 This is Part 1 of From the London Times of 1904. Correspondence of the London Times, Chicago, April 1, 1904. I resume by cable telephone where I left off yesterday. For many hours now, this vast city, along with the rest of the globe, of course, has talked of nothing but the extraordinary episode mentioned in my last report. In accordance with your instructions, I will now trace the romance from its beginnings down to the culmination of yesterday or today. Call it what you like. By an odd chance I was a personal actor in a part of this drama myself. The opening scene plays in Vienna. Date, one o'clock in the morning, March 31, 1898. I had spent the evening at a social entertainment. About midnight I went away, in company with the military attachés of the British, Italian and American embassies, to finish with a late smoke. This function had been appointed to take place in the House of Lieutenant Hillier, the third attaché mentioned in the above list. When we arrived there we found several visitors in the room. Young Shepanik, note I, pronounced approximately Shepanik. Mr. K., his financial backer, Mr. W., the latter's secretary, and Lieutenant Clayton of the United States Army. War was at that time threatening between Spain and our country, and Lieutenant Clayton had been sent to Europe on military business. I was well acquainted with Young Shepanik and his two friends, and I knew Mr. Clayton slightly. I had met him at West Point years before, when he was a cadet. It was when General Merritt was superintendent. He had the reputation of being an able officer, and also of being quick-tempered and plain-spoken. This smoking-party had been gathered together partly for business. This business was to consider the availability of the telelectroscope for military service. It sounds oddly enough now, but it is nevertheless true that at that time the invention was not taken seriously by anyone except its inventor. Even his financial support regarded it merely as a curious and interesting toy. Indeed, he was so convinced of this that he had actually postponed its use by the general world to the end of the dying century by granting a two years exclusive lease of it to a syndicate, whose intent was to exploit it at the Paris World's Fair. When we entered the smoking-room, we found Lieutenant Clayton and Shepanik engaged in a warm talk over the telelectroscope in the German tongue. Clayton was saying, well, you know my opinion of it anyway, and he brought his fist down with emphasis upon the table. And I do not value it, retorted the young inventor, with provoking calmness of tone and manner. Clayton turned to Mr. K. and said, I cannot see why you are wasting money on this toy. In my opinion, the day will never come when it will do a far thing's worth of real service for any human being. That may be, yes, that may be. Still, I have put the money in it, and am content. I think, myself, that it is only a toy, but Shepanik claims more for it, and I know him well enough to believe that he can see farther than I can, either with his telelectroscope or without it. The soft answer did not cool Clayton down. It seemed only to irritate him the more, and he repeated and emphasized his conviction that the invention would never do any man a farthing's worth of real service. He even made it a brass farthing this time. Then he laid an English farthing on the table and added, Take that, Mr. K., and put it away. And if ever the telelectroscope does any man an actual service, mind a real service, please mail it to me as a reminder, and I will take back what I have been saying. Will you? I will. And Mr. K. put the coin in his pocket. Mr. Clayton now turned toward Shepanik and began with a taunt. A taunt which did not reach a finish. Shepanik interrupted it with a hardy retort and followed this with a blow. There was a brisk fight for a moment or two, then the attachés separated the men. The scene now changes to Chicago. Time, the autumn of 1901. As soon as the Paris contract released the telelectroscope, it was delivered to public use and was soon connected with the telephonic systems of the whole world. The improved limitless distance telephone was presently introduced, and the daily doings at the globe made visible to everybody and audibly discussable, too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues. By and by Shepanik arrived in Chicago. Clayton, now captain, was serving in that military department at the time. The two men resumed the Viennese quarrel of 1898. On three different occasions they quarrelled and were separated by witnesses. Then came an interval of two months during which time Shepanik was not seen by any of his friends, and it was at first supposed that he had gone off on a sight-seeing tour and would soon be heard from. But no, no word came from him. Then it was supposed that he had returned to Europe. Still, time drifted on and he was not heard from. Nobody was troubled, for he was like most inventors and other kinds of poets, and went and came in a capricious way, and often without notice. Now comes the tragedy. On December 29, in a dark and unused compartment of the cellar under Captain Clayton's house, a corpse was discovered by one of Clayton's maid servants. Friends of deceased identified it as Shepanik's. The man had died by violence. Clayton was arrested, indicted, and brought to trial, charged with this murder. The evidence against him was perfect in every detail and absolutely unassailable. Clayton admitted this himself. He said that a reasonable man could not examine this testimony with a dispassionate mind and not be convinced by it. Yet the man would be an error, nevertheless. Clayton swore that he did not commit the murder, and that he had nothing to do with it. As your readers will remember, he was condemned to death. He had numerous and powerful friends, and they worked hard to save him, for none of them doubted the truth of his assertion. I did what little I could to help, for I had long since become a close friend of his, and thought I knew that it was not in his character to invagle an enemy into a corner and assassinate him. During 1902 and 1903 he was several times reprieved by the governor. He was reprieved once more in the beginning of the present year, and the execution day was postponed to March 31st. The governor's situation has been embarrassing, from the day of the condemnation, because of the fact that Clayton's wife is the governor's niece. The marriage took place in 1899 when Clayton was 34 and the girl 23, and has been a happy one. There is one child, a little girl, three years old. Pity for the poor mother and child kept the mouths of grumblers closed at first, but this could not last forever, for in America politics has a hand in everything, and by and by the governor's political opponents began to call attention to his delay in allowing the law to take its course. These hints have grown more and more frequent of late, and more and more pronounced. As a natural result his own party grew nervous. Its leaders began to visit Springfield and hold long private conferences with him. He was now between two fires. On the one hand his niece was imploring him to pardon her husband. On the other were the leaders, insisting that he stand to his plain duty as Chief Magistrate of the State, and place no further bar to Clayton's execution. Duty won in the struggle, and the governor gave his word that he would not again respite the condemned man. This was two weeks ago. Mrs. Clayton now said, Now that you have given your word, my last hope is gone, for I know you will never go back from it. But you have done the best you could for John, and I have no reproaches for you. You love him, and you love me, and we know that if you could honorably save him, you would do it. I will go to him now, and be what help I can to him, and get what comfort I may out of the few days that are left to us before the night comes which will have no end for me in life. You will be with me that day. You will not let me bear it alone. I will take you to him myself, poor child, and I will be near you to the last. By the governor's command Clayton was now allowed every indulgence he might ask for, which could interest his mind and soften the hardships of his imprisonment. His wife and child spent the days with him. I was his companion by night. He was removed from the narrow cell which he had occupied during such a dreary stretch of time, and given the chief warden's roomy and comfortable quarters. His mind was always busy with the catastrophe of his life, and with the slaughtered inventor, and he now took the fancy that he would like to have the telelectroscope and divert his mind with it. He had his wish. The connection was made with the International Telephone Station, and day by day and night by night he called up one corner of the globe after another, and looked upon its life, and studied its strange sights, and spoke with his people, and realized that by grace of this marvelous instrument he was almost as free as the birds of the air, although a prisoner under locks and bar. He seldom spoke, and I never interrupted him when he was absorbed in this amusement. I sat in his parlour and read, and smoked, and the nights were very quiet and reposefully sociable, and I found them pleasant. Now and then I would hear him say, Give me Yedo! Next give me Hong Kong! Next give me Melbourne! And I smoked on and read in comfort, while he wandered about the remote underworld, where the sun was shining in the sky, and the people were at their daily work. Sometimes the talk that came from those far regions through the microphone attachment interested me, and I listened. Yesterday—I keep calling it yesterday, which is quite natural for certain reasons—the instrument remained unused, and that also was natural, for it was the eve of the execution day. It was spent in tears and lamentations and farewells. The governor and the wife and child remained until the quarter past eleven at night, and the scenes I witnessed were pitiful to see. The execution was to take place at four in the morning. A little after eleven a sound of hammering broke out upon the still night, and there was a glare of light, and the child cried out, What is that, Papa?—and ran to the window before she could be stopped, and clapped her small hands, and said, Oh, come and see, Mama, such a pretty thing they are making! The mother knew, and fainted. It was the gallows. She was carried away to her lodging, poor woman, and Clayton and I were alone. Alone and thinking, brooding, dreaming. We might have been statues. We sat so motionless and still. It was a wild night, for winter was come again for a moment after the habit of this region in the early spring. The sky was starless and black, and a strong wind was blowing from the lake. The silence in the room was so deep that all outside sounds seemed exaggerated by contrast with it. These sounds were fitting ones. They harmonized with the situation and the conditions. The boom and thunder of sudden storm, gusts among the roofs and chimneys, then the dying down into moanings and wailings about the eaves and angles. Now and then a gnashing and lashing rush of sleet along the window-pains, and always the muffled and uncanny hammering of the gallow-builders in the courtyard. After an age of this another sound, far off, and coming smothered and faint through the riot of the tempest. A bell tolling twelve. Another age, and it was told again. By and by again. A dreary long interval after this, then the spectral sound floated to us once more. One, two, three. And this time we caught our breath. Sixty minutes of life left. Clayton rose, and stood by the window, and looked up into the black sky, and listened to the thrashing sleet and the piping wind. Then he said, that a dying man's last of earth should be this. After a little he said, I must see the sun again. The sun! In the next moment he was feverishly calling, China! Give me China! Pea-king! I was strangely stirred, and said to myself, to think that it is a mere human being who does this unimaginable miracle, turns winter into summer, night into day, storm into calm, gives the freedom of the great globe to a prisoner in his cell, and the sun in his naked splendor to a man dying in Egyptian darkness. I was listening. What light! What brilliancy! What radiance! This is Pea-king? Yes. The time? Mid-afternoon. What is the great crowd for in such gorgeous costumes? What masses and masses of rich color and barbaric magnificence? And how they flash and glow and burn in the flooding sunlight? What is the occasion of it