 CHAPTER 14 AT THE APPETITE CURER This establishment's name is Hochberhaus. It is in Bohemia, a short day's journey from Vienna, and being in the Austrian Empire is, of course, a health resort. The Empire is made up of health resorts. It distributes health to the whole world. Its waters are all medicinal. They are bottled and sent throughout the earth. The natives themselves drink beer. This is self-sacrifice, apparently, but outlanders who have drunk Vienna beer have another idea about it. Particularly the Pilsner, which one gets in a small cellar up an obscure back lane in the first Besirk. The name has escaped me, but the place is easily found. You inquire for the Greek church. When you get to it, go right along by. The next house is that little beer mill. It is remote from all traffic and all noise. It is always Sunday there. There are two small rooms with low ceilings supported by massive arches. The arches and ceilings are whitewashed. Otherwise the rooms would pass for cells in the dungeons of a Bastille. The furniture is plain and cheap. There is no ornamentation anywhere. Yet it is a heaven for the self-sacrificers, for the beer there is incomparable. There is nothing like it elsewhere in the world. In the first room you will find twelve or fifteen ladies and gentlemen of civilian quality. In the other one a dozen generals and ambassadors. One may live in Vienna many months and not hear of this place, but having once heard of it and sampled it, the sampler will afterward infest it. However this is all incidental, a mere passing note of gratitude for blessings received. It has nothing to do with my subject. My subject is health resorts. All unhealthy people ought to domicile themselves in Vienna and use that as a base, making flights from time to time to the outlying resorts according to need, a flight to Marienbad to get rid of fat, a flight to Karlsbad to get rid of rheumatism, a flight to Kultenleutgaben to take the water cure and get rid of the rest of the diseases. It is all so handy. You can stand in Vienna and toss a biscuit into Kultenleutgaben with a twelve-inch gun. You can run out thither at any time of the day. You go by the phenomenally slow trains, and yet inside of an hour you have exchanged the glare and swelter of the city for wooded hills and shady forest paths and soft cool airs and the music of birds and the repose and peace of paradise. And there are plenty of other health resorts at your service and convenient to get at from Vienna, charming places, all of them. Vienna sits in the center of a beautiful world of mountains, with now and then a lake and forests. In fact, no other city is so fortunately situated. There are abundance of health resorts, as I have said, among them this place, Hochperhaus. It stands solitary on the top of a densely wooded mountain and is a building of great size. It is called the Appetite Anstalt, and people who have lost their appetites come here to get them restored. When I arrived, I was taken by Professor Holmberger to his consulting room and questioned, It is six o'clock. When did you eat last? At noon. What did you eat? Next to nothing. What was on the table? The usual things, chops, chickens, vegetables, and so on. Yes, but don't mention them, I can't bear it. Are you tired of them? Oh, utterly! I wish I might never hear of them again. The mere sight of food offends you, does it? More, it revolts me. The doctor considered a while, then got out a long menu and ran his eye slowly down it. I think, said he, that what you need to eat is—but here, choose for yourself. I glanced at the list and my stomach threw a handspring. Of all the barbarous layouts that were ever contrived, this was the most atrocious. At the top stood tough, underdone, overdue tripe, garnished with garlic. Halfway down the bill stood young cat, old cat, scrambled cat. At the bottom stood sailor boots, softened with tallow, served raw. The wide intervals of the bill were packed with dishes calculated to insult a cannibal. I said, Doctor, it is not fair to joke over so serious a case as mine. I came here to get an appetite not to throw away the remnant that's left. He said gravely, I am not joking. Why should I joke? But I can't eat these horrors. Why not? He said it with a naivete that was admirable, whether it was real or assumed. Why not? Because, my doctor, for months I have seldom been able to endure anything more substantial than omelets and custards. These unspeakable dishes of yours. Oh, you will come to like them. They are very good. And you must eat them. It is the rule of the place, and is strict. I cannot permit any departure from it. I said, smiling, well then, doctor, you will have to permit the departure of the patient. I am going. He looked hurt, and said, in a way which changed the aspect of things, I am sure you would not do me that injustice. I accepted you in good faith. You will not shame that confidence. This appetite cure is my whole living. If you should go forth from it, with the sort of appetite which you now have, it could become known. And you can see yourself that people would say my cure failed in your case, and hence can fail in other cases. You will not go. You will not do me this hurt. I apologized, and said I would stay. That is right. I was sure you would not go. It would take the food from my family's mouths. Would they mind that? Do they eat these fiendish things? They? My family? His eyes were full of gentle wonder. Of course not. Oh, they don't. Do you? Certainly not. I see. It's another case of a physician who doesn't take his own medicine. But I don't need it. It is six hours since you launched. Will you have supper now or later? I am not hungry, but now is as good a time as any, and I would like to be done with it and have it off my mind. It is about my usual time, and regularity is commanded by all the authorities. Yes, I will try to nibble a little now. I wish a light horse-whipping would answer instead. The Professor handed me that odious menu. Choose, or will you have it later? Oh, dear me. Show me my room. I forgot your hard rule. Wait just a moment before you finally decide. There is another rule. If you choose now, the order will be filled at once. But if you wait, you will have to await my pleasure. You cannot get a dish from that entire bill until I consent. All right. Show me to my room, and send the cook to bed. There is not going to be any hurry. The Professor took me up one flight of stairs and showed me into a most inviting and comfortable apartment consisting of parlor, bed-chamber, and bathroom. The front windows looked out over a far-reaching spread of green glades and valleys, and tumbled hills clothed with forests, a noble solitude unvext by the fuzzy world. In the parlor were many shelves filled with books. The Professor