because they all loved him, and his relations grieving around, he just laid there as happy as a bug, and tried to beat time and showing all over how much he enjoyed it, and presently he got worked up and excited and tried to join in, for, mind you, he was pretty proud of his abilities in the singing-line, but the first time he opened his mouth, and was just going to spread himself, his breath took a walk. I never see a man snuffed out so sudden. Ah, it was a great loss. It was a powerful loss to this poor little one-horse town. Well, well, well, I ain't got time to be plavering along here, got to nail on the lid and mosey along with him, and if you'll just give me a lift we'll skeet him into the hearse and meander down. Relations bound to have it so. Don't pay no attention to dying in junctions, a minute a corpse gone. But if I had my way, if I didn't respect his last wishes and tow him behind the hearse, I'll be cussed. I consider that whatever a corpse wants done for his comfort is a little enough matter, and a man ain't got no right to deceive him or take advantage of him, and whatever a corpse trusts me to do, I'm a going to do it, you know, even if it's to stuff him and paint him yaller and keep him for a keepsake, you hear me? He cracked his whip and went lumbering away with his ancient ruin of a hearse, and I continued my walk with a valuable lesson learned that a healthy and wholesome cheerfulness is not necessarily impossible to any occupation. The lesson is likely to be lasting, for it will take many months to obliterate the memory of the remarks and circumstances that impressed it. The Galaxy November 1870. Memoranda by Mark Twain. A general reply. When I was sixteen or seventeen years old, a splendid idea burst upon me, a brand new one, which had never occurred to anybody before. I would write some pieces and take them down to the editor of the Republican, and ask him to give me his plain unvarnished opinion of their value. Now, as old and threadbare as the idea was, it was fresh and beautiful to me, and it went flaming and crashing through my system like the genuine lightning and thunder of originality. I wrote the pieces. I wrote them with that placid confidence and that happy facility which only want of practice and absence of literary experience can give. There was not one sentence in them that cost half an hour's weighing and shaping and trimming and fixing. Indeed, it is possible that there was no one sentence whose mere wording cost even one-sixth of that time. If I remember rightly, there was not one single erasure or inter- lineation in all that chaste manuscript. I have since lost that large belief in my powers, and likewise that marvelous perfection of execution. I started down to the Republican office with my pocket full of manuscripts, my brain full of dreams, and a grand future opening out before me. I knew perfectly well that the editor would be ravished with my pieces. But presently, however the particulars are of no consequence, I was only about to say that a shadowy sort of doubt just then intruded upon my exaltation. Another came, and another. Pretty soon a whole procession of them, and at last, when I stood before the Republican office and looked up at its tall, unsympathetic front, it seemed hardly me that could have chinned its towers ten minutes before, and was now so shrunk up and pitiful that if I dared to step on the greatings I should probably go through. At about that crisis the editor, the very man I had come to consult, came downstairs and halted a moment to pull at his wristbands and settle his coat to its place, and he happened to notice that I was eyeing him wistfully. He asked me what I wanted. I answered, Nothing! with the boy's own meekness and shame, and dropping my eyes crept humbly round till I was fairly in the alley, and then drew a big, grateful breath of relief, and picked up my heels and ran. I was satisfied. I wanted no more. It was my first attempt to get a plain, unvarnished opinion out of a literary man concerning my compositions, and it has lasted me until now. And in these latter days, whenever I receive a bundle of manuscript through the mail, with a request that I will pass judgment upon its merits, I feel like saying to the author, If you had only taken your piece to some grim and stately newspaper office, where you did not know anybody, you would not have so fine an opinion of your production as it is easy to see you have now. Every man who becomes editor of a newspaper or magazine straight away begins to receive manuscripts from literary aspirants, together with requests that he will deliver judgment upon the same. And, after complying in eight or ten instances, he finally takes refuge in a general sermon upon the subject, which he inserts in his publication, and always afterward refers such correspondence to that sermon for answer. I have at last reached this station in my literary career. I now cease to reply privately to my applicants for advice, and proceed to construct my public sermon. As all letters of the sort I am speaking of contain the very same matter differently worded, I offer, as a fair average specimen, the last one I have received. Mark Twain Esquire. Dear Sir, I am a youth just out of school and ready to start in life. I have looked around, but don't see anything that suits exactly. Is a literary life easy and profitable, or is it the hard times it is generally put up for? It must be easier than a good many if not most of the occupations, and I feel drawn to launch out on it, make or break, sink or swim, survive or perish. Now, what are the conditions of success in literature? You need not be afraid to paint the thing just as it is. I can't do any worse than fail. Everything else offers the same. When I thought of the law, yes, and five or six other professions, I found the same thing was the case every time. These, all full, overrun, every profession so crammed that success is rendered impossible. Too many hands and not enough work. But I must try something, and so I turn at last to literature. Something tells me that that is the true bent of my genius, if I have any. I enclose some of my pieces. Will you read them over and give me your candid, unbiased opinion of them? And now I hate to trouble you, but you have been a young man yourself, and what I want is for you to get me a newspaper job of writing to do. You know many newspaper people, and I am entirely unknown. And will you make the best terms you can for me, though I do not expect what might be called high wages at first, of course? Will you candidly say what such articles as these I enclose are worth? I have plenty of them. If you should sell these and let me know, I can send you more, as good and maybe better than these. An early reply, etc., yours truly, etc. I will answer you in good faith, whether my remarks shall have great value or not, or my suggestions be worth following, are problems which I take great pleasure in, leaving entirely to you for solution. To begin, there are several questions in your letter which only a man's life experience can eventually answer for him, not another man's words. I will simply skip those. One. Literature, like the ministry, medicine, the law, and all other occupations, is cramped and hindered for want of men to do the work, not want of work to do. When people tell you the reverse, they speak that which is not true. If you desire to test this, you need only hunt up a first-class editor, reporter, business manager, foreman of a shop, mechanic, or artist in any branch of industry, and try to hire him. You will find that he is already hired. He is sober, industrious, capable, and reliable, and is always in demand. He cannot get a day's holiday except by courtesy of his employer, or his city, or the great general public. But if you need idlers, shirkers, half-instructed, unambitious, and comfort-seeking editors, reporters, lawyers, doctors, and mechanics, apply anywhere. There are millions of them to be had at the dropping of a handkerchief. Two. No, I must not and will not venture any opinion whatever as to the literary merit of your productions. The public is the only critic whose judgment is worth anything at all. Do not take my poor word for this, but reflect a moment and take your own. For instance, if Silvanus Cobb or T. S. Arthur had submitted their maiden manuscripts to you, you would have said, with tears in your eyes, now please don't write any more. But you see yourself how popular they are, and if it had been left to you, you would have said the marble fawn was tiresome, and that even Paradise Lost lacked cheerfulness. But you know they sell. Many wiser and better men than you, who pood Shakespeare, even as late as two centuries ago. But still that old party has outlived those people. No, I will not sit in judgment upon your literature. If I honestly and conscientiously praised it, I might thus help to inflict a lingering and pitiless bore upon the public. If I honestly and conscientiously condemned it, I might thus rob the world of an undeveloped and unsuspected dickens, or Shakespeare. III. I shrink from hunting up literary labour for you to do and receive pay for. Whenever your literary productions have proved for themselves that they have a real value, you