 This is Section 113 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 113, The Galaxy, June 1870. Memoranda by Mark Twain. Higgins. Yes, I remember that anecdote, the Sunday school superintendent said, with the old pathos in his voice, and the old say-look in his eyes. It was about a simple creature named Higgins, that used to haul rock for old Maltby. When the lamented judge Bagley tripped and fell down the courthouse stairs and broke his neck, it was a great question how to break the news to poor Mrs. Bagley. But finally the body was put into Higgins' wagon, and he was instructed to take it to Mrs. B., but to be very guarded and discreet in his language, and not break the news to her at once, but do it gradually and gently. When Higgins got there, with his sad freight, he shouted till Mrs. Bagley came to the door. Then he said, Does the widow Bagley live here? The widow Bagley? No, sir. I'll bet she does. But have it your own way. Well, does Judge Bagley live here? Yes, Judge Bagley lives here. I'll bet he don't. But never mind. It ain't for me to contradict. Is the judge in? No, not at present. I just expected as much, because, you know, take hold of something, Mum, for I'm going to make a little communication, and I reckon maybe it'll jar you some. There's been an accident, Mum. I've got the old Judge curled up out here in Wagon, and when you see him you'll acknowledge yourself that an inquest is about the only thing that could be a comfort to him. The Galaxy June 1870. Memoranda, by Mark Twain. Hogwash. For five years I have preserved the following miracle of pointless imbecility and bathos, waiting to see if I could find anything in literature that was worse. But in vain I have read it forty or fifty times altogether, and with a steadily increasing pleasurable disgust. I now offer it for competition as the sickliest specimen of sham sentimentality that exists. I almost always get it out and read it when I am low-spirited, and it has cheered many and many a sad hour for me. I will remark, in the way of general information, that in California, that land of felicitous nomenclature, the literary name of this sort of stuff is Hogwash. From the California farmer. A Touching Incident. Mr. Editor. I hand you the following for insertion, if you think it worthy of publication. It is a picture, though brief, of a living reality which the writer witnessed within a little time since, in a luxurious city. A beautiful lady sat beneath the veranda, overshadowed by clustering vines. In her lap was a young infant, apparently asleep. The mother sat, as she supposed, unobserved, and lost in deep meditation. Richly robed and surrounded with all the outward appearances of wealth and station, wife and mistress of a splendid mansion and garden around it, it would have seemed as if the heart that could claim to be queen here should be a happy one. Alas, appearances are not always the true guide, for that mother sat there like a statue a while, when over her face beamed a sad, sad smile. Then she started and shuddered as if terrible fears were crushing her spirit, then came the hot tears, and the wife and mother, with all that was seemingly joyous around her, gave herself up to the full sweep of agonizing sorrow. I gazed upon this picture for a little while only, for my own tears fell freely and without any control. The lady was so truthful and innocent to all outward appearances, that my own deepest sympathies went out instantly to her and her sorrows. This is no fancy sketch, but a sad, sad reality. It occurred in the very heart of our city, and witnessing it with deep sorrow, I asked myself how can these things be? But I remember that this small incident may only be a foreshadowing of some great sorrow deeply hidden in that mother's aching heart. The bard of Avon says, When sorrows come they come not single spies, but in battalions. I had turned away for a moment to look at some object that attracted my attention, when, looking again, this child of sorrow was drying her eyes carefully and preparing to leave and go within. And there will kanker sorrow eat her bud, and chase the native beauty from her cheek. The Galaxy June 1870, Memoranda, by Mark Twain. A literary old offender, in court with suspicious property in his possession. In last month's Memoranda I published a sketch entitled The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper, and closed it with a dreadful nitroglycerin explosion which destroyed the boy. He had unwittingly been sitting on a can of this compound and got his pantaloons greased with it, and when he got a reproving spank upon that portion of his system, the catastrophe instantly followed. There was something so stupendously grotesque about the situation, that I was filled with admiration of it, and therefore borrowed it. I say, borrowed it, for it was not my invention. I found it drifting about the sea of journalism in the shape of a simple statement of the catastrophe in a single sentence, and attributed to a California paper. I thought, at the time, that in saying it, in the Californian unnecessary pains had been taken, for such a happy inspiration of extravagance as that could not well have originated elsewhere. I used it, and stated in a footnote that I borrowed it, without the unknown but most ingenious owner's permission. I naturally expected that so neat a compliment as that would resurrect the ingenious unknown and bring him to the light of day. Truly it did produce a specter, but not the one I was looking for. The party, thus raised, hails from Philadelphia, and in testimony that he is the ingenious unknown, he encloses to me a half-column newspaper article dated December 22, signed with his name, and being what he says is the original draft of the nitroglycerin catastrophe. The impulse to make pleasant mention of this person's name and give him the credit he claims is crippled by the fact that I, or anyone else acquainted with his literary history, would feel obliged to decline to accept any evidence coming from him upon any matter, and especially upon a question of authorship. His simple word is worthless, and to embellish it with his oath would merely make it picturesque, not valuable. This person, several of us know of our own personal knowledge to be a poor little perloiner of other men's ideas and handicraft. It would not be just to call him a literary pirate, for there is a sort of manliness about flaunting the black flag in the face of a world, and taking desperate chances against death and dishonor that gives a somber dignity to the pirate's calling, but little suggestive of the creeping and stealthy ways of the smaller kind of literary rogues. But there is a sort of adventurer whom the police detect by a certain humble look in their faces, and who, when searched, yield abundance of spools, handkerchiefs, napkins, spoons, and such things acquired by them when the trusting owners left the property openly in their company not thinking any harm. The police call this kind of adventurer a blank. However, upon second thought, I will not print the name, for it has almost too harsh a sound for polite ears. But the Philadelphia person I have spoken of will probably recognize a long-lost brother in the description. Anybody capturing the subject of these remarks and overhauling the catalog of what he calls his writings will find in it two very good articles of mine, and if the rest were advertised as strayed or stolen, they would doubtless be called for by a journalist residing in all the different states of the Union. The effrontery of this person, in appearing before me, through the U.S. mail, and claiming to have originated an idea, surpasses anything that has come under my notice lately. I cannot conceive of his being so reckless as to deliberately try to originate an idea, considering how he is built. He knows himself that it would rip and tear and rend him worse than the glycerin did the boy. This sad person perloins all his literary materials, I fancy, and he spreads his damaged remnants before his customers, with as happy an admiration as if they were bright and fresh from the intellectual loom. With due modesty I venture the prophecy that some day he will even ravish a dying speech from some poor fellow, to say with a flourish as he goes out of the world, fellow citizens, I die innocent. I do not print this party's name, because knowing as I do upon what an exceedingly slender capital of merit, fame, or public invention, two or three of the most widely popular lecturers of the day, of both sexes, got a foothold upon the rostrum, I might thus help to pave the way for him to transfer the report of somebody's speech from the papers to his portfolio, and step into the lecture arena upon a sudden and comfortable income of ten or fifteen thousand dollars a season. I cannot take this person's evidence. Will the party from whom he pilfered the nitroglycerin idea please send me a copy of the paper in which it first appeared, and with the date of the paper intact. I shall now soon find out who really invented the exploded boy. The Galaxy June 1870, Memoranda, by Mark Twain. Widow's Lament. One of the saddest things that ever came under my notice, said the banker's clerk, was there in Corning during the war. Dan Murphy enlisted as a private, and fought very bravely. The boys all liked him, and when a wound by and by weakened him down till carrying a musket was too heavy work for him, they clubbed together and fixed him up as a subtler. He made money then, and sent it always to his wife to bank for him. She was a washer and ironer, and knew enough by hard experience to keep money when she got it. She didn't waste a penny. On the contrary, she began to get miserly as her bank account grew. She grieved to part with a sent, poor creature, for twice in her hard working life she had known what it was to be hungry, cold, friendless, sick, and without a dollar in the world, and she had a haunting dread of suffering so again. Well, at last Dan died, and the boys, in testimony of their esteem and respect for him, telegraphed to Mrs. Murphy to know if she would like to have him embalmed and sent home, when you know the usual custom was to dump a poor devil like him into a shallow hole, and then inform his friends what had become of him. Mrs. Murphy jumped to the conclusion that it would only cost two or three dollars to embalm her dead husband, and so she telegraphed, yes. It was at the wake that the bill for embalming arrived and was presented to the widow. She uttered a wild, sad wail that pierced every heart, and said, seventy-five dollars for Stouff and Dan, blister their souls! Did them divils suppose I was going to stare at the museum, that I'd be dialing in such expensive curiosities? The banker's clerk said there was not a dry eye in the house. A curious incident, and one which is perfectly well authenticated, comes to us in a private letter from the West. A patriarch of eighty-four was nearing death, and his descendants came from all distances to honour him with the last homage of affection. He had been blind for several years, so completely blind that night and noonday were alike to him. But about half an hour before his death his sight came suddenly back to him. He was as blithe and happy over it as any child could have been, and appeared to be only anxious to make the most of every second of time that was left him, were in to live and enjoy it. He did not waste any precious moments in speculating upon the wonderful nature of the thing that had happened to him, but diligently and