all? The coronation of our new Emperor, the Tsar. But I thought that that was to take place yesterday. Well, this is yesterday to you. Certainly it is. But my mind is confused these days. There are reasons for it. Is this the beginning of the procession? Oh, no, it began to move an hour ago. Is there much more of it still to come? Two hours of it. Why do you sigh? Because I should like to see it all. And why can't you? I have to go presently. You have an engagement? After a pause. Softly. Yes. After another pause. Who are these in the splendid pavilion? The imperial family, and visiting royalties from here and there and yonder in the earth. And who are those in the adjoining pavilions to the right and left? Ambassadors and their families and suites to the right, unofficial foreigners to the left. If you will be so good, I— Boom! That distant bell again, tolling the half hour faintly through the tempest of wind and sleet. The door opened, and the governor and the mother and child entered. The woman in widow's weeds. She fell upon her husband's breast in a passion of sobs, and I— I could not stay. I could not bear it. I went into the bedchamber and closed the door. I sat there waiting, waiting, waiting, and listening to the rattling sashes and the blustering of the storm. After what seemed a long, long time I heard a rustle and movement in the parlor and knew that the clergyman and the sheriff and the guard were come. There was some low voice talking, then a hush, then a prayer with a sound of sobbing. Presently footfalls, the departure for the gallows. Then the child's happy voice, Don't cry now, mama, when we've got papa again and taking her home. The door closed. They were gone. I was ashamed. I was the only friend of the dying man that had no spirit, no courage. I stepped into the room and said I would be a man and would follow. But we are made, as we are made, and we cannot help it. I did not go. I fidgeted about the room nervously and presently went to the window and softly raised it, drawn by that dread fascination which the terrible and the awful exert. And looked down upon the courtyard. By the garish light of the electric lamps I saw the little group of privileged witnesses, the wife crying on her uncle's breast, the condemned man standing on the scaffold with the halter around his neck, his arms strapped to his body, the black cap on his head, the sheriff at his side with his hand on the drop, the clergyman in front of him with bare head and his book in his hand. I am the resurrection and the life. I turned away. I could not listen. I could not look. I did not know whether to go or what to do. Mechanically and without knowing it I put my eye to that strange instrument, and there was Peking and the czar's procession. The next moment I was leaning out of the window gasping, suffocating, trying to speak, but dumb from the very immanence of the necessity of speaking. The preacher could speak, but I, who had such need of words, and may God have mercy upon your soul. Amen. The sheriff drew down the black cap and laid his hand upon the lever. I got my voice. Stop for God's sakes! The man is innocent. Come here and see, Jebonic, face to face. Hardly three minutes later the governor had my place at the window and was saying, strike off his bonds and set him free. Three minutes later all were in the parlor again. The reader will imagine the scene. I have no need to describe it. It was a sort of mad orgy of joy. A messenger carried word of Jebonic in the pavilion, and one could see the distressed amazement in his face as he listened to the tale. Then he came to his end of the line, and talked with Clayton and the governor and the others. And the wife poured out her gratitude upon him for saving her husband's life and in her deep thankfulness she kissed him at twelve thousand miles range. The telelectroscopes of the world were put to service now, and for many hours the kings and queens of many realms, with here and there a reporter, talked with Jebonic and praised him, and the few scientific societies which had not already made him an honorary member conferred that grace upon him. How had he come to disappear from among us? It was easily explained. He had not grown used to being a world-famous person, and had been forced to break away from the lionizing that was robbing him of all privacy and repose. So he grew a beard, put on colored glasses, disguised himself a little in other ways, then took a fictitious name and went off to wander about the earth in peace. Such is the tale of the drama, which began with an inconsequential quarrel in Vienna in the spring of 1898, and came near-ending as a tragedy in the spring of 1904. End of Part 1 of From the London Times of 1904. And end of Section 19 of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain. This is Part 2 of From the London Times of 1904. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain. Section 20. From the London Times of 1904. Part 2. Number 2 Correspondence of the London Times, Chicago, April 5, 1904. Today, by a clipper of the electric line and the latter's electric railway connections, arrived an envelope from Vienna for Captain Clayton containing an English farthing. The receiver of it was a good deal moved. He called up Vienna and stood face to face with Mr. K. and said, I do not need to say anything. You can see it all in my face. My wife has the farthing. Do not be afraid. She will not throw it away. 3. Correspondence of the London Times, Chicago, April 23, 1904. Now that the after-developments of the Clayton case have run their course and reached a finish, I will sum them up. Clayton's romantic escape from a shameful death stepped all this region in an enchantment of wonder and joy during the proverbial nine days. Then the sobering process followed, and men began to take thought and to say, but a man was killed and Clayton killed him. Others replied, That is true. We have been overlooking that important detail. We have been led away by excitement. The telling soon became general that Clayton ought to be tried again. Measures were taken accordingly, and the proper representations conveyed to Washington. For in America, under the new paragraph added to the Constitution in 1889, second trials are not state affairs but national, and must be tried by the most august body in the land, the Supreme Court of the United States. The justices were therefore summoned to sit in Chicago. The session was held day before yesterday, and was opened with the usual impressive formalities, the nine judges appearing in their black robes, and the new Chief Justice, LaMantra, presiding. In opening the case the Chief Justice said, It is my opinion that this matter is quite simple. The prisoner at the bar was charged with murdering the man, Shepanik. He was tried for murdering the man, Shepanik. He was fairly tried and justly condemned and sentenced to death for murdering the man, Shepanik. It turns out that the man, Shepanik, was not murdered at all. By the decision of the French courts in the Dreyfus matter, it is established, beyond cavill, or question, that the decisions of courts are permanent and cannot be revised. We are obliged to respect and adopt this precedent. It is upon precedence that the enduring edifice of jurisprudence is reared. The prisoner at the bar has been fairly and righteously condemned to death for the murder of the man, Shepanik, and in my opinion there is but one course to pursue in the matter. He must be hanged. Mr. Justice Crawford said, But your Excellency, he was pardoned on the scaffold for that. The pardon is not valid and cannot stand, because he was pardoned for killing Shepanik, a man whom he had not killed. A man cannot be pardoned for a crime which he has not committed. It would be an absurdity. But your Excellency, he did kill a man. That is an extraneous detail. We have nothing to do with it. The court cannot take up this crime until the prisoner has expiated the other one. Mr. Justice Hallock said, If we order his execution, your Excellency, we shall bring about a miscarriage of justice, for the Governor will pardon him again. He will not have the power. He cannot pardon a man for a crime which he has not committed. As I observed before, it would be an absurdity. After a consultation Mr. Justice Wadsworth said, Several of us have arrived at the conclusion, your Excellency, that it would be an error to hang the prisoner for killing Shepanik instead of for killing the other man, since it is proven that he did not kill Shepanik. On the contrary, it is proven that he did kill Shepanik. By the French precedent it is plain that we must abide by the finding of the court. But Shepanik is still alive. So is Dreyfus. In the end it was found impossible to ignore or get around the French precedent. There could be but one result. Clayton was delivered over for the execution. It made an immense excitement. The State rose as one man and clamored for Clayton's pardon and retrial. The Governor issued the pardon, but the Supreme Court was in duty bound to a nullet, and did so, and poor Clayton was hanged yesterday. The city is draped in black, and indeed the like may be said of the State. All America is vocal with scorn of French justice, and of the malignant little soldiers who invented it and inflicted it upon the other Christian lands. End of Part 2 of From the London Times of 1904, and end of Section 20 of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain. This is about play-acting Part 1 and 2. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain. Section 21. About Play-Acting. Parts 1 and 2. 1. I have a project to suggest, but first I will write a chapter of introduction. I have just been witnessing a remarkable play here at the Burg Theatre in Vienna. I do not know of any play that much resembles it. In fact, it is such a departure from the common laws of the drama that the name Play doesn't seem to fit it quite snugly. However, whatever else it may be, it is in any case a great and stately metaphysical poem and deeply fascinating. Deeply fascinating is the right term. For the audience sat four hours and five minutes without thrice breaking into applause, except at the close of each act. Sat wrapped and silent. Fascinated. This piece is The Master of Palmyra. It is twenty years old, yet I doubt if you have ever heard of it. It is by Wilbrandt, and is his masterpiece, and the work which is to make his name permanent in German literature. It has never been played anywhere except in Berlin, and in the Great Burg Theatre in Vienna. Yet, whenever it is put on the stage, it packs the house, and the free list is suspended. I know people who have seen it ten times. They know the most of it by heart. They do not tire of it, and they say they shall still be quite willing to go and sit under its spell whenever they get the opportunity. There is a dash of methampsychosis in it, and it is the strength of the piece. The play gave me the sense of the passage of a dimly connected procession of dream pictures. The scene of it is Palmyra in Roman times. It covers a wide stretch of time. I don't know how many years, and in the course of it the chief actress is reincarnated several times. Four times she is more or less young woman, and once she is a lad. In the first act she is Zoe, a Christian girl who has wandered across the desert from Damascus to try to Christianize the Zeus-worshiping pagans of Palmyra. In this character she is wholly spiritual, a religious enthusiast, a devotee who covets martyrdom, and gets it. After many years she appears in the second act as Phoebe, a graceful and beautiful young, lighter love from Rome, whose soul is all from the shows and luxuries and delights of this life. A dainty and capricious featherhead, a creature of shower and sunshine, a spoiled child, but a charming one. In the third act, after an interval of many years, she reappears as Prasida, mother of a daughter who is in the fresh bloom of youth. She is now a sort of combination of her two earlier selves. In religious loyalty and subjection she is Zoe. In triviality of character and shallowness of judgment, together with a touch of vanity and dress, she is Phoebe. After a lapse of years she appears in the fourth act as Nymphas, a beautiful boy in whose character the previous incarnations are engagingly mixed. And after another stretch of years all these heredities are joined in the Zenobia of the fifth act, a person of gravity, dignity, sweetness, with a heart filled with compassion for all who suffer, and a hand prompt to put into practical form the heart's benignant impulses. There are