said he would now leave me to myself, and added, smoke and read as much as you please, drink all the water you like, when you get hungry, ring and give your order, and I will decide whether it shall be filled or not. Yours is a stubborn bad case, and I think the first fourteen dishes in the bill are each and all too delicate for its needs. I ask you as a favour to restrain yourself and not call for them. Restrain myself, is it? Give yourself no uneasiness. You are going to save money by me. The idea of coaxing a sick man's appetite back with this buzzard fare is clear insanity. I said it with bitterness, for I felt outraged by this calm, cold talk over these heartless new engines of assassination. The Doctor looked grieved, but not offended. He laid the bill of fare on the commode at my bed's head, so that it would be handy, and said, Yours is not the worst case I have encountered by any means. Still it is a bad one, and requires robust treatment. Therefore I shall be gratified, if you will restrain yourself and skip down to number fifteen, and begin with that. Then he left me, and I began to undress, for I was dog-tired and very sleepy. I slept fifteen hours, and woke up finally refreshed at ten the next morning. Vienna coffee! It was the first thing I thought of, that unapproachable luxury, that sumptuous coffee-house coffee, compared with which all other European coffee, and all American hotel coffee, is mere fluid poverty. I rang and ordered it. Also Vienna bread, that delicious invention. The servant spoke through the wicket in the door, and said, But you know what he said. He referred me to the bill of fare. I allowed him to go. I had no further use for him. After the bath I dressed, and started for a walk, and God as far as the door. It was locked on the outside. I rang, and the servant came, and explained that it was another rule. The seclusion of the patient was required until after the first meal. I had not been particularly anxious to get out before, but it was different now. Being locked in makes a person wishful to get out. I soon began to find it difficult to put in the time. At two o'clock I had been twenty-six hours without food. I had been growing hungry for some time. I recognized that I was not only hungry now, but hungry with a strong adjective in front of it. Yet I was not hungry enough to face the bill of fare. I must put in the time somehow. I would read and smoke. I did it, hour by hour. The books were all of one breed, shipwrecks, people lost in deserts, people shut up in caved-in mines, people starving in besieged cities. I read about all the revolting dishes that ever-famishing men had stayed their hunger with. During the first hours these things nauseated me. Hours followed in which they did not so affect me. Still other hours followed, in which I found myself smacking my lips over some tolerably infernal messes. When I had been without food forty-five hours I ran eagerly to the bell and ordered the second dish in the bill, which was a sort of dumplings containing a compost made of caviar and tar. It was refused me. During the next fifteen hours I visited the bell every now and then, ordered a dish that was further down the list, always a refusal. But I was conquering prejudice after prejudice right along. I was making sure progress. I was creeping up on number fifteen with deadly certainty, and my heart beat faster and faster. My hopes rose higher and higher. At last when food had not passed my lips for sixty hours victory was mine, and I ordered number fifteen. Soft-boiled spring chicken in the egg, six dozen hot and fragrant. In fifteen minutes it was there, and the doctor along with it, rubbing his hands with joy. He said with great excitement, It's a cure. It's a cure. I knew I could do it. Dear sir, my grand system never fails. Never. You've got your appetite back. You know you have. Say it and make me happy. Bring on your carrion. I can eat anything in the bill. Oh, this is noble. This is splendid. But I knew I could do it. The system never fails. How are the birds? Never was anything so delicious in the world. And yet, as a rule, I don't care for game. But don't interrupt me. Don't. I can't spare my mouth. I really can't. Then the doctor said, The cure is perfect. There is no more doubt nor danger. Let the poultry alone. I can trust you with a beef steak now. The beef steak came as much as a basketful of it with potatoes and Vienna bread and coffee. And I ate a meal then that was worth all the costly preparation I had made for it. And dripped tears of gratitude into the gravy all the time. Gratitude to the doctor for putting a little plain common sense into me when I had been empty of it so many, many years. Two. Thirty years ago, Heimberger went off on a long voyage in a sailing ship. There were fifteen passengers on board. The table fair was of the regulation pattern of the day, at seven in the morning, a cup of bad coffee in bed, at nine breakfast, bad coffee with condensed milk, soggy rolls, crackers, saltfish, at one p.m. luncheon, cold tongue, cold ham, cold corned beef, soggy cold rolls, crackers, five p.m. dinner, thick pea soup, saltfish, hot corned beef and sauerkraut, boiled pork and beans, pudding. Nine till eleven p.m., supper, tea with condensed milk, cold tongue, cold ham, pickles, sea biscuit, pickled oysters, pickled pigs feet, grilled bones, golden buck. At the end of the first week eating had ceased, nibbling had taken its place. The passengers came to the table, but it was partly to put in the time and partly because the wisdom of the ages commanded them to be regular in their meals. They were tired of the course and monotonous fair and took no interest in it, had no appetite for it. All day and every day they roamed the ship half hungry, plagued by their gnawing stomachs, moody, untalkative, miserable. Among them were three confirmed dyspectics. These became shadows in the course of three weeks. There was also a bed-ridden invalid. He lived on boiled rice. He could not look at the regular dishes. Now came shipwreck and life in open boats with the usual paucity of food. Provisions ran lower and lower. The appetites improved then. When nothing was left but raw ham and the ration of that was down to two ounces a day per person, the appetites were perfect. At the end of fifteen days the dyspectics, the invalid and the most delicate ladies in the party were chewing sailor boots in ecstasy and only complaining because the supply of them was limited. Yet these were the same people who couldn't endure the ship's tedious corned beef and sauerkraut and other crudities. They were rescued by an English vessel. Within ten days the whole fifteen were in as good condition as they had been when the shipwreck occurred. They had suffered no damage by their adventure, said