hungrily looked at this, that, and the other thing, and luxuriously feasted his famishing vision. Children and grandchildren were marched in review by the bedside. The features of favourites were conned eagerly and searchingly. The freckles on a young girl's face were counted with painstaking interest, and with an unimpeachable accuracy that filled the veteran with gratified vanity. And then, while he read some verses in his testament, his sight grew dim and passed away again, and a few minutes afterward he died. It seems to be a common thing for long absent reason and memory to revisit the brains of the dying, but the return of vision is a rare circumstance indeed. There is something very touching in this news of Lady Franklin setting sail at the age of 80 years to go halfway round the globe to get a scrap of Sir John's writing, which she has heard, is in the possession of a man who will not deliver it to any hands but hers. Here is a love which has lasted through forty years of a common lot, then bridged aggrave, and lived on through twenty years of grief, which only such an affection is capable of feeling, and still at this day widowed and venerable, is able to mock at the zeal of half the honeymoon loves in the world. This is Section 114 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 114, The Galaxy, July 1870. Memoranda by Mark Twain. The Tournament in A.D. 1870. Lately there appeared an item to this effect, and the same went the customary universal round of the press. A telegraph station has just been established upon the traditional site of the Garden of Eden. As a companion to that, nothing fits so aptly and so perfectly as this. Brooklyn has revived the nightly tournament of the Middle Ages. It is hard to tell which is the most startling, the idea of that highest achievement of human genius and intelligence, the telegraph, prodding away about the practical concerns of the world's daily life in the heart and home of ancient indolence, ignorance, and savagery, or the idea of that happiest expression of the brag, vanity, and mock heroics of our ancestors, the tournament, coming out of its grave to flaunt its tinsel-trumpery and perform its chivalrous absurdities in the high noon of the nineteenth century and under the patronage of a great, broad-awake city and an advanced civilization. A tournament in Lynchburg is a thing easily within the comprehension of the average mind, but no commonly gifted person can conceive of such a spectacle in Brooklyn without straining his powers. Brooklyn is part and parcel of the city of New York, and there is hardly romance enough in the entire metropolis to resupply a Virginia night with chivalry, in case he happened to run out of it. Let the reader calmly and dispassionately picture to himself lists in Brooklyn heralds, persuivance, pages, garter king-at-arms in Brooklyn, the marshaling of the fantastic hosts of chivalry in slashed doublets, velvet trunks, ruffles and plumes in Brooklyn, mounted on omnibus and livery-stable patriarchs, promoted and referred to in cold blood as Steeds, Destriers, and Chargers, and divested of their friendly humble names, these meek old gyms and bobs and charlies, and renamed Mohamed, Pysophilus, and Saladin, in Brooklyn, mounted thus and armed with swords and shields and wooden lances, and cased in paste-board halberks, morians, grieves, and gauntlets, and addressed as Sir Smith and Sir Jones, and bearing such title-grandures as The Disinherited Knight, The Knight of Shenandoah, The Knight of the Blue Ridge, The Knight of Maryland, and The Knight of the Secret Sorrow, in Brooklyn, and at the toot of the horn charging fiercely upon a helpless ring hung on a post, and prodding at it intrepidly with their wooden sticks, and by and by skewering it and cavorting back to the judge's stand covered with glory, this in Brooklyn, and each noble success like this duly and promptly announced by an applauding toot from the herald's horn, and the band playing three bars of an old circus tune, all in Brooklyn, in broad daylight, and let the reader remember and also add to his picture as follows to it. When the show was all over, the party who had shed the most blood and overturned and hacked to pieces the most knights, or at least had produced the most muffin-rings, was accorded the ancient privilege of naming and crowning the Queen of Love and Beauty, which naming had in reality been done for him by the cut-and-dried process, and long in advance by a committee of ladies, but the crowning he did in person, though suffering from loss of blood, and then was taken to the county hospital on a shutter to have his wounds dressed, these curious things all occurring in Brooklyn, and no longer ago than one or two yesterdays, it seems impossible, and yet it is true. This was doubtless the first appearance of the tournament up here among the rolling mills and factories, and will probably be the last. It will be well to let it retire permanently to the rural districts of Virginia, where, it is said, the fine mailed and plumed, noble-natured, maiden-rescuing, wrong redressing, adventure-seeking knight of romance is accepted and believed in by the peasantry with pleasing simplicity, while they reject with scorn the plain, unpolished verdict whereby history exposes him as a braggard, a ruffian, a fantastic vagabond, and an ignoramus. All romance is aside. What shape would our admiration of the heroes of Ashby de la Zouche be likely to take in this practical age, if those worthys were to rise up and come here and perform again the chivalrous deeds of that famous passage of arms? Nothing but a New York jury and the insanity-plea could save them from hanging from the amiable Bois Gilbert and the pleasant Franc de Boeuf, clear down to the nameless ruffians that entered the riot with unpictured shields, and did their first murder and acquire their first claim to respect that day. The do-ings of the so-called chivalry of the Middle Ages were absurd enough, even when they were brutally and bloodly in earnest, and when their surroundings of castles and donjons, savage landscapes and half-savage peoples, were in keeping. But those do-ings gravely reproduced with tinsel decorations and mock pageantry by bucolic gentlemen with broomstick lances and with muffin-rings to represent the foe, and all in the midst of the refinement and dignity of a carefully developed modern civilization is absurdity gone crazy. Now, for next exhibition let us have a fine representation of one of those chivalrous wholesale butcheries and burnings of Jewish women and children, which the crusading heroes of romance used to indulge in in their European homes just before starting to the Holy Land, to seize and take to their protection the sepulcher and defend it from pollution. The Galaxy July 1870. Memoranda by Mark Twain. Un-Berlesquable Things. There are some things which cannot be burlesqueed, for the simple reason that in themselves they are so extravagant and grotesque that nothing is left for burlesque to take hold of. For instance, all attempts to burlesque the Byron scandal were failures because the central feature of it, incest, was a situation so tremendous and so imposing that the happiest available resources of burlesque seemed tame and cheap in its presence. Burlesque could invent nothing to transcend incest except by enlisting two crimes, neither of which is ever mentioned among women and children, and one of which is only mentioned in rare books of the law, and then as the crime without a name. A term with a shutter in it. So the reader never saw the Byron scandal successfully travestied in print, and he may rest satisfied that he never will. All attempts to burlesque the monster-musical piece jubilee in Boston were mournful failures. The ten thousand singers, the prodigious organ, the hundred anvils, and the artillery accompaniment made up an unintentional but complete, symmetrical and enormous burlesque, which shamed the poor inventions of the sketchers and scribblers who tried to be funny over it in magazines and newspapers. Even Cruikshank failed when he tried to pictorially burlesque the English musical extravaganza which probably furnished Mr. Gilmore with his idea. There was no burlesqueing the situation when the French train, Henri Rougfort, braided forth the proclamation that whenever he was arrested forty thousand ouviers would be there to know the reason why, when alas, right on top of it, one single humble policeman took him and marched him off to prison through an atmosphere with never a taint of garlic in it. There is no burlesqueing the McFarland trial, either as a whole or piecemeal by selection, because it was sublimated burlesque itself, in any way one may look at it. The court gravely tried the prisoner, not for murder apparently, but as to his sanity or insanity. His counsel attempted the intellectual miracle of proving the prisoner's deed to have been a justifiable homicide by an insane person. The recorder charged the jury to—well, there are different opinions as to what the recorder wanted them to do—among those who have translated the charge from the original Greek, though his general idea seemed to be to scramble first to the support of the prisoner, and then to support of the law, and then to the prisoner again, and back again to the law, with a vaguely perceptible desire to help the prisoner a little, the most, without making that desire unofficially and ungracefully prominent. To wind up and put a final polish to the many-sided burlesque, the jury went out and devoted nearly two hours to trying for his life a man whose deed would not be accepted as a capital crime by the mass of mankind, even though all the lawyers did their best to prove it such. It is hardly worthwhile to mention that the emotional scene in the courtroom, following the delivery of the verdict, when women hugged the prisoner, the jury, the reporters, and even the remorselessly sentimental Graham, is eminently unburlesquable. But first and last the splendid feature of the McFarland comedy was the insanity part of it, where the occasion was for dragging in that poor old threadbare lawyer trick is not perceptible, except it was to make a show of difficulty in winning a verdict that would have won itself without even a lawyer to meddle with the case. Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough long ago, but now that the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows' rope and picking every prisoner lock with it, it has become a sneaking villainy that ought to hang, and keep on hanging its sudden possessors until evildoers should conclude that the safest plan was to never claim to have it until they came by it legitimately. The very caliber of the people the lawyers most frequently tried to save by the insanity sub-trafuge ought to laugh the plea out of the courts, one would think. Anyone who watched the proceedings closely in the McFarland Richardson mockery will believe that the insanity plea was a rather far-fetched compliment to pay the prisoner in as much as one must first have brains before he can go crazy, and there was surely nothing in the evidence to show that McFarland had enough of the raw material to justify him in attempting anything more imposing than a lively form of idiocy. Governor Alcorn of Mississippi recommends his legislature to so alter the laws that as soon as the insanity plea is offered in the case of a person accused of crime, the case shall be sent up to a high state court, and the insanity part of the matter inquired into, and settled permanently, by itself, before the trial for the crime charged is touched at all. Anybody but one of this latter-day breed of lunatics on trial for murder will recognize the wisdom of the proposition at a glance. There is one other thing which transcends the powers of Burlesque, and that is a Fenian invasion. First we have the portentous mystery that precedes it for six months, when all the air is filled with stage whisperings, when councils meet every night with awful secrecy, and the membership try to see who can get up first in the morning and tell the proceedings. Next the expatriated nation struggles through a travail of national squabbles and political splits, and is finally delivered of a litter of governments, and Presidents McThis and Generals owe that, of several different complexions politically speaking. And straight away the newspapers team with the new names, and men who were insignificant and obscure one day find themselves great and famous the next. Then the several governments, and Presidents, and Generals, and Senates get by the ears, and remain so until the customary necessity of carrying the American city elections with a minority vote comes around, and unites them. Then they begin to sound the tuxen of war again. That is to say, in solemn whisperings at dead of night they secretly plan a Canadian raid, and publish it in The World next morning. They begin to refer significantly to Ridgeway, and we reflect boatingly that there is no telling how soon that slaughter may be repeated. Presently the invasion begins to take tangible shape, and as no news travels so freely or so fast as the secret doings of the Fenian Brotherhood, the land is shortly in a tumult of apprehension. The Telegraph announces that, last night, four hundred men went north from Utica, but refused to disclose their destination, were extremely reticent, answered no questions, were not armed or in uniform, but it was noticed that they marched to the depot in military fashion, and so on. Fifty such dispatches follow each other within two days, evidencing that squads of locomotive mystery have gone north from a hundred different points and rendezvoused on the Canadian border, and that consequently a horde of twenty-five thousand invaders, at least, is gathered together. And then, hurrah! They cross the line! Hurrah! They meet the enemy! Hip, hip hurrah! A battle ensues! Hip—no, not hip, nor hurrah! For the U.S. Marshal and one man sees the Fenian General-in-Chief on the battlefield in the midst of his army, and bowl him off in a carriage and lodge him in a common jail, and presto! The illustrious invasion is at an end. The Fenians have not done many things that seem to call for pictorial illustration, but their first care has usually been to make a picture of any performance of theirs that would stand it as soon as possible after its achievement, and paint everything in it, a violent green, and embellish it with harps and pickaxes, and other emblems of national grandeur, and print thousands of them in the severe simplicity of primitive lithography, and hang them above the national palladium among the decanters. Shall we have a nice picture of the Battle of Pigeon Hill, and a little accident to the Commander-in-Chief? No. A Fenian invasion cannot be burlasked, because it uses up all the material itself. It is harmless fun, this annual masquerading toward the border, but America should not encourage it, for the reason that it may some time or other succeed in embroiling the country in a war with a friendly power. And such an event as that would be ill-compensated by the liberation of even so excellent a people as the downtrodden nation. The Galaxy July 1870. Memoranda by Mark Twain. A daring attempt at a solution of it. The Fenian invasion failed because George Francis Train was absent. There was no lack of men, arms or ammunition, but there was sad need of Mr. Train's organizing power, his coolness and caution, his tranquillity, his strong good sense, his modesty and reserve, his secrecy, his taciturnity, and above all his frantic and bloodthirsty courage. Mr. Train and his retiring and diffident private secretary were obliged to be absent, though the former must certainly have been lying at the point of death, else nothing could have kept him from hurrying to the front, and offering his heart's best blood for the downtrodden people he so loves, so worships, so delights to champion. He must have been in a disabled condition, else nothing could have kept him from invading Canada at the head of his children. And indeed this modern Samson, solitary and alone, with his formidable jaw would have been a more troublesome enemy than five times the Fenians that did invade Canada, because they could be made to retire, but G. F. would never leave the field while there was an audience before him, either armed or helpless. The invading Fenians were wisely cautious, knowing that such of them as were caught would be likely to hang, but the champion would have stood in no such danger. There is no law, military or civil, for hanging persons afflicted in his particular way. He was not present alas, save in spirit. He could not and would not waste so fine an opportunity, though, to send some ecstatic lunacy over the wires, and so he wound up a ferocious telegram with this. With vengeance steeped in Wormwood's gall. Damn, old England, say we all. And keep your powder dry. George Francis Train. Sherman House, Chicago. Noon, Thursday, May 26. P.S. just arrived and addressed Grand Fenian Meeting in Fenian Armory and donating fifty dollars. This person could be made really useful by roosting him on some Hatteras Lighthouse or other prominence where storms prevail, because it takes so much wind to keep him going that he probably moves in the midst of a dead calm wherever he travels. The Galaxy, July 1870, Memoranda, by Mark Twain, to Correspondence. To those parties who have offered to send me curious obituaries, I would say that I shall be very glad to receive such. A number have already been sent me. The quaint epitaph business has had a fair share of attention in all generations, but the village obituaries, those marvellous combinations of ostentatious sorrow and ghastly writing, have been unkindly neglected. Inquirers are informed that the postmortem poetry of last month really came, without alteration, from the Philadelphia Ledger. The deaths have long been a prominent feature in the Ledger. Those six or eight persons who have written me from various localities inquiring with a deal of anxiety, if I am permanently engaged to write for the Galaxy, have been surprised, maybe, at the serene way in which I let the days go by without making any sort of reply. Do they suppose that I am one of that kind of birds that can be walked up to and captured by the process of putting salt on its tail? Hardly. These people want to get me to say yes, and then stop their magazine. The subscriber was not fledged yesterday. And finally, when I say that the poem which I composed was not the one which my father was enamored of, persons who may have known us both will not need to have this truth shot into them with a mountain howitzer before they can receive it. My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy, a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken and suffering ensued, but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us, which is to say my father did the breaking and I did the suffering. As a general thing I was a backward, cautious, unadventurous boy, but once I jumped off a two-story stable. Another time I gave an elephant a plug of tobacco and retired without waiting for an answer, and still another time I pretended to be talking in my sleep and got off a portion of a very wretched original conundrum in hearing of my father. Let us not pry into the result. It was of no consequence to any one but me. But the poem I have referred to as attracting my father's attention and achieving his favour was Hayawatha. Some man who courted a sudden and awful death presented him an early copy, and I never lost faith in my own senses until I saw him sit down and go to reading it in cold blood, saw him, opened the book, and heard him read these following lines with the same inflectionless judicial fragility with which he always read his charge to the jury, or administered an oath to a witness. Take your bow, O Hayawatha. Take your arrows, Jasper-headed. Take your war-club, Pugawagan, and your mittens, Minjikavan, and your birch canoe for sailing, and the oil of Mishonama. Presently my father took out of his breast pocket an imposing warranty deed and fixed his eyes upon it and dropped into meditation. I knew what it was. A Texan lady and gentleman had given my half-brother, Oren Johnson, a handsome property in a town in the north, in gratitude to him for having saved their lives by an act of brilliant heroism. By and by my father looked toward me inside, and then he said, If I had such a son as this poet, here were a subject worthier than the traditions of these Indians. If you please, sir, where? In this deed. In the deed? Yes, in this very deed, said my father, throwing it on the table. There is more poetry, more romance, more sublimity, more splendid imagery hidden away in that homely document than could be found in all the traditions of all the savages that live. Indeed, sir, could I—could I get it out, sir? Could I compose the poem, sir, do you think? You! I wilted. Presently my father's face softened somewhat, and he said, Go and try, but mind, curb folly, no poetry at the expense of truth, keep strictly to the facts. I said I would, and bowed myself out, and went upstairs. Hiawatha kept droning in my head, and so did my father's remarks about the sublimity and romance hidden in my subject, and also his injunction to beware of wasteful and exuberant fancy. I noticed, just here, that I had heedlessly brought the deed away with me. Now, at this moment came to me one of those rare moods of daring recklessness, such as I referred to a while ago. Without another thought, and in plain defiance of the fact that I knew my father meant me to write the romantic story of my half-brother's adventure and subsequent good fortune, I ventured to heed merely the letter of his remarks and ignore their spirit. I took the stupid warrant deed itself, and chopped it up into Hiawatha and blank verse, without altering or leaving out three words, and without transposing six. It required loads of courage to go downstairs and face my father with my performance. I started three or four times before I finally got my pluck to where it would stick. But at last I said I would go down and read it to him if he threw me over the church for it. I stood up to begin, and he told me to come closer. I edged up a little, but still left as much neutral ground between us as I thought he would stand. Then I began. It would be useless for me to try to tell what conflicting emotions expressed themselves upon his face, nor how they grew more and more intense as I proceeded, nor how a fell darkness descended upon his countenance, and he began to gag and swallow, and his hands began to work and twitch as I reeled offline after line, with the strength ebbing out of me and my legs trembling under me. The story of a gallant deed. This indenture made the tenth day of November in the year of our lord, one thousand eight, hundred six and fifty, between Joanna S. E. Gray, and Philip Gray, her husband, of Salem City in the state of Texas of the first part, and O. B. Johnson of the town of