a number of curious and interesting features in this piece. For instance, its hero, Apollese, young, handsome, vigorous in the first act, remains so all through the long flight of years covered by the five acts. Other men, young in the first act, are touched with gray in the second, are old and racked with infirmities in the third. In the fourth all but one are gone to their long home, and this one is a blind and helpless hulk of ninety or a hundred years. It indicates that the stretch of time covered by the piece is seventy years or more. The scenery undergoes decay too, the decay of age assisted and perfected by a conflagration. The fine new temples and palaces of the second act are by and by a wreck of crumbled walls and prostrate columns, moldy, grass-grown and desolate, but their former selves are still recognizable in their ruins. The aging men and the aging scenery together convey a profound illusion of that long lapse of time. They make you live it yourself. You leave the theatre with the weight of a century upon you. Another strong effect—death, in person, walks about the stage in every act. So far as I could make out, he was supposedly not visible to any accepting two persons, the one he came for, and Apolles. He used various costumes, but there was always more black about them than any other tint, and so they were always somber. Also, they were always deeply impressive and indeed awe-inspiring. The face was not subjected to changes, but remained the same first and last, a ghastly white. To me he was always welcome, he seemed so real, the actual death, not a play-acting artificiality. He was of a solemn and stately carriage, and he had a deep voice, and used it with a noble dignity. Wherever there was a turmoil of merry-making, or fighting, or feasting, or chafing, or quarreling, or a gilded pageant, or other manifestation of our trivial and fleeting life, into it drifted that black figure with a corpse face, and looked its fateful look and past on, leaving its victim shuddering and smitten. And always its coming made the fussy human pack seem infinitely pitiful and shabby, and hardly worth the attention of either saving or damning. In the beginning of the first act the young girl Zoe appears by some great rocks in the desert, and sits down exhausted to rest. Presently arrive a pauper couple stricken with age and infirmities, and they begin to mumble and pray to the spirit of life who is said to inhabit that spot. The spirit of life appears, also death uninvited. They are supposedly invisible. Death, tall, black-robed, corpse-faced, stands motionless and waits. The aged couple pray to the spirit of life for a means to prop up their existence and continue it. Their prayer fails. The spirit of life prophesies Zoe's martyrdom. It will take place before night. Soon Apollese arrives, young and vigorous and full of enthusiasm. He has led a host against the Persians and won the battle. He is the pet of fortune, rich, honored, believed, master of Palmyra. He has heard that whoever stretches himself out on one of those rocks there, and asks for a deathless life, can have his wish. He laughs at the tradition, but wants to make the trial anyway. The invisible spirit of life warns him, Life without end can be regret without end. But he persists. Let him keep his youth, his strength and his mental faculties unimpaired, and he will take all the risks. He has his desire. From this time forth act after act. The troubles and sorrows and misfortunes and humiliations of life beat upon him without pity or respite. But he will not give up. He will not confess his mistake. Whenever he meets death he still furiously defies him, but death patiently waits. He, the healer of sorrows, is man's best friend. The recognition of this will come. As the years drag on and on and on, the friends of the master's youth grow old, and one by one they totter to the grave. He goes on with his proud fight, and will not yield. At length he is wholly alone in the world. All his friends are dead. Last of all his darling of darlings, his son, the lad Nymfus, who dies in his arms. His pride is broken now, and he would welcome death, if death would come. If death would hear his prayers and give him peace. The closing act is fine and pathetic. Apolles meets Zenobia, the helper of all who suffer, and tells her his story which moves her pity. By common report she is endowed with more than earthly powers, and since he cannot have the boon of death, he appeals to her to drown his memory in forgetfulness of his griefs—forgetfulness which is death's equivalent. She says, roughly translated, in an exaltation of compassion, Come to me! kneel, and may the power be granted me to cool the fires of this poor tortured brain, and bring it peace and healing. He kneels. From her hand, which she lays upon his head, a mysterious influence steals through him, and he sinks into a dreamy tranquillity. Oh, if I could but so drift through this soft twilight into the night of peace, never to wake again. Raising his hand, as if in benediction. Oh, Mother Earth, farewell. Gracious Thou were to me, farewell. Apolles goes to rest. Death appears behind him and encloses the uplifted hand in his. Apolles shudders, wearily and slowly turns, and recognizes his lifelong adversary. He smiles and puts all his gratitude into one simple and touching sentence, Ich dank dir, and dies. Nothing, I think, could be more moving, more beautiful than this close. This piece is just one long soulful, sardonic laugh at human life. Its title might properly be, Is life a failure? And leave the five acts to play with the answer. I am not at all sure that the author meant to laugh at life. I only notice that he has done it, without putting into words any ungracious or discourteous things about life. The episodes in the piece seem to be saying all the time, inarticulately, note what a silly poor thing human life is, how childish its ambitions, how ridiculous its pumps, how trivial its dignities, how cheap its heroisms, how capricious its course, how brief its flight, how stingy in happiness, how opulent in miseries, how few its prides, how multitudinous its humiliations, how comic its tragedies, how tragic its comedies, how wearisome and monotonous its repetition of its stupid history through the ages, with never the introduction of a new detail, how hard it has tried from the creation down to play itself upon its possessor as a boon and has never proved its case in a single instance. Take note of some of the details of the piece. Each of the five acts contains an independent tragedy of its own. In each act someone's edifice of hope or of ambition or of happiness goes down in ruins. Even Appley's perennial youth is only a long tragedy and his life a failure. There are two martyrdoms in the piece, and they are curiously and sarcastically contrasted. In the first act the pagans persecute Zoe, the Christian girl, and a pagan mob slaughters her. In the fourth act those same pagans, now very old and zealous, are become Christians, and they persecute the pagans. A mob of them slaughters the pagan youth, Nymphas, who is standing up for the old gods of his fathers. No remark is made about this picturesque failure of civilization, but there it stands, as an unworded suggestion, that civilization, even when Christianized, was not able wholly to subdue the natural man in that old day. Just as in our day the spectacle of a shipwrecked French crew, clubbing women and children who tried to climb into the lifeboats, suggests that civilization has not succeeded in entirely obliterating the natural man even yet. Common sailors a year ago, in Paris, at a fire, the aristocracy of the same nation, clubbed girls and women out of the way to save themselves. Civilization tested at top and bottom both, you see. And in still another panic of fright we have this same tough civilization saving its honor by condemning an innocent man to multi-form death and hugging and whitewashing the guilty one. In the second act a grand Roman official is not above trying to blast Appoli's reputation by falsely charging him with misappropriating public monies. Appoli's, who is too proud to endure even the suspicion of irregularity, strips himself to naked poverty to square the unfair account, and his troubles begin. The blight, which is to continue and spread, strikes his life, for the frivolous, pretty creature whom he brought from Rome has no taste for poverty and agrees to elope with a more competent candidate. Her presence in the house has previously brought down the pride and broken the heart of Appoli's poor old mother, and her life is a failure. Death comes for her, but is willing to trade her for the Roman girl, so the bargain is struck with Appoli's, and the mother is spared for the present. No one's life escapes the blight. Timolius, the gay satirist of the first two acts, who scoffed at the pious hypocrisies and money-grubbing ways of the great Roman lords, is grown old and fat and blear-eyed and wracked with disease in the third, has lost his stately purities, and watered the acid of his wit. His life has suffered defeat. Unthinkingly he swears by Zeus from ancient habit, and then quakes with fright, for a fellow communicant is passing by. Reproached by a pagan friend of his youth for his apostasy, he confesses that principle, when unsupported by an assenting stomach, has to climb down. One must have bread, and the bread is Christian now. Then the poor old wreck, once so proud of his iron rectitude, hobbles away, coughing and barking. In that same act Appoli's gives his sweet young Christian daughter and her fine young pagan lover his consent and blessing, and makes them utterly happy, for five minutes. Then the priest and the mob come to tear them apart and put the girl in a nunnery, for marriage between these sects is forbidden. Appoli's wife could dissolve the rule, and she wants to do it, but under priestly pressure she wavers, then fearing that in providing happiness for her child she would be committing a sin dangerous to her own, she goes over to the opposition, and throws the casting vote for the nunnery. The blight has fallen upon the young couple, and their life is a failure. In the fourth act, Longinus, who made such a prosperous and enviable start in the first act, is left alone in the desert, sick, blind, helpless, incredibly old, to die. Not a friend left in the world, another ruined life. And in that act also Appoli's worshipped boy, Nymphus, done to death by the mob, breathes out his last sigh in his father's arms. One more failure. In the fifth act Appoli's himself dies, and is glad to do it. He who so ignorantly rejoiced only four acts before over the splendid present of an earthly immortality, the very worst failure of the lot. Two. Now I approach my project. Here is the theater list for Saturday, May 7, 1898, cut from the advertising columns of a New York paper. Graphic here. Now I arrive at my project, and make my suggestion, from the look of this lightsome feast, I conclude that what you need is a tonic. Send for the Master of Palmyra. You are trying to make yourself believe that life is a comedy, that its sole business is fun, that there is nothing serious in it. You are ignoring the skeleton in your closet. Send for the Master of Palmyra. You are neglecting a valuable side of your life. Presently it will be atrophied. You are eating too much mental sugar. You will bring on Bright's disease of the intellect. You need a tonic. You need it very much. Send for the Master of Palmyra. You will not need to translate it. Its story is as plain as a procession of pictures. I have made my suggestion. Now I wish to put an annex to it. And that is this. It is right and wholesome to have those light comedies and entertaining shows, and I shouldn't wish to see them diminished. But none of us is always in the comedy spirit. We have our graver moods. They come to us all. The lightest of us cannot escape them. These moods have their appetites, healthy and legitimate appetites, and there ought to be some way of satisfying them. It seems to me that New York ought to have one theater devoted to tragedy. With her three millions of population and seventy outside millions to draw upon, she can afford it. She can support it. America devotes more time, labor, money and attention to distributing literary and musical culture among the general public than does any other nation, perhaps. Yet here you find her neglecting what is possibly the most effective of all the breeders and nurses and disseminators of high literary taste and lofty emotion—the tragic stage. To leave that