will never have to go around hunting for remunerative literary work to do. You will require more hands than you have now, and more brains than you probably ever will have to do even half the work that will be offered you. Now, in order to arrive at the proof of value herein before spoken of, one needs only to adopt a very simple and certainly very sure process, and that is, to write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers pay, within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for. If he has any wisdom at all, then, he will retire with dignity and assume his heaven-appointed vocation. In the above remarks I have only offered a course of action which Mr. Dickens and most other successful literary men had to follow, but it is a course which will find no sympathy with my client, perhaps. The young literary aspirant is a very, very curious creature. He knows that if he wished to become a tenor, the Master Smith would require him to prove the possession of a good character, and would require him to promise to stay in the shop three years, possibly four, and would make him sweep out and bring water and build fires all the first year, and let him learn to black stoves in the intervals, and for these good, honest services would pay him two suits of cheap clothes and his board, and next year he would begin to receive instructions in the trade, and a dollar a week would be added to his emoluments, and two dollars would be added the third year, and three the fourth, and then, if he had become a first rate tenor, he would get about fifteen or twenty, or maybe thirty dollars a week, with never a possibility of getting seventy-five while he lived. If he wanted to become a mechanic of any other kind, he would have to undergo this same tedious ill-paid apprenticeship. If he wanted to become a lawyer or a doctor, he would have fifty times worse, for he would get nothing at all during his long apprenticeship, and in addition would have to pay a large sum for tuition, and have the privilege of boarding and clothing himself. The literary aspirant knows all this, and yet he has the hardy hood to present himself a reception into the literary guild, and ask to share its high honors and emoluments, without a single twelve months' apprenticeship to show an excuse for his presumption. He would smile pleasantly if he were asked to make even so simple a thing as a ten-cent, ten-dipper without previous instruction in the art, but all green and ignorant, wordy, pompously assertive, ungrammatical, and with a vague distorted knowledge of men and the world acquired in a back-country village, he will serenely take up so dangerous a weapon as a pen, and attack the most formidable subject that finance, commerce, war, or politics can furnish him with all. It would be laughable if it were not so sad and so pitiable. The poor fellow would not intrude upon the tin shop without an apprenticeship, but is willing to seize and wield with unpracticed hand an instrument which is able to overthrow dynasties, change religions, and decree the wheel or woe of nations. If my correspondent will write free of charge for the newspapers of his neighborhood, it will be one of the strangest things that ever happened if he does not get all the employment he can attend to on those terms, and as soon as ever his writings are worth money, plenty of people will hasten to offer it. And by way of serious and well-mint encouragement I wish to urge upon him, once more, the truth that acceptable writers for the press are so scarce that book and periodical publishers are seeking them constantly, and with a vigilance that never grows heedless for a moment. Alexi, November 1870. Memoranda by Mark Twain. Favors from Correspondence. Out of a rusty and dusty old scrapbook a friend in Nevada resurrects the following verses for us. Thirty years ago, they were very popular, it was on a wager as to whether this poem originated in the Noctis Ambrosiane or not, that Lester won two thousand pounds, the Lawyer's Poem. Whereas on sundry boughs and sprays now diverse birds are heard to sing, and sundry flowers their heads upraised to hail the coming-on of spring, the songs of the said birds arouse the memory of our youthful hours, as young and green as the said boughs, as fresh and fair as the said flowers. The birds aforesaid, happy pairs, love midst the aforesaid boughs and shrines in household nests, themselves, their heirs, administrators, and assigns. Oh, busiest time of Cupid's court when tender plaintives actions bring. Season of frolic and of sport, hail as aforesaid coming spring. Occasionally from suffering soul there comes to this department a frantic appeal for help, which just boils an entire essay down into one exhaustive sentence, and leaves nothing more to be said upon that subject. Now, can the reader find any difficulty in picturing to himself what this subscriber has been going through out there at Hazel Green, Wisconsin? Mr. Twain, my dear sir, do not in your memoranda forget the traveling book agents. They are about as tolerable as lightning rod men, especially the red-nosed chaps who sell juveniles, temperance tracks, and such like delectable fodder, yours, etc., a subscriber. Such subscription canvassers, probably, are all this correspondence fancy-paints them, none but those canvassers who sell compact concentrations of solid wisdom, like the work entitled The Innocence Abroad, can really be said to be indispensable to the nation. In a graceful feminine hand comes the following from a city of Illinois. Reading your remarks upon innocence in a recent galaxy, I must tell you how that touching little obituary was received here. I attended a lecture and sat beside and was introduced to a young minister from Pennsylvania a few evenings since. Having my galaxy in my hand, and knowing the proverbial ministerial love of a joke, I handed him the little poem simply whispering, Mark Twain. He read it through gravely, and in the most serious manner turned to me and whispered, Did Mark Twain write that? Breeze there a man with soul so dead. If this is a specimen of your eastern young ministers, we Western girls will take no more at present, I thank you. Speaking of ministers reminds me of a joke that I always thought worth publishing. It is a fact too, which all the jokes published are not. The Reverend Dr. B. was minister in our stylish little city some years since. He was a pompous, important, flowery sort of preacher, very popular with the masses. He exchanged pulpits with old Solomon M., the plain, meek old minister of the little sea church, one Sabbath. And the expectant little congregation were surprised when the grand doctor arose and gave out as his text. For, behold, a greater than Solomon is here. It is said that once a man of small consequence died, and the Reverend T. K. Beecher was asked to preach the funeral sermon, a man who abhors the louding of people, either dead or alive, except in dignified and simple language, and then only for merits which they actually possessed or possess, not merits which they merely ought to have possessed. The friends of the deceased got up a stately funeral. They must have had misgivings that the corpse might not be praised strongly enough, for they prepared some manuscript headings and notes in which nothing was left unsaid on that subject that a fervid imagination and an unabridged dictionary could compile, and these they handed to the minister as he entered the pulpit. They were merely intended as suggestions, and so the friends were filled with consternation when the minister stood up in the pulpit and proceeded to read off the curious odds and ends in ghastly detail and in a loud voice. And their consternation solidified to petrification when he paused at the end, contemplated the multitude reflectively, and then said impressively, The man would be a fool who tried to add anything to that. Let us pray. And with the same strict adhesion to truth it can be said that the man would be a fool who tried to add anything to the following transcendent obituary poem. There is something so innocent, so guileless, so complacent, so unearthly serene, and so satisfied about this peerless hogwash, that the man must be made of stone who can read it without a dulcet ecstasy creeping along his backbone and quivering in his marrow. There is no need to say that this poem is genuine, and in earnest, for its proofs are written all over its face. An ingenious scribbler might imitate it after a fashion, but Shakespeare himself could not counterfeit it. It is noticeable that the country editor who published it did not know that it was a treasure, and the most perfect thing of its kind that the big storehouses and museums of literature could show. He did not dare to say no to the dread poet, for such a poet must have been something of an apparition. But he just shoveled it into his paper anywhere that came handy, and felt ashamed, and put that disgusted published by request over it, and hoped that his subscribers would overlook or not feel an impulse to read it. Published by Request Lines Composed on the Death of Samuel and Catherine Belknap's Children by M. A. Glaze Friends and neighbors all draw near and listen to what I have to say, and never leave your children, dear, when