Austin, Ditto, Witnesseth, that said party of the first part, for and in consideration of the sum of twenty thousand dollars lawful money of the U.S. of America, to them in hand now paid by said party of the second part, the due receipt whereof is here, by confessed and acknowledged, have granted, bargained, sold, remissed, released, and elined, and conveyed, confirmed, and by these presents do grant and bargain, sell, remiss, eline, release, convey, and confirm unto the said aforesaid party of the second part, and to his heirs and assigns for ever and ever, all that certain piece or parcel of land situate in city of Dunkirk, county of Chautauqua, and likewise furthermore in York State, bounded and described to it as follows herein, namely, beginning at the distance of a hundred, two, and forty feet, north half east, north east by north, east north east, and northerly of the northerly line of Mulligan Street, on the westerly line of Branigan Street, and running thence due northerly on Branigan Street two hundred feet, thence at right angles westerly, north west by west, and west half west, west and by north, north west by west, about—I kind of dodged, and the boot-jack broke the looking-glass. I could have waited to see what became of the other missiles if I had wanted to, but I took no interest in such things. End of Section 115. This is Article 116 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. Section 116. The Galaxy, September 1870. Memoranda by Mark Twain. A Royal Compliment. The latest report about the Spanish Crown is that it will now be offered to Prince Alfonso, the second son of the King of Portugal, who is but five years of age. The Spaniards have hunted through all the nations of Europe for a King. They tried to get a Portuguese in the person of Dom Luiz, who is an old ex-monarch. They tried to get an Italian in the person of Victor Emmanuel's young son, the Duke of Genoa. They tried to get a Spaniard in the person of Espartero, who is an octogenarian. Some of them desired a French bourbon, Montpensier. Some of them a Spanish bourbon, the Prince of Asturias. Some of them an English prince, one of the sons of Queen Victoria. They have just tried to get the German Prince Leopold, but they have thought it better to give him up than take a war along with him. It is a long time since we first suggested to them to try an American ruler. We can offer them a large number of able and experienced sovereigns to pick from. Men skilled in the statesmanship, versed in the science of government, and adepts in all the arts of administration. Men who could wear the crown with dignity and rule the kingdom at a reasonable expense. There is not the least danger of Napoleon threatening them if they take an American sovereign. In fact, we have no doubt he would be pleased to support such a candidature. We are unwilling to mention names, though we have a man in our eye whom we wish they had in theirs—New York Tribune. It would be but an ostentation of modesty to permit such a pointed reference to myself to pass unnoticed. This is the second time that the Tribune, no doubt sincerely looking to the best interests of Spain and the world at large, has done me the great and unusual honor to propose me as a fit person to fill the Spanish throne. Why the Tribune should single me out in this way from the midst of a dozen Americans of higher political prominence is a problem which I cannot solve. Beyond a somewhat intimate knowledge of Spanish history and a profound veneration for its great names and illustrious deeds, I feel that I possess no merit that should peculiarly recommend me to this royal distinction. I cannot deny that Spanish history has always been mother's milk to me. I am proud of every Spanish achievement, from Hernando Cortes' victory at Thermopylae, down to Vasco Nunes de Balboa's discovery of the Atlantic Ocean, and of every splendid Spanish name from Don Quixote and the Duke of Wellington, down to Don Cesar de Bazán, however these little graces of erudition are of small consequence being more showy than serviceable. In case the Spanish scepter is pressed upon me, and the indications unquestionably are that it will be, I shall feel it necessary to have certain things set down and distinctly understood beforehand—for instance, my salary must be paid quarterly in advance. In these unsettled times it will not do to trust. If Isabella had adopted this plan, she would be roosting on her ancestral throne today for the simple reason that her subjects never could have raised three months of a royal salary in advance, and of course they could not have discharged her until they had squared up with her. My salary must be paid in gold—when greenbacks are fresh in a country they are too fluctuating. My salary has got to be put at the ruling market rate. I am not going to cut under on the trade, and they are not going to trail me a long way from home and then practice on my ignorance and play me for a royal North Adams Chinaman by any means. As I understand it, imported kings generally get five millions a year and house rent free. Young George of Greece gets that, as the revenues only yield two millions, he has to take the national note for considerable. But even with things in that sort of shape he is better fixed than he was in Denmark, where he had to eternally stand up because he had no throne to sit on, and had to give bail for his board, because a royal apprentice gets no salary there while he is learning his trade. England is the place for that. Fifty thousand dollars a year Great Britain pays on each royal child that is born, and this is increased from year to year as the child becomes more and more indispensable to his country. Look at Prince Arthur. At first he only got the usual birth bounty, but now that he has got so that he can dance there is simply no telling what wages he gets. I should have to stipulate that the Spanish people wash more and endeavor to get along with less quarantine. Do you know Spain keeps her ports fast locked against foreign trade three-fourths of each year? Because one day she is scared about the cholera, and the next about the plague, and the next the measles, next the hooping cough, the hives, and the rash. But she does not mind Leonine leprosy and elephantiasis any more than a great and enlightened civilization minds freckles. Soap would soon remove her anxious distress about foreign distempers. The reason arable land is so scarce in Spain is because the people squander so much of it on their persons, and then when they die it is improvidently buried with them. I should feel obliged to stipulate that Marshall Serrano be reduced to the rank of constable or even roundsman. He is no longer fit to be city-martial. A man who refused to be king because he was too old and feeble is ill-qualified to help sick people to the station house when they are armed, and their form of delirium tremens is of the exuberant and demonstrative kind. I should also require that a force be sent to chase the late Queen Isabella out of France. Her presence there can work no advantage to Spain, and she ought to be made to move at once, though, poor thing, she has been chased enough here to war for a Spanish woman. I should also require that I am at this moment authoritatively informed that the Tribune did not mean me after all. Very well. I do not care too sense. The Galaxy September 1870. Memoranda by Mark Twain. The Approaching Epidemic. One calamity to which the death of Mr. Dickens dooms this country has not awakened the concern to which its gravity entitles it. We refer to the fact that the nation is to be lectured to death and read to death all next winter by Tom, Dick, and Harry, with poor lamented Dickens for a pretext. All the vagabonds who can spell will afflict the people with readings from Pickwick and Copperfield, and all the insignificance who have been ennobled by the notice of the great novelist or transfigured by his smile will make a marketable commodity of it now, and turn the sacred reminiscence to the practical use of procuring bread and butter. The lecture rostrum will fairly swarm with these fortunates. Already the signs of it are perceptible. Behold how the unclean creatures are wending toward the dead lion and gathering to the feast. Reminiscences of Dickens. A lecture by John Smith, who heard him read eight times. Remembrance of Charles Dickens. A lecture by John Jones, who saw him once in a streetcar and twice in a barbershop. Recollections of Mr. Dickens. A lecture by John Brown, who gained a wide fame by writing deliriously appreciative critiques and rhapsodies upon the great author's public readings, and who shook hands with the great author upon various occasions, and held converse with him several times. Readings from Dickens by John White, who has the great delineator's style and manner perfectly, having attended all his readings in this country, and made these things a study, all was practising each reading before retiring, and while it was hot from the great delineator's lips. Upon this occasion Mr. W. will exhibit the remains of a cigar which he saw Mr. Dickens smoke. This relic is kept in a solid silver box made purposely for it. Sights and Sounds of the Great Novelist. A popular lecture by John Gray, who waited on his table all the time he was at the Grand Hotel New York, and still has in his possession, and will exhibit to the audience, a fragment of the last piece of bread which the lamented author tasted in this country. Heart treasures of precious moments with literature's departed monarch, a lecture by Miss Serena Amelia Traffinia McSpadden, who still wears and will always wear a glove upon the hand made sacred by the clasp of Dickens. Only death shall remove it. Readings from Dickens by Mrs. J. O'Hooligan Murphy, who watched for him. Familiar talks with the great author, a narrative lecture by John Thomas for two weeks his valet in America, and so forth and so on. This isn't half the list. The man who has a toothpick once used by Charles Dickens will have to have a hearing, and the man who once rode in an omnibus with Charles Dickens, and the lady to whom Charles Dickens granted the hospitalities of his umbrella during a storm, and the person who possesses a hole which once belonged in a handkerchief owned by Charles Dickens. Be patient and long-suffering good people, for even this does not fill up the measure of what you must endure next winter. There is no creature in all this land who has had any personal relations with the late Mr. Dickens, however slight or trivial, but will shoulder his way to the rostrum and inflict his testimony upon his helpless countrymen. To some people it is fatal to be noticed by greatness. The Galaxy September 1870, Memoranda by Mark Twain, favors from correspondence. An unknown friend in Cleveland sends me a printed paragraph signed Lucretia, and says, I venture to forward to you the enclosed article taken from a news correspondence in a New Haven paper, feeling confident that for gushing tenderness it has never been equalled, even that touching western production which you printed in the June Galaxy, by way of illustrating what Californian journalists term hogwash, is thin when compared with the unctuous ooze of Lucretia. The Clevelander has a correct judgment, as Lucretia's paragraph here and too appended will show. One lovely morning last week the pearly gates of heaven were left a jar, and white-robed angels earthward came, bearing on their snowy pinions a lovely babe. Silently, to a quiet home nest, where love and peace abide, the angels came and placed the infant softly on a young mother's arm, saying in sweet musical strains, Lady, the Saviour bids you take this child and nurse it for him. The low-toned music died away as the angels passed upward to their bright home, but the baby girl sleeps quietly in her new-found home. We wish thee joy, young parents, in thy happiness. This, if I have been rightly informed, is not the customary method of acquiring offspring, and for all its seeming plausibility it does not look to me to be above suspicion. I have lived many years in this world, and I never knew of an infant being brought to a party by angels or other unauthorized agents, but it made more or less talk in the neighbourhood. It may be, Miss Lucretia, that the angels consider New Haven a more eligible place to raise children in than the realms of eternal day, and are capable of deliberately transferring infants from the one locality to the other. But I shall have to get you to excuse me. I look at it differently. It would be hard to get me to believe such a thing, and I will tell you why. However, never mind, you know yourself that the thing does not stand to reason. Still, if you were present when the babe was brought so silently to that quiet home nest, and placed in that soft manner on the young mother's arm, and if you heard the sweet musical strains which the messengers made, and could not recognise the tune, and feel justified in believing that it, and likewise the messengers themselves, were of super-sublunary origin, I pass. And so I leave the question open. But I will say, and do say, that I have not read anything sweeter than that paragraph for seventy or eighty years. The Galaxy September 1870, Memoranda by Mark Twain Another correspondent writes as follows from New York. Having read your beef contract in the May Galaxy, with a great deal of gratification, I showed it to a friend of mine, who after reading it said he did not believe a word of it, and that he was sure it was nothing but a pack of lies, that it was a libel on the government, and the man who wrote it ought to be prosecuted. I thought this was as good as the contract itself, and knew it would afford you some amusement. Yours truly, S.S.G. That does amuse me, but does not surprise me. It is not possible to write a burlesque so broad that some innocent will not receive it in good faith as being a solemn statement of fact. Two of the lamest that ever were cobbled up by literary shoemakers went the rounds two or three months ago, and excited the wonder and led captive the faith of many unprejudiced people. One was a sickly invitation about a remote valley in Arizona, where all the lost hairpins and such odds and ends as had disappeared from the toilet tables of the world, for a generation, had somehow been mysteriously gathered together, and this poor little production wound up with a prophecy by an Apache squaw to the effect that, by and by, heap muchy shake, big town muchy shake all down. A prophecy which pointed inexorably at San Francisco, and was awfully suggestive of its coming fate. The other shallow invention was one about some mud turtle of a Mississippi diving-bell artist finding an ancient copper canoe, roofed and hermetically sealed, and believed to contain the remains of De Soto. Now it could not have marred but only symmetrically finished, so feeble and imposture is that, to have added that De Soto's name was deciphered upon a tombstone which was found tagging after the sunken canoe by a string. Plenty of people even believed that story of a South American doctor who had discovered a method of chopping off people's heads and putting them on again without discremoting the party of the second part, and who finally got a couple of heads mixed up and transposed, yet did the fitting of them on so neatly that even the experimentees themselves thought everything was right, until each found that his restored head was recalling, believing in and searching after moles, scars and other marks which had never existed upon his body, and at the same time refusing to remember or recognize similar marks which had always existed upon the said body. A bogus proclamation is a legitimate inspiration of genius, but any infant can contrive such things as those I have been speaking of. They really require no more brains than it does to be a practical joker. Perhaps it is not risking too much to say that even the innocuous small reptile they call the village wag is able to build such inventions. Before I end this paragraph and subject I wish to remark that maybe the gentleman who said my beef-contract article was a libel upon the government was right, though I had certainly always thought differently about it. I wrote that article in Washington in November 1867 during Andrew Johnson's reign. It was suggested by Senator Stewart's account of a tedious, tiresome and exasperating search which he had made through the land office and the Treasury Department, among no end of lofty and supercilious clerks, to find out something which he ought to have been able to find out at ten minutes' notice. I mislaid the M.S. at the time, and never found it again until last April. It was not a libel on the government in 1867. Mr. Stewart still lives to testify to that. From Boston a correspondent writes as follows, Please make a memorandum of this drop of comfort which I once heard a child-hating bachelor offer to his nieces at their father's funeral. Dear children, this happens only once in your lifetime, and don't cry, it can't possibly occur again. From Alabama a friend responds to our call for touching obituaries with the following from an old number of the Tuscaloosa Observer. The disease of this sufferer, as per Third Stanza, will probably never attack the author of his obituary, and for good and sufficient reasons. Farewell, thou earthy friend of mine! The messenger was sent. Why do we repine? Why should we grieve and weep in Jesus he fell asleep? Around his bed his friends did stand, nursing with a willing hand. Anxiety great with medical skill, the fever raged he still was ill. His recovery we prayed, but in vain. The disease located on his brain. Death succeeded human skill. Pulse ceased to beat. Death chilled every limb. Death did not distorture his pale face. How short on earth was his Christian race, with tears flowing from the youth and furrowed face he was consigned to his last resting, resting place. The lofty oaks spreading branches shades the grave of his dear sister Addie and sweet little Francis. Three children now, in heaven rest, should parents grieve? Jesus called and blessed. A number of answers to the enigma published in the July Galaxy have been received and filed for future reference. I think one or two have guessed it, but am not certain. I got up the enigma without any difficulty, but the effort to find out the true answer to it has proved to be beyond my strength thus far. After I had drifted into the White House with the flood tide of humanity that had been washing steadily up the street for an hour, I obeyed the orders of the soldier at the door and the policeman within, and banked my hat and umbrella with a colored man, who gave me a piece of brass with a number on it, and said that that thing would reproduce the property at any time of the night. I doubted it, but I was on unknown ground now, and must be content to take a good many chances. Another person told me to drop in with a crowd, and I would come to the President presently. I joined, and we drifted along till we passed a certain point, and then we thinned out to double and single file. It was a right gay scene and a right stirring and lively one, for the whole place was brightly lighted, and all down the great hall, as far as one could see, was a restless and writhing multitude of people. The women, powdered, painted, jeweled, and splendidly upholstered, and many of the men, gilded with the insignia of great naval, military, and ambassadorial rank. It was bewildering. Our long line kept drifting along, and by and by we came in sight of the President and Mrs. Grant. They were standing up shaking hands and trading civilities with our procession. I grew somewhat at home, little by little, and then I began to feel satisfied and contented. I was getting to be perfectly alive with interest by the time it came my turn to talk with the President. I took him by the hand, and looked him in the eye, and said, �Well! I reckon I see you at last, General! I have said as much as a thousand times out in Nevada, that if ever I went home to the States I would just have the private satisfaction of going and saying to you, by word of mouth, that I thought you was considerable of a soldier, anyway. Now you know, out there we—� I turned round and said to the fellow behind me, �Now look here, my good friend, how the nation do you suppose I can talk with any sort of satisfaction with you crowding me this way? I am surprised at your manners!� He was a modest looking creature, he said, �But you see, the whole procession stopped. They�re crowding up on me.� I said, �Some people have got more cheek. Just suggest to the parties behind you to have some respect for the place they are in and not try to shove in on a private conversation. What the General and me are talking about ain�t of the least interest to them� Then I resumed with the President. �Well, well, well, now this is fine. This is what I call something like �day�. Well I should say so, and so this is what you call a presidential reception. I�m free to say that it just lays over anything that ever I saw out in the sage-brush. I have been to Governor Nye�s Injun receptions at Honey Lake and Carson City many and many a time. He�s that�s Senator Nye now. You know him, of course. I never saw a man in all my life that Jim Nye didn�t know. And not only that, but he could tell him where he knew him, and all about him, family included, even if it was forty years ago. Most remarkable man, Jim Nye, remarkable. He can tell a lie with that purity of accent, and that grace of utterance, and that convincing emotion. I turned again and said, �My friend, your conduct surprises me. I have come three thousand miles to have a word with the President of the United States upon subjects with which you are not even remotely connected. And by the living gee, Wilkins, I can�t proceed with any sort of satisfaction on account of your cusset crowding. Will you just please to go a little slow now, and not attract so much attention by your strange conduct? If you had any eyes you could see how the bystanders are staring.� He said, �But I tell you, sir, it�s the people behind. They are just growling and surging and shoving, and I wish I was in Jericho. I do.� I said, �I wish you was myself. You might learn some delicacy of feeling in that ancient seat of civilization, maybe. Drat, if you don�t need it.� And then I resumed with the President. �Yes, sir, I�ve been at receptions before. Plenty of them, old Nye�s Injun receptions, but they weren�t as starchy as this by considerable. No great long strings of high flyers like these galutes here, you know, but old high-flavored wash-shoes and piutes, each one of them as powerful as a rag-factory on fire. Phew! Those were Halcyon days. Yes, indeed, General, and Madam, many and many�s the time, out in the wilds of Nevada, I�ve been�perhaps you had better discontinue your remarks till another time, sir, as the crowd behind you are growing somewhat impatient.� The President said, �Do you hear that?