powerful agency out is to haul the culture wagon with a crippled team. Nowadays, when a mood comes which only Shakespeare can set to music, what must we do? Read Shakespeare ourselves. Isn't it pitiful? It is playing an organ solo on a Jew's harp. We can't read. None but the booths can do it. Thirty years ago Edwin Booth played Hamlet a hundred nights in New York. With three times the population, how often is Hamlet played now in a year? If Booth were back now in his prime, how often could he play it in New York? Some will say twenty-five nights. I will say three hundred and say it with confidence. The tragedians are dead, but I think that the taste and intelligence which make their market are not. What has come over us, English-speaking people? During the first half of this century, tragedies and great tragedians were as common with us as farce and comedy, and it was the same in England. Now we have not a tragedian, I believe, and London with her fifty shows and theatres has but three, I think. It is an astonishing thing, when you come to consider it. Vienna remains upon the ancient basis. There has been no change. She sticks to the former proportions—a number of rollicking comedies admirably played every night, and also every night at the Berg Theatre—that wonder of the world for grace and beauty and richness and splendor and costliness, a majestic drama of depth and seriousness, or a standard old tragedy. It is only within the last dozen years that men have learned to do miracles on the stage in the way of grand and enchanting scenic effects, and it is at such a time as this that we have reduced our scenery mainly to different breeds of parlours and varying aspects of furniture and rugs. I think we must have a Berg in New York, and Berg scenery, and a great company like the Berg Company. Then, with a tragedy tonic once or twice a month, we shall enjoy the comedies all the better. Comedy keeps the heart sweet, but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional climb among the solemn pumps of the intellectual snow summits built by Shakespeare and those others. Do I seem to be preaching? It is out of my life. I only do it because the rest of the clergy seem to be on vacation. End of about play-acting part one and two, and end of section 21 of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain. This is Travelling with a Reformer. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain, section 22. Travelling with a Reformer. Last spring I went out to Chicago to see the fair. And although I did not see it—my trip was not wholly lost—there were compensations. In New York I was introduced to a major in the regular army who said he was going to the fair, and we agreed to go together. I had to go to Boston first, but that did not interfere. He said he would go along and put in the time. He was a handsome man and built like a gladiator. But his ways were gentle, and his speech was soft and persuasive. He was companiable, but exceedingly reposeful. Yes, and holy destitute of the sense of humour! He was full of interest in everything that went on around him, but his serenity was indestructible. Nothing disturbed him. Nothing excited him. But before the day was done I found that deep down in him, somewhere, he had a passion—quiet as he was—a passion for reforming petty public abuses. He stood for citizenship. It was his hobby. His idea was that every citizen of the Republic ought to consider himself an unofficial policeman, and keep unsalaried watch and ward over the laws and their execution. He thought that the only effective way of preserving and protecting public rights was for each citizen to do his share in preventing or punishing such infringements of them as came under his personal notice. It was a good scheme, but I thought it would keep a body in trouble all the time. It seemed to me that one would be always trying to get offending little officials discharged, and perhaps getting laughed at for all reward. But he said no, I had the wrong idea. That there was no occasion to get anybody discharged, that in fact you mustn't get anybody discharged. That that would itself be a failure. No, one must reform the man, reform him, and make him useful where he was. Must one report the offender and then beg his superior not to discharge him, but reprimand him and keep him? No, that is not the idea. You don't report him at all. For then you risk his bread and butter. You can act as if you were going to report him, when nothing else will answer. But that's an extreme case. That is a sort of force, and force is bad. Diplomacy is the effective thing. Now if a man has tacked, if a man will exercise diplomacy, for two minutes we had been standing at a telegraph wicket, and during all this time the Major had been trying to get the attention of one of the young operators, but they were all busy sky-larking. The Major spoke now and asked one of them to take his telegram. He got for reply, "'I reckon you can wait a minute, can't you?' and the sky-larking went on. The Major said yes, he was not in a hurry. Then he wrote another telegram. President Western Union Telco. Come and dine with me this evening. I can tell you how business is conducted in one of your branches." Presently the young fellow who had spoken so pertly a little before reached out and took the telegram, and when he read it he lost color and began to apologize and explain. He said he would lose his place if this deadly telegram was sent, and he might never get another. If he could be let off this time he would give no cause of complaint again. The compromise was accepted. As we walked away the Major said, Now you see, that was diplomacy, and you see how it worked. It wouldn't do any good to bluster the way people are always doing. That boy can always give you as good as you send, and you'll come out defeated and ashamed of yourself pretty nearly always. But you see he stands no chance against diplomacy. Gentle words and diplomacy. Those are the tools to work with. Yes, I see. But everybody wouldn't have had your opportunity. It isn't everybody that is on those familiar terms with the President of the Western Union. Oh, you misunderstand. I don't know the President. I only use him diplomatically. It is for his good and for the public good. There's no harm in it. I said with hesitation and diffidence, but is it ever right or noble to tell a lie? He took no note of the delicate self-righteousness of the question, but answered with undisturbed gravity and simplicity. Yes, sometimes. Lies told to injure a person, and lies told to profit yourself are not justifiable, but lies told to help another person, and lies told in the public interest. Oh, well, that is quite another matter. Anybody knows that. But never mind about the methods. You see the result. That youth is going to be useful now, and well-behaved. He had a good face. He was worth saving. Why, he was worth saving on his mother's account, if not his own. Of course, he has a mother, and a sister's, too. Damn these people who are always forgetting that. Do you know I've never fought a duel in my life, never once, and yet have been challenged, like other people. I could always see the other man's unoffending women-folks, or his little children standing between him and me. They hadn't done anything. I couldn't break their hearts, you know. He corrected a good many little abuses in the course of the day, and always without friction, always with a fine and dainty diplomacy, which left no sting behind. And he got such happiness and such contentment out of these performances that I was obliged to envy him his trade, and perhaps would have adopted it, if I could have managed the necessary deflections from fact, as confidently with my mouth, as I believe I could with a pen, behind the shelter of print, after a little practice. Away late that night we were coming uptown in a horse-car when three boisterous ruffs got aboard, and began to fling hilarious obscenities and profanities right and left among the timid passengers, some of whom were women and children. Nobody resisted or retorted. The conductor tried soothing words and moral suasion, but the tufts only called him names and laughed at him. Very soon I saw that the Major realized that this was a matter which was in his line. Evidently he was turning over his stock of diplomacy in his mind and getting ready. I felt that the first diplomatic remark he made in this place would bring down a landslide of ridicule upon him, and maybe something worse. But before I could whisper to him and check him, he had begun. And it was too late. He said, in a level and dispassionate tone, Conductor, you must put these swine out. I will help you. I was not looking for that. In a flash the three ruffs plunged at him, but none of them arrived. He delivered three such blows as one could not expect to encounter outside the prize-ring, and neither of the men had life enough left in him to get up from where he fell. The Major dragged them out and threw them off the car, and we got underway again. I was astonished. Astonished to see a lamb act so. Astonished at the strength displayed, and the clean and comprehensive result. Astonished at the brisk and business-like style of the whole thing. The situation had a humorous side to it, considering how much I had been hearing about mild persuasion and gentle diplomacy all day from this pile-driver, and I would have liked to call his attention to that feature and do some sarcasms about it. But when I looked at him I saw that it would be of no use. His placid and contented face had no ray of humor in it. He would not have understood. But when we left the car, I said, that was a good stroke of diplomacy. Three good strokes of diplomacy, in fact. That? That wasn't diplomacy. You were quite in the wrong. Diplomacy is a wholly different thing. One cannot apply it to that sort. They would not understand it. No, that was not diplomacy. It was force. Now that you mention it, I—yes, I think perhaps you are right. Right? Of course I am right. It was just force. I think myself it had the outside aspect of it. Do you often have to reform people in that way? Far from it. It hardly ever happens. Not oftener than once in half a year at the outside. Those men will get well? Get well? Why, certainly they will. They are not in any danger. I know how to hit and where to hit. You notice that I did not hit them under the jaw. That would have killed them. I believed that. I remarked rather wittily, as I thought, that he had been a lamb all day, but now had all of a sudden developed into a ram, battering ram. But with dulcet frankness and simplicity, he said, no. A battering ram was quite a different thing, and not in use now. This was maddening, and I came near bursting out and saying he had no more appreciation of witt than a jackass. In fact, I had it right on my tongue, but did not say it, knowing there was no hurry, and I could say it just as well some other time, over the telephone. We started to Boston the next afternoon. The smoking compartment in the parlor car was full, and we went into the regular smoker. Across the aisle in the front seat sat a meek, farmer-looking old man with a sickly pallor in his face, and he was holding the door open with his foot to get the air. Presently a big breakman came rushing through, and when he got to the door he stopped, gave the farmer an ugly scowl, then wrenched the door too, with such energy as to almost snatch the old man's boot off. Then on he plunged about his business. Several passengers laughed, and the old gentleman looked pathetically shamed and grieved. After a little the conductor passed along, and the major stopped him and asked him a question in his habitually courteous way. Conductor, where does one report the misconduct of a breakman? Does one report to you? You can report him at New Haven, if you want to. What has he been doing? The major told the story. The conductor seemed amused. He said was just a touch of sarcasm in his bland tones. As I understand you, the breakman didn't say anything? No, he didn't say anything. But he scowled, you say. Yes. And snatched the door loose in a rough way. Yes. That's the whole business, is it? Yes, that is the whole of it. The conductor smiled pleasantly and said, wow, if you want to report him all right, but I don't quite make out what it's going to amount to. You'll say, as I understand you, that the breakman insulted this old gentleman. They'll ask you what he said. And you'll say he didn't say anything at all. I reckon they'll say, how are you going to make out an insult when you acknowledge