they are small, and go away, but always think of that sad day that happened in year of sixty-three. Four children with a house did burn, think of their awful agony. Their mother, she had gone away, and left them there alone to stay. The house took fire, and down did burn before their mother did return. Their piteous cry the neighbors heard, and then the cry of fire was given. But, ah, before they could reach their little spirits had flown to heaven. Their father, he to war, had gone, and on the battlefield was slain. But little did he think when he went away, but what on earth they would meet again. The neighbors often told his wife not to leave his children there, unless she got some one to stay, and of the little ones take care. The oldest he was years, not six, and the youngest only eleven months old. But often she had left them there alone, as by the neighbors I have been told. How can she bear to see the place where she so oft has left them there, without a single one to look to them, or of the little ones to take good care? Oh, can she look upon the spot where under their little burnt bones lay, but what she thinks she hears them say, was God had pity and took us on high. And there may she kneel down and pray, and ask God, her, to forgive, and she may lead a different life while she on earth remains to live. Her husband and her children too, God has took from pain and woe. May she reform and mend her ways that she may also to them go. And when it is God's holy will, oh, may she be prepared to meet her God and friends in peace, and leave this world of care. CHAPTER I THE GALAXY DECEMBER 1870 MEMORANDA by Mark Twain AN ENTERTAINING ARTICLE I take the following paragraph from an article in the Boston Advertiser. An English critic on Mark Twain. Perhaps the most successful flights of the humor of Mark Twain have been descriptions of the persons who did not appreciate his humor at all. We have become familiar with the Californians who were thrilled with terror by his burlesque of a newspaper reporter's way of telling a story, and we have heard of the Pennsylvania clergyman who sadly returned his innocence abroad to the book-agent with a remark that, the man who could shed tears over the tomb of Adam must be an idiot. But Mark Twain may now add a much more glorious instance to his string of trophies. The Saturday Review, in its number of October 8, reviews his book of travels, which has been republished in England, and reviews it seriously. We can imagine the delight of the humorist in reading this tribute to his power, and indeed it is so amusing in itself that he can hardly do better than reproduce the article in full in his next monthly memoranda. Publishing the above paragraph thus gives me a sort of authority for reproducing the Saturday Review's article in full in these pages. I dearly wanted to do it, for I cannot write anything half-so-delicious myself. If I had a cast-iron dog that could read this English criticism and preserve his austerity, I would drive him off the doorstep. Editor Memoranda From the London Saturday Review Review of New Books The Innocence Abroad A Book of Travels by Mark Twain London Hotten Publisher, 1870 Would Macaulay Die Too Soon? We never felt this so deeply as when we finished the last chapter of the above-named extravagant work. Macaulay died too soon, for none but he could meet out complete and comprehensive justice to the insolence, the impertinence, the presumption, the mendacity, and above all, the majestic ignorance of this author. To say that the Innocence Abroad is a curious book would be to use the faintest language, would be to speak of the Matterhorn as a neat elevation, or of Niagara as being nice or pretty. Curious is too tame a word wherewith to describe the imposing insanity of this work. There is no word that is large enough or long enough. Let us therefore photograph a passing glimpse of book and author, and trust the rest to the reader. Let the cultivated English student of human nature picture to himself this Mark Twain as a person capable of doing the following described things, and not only doing them, but with incredible innocence printing them calmly and tranquilly in a book, for instance. He states that he entered a hairdressers in Paris to get shaved, and the first rake the barber gave with his razor it loosened his hide and lifted him out of the chair. This is unquestionably exaggerated. In Florence he was so annoyed by beggars that he pretends to have seized an eaten one in a frantic spirit of revenge. There is, of course, no truth in this. He gives that full length a theatrical program, seventeen or eighteen hundred years old, which he professes to have found in the ruins of the Colosseum among the dirt, and mould, and rubbish. It is a sufficient comment upon this statement to remark that even a cast iron program would not have lasted so long under such circumstances. In Greece he plainly betrays both fright and flight upon one occasion, but with frozen effrontery puts the latter in this falsely tamed form. We sidled towards the Piraeus. Sidled indeed. He does not hesitate to intimate that at Ephesus when his mule strayed from the proper course, he got down, took him under his arm, carried him to the road again, pointed him right, remounted, and went to sleep contentedly till it was time to restore the beast to the path once more. He states that a growing youth among his ship's passengers was in the constant habit of appeasing his hunger with soap and oakum between meals. In Palestine he tells of ants that came eleven miles to spend the summer in the desert and brought their provisions with them, yet he shows by his description of the country that the feat was an impossibility. He mentions, as if it were the most common place of matters, that he cut a Moslem in two, in broad daylight in Jerusalem, with Godfrey de Bouillon's sword, and would have shed more blood if he had had a graveyard of his own. These statements are unworthy a moment's attention. Mr. Twain, or any other foreigner who did such a thing in Jerusalem, would be mobbed and would infallibly lose his life. But why go on? Why repeat more of his audacious and exasperating falsehoods? Let us close fittingly with this one. He affirms that, in the Mosque of St. Sophia at Constantinople I got my feet so stuck up with a complication of gums, slime, and general impurity that I wore out more than two thousand pair of bootjacks getting my boots off that night. And even then some Christian hide peeled off with them. It is monstrous. Such statements are simply lies. There is no other name for them. With the reader longer marvel at the brutal ignorance that pervades the American nation when we tell him that we are informed upon perfectly good authority, that this extravagant compilation of falsehoods, this exhaustive mind of stupendous lies, this innocence abroad, has actually been adopted by the schools and colleges of several of the states as a textbook. But if his falsehoods are distressing, his innocence and his ignorance are enough to make one burn the book and despise the author. In one place he was so appalled at the sudden spectacle of a murdered man unveiled by the moonlight that he jumped out of the window, going through sash and all, and then remarks with the most childlike simplicity that he was not scared but was considerably agitated. It puts us out of patience to note that the simpleton is densely unconscious that Lucretia Borgia ever existed off the stage. He is vulgarly ignorant of all foreign languages, but is frank enough to criticize the Italians' use of their own tongue. He says they spell the name of their great painter Vinci, but pronounce it Vincci, and then adds with a naivete possible only to helpless ignorance, foreigners all spell better than they pronounce. In another place he commits the bald absurdity of putting the phrase Ternunz into an Italian's mouth. In Rome he unhesitatingly believes the legend that St. Philip Neri's heart was so inflamed with divine love that it burst his ribs, believes it wholly because an author, with a learned list of university degrees strung after his name, endorses it. Otherwise, says this gentle idiot, I should have felt curiosity to know what Philip had for dinner. Our author makes a long, fatiguing journey to the Grotto del Cane on purpose to test its poisoning powers on a dog, got elaborately ready for the experiment, and then discovered that he had no dog. A wiser person would have kept such a thing discreetly to himself. But with this harmless creature everything comes out. He hurts his foot in a rut two thousand years old in exhumed Pompeii, and presently when staring at one of the cinder-like corpses unearthed in the next square, conceives the idea that maybe it is the remains of the ancient street commissioner, and straightway his horror softens down to a sort of chirpy contentment with the condition of things. In Damascus he visits the well of Ananias, three thousand years old, and is as surprised and delighted as a child to find that the water is as pure and fresh as if the well had been dug yesterday. In the Holy Land he gags desperately at the hard Arabic and Hebrew Biblical names, and finally concludes to call them Baldwinsville, Williamsburg, and so