� I said to the fellow behind me. �I suppose you will take that hint anyhow. I tell you he is milder than I would be. If I was President, I would waltz you people out the back door if you came crowding a gentleman this way, that I was holding a private conversation with.� And then I resumed with the President. �I think that hint of yours will start them. I never saw people act so. It is really about all I can do to hold my ground with that mob shoving up behind. But don�t you worry on my account, General. Don�t give yourself any uneasiness about me. I can stand it as long as they can. I�ve been through this kind of a mill before. Why, as I was just saying to you, many and many a time, out in the wilds of Nevada, I have been at Governor Nye�s engine receptions. And between you and me, that old man was a good deal of a governor. Take him all round. I don�t know what for senator he makes. Though I think you�ll admit that him and Bill Stewart and Tom Fitch take a bigger average of brains into that capital up yonder, by a hundred and fifty fold, than any other state in America, according to population. Now that is so. Those three men represent only twenty or twenty-five thousand people, bless you, the least little bit of a trifling ward in the city of New York casts two votes to Nevada�s one. And yet those three men haven�t their superiors in Congress for straight out, Simon-pure brains and ability. And if you could just have been at one of old Nye�s engine receptions and seen those savages, not high flyers like these, you know, but frowsy old bummers, with nothing in the world on in the summertime, but an old battered plug hat and a pair of spectacles, I tell you it was a swell affair, was one of Governor Nye�s early day receptions. Many and many a time I have been to them, and seen him stand up and beam and smile on his children, as he called them in his motherly way, beam on them by the hour out of his splendid eyes, and fascinate them with his handsome face, and comfort them with his persuasive tongue, seen him stand up there and tell them anecdotes and lies, and quote waltz hymns to them, until he just took the war spirit all out of them, and grim chiefs that came two hundred miles to tax the whites for whole wagon loads of blankets and things, or make eternal war if they didn�t get them, he has sent away bewildered with his inspired mendacity, and perfectly satisfied and enriched with an old hoop skirt or two, a lot of patent office reports, and a few sides of condemned army bacon that they would have to chain up to a tree when they camped, or the skippers would walk off with them. I tell you he is a rattling talker. Talk! It�s no name for it. He—well, he is bound to launch straight into close quarters and a heap of trouble hereafter, of course, we all know that, but you can rest satisfied that he will take off his hat and put out his hand and introduce himself to the king of darkness perfectly easy and comfortable, and let on that he has seen him somewhere before, and he will remind him of parties he used to know, and things that slipped out of his memory, and he�ll tell him a thousand things that he can�t help taking an interest in, and every now and then he will just gently mix in an anecdote that will fetch him if there�s any laugh in him. He will indeed, and Jim Nye will chip in and help cross-question the candidates, and he will just hang around and hang around and hang around, getting more and more sociable all the time, and doing this, that, and the other thing in the handiest sort of way, till he has made himself perfectly indispensable. And then the very first thing you know, I wheeled and said, �My friend, your conduct grieves me to the heart. A dozen times at least your unseemly crowding has seriously interfered with the conversation I am holding with the president, and if the thing occurs again I shall take my hat and leave the premises.� �I wish to the mischief you would. Where did you come from, anyway, that you�ve got the unutterable cheek to spread yourself here and keep fifteen hundred people standing waiting half an hour to shake hands with the president?� An officer touched me on the shoulder and said, �Move along, please. You�re annoying the president beyond all patience. You have blocked the procession, and the people behind you are getting furious. Come, move along, please.� �Rather than have trouble,� I moved along. �So I had no time to do more than look back over my shoulder and say, �Yes, sir, and the first thing they would know, Jim Nye would have that place, and the salary doubled. I do reckon he is the handiest creature about making the most of his chances that ever found an all-sufficient substitute for mother�s milk and politics and sin. Now that is the kind of man Old Nye is, and in less than two months he would talk every� But I can�t make you hear the rest, General, without hollering too loud. The Galaxy October 1870 Memoranda by Mark Twain Goldsmith�s Friend Abroad Again Note �No experience is set down in the following letters which had to be invented. Fancy is not needed to give variety to the history of a Chinaman sojourn in America. Plain fact is amply sufficient. Dear Ching Fu, it is all settled, and I am to leave my oppressed and overburdened native land, and cross the sea to that noble realm where all are free and all equal, and none reviled or abused, America! America, whose precious privilege it is to call herself the land of the free and the home of the brave, we and all that are about us here, look over the waves longingly, contrasting the privations of this our birthplace with the opulent comfort of that happy refuge. We know how America has welcomed the Germans and the Frenchmen, and the stricken and sorrowing Irish, and we know how she has given them bread and work and liberty, and how grateful they are. And we know that America stands ready to welcome all other oppressed peoples, and offer her abundance to all that come, without asking what their nationality is, or their creed or color. And without being told it, we know that the foreign sufferers she has rescued from oppression and starvation are the most eager of her children to welcome us, because, having suffered themselves, they know what suffering is, and having been generously suckered, they long to be generous to other unfortunates, and thus show that magnanimity is not wasted upon them. Ah, sung he! Let her, too, at sea, eighteen hundred blank. Dear Ching Fu, we are far away at sea now, on our way to the beautiful land of the free and home of the brave. We shall soon be where all men are alike, and where sorrow is not known. The good American, who hired me to go to his country, is to pay me twelve dollars a month, which is immense wage, as you know, twenty times as much as one gets in China. My passage in the ship is a very large sum. Indeed, it is a fortune, and this I must pay myself eventually, but I am allowed ample time to make it good to my employer in he advancing it now. For a mere form I have turned over my wife, my boy, and my two daughters to my employer's partner for security for the payment of the ship fare. But my employer says they are in no danger of being sold, for he knows I will be faithful to him, and that is the main security. I thought I would have twelve dollars to begin life within America, but the American consul took two of them for making a certificate that I was shipped on the steamer. He has no right to do more than charge the ship two dollars for one certificate for the ship, with the number of her Chinese passengers set down in it, but he chooses to force a certificate upon each and every China man and put the two dollars in his pocket. As one thousand three hundred of my countrymen are in this vessel, the consul received two thousand six hundred dollars for the certificates. My employer tells me that the government at Washington know of this fraud, and are so bitterly opposed to the existence of such a wrong that they tried hard to have the extorsion—the fee, I mean—legalized by the last Congress. Note, Pacific and Mediterranean steamship bills. Ed. Mem. But as the bill did not pass, the consul will have to take the fee dishonestly until next Congress makes it legitimate. It is a great and good and noble country, and hates all forms of vice and chicanery. We are in that part of the vessel always reserved for my countrymen. It is called the Steerage. It is kept for us, my employer says, because it is not subject to changes of temperature and dangerous drafts of air. It is only another instance of the loving unselfishness of the Americans for all unfortunate foreigners. The Steerage is a little crowded and rather warm and close, but no doubt it is best for us that it should be so. Yesterday our people got too quarreling among themselves, and the Captain turned a volume of hot steam upon a mass of them, and scalded eighty or ninety of them more or less severely. Flakes and ribbons of skin came off some of them. There was wild shrieking and struggling while the vapor enveloped the great throngs, and so some who were not scalded got trampled upon and hurt. We do not complain, for my employer says this is the usual way of quieting disturbances on board the ship, and that it is done in the cabins among the Americans every day or two. Congratulate me, Ching Fu. In ten days more I shall step upon the shore of America and be received by her great-hearted people, and I shall straighten myself up and feel that I am a free man among free men. Asunghi. Letter III. San Francisco, 1800 Blank. Dear Ching Fu, I stepped ashore jubilant. I wanted to dance, shout, sing, worship the generous land of the free and home of the brave, but as I walked from the gang-plank a man in a grey uniform, note, policeman, kicked me violently behind and told me to look out, so my employer translated it. As I turned, another officer of the same kind struck me with a short club and also instructed me to look out. I was about to take hold of my end of the pole, which had mine and Hongwo's basket and things suspended from it, when a third officer hit me with his club to signify that I was to drop it, and then kicked me to signify that he was satisfied with my promptness. Another person came now, and searched all through our basket and bundles, emptying everything out on the dirty wharf. Then this person and another searched us all over. They found a little package of opium sewed into the artificial part of Hongwo's queue, and they took that, and also they made him prisoner and handed him over to an officer who marched him away. They took his luggage too, because of his crime, and as our luggage was so mixed together, that they could not tell mine from his, they took it all. When I offered to help divide it, they kicked me and desired me to look out. Having now no baggage and no companion, I told my employer that if he was willing I would walk about a little and see the city and the people until he needed me. I did not like to seem disappointed with my reception in the good land of refuge for the oppressed, and so I looked and spoke as cheerily as I could. But he said, wait a minute. I must be vaccinated to prevent my taking the smallpox. I smiled and said I had already had the smallpox, as he could see by the marks, and so I need not wait to be vaccinated, as he called it. But he said it was the law, and I must be vaccinated anyhow. The doctor would never let me pass, for the law obliged him to vaccinate all Chinamen and charge them ten dollars apiece for it, and I might be sure that no doctor who would be the servant of that law would let Afis slip through his fingers to accommodate any absurd fool who had seen fit to have the disease in some other country. And presently the doctor came and did his work and took my last penny, my ten dollars, which were the hard savings of nearly a year and a half of labour and privation. Ah, if the law-makers had only known there were plenty of doctors in the city glad of a chance to vaccinate people for a dollar or two, they would never have put the price up so high against a poor, friendless Irish or Italian or Chinese pauper fleeing to the good land to escape hunger and hard times. Ah, Song He. Letter IV. San Francisco, 1800, Blank. Dear Ching Fu, I have been here about a month now, and I am learning a little of the language every day. My employer was disappointed in the matter of hiring us out to service on the plantations in the far eastern portion of this continent. His enterprise was a failure, and so he set us all free, merely taking measures to secure to himself the repayment of the passage money which he paid for us. We are to make this good to him out of the first monies we earn here. He says it is sixty dollars apiece. We were thus set free about two weeks after we reached here. We had been massed together in some small houses up to that time, waiting. I walked forth to seek my fortune. I was to begin life a stranger in a strange land, without a friend or a penny, or any clothes but those I had on my back. I had not any advantage on my side in the world, not one, except good health, and the lack of any necessity to waste any time or anxiety on the watching of my baggage. No, I forget. I reflected that I had one prodigious advantage over paupers in other lands. I was in America. I was in the heaven-provided refuge of the oppressed and the forsaken. Just as that comforting thought passed through my mind, some young men set a fierce dog on me. I tried to defend myself, but could do nothing. I retreated to the recess of a closed doorway, and there the dog had me at his mercy, flying at my throat and face or any part of my body that presented itself. I shrieked for help, but the young men only jeered and laughed. Two men in gray uniforms, policemen is their official title, looked on for a minute, and then walked leisurely away. But a man stopped them and brought them back and told them it was a shame to leave me in such distress. Then the two policemen beat off the dog with small clubs, and a comfort it was to be rid of him, though I was just rags and blood from head to foot. The man who brought the policemen asked the young men why they abused me in that way, and they said they didn't want any of his meddling, and they said to him, This ching devil comes till America to take the bread out of decent intelligent white men's mouths, and when they try to defend their rights there's a dail of fuss made about it. They began to threaten my benefactor, and as he saw no friendliness in the faces that had gathered meanwhile he went on his way. He got many a curse when he was gone. The policemen now told me I was under arrest and must go with them. I asked one of them what wrong I had done to anyone that I should be arrested, and he only struck me with his club and ordered me to hold my yop. With a jeering crowd of street-boys and loafers at my heels I was taken up an alley and into a stone-paved dungeon which had large cells all down one side of it with iron gates to them. I stood up by a desk while a man behind it wrote down certain things about me on a slate. One of my captors said, Enter a charge against this Chinaman of being disorderly and disturbing the peace. I attempted to say a word, but he said, Silence! Now you had better go slow, my good fellow. This is two or three times you've tried to get off some of your damned insolence. Lip won't do here. You've got to simmer down, and if you don't take to it passable we'll see if we can't make you. That's your name! Ah, Sung Hee. Alias what? I said I did not understand, and he said what he wanted was my true name, for he guessed I picked up this one since I stole my last chickens. They all laughed loudly at that. Then they searched me, they found nothing, of course. They seemed very angry and asked who I supposed would go my bail or pay my fine. When they explained these things to me I said I had done nobody any harm, and why should I need to have bail or pay a fine? Both of them kicked me and warned me that I would find it to my advantage to try and be as civil as convenient. I protested that I had not meant anything disrespectful. Then one of them took me to one side and said, Now look here, Johnny, it's no use you playing softly with us. We main business, you know, and the sooner you put up on the scent of a V, the easier you'll save yourself from a dial of trouble. You can't get out of this for any less. Who's your friends? I told him I had not a single friend in all of the land of America, and that I was far from home and help and very poor, and I begged him to let me go. He gathered the slack of my blouse collar in his grip and jerked and shoved and hauled at me across the dungeon, and then, unlocking an iron cell gate, thrust me in with a kick and said, Rot there, you furren spawn, till you learn that there's no room in America for the likes of you or your nation. A Song He End of Section 117 This is Section 118 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 118, The Galaxy, October 1870, Part II The Galaxy, October 1870, Memoranda, by Mark Twain. Curious Relic for Sale For sale, for the benefit of the fund for the relief of the widows and orphans of deceased firemen, a curious ancient bedwind pipe procured at the city of Endor in Palestine, and believed to have once belonged to the justly renowned Witch of Endor. Parties desiring to examine the singular relic with a view to purchasing can do so by calling upon Daniel S. 119 and 121 William Street, New York. As per advertisement in the Herald, A curious old relic indeed, as I had a good personal right to know, in a single instant of time, a long drawn panorama of sights and scenes in the Holy Land flashed through my memory, town and grove, desert, camp, and caravan clattering after each other and disappearing, leaving me with a little of the surprised and dizzy feeling which I have experienced at sundry times when a long express train has overtaken me at some quiet curve and gone whizzing car by car around the corner and out of sight. In that prolific instant I saw again all the country from the sea of Galilee and Nazareth clear to Jerusalem, and thence over the hills of Judea and through the veil of Charon to Jopa down by the ocean. Leaving out unimportant stretches of country and details of incident, I saw and experienced the following described matters and things. Immediately three years fell away from my age, and a vanished time was restored to me. September 1867. It was a flaming Oriental day. This one, that had come up out of the past and brought along its actors, its stage properties and scenic effects, and our party had just ridden through the squalid hive of human vermin which still holds the ancient Biblical name of Endor. I was bringing up the rear on my grave, four-dollar steed, who was about beginning to compose himself for his usual new nap. My, only fifteen minutes before, how the black, mangy, nine-tenths naked, ten-tenths filthy, ignorant, bigoted, besotted, hungry, lazy, malignant, screeching, crowding, struggling, wailing, begging, cursing, hateful spawn of the original which had swarmed out of the caves and the rocks and the holes and crevices in the earth, and blocked our horse's way, besieged us, threw themselves in the animal's path, clung to their mains, saddle furniture and tails, asking, besieging, demanding, buksizh, buksizh, buksizh! We had reigned small copper Turkish coins among them as fugitives fling coats and hats to pursuing wolves, and then had spurred our way through as they stopped to scramble for the largesse. I was fervently thankful when we had gotten well up on the desolate hillside and outstripped them and left them jawing and gesticulating in the rear. What a tempest had seemingly gone roaring and crashing by me and left its dull thunders pulsing in my ears! I was in the rear, as I was saying. Our Pacmules and Arabs were far ahead, and Dan, Jack, Moult, Davis, Denny, Church, and Birch, these names will do as well as any to represent the boys, were following close after them. As my horse nodded to rest, I heard a sort of panting behind me and turned and saw that a tawny youth from the village had overtaken me, a true remnant and representative of his ancestress the witch. A galvanized scurvy wrought into the human shape and garnished with ophthalmia and leprous scars, an airy creature with an invisible shirt front that reached below the pit of his stomach and no other clothing to speak of except a tobacco pouch, an ammunition pocket, and a venerable gun, which was long enough to club any game with that came within shooting distance, but far from efficient as an article of dress. I thought to myself, now this disease with a human heart in it is going to shoot me. I smiled in derision at the idea of a Bedouin daring to touch off his great grandfather's rusty gun and getting his head blown off for his pains. But then it occurred to me, in simple schoolboy language, suppose he should take deliberate aim and haul off and fetch me with the butt end of it. There was wisdom in that view of it, and I stopped to parley. I found he was only a friendly villain who wanted a trifle of buck sheesh, and after begging what he could get in that way was perfectly willing to trade off everything he had for a more. I believe he would have parted with his last shirt for buck sheesh if he had had one. He was smoking the humblest pipe I ever saw. A dingy, funnel-shaped red clay thing, streaked and grime with oil and years of tobacco, and with all the different kinds of dirt there are, and thirty percent of them peculiar and indigenous to endor and perdition. And rank? I never smelt anything like it. It withered a cactus that stood lifting its prickly hands aloft beside the trail. It even woke up my horse. I said, I would take that. It cost me a frank, a Russian co-peck, a brass button, and a slate pencil. And my spendthrift lavishness so one upon the son of the desert that he passed over his pouch of most unspeakably villainous tobacco to me as a free gift. What a pipe it was, to be sure. It had a rude brass wire cover to it, and a little coarse iron chain suspended from the bowl, with an iron splinter attached to loosen up the tobacco and pick your teeth with. The stem looked like the half of a slender walking-stick with a bark on. I felt that this pipe had belonged to the original witch of endor as soon as I saw it, and as soon as I smelt it I knew it. Moreover, I asked the Arab cub in good English, if it was not so, and he answered in good Arabic that it was. I woke up my horse and went my way, smoking. And presently I said to myself reflectively, if there is anything that could make a man deliberately assault a dying cripple, I reckon maybe an unexpected whiff from this pipe would do it. I smoked along till I found I was beginning to lie, and project murder, and steal my own things out of one pocket and hide them in another. And then I put up my treasure, took off my spurs, and put them under my horse's tail, and shortly came tearing through our caravan like a hurricane. From that time forward, going to Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, and the Jordan, Bethany, Bethlehem, and everywhere, I loathed contentedly in the rear, and enjoyed my infamous pipe, and reveled in imaginary villainy. But at the end of two weeks we turned our faces toward the sea, and journeyed over the Judean hills, and threw rocky defiles and among the seams that Samson knew in his youth, and by and by we touched level ground just at night, and trotted off cheerily over the plain of Charon. It was perfectly jolly for three hours, and we whites crowded along together, close after the chief Arab mule tear, all the pack animals and the other Arabs were miles in the rear, and we laughed and chatted, and argued hotly about Samson, and whether suicide was a sin or not, since Paul speaks of Samson distinctly as being saved, and in heaven. But by and by the night air, and the duskiness, and the weariness of eight hours in the saddle, began to tell, and conversation flagged, and finally died out utterly. The squeaking of the saddles grew very distinct. Occasionally somebody sighed, or started to homotune and gave it up. Now and then a horse sneezed. These things only emphasized the solemnity and the stillness. Everybody got so listless that for once I and my dreamer found ourselves in the lead. It was a glad, new sensation, and I longed to keep the place for evermore. Every little stir in the dingy cavalcade behind made me nervous. Davis and I were riding side by side, right after the Arab. About eleven o'clock it had become really chilly, and the dozing boys roused up and began to inquire how far it was to ramla yet, and to demand that the Arab hurry long faster. I gave it up, then, and my heart sank within me, because, of course, they would come up to scold the Arab. I knew I had to take the rear again. In my sorrow I unconsciously took to my pipe my only comfort. As I touched the match to it the whole company came lumbering up and crowding my horse's rump and flanks. A whiff of smoke drifted back over my shoulder, and the suffering Moses, whew, by George who opened that graveyard! Boys, that Arab's been swallowing something dead! Right away there was a gap behind us. Whiff after whiff sailed eerily back, and each one widened the breach. Within fifteen seconds the barking and gasping and sneezing and coughing of the boys and their angry abuse of the Arab guide had dwindled to a murmur, and Davis and I were alone with the leader. Davis did not know what the matter was, and don't to this day. Occasionally he caught a faint film of the smoke and fell to scolding at the Arab, and wondering how long he had been decaying in that way. Our boys kept on dropping back further and further till at last they were only in hearing, not in sight. And every time they started gingerly forward to reconnoitre, or shoot the Arab as they proposed to do, I let them get within good fair range of my relic. She would carry seventy yards with wonderful precision, and then wafted a whiff among them that sent them gasping and strangling to the rear again. I kept my gun well charged and ready, and twice within the hour I decoyed the boys right up to my horse's tail, and then with one malaria blast emptied the saddles almost. I never heard an Arab abuse so in my life. He really owed his preservation to me, because for one entire hour I stood between him and certain death. The boys would have killed him if they could have got by me. By and by when the company were far in the rear I put away my pipe. I was getting fearfully dry and crisp about the gills, and rather blown with good diligent work, and spurred my animated trance up alongside the Arab and stopped him and asked for water. He unslung his little gourd-shaped earthenware jug, and I put it under my mustache and took a long, glorious, satisfying draught. I was going to scour the mouth of the jug a little, but I saw that I had brought the whole train together once more by my delay, and that they were all anxious to drink, too, and would have been long ago if the Arab had not pretended that he was out of water. So I hastened to pass the vessel to Davis. He took a mouthful and never said a word, but climbed off his horse and lay down calmly in the road. I felt sorry for Davis. It was too late now, though, and Dan was drinking. Dan got down, too, and hunted for a soft place. I thought I heard Dan say, that Arabs friends ought to keep him in the alcohol or else take him out and bury him somewhere. All the boys took a drink and climbed down. It is not well to go into further particulars. Let us draw the curtain upon this act. Well, now, to think that after three changing years I should hear from that curious old relic again, and see Dan advertising it for sale for the benefit of a benevolent object. Dan is not treating that present right. I gave that pipe to him for a keepsake. However, he probably finds that it keeps away custom and interferes with business. It is the most convincing inanimate object in all this part of the world, perhaps. Dan and I were roommates in all that long Quaker City voyage, and whenever I desired to have a little season of privacy, I used to fire up on that pipe and persuade Dan to go out, and he seldom waited to change his clothes, either. In about a quarter or from that to three-quarters of a minute he would be propping up the smokestack on the upper deck and cursing. I wonder how the faithful old relic is going to sell. End of Section 118 This is Section 119 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This is the most labor-vox recordings in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 119. The Galaxy, October 1870. Part 3. The Galaxy, October 1870. Memoranda, by Mark Twain. Aware of the interest we take in obituaries and obituary poetry, unknown friends send specimens from many states of the Union, but they are nearly all marred by one glaring defect. They are not bad enough to be good. No, they drivel along on one dull level of mediocrity, and, like Mr. Brick Pomeroy's Saturday Night sentiment, are simply dreary and humiliating, instead of wholesomely exercable and exasperating. A Boston correspondent writes, the author of Johnny Skae's item will doubtless find merit in the enclosed atrocity. I cut it from a provincial paper where it appeared in perfect seriousness as a touching tribute to departed worth. The atrocity, referred to half a column of doggerel, comes under the customary verdict, not superhumanly bad enough to be good, but nothing in literature can surpass the eloquent paragraph which introduces it, these Lines. Written on the death, sudden and untimely death, of Cornelius Kickham, son of John Kickham, Suri West, and nephew of E. Kickham Esquire, of the same place, on the twenty-fifth alt, at the age of nineteen years. In the humane attempt of rescuing three small children in a cart and a runaway horse, came in contact with the shaft, which after extreme suffering for two days, caused his death, during which time he bore with heroic resignation to the divine will. May he rest in peace. Comment here would be sacrilege. Johnny Skae's item, referred to above, was written in San Francisco by the editor of this memoranda, six or seven years ago, to burlesque a painfully incoherent style of local itemizing which prevailed in the papers there at that day. The above Lines were absolutely written and printed in a provincial paper in all seriousness just as copied above, but we will append Johnny Skae's item and leave it to the reader to say if he can shut his eyes and tell which is the burlesque and which isn't. Last evening, about six o'clock, as Mr. William Shiler, an old and respectable citizen of South Park, was leaving his residence to go downtown, as has been his usual custom for many years, with the exception only of a short interval in the spring of 1850, during which he was confined to his bed by injuries received in attempting to stop a runaway horse by thoughtlessly placing himself directly in its wake and throwing up his hands and shouting, which, if he had done so even a single moment sooner, must inevitably have frightened the animal still more instead of checking its speed, although disastrous enough to himself as it was, and rendered more melancholy and distressing by some reason of the presence of his wife's mother, who was there and saw the sad occurrence, notwithstanding it is at least likely, though not necessarily so, that she should be reconnoitering in another direction when incidents occur, not being vivacious and on the lookout as a general thing, but even the reverse, as her own mother is said to have stated, who is no more, but died in the full hope of a glorious resurrection, upwards of three years ago, aged eighty-six, being a Christian woman and without guile, as it were, or property, in consequence of the fire of 1849, which destroyed every solitary thing she had in the world. But such is life. Let us all take warning by this solemn occurrence, and let us endeavour so to conduct ourselves, that when we come to die we can do it. Let us place our hands upon our hearts and say with earnestness and sincerity that from this day forth we will beware of the intoxicating bowl. From Cambridge, New York, comes the following. In your August favors from correspondence occurs an account of the rather unique advent of a baby into New Haven. After reading Lucretia's paragraph, I remembered I had seen nearly the same thing before, only in poetry. As you may not have seen it, I forwarded, together with a rhyming reply. The Gates ajar. On the occasion of the birth of his first child the poet writes, One night, as old St. Peter slept, he left the door of Heaven ajar, when through a little angel crept and came down with a falling star. One summer, as the blessed beams of mourn approached, my blushing bride awakened from some pleasing dreams and found that angel by her side. God grant but this, I ask no more, that when he leaves this world of sin he'll wing his way to that bright shore and find the door of Heaven again, whereupon St. Peter, not liking this imputation of carelessness, thus, by a friend, replies, On the part of the defence. For eighteen hundred years and more I've kept my door securely tiled. There has no little angel strayed, no one been missing all the while. I did not sleep as you supposed, nor leave the door of Heaven ajar, nor has a little angel strayed nor gone down with a falling star. Go ask that blushing bride and see if she don't frankly own and say that when she found that angel babe she found it in the good old way. God grant but this, I ask no more, that should your number still enlarge you will not do as here to fore and lay it to old Peter's charge. From Missouri a friend furnished the following information upon a matter which has probably suggested an inquiry in more than one man's mind. A venerable and greatly esteemed and respected old patriarch, late of this vicinity, divulged to me on his deathbed the origin of a certain popular phrase or figure of speech. He said it came about in this wise. A gentleman was blown up on a Mississippi steamboat, and he went up in the air about four or four and a half miles, and then, just before parting into a great variety of fragments, he remarked to a neighbor who was sailing past on a lower level. Say, friend, how is this for high? From Albany, at the last moment, comes a screed from an old Pennsylvania paper which is the gem of all obituary poetry unearthed thus far. It is reserved for the present. It will not spoil. Some other favors have been received from correspondence in various states and are reserved for a future number of the magazine.