yourself that he didn't say a word? There was a murmur of applause at the conductor's compact reasoning, and it gave him pleasure. You could see it in his face. But the major was not disturbed. He said, there, now you have touched upon a crying defect in the complaint system. The railway officials, as the public think, and as you also seem to think, are not aware that there are any insults except spoken ones. So nobody goes to headquarters and reports insults of manner, insults of gesture, look, and so forth. And yet these are sometimes harder to bear than any words. They are bitter hard to bear because there is nothing tangible to take hold of. And the insultor can always say, if called before the railway officials, that he never dreamed of intending any offense. It seems to me that the officials ought to especially and urgently request the public to report unworded offence and incivilities. The conductor laughed, and said, well, that would be trimming it pretty fine, sure. But not too fine, I think. I will report this matter at New Haven, and I have an idea that I'll be thanked for it. The conductor's face lost something of its complacency. In fact, it settled to a quite sober cast as the owner of it moved away. I said, you are not really going to bother with that trifle, are you? It isn't a trifle. Such things ought always to be reported. It is a public duty, and no citizen has a right to shirk it. But I shan't have to report this case. Why? It won't be necessary. Diplomacy will do the business. You'll see. Presently the conductor came on his rounds again, and when he reached the major he leaned over and said, that's all right, you needn't report him, he's responsible to me, and if he does it again, I'll give him a talking to. The major's response was cordial. Now, that is what I like. You mustn't think that I was moved by any vengeful spirit, for that wasn't the case. It was my duty, just a sense of duty, that was all. My brother-in-law is one of the directors of the road, and when he learns that you are going to reason with your breakman, the very next time he brutally insults an unoffending old man, it will please him. You may be sure of that. The conductor did not look as joyous as one might have thought he would, but on the contrary looked sickly and uncomfortable. He stood around a little, then said, I think something ought to be done to him now. I'll discharge him. Discharge him? What good would that do? Don't you think it would be better wisdom to teach him better ways and keep him? Well, there's something in that. What would you suggest? He insulted the old gentleman in presence of all these people. How would it do to have him come and apologize in their presence? I'll have him here right off, and I want to say this, if people would do as you've done and report such things to me instead of keeping mum and going off and blackguarding the road, you'd see a different state of things pretty soon. I'm much obliged to you. The breakman came and apologized. After he was gone the major said, Now you see how simple and easy that was. The ordinary citizen would have accomplished nothing. The brother-in-law of a director can accomplish anything he wants to. But are you really the brother-in-law of a director? Always, always when the public interests require it, I have a brother-in-law on all the boards everywhere. It saves me a world of trouble. It is a good wide relationship. Yes. I have over three hundred of them. Is the relationship never doubted by a conductor? I have never met with a case. It is the honest truth I never have. Why didn't you let him go ahead and discharge that breakman in spite of your favorite policy? You know he deserved it. The major answered with something which really had a sort of distant resemblance to impatience. If you would stop and think a moment you wouldn't ask such a question as that. Is a breakman a dog that nothing but dogs' methods will do for him? He is a man and has a man's fight for life. And he always has a sister or a mother or wife and children to support. Always, there are no exceptions. When you take his living away from him you take theirs away too. And what have they done to you? Nothing. And where is the profit in discharging an uncourteous breakman and hiring another just like him? It's unwisdom. Don't you see that the rational thing to do is to reform the breakman and keep him? Of course it is. Then he quoted with admiration the conduct of a certain division superintendent of the Consolidated Road in a case where a switchman of two years' experience was negligent once and threw a train off the track and killed several people. Citizens came in a passion to urge the man's dismissal. But the superintendent said, No, you are wrong. He has learned his lesson. He will throw no more trains off the track. He is twice as valuable as he was before. I shall keep him. We had only one more adventure on the train. Between Hartford and Springfield the train boy came shouting with an armful of literature and dropped a sample into a slumbering gentleman's lap and the man woke up with a start. He was very angry, and he and a couple of friends discussed the outrage with much heat. They sent for the parlor-car conductor and described the matter, and were determined to have the boy expelled from his situation. The three complainants were wealthy, holy oak merchants, and it was evident that the conductor stood in some awe of them. He tried to pacify them and explained that the boy was not under his authority but under that of one of the news companies, but he accomplished nothing. Then the Major volunteered some testimony for the defense. He said, I saw it all. You gentlemen have not meant to exaggerate the circumstances, but still that is what you have done. The boy has done nothing more than all train boys do. If you want to get his ways softened down and his manners reformed, I am with you and ready to help. But it isn't fair to get him discharged without giving him a chance. But they were angry and would hear of no compromise. They were well acquainted with the President of the Boston and Albany, they said, and would put everything aside next day and go up to Boston and fix that boy. The Major said he would be on hand too and would do what he could to save the boy. One of the gentlemen looked him over and said, apparently it is going to be a matter of who can wield the most influence with the President. Do you know Mr. Bliss personally? The Major said with composure, yes, he is my uncle. The effect was satisfactory. There was an awkward silence for a minute or more, and then the hedging and the half-confessions of overhaste and exaggerated resentment began, and soon everything was smooth and friendly and sociable, and it was resolved to drop the matter and leave the boy's bread and butter unmolested. It turned out, as I had expected, the President of the road was not the Major's uncle at all, except by adoption, and for this day and train only. We got into no episodes on the return journey. Probably it was because we took a night train and slept all the way. We left New York Saturday night by the Pennsylvania road. After breakfast the next morning we went into the parlor car, but found it a dull place and dreary. There were but few people in it and nothing going on. Then we went into the little smoking compartment of the same car and found three gentlemen in there. Two of them were grumbling over one of the rules of the road, a rule which forbade card-playing on the trains on Sunday. They had started an innocent game of high-low jack and had been stopped. The Major was interested. He said to the third gentleman, did you object to the game? Not at all. I am a Yale professor and a religious man, but my prejudices are not extensive. Then the Major said to the others, you are at perfect liberty to resume your game, gentlemen. No one here objects. One of them declined the risk, but the other one said he would like to begin again if the Major would join him. So they spread an overcoat over their knees and the game proceeded. Pretty soon the parlor car conductor arrived and said brusquely, there, there, gentlemen, that won't do. Put up the cards, it's not allowed. The Major was shuffling. He continued to shuffle and said, by whose order is it forbidden? It's my order, I forbid it. The dealing began. The Major asked, did you invent the idea? What idea? The idea of forbidding card-playing on Sunday? No, of course not. Who did? The company. Then it isn't your order after all, but the company's. Is that it? Or yes. But you don't stop playing, I have to require you to stop playing immediately. Nothing is gained by hurry, and often much is lost. Who authorised the company to issue such an order? My dear sir, that is a matter of no consequence to me, and—but you forget that you are not the only person concerned. It may be a matter of consequence to me. It is indeed a matter of very great importance to me. I cannot violate a legal requirement of my country without dishonoring myself. I cannot allow any man or corporation to hamper my liberties with illegal rules, a thing which railway companies are always trying to do, without dishonoring my citizenship. So I come back to that question, by whose authority has the company issued this order? I don't know. That's their affair. Mine, too. I doubt if the company has any right to issue such a rule. This road runs through several states. Do you know what state we are in now, and what its laws are in matters of this kind? Its laws do not concern me, but the company's orders do. It is my duty to stop this game, gentlemen, and it must be stopped. Possibly. But still there is no hurry. In hotels they post certain rules in the rooms, but they always quote passages from the state law as authority for these requirements. I see nothing posted here of this sort. Please produce your authority, and let us arrive at a decision, for you see yourself that you are marring the game. I have nothing of the kind, but I have my orders, and that is sufficient. They must be obeyed. Let us not jump to conclusions. It will be better all around to examine into the matter without heat or haste, and see just where we stand before either of us makes a mistake. For the curtailing of the liberties of a citizen of the United States is a much more serious matter than you and the railroad seem to think, and it cannot be done in my person until the curtailer proves his right to do so. Now, my dear sir, will you put down those cards? All in good time, perhaps. It depends. You say this order must be obeyed. Must. It is a strong word. You see yourself how strong it is. A wise company would not arm you with so drastic an order as this, of course, without appointing a penalty for its infringement. Otherwise it runs the risk of being a dead letter and a thing to laugh at. What is the appointed penalty for an infringement of this law? Penalty? I never heard of any. Unquestionably you must be mistaken. Your company orders you to come here and rudely break up an innocent amusement and furnishes you no way to enforce the order. Don't you see that that is nonsense? What do you do when people refuse to obey this order? Do you take the cards away from them? No. Do you put the offender off at the next station? Well, no. Of course, we couldn't if he had a ticket. Do you have him up before a court? The conductor was silent and apparently troubled. The major started a new deal and said, You see that you are helpless, and that the company has placed you in a foolish position. You are furnished with an arrogant order, and you deliver it in a blustering way, and when you come to look into the matter you find you haven't any way of enforcing obedience. The conductor said with chill dignity, Gentlemen, you have heard the order, and my duty has ended. As to obeying it or not, you will do as you think fit, and he turned to leave. But wait! The matter is not yet finished. I think you are mistaken about your duty being ended. But if it really is, I myself have a duty to perform yet. How do you mean? Are you going to report my disobedience at headquarters in Pittsburgh? No. What good would that do? You must report me, or I will report you. Report me for what? For disobeying the company's orders in not stopping this game, as a citizen is my duty to help the railway companies keep their servants to their work. Are you in earnest? Yes, I am in earnest. I have nothing against you as a man, but I have this against you as an officer, that you have not carried out that order, and if you do not report me I must report you, and I will. The conductor looked