 This is Section 67 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 67, Daily Hawaiian Herald, September, October, 1866. Daily Hawaiian Herald, September 4, 1866. Sam Clements, Mark Twain, which is merely his non-deplume, has been by us advised to correspond with the herald in his vivid and gossiping style. We shall expect letters from him soon, and as our people are aware of the vim and pungency of his pen, we look forward to an interesting addition of latest news to our columns. Daily Hawaiian Herald, September 5, 1866. Mark Twain on Photographs. We have just been reading over Sam Clements—sick—last letter, and in the flowing instance he blunders on so much truth that we have a notion to countermand our order for him to communicate with us. Speaking of photographs, he says they are all false and feelingly remarks. No photograph ever was good yet of anybody. Hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it. It transforms into desperados the meekest of men, depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians, gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool and a fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom. If a man tries to look serious when he sits for his picture, the photograph makes him look as solemn as an owl. If he smiles, the photograph smirks repulsively. If he tries to look pleasant, the photograph looks silly. If he makes the fatal mistake of attempting to seem pensive, the camera will surely write him down as an ass. The sun never looks through the photographic instrument that it does not print a lie. The piece of glass it prints it on is well named a negative, a contradiction, a misrepresentation, a falsehood. I speak feelingly of this matter, because by turns the instrument has represented me to be a lunatic, a Solomon, a missionary, a burglar, and an abject idiot, and I am neither. Daily Hawaiian Herald, September 14, 1866. Mark Twain on Captain Cook. It seems that Mark Twain, while here not only borrowed Jarvie's history of Captain Cook and carried it off, v. at Armies, but that he also appropriated from its pages the following synopsis of the event of the navigator's death. Plain, unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook's assassination and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide. Wherever he went among the islands he was cordially received and welcomed by the inhabitants, and his ships lavishly supplied with all manner of food. He returned these kindnesses with insult and ill treatment. When he landed at Kealakakua Bay, a multitude of natives, variously estimated at some ten to fifteen thousand, flocked about him and conducted him to the principal temple with more than royal honors, with honors suited to their chiefest God, for which they took him to be. They called him Lono, a deity who had resided at that place in a former age, but who had gone away and had ever since been anxiously expected back by the people. Captain Cook approached the awe-stricken people they prostrated themselves and hid their faces. His coming was announced in a loud voice by heralds, and those who had not time to get out of the way after prostrating themselves were trampled underfoot by the following throngs. Arrived at the temple he was taken into the most sacred part and placed before the principal idol. These distinguished civilities were never offered by the islanders to mere human beings. Cook was mistaken for their absent God. He accepted the situation and helped the natives to deceive themselves. His conduct might have been wrong in a moral point of view, but his policy was good in conniving at the deception and proved itself so. The belief that he was a God saved him a good while from being killed protected him thoroughly and completely until, in an unlucky moment, it was discovered that he was only a man. His death followed instantly. Jarvis, from whose history, principally, I am condensing this narrative, thinks his destruction was a direct consequence of his dishonest personation of the God. But unhappily for the argument the historian proves over and over again that the false Lono was spared time and time again when simple Captain Cook of the Royal Navy would have been destroyed with small ceremony. The idolatrous worship of Captain Cook, as above described, was repeated at every heathen temple he visited. Wherever he went the terrified common people not being accustomed to seeing gods marching around of their own free will and accord and without human assistance fled at his approach or fell down and worshiped him. A priest attended him and regulated the religious ceremonies which constantly took place in his honor. Offerings, chants, and addresses met him at every point. For a brief period he moved among them an earthly God, observed, feared, and worshipped. During all this time the whole island was heavily taxed to supply the wants of the ships or contributed to the gratification of their officers and crews and, as was customary in such cases, no returns expected. The natives rendered much assistance in filling the ships and preparing them for their voyages. At one time the king of the island laid a taboo upon his people, confining them to their houses for several days. This interrupted the daily supply of vegetables to the ships. Several natives tried to violate the taboo, under threats made by Cook sailors, but were prevented by a chief, who, for the enforcing the laws of his country, had a musket fired over his head from one of the ships. This is related in Cook's voyages. The taboo was soon removed, and the Englishmen were favored with the boundless hospitality of the natives as before, except that the Kanaka women were interdicted from visiting the ships. Formerly, with extravagant hospitality, the people had sent their wives and daughters on board themselves. The officers and sailors went freely about the island and were everywhere laden with presence. The king visited Cook in royal state and gave him a large number of exceedingly costly and valuable presence, in return for which the resurrected Lono presented his majesty a white linen suit and a dagger, an instance of illiberality in every way discreditable to a god. On the 2nd of February, at the desire of his commander, Captain King proposed to the priests to purchase for fuel the railing which surrounded the top of the temple of Lono. In this, Cook manifested as little respect for the religion in the mythology of which he figured so conspicuously as scruples in violating the divine precepts of his own. Indeed, throughout his voyages, a spirit regardless of the rights and feelings of others, when his own were interested, is manifested especially in his last cruise, which is a blot upon his memory. Cook desecrated the holy places of the temple by storing supplies for his ships in them, and by using the level grounds within the enclosure as a general workshop for repairing his sails, etc. ground which was so sacred that no common native dared to set foot upon it. Ledyard, a Yankee sailor who was with Cook and whose journal is considered the most just and reliable account of this eventful period of the voyage, says two iron hatchets were offered for the temple railing, and when the sacrilegious proposition was refused by the priests, with horror and indignation, it was torn down by order of Captain Cook and taken to the boats by the sailors, and the images which surmounted it removed and destroyed in the presence of the priests and chiefs. The abused and insulted natives grew desperate under the indignities that were constantly being heaped upon them by men whose wants they had unselfishly relieved at the expense of their own impoverishment, and angered by some fresh baseness they stoned a party of sailors and drove them to their boats. From this time onward Cook and the natives were alternately friendly and hostile until Sunday the 14th, whose setting sun saw the circumnavigator a corpse. Daily Hawaiian Herald, October 6, 1866. Mark Twain on Etiquette. Etiquette varies according to one's surroundings. In the mining camps of California, when a friend tenders you a mile or invites you to take a blister, vulgarly called a drink, it is Etiquette to say, Here's hoping your dirtle-pan out day! In Washoo, when you are requested to put in a blast or invited to take your regular poison, Etiquette admonishes you to touch glasses and say, Here's hoping you'll strike it rich in the lower level! In Honolulu, when your friend, Lou Wailer, asks you to take a fid with him, it is simple Etiquette to say, Here's 1800 barrels old salt! But drink-hardy is universal. That is the orthodox reply the world over. In San Francisco sometimes, if you offend a man, he proposes to take his coat off, and inquires, Are you on it? If you are, you take your coat off, too. In Virginia City, in former times, the insulted party, if he were a true man, would lay his hand gently on his six-shooter and say, Are you healed? But in Honolulu, if Smith offends Jones, Jones asks, with a rising inflection on the last word which is excessively aggravating, How much do you weigh? Sixteen hundred and forty pound, and you? Two ton to a dot! At a quarter past eleven this four noon, Peel yourself, you're my blubber! Mark Twain Daily Hawaiian Herald, October 17, 1866. An epistle from Mark Twain, San Francisco, September 24. The Queen's Arrival Queen Emma and Sweet arrived at noon today in the PMSS Sacramento, and was received by Mr. Hitchcock, the Hawaiian consul, and escorted to the Occidental Hotel, where a suite of neatly decorated apartments had been got ready for her. The U.S. revenue-cutter Shubrick went to see and received the guest with a royal salute of twenty-one dunes, and then escorted her ship to the city. Fort Point, saluted again, and the colors of the other fortifications and on board the U.S. War-Steamer Vanderbilt were dipped as the Sacramento passed. The commander of the fleet in these waters had been instructed to tender the Vanderbilt to Queen Emma to convey her to the islands when she shall have concluded her visit. The city government worried for days together over a public reception program, and then, when the time arrived to carry it into execution, failed. But a crowd of gaping American kings besieged the Occidental Hotel and peered anxiously into every carriage that arrived and criticized every woman who emerged from it. Not a lady arrived from the steamer but was taken for Queen Emma and her personal appearance subjected to remarks, some of them flattering and some otherwise. C.W. Brooks and Jerome Leland and other gentlemen are out of pocket and a day's time in making preparations all day yesterday for a state reception. But at midnight no steamer had been telegraphed, and so they sent their sumptuous carriages and spirited four-horse teams back to the stables and went to bed in sorrow and disappointment. The Queen was expected at the public tables at dinner tonight, in the simplicity of the American heart, and every lady was covertly scrutinized as she entered the dining-room but to no purpose her majesty dined in her rooms. With her suite and the consul. She will be serenaded tonight, however, and to-morrow a numerous cortege will march in procession before the hotel and give her three