on, for convenience of spelling. We have thus spoken freely of this man's stupefying simplicity and innocence, but we cannot deal similarly with his colossal ignorance. We do not know where to begin. And if we knew where to begin, we certainly would not know where to leave off. We will give one specimen and one only. He did not know, until he got to Rome, that Michelangelo was dead. And then, instead of crawling away and hiding his shameful ignorance somewhere, he proceeds to express a pious, grateful sort of satisfaction that he has gone, and out of his troubles. Nope, the reader may seek out the author's exhibition of his uncultivation for himself. The book is absolutely dangerous, considering the magnitude and variety of its misstatements and the convincing confidence with which they are made, and yet it is a textbook in the schools of America. The poor blunderer mouses among the sublime creations of the old masters, trying to acquire the elegant proficiency in art knowledge, which he has a groping sort of comprehension is a proper thing for the traveled man to be able to display. But what is the manner of his study, and what is the progress he achieves? To what extent does he familiarize himself with the great pictures of Italy, and what degree of appreciation does he arrive at? Read. When we see a monk going about with a lion and looking up into heaven, we know that that is St. Mark. When we see a monk with a book and a pen, looking tranquilly up to heaven, trying to think of a word, we know that that is St. Matthew. When we see a monk sitting on a rock, looking tranquilly up to heaven, with a human skull beside him, and without other baggage, we know that that is St. Jerome, because we know that he always went flying light in the matter of baggage. When we see other monks looking tranquilly up to heaven, but having no trademark, we always ask who those parties are. We do this because we humbly wish to learn. He then enumerates the thousands and thousands of copies of these several pictures which he has seen, and adds with a custom simplicity that he feels encouraged to believe that when he has seen some more of each and had a larger experience, he will eventually begin to take an absorbing interest in them, the vulgar boar. That we have shown this to be a remarkable book we think no one will deny. That it is a pernicious book to place in the hands of the confiding and uninformed we think we have also shown. That the book is a deliberate and wicked creation of a diseased mind is apparent upon every page. Having placed our judgment thus upon record, let us close with what charity we can, by marking that even in this volume there is some good to be found. For whenever the author talks of his own country and lets Europe alone, he never fails to make himself interesting, and not only interesting but instructive. No one can read without benefit his occasional chapters and paragraphs about life in the gold and silver mines of California and Nevada, about the Indians of the plains and deserts of the West and their cannibalism, about the raising of vegetables in kegs of gunpowder, by the aid of two or three teaspoonfuls of guano, about the moving of small farms from place to place at night in wheel-barrows to avoid taxes, and about a sort of cows and mules in the humboldt mines that climbed down chimneys and disturbed the people at night. These matters are not only new, but are well worth knowing. Note, yes, I calculated they were pretty new, I invented them myself, Mark Twain. It is a pity the author did not put in more of the same kind. His book is well written and is exceedingly entertaining, and so it just barely escaped being quite valuable also. THE GALAXY December 1870 Memoranda by Mark Twain History repeats itself. The following I find in a sandwich island paper which some friend has sent me from that tranquil far-off retreat. The coincidence between my own experience and that here set down by the late Mr. Benton is so remarkable that I cannot forbear publishing and commenting upon the paragraph. The sandwich island paper says, How touching is this tribute of the late Honorable T. H. Benton to his mother's influence? My mother asked me never to use tobacco. I have never touched it from that time to the present day. She asked me not to gamble. And I have never gambled. I cannot tell who is losing in games that are being played. She admonished me too against liquor-drinking, and whatever capacity for endurance I have at present, and whatever usefulness I may have attained through life, I attribute to having complied with her pious and correct wishes. When I was seven years of age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a resolution of total abstinence, and that I have adhered to it through all time I owe to my mother. I never saw anything so curious. It is almost an exact epitome of my own moral career, after simply substituting a grandmother for a mother. How well I remember my grandmother's asking me not to use tobacco, good old soul. She said, You're at it again. Are you, you welp? Now, don't ever let me catch you chewing tobacco before breakfast again, or I lay I'll black snake you within an inch of your life. I have never touched it at that hour of the morning from that time to the present day. She asked me not to gamble. She whispered and said, Put up those wicked cards this minute to pair in a jack you numbskull, and the other fellows got a flush. I never have gambled from that day to this, never once, without a cold deck in my pocket. I cannot even tell who is going to lose in games that are being played unless I dealt myself. When I was two years of age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a resolution of total abstinence, that I have adhered to it and enjoyed the beneficent effects of it through all time I owe to my grandmother. I have never drunk a drop from that day to this of any kind of water. THE GALAXY DECEMBER 1870. MEMORANDA BY MARK TWAIN. RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR. A few months ago I was nominated for governor of the great state of New York to run against Stuart L. Woodford and John T. Hoffman on an independent ticket. I somehow felt that I had one prominent advantage over these gentlemen, and that was, good character. It was easy to see by the newspapers, but if ever they had known what it was to bear a good name, that time had gone by. It was plain that in these latter years they had become familiar with all manner of shameful crimes, but at the very moment that I was exalting my advantage, enjoying in it in secret, there was a muddy undercurrent of discomfort riling the deeps of my happiness, and that was the having to hear my name bandied about in familiar connection with those of such people. I grew more and more disturbed. Finally I wrote my grandmother about it. Her answer came quick and sharp. She said, You have never done one single thing in all your life to be ashamed of. Not one. Look at the newspapers. Look at them and comprehend what sort of characters Woodford and Hoffman are, and then see if you are willing to lower yourself to their level and enter a public canvas with them. It was my very thought. I did not sleep a single moment that night, but after all I could not recede. I was fully committed and must go on with the fight. As I was looking listlessly over the papers at breakfast I came across this paragraph, and I may truly say I never was so confounded before. PERJURY Perhaps, now that Mr. Mark Twain is before the public as a candidate for governor, he will condescend to explain how he came to be convicted of perjury by thirty-four witnesses in Waka Waka Cochin, China, in 1863, the intent of which perjury was to rob a poor native widow and her helpless family of a meager plantain patch, their only stay and support in their bereavement and their desolation. Mr. Twain owes it to himself, as well as to the great people whose suffrages he asks to clear this matter up. Will he do it? I thought I should burst with amazement. Such a cruel, heartless charge! I never had seen Cochin, China. I never had heard of Waka Waka. I didn't know a plantain patch from a kangaroo. I did not know what to do. I was crazed and helpless. I let the day slip away without doing anything at all. The next morning the same paper had this, nothing more. Significant. Mr. Twain, it will be observed, is suggestively silent about the Cochin, China perjury. Mem, during the rest of the campaign, this paper never referred to me in any other than as the infamous perjurer Twain. Next came the Gazette, with this. Wanted to know, will the new candidate for governor deign to explain to certain of his fellow-citizens, who are suffering to vote for him, the little circumstance of his cabin-mates in Montana losing small valuables from time to time, until at last these things having been invariably found on Mr. Twain's person, or in his trunk—newspaper he rolled his traps in—they felt compelled to give him a friendly admonition for his own good, and so tarred and feathered him, and rode him on a rail, and then advised him to leave a permanent vacuum in the place he usually occupied in the camp. Will he do this? Could anything be more deliberately malicious than that, for I never was in Montana in my life. After this, this journal customarily spoke of me as Twain the Montana Thief. I got to picking up papers apprehensively, much as one would lift a retired blanket, which he had some idea might have a rattlesnake under it. One day this met my eye. The lie nailed. By the sworn affidavits of Michael O'Flanagan Esquire of the Five Points, and Mr. Kit Burns and Mr. John Allen of Water Street, it is established that Mr. Mark Twain's vile statement that the lamented grandfather of our noble standard-bearer John T. Hoffman was hanged for highway robbery is a brutal and gratuitous lie, without a single shadow of foundation in fact. It is disheartening to virtuous men to see such shameful means resorted to to achieve political success as the attacking of the dead in their graves and defiling their honored names with slander. When we think of the anguish this miserable falsehood must cause the innocent relatives and friends of the deceased, we are almost driven to incite an outraged and insulted public to summary and unlawful vengeance upon the traducer. But no, let us leave him to the agony of a lacerating conscience. Though if passions should get the better of the public, and in its blind fury they should do the traducer bodily injury, it is but too obvious that no jury could convict and no court punish the perpetrators of the deed. The ingenious closing sentence had the effect of moving me out of bed with dispatch that night and out at the back door also while the outraged and insulted public surged in the front way, breaking furniture and windows in their righteous indignation as they came and taking off such property as they could carry when they went. And yet I can lay my hand upon the book and say that I never slandered Governor Hoffman's grandfather. More I had never even heard of him or mentioned him up to that day and date. I will state in passing that the journal above quoted from always referred to me afterward as Twain the Body Snatcher. The next newspaper article that attracted my attention was the following. A sweet candidate. Mark Twain, who was to make such a blighting speech at the mass meeting of the independents last night, didn't come to time. A telegram from his physician stated that he had been knocked down by a runaway team and his leg broken in two places, sufferer lying in great agony and so forth and so forth, and a lot more Bosch of the same sort. And the independents tried hard to swallow the wretched subterfuge and pretend that they did not know what was the real reason of the absence of the abandoned creature whom they denominate their standard bearer. A certain man was seen to reel into Mr. Twain's hotel last night in state of beastly intoxication. It is the imperative duty of the independents to prove that this besotted brute was not Mark Twain himself. We have them at last. This is a case that admits of no shirking. The voice of the people demands in thunder-tones, who was that man? It was incredible, absolutely incredible, for a moment, that it was really my name that was coupled with this disgraceful suspicion. Three long years had passed over my head since I had tasted ale, beer, wine, or liquor of any kind. It shows what effect the times were having on me when I say that I saw myself confidently dubbed Mr. Delirium Tremens Twain in the next issue of that journal without a pang, notwithstanding I knew that with monotonous fidelity the paper would go on calling me so to the very end. By this time anonymous letters were getting to be an important part of my mail matter, this form was common. How about that old woman you kiked of your premises which was begging? Pull pry. And this. There is things which you have done which is unbeknownst to anybody but me. You better trot out a few dolls to yours truly, or you'll hear through the papers from Handy Andy. That is about the idea. I could continue them till the reader was sufficient, if desirable. Shortly the principal republican journal convicted me of wholesale bribery, and the leading democratic paper nailed an aggravated case of blackmailing to me. In this way I acquired two additional names, Twain, the filthy corruptionist, and Twain, the loathsome embracer. By this time there had grown to be such a clamor for an answer to all the dreadful charges that were laid to me that the editors and leaders of my party said it would be political ruin for me to remain silent any longer. As if to make their appeal the more imperative, the following appeared in one of the papers the very next day. Behold the man! The independent candidate still maintains silence, because he dare not speak. Every accusation against him has been amply proved, and they have been endorsed and re-endorsed by his own eloquent silence to let this day he stands forever convicted. Look upon your candidate independence. Look upon the infamous perjurer. The mountain thief. The body snatcher. Contemplate your incarnate delirium tremens. Your filthy corruptionist. Your loathsome embracer. Gaze upon him. Ponder him well. And then say if you can give your honest votes to a creature who has earned this dismal array of titles by his hideous crimes and dares not open his mouth in denial of any one of them. There was no possible way of getting out of it, and so in deep humiliation I set about preparing to answer a mass of baseless charges and mean and wicked falsehoods. But I never finished the task. For the very next morning a paper came out with a new horror, a fresh malignity, and seriously charged me with burning a lunatic asylum with all its inmates because it obstructed the view from my house. This threw me into a sort of panic. Then came the charge of poisoning my uncle to get his property, with an imperative demand that the grave should be opened. This drove me to the verge of distraction. On top of this I was accused of employing toothless and incompetent old relatives to prepare the food for the Foundling Hospital when I was warden. I was wavering, wavering, and at last as a due and fitting climax to the shameless persecution that party-ranker had inflicted upon me, nine little-toddling children of all shades of color and degrees of raggedness were taught to rush onto the platform at a public meeting and clasp me around the legs and call me pa. I gave up. I hauled down my colors and surrendered. I was not equal to the requirements of a gubernatorial campaign in the state of New York, and so I sent in my withdrawal from the candidacy and in bitterness of spirit, signed it, truly yours, once a decent man, but now Mark Twain, IP, MT, BS, DT, FC, and LE. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper articles by Mark Twain, Section 125, The Galaxy, December 1870, Part 3. The Galaxy, December 1870, by Miranda, by Mark Twain. The present nuisance. To be the editor of any kind of a newspaper, either country or metropolitan, but very especially the former, is a position which must be trying to a good-natured man, because it makes him an object of charity whether or no. It makes him the object of a peculiar and humiliating, because an interested, charity. A charity thrust upon him with offensive assurance and a perfectly unconcealed, taken for granted, that it will be received with gratitude, and the donor accounted a benefactor, and at the very same time the donor's chief motive, his vulgar self-interest, is left as frankly unconcealed. The country editor offers his advertising space to the public at the trifle of one dollar and a half or two dollars a square, first insertion, and one would suppose his patrons would be satisfied with that. But they are not. They puzzle their thin brains to find out some still cheaper way of getting their wares celebrated, some way whereby they can advertise virtually for nothing. They soon hit upon that meanest and shabbiest of all contrivances for robbing a gentle-spirited scribbler, these, the conferring upon him of a present and begging a notice of it, thus pitifully endeavouring to not only invade his sacred editorial columns, but get ten dollars worth of advertising for fifty cents worth of merchandise. And on top of that leave the poor creature burdened with a crushing debt of gratitude, and so the corrupted editor, having once debauched his independence and received one of these contemptible presents, wavers a little while the remnant of his self-respect is consuming, and at last abandons himself to a career of shame, and prostitutes his columns to notices of every sort of present that a stingy neighbour chooses to inflict upon him. The confectioner insults him with forty cents worth of ice-cream, and he lavishes four squares of editorial compliments on him. The grocer insults him with a bunch of overgrown radishes and a dozen prized turnips, and gets an editorial paragraph perfectly putrid with gratitude. The farmer insults him with three dollars worth of peaches, or a beat like a man's leg, or a watermelon like a channel-booey, or a cabbage, in many respects, like his own head, and expects a third of a column of exuberant imbecility, and gets it. And these trivial charities are not respectfully and gracefully tendered, but are thrust insilently upon the victim, and with an air that plainly shows that the victim will be held to a strict accountability in the next issue of his paper. I am not an editor of a newspaper, and shall always try to do right and be good, so that God will not make me one. But there are some persons who have got the impression, somehow, that I am that kind of character, and they treat me accordingly. They send me a newfangled wheel-barrow, and ask me to notice it, or a peculiar boot-jack, and ask me to notice it, or a sample of coffee, and ask me to notice it, or an article of furniture worth eight or ten dollars, or a pair of crutches, or a truss, or an artificial nose, or a few shillings worth of rubbish of the vegetable species. And here, lately, all in one day, I received a barrel of apples, a thing to milk cows with, a basket of peaches, a box of grapes, a new sort of wooden leg, and a patent composition gravestone. Notices requested. A barrel of apples, a cow-milker, a basket of peaches, and a box of grapes all put together are not worth the bore of writing a notice, nor a tenth part of the room the notice would take up in the paper, and so they remained unnoticed. I had no immediate use for the wooden leg, and would not have accepted a charity gravestone, if I had been dead and actually suffering for it when it came. So I sent those articles back. I do not want any of these underhanded, obligation inflicting presents. I prefer to cramp myself down to the use of such things as I can afford, and then pay for them, and then, when a citizen needs the labour of my hands, he can have it, and I will infallibly come on him for damages. The ungraceful custom so popular in the back settlements of facetiously wailing about the barren pockets of editors is the parent of this uncanny present inflicting, and it is time that the guild that originated the custom and now suffer in pride and from it reflected that decent and dignified poverty is thoroughly respectable, while the flaunting of either a real or pretended neediness in the public face, and the bartering of nauseating puffs for its legitimate fruit of charitable presence, are as thoroughly indelicate, unbecoming, and disreputable. The Galaxy December 1870. Memoranda by Mark Twain. Dogberry in Washington. Some of the decisions of the Post Office Department are eminently luminous. It has, in times gone by, been enacted that author's manuscript should go through the mails for a trifling postage, newspaper postage, in fact. A calm and dispassionate mind would gather from this that the object had in view was to facilitate and foster newspaper correspondence, magazine writing, and literature generally, by discontinuing attacks in the way of postage which had become very burdensome to gentlemen of the quill. Now, by what effort of good old well-meaning grandmotherly dullness does the reader suppose the postal authorities have rendered that wise and kindly decree utterly null and void and solemnly funny? By deciding that author's manuscript does not mean anything but manuscript intended to be made into a bound book, all pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers ruled out. Thus we are expected to believe that the original regulation was laboriously got up to save two dollars' worth of postage to two authors in a year, for probably not more than that number of manuscript books are sent by mail to publishers each year. Such property is too precious to trust to any conveyance, but the author's own carpet sack as a general thing. But granting that one thousand manuscript books went to the publishers in a year and thus saved to one thousand authors a dollar a piece in postage in the twelve months would not a law whose whole aim was to accomplish such a trifle as that be simply an irreverent pleasantry, and not proper company to thrust among grave and weighty statutes in the law books. The matter which suggested these remarks can be stated in a sentence. Once or twice I have sent magazine manuscripts from certain cities on newspaper rates as author's manuscript, but in Buffalo the postmaster requires full letter postage. He claims no authority for the saved decisions of the post office department. He showed me the law itself, but even the highest order of intellectual obscurity, backed by the largest cultivation outside of a post office department, could not find it in authority for the decisions aforementioned. And I ought to know, because I tried it myself. I say that not to be trivially facetious when talking in earnest, but merely to take the word out of the mouths of certain cheap witlings who always stand ready in any company to interrupt anyone whose remark offers a chance for the exhibition of their poor wit and worse manners. I will not say one word about this curious decision, or utter one sarcasm or one discourteous speech about it, or the well-intending but misguided officer who rendered it. But if he were in California he would fare far differently, very far differently, for there the wicked are not restrained by the gentle charities that prevail in Buffalo, and so they would deride him, and point the finger of scorn at him, and address him as old, smarty from Mud Springs. Indeed they would. THE GALAXY DECEMBER 1870. MEMORANDA BY MARK TWAIN In a sandwich-island paper just received by mail I learned that some gentlemen of taste and enterprise, and also of Kia Kaka'iowa, have named a fast young colt for me. Verily one does have to go away from home to learn news. The cannibal paper adds that the colt has already trotted his mile of his own accord in two minutes seventeen and a half. He was probably going to dinner at the time. The idea of naming anything that is fast after me, except an anchor or something of that kind, is a perfect inspiration of humour. If this poor colt could see me trot around the course once he would laugh some of his teeth out, he would indeed if he had time to wait till I finish the trip. I have seen slower people than I am and more deliberate people than I am, and even quieter and more listless and lazier people than I am. But they are dead. And by that sandwich-island paper, commercial advertiser, I also learned that H. M. Whitney, its able editor and proprietor for sixteen years, was just retiring from business, having sold out to younger men. I take this opportunity of thanking the disappearing veteran for courtesies done, and information afforded me in bygone days. Mr. Whitney is one of the fairest-minded and best-hearted cannibals I ever knew, if I do say it myself. There is not a stain upon his name and never has been, and he is the best judge of a human being I ever saw go through a market. Many a time I have seen natives try to palm off part of an old person on him for the fragment of a youth, but I never saw it succeed. Ah, no, there was no deceiving H. M. Whitney. He could tell the very family a roast came from, if he had ever tried the family before. I remember his arresting my hand once and saying, Let that alone! It's from one of those hula-hulas a very low family and tough. I cannot think of Whitney without my mouth watering. We used to eat a great many people in those Halcyon days, which shall come again, alas, nevermore. We lived on the fat of the land, and I will say this for H. Whitney. He never thought less of his friend after examining into him, and he was always sorry when his enemy was gone. Most of the above may fairly unjustly rank as nonsense, but my respect and regard for Mr. Whitney are genuine. My old friend is married again, as I learn from the following notice cut by a correspondent from a Cincinnati paper last May. Rather old news, but it is a good scattering shot, and cannot fail to fetch some ignorant interested body somewhere, considering the number of brides. Married Young Martin Pendergast, Jenickson Cleveland Martin. In Salt Lake City, Utah, on the 16th Alt, in the presence of the Saints, Elder Brigham Young to Mrs. J. R. Martin, Miss L. M. Pendergast, Mrs. R. M. Jenickson, Miss Susie P. Cleveland, and Miss Emily P. Martin, all of the county of Berks, England. The following is genuine, and was cut from the regular advertising columns of a great daily newspaper in a certain city. How many of my little Sunday school friends can guess the city? Do not all speak at once, or if you do, do not put the emphasis strong on the second syllable, because it would not be nice for little boys and girls to disturb the Continent, though people who want divorces are not always the Continent. Read. Wanted. Divorces legally obtained without publicity and at small expense. No fee and less decree is obtained. Address? P.O. Box 1037. This is the P.O. Box advertised for the past six years, and the owner has obtained four hundred and sixty-six divorces during that time. M. Springfield O. Encloses for the memoranda an inscription copied verbatim from a tombstone in Mount Woods Cemetery, Wheeling, erected to the memory of four little children who died within a few weeks of each other. S. J. of Wheeling also sends a copy of the same. The verses seem to represent a conversation between the parents and the departed. Children, dear, what made you go far away, et cetera, and leave us in our grief below, far away, et cetera? You could not find a better home nor better friends where ere you roam, since you have left your earthly dome, far away, et cetera. A heavenly message came for we all as well, et cetera, to go and join that glorious glee all as well, et cetera. We are members of that band on a holy pavement we do stand, with a golden trumpet in our hands, all as well, et cetera. Ye are strangers in that sphere, children, dear, et cetera. You have no friends that you know there, children, dear, et cetera. We wish, we wish we could but see that heavenly palace where you be, and bring you back to live with we, children, dear, et cetera. Dear parents, weep for us no more, all as well, et cetera. We landed safe on Cayman's shore, all as well, et cetera. Ah! friends we have! We are well known with saints and angels round the throne, and Jesus claims us as his own. All is well, et cetera. Quiz, quiz, hurls me this, under New York Postmark. I met last night on the Podunk Railroad, an individual whose characteristics are best indicated by what follows. I handed him the galaxy, directing his attention to your map of Paris. He read your explanations through deliberately, and when he came to that part where you advised standing on the ear, or the use of a looking glass in order to see it properly, he turned to a careful consideration of the map. In a few moments a bright idea struck him. Holding the sheet up to a light, he looked through the reverse side and exclaimed, Why, all that ain't necessary after all. All you've got to do is to look at it the wrong way, and it makes it all right. He read the remainder of your explanation, including certificates, and then returned to the profound study of the map. After a while he burst out, Why, here's a thing that's wrong anyhow. You can't get Omaha on the west and Jersey City on the east. They're both west. I don't care who says it's right. I say it ain't. I mildly suggested that Jersey City and Omaha were a long way apart, and probably the Longitude had something to do with it, for it was impossible to suppose such military critics as General Grant and General Sherman would not have detected the blunder if it were one. He pondered some time. Ah! he said finally, It must be the Longitude, for you see if you go around the world one way you might get Omaha on the west, while if you went round for Jersey City the other way, you'd get that on the east. I see it. It's the Longitude, does it? The above mention of my map of Paris calls to mind that that work of art is appreciated among the learned. It is duly advertised that whoever sends a club of one hundred subscribers to the Yale College current, together with the necessary four hundred dollars, will receive as a prize a copy of my map. I am almost tempted to go canvassing myself. All my soul is in art lately, since I have been taking lessons in drawing and painting. I have drawn and am now engraving an elegant portrait of King William of Prussia as a companion to the customary Galaxy portraits and to complete the set. This work of art, with accompanying remarks, will appear in the January edition of this magazine. End of Section 125. This is Section 126 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 126, The Galaxy, January 1871. Memoranda by Mark Twain. Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again. Note. No experience is set down in the following letters which had to be invented. Fancy is not needed to give variety to the history of a Chinaman soldier in America. Plain fact is amply sufficient. Letter 7. San Francisco, 18 Blank. Dear Qingfu. I was glad enough when my case came up. An hour's experience had me as tired of the police court as of the dungeon. I was not uneasy about the result of the trial, but, on the contrary, felt that as soon as the large auditory of Americans present should hear how that the rowdies had set the dogs on me when I was going peacefully along the street, and how, when I was all torn and bleeding, the officers arrested me and put me in jail and let the rowdies go free. The gallant hatred of oppression which is part of the very flesh and blood of every American would be stirred to its utmost, and I should be instantly set of liberty. In truth I began to fear for the other side. There, in full view, stood the Ruffians who had misused me, and I began to fear that in the first burst of generous anger occasioned by the revealment of what they had done, they might be harshly handled, and possibly even banished the country as having dishonored her, and being no longer worthy to remain upon her sacred soil. The official interpreter of the court asked my name, and then spoke it aloud so that all could hear. Supposing that all was now ready, I cleared my throat and began, in Chinese, because of my imperfect English. Here, O high and mighty Mandarin, and believe, as I went about my peaceful business in the street, behold, certain men set a dog on me, and—silence! It was the judge that spoke. The interpreter whispered to me that I must keep perfectly still. He said that no statement would be received from me. I must only talk through my lawyer. I had no lawyer. In the early morning a police-court lawyer, termed in the Higher Circles of Society a Scheister, had come into our den in the prison and offered his services to me, but I had been obliged to go without them, because I could not pay in advance or give security. I told the interpreter how the matter stood. He said I must take my chances on the witnesses, then. I glanced around, and my failing confidence revived. Call those four Chinaman yonder, I said. They saw it all. I remember their faces perfectly. They will prove that the white men set the dog on me when I was not harming them. That won't work, said he. In this country white men can testify against Chinaman all they want to, but Chinaman ain't allowed to testify against white men. What a chill went through me! And then I felt the indignant blood rise to my cheek at this libel upon the home of the oppressed, where all men are free and equal, perfectly equal, perfectly free and perfectly equal. I despised this China-speaking Spaniard for his mean slander of the land that was sheltering and feeding him. I sorely wanted to sear his eyes with that sentence from the great and good American Declaration of Independence, which we have copied in letters of gold in China, and keep hung up over our family altars and in our temples. I mean the one about all men being created free and equal. But woe is me, Ching Fu, the man was right. He was right after all. There were my witnesses, but I could not use them. But now came a new hope. I saw my white friend come in, and I felt that he had come there purposely to help me. I may almost say I knew it. So I grew easier. He passed near enough to me to say under his breath, Don't be afraid, and then I had no more fear. But presently the rowdies recognized him and began to scowl at him in no friendly way, and to make threatening signs at him. The two officers that arrested me fixed their eyes steadily on his. He bore it well, but gave in presently and dropped his eyes. They still gazed at his eyebrows, and every time he raised his eyes he encountered their winkless stare. Until after a minute or two he ceased to lift his head at all. The judge had been giving some instructions privately to someone for a little while, but now he was ready to resume business. Then the trial, so unspeakably important to me, and freighted with such prodigious consequence to my wife and children, began, progressed, ended, was recorded in the books, noted down by the newspaper reporters, and forgotten by everybody but me, all in the little space of two minutes. Ah, sung he, Chinaman, officers O'Flanagan and O'Flaherty, officers, come forward, officer O'Flanagan. Officer, he was making a disturbance in Kearney Street. Judge, any witnesses on the other side? No response. The white friend raised his eyes, encountered officer O'Flaherty's, blushed a little, got up and left the courtroom, avoiding all glances and not taking his own from the floor. Judge, give him five dollars or ten days! In my desolation there was a glad surprise in the words, but it passed away when I found that he only meant that I was to be fined five dollars or imprisoned ten days longer in default of it. There were twelve or fifteen Chinaman in our crowd of prisoners, charged with all manner of little thefts and misdemeanors, and their cases were quickly disposed of as a general thing. When the charge came from a policeman or other white man, he made his statement, and that was the end of it, unless the Chinaman's lawyer could find some white person to testify on his client's behalf. For neither the accused Chinaman nor his countrymen being allowed to say anything, the statement of the officers or other white person was amply sufficient to convict. So, as I said, the Chinaman's cases were quickly disposed of and fines and imprisonment promptly distributed among them. In one or two of the cases the charges against Chinaman were brought by Chinaman themselves, and in those cases Chinaman testified against Chinaman through the interpreter. But the fixed rule of the court being that the preponderance of testimony in such cases should determine the prisoner's guilt or innocence, and there being nothing very binding about an oath administered to the lower orders of our people without the ancient solemnity of cutting off a chicken's head and burning some yellow paper at the same time, the interested parties naturally drum up a cloud of witnesses who are cheerfully willing to give evidence without ever knowing anything about the matter in hand. The judge has a custom of rattling through with as much of this testimony as his patience will stand, and then shutting off the rest and striking in average. By noon all the business of the court was finished, and then several of us who had not fared well were remanded to prison. The judge went home, the lawyers and officers and spectators departed there several ways, and left the uncommon court room to silence, solitude, and Stiggers, the newspaper reporter, which latter would now write up his items, said an ancient Chinaman to me, in the which he would praise all the policemen indiscriminately and abuse the Chinaman and dead people. ASUN HE THE GALAXY, January 1871, Memoranda, by Mark Twain. MEAN PEOPLE. My ancient comrade does sticks, in a letter from New York, quotes a printed paragraph concerning a story I used to tell to lecture audiences about a wonderfully mean man whom I used to know, and then Mr. D. throws himself into a passion and relates the following circumstances, writing on both sides of his paper, which is at least singular in a journalist, if not profane and indecent. Now, I don't think much of that. I know a better thing about old Captain Asa T. Mann of this town. You see, old man used to own and command a pickin'inny, bull-headed, mud-turtle shaped craft of a schooner that hailed from Perth Amboy. Old man used to prance out of his little cove where he kept his three cent craft, and steal along the coast of the dangerous Kilvon Kul, on the larbored side of Staten Island, to smooch oysters from unguarded beds, or pick clams off sloops where the watch had gone to bed drunk. Well, once old man went on a long voyage for him. He went down to Virginia, taking his wife and little boy with him. The old Rapscallian put on all sorts of heirs, and pretended to keep up as strict discipline as if his craft was a man of war. One day his darling baby tumbled overboard. A sailor named Jones jumped over after him, and after cavorting around about an hour or so, succeeded in getting the miserable little scion of a worthless sire on board again. Then old man got right up on his dignity. He put up all the dig, he had handy, and in two minutes he had Jones into double irons, and there he kept him three weeks in the forehold, for leaving the ship without orders. I will not resurrect my own mean man, for possibly he might not show to good advantage in the presence of this gifted sailor. But I will enter a Toledo bridegroom against the sun of the salt wave, and let the winner take the money. I give the Toledo story just as it comes to me. It, too, is written on both sides of the paper, but as this correspondent is not a journalist, the act is only wicked, not obscene. In this village there lived and continued to live two chaps who in their bachelor days were chums. S., one of the chaps, tiring of single blessedness, took unto himself a wife and a wedding, with numerous pieces of silverware and things from congratulating friends. C., the other chap, sent in a handsome silver ladle, costing several dollars or more. Their friendship continued. A year later, C. also entered into partnership for life with one of the fair eyes, and he also had a wedding. S., being worth something less than twenty thousand dollars, thought he ought to return the compliment of a wedding present, and a happy thought struck him. He took that ladle down to the jeweler from whom it was purchased by sea the year before, and traded it off for silver salt-dishes to present to sea and his bride. THE GALAXY, January 1871, Memoranda by Mark Twain. A Sad, Sad Business. Laterally I have received several letters and see a number of newspaper paragraphs all upon a certain subject and all of about the same tenor. I here give honest specimens. One is from a New York paper, one is from a letter from an old friend, and one is from a letter from a New York publisher who is a stranger to me. I humbly endeavor to make these bits toothsome with the remark that the article they are praising, which appeared in the December Galaxy, and pretended to be a criticism from the London Saturday Review on my Innocence Abroad, was written by myself, every line of it. The Herald says the richest thing out is the serious critique in the London Saturday Review on Mark Twain's Innocence Abroad we thought before we read it that it must be serious, as everybody said so, and we're even ready to shed a few tears, but since perusing it we are bound to confess that next to Mark's Jumping Frog it's the finest bit of humor and sarcasm that we've come across in many a day. I do not get a compliment like that every day. I used to think that your writings were pretty good, but after reading the criticism in the Galaxy from the London Review have discovered what an ass I must have been. If suggestions are in order mine is that you put that article in your next edition of the Innocence as an extra chapter. If you were not afraid to put your own humor in competition with it, it is as rigid a thing as I ever read, which is strong commendation from a book publisher. The London Reviewer, my friend, is not the stupid serious creature he pretends to be, I think, but on the contrary, has a keen appreciation and enjoyment of your book. As I read his article in the Galaxy I could imagine him giving vent to many a hearty laugh, but he is writing for Catholics and established church people, and high-toned antiquated conservative gentility whom it is a delight to him to help you shock while he pretends to shake his head with owlish density. He is a magnificent humorist himself. Now that is graceful and handsome. I take off my hat to my lifelong friend and comrade, and with my feet together and my fingers spread over my heart I say in the language of Alabama, you do me proud. I stand guilty of the authorship of the article, but I did not mean any harm. I saw by an item in the Boston Advertiser that a solemn, serious critique on the English edition of my book had appeared in the London Saturday Review, and the idea of such a literary breakfast by a stolid, ponderous British ogre of the quill was too much for a naturally weak virtue, and I went home and burlesqueed it, reveled in it, I may say. I never saw a copy of the real Saturday Review Criticism until after my burlesque was written and mailed to the printer. But when I did get hold of a copy, I found it to be vulgar, awkwardly written, ill-natured, and entirely serious and in earnest. The gentleman who wrote the newspaper paragraph above, quoted, had not been misled as to its character. If any man doubts my word now, I will kill him. No, I will not kill him. I will win his money. I will bet him twenty to one and let any New York publisher hold the stakes that the statements I have above made as to the authorship of the article in question are entirely true. Perhaps I may get wealthy at this, for I am willing to take all the bets that offer, and if a man wants larger odds, I will give him all he requires. But he ought to find out whether I am betting on what is termed a sure thing or not, before he ventures his money, and he can do that by going to a public library and examining the London Saturday Review of October 8, which contains the real critique. Bless me, some people thought that I was the sold person. P.S. I cannot resist the temptation to toss in, this most savoury thing of all, this easy, graceful, philosophical disquisition with its happy, chirping confidence. It is from the Cincinnati Inquirer. Nothing is more uncertain than the value of a fine cigar. Nine smokers out of ten would prefer an ordinary domestic article, three for a quarter, to a fifty cent partaga, if kept in ignorance of the cost of the latter. The flavour of the partaga is too delicate for pallets that have been accustomed to Connecticut seed-leaf, so it is with humour. The finer it is in quality, the more danger of its not being recognised at all. Even Mark Twain has been taken in by an English review of his in its sense abroad. Mark Twain is by no means a coarse humorist, but the Englishman's humour is so much finer than his that he mistakes it for solid earnest, and larfs most consumedly. A man who cannot learn stands in his own light. Hereafter when I write an article which I know to be good, but which I may have reason to fear will not in some quarters be considered to amount to much, coming from an American, I will aver that an Englishman wrote it, and that it is copied from a London journal, and then I will occupy a back seat and enjoy the cordial applause. The Galaxy January 1871. Memoranda by Mark Twain. Answer to an Inquiry from the Coming Man. Young Author. Yes, Agacy does recommend authors to eat fish, because the phosphorus in it makes brains. So far you are correct, but I cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat, at least not with certainty. If the specimen composition you send is about your fair usual average, I should judge that perhaps a couple of whales would be all you would want for the present. Not the largest kind, but simply good middling-sized whales. End of Section 126