puzzled, and was thoughtful a moment, then he burst out with, I seem to be getting myself into a scrape. It's all a muddle. I can't make head or tail of it. It never happened before. They always knocked under and never said a word, and so I never saw how ridiculous that stupid order with no penalty is. I don't want to report anybody, and I don't want to be reported. Why, it might do me no end of harm. No, do go on with the game. Play the whole day if you want to, and don't let's have any more trouble about it. No, I only sat down here to establish this gentleman's rights. He can have his place now. But before, won't you tell me what you think the company made this rule for? Can you imagine any excuse for it? I mean a rational one. An excuse that is not on its face silly and the invention of an idiot. Why, surely I can, the reason it was made is plain enough, it is to save the feelings of the other passengers, the religious ones among them, I mean. They would not like it to have the Sabbath desecrated by card playing on the train. I just thought as much. They are willing to desecrate it themselves by traveling on Sunday, but they are not willing that other people—by gracious you've hit it! I never thought of that before. The fact is, it is a silly rule when you come to look at it. At this point the train conductor arrived and was going to shut down the game in a very high-handed fashion, but the parlor-car conductor stopped him and took him aside to explain. Nothing more was heard of the matter. I was ill in bed eleven days in Chicago and got no glimpse of the fare, for I was obliged to return east as soon as I was able to travel. The major secured and paid for a state room in a sleeper the day before we left, so that I could have plenty of room and be comfortable. But when we arrived at the station, a mistake had been made, and our car had not been put on. The conductor had reserved a section for us, but it was the best he could do, he said. But major said we were not in a hurry and would wait for the car to be put on. The conductor responded with pleasant irony. It may be that you were not in a hurry, just as you say, but we are. Come, get aboard, gentlemen, get aboard, don't keep us waiting. But the major would not get aboard himself nor allow me to do it. He wanted his car and said he must have it. This made the hurried and perspiring conductor impatient, and he said, It's the best we can do. We can't do impossibilities. You will take the section or go without. A mistake has been made and can't be rectified at this late hour. It's a thing that happens now and then, and there is nothing for it but to put up with it and make the best of it. Other people do. Ah, that is just it, you see. If they had stuck to their rights and enforced them, you wouldn't be trying to trample mine underfoot in this bland way now. I haven't any disposition to give you unnecessary trouble, but it is my duty to protect the next man from this kind of imposition, so I must have my car. Otherwise I will wait in Chicago and sue the company for violating its contract. Sue the company for a thing like that? Certainly. Do you really mean that? Indeed I do. The conductor looked the major overwonderingly and then said, It beats me. It's brand new. Well, I have never struck the mate to it before, but I swear I think you'd do it. Look here, I'll send for the station master. When the station master came, he was a good deal annoyed. At the major, not at the person who had made the mistake, he was rather brusque and took the same position which the conductor had taken in the beginning, but he failed to move the soft-spoken artilleryman who still insisted that he must have his car. However, it was plain that there was only one strong side in this case and that that side was the major's. The station master banished his annoyed manner and became pleasant and even half-apologetic. This made a good opening for a compromise, and the major made a concession. He said he would give up the engaged stateroom, but he must have a stateroom. After a deal of ransacking, one was found whose owner was persuadable. He exchanged it for our section, and we got away at last. The conductor called on us in the evening and was kind and courteous and obliging, and we had a long talk and got to be good friends. He said he wished the public would take trouble oftener. It would have a good effect. He said that the railroads could not be expected to do their whole duty by the traveller unless the traveller would take some interest in the matter himself. I hoped that we were done reforming for the trip now, but it was not so. In the hotel car in the morning the major called for broiled chicken. The waiter said, It's not on the bill of fare, sir. We do not serve anything but what is in the bill. That gentleman Yonder is eating a broiled chicken. Yes, but that is different. He is one of the superintendents of the road. Then all the more must I have a broiled chicken. I do not like these discriminations. Please hurry, bring me a broiled chicken. The waiter brought the steward who explained in a low and polite voice that the thing was impossible. It was against the rule, and the rule was rigid. Very well, then, you must either apply it impartially or break it impartially. You must take that gentleman's chicken away from him or bring me one. The steward was puzzled and did not quite know what to do. He began an incoherent argument, but the conductor came along just then and asked what the difficulty was. The steward explained that here was a gentleman who was insisting on having a chicken when it was dead against the rule and not in the bill. The conductor said, Stick by your rules, you haven't any option. Wait a moment. Is this the gentleman? Then he laughed and said, Never mind your rules, it's my advice and sound. Give him anything he wants, and don't get him started on his rights. Give him whatever he asks for, and if you haven't got it, stop the train and get it. The major ate the chicken, but said he did it from a sense of duty, and to establish a principle, for he did not like chicken. I missed the fare, it is true, but I picked up some diplomatic tricks, which I and the reader may find handy and useful as we go along. End of Travelling with a Reformer and end of Section 22 of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain This is Diplomatic Pay and Clothes. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain Section 23 Diplomatic Pay and Clothes Vienna, January 5 I find in this morning's papers the statement that the Government of the United States has paid to the two members of the Peace Commission entitled to receive money for their services, $100,000 each for their six weeks' work in Paris. I hope that this is true. I will allow myself the satisfaction of considering that it is true, and of treating it as a thing finished and settled. It is a precedent, and ought to be a welcome one to our country. A precedent always has a chance to be valuable, as well as the other way. And its best chance to be valuable or the other way is when it takes such a striking form as to fix a whole nation's attention upon it. If it come justified out of the discussion which will follow, it will find and career ready and waiting for it. We realize that the edifice of public justice is built of precedence from the ground upward, and we do not always realize that all the other details of our civilization are likewise built of precedence. The changes also which they undergo are due to the intrusion of new precedence, which hold their ground against opposition and keep their place. A precedent may die at birth, or it may live. It is mainly a matter of luck. If it be imitated once, it has a chance. If twice, a better chance. If three times, it is reaching a point where a count must be taken of it. If four, five, or six times, it has probably come to stay, for a whole century possibly. If a town start a new bow, or a new dance, or a new temperance project, or a new kind of hat, and can get the precedent adopted in the next town, the career of that precedent is begun, and it will be unsafe to bet as to where the end of its journey is going to be. It may not get this start at all, and may have no career. But if a crown prince introduce the precedent, it will attract vast attention, and its chances for a career are so great as to amount almost to a certainty. For a long time we have been reaping damage from a couple of disastrous precedence. One is the precedent of shabby pay to public servants standing for the power and dignity of the Republic in foreign lands. The other is a precedent condemning them to exhibit themselves officially in clothes which are not only without grace or dignity, but are pretty loud and pious rebuke to the vain and frivolous costumes worn by other officials. To our day an American ambassador's official costume remains under the reproach of these defects. At a public function in a European court all foreign representatives except ours wear clothes which in some way distinguish them from the unofficial throng, and mark them as standing for their countries. But our representative appears in a plain black swallow-tail which stands for neither country nor people. It has no nationality. It is found in all countries. It is as international as a night-shirt. It has no particular meaning. But our government tries to give it one. It tries to make it stand for republican simplicity, modesty, and unpretentiousness. Tries, and without doubt fails, for it is not conceivable that this loud ostentation of simplicity deceives anyone. The statue that advertises its modesty with a fig-leaf really brings its modesty under suspicion. Worn officially, our non-conforming swallow-tail is a declaration of ungracious independence in the matter of manners, and is uncourteous. It says to all around, In Rome we do not choose to do as Rome does. We refuse to respect your tastes and your traditions. We make no sacrifices to anyone's costumes and prejudices. We yield no job to the courtesies of life. We prefer our manners, and intrude them here. That is not the true American spirit, and those clothes misrepresent us. When a foreigner comes among us and trespasses against our customs and our code of manners, we are offended, and justly so. But our government commands our ambassadors to wear abroad an official dress which is an offence against foreign manners and customers, and the discredit of it falls upon the nation. We did not dress our public functionaries in undistinguished raiment before Franklin's time, and the change would not have come if he had been an obscurity. But he was such a colossal figure in the world that whatever he did of an unusual nature attracted the world's attention and became a precedent. In the case of clothes, the next representative after him and the next had to imitate it. After that the thing was custom, and custom is a petrification. Nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century. We imagined that our queer official costumeerie was deliberately devised to symbolize our republican simplicity, a quality which we have never possessed, and are too old to acquire now if we had any use for it or any learning toward it. But it is not so. There was nothing deliberate about it. It grew naturally and heedlessly out of the precedent set by Franklin. If it had been an intentional thing and based upon a principle, it would not have stopped where it did. We should have applied it further. Instead of clothing our admirals and generals, for court-martial and other public functions, in superb dress uniforms blazing with color and gold, the government would put them in swallow-tails and white cravats, and make them look like ambassadors and lackeys. If I am wrong in making Franklin the father of our curious official clothes, it is no matter. He will be able to stand it. It is my opinion, and I make no charge for the suggestion, that whenever we appoint an ambassador or a minister, we ought to confer upon him the temporary rank of admiral or general, and allow him to wear the corresponding uniform at public functions in foreign countries. I would recommend this for the reason that it is not consonant with the dignity of the United States of America that her representative should appear upon occasions of state in a dress which makes him glaringly conspicuous. And that is what his present undertaker outfit does when it appears, with its dismal smudge, in the midst of the butterfly splendors of a Continental Court. It is a most trying position for a shy man, a modest man, a man accustomed to being like