the Professor. Do you note that? Yes. Do you note it well? Yes, I think I do. But you don't. You hesitate. You don't rise to the importance of it. I will say it again with emphasis. Not one of them suffered any damage. Now I begin to see. Yes, it was indeed remarkable. Nothing of the kind. It was perfectly natural. There was no reason why they should suffer damage. They were undergoing nature's appetite cure, the best and wisest in the world. Is that where you got your idea? That is where I got it. It taught those people a valuable lesson. What makes you think that? Why, shouldn't I? You seem to think it taught you one. That is nothing to the point. I am not a fool. I see. Were they fools? They were human beings. Is it the same thing? Why do you ask? You know it yourself, as regards his health and the rest of the things. The average man is what his environment and his superstitions have made him, and their function is to make him an ass. He can't add up three or four new circumstances together and perceive what they mean. It is beyond him. He is not capable of observing for himself. He has to get everything at second hand. If what are miscalled the lower animals were as silly as man is, they would all perish from the earth in a year. Those passengers learned no lesson then. Not a sign of it. They went to their regular meals in the English ship, and pretty soon they were nibbling again. Nibbling, appetiteless, disgusted with the food, moody, miserable, half-hungry, their outraged stomachs cursing and swearing, and whining and supplicating all day long, and in vain for they were the stomachs of fools. Then, as I understand it, your scheme is quite simple. Don't eat till you are hungry. If the food fails to taste good, fails to satisfy you, rejoice you, comfort you. Don't eat it again until you are very hungry. Then it will rejoice you, and do you good too. And I observe no regularity as to ours. When you are conquering a bad appetite, no. After it is conquered, regularity is no harm, so long as the appetite remains good. As soon as the appetite wavers, apply the corrective again, which is starvation, long or short, according to the needs of the case. The best diet, I suppose, I mean the wholesomeest. All diets are wholesome. Some are wholesomeer than others. But all the ordinary diets are wholesome enough for the people who use them. Whether the food be fine or coarse, it will taste good and will nourish if a watch be kept upon the appetite, and a little starvation introduced every time it weakens. Nansen was used to find fair, but when his meals were restricted to bare meat months at a time, he suffered no damage and no discomfort, because his appetite was kept at par through the difficulty of getting his bare meat regularly. But doctors arranged carefully considered and delicate diets for invalids. They can't help it. The invalid is full of inherited superstitions and won't starve himself. He believes it would certainly kill him. It would weaken him, wouldn't it? Nothing to hurt. Look at the invalids in our shipwreck. They lived fifteen days on pinches of raw ham, a suck at sailor boots, and general starvation. It weakened them, but it didn't hurt them. It put them in fine shape to eat heartily of hearty food and build themselves up to a condition of robust health. But they did not perceive that. They lost their opportunity. They remained invalids. It served them right. Do you know the tricks that the health resort doctors play? What is it? My system disguised. Covert, starved, covert starvation, grape cure, bath cure, mud cure. It is all the same. The grape and the bath and the mud make a show and do a trifle of the work. The real work is done by the surreptitious starvation. The patient accustomed to four meals and late hours at both ends of the day. Now consider what he has to do at a health resort. He gets up at six in the morning, eats one egg, tramps up and down a promenade, two hours with the other fools, eats a butterfly, slowly drinks a glass of filtered sewage that smells like a buzzard's breath, promenades another two hours, but alone. If you speak to him, he says anxiously, my water, I am walking off my water, please don't interrupt and goes stumping along again. Eats a candied rose leaf, lies at rest in the silence and solitude of his room for hours, mustn't speak, mustn't read, mustn't smoke. The doctor comes and feels of his heart now and his pulse and thumps his breast and his back and his stomach and listens for results through a penny-flagellette, then orders the man's bath, half a degree roimer cooler than yesterday. After the bath another egg, a glass of sewage at three or four in the afternoon and promenade solemnly with the other freaks. Dinner at six, half a donut and a cup of tea. Walk again, half past eight, supper, more butterfly, at nine to bed. Six weeks of this regime. Think of it, it starves a man out and puts him in splendid condition. It would have the same effect in London, New York, Jericho, anywhere. How long does it take to put a person in condition here? It ought to take but a day or two, but in fact it takes from one to six weeks according to the character and mentality of the patient. How is that? Do you see that crowd of women playing football and boxing and jumping fences yonder? They have been here six or seven weeks. They were spectral poor weaklings when they came. They were accustomed to nibbling dainties and delicacies at set hours four times a day, and they had no appetite for anything. I questioned them, and then locked them into their rooms, the frailest ones to starve nine or ten hours, the others twelve or fifteen. Before long they began to beg, and indeed they suffered a good deal. They complained of nausea, headache, and so on. It was good to see them eat when the time was up. They could not remember when the devouring of a meal had afforded them such rapture. That was their word. Now then, that ought to have ended their cure. But it didn't. They were free to go to any meals in the house, and they chose their accustomed four. Within a day or two I had to interfere. Their appetites were weakening. I made them knock out a meal. That set them up again. Then they resumed the four. I begged them to learn to knock out a meal themselves, without waiting for me. Up to a fortnight ago they couldn't. They really hadn't manhood enough, but they were gaining it, and now I think they are safe. They drop out a meal every now and then of their own accord. They are in fine condition now, and they might safely go home, I think. But their confidence is not quite perfect yet, so they are waiting a while. Other cases are different. Oh, yes! Sometimes a man learns the whole trick in a week. Learns to regulate his appetite and keep it in perfect order. Learns to drop out a meal with frequency, and not mind it. But why drop the entire meal out? Why not a part of it? It's a poor device, and inadequate. If the stomach doesn't call vigorously, with a shout, as you may say, it is better not to pester it, but just give it a real rest. Some people can eat more meals than others, and still thrive. There are all sorts of people, and all sorts of appetites. I will show you a man, presently, who was accustomed to nibble at eight meals a day. It was beyond the proper gait of his appetite by two. I have got him down to six a day now, and he is all right, and enjoys life. How many meals do you affect per day? Formerly, for twenty-two years, a meal and a half. During the past two years, two and a half, coffee and a roll at nine, luncheon, one, dinner, seven-thirty or eight. Formerly, a meal and a half, that is, coffee and a roll at nine, dinner in the evening, nothing in between? Is that it? Yes. Why did you add a meal? It was the family's idea. They were uneasy. They thought I was killing myself. You found a meal and a half per day enough, all through the twenty-two years? Plenty. Your present poor condition is due to the extra meal. Drop it out. You are trying to eat offener than your stomach demands. You don't gain, you lose. You eat less food now in a day on two and a half meals than you formerly ate on one and a half. True. A good deal less. For in those old days my dinner was a very sizable thing. Put yourself on a single meal a day now, dinner, for a few days till you secure a good sound, regular, trustworthy appetite. Then take to your one and a half permanently, and don't listen to the family any more. When you have any ordinary ailment, particularly of a feverish sort, eat nothing at all during twenty-four hours. That will cure it. It will cure the stubbornness cold in the head too. No cold in the head can survive twenty-four hours of modified starvation. I know it. I have proved it many a time. End of Chapter 14 at the Appetite Cure. Read by John Greenman. Section 20 of How to Tell a Story and Other Essays by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. How to Tell a Story and Other Essays by Mark Twain. Chapter 15 in Memoriam. Olivia Susan Clemens. Died. August 18th, 1896. Aged, 24. In a fair valley, oh, how long ago, how long ago, where all the broad expanse was clothed in vines, and fruitful fields and meadows starred with flowers, and clear streams wandered at their idle will, and still lakes slept, their burnished surfaces a dream of painted clouds, and soft airs went whispering with odorous breath, and all was peace in that fair veil, shot from the troubled world a nameless hamlet drowsed. Hard by, apart, a temple stood, and strangers from the outer world passing noted it with tired eyes, and seeing saw it not. A glimpse of its fair form, an answering momentary thrill, and they passed on, careless and unaware. They could not know the cunning of its make. They could not know the secret shut up in its heart. Only the dwellers of the hamlet knew. They knew that what seemed brass was gold. What marble seemed was ivory. The glories that enriched the milky surfaces, the trailing vines and interwoven flowers, and tropic birds-wing clothed all in tinted fires. They knew for what they were, not what they seemed, encrusting all of gems, not perishable splendors of the brush. They knew the secret spot where one must stand. They knew the surest hour, the proper slant of sun, to gather in unmarred, undimmed, the vision of the fane in all its fairy grace. A fainting dream against the opal sky. And more than this they knew that in the temple's inmost place a spirit dwell made all of light. For glimpses of it they had caught beyond the curtains when the priests that served the altar came and went. All loved that light and held it dear that had this partial grace. But the adoring priests alone who lived by day and night submerged in its immortal glow knew all its power and depth, and could appraise the loss, if it should bade, and fail, and come no more. All this was long ago, so long ago, the light burned on, and they that worshipped it, and they that caught its flash at intervals and held it dear, contented lived in its secure possession. Ah, how long ago it was! And then when they were nothing fearing, and God's peace was in the air, and none was prophesying harm, the vast disaster fell, where stood the temple when the sun went down, was vacant desert when it rose again. Ah, yes, to his ages since it chanced. So long ago it was, that from the memory of the Hamlet folk the light has passed, they scarce believing now that once it was, or if believing, yet not missing it, and reconciled to have it gone. Not so the priests, oh, not so the stricken ones that served it day and night, adoring it, abiding in the healing of its peace. They stand yet, where erst they stood speechless in that dim morning long ago, and still they gaze, as then they gazed, and murmur, it will come again. It knows our pain, it knows, it knows. Ah, surely it will come again. S. L. C. Lake Lucerne, August 18th, 1897 End of Chapter 15, In Memoriam, read by John Greenman Section 21 of How to Tell a Story and Other Essays by Mark Twain This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. How to Tell a Story and Other Essays by Mark Twain Chapter 16 Mark Twain, A Biographical Sketch by Samuel E. Moffat In 1835 the creation of the Western Empire of America had just begun. In the whole region west of the Mississippi, which now contains 21 million people, nearly twice the entire population of the United States at that time, there were less than half a million white inhabitants. There were only two states beyond the Great River, Louisiana, and Missouri. There were only two considerable groups of population, one about New Orleans, and the other about St. Louis. If we omit New Orleans, which is east of the river, there was only one place in all that vast domain with any pretension to be called a city. That was St. Louis, and that Metropolis, the wonder and pride of all the Western country, had no more than ten thousand inhabitants. It was in this frontier region, on the extreme fringe of settlement, that just divides the desert from the zone. That Samuel Langhorn Clemens was born, November 30, 1835, in the hamlet of Florida, Missouri. His parents had come there to be in the thick of the Western boom, and by a fate for which no lack of foresight on their part was to blame, they found themselves in a place which succeeded in accumulating 125 inhabitants in the next sixty years. When we read of the westward sweep of population and wealth in the United States, it seems as if those who were in the van of that moment must have been inevitably carried on to fortune. But that was a tide full of eddies and back currents, and Mark Twain's parents possessed a faculty for finding them that appears nothing less than miraculous. The whole Western Empire was before them where to choose. They could have bought the entire site of Chicago for a pair of boots. They could have taken up a farm within the present city limits of St. Louis. What they actually did was to live for a time in Columbia, Kentucky, with a small property in land, and six inherited slaves, then to move to Jamestown on the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee, a place that was then no farther removed from the currents of the world's life than Uganda, but which no resident of that or any other part of Central Africa would now regard as a serious competitor, and next to migrate to Missouri, passing St. Louis and settling first in Florida and afterward in Hannibal. But when the whole map was blank, the promise of fortune glowed as rosely in these regions as anywhere else. Florida had great expectations when Jackson was president. When John Marshall Clemens took up eighty thousand acres of land in Tennessee, he thought he had established his children as territorial magnates. That phantom vision of wealth furnished later one of the motives of the gilded age. It conferred no other benefit. If Samuel Clemens missed a fortune he inherited good blood. On both sides his family had been settled in the South since early colonial times. His father, John Marshall Clemens of Virginia, was a descendant of Gregory Clemens, who became one of the judges that condemned Charles I to death, was accepted from the amnesty after the restoration in consequence, and lost his head. A cousin of John M. Clemens, Jeremiah Clemens, represented Alabama in the United States Senate from 1849 to 1853. Through his mother, Jane Lampton, Lampton, the boy was descended from the Lamptons of Durham, whose modern English representatives still possessed the lands held by their ancestors of the same name since the 12th century. Some of her forebears on the maternal side, the Montgomery's, went with Daniel Boone to Kentucky and were in the thick of the romantic and tragic events that accompanied the settlement of the dark and bloody ground, and she herself was born there twenty-nine years after the first log cabin was built within the limits of the present Commonwealth. She was one of the earliest, prettiest, and brightest of the many bells that have given Kentucky such an enviable reputation as a nursery of fair women, and her vivacity and wit left no doubt in the minds of her friends concerning the source of her son's genius. John Marshall Clemens, who had been trained for the bar in Virginia, served for some years as a magistrate at Hannibal, holding for a time the position of county judge. With his death in March 1847, Mark Twain's formal education came to an end, and his education in real life began. He had always been a delicate boy, and his father, in consequence, had been lenient in the matter of enforcing attendance at school, although he had been profoundly anxious that his children should be well educated. His wish was fulfilled, although not in the way he had expected. It is a fortunate thing for literature that Mark Twain was never ground into smooth uniformity under the scholastic Emory Wheel. He has made the world his university, and in men and books and strange places, and all the phases of an infinitely varied life, has built an education broad and deep on the foundations of an undisturbed individuality. His high school was a village printing office, where his elder brother Orian was conducting a newspaper. The thirteen-year-old boy served in all capacities, and in the occasional absences of his chief he reveled in personal journalism, with original illustrations hacked on wooden blocks with a jackknife, to an extent that riveted the town's attention, but not its admiration, as his brother plaintively confessed. The editor spoke with feeling, for he had to take the consequences of these exploits on his return. From his earliest childhood young Clemens had been of an adventurous disposition. Before he was thirteen he had been extracted three times from the Mississippi and six times from Bear Creek in a substantially drowned condition, but his mother, with a high confidence in his future that never deserted her, merely remarked, People who are born to be hanged are safe in the water. By 1853 the Hannibal Tether had become too short for him. He disappeared from home and wandered from one eastern printing office to another. He saw the world's fair at New York and other marvels, and supported himself by setting type. At the end of this wander-yard financial stress drove him back to his family. He lived at St. Louis, Muscatine, and Keokuk, until 1857, when he induced the great Horace Bixby to teach him the mystery of steamboat piloting. The charm of all this warm, indolent existence in the sleepy river towns has colored his whole subsequent life. In Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, life on the Mississippi and Puddin Head Wilson, every phase of that vanished estate is lovingly dwelt upon. Native character will always make itself felt, but one may wonder whether Mark Twain's humor would have developed in quite so sympathetic and buoyant of vein if he had been brought up in Ecclfekken instead of in Hannibal, and whether Carlisle might not have been a little more human if he had spent his boyhood in Hannibal instead of in Ecclfekken. A Mississippi pilot in the later fifties was a personage of imposing grandeur. He was a miracle of attainments. He was the absolute master of his boat while it was under way, and just before his fall he commanded a salary precisely equal to that earned at that time by the Vice President of the United States, or a Justice of the Supreme Court. The best proof of the superlative majesty and desirability of his position is the fact that Samuel Clemens deliberately subjected himself to the incredible labor necessary to attain it. A labor compared with which the efforts needed to acquire the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at a university are as light as a summer course of modern novels. To appreciate the full meaning of a pilot's marvelous education one must read the whole of life on the Mississippi, but this extract may give a partial idea of a single feature of that training, the cultivation of the memory. First of all there is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection. Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory. He cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is so and so. He must know it. For this is eminently one of the exact sciences. With what scorn a pilot was looked upon in the old times, if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase, I think, instead of the vigorous one, I know. One cannot easily realize what a tremendous thing it is to know every trivial detail of twelve hundred miles of river, and know it with absolute exactness. If you will take the longest street in New York and travel up and down it, conning its features patiently, until you know every house and window and door and lamppost, and big and little sign by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random in that street in the middle of an inky black night, you will then have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a pilot's knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in his head. And then if you will go on until you know every street crossing, the character, size, and position of the crossing stones, and the varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places, you will have some idea of what the pilot must know in order to keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble. Next, if you will take half of the signs in that long street and change their places once a month, and still manage to know their new positions accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changes without making any mistakes, you will understand what is required of a pilot's pureless memory by the fickle Mississippi. I think a pilot's memory is about the most wonderful thing in the world, to know the old and new testaments by heart, and be able to recite them glibly forward or backward, or begin at random anywhere in the book and recite both ways, and never trip or make a mistake, is no extravagant mass of knowledge, and no marvelous facility compared to a pilot's massed knowledge of the Mississippi, and his marvelous facility in handling it, and how easily and comfortably the pilot's memory does its work, how placidly effortless is its way, how unconsciously it lays up its vast stores hour by hour, day by day, and never loses or mislays a single valuable package of them all. Take an instance. Let a Ledzman say, half twain, half twain, half twain, half twain, half twain, until it becomes as monotonous as the ticking of a clock. Let conversations be going on all the time, and the pilot be doing his share of the talking, and no longer consciously listening to the Ledzman, and in the midst of this endless string of half twains let a single quarter twain be interjected without emphasis, and then the half twain cry go on again just as before. Two or three weeks later that pilot can describe with precision the boat's position in the river when that quarter twain was uttered, and give you such a lot of head marks, stern marks, and side marks to guide you that you want to be able to take the boat there and put her in that same spot again yourself. The cry of quarter twain did not really take his mind from his talk, but his trained faculties instantly photographed the bearings, noted the change of depth, and laid up the important details for future reference without requiring any assistance from him in the matter. Young Clemens went through all that appalling training, stored away in his head the bewildering mass of knowledge a pilot's duties required, received the license that was the diploma of the River University, entered into regular employment, and regarded himself as established for life, when the outbreak of the Civil War wiped out his occupation at a stroke, and made his weary apprenticeship a useless labor. The commercial navigation of the lower Mississippi was stopped by a line of fire and black squat gun boats, their sloping sides plated with railroad iron, took the place of the gorgeous white side-wheelers whose pilots had been the envied aristocrats of the River Towns. Clemens was in New Orleans when Louisiana seceded, and started north the next day. The boat ran a blockade every day of her trip, and on the last night of the voyage, the batteries at the Jefferson Barracks, just below St. Louis, fired two shots through her chimneys. Brought up in a slave-holding atmosphere, Mark Twain naturally sympathized at first with the South. In June he joined the Confederates in Rawls County, Missouri, as a second lieutenant under General Tom Harris. His military career lasted for two weeks, narrowly missing the distinction of being captured by Colonel Ulysses S. Grant, he resigned explaining that he had become incapacitated by fatigue through persistent retreating. In his subsequent writings he has always treated his brief experience of warfare as a burlesque episode, although the official reports and correspondence of the Confederate commanders speak very respectfully of the work of the Raw Countrymen of the Harris Brigade. The elder Clemens' brother, Orian, was persona grata to the administration of President Lincoln, and received in consequence an appointment as the first secretary of the new territory of Nevada. He offered his speedily reconstructed junior the position of private secretary to himself, with nothing to do and no salary. The two crossed the plains in an overland coach in eighteen days, almost precisely the time it will take to go from New York to Vladivostok, when the Trans-Siberian Railway is finished. A year of variegated fortune hunting among the silver mines of the Humboldt and Esmeralda regions followed. Occasional letters written during this time to the leading newspaper of the Territory, the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, attracted the attention of the proprietor, Mr. J. T. Goodman, a man of keen and unerring literary instinct, and he offered the writer the position of local editor on his staff. With the duties of this place were combined those of legislative correspondent at Carson City, the capital. The work of young Clemens created a sensation among the lawmakers. He wrote a weekly letter spined with barbed personalities. It appeared every Sunday, and on Mondays the legislative business was obstructed with the complaints of members who rose to questions of privilege and expressed their opinion of the correspondent with a serbity. This encouraged him to give his letters more individuality by signing them. For this purpose he adopted the old Mississippi-Ledsman call for two fathoms, twelve feet, Mark Twain. At that particular period dueling was a passing fashion on the Comstock. The refinements of Parisian civilization had not penetrated there, and a washu duel seldom left more than one survivor. The weapons were always Colt's navy revolvers, distance, fifteen paces, fire and advance, six shots allowed. Mark Twain became involved in a quarrel with Mr. Laird, the editor of the Virginia Union, and the situation seemed to call for a duel. Neither combatant was an expert with a pistol, but Mark Twain was fortunate enough to have a second who was. The men were practicing in adjacent gorges, Mr. Laird doing fairly well, and his opponent hitting everything but the mark. A small bird lit on a sage-bush thirty yards away, and Mark Twain's second fired and knocked off its head. At that moment the enemy came over the ridge, saw the dead bird, observed the distance, and learned from Gillis, the humorous second, that the feat had been performed by Mark Twain, for whom such an exploit was nothing remarkable. They withdrew for consultation, and then offered a formal apology, after which peace was restored, leaving Mark Twain with the honors of war. However, this incident was the means of affecting another change in his life. There was a new law which prescribed two years imprisonment for anyone who should send, carry, or accept a challenge. The fame of the proposed duel had reached the capital eighteen miles away, and the Governor wrathfully gave orders for the arrest of all concerned, announcing his intention of making an example that would be remembered. A friend of the dualists, heard of their danger, outrode the officers of the law, and hurried the parties over the border into California. Mark Twain found a birth as City Editor of the San Francisco Morning Call, but he was not adapted to routine newspaper work, and in a couple of years he made another bid for fortune in the mines. He tried the pocket mines of California this time, at Jackass Gulch in Calaveras County, but was fortunate enough to find no pockets. Thus he escaped the hypnotic fascination that has kept some intermittently successful pocket miners willing prisoners in the Sierra Cabins for life, and in three months he was back in San Francisco, penniless, but in the line of literary promotion. He wrote letters for the Virginia Enterprise for a time, but, tiring of that, welcomed an assignment to visit Hawaii for the Sacramento Union, and write about the sugar interests. It was in Honolulu that he accomplished one of his greatest feats of straight newspaper work. The clipper Hornet had been burned on the line, and when the skeleton survivors arrived, after a passage of forty-three days in an open boat on ten days' provisions, Mark Twain gathered their stories, worked all day and all night, and threw a complete account of the horror aboard a schooner that had already cast off. It was the only full account that reached California, and it was not only a clean scoop of unusual magnitude, but an admirable piece of literary art. The Union testified its appreciation by paying the correspondent ten times the current rates for it. After six months in the islands, Mark Twain returned to California and made his first venture upon the lecture platform. He was warmly received and delivered several lectures with profit. In 1867 he went east by way of the Isthmus, and joined the Quaker City excursion to Europe and the Holy Land as correspondent of the Alta California of San Francisco. During this tour of five or six months the party visited the principal ports of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. From this trip grew The Innocence Abroad, the creator of Mark Twain's reputation as a literary force of the First Order. The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County had preceded it, but The Innocence gave the author his first introduction to international literature. A hundred thousand copies were sold the first year, and as many more later. Four years of lecturing followed, distasteful but profitable. Mark Twain always shrank from the public exhibition of himself on the platform, but he was a popular favorite there from the first. He was one of a little group, including Henry Ward Beecher and two or three others, for whom every Lyceum committee in the country was bidding, and whose capture at any price ensured the success of a lecture course. The Quaker City excursion had a more important result than the production of The Innocence Abroad. Through her brother, who was one of the party, Mr. Clemens became acquainted with Miss Olivia L. Langdon, the daughter of Jervis Langdon of Elmira, New York, and this acquaintance led, in February 1870, to one of the most ideal marriages in literary history. Four children came of this union. The eldest Langdon, a son, was born November 1870, and died in 1872. The second, Susan Olivia, a daughter, was born in the latter year, and lived only twenty-four years, but long enough to develop extraordinary mental gifts and every grace of character. Two other daughters, Clara Langdon and Jean, were born in 1874 and 1880, respectively, and still live, 1899. Mark Twain's first home as a man of family was in Buffalo, in a house given to the bride by her father as a wedding present. He bought a third interest in a daily newspaper, The Buffalo Express, and joined its staff. But his time for jogging in harness was past. It was his last attempt at regular newspaper work, and a year of it was enough. He had become assured of a market for anything he might produce, and he could choose his own place and time for writing. There was a tempting literary colony at Hartford. The place was steeped in an atmosphere of antique peace and beauty, and the Clemens family were captivated by its charm. They moved there in October 1871 and soon built a house, which was one of the earliest fruits of the artistic revolt against the mid-century Philistanism of domestic architecture in America. For years it was an object of wonder to the simple-minded tourist, the facts that its rooms were arranged for the convenience of those who were to occupy them, and that its windows, gables, and porches were distributed with an eye to the beauty, comfort, and picturesqueness of that particular house, instead of following the traditional lines laid down by the carpenters and contractors who designed most of the dwellings of the period, distracted the critics, and gave rise to grave discussions in the newspapers throughout the country of Mark Twain's practical joke. The years that followed brought a steady literary development. Roughing it, which was written in 1872, and scored a success hardly second to that of the innocence, was, like that, simply a humorous narrative of personal experiences, variegated by brilliant splashes of description. But with the gilded age, which was produced in the same year in collaboration with Mr. Charles Dudley Warner, the humorous began to evolve into the philosopher. Tom Sawyer, appearing in 1876, was a veritable manual of boy nature, and its sequel, Huckleberry Finn, which was published nine years later, was not only an advanced treatise in the same science, but a most moving study of the workings of the untutored human soul in boy and man. The Prince and the Pauper, 1882, a Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, 1890, and Putinhead Wilson, first published serially in 1893-94, were all alive with a comprehensive and passionate sympathy to which their humor was quite subordinate, although Mark Twain never wrote, and probably never will write, a book that could be read without laughter. His humor is as irrepressible as Lincoln's, and, like that, it bubbles out on the most solemn occasions. But still, again, like Lincoln's, it has a way of seeming, in spite of the surface in congruity, to belong there. But it was in the personal recollections of Joan of Arc, whose anonymous serial publication in 1894-95 betrayed some critics of reputation into the absurdity of attributing it to other authors, notwithstanding the characteristic evidences of its paternity that obtruded themselves on every page, that Mark Twain became, most distinctly, a prophet of humanity. Here, at last, was a book with nothing ephemeral about it, one that will reach the elemental human heart as well among the flying machines of the next century as it does among the automobiles of today, or as it would have done among the stagecoaches of a hundred years ago. And, side by side with this spiritual growth, had come a growth in knowledge and in culture. The Mark Twain of the innocence keen-eyed, quick of understanding and full of fresh, eager interest in all Europe had to show, but frankly avowing that he did not know what the mischief of the renaissance was, had developed into an accomplished scholar and a man of the world for whom the globe had few surprises left. The Mark Twain of 1895 might conceivably have written the innocence abroad, although it would have required an effort to put himself in the necessary frame of mind, but the Mark Twain of 1869 could know more have written Joan of Arc than he could have deciphered the Maya hieroglyphics. In 1873 the family spent some months in England and Scotland, and Mr. Clemens lectured for a few weeks in London. Another European journey followed in 1878. A tramp abroad was the result of this tour, which lasted 18 months. The Prince and the pauper, Life on the Mississippi, and Huckleberry Finn, appeared in quick succession in 1882, 1883, and 1885. Considerably more amusing than anything the humorist ever wrote was the fact that the trustees of some village libraries in New England solemnly voted that Huckleberry Finn, whose power of moral uplift has hardly been surpassed by any book of our time, was too demoralizing to be allowed on their shelves. All this time fortune had been steadily favorable, and Mark Twain had been spoken of by the press, sometimes with admiration, as an example of the financial success possible in literature, and sometimes with uncharitable envy, as a haughty millionaire forgetful of his humble friends. But now began the series of unfortunate investments that swept away the accumulations of half a lifetime of hard work, and left him loaded with debts incurred by other men. In 1885 he financed the publishing house of Charles L. Webster and Company in New York. The firm began business with the prestige of a brilliant coup. It secured the publication of the memoirs of General Grant, which achieved a sale of more than six hundred thousand volumes. The first check received by the Grant heirs was for two hundred thousand dollars, and this was followed a few months later by one for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. These are the largest checks ever paid for an author's work on either side of the Atlantic. Meanwhile Mr. Clemens was spending great sums on a type-setting machine of such seductive ingenuity as to captivate the imagination of everybody who saw it. It worked to perfection, but it was too complicated and expensive for commercial use, and after sinking a fortune in it between 1886 and 1889, Mark Twain had to write off the whole investment as a dead loss. On top of this the publishing house, which had been supposed to be doing a profitable business, turned out to have been incapable conducted, and all the money that came into its hands was lost. Mark Twain contributed sixty-five thousand dollars in efforts to save its life, but to no purpose, and when it finally failed he found that it had not only absorbed everything he had put in it, but had incurred liabilities of ninety-six thousand dollars, of which less than one-third was covered by assets. He could easily have avoided any legal liability for the debts, but as the credit of the company had been based largely upon his name, he felt bound and honoured to pay them. In 1895-96 he took his wife and second daughter on a lecturing tour around the world, wrote following the equator, and cleared off the obligations of the house in full. The years 1897, 1898, and 1899 were spent in England, Switzerland, and Austria. Vienna took the family to its heart, and Mark Twain achieved such a popularity among all classes there as is rarely won by a foreigner anywhere. He saw the manufacture of a good deal of history in that time. It was his fortune, for instance, to be present in the Austrian Reichsrath on the memorable occasion when it was invaded by sixty policemen, and sixteen refractory members were dragged roughly out of the hall. That momentous event in the progress of parliamentary government profoundly impressed him. Mark Twain, although so characteristically American in every fiber, does not appeal to Americans alone, nor even to the English-speaking race. His work has stood the test of translation into French, German, Russian, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, and Magyar. That is pretty good evidence that it possesses the universal quality that marks the master. Another evidence of its fidelity to human nature is the readiness with which it lends itself to dramatization. The Gilded Age, Tom Sawyer, the Prince and the pauper, and Putinhead Wilson, have all been successful on the stage. In the thirty-eight years of his literary activity Mark Twain has seen generation after generation of American humorists rise, expand into sudden popularity, and disappear, leaving hardly a memory behind. If he has not written himself out like them, if his place in literature has become every year more assured, it is because his humor has been something radically different from theirs. It has been irresistibly laughter-provoking, but its sole end has never been to make people laugh. Its more important purpose has been to make them think and feel, and with the progress of the years Mark Twain's own thoughts have become finer, his own feelings deeper and more responsive. Sympathy with the suffering, hatred of injustice and oppression, and enthusiasm for all that tends to make the world a more tolerable place for mankind to live in, have grown with his accumulating knowledge of life as it is. That is why Mark Twain has become a classic, not only at home, but in all lands whose people read and think about the common joys and sorrows of humanity.