cheers and a tiger, and then, no doubt, the public will be on hand to see her if she shows herself. Alphabet Warren I believe I do not know of anything further to write about that will interest you except that in Sacramento a few days ago, when I went to report the horse fair of the State Agricultural Society, I found Mr. John Quincy Adam Warren, late of the Islands, and he was well dressed and looked happy. He had on exhibition a hundred thousand varieties of lava, and worms, and vegetables, and other valuables which he had collected in Hawaii Nei. I smiled on him, but he wouldn't smile back again. I did not mind it a great deal, though I could not help thinking it was ungrateful in him. I made him famous in California with a paragraph which I need not have written unless I wanted to, and this is the thanks I get for it. He would never have been heard of if I had let him alone, and now he declines to smile. I will never do a man a kindness again. Malicious! Charles L. Richards of Honolulu sails to-morrow for the Islands with a fast team he purchased here. The steamer Colorado is undergoing the alterations necessary to fit her for the China Mail Company service, and will sail about the first of January with about all the cabin passengers she can carry. She will touch at Honolulu as I now understand. I expect to go out in her in order to see that everything is done right. Commodore Watson is to command her, I believe. I am going chiefly, however, to eat the editor of the commercial advertiser for saying I do not write the truth about the Hawaiian Islands, and for exposing my highway robbery and carrying off Father Damien's book, History of the Islands. I shall go there mighty hungry. Mr. Whitney is jealous of me because I speak the truth so naturally, and he can't do it without taking the lock-jaw. But he ought not to be jealous. He ought not to try to ruin me because I am more virtuous than he is. I cannot help it. It is my nature to be reliable, just as it is his to be shaky on matters of fact. We cannot alter these natures. Us leopards cannot change our spots. Therefore why growl, why go and try to make trouble? If he cannot tell when I am writing seriously and when I am burlesking, if he sits down solemnly and takes one of my palpable burlesques and reads it with a funerial aspect and swallows it as petrified truth, how am I going to help it? I cannot give him the keen perception that nature denied him now, can I? Whitney knows that. Whitney knows he has done me many a kindness and that I do not forget it, and I am still grateful. And he knows that if I could scour him up so that he could tell a broad burlesque from a plain statement of fact, I would get up in the night and walk any distance to do it. You know that, Whitney! I am coming down there mighty hungry, most uncommonly hungry, Whitney! Mark Twain. Daily Hawaiian Herald, October 23, 1866. Mark Twain's Lecture. This lecture, delivered in San Francisco on the night of October 2, appears by the comments of the press of that city to have been a success. The bulletin says, the Academy of Music was stuffed to use an expression of the lecturer to repletion last night on the occasion of the delivery of Mark Twain's, Samuel Clemens, sick, lecture on the Sandwich Islands. It is perhaps fortunate that the King of Hawaii did not arrive in time to attend, for unless he had gone early he must have been turned away, as many others were, who could not gain admittance. Nearly every seat in the house had been engaged beforehand, and those who came last had to put up with the best they could get, while many were obliged to stand up all the evening. The appearance of the lecturer was the signal for applause, and, from the time he closed, the greatest good feeling existed. He commenced by apologizing for the absence of an orchestra. He wasn't used to getting up operas of this sort. He had engaged a musician to come and play, but the trombone player insisted upon having some other musicians to help him. He had hired the man to work, and wouldn't stand any such nonsense, and so discharged him on the spot. The lecturer then proceeded with his subject, and delivered one of the most interesting and amusing lectures ever given in this city. It was replete with information of that character which as seldom got from books, describing all those minor traits of character, customs, and habits which are only noted by a close observer, and yet the kind of information which gives the most correct idea of the people described. Their virtues were set forth generously, while their vices were touched off in a humorous style, which kept the audience in a constant state of merriment. From the lecturer's reputation as a humorist, the audience were unprepared for the eloquent description of the volcano of Kilauea, a really magnificent piece of word painting, their appreciation of which was shown by long and continued applause. Important facts concerning the resources of the islands were given, interspersed with pointed anecdotes and side-splitting jokes. Their history, traditions, religion, politics, aristocracy, royalty, manners and customs were all described in brief and in the humorous vein peculiar to the speaker. It would be impossible to do justice to the lecture in a synopsis, and as it will probably be repeated we shall not attempt it. The lecturer kept his audience constantly interested and amused for an hour and a half, and the lecture was unanimously pronounced a brilliant success. After its close, and the audience had risen to leave, he was called out again, and in his funny style apologized for the inflection, assuming as an excuse that he was about writing a book on the sandwich islands and needed funds for its publication. We are pleased that Mark Twain is using the data he gathered here for the purpose of advancing the interests of these islands, although Mr. Sam Clemens, sick, has been accused of unfairness, we think that his forthcoming work will show that he has been an industrious collater of facts. End of Section 67 This is Section 68 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 68. Daily Hawaiian Herald, November, December, 1866 Daily Hawaiian Herald, November 16, 1866. Characteristic. The following is the conclusion of Mark Twain's advertisement for his lecture delivered lately in Grass Valley. After the lecturer is over, the lecturer will perform the following wonderful feats on Slight of Hand, if desired to do so. At a given signal, he will go out with any gentleman and take a drink. If desired, he will repeat this unique and interesting feat, repeat it until the audience are satisfied that there is no deception about it. After a moment's warning, he will depart out of town and leave his hotel bill unsettled. He has performed this ludicrous trick many hundreds of times in San Francisco and elsewhere, and it has always elicited the most enthusiastic comments. At any hour of the night, after ten, the lecturer will go through any house in the city, no matter how dark it may be, and take an inventory of its contents, and not miss as many of the articles as the owner will in the morning. The lecturer declines to specify any more of his miraculous feats at present for fear of getting the police too much interested in his circus. Daily Hawaiian Herald, December 13, 1866. Letter from Mark Twain. How, for instance? Coming down from Sacramento on the capital the other night, I found on a center table a pamphlet advertisement of an accident insurance company. It interested me a good deal, with its general accidents and hazardous tables and extra-hazardous furniture of the same description, and I would like to know something more about it. It is a new thing to me. I want to invest if I come to like it. I want to ask merely a few questions of the man who carries on this accident shop, if you think you can spare so much space to a far distant stranger. I am an orphan. He publishes this list as accidents he is willing to ensure people against. General accidents include the traveling risk and also all forms of dislocations, broken bones, ruptures, tendons, sprains, concussions, crushings, bruising, cuts, stabs, gunshot wounds, poisoned wounds, burns and scalds, freezing, bites, unprovoked assaults by burglars, robbers or murderers. The action of lightning or sunstroke, the effects of explosions, chemicals, floods and earthquakes, suffocation by drowning or choking, where such accidental injury totally disables the person insured from following his usual avocation or causes death within three months from the time of the happening of the injury. I want to address the party as follows. Now Smith, I suppose likely your name is Smith. You don't know me and I don't know you, but I am willing to be friendly. I am acquainted with a good many of your family. I know John as well as I know any man, and I think we can come to an understanding about your little game without any hard feelings. For instance, do you allow the same money on a dog bite that you do on an earthquake? Do you take special risks for specific accidents? That is to say, could I, by getting a policy for dog bites alone, get it cheaper than if I took a chance in your whole lottery? And if so, and supposing I got insured against earthquakes, would you charge any more for San Francisco earthquakes than for those that prevail in places that are better anchored down? And if I had a policy on earthquakes alone, I couldn't collect on a dog bite, maybe, could I? If a man had such a policy, and an earthquake shook him up and loosened his joints a good deal, but not enough to incapacitate him from engaging in pursuits which did not require him to be tight, wouldn't you pay him some of his pension? I notice you do not mention Biles. How about Biles? Why do you discriminate between provoked and unprovoked assaults by burglars? If a burglar entered my house at dead of night, and I, in the excitement natural to such an occasion, should forget myself and say something that provoked him, and he should cripple me, wouldn't I get anything? But if I provoked him by pure accident, I would have you there, I judge, because you would have to pay for the accident part of it anyhow. Seeing that ensuring against accident is just your strong suit, you know. Now, that item about protecting a man against freezing is good. It will procure you all the custom you want in this country, because you understand, the people hereabouts have suffered a good deal from just such climatic drawbacks as that. Why, three years ago, if a man, being a small fish in the matter of money, went over to Washu, and bought into a good silver mine, they would let that man go on and pay assessments till his purse got down to about thirty-two Fahrenheit, and then the big fish would close in on him and freeze him out, and from that day forth you might consider that man in the light of a bankrupt community, and you would have him down to a spot, too. But if you are ready to ensure against that sort of thing and can stand it, you can give Washu a fair start. You might send me an agency—business? Why, Smith, I could get you more business than you could attend to. With such an understanding as that, the boys would all take a chance. You don't appear to make any particular