other people. He is the most striking figure present. There is no hiding from the multitudinous eyes. It would be funny if it were not such a cruel spectacle to see the hunted creature in his solemn sabers scuffling round in that sea of vivid color like a mislaid Presbyterian in perdition. We are all aware that our representative's dress should not compel too much attention for anybody but an Indian chief knows that that is a vulgarity. I am saying these things in the interest of our national pride and dignity. Our representative is the flag. He is the Republic. He is the United States of America. And when these embodiments pass by, we do not want them scoffed at. We desire that people shall be obliged to concede that they are worthily closed and politely. Our government is oddly inconsistent in this matter of official dress. When its representative is a civilian who has not been a soldier it restricts him to the black swallow-tail and white tie. But if he is a civilian who has been a soldier it allows him to wear the uniform of his former rank as an official dress. When General Sickles was minister to Spain he always wore, when on official duty, the dress uniform of a major general. When General Grant visited foreign courts he went handsomely and properly ablaze in the uniform of a full general and was introduced by diplomatic survivals of his own presidential administration. The latter, by official necessity, went in the meek and lowly swallow-tail, a deliciously sarcastic contrast. The one dress, representing the honest and honorable dignity of the nation, the other the cheap hypocrisy of the republican simplicity tradition. In Paris our present representative can perform his official functions reputably clothed, for he was an officer in the Civil War. In London our late ambassador was similarly situated, for he also was an officer in the Civil War. But Mr. Chote must represent the Great Republic even at official breakfasts at seven in the morning in that same old funny swallow-tail. Our government's notions about proprieties of costume are indeed very, very odd, as suggested by that last fact. The swallow-tail is recognized the world over as not wearable in the daytime. It is a night dress, and a night dress only. A night shirt is not more so. Yet when our representative makes an official visit in the morning he is obliged by his government to go in that night dress. It makes the very cab horses laugh. The truth is that for a while during the present century, and up to something short of forty years ago, we had a lucid interval and dropped the republican simplicity sham, and dressed our foreign representatives in a handsome and becoming official costume. This was discarded by and by, and the swallow-tail substituted. I believe it is not now known which statesmen brought about this change, but we all know that, stupid as he was as to diplomatic proprieties and dress, he would not have sent his daughter to a state ball in a corn-shucking costume, nor to a corn-shucking in a state ball costume, to be harshly criticized as an ill-mannered offender against the proprieties of custom in both places. And we know another thing, these, that he himself would not have wounded the tastes and feelings of a family of mourners by attending a funeral in their house in a costume which was an offence against the dignities and decorum prescribed by tradition and sanctified by custom. Yet that man was so heedless as not to reflect that all the social customs of civilized peoples are entitled to respectful observance, and that no man with a right spirit of courtesy in him ever has any disposition to transgress these customs. There is still another argument for a rational diplomatic dress, a business argument. We are a trading nation, and our representative is a business agent. If he is respected, esteemed, and liked where he is stationed, he can exercise an influence which can extend our trade and forward our prosperity. A considerable number of his business activities have their field in his social relations and clothes which do not offend against local manners and customers and prejudices are a valuable part of his equipment in this matter, would be, if Franklin had died earlier. I have not done with gratis suggestions yet. We made a great deal of valuable advance when we instituted the office of Ambassador. That lofty rank endows its possessor with several times as much influence, consideration, and effectiveness as the rank of minister bestows. For the sake of the country's dignity and for the sake of her advantage commercially we should have ambassadors not ministers at the great courts of the world, but not at present salaries. No, if we are to maintain present salaries, let us make no more ambassadors, and let us unmake those we have already made. The great position, without the means of respectably maintaining it, there could be no wisdom in that. A foreign representative to be valuable to his country must be on good terms with the officials of the capital and with the rest of the influential folk. He must mingle with this society. He cannot sit at home. It is not business. It butters no commercial parsnips. He must attend the dinners, banquets, suppers, balls, receptions, and must return these hospitalities. He should return as good as he gets, too, for the sake of the dignity of his country, and for the sake of business. Have we ever had a minister or an ambassador who could do this on his salary? No, not once, from Franklin's time to ours. Other countries understand the commercial value of properly lining the pockets of their representatives, but apparently our government has not learned it. England is the most successful trader of the several trading nations, and she takes good care of the watchmen who keep guard in her commercial towers. It has been a long time now since we needed to blush for our representatives abroad. It has become custom to send our fittest. We send men of distinction, cultivation, character, our ableist, our choicest, our best. Then we cripple their efficiency through the meagerness of their pay. Here is a list of salaries for English and American ministers and ambassadors. City Paris Salaries American Seventeen Thousand Five Hundred English Forty-Five Thousand Berlin Salary American Seventeen Thousand Five Hundred English Forty Thousand Vienna Salary American Twelve Thousand English Forty Thousand Constantinople Salary American Ten Thousand English Forty Thousand St. Petersburg Salary American Seventeen Thousand Five Hundred English Thirty-Nine Thousand Rome Salary American Twelve Thousand English Thirty-Five Thousand Washington Salaries American Blank English Thirty-Two Thousand Five Hundred Sir Julian Pondsfoot, the English Ambassador at Washington, has a very fine house besides at no damage to his salary. English ambassadors pay no house rent. They live in palaces owned by England. Our representatives pay house rent out of their salaries. You can judge by the above figures what kind of houses the United States of America has been used to living in abroad, and what sort of return entertaining she has done. There is not a salary in our list, which would properly house the representative receiving it, and in addition pay three thousand dollars towards his family's bacon and donuts, the strange but economical and customary fare of the American ambassador's household except on Sundays when petrified Boston crackers are added. The ambassadors and ministers of foreign nations not only have generous salaries, but their governments provide them with money wherewith to pay a considerable part of their hospitality bills. I believe our government pays no hospitality bills except those incurred by the Navy. Through this concession to the Navy that arm is able to do us credit in foreign parts, and certainly that is well and politic. But why the government does not think it well and politic that our diplomats should be able to do us like credit abroad is one of those mysterious inconsistencies which have been puzzling me ever since I stopped trying to understand baseball and took up statesmanship as a pastime. To return to the matter of house rent, good houses properly furnished in European capitals are not to be had at small figures. Consequently our foreign representatives have been accustomed to live in garrets, sometimes on the roof. Being poor men it has been the best they could do on the salary which the government has paid them. How could they adequately return the hospitality shown them? It was impossible. It would have exhausted the salary in three months. Still it was their official duty to entertain their influentials after some sort of fashion, and they did the best they could with their limited purse. In return for champagne they furnished lemonade. In return for game they furnished ham. In return for whale they furnished sardines. In return for liquors they furnished condensed milk. In return for the battalion of liveried and powdered flunkies they furnished the hired girl. In return for the fairy wilderness of sumptuous decorations they draped the stove with the American flag. In return for the orchestra they furnished zither and ballads by the family. In return for the ball, but they didn't return the ball, except in cases where the United States lived on the roof and had room. Is this an exaggeration? It can hardly be called that. I saw nearly the equivalent of it a good many years ago. A minister was trying to create influential friends for a project which might be worth ten millions a year to the agriculturists of the Republic, and our government had furnished him ham and lemonade to persuade the opposition with. The minister did not succeed. He might not have succeeded if his salary had been what it ought to have been, fifty thousand dollars or sixty thousand dollars a year, but his chances would have been greatly improved, and in any case he and his dinners and his country would not have been joked about by the hard-hearted and pitied by the compassionate. Any experienced drummer will testify that when you want to do business there is no economy in ham and lemonade. The drummer takes his country customer to the theatre, the opera, the circus, dines him, whines him, entertains him all the day and all the night in luxurious style, and plays upon his human nature in all seductive ways, for he knows by old experience that this is the best way to get a profitable order out of him. He has this reward. All governments except our own play the same policy with the same end in view, and they also have their reward. But ours refuses to do business by business ways, and sticks to ham and lemonade. This is the most expensive diet known to the diplomatic service of the world. Ours is the only country of first importance that pays its foreign representatives trifling salaries. If we were poor we could not find great fault with these economies perhaps. At least one could find a sort of plausible excuse for them. But we are not poor, and the excuse fails. As shown above some of our important diplomatic representatives received twelve thousand dollars, others seventeen thousand five hundred dollars. These salaries are all ham and lemonade and unworthy of the flag. When we have a rich ambassador in London or Paris he lives as the ambassador of a country like ours ought to live and it costs him one hundred thousand dollars a years to do it. But why should we allow him to pay that out of his private pocket? There is nothing fair about it, and the Republic is no proper subject for anyone's charity. In several cases our salaries of twelve thousand dollars should be fifty thousand dollars, and all of the salaries of seventeen thousand five hundred dollars ought to be seventy five thousand dollars or one hundred thousand dollars, since we pay no representatives house rent. Our State Department realizes the mistake which we are making and would like to rectify it, but it has not the power. When a young girl reaches eighteen she is recognized as being a woman. She adds six inches to her skirt, she unplates her dangling braids and balls her hair on top of her head, she stops sleeping with her little sister and has a room to herself and becomes in many ways a thundering expense. But she is in society now and papa has to stand it. There is no avoiding it. Very well, the great Republic lengthened her skirts last year, balled up her hair, and entered the world's society. This means that if she would prosper and stand fairer with society she must put aside some of her dearest and darlingest young ways and superstitions and do as society does. Of course