 This is Section 88 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 88, Alta, California, July 28, 1867. New York, May 28, 1867. Academy of Design Editors, Alta. I am thankful that the good God creates us all ignorant. I am glad that when we change His plans in this regard we have to do it at our own risk. It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art and ignorant also of surgery, because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes, and surgeons and anatomists see no beautiful women in all their lives, but only a ghastly stack of bones with Latin names to them, and a network of nerves and muscles and tissues inflamed by disease. The very point in a picture that fascinates me with its beauty is to the cultured artist a monstrous crime against the laws of colouring, and the very flush that charms me in a lovely face is to the critical surgeon, nothing but a sign hung out to advertise a decaying lung. A cursed be all such knowledge. I want none of it. The art critics have been so diligently abusing everything in and about the Academy of Design for weeks past that I was satisfied that a visit there could produce nothing but unhappiness. I wandered into the place by accident today, however, and stayed there three hours. I could have stayed a week. I was not cultivated enough to see the dreadful faults that were so glaring to others' eyes. There were some three hundred pictures on exhibition, and, to me, about thirty or forty were very beautiful. I liked all the sea views and the mountain views, and the quiet woodland scenes with shadow-tinted lakes in the foreground, and I just reveled in the storms. There was a dreamy tropical scene, a wooded island in the centre of a glassy lake bordered by an impenetrable jungle of trees all woven together with vines and hung with drooping garlands of flowers. The still lake pictured all over with the reflected beauty of the shores, two lonely birds winging their way to the further side, where grassy lawns and mossy rocks and a wilderness of tinted foliage were sleeping in a purple mist. I thought it was beautiful, but I suppose it wasn't. I suppose if I were not so ignorant I would have observed that one of the bird's hind legs was out of line and that the colouring was shaky in places and that some of the effects were criminal transgressions of the laws of art. And I know I ought to have admired that picture by one of the old masters, where six bearded faces without any bodies to them were glaring out of Egyptian darkness and glowering upon a naked infant that was not built like any infant that ever I saw, nor coloured like it either. I am glad the old masters are all dead, and I only wish they had died sooner. There were two pictures that suited me, but they were so small and so modest that I was ashamed to let the other visitors see me looking at them so much, so I gazed at them sidewise and let on to be worshipping the old master rascalities. I had no catalogue and did not want any, because if a picture cannot tell its own story to us uncultivated vagrants we scorn to read it out of a book. One of these pictures represented two libertines of quality teasing and jesting with a distressed young peasant girl while her homely brother, or sweetheart maybe, sat by with the signs of a coming row overshadowing his face. The other was racy. In a little nook in a forest a splendid grey squirrel, brimful of frisky action, had found a basket covered brandy flask upset and was sipping the spilled liquor from the ground. His face told that he was delighted. Close by a corpulent old fox squirrel was stretched prone upon his back and the jolly grin on his two front teeth, and the drunken leer of his half-closed eye told that he was happy, and that the anxious solicitude in the face of the black squirrel that was bending over him and feeling his pulse was all uncalled for by the circumstances of the case. More than half the paintings in the academy are devoted to the usual harmless subjects, of course. You find the same old pile of cats asleep in the corner, and the same old party of kittens skylarking with a cotton ball, and the same old excited puppy looking out of a window, and the same old detachment of cows wading across a branch at sunset, and the same old naked libels marked Eve, and the same old stupid-looking wenches marked Autumn and Summer, etc., loafing around in the woods or toting flowers and all of them out of shirts in the same old way, and there were the everlasting farmers gathering their eternal squashes, and a girl swinging on a gate, and a girl speaking, and girls performing all sorts of similar prodigies, and most numerous and most worn out of all, there was the usual endless array of vases and dishes full of grapes and peaches and slices of watermelon and such stuff, and the same tiresome old Tom cat laying for a goldfish. However, I ought to be circumspect in the matter of these fruit-pictures, because those are the first things the young ladies look at when they come in, and the last they examine before they go out. Now, after four or five years of terrible warfare, there's only one historical picture in the Academy, Lincoln's entry into Richmond, and that is execrable. There isn't a single battle-piece. What do you suppose is the reason? There is one fine piece of obituary, Eve, but she had three apples, two in her left hand and one in her right, which she was getting ready to bite. I thought our common mother only plucked one apple. When this sculpture makes another Eve, he had better get her a basket. Now, I suppose I have gone and done the very same thing the art critics do, left unmentioned the works I liked, and mentioned only those I did not like. However, let it go. I must abuse the building these things are in, though. Outside it is barred and cross-barred and streaked and striped and spotted and speckled and gilded and defiled from top to bottom with infamous flummary and filigree gingerbread, to that degree that the first glance a stranger casts upon it unsettles his mind for a week. First, he thinks it is a church. But then it flashes upon him that no God-fearing Christian would worship in such a church. Then he thinks it is a hotel, and forthwith it occurs to him that a man that has got sense enough to keep a hotel has got more sense than to build such a house as that. Next, he thinks it is a huge dwelling-house, but he acknowledges, in a moment, that no man could keep his brain straight who tried to live in such an architectural nightmare of a mansion as this. Then he thinks it may be a lunatic asylum, built upon plans furnished by the inmates. But immediately he is ashamed of this mean insinuation against the helpless and unfortunate. At last he concludes that it is a preposterous stable invented by some vulgar sporting-man who has grown suddenly rich, but never, never, never does he become so lost to all honorable feeling as to conceive that that wretched pile of marble, paint, and gold leaf was created for the National Academy of Design. No man could fall so low as that. I speak only the truth when I say that the architecture of this Academy of Design is more atrocious than that of young Dr. Ting's new church and several other new churches that have sprung up here and somehow are left undestroyed by the lightnings of heaven. The Academy people call their costly stack of architectural deviltry the Moorish style, as if the atmosphere of antiquity and poetry and romance that cast a charm around that style in its ancient home beyond the seas could be reproduced here in the midst of railroads and steamboats and business rush and clamor and acres of brown stone fronts, and as if it could be anything but clownish and repulsive without that atmosphere they might as well have put up a wigwam there and expected it to be romantic and picturesque without its natural surroundings of flowers and grass and brooks and the solemn silence of dim old forests. Greeley and Jeff. Mr. Greeley has put his foot in it, in the Jefferson Davis bail-bond matter, but with characteristic courage and independence he stands up for what he has done and refuses to go back an inch. He is catching it on all sides, and in language that despises elegant forms of speech, but goes straight to the matter in hand with a meat-axe earnestness and bluntness. Mr. Greeley has shown conclusively enough that his motives were good and worthy, that his record has been clear from the first, and that his conduct in this transaction was not in any respect inconsistent with that record. So far so good. That part of Mr. Greeley's case is strong, and those who argue against it lose their labour. The nation says that for the leader of the northern sentiment, that for six years has charged all manner of atrocities upon Davis, to come forward at the last and take this arch-criminal to his arms was repulsive, and in that no doubt the people view it. After convicting a man by argument and testimony of murder and robbery and perjury and treason and other acts of an indelicate character, it is ungraceful to shake hands with him and ask him home to dinner. It is contented that if Davis had been so friendless and forlorn that no man would come forward and bail him, it would have been a grand and magnanimous deed for his ancient enemy to save and succour him. But considering that Davis had a thousand friends at his back and could have got millions of dollars on his bond if necessary, there was no call for that ancient enemy to compromise with him at all, especially as that enemy was a representative man, and his action might be taken as a compromise endorsed by the millions of men he represented. I think the very strongest argument that could be made in this thing against Mr. Greeley would be that he had no right to go on Jeff Davis's bond because the millions he represented would not have done it, because he was not and could not be merely Mr. Horace Greeley under such circumstances, but was the embodiment of a nation or a national sentiment because he was public opinion and had no right to misrepresent his character. Horace Greeley's position and antecedents render it impossible for him to act in great public matters as a private individual. He cannot shed his representative character as he could his coat. Mr. Jones or Mr. Brown or Mr. Smith might go on Jeff Davis's bond if they chose because being obscure and unknown they could not implicate a nation and because being essentially private individuals they have a right to do their own private will but representative men possess no such rights. Mr. Greeley ought to have let the majority rule in a momentous matter like the bailing of Jeff Davis. He ought to have sunk his character as one unimportant private individual and assumed his public one as the representative of a great party and a widespread political sentiment and acted as that character would have made it proper for him to act. Foolishness. They are making a great fuss in Springfield, Massachusetts because a young lady schoolteacher has unmercifully flogged one of her boy pupils. Now that is a nice subject for a public excitement, isn't it? Why, I used to catch it that way three times a day when I went to school and nobody ever thought of getting up a general indignation about it. I never got any sympathy. It used to take me all vacation to grow a new hide in place of the one they flogged off me during the school term. They whipped boys then for every little thing, for throwing spitballs at the teacher, for fixing pins in the benches for boys to sit down on, for catching flies during morning prayers and even for throwing rocks at passing strangers in recess when the motive was in no wise dishonorable the only object in view being to surprise the stranger. For these things they whipped boys and, what was more degrading still, every boy had to furnish his own hickories. Boys had no friends in those dark days. They were persecuted on all occasions and there was never any popular excitement about it. We pulled down a stable once. It was only an old stable and very shabby and the cow that was in it could have got out if she had wanted to. She had plenty of time. And once we burned a carpenter's shop. It was an ugly, shameful old affair and spoiled the looks of the town. And merely for doing these things we were punished. As usual, no popular excitement. They took outrages like these very easy in those barbarous times. But now things are different. School marms cannot be such bloody pirates nowadays. They haul them up before the courts and put them under $200 bonds to appear in answer. Oh, unfeeling Greeley that would sign one of them. But school marm instincts have not changed. The boy was getting the best of this one in Springfield, but she called for reinforcements and another teacher came. They doubled teams on him. It is the old, old story. We have one of our old maids nearly flaxed out once. We had her to the edge of the well and we would put her in it another minute. But the unprincipled old harridan piped for assistance. The times are changed. The world progresses. It is but another evidence of advancing civilization when public sympathy speaks up for the persecuted school boy. The Forest Divorce An application by Mr. Edwin Forrest yesterday for an injunction to restrain his divorced wife from collecting the alimony awarded her money celebrated divorce suit fifteen years ago was denied. The award was $4,000 a year, but Mr. Forrest has managed, by appealing and reappealing the case from time to time, to stave off payment till the alimony bill has at last run up to about $60,000. It is supposed that all the various legal subterfuges for escaping payment have been exhausted and that Mr. Forrest will have to validate now. There is no telling, however. There may be some more holes in the legal net large enough for a man of Mr. Forrest's size to get through. Stuart's Palace This unsightly pile with its once white but now dingy filigree columns and pilasters boarded up with unpainted planks still marrs the beauty of the noblest street in America, the Fifth Avenue. They say it has already cost two millions of dollars and that when it is finished and furnished it will have cost three. There are 250 dwellings in the same street that are handsomer, more graceful, more elegant and richer in appearance than Stuart's's and not one of them cost a twentieth of the money. Verily it is one thing to have cash and another to know how to spend it. The man ought to die of violent death that put it into people's heads to try to make cherished, beloved, sacred homes out of such cold, ghostly, unfeeling stuff as marble, a material which God intended only for gravestones. You can build a house out of it and put a door plate on it and call it a dwelling. But it isn't any use it is bound to look like a mausoleum after all. Stuart's House looks like a stately tomb now, and after it is finished it will never look entirely natural without a hearse in front of it. Stuart's dwelling is calculated to mislead people. It looks like the new Herald Building, diminished in size, just enough like it to make poor, unoffending drunken men, when they stumble on it, think they have gotten nearly to the foot of Broadway in some unaccountable way, and start them out on a weary march towards Central Park. It is harmful to impose upon the helpless. Nothing could be more beautiful, more refined, more elegant than the brown stone used in facing buildings here, and for light, graceful architecture, nothing could be more charming than the rich, cream-colored Portland Stone, which has lately come into vogue, and which so fascinates the eye of a stranger, as he saunters up the new end of the magnificent avenue. But these didn't suit Mr. Stuart, and so he had to send to Italy, and get some dismal ornamental tombstones, carved out how immense expense by those foreigners, and have them brought over here and piled on high in the midst of that cheerful street, to dampen people's spirits, and set them to thinking of the grave, and death, and the hereafter. It is all wrong. He could have beautified the city, and yet spent his money right here in America, if he had chosen to do it. I believe he is trying to see how much money he can spend on that mausoleum. He has put ten thousand dollars worth of gas and water piping into it, and not a yard of it is visible to the eye. And after all, it is just possible that he is disappointed in his fine house, for they say he has given it, or is going to give it to the Lady's Society for the Reclamation of Abandoned Women. It is a good idea. If anything could make a lost woman feel miserable and set her to reflecting, it would be to shut her up in that awful tomb. Miscellaneous. Eighty-five passengers are booked for the Palestine excursion in the Quaker City, and more are to join at Marseille. The ship is newly painted, and handsomely fitted up throughout. I have got a nice moral roommate, and he has got many shirts, and a history of the Holy Land, a cribbage-board, and three thousand cigars. I will not have to carry any baggage at all. General Sherman is not going. That is lucky. His stateroom is fitted and furnished like a palace. I will naturally get that now, because I stood number two in the schedule, and come first in the order of promotion. There will be room for more baggage, then, if necessary. Miss Maggie Mitchell and her mother have joined the expedition. There were to be amateur theatrical performances on the ship, anyhow, and now we shall have a star. Scenery is being prepared, and a stage will be erected in one end of the ship, and a pulpit in the other. I will have a chance now. Young Beach of the Sons is going to publish a newspaper on board. This will afford me an opening for a birth. Massachusetts is getting shaky on the subject of compulsory temperance, and is going to submit the question of licensing people to sell rum to a popular vote again. Evidence has been brought forward which proves that prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure it or even diminish it. In one town in New Hampshire the hotel keepers have shut up their houses and almost brought business to a dead stop, very much to the consternation of the community. The landlords say they will not open till they can sell liquor, and the people have thus been forced to entertain the motion and are now discussing it with powerful interest. Ex-Size is a rife subject all over the land, and it does so exercise the people that I think they ought to add that middle syllable to the word. End of Section 88 This is Section 89 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 89, All to California, August 4, 1867 New York, June 2, 1867 The Domes of the Yosemite That is the name of Birstad's last picture. The art critics here abused it without stint when its exhibition began a month ago. They ridiculed it so mercilessly that I thought it surely could not be worth going to see, and so I stayed away. I went to-day, however, and I think it is very well worth going to see. It is very beautiful, considerably more beautiful than the original. You stand twelve hundred feet above the valley, and look up it toward the east, with the north dome on the left, and the south dome on the right. The rugged mountain range beyond the latter sweeps round to the right and shuts up the valley, and springing up among the clouds in the distance you see one or two great peaks clad in robes of snow. Well, the bird's-eye view of the level valley with its clusters of diminished trees and its little winding river is very natural and familiar and pleasant to look upon. The pine trees growing out of clefts in a bold rock wall in the right foreground are very proper trees, and the grove of large ones in the left foreground and close at hand are a true copy of nature, and so are the various granite boulders in the vicinity. Now, to sum up the picture's merits, those snow-peaks are correct. They look natural. The valley is correct and natural. The pine trees clinging to the bluff on the right and the grove on the left and the boulders are all like nature. We will assume that the domes and things are drawn accurately. One sees these things in all sorts of places throughout California, and under all sorts of circumstances, and gets so familiar with them that he knows them in a moment when he sees them in a picture. I knew them in Bierstadt's picture, and checked them off one by one and said, These things are correct. They all look just as they ought to look, and they all belong to California. But when I got around to the atmosphere, I was obliged to say, This man has imported this atmosphere. This man has surely imported this atmosphere from some foreign country, because nothing like it was ever seen in California. I may be mistaken, for all men are liable to air, but I honestly think I am right. The atmospheric effects in that picture are startling, are full of variety, and are charming. It is more the atmosphere of kingdom come than of California. The time is early morning. The eastern heavens are filled with shredded clouds, and these afford the excuse for the dreamy lights and shadows that play about the leftward precipices, and the great dome, a rich blending of softest purple and gray and blue and brown and white, instead of the bald, glaring expanse of rocks and earth, splotched with cloud shadows, like unpoetical ink-plots, which one ought to see in a Californian mountain picture when correctly painted. Some of Mr. Bierstadt's mountains swim in a lustrous pearly mist, which is so enchantingly beautiful that I am sorry the creator hadn't made it instead of him, so that it would always remain there. In the morning the outlines of mountains in California, even though they be leagues away, are painfully bold and sharp, because the atmosphere is so pure and clear. But the outlines of Mr. Bierstadt's mountains are soft and rounded and velvety, which is a great improvement on nature. As a picture this work must please, but as a portrait I do not think it will answer. Portraits should be accurate. We do not want feeling and intelligence smuggled into the pictured face of an idiot, and we do not want this glorified atmosphere smuggled into a portrait of the Osemity, where it surely does not belong. I may be wrong, but still I believe that this atmosphere of Mr. Bierstadt's is altogether too gorgeous. A Curious Book In one of the libraries here I have found an edition of 1621 of the Apocryphal New Testament. It is rather a curious book, as one may judge, by the titles to some of the chapters, Christ kissed by a bride made dumb by sorcerers cures her, a leprous girl cured by the water in which the infant Christ was washed and becomes the servant of Joseph and Mary, the leprous son of a prince cured in like manner, a young man who had been bewitched and turned into a mule miraculously cured by the infant saviour being put on his back, and is married to the girl who had been cured of leprosy, whereupon the bystanders praise God. Extract. 33. After the marriage of this girl Joseph and Mary tarried there ten days, then went away, having received great respect from those people. 34. Who, when they took their leave of them and returned home, cried. 35. But especially the girl. This book has many chapters devoted to the infancy of the saviour and the miracles he took. For instance, Chapter 15. Jesus and other boys play together and make clay figures of animals. Jesus causes them to walk. Also makes clay birds, which he causes to fly and eat and drink. The children's parents are alarmed and take Jesus for a sorcerer and order them to seek better company. He goes to a dyer's shop and throws all the clothes into the fire and works a miracle with. Whereupon the bystanders praise God. It appears that Joseph had a shop and was regularly in business as a carpenter, although his work was not remarkable for its excellence. The infant saviour was of great assistance to him, sometimes. Chapter 16. Christ miraculously widens or contracts gates, milk pails, sieves, or boxes not properly made by Joseph. He not being skillful at his carpenter's trade. The king of Jerusalem gives Joseph an order for a throne. Joseph works on it for two years and makes it two spans too short. The king being angry with him, Joseph comforts him, commands him to pull one side of the throne while he pulls the other and brings it to its proper dimensions. Whereupon the bystanders praise God. Chapter 19. Jesus, charged with throwing a boy from the roof of a house, miraculously causes the dead boy to speak and acquit him. Fetch his water for his mother, breaks the pitcher, and miraculously gathers the water in his mantle and brings it home. Makes fish-pools on the Sabbath and causes a boy to die who broke them down. Another boy runs against him, whom he also causes to die, whereupon the bystanders, etc., etc. Sent to a schoolmaster refuses to tell his letters and the schoolmaster going to whip him, his hand withers, and he dies. Kills a boy, causes blindness to fall upon his accusers, for which Joseph pulls him by the ear. The young saviour's resentments were so frequent and always so exceedingly prompt and practical a turn that Joseph finally grew concerned about the matter and gave it his personal attention. 16. Then said Joseph unto Mary, Henceforth we will not allow him to go out of the house, for every one who displeases him is killed. His aside he was pleasant but attended by serious drawbacks. Further on, in this quaint volume of rejected Gospels, is an epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians, which was used in the churches, and considered genuine, fourteen or fifteen hundred years ago. In it this account of the fabled Phoenix occurs. 1. Let us consider that wonderful type of the resurrection which is seen in the eastern countries, that is to say, in Arabia. 2. There is a certain bird called a Phoenix. Of this there is never but one at a time, and that lives five hundred years, and when the time of its dissolution draws near that it must die, it makes itself a nest of frankincense and myrrh, and other spices into which, when its time is fulfilled, it enters and dies. 3. But its flesh, putrefying, breeds a certain worm, which, being nourished with the juice of the dead bird, brings forth feathers, and when it is grown to a perfect state, it takes up the nest in which the bones of its parent lie, and carries it from Arabia into Egypt to a city called Heliopolis. 4. And flying in open day in the sight of all men, lays it upon the altar of the sun, and so returns from whence it came. 5. The priests then search into the records of the time, and find that it returned precisely at the end of five hundred years. 6. Well, business is business, and there is nothing like punctuality, especially in a phoenix. The few chapters relating to the infancy of the Saviour contain many things which seem frivolous and trifling, and not worth preserving. A large part of the remaining portions of the book read like good scripture, however, and one is inclined to wonder why the conclave of three hundred and eighteen bishops who compiled our New Testament in the fourth century from a mass of ancient manuscripts rejected them. One Sabinas, a plain spoken bishop of Heraklia, explains the matter in this wise. He says that that conclave of compilers was composed of a set of illiterate, simple creatures that understood nothing. Well, of course, we do not know anything about that, and besides Sabinas was doubtless but there is one verse in the back part of the book that ought not to have been rejected, because it so evidently prophetically refers to the general run of Congresses of the United States. One hundred and ninety-nine. They carry themselves high and as prudent men, and though they are fools, yet would seem to be teachers. Street Livelihoods A few months ago puzzles were all the rage with the street peddlers. A man could not walk three blocks without having some new invention of a ten-cent puzzle offered him to tangle his brain with. There were puzzles consisting of iron rings with handles to them, and iron rings strung on a stick, and iron rings linked together, and other puzzle nuisances. People bought these things, thousands and hundreds of thousands of them, and figured at them till they got them apart, and then figured at them till they got them together again. And then they saw the vanity of such things and did no more invest in them. And so the puzzle mania died. Then there was an eruption of blind people from somewhere, blind people led by a friend, blind people led by dogs, blind people who felt their way with a stick, blind people who sat on doorsteps with horrid poetry labeled on their hats and a tin cup alongside with a penny nest egg in it, blind men who tortured charity from foot passengers by grinding dismal music out of a thing like a mud turtle. The blind business was immensely popular for three days. Everybody who had a blind friend borrowed him and trotted him out. It was a short-lived excitement, but it was fine while it lasted. Next came a villain who shrieked and whistled like a mockingbird, and who almost split people's ears when he happened upon them unawares. He carried a basket full of vile inventions which were able to make other people as capable of dispensing his kind of misery as himself. I have lost sight of him latterly. He is dead, maybe. I hope so. Popular rage now runs to little painted horses, clowns, chickens, et cetera, suspended from India rubber strings. On every corner is a vagrant peddling these wonderfully trifling toys. No invention, since the game of croquet, has reached such miraculous triviality. And, by the way, this toy on a string business had its origin in a thing invented by a Brooklyn man about two years ago, and which was nothing more extraordinary than a ball attached to an elastic cord. Its sole virtue was that, when expelled from one's hand, it returned again, provided the end of the string was firmly held. This gave great satisfaction to the performer. Everybody bought this toy and played with it men, women, and children. Everybody neglected grave or pursuits and reveled in the fierce intoxication of this amusement. The happiness at occasion was universal. The inventor found himself suddenly famous and suddenly wealthy. But mark you the moral. The fates favored him only to deceive. They promised him a long life blessed with the comfort and serenity that go with a competence honestly earned. But behold, an ex-policeman way-laid the favorite of fortune in the streets of Brooklyn at dead of night a week ago, and shot him to death with an air gun. Riches will still take wings and fly away, and so also will life, and nothing can assist them in their flight better than an ex- policeman. A character. It takes all kinds of people, and more, to make a world. We all know that. The world would not have been entirely complete, I think, without Captain Summers of the Navy. He is very old now, and very proud of his long and honorable career too, in the service of his country. He entered the Navy through the haws-holes, as the phrase goes, and worked himself up to his present high rank by hard labor and close attention to duty. He is just a little illiterate, is eminently practical, has no poetry in his composition, and can abide no nonsense. He is entirely free from everything in the shape of sentiment. I had heard a good deal of him, and went to his favorite saloon last night, purposely, to hear him talk. You see, he is on the retired list, and has nothing to do but spin yarns, and sip away his pay in hot whiskey punches. I spent a pleasant evening, and picked up many a queer item, which I mean to print, after a little, and did intend to in this letter, but it has already grown too long. Still, as I have mentioned the old captain, I must tell one story they have on him at any rate. Twenty or thirty years ago, when Missionary Enterprise was in its infancy among the islands of the South Seas, Captain Summers anchored his sloop of war off one of the Marquesas, I think it was. The next morning he saw an American flag floating from the beach, Union down. This excited him fearfully, of course, and he sent off a boat at once to inquire into the matter. Presently the boat returned and brought a grave-looking missionary. The captain's anxiety ran high. He said, What's the trouble out there? Quick! Well, I am grieved to say, sir," said the missionary, that the natives have been interrupting our sacerdotal exercises. No! Blast their yaller-hides! I'll—what? What was it you said they had been doing? Pains me, sir, to say that they have been interrupting our sacerdotal exercises! Interrupting your—your— Hell! Man, then, starboard guns! Stand by now to give them the whole battery!" The astounded clergyman hastened to protest against such excessive rigorous measures, and finally succeeded in making the old tar understand that the natives had only been breaking up a prayer meeting. Oh, devil-take-it-man, is that all? I thought you meant that they'd stopped your grog! Artemis Ward The body of poor Artemis Ward arrived here per steamer today from England, and was received by Charles Dawson Shanley and the other American executioners of the deceased, and will be forwarded to the old homestead in Maine on Monday for final internment. Artemis stipulated in his will that his little valet should be apprenticed for two years to the best printer in America to learn the value of learning, and then sent to college. This is Section 90 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 90, Alta, California, August 11, 1867. New York, June 5, 1867. New York. Editors, Alta. I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that it is a splendid desert, a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race. A man walks his tedious miles through the same interminable street every day, elbowing his way through a buzzing multitude of men, yet never seeing a familiar face, and never seeing a strange one the time. He visits a friend once—it is a day's journey—and then stays away from that time forward till that friend cools to a mere acquaintance, and finally to a stranger. So there is little sociability, and consequently there is little cordiality. Every man seems to feel that he has got the duties of two lifetimes to accomplish in one, and so he rushes, rushes, rushes, and never has time to be companionable, never has any time at his disposal to fool away on matters which do not involve dollars and duty and business. All this has a tendency to make the city-bred man impatient of interruption, suspicious of strangers, and fearful of being bored, and his business interfered with. The natural result is that the striking want of heartiness available here, sometimes even among old friends, degenerates into something which is hardly even chilly politeness towards strangers. A large party of Californians were discussing this matter yesterday evening, and one said he didn't believe there was any genuine fellow feeling in the camp. Another said, come now! Don't judge without a full hearing! Try all classes! Try everybody! I have been to the Young Men's Christian Association, but the first speaker said, my son, I have been to the Young Men's Christian Association and it isn't any use. It was the same old thing, thermometer at thirty-two degrees, which is the freezing notch, if I understand it. They were polite there, exasperatingly polite, just as they are outside. One of them prayed for the stranger within his gates, meaning me, but it was plain enough that he didn't mean his petition to be taken in earnest, it simply amounted to this, that he didn't know me, but would recommend me to mercy anyhow, since it was customary, but didn't wish to be misunderstood as taking any personal interest in the matter. Of course, that was rather a strong exaggeration, but I thought it was a pretty fair satire upon the serene indifference of the New Yorker to everybody and everything, without the pale of his private and individual circle. There is something about this ceaseless buzz and hurry and bustle that keeps a stranger in a state of unwholesome excitement all the time, and makes him restless and uneasy, and saps from him all capacity to enjoy anything or take a strong interest in any matter whatever. A something which impels him to try to do everything and yet permits him to do nothing. He is a boy in a candy shop, could choose quickly if there were but one kind of candy, but is hopelessly undetermined in the midst of a hundred kinds. A stranger feels unsatisfied here a good part of the time. He starts to a library, changes, and moves toward a theater, changes again, and thinks he will visit a friend, goes within a biscuit toss of a picture gallery, a billiard room, a beer cellar and a circus in succession, and finally drifts home and to bed, without having really done anything or gone anywhere. He don't go anywhere because he can't go everywhere, I suppose. This fidgety, feverish restlessness will drive a man crazy after a while or kill him. It kills a good many dozens now by suicide. I have got to get out of it. There is one thing very sure. I can't keep my temper in New York. The cars and carriages always come along and get in the way just as I want across the street, and if there is anything that can make a man soar into flights of sublimity in the matter of profanity, it is that. You know that yourself. However I must be accurate, I must speak truth and say there is one thing that is more annoying. That is to go down West Tenth Street, hunting for the art building No. 51. You are tired, and your feet are hot and swollen, and you wouldn't start, only you calculate that it cannot be more than two blocks away, and you almost feel a genuine desire to go and see the picture on exhibition without once changing your mind. Very well, you come to No. 7, and directly you come to No. 142. You stare a minute, then step back and start over again, but it isn't any use. When you are least expecting it comes that unaccountable jump. You cross over and find No. 18, 20, 22, and then perhaps you jump to No. 376. Your gall begins to rise. You go on, you get on a trail, at last the figure is leading by regular approaches up toward No. 51. But when you have walked four blocks they start at No. 49 and begin to run the other way. You are perspiring and furious by this time, but you keep desperately on and speculate on new and complicated forms of profanity, and behold, in time the numbers become bewilderingly complicated. On one door, 18, A3, on a little tin scrap. On the next, a 17 in gold characters, a foot square. On the next, a 19, A5, and a 137, one above the other and in three different styles of figuring. You do not swear any more now, of course, because you can't find any words that are long enough or strong enough to fit the case. Graded and ignominious and subjugated, and there and then you say that you will go away from New York and start over again, and that you will never come back to settle permanently till you have learned to swear with the utmost fluency in 17 different languages. You become more tranquil now, because you see your way clearly before you, how that, when you are properly accomplished you can live in this great city and still be happy. You feel that in that day, when a subject shall defy English, you can try the Arabic, the Hungarian, the Japanese, the Kulu Kafir, and when the worst comes to the worst you can come to the Hindustani on it and conquer. After this you go tranquilly on for a matter of 17 blocks and find fifty-one sandwiched in between numbers 13 and 32,986. Then you wish you had never been born, to come to a strange land and suffer in this way. Well, I intended, when I started out, to give my views of the pleasant side of New York, but I perceived that I have wandered into the wrong vein, and so I will stop short and give it up until I find myself in a more fortunate humor. I do not think that I could twist myself around now any easier than I could turn myself inside out. Bridget Durgan. They left out the insanity business in this woman's case and tried her on the plain guilty or innocent merits of the charge against her. Of course they brought her in guilty of murder in the first degree and without any recommendation to mercy. After the verdict was rendered she went out of the courtroom smiling and seemingly in excellent spirits. The woman is either a fiend or a fool. Her case is utterly incomprehensible. The circumstantial evidence shows that she cut and hacked and stabbed her victim in many places and bit her on the neck, and then wore out some of the furniture beating her with it, and yet not the shadow of a motive can they discover that she had for harming her mistress at all. Unless Bridget Durgan goes and spoils everything by confessing before they hang her, this dark and bloody murder will be the most relishable mystery of the age. It is said, however, that she has intimated that in due time she will confess not that she did the deed, but that she saw it done and will furnish to the world all the dread particulars of the assassination. The story would be read here with a ravenous interest. Another woman is to be tried shortly as her accomplice. General Sutter. It is said that a sumptuous banquet was given to General Sutter by the gentlemen of the Traveler's Club on the night of May 31st. They must have kept it very quiet. The cards of invitation gave out that the reception would take place on the evening of June 1st, and I went there to report the proceedings along with a herald man. But it was a fraud on us newspaper men. There was nothing whatever going on, and so we were just feelingly gouged out of a dinner. I think they dated the cards ahead on purpose to impose on us and escape a famine. That may be fair, but we do not so regard it. It might have been excusable, but that utterly innocent parties had to suffer for it eventually, because we went and took dinner at a restaurant which had just been opened and had not yet acquired a lucrative run of custom. How ought the Traveler's cheeks to burn with shame when this fact comes to their ears? General Sutter is said to be in excellent health and spirits, and has been receiving many and distinguished marks of attention at the hands of the citizens of New York. THE INDIAN ROW I wonder if you are in as much distress about the Indians as we are. We talk Maximilian, and his possible execution some, but our main dependence for solid conversation is the Indians. The herald, tribune, and world attend to the Indians in editorials, and the Times gives three columns of statistics which really show that all the fuss is made up out of very slender material. Yet the talk goes on, and the telegrams, and official orders, and the sundry other notes of preparation that fill the air with warnings serve to swell the interest of the thing and constantly augment its importance. An educated and highly cultivated American lady who speaks French and Italian has traveled in Europe and studied the country so faithfully that she knows it as well as another woman would know her flower garden. Said to me yesterday that she had some very dear friends in San Francisco and other parts of Idaho, and these Indian rumors gave her unspeakable uneasiness. She believed that for seven nights she had hardly slept at all, without imagining the horrors which are liable at any moment to fall upon those friends, and she said she had friends in Santa Fe and Los Angeles, but she did not feel so worried about them, because she believed the Indians did not infest the Caribou country as much as they did the Feralon Mountains and other localities further west. I tried to comfort her all I could, I told her I honestly believed that her friends in San Francisco and other parts of Idaho were just as safe there as they would be in Jerusalem or any other part of China. Here she interrupted me and told me with a well-bred effort to keep her countenance that Jerusalem was not in China. I apologized and said it was a slip of the tongue, but what I had meant to express was that her friends would be just as safe in Santa Fe and other parts of Caribou as they would be in Damascus or any other locality in France. And she interrupted me again, and this time she did laugh a little bit and told me modestly and in a way that could not hurt anybody's feelings that Damascus was not in France. I excused my stupidity again and said that what I was trying to get at was that her people might be even in the perilous gorges of the Feralon Mountains and districts further west and still fair as well as if they were in Hong Kong or any other place in Italy. And then she did not laugh, but looked serious and said, Are you so preposterously ignorant as all this amounts to, or are you trying to quiz me? And I said, Don't you go to Europe any more till you know a little something about your own country? I won. It is funny, the absurd remarks people make about the far west and the wild questions they ask about it when they are discussing the Indian difficulties. It is humiliating to me to consider how high an opinion we have of our importance out there in the Pacific regions, and then to discover how very little some people know about us. A late number of Blackwood spoke of Andrew Jackson as being still alive, and I wondered at it at the time. But I do not wonder at it so much now. Why, I have seen one man who possessed ordinary intelligence, who was under the impression that silver bricks came from the mine just as they were. He could understand that, easily enough, because it looked reasonable. But how the assayers stamp came there was what worried him. It surprises me to reflect how much I taught that man in the next fifteen minutes, and I did not charge him anything for it. I meet people occasionally, poor fellows, who wish to inquire after unknown and unheard of mines in all manner of impossible places, and who bought at round prices a year or two ago, and somehow have not heard from their mines, or anybody connected with them, for many months. They uniformly wound up by asking what they had better do. I always advise them to sell. Now, I consider that a deep and a subtle joke, but in their wretched ignorance they never know enough to laugh at it. I am waiting patiently to hear that they have ordered General Conner out to polish off those Indians, but the news never comes. He has shown that he knows how to fight the kind of Indians that God made, but I suppose the Humanitarians want somebody to fight the Indians that J. Fenimore Cooper made. There is just where the mistake is. The Cooper Indians are dead. Died with their creator. The kind that are left are of altogether a different breed, and cannot be successfully fought with poetry and sentiment and soft soap and magnanimity. Great Temperance Picnic The strong effort being made to break down the excise law has aroused the temperance societies to renewed activity. They hold meetings. They have lectures, print addresses, circulate petitions, project discussions, do everything they can, in fact, to keep the interest of temperance devotees from flagging or failing. They feel that their cause and their excise triumph are in some peril, and appreciate the necessity for union and energy. Their ingenuity culminated a few days ago in a grand picnic, but alas, the picnic culminated in a grand drunk. Some miscreant invaded the camp with whiskey, and many of the crusaders fell. New converts could not resist their old love, and some of the elder knights that did resist courageously were overcome at last. Then there was a fight, and several very good Templars blacked each other's eyes and flattened each other's noses. It was very sad. The enemies of temperance were beginning to grow hopeless again, and a few more processions and proclamations would have sent them cowering to their dens, never more to break the cause of right and virtue perchance when these good Templars forgot themselves and their great work and got drunk. Why is it that good Templars will always go and get drunk when they have picnics? Why is it? It is such a public occasion that a temperance society cannot get drunk at a picnic without exciting remark. I have uniformly noticed that when temperance societies get drunk at picnics, people speak of it. Why cannot such societies choose their officers with some judgment? Unhappily, it is too often the case that these officers are chosen by partiality and not by personal merit. The consequence is that the affairs of the organization are conducted in a loose, slip-shod way, and every day exposes the inefficiency of the chief officers. What result must inevitably follow this official poverty of judgment? Plainly this, that instead of getting drunk in the privacy of the meeting-room, the society goes off and gets drunk at a vile public picnic. This is all wrong, and has a bad effect. It does more to retard the cause of temperance than can well be estimated. It is because the example it sets is questionable. Organizations of this kind should jealously guard against any conduct as a society which can be considered questionable. No temperance society which is well-officered and which has the real good of our fellow men in view will ever get drunk save in the seclusion of its temperance hall. I speak feelingly upon this subject, because I have seen so much of this thing. I have been a member of three zealous, hard-working, and sincere temperance organizations whose influence for good in each case became permanently impaired through their persisting in getting drunk in public every Saturday night. I warned them repeatedly that this was bad judgment, but they could not comprehend how this could be, and so the result was, as I have stated. A little self-sacrifice on their part would have saved the cause and saved the societies themselves much adverse criticism, but no, they refused to get drunk in private. With my experience, I know what is to befall these societies here that are arrayed against the excise law. The example of that one ill-officered organization will entrap them all into the error that public debauches are proper, and so they will now proceed to ruin their great cause by getting drunk at their picnics instead of in private. I grieve to contemplate this unfortunate state of things, and would willingly do everything to avert the disaster these people are about to bring upon themselves, but now that they have got started, I know of no way to do it, and therefore must hope against hope and, sadly, leave them to their destiny. End of Section 90. This is Section 91 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This Libervox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 91, Alta, California, August 18, 1867. New York, June 6, 1867. Harry's Hills. Among the many attractive and fashionable places of resort with which New York is so well-stocked, I wish to call particular attention to Mr. Harry Hills Clubhouse in Crosby Street, two or three blocks from Broadway. It is a retired spot and is cheerful and peculiar. I was coming down street with a couple of friends last night, and they suggested that we drop in at Harry Hills. It was in my head somehow that Harry Hills was where the savants were in the habit of meeting to commune upon abstruse matters of science and philosophy, men like Agassiz and Erickson and people of that stamp. I felt in a reflective mood, and I said I would like to go to Harry Hills and hear those great men talk much better than to trifle away the time in the follies of gayer localities. We started through a little saw-dusted den of a tenth-rate rum-hole, and I said, this is just like the eccentricities of those wonderful intelligences. We never find them surrounded by gilded trappings and pretentious display. As we passed through a door at the other end, a mashed-nose athlete in his shirt-sleeves shouted to someone whom I could not see. Now's your time, gents! The Wizard of the Mountains is on next in his inimical feats of magic. The wise men are seeking to sound the capabilities of human ingenuity, I thought, and I admire this evidence of their sympathy with matters of mere minor importance when they could busy themselves with abstruse problems in mechanics and astronomy if they chose. We went upstairs and found a great many gentlemen and also a great many ladies. I was glad to see ladies encouraging science with their inspirating presence. I like to pick out great men in a crowd by the sign and seal of superiority which nature imprints upon their features. In this case I was troubled to select agassis and hesitated long. Finally I said, this man is he. This must be he, though, to say truly he hath all the seeming of a murderer. And this is Erickson. This surely is Erickson, albeit in another place I might take him for a burglar. And this must be Professor Morse, I think, notwithstanding the sneaking villainy in his eye. And this, here there was a sound of music, and I marveled greatly to see the wise men take each a lady and spin her in the giddy waltz. The ladies too did spin around with such thoughtless vehemence that I was constrained to place my hat before my eyes. When they had finished, the great Erickson embraced his lady publicly and kissed her. Professor Morse sat down and took his lady on his lap. She, not observing that her hoops were mightily elevated. And Professor Agassis conveyed his lady to a small bar which I had not before noticed, and called for drinks for the crowd. I shuddered. I could not help it, because these things seemed so out of keeping with the grave characters I had thought all the philosophers possessed, so I turned me away and perused certain placards that hung upon the walls. One read, Obscene language and profanity not permitted here. Another read, People who are drunk must leave the premises. And still another read, Lovers not wanted here. And yet another, All equality here, All treated alike, All sociable, No lovers allowed. Then, in big letters, Obscene language and profanity most positively forbidden. These are all good wholesome rules, I said within myself. Surely I can find no fault with them. But how dreadfully irregular these philosophers must be to render such ordinances necessary! There were also large placards adorned with verses of poetry, but the excellence of it seemed questionable to me, though I could not believe otherwise than that Mr. Longfellow or Mr. Bryant must have written it, of course. It was chiefly laudatory of the merits and attractions of the place. Presently a man came out on a stage and sang, It was a cold winter's night and the tempest was snarling, and several parties accompanied him upon violins and a piano. After him came a remarkably black negro whose clothes were ragged and danced a boisterous dance and sang, I am a happy contraband, though all his statements regarding himself would have warranted a different condition, I thought. After him came a man who mimicked fighting cats and the buzzing of mosquitoes and the squealing of a pig. Then a homely young man in a highland costume entered upon the stage and danced, and he ought to have danced moderately because he had nothing in the wide world on but a short coat and short stockings. This was apparent every time he whirled around. However no one observed it but me. I knew that because several handsomely dressed young ladies, from thirteen to sixteen and seventeen years of age, went and sat down under the footlights, and of course they would have moved away if they had noticed that he was only partly dressed. I had a great desire to become acquainted with Professor Agassiz, and so I went over and spoke respectfully to a young lady, a very charming girl, barely out of her teens, and said, pardon me, mademoiselle, but I suppose that gentleman yonder is the great philosopher, the renowned Agassiz. She gazed upon me with great interest a while, and then she said, You're sick, ain't you, sonny? I was surprised at the remark. I hesitated a little, and then I said, I am not well, as you have deigned to observe, but if that is Mr. Agassiz, oh, that be! It's bladder-nosed Jake! I thought I should sink through the floor with mortification. I was going to excuse myself and bid the young person good evening when she interrupted with great spirit and said, Oh, if you want to shoot your gab, take me up to the bar and ties me, and then you can yelp till you rot. I never felt so badly in my life. I purchased her a drink. It was nothing more harmful than soda water, and then she wanted me to buy her an orange, which I did. Next she desired me to waltz with her, but I excused myself because I began to have some suspicions about her, and finally she asked me to see her home, which I refused to do. I wanted to go away from there, and my friends consented. When we got outside I said, Is it possible that old Agassiz and those philosophers go to that place and carry on that way every night? Philosophers, said they. Why, there was never a philosopher there in the world. That is Harry Hills, one of the worst dens in all New York. Those men were a very hard lot, except those country bumpkins that were skirmishing round there, flies in the web, and didn't know it, and the young girls were street walkers, and the most abandoned in the city. When I found that I, a newspaper man, had been drawn into such a place as that, my indignation knew no bounds, and I said we would go and hunt up another one. The Holy Land Excursion Everything is ready, and tomorrow at 3 p.m. the ship will sail. Tonight all the passengers are to gather themselves together at the house of Mr. Beecher in Brooklyn to consult concerning the voyage and to get acquainted. I hope we shall have a pleasant time of it. My creditors held a social reunion last night, and I am sure that they had a pleasant time of it at any rate, at least it was as cheerful as the circumstance of parting with me could make it, and you know I have been an old standby with them. I was the salvation of one of those people. He was a collector. His business became reduced till he hadn't a bill left to collect except one against me. That kept him in employment till a brighter day dawned for him, but all through the long night of his distress that one solitary wash-bill was a beacon of hope that never, never went out. Never showed any signs of going out. Never even flickered, I may say. Naturally that man reveres my name and looks upon me as his benefactor. I have been a benefactor to a good many of his class. I have never mentioned it before. I have gone about doing good in this unastentatious way and have never said one word about it until this moment. These people drank wine and made merry last night until I was ready to go. Then they wept and presented me with the following beautiful memorial wrought upon parchment. Mr. Mark Twain. To Mrs. O'Shaughnessy and nine children. To Washing, which the same has not been paid for, $18.45. To Hope Restaurant for Sustenance, $68.25. To Subscription to Dinner for Benefit of Orphan's Fund, $0.50. And to Difference between Subscription and Amount of Dinner Consumed by Subscriber, $6.30. Several more items of this nature were in the memorial and also a nice blank place for Received Payment. The blank marrs the beauty of the thing to some extent, but still I suppose it will answer the way it is. Usually blanks are unsightly because they are so meaningless, but this one is full of expression. A Specimen Brick. I can give you a specimen of our passengers if you like, but I am glad to say he is the only specimen of the kind on the list, at least he is the only one left now. When he heard that General Sherman was going to remain in the States he howled fearfully. Indeed he almost shed tears. He said, There I just thought so all along. I just knew how it would be. I tell you the trip has lost all its charms. I wouldn't give two straws to go now. I had rather have lost my right arm than that this should have happened. This fellow had tried to stipulate that his wife should be introduced to Miss Sherman early and have a seat next to her at table and that he should be permitted to sit next the General himself. And next I suppose this flunky would have waited to hold the General's hat while he washed his teeth. General Sherman ought to congratulate himself upon his escape from five months' worship by this bred and born slave. If that man goes in the ship and you hear that somebody has fallen overboard in a dark and mysterious manner, some night, you can calculate that it is he. Another passenger, a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg that looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity, as Henry Clap said of Reverend Dr. Osgood, walked in the other day and stood around for some time and finally said he had forgotten, when he took passage, to inquire if the excursion would come to a halt on Sundays. Captain Duncan replied that he had hardly expected to anchor the ship in the middle of the Atlantic, but that on shore everybody would be free, no restrictions, free to travel on Sunday or not, just as they saw fit, and he had no doubt that some would do one and some the other. The questioner did not groan audibly, but I think he did inwardly. Then he said it would be well for people to calculate their chances before doing wrong, that he had always got into trouble when he travelled on the Sabbath, and that he should do so no more when he could avoid it. That he lately travelled with a man in Illinois who would not lay by on Sunday because he could not afford the time, but he himself laid by and still beat the sinner and got to the end of the journey first. Now I respected that man's repugnance to violating the Sabbath until he betrayed that he would violate it in a minute if he were not afraid the lightning would strike him or something else would happen to him, and then I lost my reverence for him. I thought I perceived that he was not good and holy, but only sagacious, and so I turned the key on my valise and moved it out of his reach. I shall have to keep an eye on that fellow. Satisfied Curiosity I have a large share of curiosity, but I believe it is satisfied for the present. I have seen the horse Dexter trot a race, but then I know but little about horses that appreciate the exhibition. I was present at the great annual meeting of the Quakers a week ago, but between you and I it was excessively dull. I went to a billiard tournament where Phelan and McDevitt played, but I knew beforehand what to expect, and so there was no chance to get up a revivifying astonishment. I have been to three Sunday schools and have heard all the great guns of the New York pulpit preach, and so that department is exhausted. I have been through the dens of poverty, crime, and degradation that hide from the light of day in the five points and infinitely worse locations, but I, even I, can blush and must decline to describe them. I have been in the Bible-house and also in the station-house, pleasant experiences of a day, but nothing worth for a second visit. I have gone the rounds of the newspaper offices and the theatres, all contrasted the feverish turmoil of Broadway with the still repose of Greenwood Cemetery. I have seen Barnum's Museum and Time and again have looked upon the summer loveliness of Central Park and stood upon its high grounds and wondered how any landscape could be so beautiful as that which stretches abroad right and left over Jersey and far up the river, and yet have no sign of a mountain upon it. I have seen Brooklyn and the ferry boats and the Dunderburg and the Boot Blacks and Staten Island and Peter Cooper and the Fifth Avenue and the Academy of Design and Rosa Bonner's Horse Fair and have compared the noble architecture of Old Trinity Church with the cluster of painted shower-baths they call Young Dr. Ting's Church. They don't dare to call it the Church of God, understanding it has got a safety iron fence on its roof and sixty-two lightning rods. And behold, I have tried the Russian Bath and skated while the winter was here and did contract to go up in a balloon. But the balloon didn't go. I have seen all there was to see, even the black crook, and yet I say it—that shouldn't say it—all is vanity. There has been a sense of something lacking, something wanting, every time. And I guess that something was the provincial quietness I am used to. I have had enough of sights and shows and noise and bustle and confusion and now I want to disperse. I am ready to go. The Life Raft The departure of Captain Mike's for Europe on a Life Raft was the sensation of the week. This raft is a thing made of three cylinders, twenty-five feet long each and twenty-six inches in diameter, made fast together side by side. We have all heard of shipwrecked men drifting for days and days together in mid-ocean on such contrivances, not very dissimilar to this, but why any man should want to start to Europe on one when he could travel in a ship and still have a reasonable hope of never getting there is a mystery to me. If Captain Mike's thought this would be a shrewd method of beating the life insurance companies, it would be a good deal because they promptly barred the Life Raft. The Captain rigged five sails on his little hen-coupe and took forty days rations of water and provisions for himself and his two men. He expects to reach Havre in twenty-five to thirty days, but somehow the more I looked at that shaky thing the more I felt satisfied that the old tar was on his last voyage. He is going to run in the usual route of the ships and somebody will run over him some murky gray night and we shall never hear of the bold Prussian any more. To whom it may concern. I shall write very often to the altar on this Palestine excursion, of course. The various issues of the altar have a very wide circulation on the Great Plains, the Pacific Coast, the islands of the South Seas and in China and Japan, and through my efforts I trust that these diversified peoples will yet know more about the Holy Land than the Holy Landers do themselves. I am peculiarly fitted to deal with that patriarchal country because of my personal experience of life in Great Salt Lake City. Goodbye. Mark Twain. Twain for the next few months was on the famous voyage of the Quaker City and the other innocence abroad. End of Section 91. This is Section 92 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 92, Alta, California, January 8th, 1868. New York, November 20th. Home again. The steamer Quaker City arrived yesterday morning and turned her menagerie of pilgrims loose on America but, thank heaven, they came ashore in Christian costume. There was some reason to fear that they would astound the public with Moorish hakes, Turkish fezzes, sashes from Persia, and such other outlandish Diablory as their distempered fancies were apt to suggest to them to resurrect from their curious foreign trunks. They have struggled through the custom house and escaped to their homes. Their pilgrims' progress is ended and they know more now than it is lawful for the gods themselves to know. They can talk it from now till January. Most of them are too old to last longer. They can tell how they criticize the masterpieces of Rubens, Titian, and Murillo in Paris, Italy, and Spain. But they, nor any other man, can tell precisely how competent they were to do it. They can give their opinion of the Emperor of France, the Sultan of Turkey, the Tsar of Russia, the Pope of Rome, the King of Italy, and Garibaldi from personal observation. But, alas, they cannot furnish those gentlemen's opinion of them. They can tell how they ascended Mont Blanc, how they tried to snuffle over the tomb of Romeo and Juliet, how they gathered weeds in the Colosseum and cabaged mosaics from the baths of Caracalla, how they explored the venerable Alhambra and were entranced with the exquisite beauty of the Alcazar, how they infested the bazaars of Smyrna, Constantinople, and Cairo, how they went through the holy places of Palestine and left their private mark on every one of them, from Dan, unto the Sea of Galilee, and from Nazareth, even unto Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. They climbed the pyramids of Egypt and swore that Vesuvius was finer than they, that the Sphinx was foolishness to the Parthenon and the dreamy panorama of the Nile, nonsense to the glories of the Bay of Naples. They can tell all about that, and they will. They can boast about all that, but will they tell the secret history of the trip? Catch them at it. They will blow their horns about the thousand places they have visited and get the locked jaw three times a day trying to pronounce the names of them. They never did get any of those names right, but never, never in the world will they open the sealed book of the secret history of their memorable pilgrimage. And I won't, for the present at any rate. Goodbye to the well-meaning old gentlemen and ladies. I bear them no malice, albeit they never took kindly the little irreverent remarks I had occasion to make about them occasionally. We didn't amalgamate, that was all. Nothing more than that. I was exceedingly friendly with a good many of them, eight out of the sixty-five, but I didn't doubt on the others, and they didn't doubt on me. We were all was glad to meet, but then we were just as glad to part again. There was a little difference of opinion between us, nothing more. They thought they could have saved Sodom and Gomorrah, and I thought it would have been unwise to risk money on it. I never failed to make friends on ship-board before, but maybe I was meaner than usual this trip. Still I was more placable than they. Every night in calm or storm I always turned up in their synagogue in the after-cabin at Seven Bells, but they never came near my stateroom. They called it a den of iniquity, but I cared not. There were others who knew it as the home of modest merit. I bear the pilgrims no malice, now none at all. I did give them a little parting blast in the herald this morning, but I only did that just to see the galled jade wince. A model excursion. People always jump to the conclusion that passengers of diverse natures, occupations, and modes of life, thrown together in great numbers on board a ship, must infallibly create trouble and unending dissatisfaction for each other. This idea is wrong. Diverse natures, when they are good, whole-hearted human natures, blend and dovetail together on ship-board as neatly as the vericolored fragments of stone in an exquisite mosaic. It is your gang of all perfection, all piety, all economy, all unchartableness, like ancient mosaic pavements in the ruins of Rome, the stones all one color, and the cracks between them unpleasantly conspicuous. It is a gang like this that makes a particularly and peculiarly infernal trip. I am tired hearing about the mixed character of our party on the Quaker City. It was not mixed enough. There were not black guards enough on board in proportion to the saints. There was not genuine piety enough to offset the hypocrisy. Genuine piety. Do you know what constitutes a legal quorum for prayer? It is in the Bible, when two or three are gathered together, etc. You observe the number. It means two or more honest, sincere Christians, of course. Well, we held 165 prayer meetings in the Quaker City, and 118 of them were scandalous and illegal, because four out of the five real Christians on board were too seasick to be present at them, and so there wasn't a quorum. I know. I kept a record. Prompted partly by the old repertorial instinct, and partly because I knew that their proceedings were null and void, and ought not to be allowed to pass without a protest. I had seen enough of legislatures to know right from wrong, and I was sorry enough to see things going as they were. They never could have stood a call of the house, and they resented every attempt of mine to get one. But I am wandering from my subject somewhat. I was only going to say that people of diverse natures make the pleasantest companionship in long sea voyages, and people all of one nature and that not a happy one, make the worst. If I were going to start on a pleasure excursion around the world and to the Holy Land, and had the privilege of making out her passenger list, I think I could do it right, and yet not go out of California. This thought was suggested by a dream I had a month ago, while this pilgrimage was still far at sea. I dreamed that I saw the following placard posted upon the bulletin boards of San Francisco, passenger list of the steamer constitution, Captain Ned Wakeman, which leaves this day on a pleasure excursion around the world, permitting her passengers to stop forty days in London, forty in Vienna, forty in Rome, ten in Geneva, ten in Naples, ten in its surroundings, twenty in Venice, thirty in Florence, fifty in the cities of Spain, two days in Constantinople, half a day in Smyrna, thirty days in St. Petersburg, five months in the Sandwich Islands, six in Egypt, forever in France, two hours and a half in the Holy Land. Reverend Dr. Wadsworth, James Anthony, Archbishop Alamani, Paul Morrill, Reverend Horatio Stebbins, John William Skae, Bishop Kipp, T.J. Lamb, General W.H. French, Asa Nudd, Emperor Norton, Louis Leyland, Old Ridgeway, John McComb, George Parker, Frank Pixley, Barry and Patton, Admiral Jim Smith, late of Hawaiian Navy, Captain Pease, Louis Kahn, Alec Badlam, Charles Lowe, Colonel Fry, Joe Jones, Pete Hopkins, General Drum, absent, Colonel Catherwood, Squarza, Stiggers, Citizen Sam Platt, Jim Coffroth, Frank Soul, Arby Swain, one dozen doctors chosen at large, delegates from San Quentin and Frank Bret Hart, George Barnes, Mark Twain, and three hundred other newspaper men in the steerage. It was a dream, but still it was a dream with wisdom in it. That tribe could travel forever without a row, and preserve each other's respect and esteem, keep the steerage passengers out of sight, and nothing could be set against the character of the party, either. The list I dreamt of, as above set down, could travel pleasantly. They would certainly make a sensation wherever they went, but they would certainly leave a good impression behind. And yet this list is made up of all sorts of people, and people of all ages. Against the impressive solemnity of Jim Coffroth, we have the levity of Dr. Wattsworth. Against the boisterousness of Arby Swain, we have the graveyard silence and decorum of Alex Badlam. Against General Drum's fondness for showing military dress, we have the emperor Norton's antipathy to epaulettes and soldier buttons. Against the reckless gaity of Bishop Kipp, we would bring the unsmiling puritanical straight lacedness of Anthony and Morrill. Against the questionable purity of the five delegates from San Quentin, we would array the bright virtue of the three hundred steerage passengers. Such was the pleasure-party I saw in my dream. There was a crowd for you that could swing round the circle for six months and never get homesick, never fall out, never mope and gossip, never wear out a Napoleon carrying it in their pockets. Never show disrespect to honest religion, never bring their nationality into disrepute, never fail to make Europe say, Lo, these Americans be bricks! To Washington. I am going to Washington to stay a month or two, possibly longer. I have a lot of Holy Land letters on the way to you that will arrive some time or other. End of Section 92. Section 93 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain Section 93, California, January 15, 1868. Mark Twain in Washington. Special Correspondents of the Alta, California. Prospects of the Hawaiian Treaty. A Model Treaty. Putting officials out of the way. Dark hints and surmises. Personal items. New Postmaster for San Francisco. Office Seekers. Washington, December 10, 1867. The Hawaiians I have talked frequently with General McCook, United States Minister to the Sandwich Islands, since I have been here. As you are aware, his business in Washington is to get the reciprocity treaty between Hawaii and this country through the Senate. It has been slow work and very troublesome, but a fair degree of progress is being made. The Senate has procured an endorsement of the proposed treaty by the Board of Trade of that city. A similar endorsement by the Chamber of Commerce of San Francisco was received by Telegraph a few days ago. These things have aided matters considerably. The Senate Committee, which has the affair in charge, called for a concise statement of the advantages to be gained by the United States through this treaty, and the Minister has been able and convincing paper. Yesterday they demanded minute statistics of the commerce between the two countries, and also a legal opinion as to the constitutionality of the proposed treaty. General McCook has the materials at hand for the commercial estimates and will immediately prepare them. He asked Associate Justice Field to post him upon the constitutional points of the case and received a cordial assent at once. Judge Field looked up all the authorities that bear upon it and delivered the memorandum this morning. This leaves the framing of the legal opinion an easy task, as General McCook was a lawyer before he was a soldier. I think the treaty is doing well now and is likely to be happily born before long. The committee have got the general statistics and will shortly have the particular ones. They will soon have the legal opinion of the constitutional points. They can have Harris's opinion any time if they want it, because he is here from Honolulu. They have the endorsements of the Boston and San Francisco chambers of commerce. The treaty does not conflict with the Plymouth collection of hymns nor the Sunday liquor law. What more these gentlemen can possibly want is a matter that is beyond human foresight. I do not see why they don't take to it instantly and with enthusiasm. It has got more statistics and more constitutionality in it than any documents in the world. That treaty has grown and grown upon my reverence until, in my eyes, it has become a perfect monument of mathematics and virtue. General McCook is getting a little tired of the delays and vexations of his position, tired of waltzing around the President, the Secretary of State, and the Senate committee with arguments and statistics. But he will see the end of it before he retreats. I have a sort of vague idea that he will begin to taste constitutionality in his food and smell of statistics before long. In concluding these remarks I will observe that I have not said the treaty is sure to pass. I only say that nothing has been left undone that could conduce to that end, and that success looks very promising. A Curious Idea It seems a curious idea to me, but at the hotel table the other evening I overheard two high government officials express the opinion, in fact almost assert, that the presidents of the United States who have died in office were put out of the way. They were put out of the way not by their successors, but by parties seeking contracts or offices who were unpopular with the regular incumbent but could realize their desires if the vice president were to rise to the throne. They did not even imagine for a moment that the vice presidents who succeeded were privy to the taking off or remotely suspected that it was going to transpire. They said that our form of government offered the same inducement to an ambitious or covetous man to put the president out of the way that is offered by the monarchical form. If he perfectly knew that his fortunes were by the vice president, if he were in power, it was a strong temptation to a bad man to procure the taking of the president's life. This conversation was as interesting to me as it was startling. I had never dreamt of such a thing before as a president's sacred life being in danger from the knives and poisons of assassins in times of profound peace. These gentlemen mentioned several curious circumstances that bore upon the subject. He said that for several days before President Taylor was taken sick, a restless, uneasy stranger hung about the White House grounds so much and acted so singularly as to excite remark. The day the president fell ill, this person was found in his bedroom. No one could tell how he got there. His own story was full of contradictions. It was supposed he came there to steal. He was searched and a curious powder found on his person, which, when removed, proved to be dirt. So there is every reason to believe President Taylor was poisoned. And then there was the man, dark and hairy, and malignant of expression, who was found at midnight under President Harrison's bed. He had a keg of powder with him and a fuse. Nothing saved the president but this man's stupidity, the providential stupidity of a remark he made, and which betrayed him. Could your excellency lend me a match? I can't make these damn things go!" That fortunate piece of carelessness on the stranger's part unquestionably saved the president's life. He confessed afterwards that he was not there for any good purpose. Considerations which he would not name, he said, had prompted him to wish that the president were out of the chair. Through anonymous letters he had tried to frighten him out. By the same means he had tried to frighten him out. When these had failed he saw with pain that it was necessary to blast him out. He had come for that purpose. He was sorry he had not succeeded. This man was quietly pardoned and set a liberty and advised to leave the country. He did not do it, however, and significant circumstances afterward aroused a strong suspicion that he had procured the president's death by poison through one of the White House The subject is interesting, notwithstanding the incidents above related have something of an improbable cast about them. That a president's life is always in very great danger, however, is a truth that cannot be doubted. That any president ever died in office by a natural death is a matter that is disbelieved by very wise men in Washington. Personal. I have met the California Senators, Thomas and Cole, and also Honorable Mr. Axtel of the Lower House. I believe I have nothing special to report concerning them. I have seen Jump also. He has just returned from Paris and is here making caricatures for Frank Leslie's publications. Mr. Hagen and C. F. Wood are here, and Mr. Chamberlain, late partner of Mr. Hayward in his mine, was until yesterday. He has gone away on an extensive foreign tour. General Ants McCook, brother of the Hawaiian minister-resident, is stopping here for a few days. He was, formerly, an honest miner, and lived at Nevada City. He is very young, but like the other members of the McCook family made a handsome record during the war. I came across one of the lions of the country today at the Senate, General Sherman. The conversation I had with this gentleman has considerable political significance and therefore ought to be reported, I suppose. I said the weather was very fine, and he said he had seen finer. Not liking to commit myself further in the present unsettled condition of politics, I said, good morning. Understanding my little game, he said, good morning also. This was all that passed, but it was very significant. It reveals clearly what he thinks of impeachment. Many great man's opinions as a little underhanded, but then everybody does it. People do it every day, as you can see by the papers, and find out as much as I did, and then rush off and publish it. The postmaster for San Francisco has been appointed by the president, but I am not at liberty to mention his name. His name will come before the Senate for confirmation shortly. There were twenty-seven applicants for the position. Speaking of applicants reminds me that the population of Washington even now seems to be made up of people who want offices. What must it be when a new president comes in? These office seekers are wonderfully seedy, wonderfully hungry-eyed, wonderfully importunate, and supernaturally gifted with cheek. They fasten themselves to influential friends like barnacles to whales, and never let go until they are carried right into the pleasant waters of office or scraped off against a protruding hotel bill. Their desires are seldom as modest as their qualifications. There was a fellow here the other day who had been consul to some starvation unexplored region of South America. We notoriously use only indifferent talent in the stocking of consulships, and having graduated in that little business had come to Washington to beg for the post minister to Mexico. Another who has been postmaster of some village in Arkansas where they have a mail every four weeks and it miscarries then oftener than it is safely delivered, is here drawn hither by a report that the postmaster general intended to resign. He wants the birth. I have only heard of one modest office seeker yet. He came here to apply for the post of secretary of war, and the general grant was ahead of him there. So he wants to be Governor of Alaska now. That is a retrograde movement that speaks well for him. It shows a disposition that is competent to adapt itself to circumstances. If any man can enjoy icebergs, this is he. If any man can maintain his serenity in the company of polar bears, this is the person. If any man can sustain the dignity of the state despite of such company and such surroundings, this is certainly that man. He ought to be appointed. A. J. Mulder, formerly of the San Francisco Herald, was married the other day in Philadelphia, and will shortly arrive here to be the chief of the Associated Press for Washington. Mark Twain. End of Section 93. This is Section 94 of this LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper articles by Mark Twain, Section 94, Alta, California, January 21, 1868. Letter from Mark Twain, special correspondent of the Alta, California. Concerning government salaries, female clerks, distribution of the places, Secretary Seward's real estate bargains, a shaky piece of satro tunnel. Washington, December 14, 1867. Salaries and clerkships. Our government pays the poorest salaries of any first power in the world, no doubt. She invites her servants, by poor salaries, to steal. She persuades them by great opportunities to steal. She forces them by the necessity of keeping up some degree of state and lack of the means to do it with poor salaries. She procures the services of men of second rate standing and 17th rate ability, and then debauches their little modicum of honesty and turns them adrift considerably worse than they were before. Members of the president's cabinet, heads of all great departments of the government, get $8,000 a year. Something over $7,000 after the income tax is subtracted. House rent $300 to $3,000, carriage, horses, servants, champagne blowouts and other necessaries, $6,000 with purchase of vehicle, etc. Wife, daughters, oysters, and other luxuries, well, anything from $3,000 up to $10,000 a year according to the style of your wife and the quality of your oysters. These gentlemen of the cabinet represent the great ministers of the state of a monarchy, and, of course, are obliged to live in a style somewhat in keeping with the high dignity of their positions. Not one of them can make his salary keep and clothe himself and family a year. Here is a temptation to steal. Have they the opportunity? Probably not one of them is without opportunities and most seductive ones with all. I am aware of two cases where the head of a department, by rendering in favor of two great companies, could have profited them to the amount of seven million dollars and would have received a present of a matter of $600,000 for doing it. His decision would have been final. From it there would have been no appeal. The parties benefited would have praised him. The parties not benefited would have abused him. The general public would not have cared much about the matter one way or the other. It was a cruel temptation to set before a man who was striving hard to make his salary support him, and not by any means succeeding. The heads of the great departments are assailed by these dazzling temptations every day. Is not an inadequate salary a bid for corruption. At least is it not a stronger bid than a full belly and a comfortable livelihood would be. We pay our European consuls just enough to keep them out of the poor house, and then we add an exquisite cruelty to this by giving the majority of them no chance to steal. The necessary consequence is that we get little, cheap pothouse politicians and other people who are just worth the money and no more. They are not paid to add to the country's reputation abroad, or the utmost fidelity they don't do it. Great Britain gets better men for such offices, for she pays better prices. She educates their servants, and promotes them as they deserve it. When a French envoy to Turkey equits himself well, he becomes a great minister of state next. He has that reward before him all the time. When a representative of ours learns, after long experience, how to conduct the affairs of his office, we discharge him and hire somebody that don't know anything about it. But the clerkship business in Washington seems to me to be the better of this metropolis. The heads of departments are harassed by congressmen to give clerkships to their constituents, until they are fairly obliged to consent in order to get a little peace. I heard one of these gentlemen say that if he dared dismiss one-third of his clerical force he could transact the business of his department infinitely better with the other two-thirds. In one or two of these departments, crowded as they are with officers, everything is at odds and ends, and paper that ought to be found in a moment, by reference to properly kept indexes, is often chased for miles through the vast circumlocution office, and found at last in a basket of loose documents. I have this from men who have proven it by personal experience. They tell hard stories about these departments which employ women. The women tell these things themselves. I will not enter them. I will only mention a suggestive conversation said to have occurred lately between a chief clerk of a bureau and a friend of a lady office-seeker. The clerk excused himself, was sorry, etc., but declined to make the appointment. But, the gentleman said, the place is vacant, and I have shown you that the lady is thoroughly competent. Competent? Why? She is as homely as an oyster. This may be a fabrication, I don't know. I only know that the several hundred girls in the Treasury Seraglio and in the other government harems—I get these terms on the street, they are not mine—average astonishingly well in the matter of youth and beauty. And yet experience teaches us that young and beautiful clerks are seldom the most valuable. Forty-two women applied for a vacant clerkship in one of the departments, all within three hours ago. They were of the oyster style of comeliness. They didn't get the clerkship. Whether the one fact were the cause and the other, the effect of that cause is a question I cannot decide. But seriously, very many of the female clerks are faithful to their duties and bear spotless reputations. If a different class creep in, it cannot be helped. The labor they have to perform is better suited to them than to sturdy them. And the government has done an act that is not more generous than just in extending their sphere of usefulness and their opportunity of earning a livelihood. No man can go into the departments and pick up hairpins and gaze upon the beauty there without being kindly disposed toward the innovation. This brings me easily and comfortably to an interesting feature of this subject. These departments are the first and other small government fish. Illinois heads the list. She furnishes four hundred and fifty of them. Whenever an official tooth needs filling, Mr. Washburn always stands ready with an Illinois plug, and the thing is done. He is the most inveterate dentist of them all, and the most successful. Pennsylvania comes next. She furnishes four hundred. Indiana comes next. Then Ohio, then the great state of New York. Rhode Island, which is so small that the inhabitants have to trespass on other states when they want to take a walk, furnishes more than the whole Pacific Coast put together. Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Washington Territory furnish twelve all told. There are plenty of people from those districts who would like well to sit at the official feast, chance. But Mr. Newcombe of Missouri has just introduced a resolution into Congress inquiring how many clerks are employed in the various departments, how long they have held their offices, what salaries they get, and what congressional districts they were recommended from. This will make a stir, and if there were an inquiry added of how much these clerks do and how much they don't do, the stir does, Mr. Washburn jumped to his feet and objected to the measure, and so it had to lie over under the rule. But it will come up again. Our Purchases. All Washington is laughing about our unfortunate purchases of Territory. We bought the island of St. Thomas not long ago. We may have got it at a bargain for its inhabitants were all dying off with the fevers of the country, and it promised to be nothing more than a bargain. Young Seward was sent down to pay all the property and the sailors stole all the money while he was ashore. More was procured and the business completed, and then began a series of catastrophes such as never astounded an unsuspecting purchaser before since the world was created. A storm arose, and the sea swept the island as clean as a ship's deck. A few days afterward an earthquake shook it up in a vast way. Before the people had had a chance to recover their tranquility, a volcano started up in their midst and threatened to hoist them all into eternity. The secretary of the navy sent two men of war down there to reconnoit her, and another earthquake rushed them ashore and shook half the timbers out of them. For thirty days the unhappy island has been torn and drenched and scorched by earthquakes, the inhabitants that are not too sick with fevers to be astonished are astonished as they never were in all their lies before and distressed beyond all possible description. Puerto Rico is undergoing a similar siege of supernatural disasters, and the people of Washington begin to suspect from these signs that we must have purchased Puerto Rico too through some secret treaty that has not yet transpired. I think Thomas Purchas have set the Senate against territorial speculations or not, I cannot say, but certainly a number of its members refuse to entertain the idea of paying for our former acquisition while Russia. If the Senate should refuse to pay for it, they would do a very absurd thing. To offend so powerful a friend as Russia for the trifle of seven million dollars would be unwise. Russia, by her simple and without lifting a hand, is able to save us from wars with European powers that would eat up the price of while Russia in four days, but perhaps we had better hold on to that money and buy some more earthquakes with it. Return of the Sutro Tunnel from Europe Mr. A. Sutro, of the great Sutro Tunnel Scheme arrived yesterday from Europe in the Russia. He brought his tunnel back with him. He had to sell to the Europeans. They liked the tunnel, they said it was a good tunnel, they said it was a good tunnel and a long tunnel and appeared to be a straight tunnel, but that they would look around a little before purchasing. If they could not find a tunnel to suit them near home they would call again. Many capitalists were fascinated with the idea of owning a tunnel, but none wanted such a long tunnel or one that was so far quiet. Evidently these Europeans think a tunnel is some kind of a curious ivory handled ornament suitable for a Philippine present. But seriously the Europeans said they were afraid of American stocks. That was it. Sutro was received with distinguished courtesy by the Savons and official dignitaries of half a dozen nations and by the chiefs of all the great minds in those countries. He showed his ores and his certified maps and statistics and astounded them with the wonderful productiveness of the Comstock a load they had never heard of and whose richness and extent they would not have believed but for the attested facts and figures. But they said capital was afraid of American stocks. Sutro visited all their little minds and gathered a mass of information which will always be interesting if never useful. In all the minds of Europe he found pupils. In the great school of minds of Freiburg he found 104 students, 43 of them were Americans. This is something of an argument in favor of Senator Stewart's recent bill for the founding of a national mining school in Nevada. Mr. Sutro is not discouraged about the great tunnel enterprise but has come straight to Washington to see if he cannot get Congress to grant the corporation some aid in grants of land or otherwise. Sutro ought to succeed with his great enterprise. Energy and everlasting industry and tenacity like his deserve a generous success. Any other man would have lost heart and abandoned this thing long before this time. Mark Twain.