mention of taking risks on blighted affections, but if you should conclude to do a little business in that line, you might put me down for six or seven chances. I wouldn't mind expense. You might enter it on extra-hazardous. I suppose I would get ahead of you in the long run anyhow, likely. I have been blighted a good deal in my time. But now as to those effects of lightning. Suppose the lightning were to strike out at one of your men and miss him and fetch another party. Could that other party come on you for damages? Or could the relatives of the party thus suddenly snaked out of the bright world in the bloom of his youth come on you in case he was crowded for time? As of course he would be, you know, under such circumstances. You say you have issued over sixty thousand policies, forty-five of which have proved fatal and been paid for. Now do you know, Smith, that that looks just a little shaky to me in a measure. You appear to have it pretty much all your own way, you see. It is all very well for the lucky forty-five that have died and been paid for, but how about the other fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and fifty-five? You have got their money, haven't you? But somehow the lightning don't seem to strike them, and they don't get any chance at you. Won't their families get fatigued waiting for their dividends? Don't your customers drop off rather slow, so to speak? You will ruin yourself publishing such damaging statements as that, Smith. I tell you as a friend, if you had said that the fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and fifty-five died and that forty-five lived, you would have issued about four tons of policies the next week. But people are not going to get insured when you take so much pains to prove that there is such precious little use in it. Yours, Mark Twain. Early Hawaiian Herald, December 17, 1866. Open letter to Mark Twain. Honolulu, December 14, 1866. Affluent Mark. I write you in sorrow and tribulation. Since you left here everything has gone wrong. The season wasn't worth shucks to ship chandlers, grog-shops, or drug-stores. The only class of people who made money out of it were newspaper men, music teachers, and portrait painters. Captain Coffin didn't make his salt, notwithstanding he had had all his harness-casks repaired. Whitney's sales have been unprecedented. He disposed of three cases of Josephus, NAPS Life of Caesar, Eke Homo, and three cotton-jeans. And Mr. Damon has cleared his shelves of all the latest sensation novels. By the way, the latter gentleman is getting anxious about his Jarvis. He and Mr. W. had a dispute about the ownership of the volume. How it came out I am not informed. But the latter's hair has gone mighty thin all of a sudden. What's the use of their quarreling about it? You and I know neither of them will ever see it again. Mark, your friends here are delighted at your pecuniary success in lecturing. They think you will not only help to establish the reputation of the islands abroad, but that you will help them out of their peliquia—trouble. When you arrive here on the first China steamer, some of them are unkind enough to hint that you are giving the islands fits. And that's the reason why you won't have the lecture published. Is it so? Bring plenty of rhino with you when you come. You have no idea how many admirers you have here. Where stout buckskin gloves for the pressure of hands will be immense. The natives of this island form a very even community, generally speaking. If you arrive here flush every one of them is anxious to shake you by the hand, and if you arrive broke they are sure to shake you anyhow. By this you will see how uniform is the native temperament. Speaking of temperament reminds me that our friend Bucephalus Brown has, as usual, slipped up again. Some two months since he started a temperance society and elected himself president, treasurer, and all the members. His motto was, The greatest good to the greatest bummers, and great things were expected from it. The society flourished for a while, but I regret to say that where it should have found its truest friend it found its most unrelenting foe. You know, Mark, that Brown always got along swimmingly, both hygienically and pecuniarily, when he took his regular tangle-leg like a man. He was unknown to that confiding art. Your Montgomery Street friends can vouch for this from the number of IOUs they have signed over to BB, but he backslided, and as I said above, organized himself into a grand temperance union for the propagation of cold water habits. From that day Brown has been going down. He preached cold water and vilified corn juice. He denounced the api and hilarious mood and sang pians to the Honolulu waterworks. Don Miguel Harvey, from Limerick, was his aversion. Colonel Pendergast, from Hilo, was his nepla ultre. Now mark the sequel. Just as he thought he was getting adversity, where the har is short, cold water threw him higher than a Chinese kite. After he was too heavy on cold water and it rebelled, or tamarind syrup with a stick in it became jealous of its competitor and fiendishly made it the dupe to compass Brown's destruction. A few nights ago the water-tap overflowed in his umble but gorgeously equipped hatty, and as the landlord had taken the marvelous precaution to have holes bored in the floor, just above a large invoice of most unsalable and costly, privately, they were just out of season, articles ever imported from Injar, his fellow tenants embroidered silk overcoats and wristory crinolins got soaked. When he was called upon to examine the goods, he discovered just what he said he had anticipated, were delicate, that the water had travelled all around the store and hugged the only good on hand for which there was no market. You will appreciate poor Brown's feelings, Mark, when I privately tell you that he has a big disgust on against water, that water and he don't mix, that he is hydrophobic. Mark, avoid it. If you must spend your money, spend it on something less liable to leak through floors than cold water. I would also advise you, whenever you rent an upper story, to see that the first floor is occupied by a lager beer-merchant, or a charity school. Remember Brown. Mark, I see you are raking up the disease and accident insurance companies. As you and Smith the insurance man seem to understand each other, use your influence with him in Brown's favour. He thinks of returning to the coast, and making another pile. But as you know, he always had an irresistible desire to establish a daily newspaper at the Farallons. I fear he may invest his next fortune in that enterprise. If you could only get Smith to add to his list of articles insured the item of hydro-scatteries, I will get Brown to remember you in his last will and testament. Ever of the S. PER MOIL. SO LONG. I leave for the States in the opposition steamer to-morrow, and I ask as a special favour that you will allow me to say good-bye to my highway robber friends of the Gold Hill and Virginia Divide, and convince them that I have got ahead of them. They had their joke in robbing me and returning the money, and I had mine in the satisfaction of knowing that they came near freezing to death while they were waiting two hours for me to come along the night of the robbery. And at this day, so far from bearing them any ill will, I want to thank them kindly for their rascality. I am pecuniarily ahead on the transaction. I got a telegram from New York last night which reads as follows. New York December 12. Mark Twain. Go to Nudd, Lord and Company, Front Street, collect amount of money equal to what highwaymen took from you, signed ADN. I took that telegram and went to that store and called for a thousand dollars with my customary modesty, but when I found they were going to pay it, my conscience smoked me and I reduced the demand to a hundred. It was promptly paid, in coin. And now, if the robbers think they have got the best end of that joke they are welcome. They have my free consent to go on thinking so. It is barely possible that the heft of the joke is on ADN now. Good-bye, felons! Good-bye! I bear you no malice, and I sincerely pray that when your cheerful career is closing, and you appear finally before a delighted and appreciative audience to be hanged, that you will be prepared to go, and that it will be as a ray of sunshine amid the gathering blackness of your damning recollections, to call to mind that you never got a cent out of me. So long, brigands! Mark Twain Alta, California, December 15, 1866. Mark Twain's Farewell Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, the talented humorist and brilliant writer, leaves San Francisco on the steamer America today, and we take occasion to print the farewell address delivered on Monday night at Congress Hall, after having kept the audience listening in rapt attention to his gorgeous imagery, in describing the scenes at the Sandwich Islands, or convulsed with laughter at the humorous sallies interspersed through the lecture, he seemed to come reluctantly to the promised good-bye, and then his whole manner changed. The words were evidently the language of the heart and the convictions of his judgment. He said, My friends and fellow-citizens, I have been treated with extreme kindness and cordiality by San Francisco, and I wish to return my sincerest thanks and acknowledgments. I have also been treated with marked and unusual generosity, forbearance, and good fellowship, by my ancient comrades, my brethren of the press. A thing which has peculiarly touched me, because long experience in the service, has taught me that we of the press are slow to praise but quick to censure each other as a general thing, wherefore in thanking them I am anxious to convince them, at the same time, that they have not lavished their kind offices upon one, who cannot appreciate or is insensible to them. I am now about to bid farewell to San Francisco for a season, and to go back to that common house we all tenderly remember in our waking hours, and fondly revisit in dreams of the night, a home which is familiar to my recollection, but will be an unknown land to my unaccustomed eyes. I shall share the fate of many another longing exile who wanders back to his early home to find gray hairs where he expected youth, graves where he looked for firesides, grief where he had pictured joy, everywhere change, remorseless change where he had heedlessly dreamed that desolating time had stood still, to find his cherished anticipations of mockery, and to drink the leaves of disappointment instead of the beaded wine of hope that is crowned with its fruition. And while I linger here upon the threshold of this, my new home, to say to you, my kindest and my truest friends, a warm goodbye and an honest peace and prosperity attend you, I accept the warning that mighty changes will have come over this home also, when my returning feet shall walk these streets again. I read the signs of the times, and I, that am no profit, behold the things that are in store for you. Over slumbering California is stealing the dawn of a radiant future. The great China mail-line is established. The Pacific Railroad is creeping across the continent. The commerce of the world is about to be revolutionized. California is crowned princess of the new dispensation. She stands in the center of the grand highway of the nations. She stands midway between the old world and the new, and both shall pay her tribute. From the far east and from Europe, multitudes of stout hearts and willing hands are preparing to flock hither, to throng her hamlets and villages, to till her fruitful soil, to unveil the riches of her countless minds, to build up an empire on these distant shores that shall shame the bravest dreams of her visionaries. From the opulent lands of the Orient, from India, from China, Japan, the Amur, from tributary regions that stretch from the Arctic circle to the equator is about to pour in upon her the princely commerce of a teeming population of 450 million souls. Half the world stands ready to lay its contributions at her feet. Has any other state so brilliant a future? Has any other city a future like San Francisco? This straggling town shall be a vast metropolis. This sparsely populated land shall become a crowded hive of busy men. More waste places shall blossom like the rose, and your deserted hills and valleys shall yield bread and wine for unnumbered thousands. Railroads shall be spread hither and thither, and carry the invigorating blood of commerce to regions that are languishing now. Mills and workshops, yay, and factories shall spring up everywhere, and minds that have neither name nor place today, shall dazzle the world with their affluence. The time is drawing on a pace when the clouds shall pass away from your firmament, and a splendid prosperity shall descend like a glory upon the whole land. I am bidding the old city and my old friends a kind, but not a sad farewell, for I know that when I see this home again, the changes that will have been wrought upon it will suggest no sentiment of sadness. Its estate will be brighter, happier, and prouder a hundredfold than it is this day. This is its destiny, and in all sincerity I can say, so moat it be! Mark Twain goes off on his journey over the world as the traveling correspondent of the Alta California, not stinted as to time, place, or direction, writing his weekly letters on such subjects and from such places as will best suit him. But we may say that he will first visit the home of his youth, St. Louis. Thence through the principal cities to the Atlantic seaboard again, crossing the ocean to visit the universal exposition at Paris, through Italy, the Mediterranean, India, China, Japan, and back to San Francisco by the China Male Steamship Line. That his letters will be read with interest needs no assurance from us. His reputation has been made here in California, and his great ability is well known. But he has been known principally as a humorist, while he really has no superior as a descriptive writer, a keen observer of men and their surroundings, and we feel confident his letters to the Alta, from his new field of observation, will give him a worldwide reputation. CHAPTER XIII Steamship America at Sea, 900 miles south of San Francisco. December 20, 1866. Away! Good-bye, my boy! Take care of yourself!" said Jones and Smith and Thompson, and shook hands with me, and then all shouldered their way through the crowd toward the other end of the steamer to have a farewell shake with somebody else, for the ship was just ready to leave. All was confusion, everybody in a hurry. I edged out of the surging mass of humanity, and leaned on the port bulwarks to search among the multitude on the pier for familiar faces. Then the young man with the evil countenance parted the crowd on either side of him, struggled edgeways toward me, like a hog climbing through a fence, and offered to sell me some limes. I had refused him a dozen times already, but this time I purchased to get rid of him. Good-bye, my lad! Take care of yourself!" I rung the hands of Jones, Smith and Thompson again, and again they disappeared through the human commotion to repeat their farewells with other friends at the other end of the ship. I turned toward the crowd on shore again, and neatly dodged an apple discharged at someone behind me, whose friend on shore took this method of shaking hands with him. Some of the faces were glad, some were listless, some were sorrowful. They belonged to people who were enjoying the distinction of being acquainted with parties on the departing ship, to people who knew no one on board, and who were sullenly hopeless of ever being able to go home, to people whose friends and relatives were going to distant lands and whose pleasant faces they might never behold again in life. The cut throat with the illustrated papers clove a passage to me, and I bought him out, and got rid of him, and then I phased about and dodged an orange hurled from the shore, another good-bye that came near miscarrying. Good-bye, my lad! Take care of yourself!" I shook Jones and Smith and Thompson, warmly by the hand once more, and once more panting and perspiring. They struggled through the crowd to bid another farewell to friends at the other end of the ship. The party, with the withered cigars, "'Yost' imbortit fum ha wan!' arrived, and offered his whole stock at a ruinous sacrifice, five cents apiece. I had it not in my heart to take advantage of any man's necessities, and I refused to purchase. I was grieved to see a good-bye apple from the shore cave in the side of his head as he turned away. At this point Bilgewater arrived with a keg of quartz specimens to be delivered to his aunt in New York. Johnson brought a glass jar of fine tarantulas and scorpions for his brother, the doctor, in Brooklyn. Witherspoon brought a case of extra California wines to be presented in his name to the Secretary of the Interior, and Elbridge brought a box of choice California fruits to be placed on exhibition at the Patent Office. We had an outside stateroom, number 14, and so it cost us but little trouble to receive and stow away these things, though to speak truly they crowded our baggage somewhat. "'All ashore that's going!' it was too bad. Jones was nearly back again, was even reaching out his hand at arm's length for another farewell shake, but was wedged into the crowd and so squeezed that his eyes were well nigh bursting from his red hot face. Smith and Thompson were close behind him. The order spoiled everything. They could not overcome the crowd, and so were born bodily backward toward the companion-way, and disappeared. We backed out through a pitiless storm of apples and oranges, through which I caught occasional glimpses of excited faces and flashing handkerchiefs on shore, as one sees such things through a pelting hail and snow, and as it ceased and distance intervened, and the multitude broke apart and dribbled away like a temporary human embankment, I saw Jones and Smith and Thompson, each shaking his own hands, and faintly heard a word or two of their good old kindly farewell. I heard the words, by, and care, and I knew they had used the old formula, because these were naturally the only words emphasized in that formula. An elopement sensation. Then I stood apart and soliloquized. Green, be my memories of thee, as are thy hills this bright December day, O mistress of the Occident! May no—oh, dang the Occident! There's lively times downstairs! The old man playing his hand for all it was worth! The passengers raised him, the old man come back, they went him better, the old man passed out, and all things are lovely, and the say what you have got to say in plain English-brown, and refrain from vulgar metaphor. Well! There was a young fellow married a girl and smuggled her aboard, and her father boarded us in a white-haul boat with a bogus policeman, and they grabbed her and he resisted, and there was a fight, and she cried and took on and said she would go with him or die, and if she went home she'd up and die sure, and they corralled her and seized a rope round her waist, and was going to lower her away, but the passengers mixed in and shucked the old man out and made the bogus policeman jump overboard with a black eye, and said they'd hang him if they didn't leave quick, and so the turtles are safe in the stateroom, and the old son of a sea-cook's gone, but you ought to have been there to hear the old man cuss, and the girl cry and hang on to him, to the young one, not the old one, and the passengers singing out, BUST HIM! HEAVE HIM OVERBOARD, KILL HALL THE OLD Hound! And one would take him a whack under the ear, and another would fetch him a welt in the ribs, and the policeman catching it right and left, and holding up his hands to save his mug, and about two thousand steerage-women snuffling and howling and more crowding and gouging and trampling going on—oh, blood, hair, and the ground tore up! I never see the like!" I said, "'You can go to bed now, Brown, if you feel tired.' And I went forward to make inquiries. It appeared that a youth of twenty-three or four had clandestinely married a girl of fifteen, and taken passage for New York. Her father had boarded us in the stream with a pretended policeman, discarded lover in disguise, no doubt. There was a fight. The passengers took sides with the young people and were victorious. The girl, hanging by a rope and just ready to go by the run into the small boat, was hauled aboard again. The father and his man were driven out of the ship. We were under way for America once more, and the sinking honeymoon rose up with added luster over the rescued victims of matrimony. Long may it shine unclouded." That was one story. Another said the policeman showed the star of legitimate authority, and the old man sat in the boat as we moved away, and cried bitterly and shook his hand at the lover and said, You miserable heartless dog! You have stolen away my child!" And they said he was a worthy-looking old man, too. NUN 16. All the afternoon, yesterday, two or three hundred passengers paced the promenade deck, and so quiet was the sea that not half a dozen of them succumbed to sickness. But at eight or nine at night the wind began to rise, and from that time it steadily increased in violence until at midnight it was blowing a hurricane. There was a tremendous sea running, and the night was so pitch-dark that a man standing on the deck would find by voices at his elbow that other persons were almost touching him when he imagined himself alone. On deck, above the lashing of the waves and the roaring of the winds, the shouting of the captain and his officers and the hurried tramping of the men were scarcely to be heard. The steerage passengers were at once imprisoned below, and the hatches battened down and canvassed over. The ship was by the head, and the seas were sweeping over the boughs every now and then. Every man under the ship's pay, officers, cabin crew, and all, were set to work to break cargo and move it aft. A large quantity of flour was transferred to the stern, and the large boats on the after-guard were pumped full of water. These precautions eased the ship's head and saved her. It was well that the hatches were down snug before the terrific squalls struck us, just after midnight, else either of the three fearful seas that swept over the ship then in quick succession must have poured thousands of tons of water into her and sent her to the bottom. As it was, the vessel was in peril enough. She was tossed about like a play-thing, climbed lofty billows, paused a moment on the crest, and then plunged down into the gulf on the other side, climbed the next wave, and while one held his breath in anticipation of the ghastly dive and the deadly sinking sensation in the chest that always accompanies it, a prodigious wave would spring upon her from some side angle and send her stunned and staggering, broadside on, like a man struck with a club, and then the officers floundered in water up to their hips and shouted orders that came after reduced to hoarse, confused whispers by the howling blast. Then the gunnel, a solid timber as thick as a man's thigh, snapped like a pipe-stem. Away went twenty feet of the starboard bulwarks forward, down came a dozen stanchions with a clatter, crash went a deluge of water booming aft through steerage and forward cabin, carrying stools, carpet sacks, boxes, boots, velices, and a rattling smash-up of queen's wear and crockery along with it, and on the reeling floors amid the shrieking of the cordage and the roaring of the midnight winds, and the thundering of the midnight sea down on their knees and the slush went two hundred and fifty of the ungodliest of all the ungodly crowds that ever lumbered a ship yet. To pray! Such consternation as there was aboard this ship you have not seen in ten years, perhaps. Poor fellows, some of them were well nigh beside themselves. A man from one of the back settlements knelt down in the middle of the forward cabin, with an arm clasping a stanchion to enable him to maintain his position, and there he knelt and prayed fervently till an oil-skin carpet sack came washing by him, and he grabbed it, and it was not his, set it adrift again, and went on praying, and so he went on supplicating for succor and prospecting for carpet sacks till sea sickness got him, and he had to drop all other considerations and attend to bailing out his stomach. But it may be said of this stranger that he meant well, and held his grip as well as any man could have done it, and any man of judgment cannot but think well of his modesty in only relying on providence to save the ship but looking out for his carpet sack himself. If we would always do our share, many things would be accomplished that never are accomplished. It was a heavy storm. The heaviest Captain Wakeman has seen on this coast in seventeen years except one, and the heaviest another old sea-captain among our passengers, of twenty-eight years experience, ever saw in his life. Not a bene, is there always an old skipper aboard who never saw such a storm before? It proved the America to be a staunch and reliable vessel, however, and her commander a thoroughly competent officer, and these things will render the passengers more satisfied and confident hereafter in case we have another storm. Sequel to the Elopement Noon, 19. I have to give the sequel to the runaway match now. Yesterday it was whispered about that our young couple, who passed in the ship as Mr. and Wife, and occupied a state-room together, were really not married. Luscious sensation for a monotonous sea voyage! Captain Wakeman exploded two or three awful salt-water oaths and ordered the purser to produce the culprits before him at once. It was done at eight p.m. An explanation was demanded. They said they were married in San Jose Valley but had lost the certificate. The captain swore a blood-curdling oath that he'd furnish them another and mighty-quick, too, and ordered up the Reverend Mr. Fackler, and his Piscatelian minister of San Francisco, to perform the ceremony and four respectable persons to witness it. The bridegroom did not seem particularly gratified with these proceedings, and even the bride said afterwards that they had kept company together four days on shore before they shipped, and she was satisfied, thought people might mind their own business and let theirs alone. She said they were going to be married in Brooklyn, and that was the program from the start. Didn't care anything about having any such foolishness on the ship. A child, fifteen years old, and weighed down with the wisdom and experience of an infant. Another lady said she couldn't see why people wanted to meddle with other people's business. Why couldn't they let the girl alone? God help me! I am an orphan and many and many a legate see with such a crowd as this. Another sequel. The old man had them married, though, on the spot, at sea, seventy miles south of San Francisco, and gave the girl a certificate, and kept one himself to give to her father in San Francisco, and the trouble was at an end, and the sensation over. A fresh one was started to-day, when it was discovered that the bridegroom was spliced under a fictitious name, and so the old man, as all sea captains are called, got off some more complicated and appalling blasphemy, and hauled up the young man, and married him over again. END OF SEXTION SEVENTY DECEMBER TWENTYTH Five days out from San Francisco. The fearful storm the first night out came near foundering the ship, and it did succeed in making everybody seasick. It stove in the forward bulwarks, and flooded steerage and forward cabin with water, and amid a wild rush of floating boots and carpet bags, miners from Washoo and California, and web-feet from Oregon, who had never prayed in their lives before, perhaps, knelt down and did the best they could at it, on short notice. Isaac! For three days afterward most of the ship's family brooded in sorrow and seasickness in their births, and it took them all of the fourth day to get up a tolerable degree of cheerfulness. Today, however, Brown, Baker, Stribbling, Smith, Kingdom, Hercules, Isaac, and several of the ladies, seem about restored to their natural selves. However, to say truly, Isaac has been his natural self in the beginning. His vanity, impudence, obsequiousness, and utter imperviousness to insult trench upon the wonderful. He started in very confined quarters in the second cabin, but by sheer and persistent labor with his seductive tongue he has already worked up to a seat at the purser's table, and the choice of stateroom on the upper deck, and without extra charge. He writes cards for a living, and came on board with a pack ready written and elaborately decorated with the familiar old tiresome flowers, cupids, and birds of unknown species, for half the officers of the ship, and was surprised to learn that nautical etiquette forbade those gentlemen to accept of presence from passengers. He offered Captain Waxman, all the names I use for ship, passengers, Captain and all, are fictitious. A Mirsham pipe, bogus, and was utterly confounded at its non-acceptance. Broad-shouldered, kinky-haired Isaac receives each addition to the list of convalescent passengers with his stereotyped complacent smile and forces upon him a luncheon from his stock of bad foreign sausage, good-tasting Limburg cheese with a death-dealing smell, and extricable Dutch herrings, all of which conduct looks kind and considerate. It really does, but it certainly must mean business. He probably knows what he is about. The weather is beyond all praise. No seasick passengers may hope to resist it long. It is so soft and balmy, and so grateful to lungs accustomed to the frequent fogs of San Francisco. The whole promenade deck is sheltered from the sun by awnings, and it is delightful to march up and down the breezy deck in procession and smoke, or sit on the benches and look out upon the hills and valleys of Mexico. The Captain Midnight Have been listening to some of Captain Waxman's stunning folksal yarns, and will do him the credit to say he knows how to tell them, with his strong, cheery voice, animated countenance, point-phraseology, defiance of grammar and extraordinary vim in the matter of gesture and emphasis, he makes the most effective story out of very unpromising materials. There is a contagion about his whole sole jollity that the chief mourner at a funeral could not resist. He is fifty years old, and as rough as a bear in voice and action, and yet as kind-hearted and tender as a woman. He is a burly, hairy, sun-burned, stormy-voiced old salt, who mixes strange oaths with incomprehensible sailor-phraseology and gentlest and most touching pathos, and is tattooed from head to foot like a Fiji islander. His tongue is forever going when he has got no business on his hands, and though he knows nothing of policy or the ways of the world, he can cheer up any company of passengers that ever travelled in a ship and keep them cheered up. He never drinks a drop, never gambles, and never swears where a lady or a child may chance to hear him, but with all things consonant with the occasion he sometimes soars into flights of fancy swearing that fill the listener with admiration. He is—who knocked? Me, let me in. The ship lurched. I unfastened the door, and the person named Brown plunged in head foremost. It was thoughtless on my part. He stove in the middle berth and started his kelp. Well, what do you want, Brown? Here a chapter of blasphemy is omitted. Why, the old man's going to cross the Gulf of Tehuantepec Christmas Day instead of going down shore in the quiet waters as he's been ordered. He will throw this ship more double-summer sets than you can see in a circus, and I know the old man's idea. He means to get up a starchy Christmas dinner, and then hold her out four points, and all the paper weights in America couldn't keep it on a man's stomach. The Gulf of Tehuantepec is the Hatteras of the Pacific. It always blows there, and is more or less stormy out from shore, but so deep and inscrutable a mind for strategy as the captain's dark design implied, as imputed to him by Brown, never reposed in his honest ingenious head. While I was explaining this to Brown, I heard the captain's horse voice shout, Rouse out the parson, and order the first cabin aft! Of course we turned out to learn what such an unusual order meant at the solemn hour of midnight. In a few minutes there was as many of us in the captain's apartments as could find room. Marriage of the Runaway Couple The old man was sitting in his arm-chair in great state, and his swart countenance and his whole-bearing frown with a pretentious dignity. Order up the convicts! They came and stood before him, a very young man with a surprised look on his face, and a blushing, frightened young girl of fifteen, with tears flowing fast from her pleading eyes. So, youngsters, you've been running the blockade, have you? You've slipped your cables and gone to sea when nobody was on the lookout, and you've been sailing under false colors. You've been letting on that you're married, and you ain't. And now you say you're going to splice as soon as you get to where you're going in New Jersey. This sort of doing ain't going to do in my ship. Blood and wrath! I'm outraged! Giant hands! The captain stood up and uncovered, all others did the same. Stand by, parson. Stand by for a surge. Steady! So let him slide into the joys and sorrows of matrimony. Slowly and distinctly the clergyman asked the questions, while the witnesses looked eagerly on. As the ceremony closed, the captain took up its parting injunction, and repeated it, with grave and deep-voiced impressiveness. Aye, lads! Them whom God has spliced together, let no man put him asunder. Amen! The minister prayed, then blessed the couple, and all the guests shook hands with them, and wished them well. The witnesses signed the certificate, the marriage was entered on the ship's log with marvellous ceremony, and we were all about to depart, when the captain rose up solemnly and addressed the bride and groom in a few words of homely eloquence—words which he probably honestly considered absolutely necessary to the due completion of the marriage rites. The captain's speech. Young people! You're all right now. No more dodging, no more shirking the revenue, no more smuggling, no more sailing under false colors. You can fly your flag from the Misenpeak Halleards now, where all men may see it, and sail where you will on the broad seas. Your papers are made out correct, and nobody can ever overhaul you any more. It's best for you the way it is. You love one another. I see that. We all see it. Every man and every woman was sent into the world for some four ordinated purpose or other. They ain't going to carry it out cruising round single, and packing off from this place to that place, and from that place to another place, never taking root anywheres, and never having any set aim in this life or hereafter. The world's got little enough fair weather in it as it is. Splice and make the most of it. Sail in company and help one another. When one's aground, Tother's there to help him off. When one's stove, Tother's there to save him. When one's dismasted and drifting ashore, Tother's there to lend him an anchor. Up, Tandvis, and away, and a happy voyage to you. The wind is fair now, and you can carry skisels, riles, stuntsles, every rag you've got. But by and by it'll be on your quarter than a beam and finally ahead, but hold your grip, don't mind it, it ain't every gale that founders a ship. You'll have sun on the line and ice at the pole, you'll have calms that aggravate you and headwinds that drive you back, you'll have storms that'll sweep your decks as clean as a desert, but stick together, hold your grip and stick together, and by and by when your voyage is up, you'll ride safe at anchor in a haven where calms, nor storms, nor breaching seas can ever distress you any more. SCANDAL DECEMBER XXIII Gossiping has begun. Scandal is in full blast, and I wouldn't put that in there if I was you. Mr. Brown, the matter is none of your business. It is none of your business, I repeat, but as long as you've mentioned it, why wouldn't you put it in? Because it ain't any use, because you as much as said it before, because you've said that some of the women are out and healthy, and don't anybody that knows as much as a clam know that whenever a woman is out and healthy she's going to start in and make trouble? Mr. Brown, no man can sit in this stateroom after making such a shameful remark as that. Go. Oh! Certainly! That's all right. I expect maybe I'm wrong, and you're right, anyway. However it was Old Slimans that made me make the mistake. She was the first one out, and she said, Old Slimans, would it say Miss Slimans Brown, it is more respectful? Well what did she say? What did she say? Why, there is not a solitary passenger in the ship, but what that double-chinned old pelican has black-guarded. She says awful things about that pretty girl that sits at the middle of the purser's table. And she says that poor crippled gray-headed old grandmother in the second cabin is no better than she ought to be. And she says she knew that innocent old fat girl that's always asleep, and has to be shoveled out of her room at four bells for the inspection, and always eats till her eyes bug out like the bolt heads on a jail-door, knew her long ago, up on the San Joaquin, and knows the clothes she's got on now, she's traveled in eleven weeks without changing. Says her stockings are awful, there eleven weeks gone, too. And when she complained of the weather being so hot, Old Slimans said, Why, don't she go and scrape herself and then wash? It would be equal to taking off two suits of flannel. And she black-guards the choir that's been started, and says if they come serenading those girls in her end of the ship any more, she'll stop their catarwalling all mighty quick. She swears she wishes she may never flutter her tongue again if she don't scald them. You bet she'll do it, too. And she says all the women in the ship are sassash, and are going to Washington to hatch up some devil-tree against the government. And she's going to show them up in the hang-town thunder-clap of freedom. Because, you know, she's a correspondent like you, a sister correspondent, as you may say, and my, but she's savage on that old rooster that's religious. She says if ever a man had a hang-dog countenance on him, it's him. And moreover, she's satisfied he stole a bottle of cologne out of her room yesterday, when she let him go in there to borrow her prayer-book. She calls it cologne, you know, but it's Jim. And—and—well, I believe that's all. Except that she says you was very sick last night. It seemed you was all mighty sick. Everybody said. But if she ain't blind and a-born fool to boot, you was as drunk as the piper that played before Moses. There you are now. Maybe you don't believe it. If you don't, you just come and hear the old sage-hand cackle for yourself. Good day! Poor Brown. He is a man of no tact. He always leaves just as he is about to become interesting to me. I have no more curiosity than other people, but still I would like to know what else that venomous old hag has been saying about me. But we are all catching it. We are all being carefully dissected—men, women, and children. Slimans is the chief operator. But she is not alone. Everybody takes a hand in it, fires his charge of detraction, and winces under the return shot. It serves one good purpose at any rate. It makes things exceedingly lively sometimes, and keeps the passengers in material for conversation always. Alta, California, February 24, 1867. Steamer Columbia at sea, Sunday, December 23. Last night was magnificent—cool, balmy, breezy, and easy sea-on, and all things so flooded with moonlight that each wave of the ocean, each rope and spar of the ship, and each face and form about the decks were almost as plain to the sight as if it were noonday. The six individuals who sing—think of it only six persons out of five hundred who make the slightest pretensions to vocal talent—organize themselves into a choir and practice several hymns until a late hour. For we are to have religious services to-day. After that they sang dog-tray, and marching through Georgia, and what is home without a mother?—and other venerable melodies, and a few wretched volunteers joined in and completed the villainy of the performance. Home without a mother may not amount to much, but there is no use in aggravating the thing with such a tune as that, and the idea of resurrecting that infamous dog-tray at this day. That choir sang everything they ought not to have sung except one, and I tremble to think the surroundings would yet suggest it. I refer to the song called Roll On Silver Moon. If they had attempted that outrage I would have scuttled the ship. I can stand a good deal, but I cannot stand everything. I would rather perish than lose my reason. All together ours is a very poor choir. I will remark here that although I hummed a tune occasionally and whistled some, I was not requested to sing. This is a beautiful morning, and all parties seem as light-hearted and happy as children. In fact, the pastimes of the gentlemen on the promenade-deck in the shade of the awnings, for their own and the lady's amusement, have an entirely boyish cast about them. Two men are playing mumble-peg, with absorbing interest. A large party are trying to see which shall be able to walk ten steps blindfolded, and place a hat on the compass. A colonel, who greatly distinguished himself in the war, is trying to sit on a champagne bottle with feet crossed, arms folded, and thread a darning needle without falling over. The bottle lying on its side, of course, and pointing straight a stern, while he faces towards the ship's head. He has just accomplished it after the ninth attempt, and raised a boisterous round of applause, some consolation for the bursts of laughter that greeted his failures. All are engaged in this sort of nonsense, Isaac, the Israelite included. Except the youth they call shape. With hat perched jaundely on one side of his head, and hands thrust into his coat-pockets, he promenades the deck fore and aft, and admires his legs. They say he is a little cracked, I don't know. The idea may have originated with Miss Slimans of the thunder clap. Being a little under the weather, I have intruded into the captain's room, along with the veteran's sleet, a skipper of thirty years standing, going home on furlough from his ship. The forenoon is waning fast. Enter Captain Waxman, sweating and puffing from overexertion, and says he has TOR UP THE WHOLE SHIP! He scorns grammar when his mind is seething with business. Has TOR UP THE WHOLE SHIP! To build a pulpit at the after-compass, and rig benches and chairs that thwarp the quarter-deck, and fetch up the organ from them below, and get everything ship-shape for the parson. And the PASSENGERS, said he, as soon as they found they were going to be sermonized, they've up anchors and gone to sea, clean gone and deserted. There ain't a baker's dozen left on the after-deck. They're worse than the rats in on— Here, you velvet head, you son of Africa's sunny climb! Go forward and tell the mate to let her go a couple of points free in Honolulu. Me and old Josephus—he was a Jew—and got rich as Creosote in San Francisco afterwards—we were going home-passengers from the Sandwich Islands in a brand-new brig on her third voyage, and our trunks were down below. He went with me, laid over one vessel to do it, because he warn't no sailor, and he liked to be convoyed by a man that was, felt safe-free, understand. And the brig was sliding out between the buoys, and her headline was paying out ashore. There was a wood-pile right where it was made fast on the pier, when up comes the biggest rat, as big as any ordinary cat he was, and darted out on that line and cantered for the shore, and up come another, and another, and another, and away they galloped over that hauser, each one treading on tother's tail, till they were so thick you couldn't see a thread of the cable, and there was a procession of them three hundred yards long over the levee, like a streak of piss-mires, and the canacas, some throwing sticks from that wood-pile, and chunks of lava and coral-atom, and knocking them in ways every shot for—but do you suppose it made any difference to them rats? Not a particle. Not a particle on earth, bless you. They'd smelt trouble. They'd smelt it by their unearthly supernatural instinct. They wanted to go, and they never let up till the last rat was ashore out of that brand-new beautiful brig. I called a canaca with his boat, and he hove alongside and shinned up a rope and stood off on for orders, and says, I—do you see that trunk down there? I—well, yank it out of there, and the snake at ashore quicker and you can wink, lively now. Solomon the Jew, what I say his cussed name was, anyhow he says, What are you doing, captain? Doing? I'm taking my trunk ashore. That's about what I'm doing. Taking your trunk ashore? Why, bless us, what is that for? What is it for? Says I. See them rats are leaving this ship. She's doomed, sir. She's doomed past retribution. Burnt brandy wouldn't save her, sir. She'll never finish this voyage. She'll never be heard of again, sir. Solomon says, Boy! Take that other trunk ashore, too! And don't you know that brand new beautiful brig sailed out of Honolulu without a rat on board, and was never seen again by mortal man, sir? It's so, as sure as you're born, it's so. We shipped in an old tub that was so rotten that you had to walk easy on her main deck to keep from going through. So crazy, sir, that in our births, when there was a sea on, the timbers overhead worked backwards and forwards eleven inches in their sockets, just for the world like an old wicker basket, sir. And the rats were as big as greyhounds, and as lean, sir, and they bit the buttons off our coats and chawed our toenails off while we slept. And there were so many of them that in a gale, once they all scampered to the starboard side when we were going about, and put her down the wrong way, so that she miss stays and come monstrous near foundering. But she went through safe, I tell you, because she had rats aboard. After this marvellous chapter of personal history, the captain rushed out in a business frenzy and rushed back again in the course of a couple of minutes. Everything sat, the passengers are back again and stowed, and the parson's all ready to cat his anchor and get under way. Everybody ready and waiting on that bloody choir that was practicing and squawking and blatting all night, and now ain't come to time when their watch is called. Out again and back in something like a minute. Damn that choir! There like the fellow's sow had to haul her ears off to get her up to the trough, and then had to pull her tail out to get her away again. But rats, don't tell me nothing about the talent of rats. It's been noticed, sir. Notes has been taken of it, sir, and their judgment is better than a human, sir. Didn't I hear old Ben Wilson, made of the Empress of the Seas, as fine a sailor and as lovely a ship as ever rode a gale? Didn't I hear him tell how seventeen years ago, when he was laying at Liverpool Docks empty, empty as a jug, and a full indiumen right alongside full of provisions and corn and everything a rat might prefer, and going to sail next day, now in the middle of the night, the rats all left her, and crossed his decks and went ashore. Every one of them. Every bloody one of them, sir. And finally, it was moonlight. He saw a musk going on by the capstone of that other ship, and he slipped around, and there was a dozen old rats laying their heads together and chattering about something and looking down the forward hatch every now and then, and finally they appeared to have got their minds made up, and one of them went aft and got a scrap of old stuntsles half a foot square, and they bored holes in the corners with their teeth, and bent on some long pieces of spun yarn, made a sort of little hammock of it, you understand, and then they lowered away gently for a while and stopped, and directly they begun heaving again, and up out that forward hatch in full view of the mate who was watching him all the time, up comes that little hammock with a poor old decrepit sick rat on it, all gone in with consumption, and they lugged him ashore, and they all went uptown to the very last rat, and that ship sailed the next day for India, or keep a good hope, for summers, and the mate of the empress didn't sail for as much as three weeks, and up to that time that ship hadn't been heard from, sir. Drat that choir! I must go and start him out! This sort of thing won't do! The First Death Christmas Eve It has been an exceedingly quiet Christmas Eve today. It is because a young child of one of the cabin passengers is lying very ill, suddenly taken last night, and so no one is willing to be noisy, or even passably cheerful for that matter. All act as if they were related by blood to the child, and it is natural it should be so. A ship's passengers on a long voyage become as one family. Christmas Night The child died last evening, and some of the lady passengers sat up with the corpse all night. At ten this morning we all assembled on the lower guard aft, and listened with uncovered heads to a brief sermon by the clergyman, Reverend Mr. Facler, and the reading of the Episcopal Burial Service. The capstan, with a national flag over it, served for a pulpit, and meanwhile the first officer and bosun held the canvassed corpse with its head resting on their shoulders and its feet upon the taff rail. At the conclusion there was a breathless pause, then the minister said, earth unto earth, ashes unto ashes, dust unto dust. A sharp plunge of the weighted body into the sea, a shudder from the startle passengers, a wild shriek from the young mother, a mere girl, and all was over. Within three hours with that solemn presence gone out of the ship, cheerfulness and vivacity reigned again. The Fall of the Isaac. December 28. Isaac's upward flight culminated yesterday in a raffle, and now he has fallen. Hobnobbing with the chief officers and Hale fellow well met with everybody yesterday, today degraded to the ranks, and none so poor as to take notice of him. You see, he has often excited sympathy by displaying his late wife's jewellery, he said she died six weeks ago, and mourning over it. But yesterday he got up that raffle, said it grieved him to the heart to have those mementos of his lost one about him, and her dear jewellery constantly reminded him of happy days he should never again see, and so he gathered it together and raffled it off for three hundred and fifty dollars. He feels easier after that, no doubt, his lacerated heart will be able to stand it for a while now, perhaps. The reaction dethroned him from his high place among the passengers, when they reflected that he won all the jewellery himself that was worth having, but what they got was pinchback, and that he had either been heartless enough to part with his dead wife's jewellery under shameful circumstances, or else he had no wife, and had presumed to lie to his betters. They felt ashamed of themselves, and from that moment Isaac was taboo. For two days now he has been unmercifully snubbed at every turn, and already an act of his that one applause at first is quoted against him to further damn him. I refer to his having prevailed with the good-hearted captain to take a modest-looking young German girl out of the steerage where she was constantly subject to insult and put her in the second cabin. They say now that he was actuated by none but selfish motives, and had rascally designs against her. They do say that when a man starts downhill everybody is ready to help him with a kick, and I suppose it is so. Last night, as usual, Isaac intruded upon the captain's dog-watch lunch, which is, or should be, sacred to himself, and got into trouble. One of the passengers put something into his tea that came near making him throw up his boots, but some people will never learn anything. He went into the captain's room to-day, uninvited, and fell into another trap provided for him by a passenger. He found a bottle. He always drinks from bottles wherever he finds them, whether asked to do it or not. He drank from that bottle, and then retired to his stateroom, and has been patiently disgorging ever since. A legend from the captain. We have been sailing placidly along the coast of Guatemala all day, a broad lowland, densely clad in a green tropical vegetation, among which the coconut tree is prominent. Occasionally we see a thatched native hut. In full view are three noble mountains, tall, symmetrical cones, with sides furrowed with wrinkle-like valleys veiled in a dreamy purple mist that is charming to the eye, and summits swathed in a grand turban of rolling clouds. They say these are volcanoes, but we cannot see any smoke. No matter, it is a fairy landscape that is very pleasant to look upon. "'Do you see that ship anchored yonder?' the young lady addressed, said she did see the ship. "'Well,' said Captain W, "'she's a whaler. She's trying out oil. The first time I ever was along here was seventeen years ago. I didn't know anything about whaling, then, bless you. It was in the night, just after dark, and just where you see that ship there now. I saw a ship all on fire. I laid to immediately and ordered out a boat's crew and said, "'Pull, boys, for your life! Don't miss a stroke. Don't lose a minute. Tell the Captain not to lose his grip. I'll lay here a week and give him all the help I can. And then I'll take him and his crew to California and do the very best I know how by him. Well, we lay to and waited and waited. All the passengers on deck and anxious for the boat to come back with the awful news. But, nine o'clock, no boat, ship still burning, and glaring out on the black ocean like a sun dropped out of the sky. Ten o'clock, no boat. Passengers beginning to get tired, and two or three quit and went to bed. Eleven, no boat. And one by one they sidled off to roost, give it up. You see all gone but me and one solitary motherly old soul, me marching slow up and down the deck and she gazing out across the water at the burning ship. We were just so until half past eleven, and then we heard the sound of oars. We closed up to the railing and stood by for them. Pretty soon the boat ranged up alongside. I tell you, I felt awful. Something made me hanker to look down into that boat, and yet something held me back. The officer of the boat reported, "'The ship ain't burning, sir!' I felt relieved then. He says he's in big luck, is full of oil, and ready for home, and so they're cooking doughnuts in the fat, and having a grand blowout, illumination, and jollification. But he's uncommon, thankful for the good intentions you've shown, and hopes you'll accept this lot of A1 sea turtles." The old woman leaned over the rail and shaded her eyes from the lantern with her hand, and she see them varmints flopping their flippers about in the boat, and she says, "'For the land's sake, I have sat here, and sat here, and sat here all this blessed night, colliding you fetch a boatload of sorrowful roasted corpses, and now it ain't nothing but a lot of nasty cussing mud-turcles. It's a daring thief and shame, that's my opinion of it." San Juan and cholera. December 29. One sea voyage has ended anyhow. We have arrived at San Juan del Sur, and must leave the ship and cross the Ismus. Not today, though. They have posted a notice on the ship that the cholera is raging among a battalion of troops just arrived from New York, and so we are not permitted to go ashore today. And to the sea-weary eyes of some of our people, no doubt, bright green hills never looked so welcome, so enchanting, so altogether lovely as these do that lie here within the pistol-shot of us. But the law is spoken, and so half the ship's family are looking longingly ashore, or discussing the cholera news fearfully, and the other half are in the after-cabin, singing boisterously and carrying on like a troop of wild school-children. Ashore. Graytown. January 1. While we lay all night at San Juan, the baggage was sent ashore in lighters, and next morning we departed ourselves. We found San Juan to consist of a few tumble-down-frame shanties they call them hotels, nestling among green verdure and overshadowed by picturesque little hills. The spot where we landed was crowded with horses, mules, ambulances, and half-clad yellow natives, with bowie-knives two feet long, and as broad as your hand, strapped to their waists. I thought these barefooted scoundrels were soldiers, but no, they were merely citizens in civil life. Here and there on the beach moved a soiled and ragged white woman, to whom the sight of our ship must have been as a vision of paradise. For here a vast ship-load of passengers had been kept in exile for fifteen days through the wretched incompetency of one man, the company's agent on the Isthmus. He had sent a steamer empty to San Francisco when he knew well that this multitude of people were due at Greytown. They will finish their journey now in our ship. Our party of eight, we had made it up the night before, being the first boat-load to leave the ship, was entitled to the first choice of the ambulances, or the equestrian accommodations that were to convey us the twelve miles we must go by land between San Juan and Virgin Bay on Lake Nicaragua. Some of the saddle horses and mules, many of them in fact, looked very well. But if there was any choice between the ambulances, or especially between the miraculous scare-crows that were to haul them, it was hardly perceptible. You never saw such harness in your life, nor such mules, nor such drivers. They were funny individuals, and funny in combination. Except the ghastly sores on the animals' backs, where the crazy harnesses had chafed and scraped and scarified, that part of it would move anybody's pity for the poor things. We climbed into one of the largest of the faded red ambulances, mud wagons we call them in the mountains, with four little sore-backed rabbits hitched to it, and cleared for Virgin Bay. The driver commenced by beating and banging his team and cursing them like a furious maniac in bad Spanish, and he kept it up all through that twelve-mile journey of three hours and a half, over a hard, level, beautiful road. We envied the people who were not crippled, and could ride horseback. But we clattered along pretty lively, and were a jolly party. The first thing the ladies noticed as we lost sight of the sea, and wound in among an overshadowing growth of dewy vines and forest-trees, was a dear, dear little baby, oh, see the darling! A vile, distempered, mud-coloured native brat, making dirt pies in front of an isolated cabin. And the first thing the men noticed was—was—but they could not make it out. A guide-board, perhaps, or a cross, or the modest gravestone of some ill-fated stranger. But it was none of these. When we drew nearer, it turned out to be a sign nailed to a tree, and it said, Try Ward's shirts. There was some round abuse indulged in, then, of ward and plantation-bitter's men, and all such people, who invade all sacred places with their rascally signs, and mar every landscape one might gaze upon in worship, and turn to a farce every sentimental thought that enters his brain. I know that if I were to go to old Niagara, and stand with his mists blowing in my face, and his voice thundering in my ear, I would swell with a noble inspiration, and say, Oh, grand sublime! Magnificent!—and then behold on his front, S.T. 1860, ex-plantation bitters, and be incensed. It is a shame! The procession under way. The bright, fresh green on every hand, the delicious softness and coolness of the air—it had just showered a little before we started—the interest of unknown birds, and flowers, and trees, the delightful new sensation of the bumping and rattling of the ambulance—everything so cheery and lively as compared with our old dull monotony and shoreless sea on board the ship—wrought our party up to a pitch of joyous animation and enthusiasm that I would have thought impossible with such dry old sticks. I ask pardon of the ladies, and even of the gentlemen also. All hands voted the Nicaragua root forever. Notabene, they used to do that every day or two, and then every other day or two they would damn the Nicaragua root forever. Much are the ways of passengers all the world over. About every two hundred yards we came across a little summer house of a peanut stand at the roadside, with raven-haired, splendid-eyed Nicaragua damsels standing in attitudes of careless grace behind them, damsels buff-colored like an envelope, damsels who were always dressed the same way, in a single flowing gown of fancifully-figured calico gathered across the breasts. They are singularly full in the bust—the young ones—and ruffled all round near the bottom of the skirt. They have white teeth and pleasant smiling, winning faces. They are virtuous according to their lights, but I guess their lights are a little dim. Two of these picturesque native girls were exceedingly beautiful, such liquid languishing eyes, such pouting lips, such glossy luxuriant hair, such ravishing incendiary expression, such grace, such voluptuous forms, and such precious little drapery about them, such tooth. But you just prospect one of them heifers with a fine tooth! This attempted interruption was from Brown, and procured his banishment at once. This man will not consent to see what is attractive alone, but always unearths the disagreeable features of everything that comes under his notice. These groups of dark maidens keep for sale a few cups of coffee, tea, or chocolate, some bananas, oranges, pineapples, hard-boiled eggs, a dozen bottles of their vile native liquors, some ornamental cups carved from gourds of the Calabash tree, a monkey or two, and their prices were so moderate that, in spite of all orders and remonstrances to the contrary, the steerage-passengers have been overloading their stomachs with all sorts of beverages and edibles, and will pay for it in Asiatic cholera before they are many days older, no doubt. Our road was smooth, level, and free from mud and dust, and the scenery in its neighbourhood was pleasing, though not particularly striking. Many of the trees were starred all over with pretty blossoms. There was no lack of vegetation, and occasionally the balmy air came to us laden with a delicious fragrance. We passed two or three high hills, whose bold fronts, free from trees or shrubs, were thickly carpeted with softest greenest grass. A picture our eyes could never tire of. Sometimes birds of handsome plumage flitted by, and we heard the blithe songs of others as we rode through the forests. But the monkeys claimed all attention. All hands wanted to see a real, live, wild monkey skirmishing among his native haunts. Our interest finally moderated somewhat in the native women. The birds, the callibash trees with their gourd-like fruit, the huge, queer knots on trees that were said to be ants' nests, the lime trees, and even in a singular species of cactus, long, slender and green, that climbed to the very tops of great trees, and completely hid their trunks and branches, and choked them to death in its winding folds, so like an ugly, endless serpent, but never did the party cease to consider the wild monkey a charming novelty and a joy for ever. Masquerading on the road. Our four hundred passengers on horseback, muleback, and in four mule ambulances, formed the wildest, and most uncouth procession I ever saw. It reminded me of the fantastic masquerading pageants they used to get up on the Fourth of July in the western states, or on Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans. The steerage passengers travelled on muleback chiefly, with coats, oil-skin carpet sacks, and blankets dangling around their saddles. Some of the saddles were new and good, but others were in all possible stages of mutilation and decay. There were not a dozen good riders in the two hundred and fifty that went on horseback, but every man seemed to consider that in as much as the animals belonged to the company, it was a stern duty to ride them to death, if possible, and they tried hard to do it. Such racing and yelling, and beating and banging and spurring, and such bouncing of blanket bundles and flapping and fluttering of coattails, and such frantic scampering of the multitude of mules, and bobbing up and down of the long column of men, and rearing and charging of struggling ambulances in their midst, I never saw before, and I never enjoyed anything so much, and never saw Brown's equanimity so disturbed as it was that day either. The philosopher had received a charge at San Francisco, a widow, with three children and a servant-girl. Every day on the trip he had been obliged to go down among the sweltering stenches of the ship's hold, to pull and haul Mrs. B's trunks out from among the piles of other baggage, and rummage among them for a shirt for Johnny, or a bib for Tommy, or a shawl for the mother or the maid, or a diaper for the baby, but these vexations were nothing to his isthmus transportation troubles. He had to take his party horseback, and in order to keep them together amid the confusion of the procession, he tied his five mules together end to end, and marched in single file, the forward horse's tail made fast to the next one's nose and so on. He rode the leading horse himself, with the baby in his arms. Mrs. B and the two boys came next, and the servant-girl brought up the rear. It was a solemnly comical spectacle. Everything went well, though, till the racing began, and then the philosopher's mule got his ambition up and led the party in merry dance. Brown tried to hold him back with one hand for a while, and then triced the baby up under his left arm, and pulled back with both hands. This had a good deal of effect, but still the little detachment darted through the main procession like the wind, making a sensation wherever it went, and was greeted with many a whack and many a laugh. Occasionally Brown's mule stopped and fell to bucking, and then his other animals closed up and got tangled together in a helpless snarl. Of course Brown had to unlimber the baby and straighten things out again. He swore hard, but under his breath, and sweated as no man ever sweated before. The entire procession had arrived at Virgin Bay, and were stowed on the boat before he got there. But his beasts had grown tranquil enough by that time, their heads were all down, and it was hard to tell which looked the most jaded and melancholy themselves or their riders. It was like intruding a funeral cortege upon the boisterous hilarity of the balance of the ship's family. All quiet again. Comfortably quartered on the little steamer, we sat in the shade and lunged, smoked, compared notes of our jolly little scamper across the isthmus, bought handsome mahogany walking canes from the natives, and finally relapsed into pensive and placid gazing out upon the rippling waters of Lake Nicaragua and the two majestic mountains that tower up out of its blue depths and wrap their green summits in the fleecy clouds.