she can decline if she wants to, but this would be unwise. She ought to realize now that she has come out that this is a right and proper time to change a part of her style. She is in Rome, and it has long been granted that when one is in Rome it is good policy to do as Rome does. To advantage Rome? No. To advantage herself. If our government has really paid representatives of ours on the Paris Commission one hundred thousand dollars a piece for six weeks' work, I feel sure that it is the best cash investment the nation has made in many years, for it seems quite impossible that, with that precedent on the books, the government will be able to find excuses for continuing its diplomatic salaries at the present mean figure. PS Vienna January 10. I see, by this morning's telegraphic news, that I am not to be the new ambassador here after all. This, well, I hardly know what to say. I, well, of course, I do not care anything about it, but it is at least a surprise. I have for many months been using my influence at Washington to get this diplomatic sea expanded into an ambassadorship, with the idea, of course, that—but never mind. Let it go. It is of no consequence. I say it calmly, for I am calm. But at the same time, however, the subject has no interest for me, and never had. I never really intended to take the place, anyway. I made up my mind to it months and months ago, nearly a year. But now, while I am calm, I would like to say this, that so long as I shall continue to possess an American's proper pride in the honor and dignity of his country, I will not take any ambassadorship in the gift of the flag at a salary short of seventy-five thousand dollars a year. If I shall be charged with wanting to live beyond my country's means, I cannot help it. A country which cannot afford ambassadors' wages should be a shame to have ambassadors. Think of the seventeen thousand five hundred dollar ambassador, particularly for America. Why, it is the most ludicrous spectacle, the most inconsistent and incongruous spectacle, contrivable by even the most diseased imagination. It is a billionaire in a paper collar, a king in a breech clout, an archangel in a tin halo, and, for pure sham and hypocrisy, the salary is just the match of the ambassador's official clothes. That boastful advertisement of a Republican simplicity which manifests itself at home in fifty thousand dollar salaries to insurance presidents and railway lawyers, and in domestic palaces whose fittings and furnishings often transcend in costly display and splendor and richness the fittings and furnishings of the palaces of the septored masters of Europe, and which has invented and exported to the old world the palace car, the sleeping car, the tram car, the electric trolley, the best bicycles, the best motor cars, the steam heater, the best and smartest systems of electric calls and telephonic aids to laziness and comfort, the elevator, the private bathroom, hot and cold water on tap, the palace hotel, with its multifarious conveniences, comforts, shows, and luxuries, the—oh, the list is interminable. In a word, Republican simplicity found Europe with one shirt on her back, so to speak, as far as real luxuries, conveniences, and the comforts of life go, and has closed her to the chin with the latter. We are the lavishest and showiest and most luxury-loving people on the earth, and at our masthead we fly one true and honest symbol, the gaudiest flag the world has ever seen. Oh, Republican simplicity! There are many, many humbugs in the world, but none to which you need to take off your hat. M.T. It was at a banquet in London in honour of one of the two or three conspicuously illustrious English military names of this generation, for reasons which will presently appear, I will withhold his real name and titles, and call him Lieutenant General Lord Arthur Scoresby, V.C., K.C.B., etc., etc., etc. What a fascination there is in a renowned name! There sat the man in actual flesh, whom I had heard of so many thousands of times since that day, thirty years before, when his name shot suddenly to the zenith from a Crimean battlefield to remain forever celebrated. It was food and drink to me to look and look and look at that demigod, scanning, searching, noting the quietness, the reserve, the noble gravity of his countenance, the simple honesty that expressed itself all over him, the sweet unconsciousness of his greatness, unconsciousness of the hundreds of admiring eyes fastened upon him, unconsciousness of the deep, loving, sincere worship welling out of the breasts of those people and flowing toward him. The clergyman at my left was an old acquaintance of mine, clergyman now, but had spent the first half of his life in the camp and field, and as an instructor in the military school at Woolwich. Just at the moment I had been talking about, a veiled and singular light glimmered in his eyes, and he leaned down and muttered confidentially to me, indicating the hero of the banquet with a gesture. privately, his glory is an accident, just a product of incredible luck. This verdict was a great surprise to me. If its subject had been Napoleon or Socrates or Solomon my astonishment could not have been greater. Some days later came the explanation of this strange remark, and this is what the Reverend told me. About forty years ago I was an instructor in the military academy at Woolwich. I was present in one of the sections when Young Scorsby underwent his preliminary examination. I was touched the quick with pity, for the rest of the class answered up brightly and handsomely while he, why dear me, he didn't know anything, so to speak. He was evidently good and sweet and lovable and guileless, and so it was exceedingly painful to see him stand there as serene as a graven image and deliver himself of answers which were veritably miraculous for stupidity and ignorance. All the compassion in me was aroused in his behalf. I said to myself, when he comes to be examined again, he will be flung over, of course, so it will be a simple harmless act of charity to ease his fall as much as I can. I took him aside and found that he knew a little of Caesar's history, and as he didn't know anything else, I went to work and drilled him like a galley-slave on a certain line of stock questions concerning Caesar which I knew would be used. If you'll believe me, he went through with flying colors on Examination Day. He went through on that purely superficial cram, and got compliments, too, while others, who knew a thousand times more than he, got plucked. By some strangely lucky accident—an accident not likely to happen twice in a century—he was asked no question outside of the narrow limits of his drill. It was stupefying. Well, all through his course I stood by him with something of the sentiment which a mother feels for a crippled child, and he always saved himself, just by miracle, apparently. Now, of course, the thing that would expose him and kill him at last was mathematics. I resolved to make his death as easy as I could, so I drilled him and crammed him and crammed him and drilled him, just on the line of questions which the Examiner would be most likely to use, and then launched him on his fate. Well, sir, try to conceive of the result. To my consternation he took the first prize, and with it he got a perfect ovation in the way of compliments. Sleep! There was no more sleep for me for a week. My conscience tortured me day and night. What I had done, I had done purely through charity, and only to ease the poor youth's fall. I never had dreamed of any such preposterous result as the thing that had happened. I felt as guilty and miserable as the creator of Frankenstein. Here was a wooden head, whom I had put in the way of glittering promotions and prodigious responsibilities, and but one thing could happen. He and his responsibilities would all go to ruin together at the first opportunity. The Crimean War had just broken out. Of course, there had to be a war, I said to myself. We couldn't have peace and give this donkey a chance to die before he is found out. I waited for the earthquake. It came. And it made me real when it did come. He was actually gazetted to a captaincy in a marching regiment. Better men grow old and gray in the service before they climb to a sublimity like that. And who could ever have foreseen that they would go and put such a load of responsibility on such green and inadequate shoulders? I could just barely have stood it if they had made him a cornet, but a captain. Think of it. I thought my hair would turn white. Consider what I did. I, who so loved, repose and in action. I said to myself, I am responsible to the country for this, and I must go along with him and protect the country against him as far as I can. So I took my poor little capital that I had saved up through years of work and grinding economy, and went with a sigh and bought a cornetcy in his regiment, and away we went to the field. And there, oh dear, it was awful. Blunders? Why, he never did anything but blunder. But, you see, nobody was in the fellow's secret. Everybody had him focused wrong, and necessarily misinterpreted his performance every time. Consequently they took his idiotic blunders for inspirations of genius. They did, honestly. His mildest blunders were enough to make a man in his right mind cry. And they did make me cry, and rage and rave too, privately. And the thing that kept me always in a sweat of apprehension was the fact that every fresh blunder he made increased the luster of his reputation. I kept saying to myself, he'll go so high that when discovery does finally come it will be like the sun falling out of the sky. He went right along up, from grade to grade, over the dead bodies of his superiors, until at last, in the hottest moment of the battle of Blank, down went our Colonel, and my heart jumped into my mouth, for Scoresby was next in rank. Now, Fort, said I, we'll all land in shoal in ten minutes, sure. The battle was awfully hot. The Allies were steadily giving way all over the field. Our regiment occupied a position that was vital. A blunder now must be destruction. At this critical moment what does this immortal fool do but detach the regiment from its place and order a charge over a neighbouring hill where there wasn't a suggestion of an enemy? There you go, I said to myself, this is the end at last. And away we did go, and were over the shoulder of the hill before the insane movement could be discovered and stopped. And what did we find? An entire and unsuspected Russian army in reserve. And what happened? We were eaten up. That is necessarily what would have happened in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, but no. Those Russians argued that no single regiment would come browsing around there at such a time. It must be the entire English army, and that the sly Russian game was detected and blocked. So they turned tail and away they went pell-mail over the hill and down into the field in wild confusion and we after them. They themselves broke the solid Russia centre in the field and tore through and in no time there was the most tremendous rout you ever saw, and the defeat of the Allies was turned into a sweeping and splendid victory. Marshall Ken Robert looked on, dizzy with astonishment, admiration, and delight, and sent right off for Scorsby and hugged him and decorated him on the field in presence of all the armies. And what was Scorsby's blunder that time? Merely the mistaking his right hand from his left. That was all. An order had come to him to fall back and support our right, and instead he fell forward and went over the hill to the left. But the name he won that day as a marvellous military genius filled the world with his glory, and that glory will never fade while history books last. He is just as good and sweet and lovable and unpretending as a man can be, but he doesn't know enough to come in when it rains. He has been pursued day by day and year by year by a most phenomenal and astonishing luckiness. He has been a shining soldier in all our wars for half a generation. He has littered his military life with blunders, and yet has never committed one that didn't make him a knight or a baronet or a lord or something. Look at his breast, why, he is just closed in domestic and foreign decorations. Well, sir, every one of them is a record of some shouting stupidity or other, and, taken together, they are proof that the very best thing in all this world that can befall a man is to be born lucky, end of luck, and end of section 24 of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain.