 This is Section 127 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. General Doolap G. Lovell, Minister of Hong-Woe, has resigned and returned to this country. His successor will not be appointed at present. Some of General Lovell's friends are nominating him for the vacant English mission. I'd him in all the papers. What a jar it gave me! For as I am a true man, I thought it meant my old fellow soldier in the Nevada Militia, General Dunlap G. Lovell. And so I read it again and again, and once more, and repeatedly, and with ever augmenting astonishment. But at last I grew calmer and began to scrutinize the internal evidences of this item. They were equal, part for, and part against, my Lovell. For instance, my Lovell, who always thought gunpowder tea was made from ordinary gunpowder boiled instead of burned—and will still think so until he sees this paragraph—is guileless enough to go on wearing a military title gained as brigadier in a militia which never saw service even in a Fourth of July procession, and consider it a distinction far from ridiculous. Consequently, this general is as likely to be as general as another's. But then the remaining point of evidence is against us, namely that this minister Lovell has resigned. So it is not my Lovell after all, for my Lovell would not have resigned. No, my Lovell is a man who can always be relied upon, a man who would be faithful to the death. If entrusted with an office, he would cling to that office until it was abolished. I am acquainted with my Lovell. The distinct evidence is against my Lovell, and yet that lifting of a serene, unblinking gaze aloft to the awful sublimity of St. James, from the remote insignificance of the U.S. embassage to Hong-Wou, with its candle-box for an official desk, and boiled beans three times a day for subsistence, and peanuts on Sunday for grandeur, is so precisely like my Lovell. But, with sorrow, I own that this general Lovell is do-lap G, while mine is only dunlap G. Consequently, they are not the same, far from it. Yet it is possible that a kind word for me may attract attention and sympathy to my poor Lovell, and thus help a deserving man to fortune. So let me go on. General P. Edward O'Connor has done the highest and faithfulest and best military service in Mormondom that ever has been rendered there for our country. For about seven years or such a matter, he has made both Brigham and the Indians reasonably civil and polite. Well, however, I see by the papers that General O'Connor has not been appointed Governor of Utah as the Pacific Coast desired. I cannot think how I came to wander off to General O'Connor, for he has nothing whatever to do with my General Lovell. Therefore I will drop him and not digress again. I now resume. When the nation rose, years ago, dunlap G. Lovell of Virginia, Nevada, Territory, flew to arms, and was created a Brigadier General of the Territorial Militia, and with his hand on his heart he swore an oath that he never would budge from his post till the enemy came. Colonel O'Connor flew to arms, and put down the Indians and the Mormons, and kept them down for years, and fought his gallant way up through bullets and blood to his Brigadier Generalship. But this is not a biography of General O'Connor. Hang General O'Connor. It is General Lovell I desire to speak of. General Lovell, how imposing he looked in his uniform. He was a very exceedingly microscopic operator in wild-cat silver-mining stocks, and so he could not wear it every day. But then he was always ready when a firearm was to be buried or a relative hung. And he did look really beautiful, any of the old citizens will say that. It was a fine sight when all the militia turned out at once. The Territorial population was some twenty thousand then, and the Territorial Militia numbered one hundred and thirty-nine persons, including regimental officers, three major and eleven Brigadier Generals. General Lovell was the eleventh. I cannot now call to mind distinctly the several engagements General Lovell was in, but I remember the following on account of their peculiar prominence. When Thompson Billings, the Desperados, captured, Lovell's brigade guarded the front door of the jail that night. It was well for Billings that he left by the back door, for it was always thought that if he had come out the front way he would have been shot. At the great sanitary ball in Carson City General Lovell was present in his uniform. When the legislature met in 1863 General Lovell and Brigade were promptly on duty, either to do honour to them or protect the public, I have forgotten which. He was present in his uniform with his men to guard the exit of the legislature of 1862 and let the members retire in peace with the surplus steel pens and stationery. This was the legislature that confirmed his appointment as Brigadier General. It also elected as enrolling clerk of its House of Representatives a militia chieftain by the name of Captain G. Murphy, who could not write. This was a misunderstanding, however, rather than a blunder, for the legislature of 1862 did not know it was necessary he should know how to write. When the Governor delivered his farewell address General Lovell and Brigade were there and never gave way an inch till it was done. General Lovell was in several other engagements, but I cannot call them to mind now. By and by the people began to feel that General Lovell's military services ought to be rewarded. So someone suggested that he run as an independent candidate for U.S. Senator, for Nevada was become a new fledged state by this time. Modest as this old soldier was, backward as he was, naturally diffident as he was, he said he would do it and he did. It was commonly reported, instead fastly believed by everybody, that he spent the bulk of his fortune, which was fifteen or twenty thousand dollars, in putting up a legislative delegation from Virginia City which should fight under his senatorial banner. And yet that man was not elected! I not only stated, but I swear to it, why, unless my memory has gone entirely crazy, that polluted legislature never even mentioned his name. What was an old public servant to do after such treatment? Shake the dust from his sandals and leave the state to its self-invited decay and ruin. That was the course to pursue, and that was the only one he did pursue. He knew a land where worth is always recognized, a city where the nation's faithful vassal cannot know the cold hand of neglect. Washington. He went there in Andrew Johnson's time. He probably got Captain John Nye to use his influence for him. Ha ha! What do we, behold, grateful nation instantly do? We see it send General O'Connor—no, I mean General Lovell—to represent us as resident minister at Oriental Hong Wo. No, no, no, I have got it all wrong again. It is not my done lap, but somebody's do lap that was sent. But might it not? No, it cannot be, and is not my Lovell whose friends are pointing him towards Auguste St. James. The first syllable of the name is so different, but my Lovell would do very well indeed for that place. I am aware that he knows no French and is not certain of his English, but then our foreign representatives seldom know the language of diplomacy anyhow. I do not know that he has any education to speak of. I am confident he has not. But cannot a man learn? I am not even certain that he knows enough to come in when it rains. But I say it again, and repeat, and reiterate it. Cannot a man learn? We need a person at such a lordly court as the British, who is well bred, and gentlemanly in his appearance and address, a man accustomed to the dignities and proprieties of the highest and best society. There is not a barkeeper, a desperado, an editor, or an Indian in Nevada, but will speak in terms of respect of done lap G. Lovell, and say that he always worthily bore himself among the very cream of society in that critical and exacting community. We want no mere unconsidered mister at the court of St. James. We want a person with a title to his name, a general, nothing less. My general would answer. He could tell those old field-martials from India and Abyssinia something about soldier life, which would be new to them perhaps. But above all, we want a great-brained, profound diplomatic genius at the court of St. James, a man surcharged with experience likewise. Now, if this deep, this bottomless, Hong-Woo-ian diplomat were only done lap G. Lovell, but no, it is do-lap. But my general would be a great card for us in England, and I wish we could have him. Contemplate him in Motley's place. Think of my dainty lily-puttion standing in Robb Dignag Motley's shoes and peeping out smartly over the insta—the great powers. It would be a thing to bless and honor a heedful Providence for this consummation. Who are the friends who desire the appointment of that other Lovell, I wonder? If that Lovell were my Lovell, I should think the term Friends referred to Captain John Nye of the lobby, Washington, a man whom I love to call the wheels of government, because if you could see him backing members up into corners by the buttonhole and influencing them in favor of this, that, and the other, Lovell whom the back settlements have cast up undigested, you would believe, as I do, that our government could not proceed without him. But, sorrow to me, this Lovell is do-lap, and mine is totally another man, done lap. Let it go. I care not. And yet my heart knows I would worship that President who should show my fading eyes and failing life, the spectacle of General Dunlap G. Lovell, envoy extraordinary and minister plenopotentiary to the court of St. James, and Captain John Nye of the lobby, Washington, secretary of legation. I would be content to die, then, entirely content. And so with loving zeal I add my name to the list of General Lovell's friends, who are nominating him for the vacant English mission. The Galaxy February 1871. Memoranda by Mark Twain. A Book Review. By R. B. W. In his preface to this volume, an inquiry into the origin, development, and transmission of the games of childhood in all ages and of every nation, critical, analytical, and historical, by Thomas Henry Huxley, L. L. D. F. R. S., Author's Edition, New York, Shelton & Brothers, 1 Volume, 12 Moe, Pages 498. Professor Huxley says, To the historiographer the most interesting period of research is that where history proper loses itself in the vague mist of mythologic shadow. The childhood of nations has always been a favorite subject of investigation. To separate the type from the fact, the symbol from the thing symbolized, the ideal from the real, to regroup the disintegrated fragments and from the materials thus gathered to construct a firm and trustworthy superstructure on which the mind may rest in tranquil confidence. This has ever been and ever will be one of the most fascinating pursuits to which the cultured intellect can be devoted. If then we seek the childhood of nations as a favorite field for philosophic speculation, may we not with equal propriety turn to the semper-existent nation of children, seek out the origin of their traditions, trace the development of their customs, and interpret by the light of history and reason their orally transmitted lore. Herein is a new field for speculative research, hence may be derived results the most far-reached prescience could not forecast, and even childhood's games may thus attain an eminence in the realms of thought undreamt of by pure-blind metaphysicians of the dormant ages. This extract shows sufficiently the spirit in which the author of vestiges of the creation has undertaken a work which, to many, might seem scarcely worthy the time and labor evidently bestowed upon it, and the high position in the scientific world its author enjoys. It is to be regretted that unfortunate domestic relations should ever affect the social status of a great and learned writer, but this affords no just ground for disputing the logical results of the inductive system. Following out the idea of similarity between the childhood of nations and the nationality of childhood, Professor Huxley says, page 76, "'Disraeli' in his Amenities of Literature has shown conclusively that the religion of Druidism was one only possible to a people not yet emerge from a state of mental childhood. The British Druids constituted a sacred and secret society, religious, political, literary, and military. In the rude mechanism of society in a state of pupillage the first elements of government, however poorile, were the levers to lift and sustain the barbaric mind. Invested with all privileges and immunities amid that transient omnipotence which man in his first feeble condition can confer, the wild children of society crouched together before those illusions which superstition so easily forges. Whatever was taught was forbidden to be written, and not only their doctrines and their sciences were veiled in sacred obscurity, but the laws which they made, and the traditions of their mythology, were oral. The Druids were the common fathers of the British youth, for they were their sole educators, and for the most part progenitors. Could the parallel be more exact?' Descending from the general to the particular consideration of this subject, Professor Huxley traces objectively the origin of many of the childish games known in this country, such as marbles, ring-taw, leapfrog, etc., and others which have been practiced from time immemorial by the youth of every climb in age. Speaking of the game of oats, peas, beans, and barlio, which is found to have originated in a mystic symbolism similar in some respects to the dances of the so-called shakers of today, he says, The allegory, constantly presented in the religious chants of the Aryans, reveals a freshness which renders their interpretation easy. It is sufficient to read the Rig Vida to be convinced that naturalism, that is to say the study of physical nature, constituted the foundation of the worship of those pastoral peoples who then occupied the Punjab, and later emigrated to the northerly plains of Hindustan. It is the direct product of that poetical and anthropomorphic spirit which personifies all objects, all phenomena, and is the unvarying form imagination takes at its awakening. The lengthy extracts already made render it impossible even to allude to many of the most entertaining topics of this exhaustive work. But one of the most curious of the traditions exhumed from the buried records of the past is that which relates to the game of hopscotch. The professor traces clearly the practice of this pastime as far back as the invention of the Morris and broadsword dances of the Scottish Klansmen in the early part of the eleventh century, and suggests, rather than positively ascribes, its origin to the boyish imitation of their parents' war-like sports by the youthful Bruce's and Douglas's of the period. He gives, however, for what it is worth, a quaint tradition which carries the origin of this game back almost to the Garden of Eden, back in fact to Cain and Abel in person. To economize space I leave out the tradition and also the arguments which the reviewer offers in support of its claims to probability. There is a superficial objection which may be made to the reception of this theory of the origin of hopscotch, and it is obvious. To have used these words Cain and Abel must have spoken English. Granted. But the explanation is really very simple. Adam was an Aryan. The Hebrews, it will be remembered, do not appear among the brotherhood of nations until the Abrahamic Era. In this respect the Mosaic Cosmogeny is fully sustained by Sanskrit writers as well as by the Chinese philosopher Confucius, who flourished 346 BC. And necessarily Cain and Abel were Aryans also. Now the roots of all languages are found in the Aryan and Semitic tongues. Professor Huxley gives numerous instances, most of which are well known to philologists, of radical identity between words in use in several of the modern languages at the present day and those of the most primitive nations of the globe. The reader familiar with the Semitic languages will have no difficulty in following the author in his philological demonstration of the innate possibility that Cain and Abel may have given this name to this game. That is, that the sound and the idea intended were the same, although it is unnecessary to say the spelling may have differed. But this is a minor point. The most interesting demonstration, however, is to be found in the algebraic formula by which Professor Huxley proves a similar conclusion. It shall be our final extract, but we cannot refrain from giving it entire in the professor's own words. Using the two known qualities Cain and Abel by the letters C and A, we proceed as follows. Let X equal the language used by Cain, and X the language used by Abel. Also let Y equal the language not used by Cain, and Y the language not used by Abel. Then close parenthesis equals X plus Y, or all the language used by Cain, and close parenthesis equals X plus Y, or all the language used by Abel. The time is assumed to be that at which the games was at its height. Then P plus P, being the respective probabilities that any particular words were used, we have CpX plus Cpy equals Cl, and Ap, X plus Ap plus Cpy equals C comma Y equals Al. Adding the two equations CpX plus Ap comma X comma plus Cpy plus Ap comma Y equals Cl plus Al. CpX plus Ap comma X equals Cl plus Al equals Cpy equals Ap comma Y, but since Y equals zero, we may omit the quantities containing that symbol, and CpX plus Ap comma X comma equals Cl comma, or CpX equals Cl and Cx equals Cl period forward slash P. Ap comma X comma equals Al comma, AX equals Al comma forward slash P, but P equals one when X words are considered, and P comma equals one when X words are considered. Therefore, adding the two equations again, we have Cx equals AX comma equals Cl plus Al. So thus proving that Cain used X words, and Abel used X comma words, QED. Enough has been given, we think, to arouse the interest of our readers in this all things considered remarkable book. It is enough to say in conclusion that the patient research and philosophical deductions of the student and the thinker have been here unearthed for the instruction and amusement of the present age, a wealth of quaint and curious information which has long lane buried in oblivion, or existed only among the Anna of that pygmy nation which exists among us and around us, but which, until Professor Huxley became its historian and interpreter, was not of us. I wish to state that this review came to me from some Philadelphia person entirely unknown to me, but as I could make neither head nor tail of the thing, I thought it must be good, and therefore have published it. I have heard of Professor Huxley before, and knew that he was the author of Watt's hymns, but I did not know before that he wrote vestiges of creation. However, let it pass. I suppose he did, since it is so stated. I have not yet seen his new work about children and, moreover, I do not want to, for all this reviewer thinks so much of it. Mr. Huxley is too handy with his slate-pencil to suit me. THE GALAXY February 1871 Memoranda by Mark Twain THE TONE IMPARTING COMMITTEE When I get old and ponderously respectable, only one thing will be able to make me truly happy, and that will be to be put on the venerable tone imparting committee of the city of New York, and have nothing to do but sit on the platform, solemn and imposing, along with Peter Cooper, Horace Greeley, etc., etc., and shed momentary fame at second hand on obscure lecturers, draw public attention to lecturers, which would otherwise clack eloquently to sounding emptiness, and subdue audiences into respectful hearing of all sorts of unpopular and outlandish dogmas and isms. That is what I desire for the cheer and gratification of my grey hairs. Let me but sit up there with those fine relics of the old red sandstone period, and give tone to an intellectual entertainment twice a week, and be so reported, and my happiness will be complete. Those men have been my envy for a long, long time, and no memories of my life are so pleasant as my reminiscence of their long and honourable career in the tone imparting service. I can recollect the first time I ever saw them on the platforms just as well as I can remember the events of yesterday. Horace Greeley sat on the right, Peter Cooper on the left, and Thomas Jefferson, red jacket, Benjamin Franklin, and John Hancock sat between them. This was on the 22nd of December, 1799, on the occasion of the State Funeral of George Washington in New York. It was a great day, that—a great day, and a very, very sad one. I remember that Broadway was one mass of black crepe from Castle Garden nearly up to where the City Hall now stands. The next time I saw these gentlemen officiate was at a ball, given for the purpose of procuring money and medicines for the sick and wounded soldiers and sailors. Horace Greeley occupied one side of the platform on which the musicians were exalted, and Peter Cooper the other. There were other tone imparters attendant upon the two chiefs, but I have forgotten their names now. Horace Greeley, gray-haired and beaming, was in sailor costume, white duck pants, blue shirt open at the breast, large neckerchief, loose as an oxbow, and tied with a jaunty sailor knot, broad turnover collar with star in the corner, shiny black little tarpolin hat roosting daintily far back on head and flying two gallant long ribbons, slippers on ample feet, round spectacles on benignant nose, and pitchfork in hand completed Mr. Greeley, and made him, in my boyish admiration, every inch a sailor, and worthy to be the honoured great-grandfather of the Neptune he was so ingeniously representing. I shall never forget him. Mr. Cooper was dressed as a general of militia, and was dismally and oppressively warlike. I neglected to remark, in the proper place, that the soldiers and sailors in whose aid the ball was given had just been sent in from Boston. This was during the war of 1812. At the grand national reception of Lafayette in 1824, Horace Greeley sat on the right and Peter Cooper on the left. The other tone imparters of that day are sleeping the sleep of the just now. I was in the audience when Horace Greeley, Peter Cooper, and other chief citizens imparted tone to the great meetings in favour of French liberty in 1848. Then I never saw them any more until here lately. But now that I am living tolerably near the city, I run down every time I see it announced that Horace Greeley, Peter Cooper, and several other distinguished citizens will occupy seats on the platform. And next morning, when I read in the first paragraph of the phonographic report that Horace Greeley, Peter Cooper, and several other distinguished citizens occupied seats on the platform, I say to myself, thank God I was present. Thus I have been enabled to see these substantial old friends of mine sit on the platform and give tone to lectures on anatomy, and lectures on agriculture, and lectures on sterpa culture, and lectures on astronomy, on chemistry, on miscegenation, on is man descended from the kangaroo, on veterinary matters, on all kinds of religion, and several kinds of politics, and have seen them give tone and grandeur to the four-legged girl, the Siamese twins, the great Egyptian sword swallower, and the old original Jacobs. Whenever somebody is to lecture on a subject not of general interest, I know that my venerated remains of the old red sandstone period will be on the platform. Whenever a lecturer is to appear whom nobody has heard of before, nor will be likely to seek to see, I know that the real benevolence of my old friends will be taken advantage of, and that they will be on the platform, and in the bills, as an advertisement. And whenever any new and obnoxious deviltry in philosophy, morals, or politics is to be sprung upon the people, I know perfectly well that these intrepid old heroes will be on that platform, too, in the interest of full and free discussion, and to crush down all narrower and less generous souls with a solid dead weight of their awful respectability. And let us all remember that while these inveterate and imperishable presiders, if you please, appear on the platform every night in the year as regularly as the volunteered piano from Steinways or Chickerings, and have bolstered up and given tone to a deal of questionable merit and obscure emptiness in their time, they have also diversified this inconsequential service by occasional powerful uplifting and upholding of great progressive ideas which smaller men feared to meddle with or countenance. The Galaxy February 1871. Memoranda by Mark Twain. The Danger of Lying in Bed. The man in the ticket office said, Have an accident insurance ticket also? No, I said, after studying the matter over a little. No, I believe not. I am going to be travelling by rail all day today. However, tomorrow I don't travel. Give me one for tomorrow. The man looked puzzled. He said, But it is for accident insurance, and if you are going to travel by rail, if I am going to travel by rail I shan't need it. Lying at home in bed is the thing I'm afraid of. I had been looking into this matter. Last year I travelled twenty thousand miles, almost entirely by rail. The year before I travelled over twenty-five thousand miles, half by sea and half by rail, and the year before that I travelled in the neighbourhood of ten thousand miles exclusively by rail. I suppose if I put in all the little odd journeys here and there, I may say I have travelled sixty thousand miles during the three years I have mentioned, and never an accident. For a good while, I said to myself every morning, Now I have escaped thus far, and so the chances are just that much increased that I shall catch it this time. I will be shrewd and buy an accident ticket. And to a dead moral certainty I drew a blank, and went to bed that night, without a joint started or a bone splintered. I got tired of that sort of daily bother, and fell to buying accident tickets that were good for a month, I said to myself. A man can't buy thirty blanks in one bundle. But I was mistaken. There was never a prize in the lot. I could read of railway accidents every day. The newspaper atmosphere was foggy with them. But somehow they never came my way. I found I had spent a good deal of money in the accident business, and had nothing to show for it. My suspicions were aroused, and I began to hunt around for somebody that had won in this lottery. I found plenty of people who had invested, but not an individual that had ever had an accident or made a cent. I stopped buying accident tickets, and went to ciphering. The result was astounding. The peril lay not in travelling, but in staying at home. I hunted up statistics, and was amazed to find that after all the glaring newspaper headings concerning railroad disasters, less than three hundred people had really lost their lives by those disasters in the preceding twelve months. The Erie Road was set down as the most murderous in the list. It had killed forty-six. Or twenty-six, I do not exactly remember which. But I know the number was double that of any other road. But the fact straight away suggested itself that the Erie was an immensely long road, and did more business than any other line in the country. So the double number of killed ceased to be matter for surprise. By further figuring it appeared that between New York and Rochester the Erie ran eight passenger trains each way every day, sixteen altogether, and carried a daily average of six thousand persons. That is about a million in six months, the population of New York City. Well, the Erie kills from thirteen to twenty-three persons out of its million in six months, and in the same time thirteen thousand of New York's million die in their beds. My flesh crept, my hair stood on end. This is appalling, I said. The danger isn't in travelling by rail, but in trusting to those deadly beds. I will never sleep in a bed again. I had figured on considerably less than one half the length of the Erie road. It was plain that the entire road must transport at least eleven or twelve thousand people every day. There are many short roads running out of Boston that do fully half as much. A great many such roads. There are many roads scattered about the union that do a prodigious passenger business. Therefore it was fair to presume that an average of two thousand five hundred passengers a day for each road in the country would be about correct. There are eight hundred and forty-six railway lines in our country, and eight hundred and forty-six times two thousand five hundred are two million one hundred and fifteen thousand. So the railways of America move more than two millions of people every day. Six hundred and fifty millions of people a year without counting the Sundays. They do that, too. There's no question about it, though where they get the raw material is clear beyond the jurisdiction of my arithmetic. For I have hunted the census through and through, and I find that there are not that many people in the United States, by a matter of six hundred and ten millions at the very least. They must use some of the same people over again likely. San Francisco is one eighth as populous as New York. There are sixty deaths a week in the former, and five hundred a week in the latter, if they have luck. That is three thousand one hundred and twenty deaths a year in San Francisco, and eight times as many in New York, say about twenty-five thousand or twenty-six thousand. The health of the two places is the same. So we will let it stand as a fair presumption that this will hold good all over the country, and that consequently twenty-five thousand out of every million of people we have must die every year. That amounts to one-fortieth of our total population. One million of us, then, die annually. Out of this million, ten or twelve thousand are stabbed, shot, drowned, hanged, poisoned, or meet a similarly violent death in some other popular way, such as perishing by kerosene lamp and hoop-skirt conflagrations, getting buried in coal mines, falling off housetops, breaking through church, or lecture-room floors, taking patent medicines, or committing suicide in other forms. The eerie railroad kills from twenty-three to forty-six. The other eight hundred and forty-five railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each, and the rest of that million, amounting in the aggregate to the appalling figure of nine hundred and eighty-seven thousand six hundred and thirty one corpses, die naturally in their beds. You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds. The railroads are good enough for me, and my advice to all people is, don't stay at home any more than you can help. But, when you have got to stay at home awhile, buy a package of those insurance tickets and sit up nights. You cannot be too cautious. One can see now why I answered that ticket agent in the manner recorded at the top of this sketch. The moral of this composition is that thoughtless people grumble more than is fair about railroad management in the United States when we consider that every day and night of the year full fourteen thousand railway trains of various kinds freighted with life and armed with death go thundering over the land. The marvel is not that they kill three hundred human beings in a twelve month, but that they do not kill three hundred times three hundred. The Galaxy February 1871. Memoranda by Mark Twain. One of mankind's bores. I suppose that if there is one thing in the world more hateful than another to all of us, it is to have to write a letter, a private letter especially, and business letters to my thinking are very little pleasanter. Nearly all the enjoyment is taken out of every letter I get by the reflection that it must be answered, and I do so dread the affliction of writing those answers that often my first and gladdest impulse is to burn my mail before it is opened. For ten years I never felt that sort of dread at all, because I was moving about constantly from city to city, from state to state, and from country to country, and so I could leave all letters unanswered if I chose, and the writers of them would naturally suppose that I had changed my post-office and missed receiving my correspondence. But I am cornered now. I cannot use that form of deception any more. I am anchored, and letters of all kinds come straight to me with deadly precision. They are letters of all sorts and descriptions, and they treat of everything. I generally read them at breakfast, and right often they kill a day's work by diverting my thoughts and fancies into some new channel, thus breaking up and making confusion of the programme of scribbling I had arranged for my working hours. After breakfast I clear for action, and for an hour try hard to write, but there is no getting back into the old train of thought after such an interruption, and so at last I give it up and put off further effort till next day. One would suppose that I would now answer those letters and get them out of the way, and I suppose one of those model young men we read about, who enter New York barefoot and live to become insolent millionaires, would be sure to do that. But I don't. I never shall be a millionaire, and so I disdain to copy the ways of those men. I did not start right. I made a fatal mistake to begin with, and entered New York with boots on and above forty cents in my pocket. With such an unpropitious beginning any efforts of mine to acquire great wealth would be frowned upon as illegitimate, and I should be ruthlessly put down as an impostor. And so, as I said before, I declined to follow the lead of those chrysalis chresuses and answer my correspondence with commercial promptness. I stop work for the day and leave the new letters stacked up along with those that came the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that, and so on. And by and by the pile grows so large that it begins to distress me, and then I attack it and give full five and sometimes six hours to the assault. And how many of the letters do I answer in that time? Never more than nine, usually only five or six. The correspondence clerk in a great mercantile house would answer a hundred in that many hours, but a man who has spent years in writing for the press cannot reasonably be expected to have such facility with a pen. From old habit he gets to thinking and thinking, patiently puzzling for minutes together over the proper turning of a sentence in an answer to some unimportant private letter, and so the precious time slips away. It comes natural to me in these latter years to do all manner of composition laboriously and ploddingly private letters included. Consequently I do fervently hate letter writing, and so do all the newspaper and magazine men I am acquainted with. The above remarks are by way of explanation and apology to parties who have written me about various matters and whose letters I have neglected to answer. I tried in good faith to answer them, tried every now and then, and always succeeded in clearing off several, but always has surely left the majority of those received each week to lie over till the next. The result was always the same to it. The unanswered letters would shortly begin to have a reproachful look about them, next an upbraiding look, and by and by an aggressive and insolent aspect, and when it came to that, I always opened the stove door and made an example of them. The return of cheerfulness and the flight of every feeling of distress on account of neglected duty was immediate and thorough. I do not answer the letter of the Wisconsin gentleman, who inquired whether imported brads were better than domesticated ones, because I did not know what brads were, and did not choose to let on to a stranger. I thought it would have looked much better in him, anyhow, to have asked somebody who he knew was in the habit of eating brads, or wearing them, whichever is the proper way of utilising them. I did manage to answer the little Kentucky boy who wished to send me his wildcat. I thanked him very kindly, and cordially, for his donation, and said I was very fond of cats of all descriptions, and told him to do like the little Indiana boy and forward it to Reverend Mr. Beecher, and I would call and get it some time. I could not bear to check the warm, young tide of his generosity, and yet I had no immediate use for the insect myself. I did not answer the young man who wrote me from Tennessee inquiring how to become a good reporter and acceptable journalist, chiefly because if one marks out the nice, easy method in which he knows these kinds of inquirers have in their mind's eye, they straightway begin to afflict him with semi-weekly specimens of what they can do under the thin disguise of a friendly correspondence, and if he marks out the unromantic and unattractive method which he believes in his heart to be the absolutely necessary one, they always write back and call him a nigger, or a thief. These people are so illogical. The Galaxy February 1871. Memoranda by Mark Twain. The indignity put upon the remains of George Holland by the Reverend Mr. Sabine. What a ludicrous satire it was upon Christian charity, even upon the vague, theoretical idea of it which doubtless this small St. Mouths from his own pulpit every Sunday. Contemplate this freak of nature, and think what a card of giant of self-righteousness is crowded into his pygmy skin. If we probe and dissect and lay open this diseased, this cancerous piety of his, we are forced to the conviction that it is the production of an impression on his part that his guild do about all the good that is done in the earth, and hence are better than common clay. Hence are competent to say to such as George Holland, you are unworthy, you are a play-actor, and consequently a sinner, I cannot take the responsibility of recommending you to the mercy of heaven. It must have had its origin in that impression, else he would have said, We are all instruments for the carrying out of God's purposes. It is not for me to pass judgment upon your appointed share of the work, or to praise or to revile it. I have divine authority for it that we are all sinners, and therefore it is not for me to discriminate and say, We will supplicate for this sinner, for he was a merchant prince or a banker, but we will beseech know forgiveness for this other one, for he was a play-actor. It surely requires the furthest possible reach of self-righteousness to enable a man to lift his scornful nose in the air, and turn his back upon so poor and pitiable a thing as a dead stranger come to beg the last kindness that humanity can do in its behalf. This creature has violated the letter of the Gospel and judged George Holland, not George Holland either, but his profession through him. Then it is in the measure fair that we judge this creature's guild through him. In effect he has said, We are the assault of the earth, we do all the good work that is done. To learn how to be good, and do good, men must come to us. Actors and such are obstacles to moral progress. Note! Reporter! What answer did you make, Mr. Sabine? Mr. Sabine. I said that I had a distaste for officiating at such a funeral, and that I did not care to be mixed up in it. I said to the gentleman that I was willing to bury the deceased from his house, but that I objected to having the funeral solemnized at a church. Reporter! Is it one of the laws of the Protestant Episcopal Church that a deceased theatrical performer shall not be buried from the church? Mr. Sabine, it is not, but I have always warned the professing members of my congregation to keep away from theatres, and not to have anything to do with them. I don't think they teach moral lessons! New York Times. Pray look at the thing reasonably for a moment, laying aside all biases of education and custom. If a common public impression is fair evidence of a thing, then this minister's legitimate, recognized, and acceptable business is to tell people calmly, coldly, and in stiff, written sentences, from the pulpit, to go and do right, be just, be merciful, be charitable. And his congregation forget it all between church and home. But for fifty years it was George Holland's business on the stage to make his audience go and do right and be just, merciful, and charitable, because by his living, breathing, feeling pictures he showed them what it was to do these things, and how to do them, and how instant and ample was the reward. Is it not a singular teacher of men, this reverend gentleman who is so poorly informed himself as to put the whole stage under ban and say, I do not think it teaches moral lessons? Where was ever a sermon preached that could make filial ingratitude so hateful to men as the sinful play of King Lear? Or where was there ever a sermon that could so convince men of the wrong and the cruelty of harboring a pampered and unanalyzed jealousy as the sinful play of Othello? And where are there ten preachers who can stand in the pulpit teaching heroism, unselfish devotion, and lofty patriotism, and hold their own against any one of five hundred William Tells that can be raised up upon five hundred stages in the land at a day's notice? It is almost fair and just to aver, although it is profanity, that nine-tenths of all the kindness, and forbearance, and Christian charity, and generosity in the hearts of the American people today, got there by being filtered down from their fountain-head, the Gospel of Christ, through dramas and tragedies and comedies on the stage, and through the despised novel and the Christmas story, and through the thousand and one lessons, suggestions and narratives of generous deeds that stir the pulses and exalt and augment the nobility of the nation day by day from the teeming columns of ten thousand newspapers and not from the drowsy pulpit. All that is great and good in our particular civilization came straight from the hand of Jesus Christ, and many creatures and of diverse sorts were doubtless appointed to disseminate it, and let us believe that this seed and the result are the main thing, and not the cut of the sower's garment, and that whosoever in his way and according to his opportunity sows the one and produces the other, has done high service and worthy. And further, let us try with all our strength to believe that whenever old simple-hearted George Holland sowed this seed, and reared his crop of broader charities and better impulses in men's hearts, it was just as acceptable before the throne as if the seed had been scattered in vapid platitudes from the pulpit of the ineffable Sabine himself. Am I saying that the pulpit does not do its share towards disseminating the marrow, the meat of the Gospel of Christ? For we are not talking of ceremonies and wire-drawn creeds now, but the living heart and soul of what is pretty often only a spectre. No, I am not saying that the pulpit teaches assemblages of people twice a week, nearly two hours altogether, and does what it can in that time. The theatre teaches large audiences seven times a week, twenty-eight or thirty hours altogether, and the novels and newspapers plead and argue, and illustrate, stir, move, thrill, thunder, urge, persuade, and supplicate at the feet of millions and millions of people every single day and all day long and far into the night, and so these vast agencies till nine-tenths of the vineyard and the pulpit till the other tenth. Yet now and then some complacent blind idiot says, you unanointed are coarse clay and useless, you are not as we, the regenerators of the world, go, bury yourselves elsewhere, for we cannot take the responsibility of recommending idlers and sinners to the yearning mercy of heaven. How does a soul like that stay in a carcass without getting mixed with the secretions and sweat it out through the pores? Think of this insect condemning the whole theatrical service as a disseminator of bad morals because it has black crooks in it, forgetting that if that were sufficient ground people would condemn the pulpit because it had crooks and colox and sabines in it. No, I am not trying to rob the pulpit of any atom of its full share and credit in the work of disseminating the meat and marrow of the Gospel of Christ, but I am trying to get a moment's hearing for worthy agencies in the same work that with overwrought modesty seldom or never claim a recognition of their great services. I am aware that the pulpit does its excellent one-tenth and credits itself with it now and then, though most of the time oppressive business causes it to forget it. I am aware that in its honest and well-meaning way it bores the people with unenflammable truisms about doing good, bores them with correct compositions on charity, bores them, chloroforms them, stupefies them with argumentative mercy, without a flaw in the grammar, or an emotion which the minister could put in in the right place if he turned his back and took his finger off the manuscript. And in doing these things the pulpit is doing its duty, and let us believe that it is likewise doing its best, and doing it in the most harmless and respectable way. And so I have said, and shall keep on saying, let us give the pulpit its full share of credit in elevating and ennobling the people, but when a pulpit takes to itself authority to pass judgment upon the work and the worth of just as legitimate an instrument of God as itself—who spent a long life preaching from the stage the self-same Gospel without the alteration of a single sentiment or a single axiom of right—it is fair and just that somebody who believes that actors were made for a high and good purpose, and that they accomplish the object of their creation and accomplish it well to protest. And having protested, it is also fair and just, being driven to it, as it were, to whisper to the Sabine pattern of clergymen under the breath a simple instructive truth and say, ministers are not the only servants of God upon earth, nor his most efficient ones either, by a very, very long distance. Sensible ministers already know this, and it may do the other kind good to find it out. But to cease teaching and go back to the beginning again, was it not pitiable that spectacle? Honored and honourable old George Holland, whose theatrical ministry had for fifty years softened hard hearts, bred generosity in cold ones, kindled emotion in dead ones, uplifted base ones, broadened, bigoted ones, and made many and many a stricken one glad and filled at brim full of gratitude. Figuratively spit upon in his unoffending coffin by this crawling, slimy, sanctimonious, self-righteous reptile. End of section 128 This is section 129 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, section 129, The Galaxy, April 1871. Memoranda by Mark Twain. My first literary venture. Valedictory. I have written for the Galaxy a year. For the last eight months, with hardly an interval, I have had for my fellows and comrades night and day doctors and watchers of the sick. During these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle and malignantly threatened two others. All this I have experienced, yet all the time been under contract to furnish humorous matter once a month for this magazine. I am speaking the exact truth in the above details, pleased to put yourself in my place and contemplate the grisly grotesqueness of the situation. I think that some of the humor I have written during this period could have been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the solemnity of the occasion. The memoranda will cease permanently with this issue of the magazine. To be a pirate, on a low salary, and with no share in the profits of the business, used to be my idea of an uncomfortable occupation, but I have other views now. To be a monthly humorist in a cheerless time is drearier. So much by way of explanation and apology to the reader of any obtrusive lack of humorousness that may have been noticed in my humorousness department during the year. At last I am free of the doctors and watchers, and am so exalted in spirits that I will cut this final memoranda very short and go off and enjoy the new state of things. I will put it to pleasant and diligent use in writing a book. I would not print any memoranda at all this month, but the following short sketch has dropped from my pen of its own accord and without any compulsion from me, and so it may as well go in. As I shall write but little for periodicals hereafter, it seems to fit in with a sort of inoffensive appropriateness here, since it is a record of the first scribbling for any sort of periodical I ever had the temerity to attempt. I was a very smart child at the age of thirteen—an unusually smart child, I thought at the time. It was then that I did my first newspaper scribbling, and, most unexpectedly to me, it steered up a fine sensation in the community. It did indeed, and I was very proud of it too. I was a printer's devil, and a progressive and aspiring one. My uncle had me on his paper, the weekly Hannibal Journal, two dollars a year in advance, five hundred subscribers, and they paid in cordwood, cabbages, and unmarketable turnips. And on a lucky summer's day he left town to be gone a week, and asked me if I thought I could edit one issue of the paper judiciously. Ah! didn't I want to try. Higgins was the editor in the rival paper. He had lately been jilted, and one night a friend found an open note on the poor fellow's bed, in which he stated that he could no longer endure life and had drowned himself in Bear Creek. The friend ran down there and discovered Higgins wading back to shore. He had concluded he wouldn't. The village was full of it for several days, but Higgins did not suspect it. I thought this was a fine opportunity. I wrote an elaborately wretched account of the whole matter, and then illustrated it with villainous cuts engraved on the bottoms of wooden type with a jackknife. One of them, a picture of Higgins wading out into the creek in his shirt with a lantern, sounding the depth of the water with a walking stick. I thought it was desperately funny, and was densely unconscious that there was any moral obliquity about such a publication. Being satisfied with this effort I looked around for other worlds to conquer, and it struck me that it would make good, interesting matter, to charge the editor of a neighbouring country paper with a piece of gratuitous rascality and see him squirm. I did it, but I was putting the article into the form of a parody on the burial of Sir John Moore, and a pretty crude parody it was too. Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously, not because they had done anything to deserve it, but merely because I thought it was my duty to make the paper lively. Next I gently touched up the newest stranger, the lion of the day, the gorgeous journeyman Taylor from Quincy. He was a simpering coxcomb of the first water and the loudest dressed man in the state. He was an inveterate woman-killer. Every week he wrote lushy poetry for the journal about his newest conquest. His rhymes for my week were headed to Mary in H. Blank L. Meaning to Mary in Hannibal, of course. But while setting up the piece I was suddenly riven from head to heel by what I regarded as a perfect thunderbolt of humour, and I compressed it into a snappy footnote at the bottom thus. We will let this thing pass just this once, but we wish Mr. J. Gordon-Runnels to understand distinctly that we have a character to sustain, and from this time forth, when he wants to commune with his friends in H. Blank L., he must select some other medium than the column of this journal. The paper came out, and I never knew any little thing attract so much attention as those playful trifles of mine. For once the Hannibal journal was in demand. A novelty it had not experienced before. The whole town was stirred. Higgins dropped in with a double-barreled shotgun early in the forenoon. When he found that it was an infant, as he called me, that had done him the damage, he simply pulled my ears and went away. But he threw up his situation that night at town for good. The tailor came with his goose and a pair of shears, but he despised me too, and departed for the south that night. The two lampoon citizens came with threats of libel, and went away incensed at my insignificance. The country editor pranced in with a war-woop next day, suffering for blood to drink. But he ended by forgiving me cordially and inviting me down to the drug-store to wash away all animosity in a friendly bumper of Fannestock's Vermifuge. It was his little joke. My uncle was very angry when he got back. Unreasonably so, I thought, considering what an impetus I had given the paper, and considering also that gratitude for his preservation ought to have been uppermost in his mind in as much as by his delay he had so wonderfully escaped dissection, tomahawking, libel, and getting his head shot off. But he softened when he looked at the accounts and saw that I had actually booked the unparalleled number of thirty-three new subscribers, and had the vegetables to show for it—cordwood, cabbage, beans, and unsalable turnips enough to run the family for two years. The Galaxy April 1871. Memoranda by Mark Twain. About a remarkable stranger. Being a sandwich-island reminiscence. On second thoughts I will extend my memoranda a little and insert the following chapter from the book I am writing. It will serve to show that the volume is not going to be merely entertaining, but will be glaringly instructive as well. I have related one or two of these incidents before lecture audiences, but have never printed any of them before. M.T. I had barely finished when this person spoke out with rapid utterance and feverish anxiety. Oh! That was certainly remarkable after a fashion, but you ought to have seen my chimney! You ought to have seen my chimney, sir! Smoke! I wish I may hang if—Mr. Jones, you remember that chimney? You must remember that chimney! No! No! I recollect now! You weren't living on this side of the island, then? But I am telling you nothing but the truth, and I wish I may never draw another breath if that chimney didn't smoke so that the smoke actually got caked in it, and I had to dig it out with a pickaxe. You may smile, gentlemen, but the high sheriff's got a hunk of it which I dug out before his eyes, and so it's perfectly easy for you to go and examine for yourselves. The interruption broke up the conversation, which had already begun to lag, and we presently hired some natives and an outrigger canoe or two, and went out to overlook a grand surf-bathing contest. Two weeks after this, while talking in a company, I looked up and detected the same man boring through and through me with his intense eye, and noted again his twitching muscles and his feverish anxiety to speak. The moment I paused, he said, Beggy pardon, sir! Beggy pardon! But it can only be considered remarkable when brought into strong outline by isolation. Sir, contrasted with a circumstance which occurred in my own experience, it instantly becomes commonplace. No, not that, for I will not speak so discertiously of any experience in the career of a stranger and a gentleman, but I am obliged to say that you could not, and you would not ever again refer to this tree as a large one, if you could behold, as I have, the great Yak-Matak tree in the island of Onuska, sea of Kamchatka, a tree, sir, not one inch less than four hundred and fifteen feet in solid diameter, and I wish I may die in a minute, if it isn't so. Oh, you needn't look so questioning, gentlemen! Here's old Cap Saltmarsh can say whether I know what I'm talking about or not. I showed him the tree. Captain Saltmarsh, come now, catch your anchor, lad, you're even too tout. You promised to show me that stunner, and I walked more than eleven miles with you through the cussidest aggravating as jungle I ever see, a hunting for it. But the tree you showed me finally weren't as big around as a beer-cask, and you know that your own self, Marcus. Hear the man talk! Of course the tree was reduced that way, but didn't I explain it? Answer me, didn't I? Didn't I say I wished you could have seen it when I first sought, when you got up on your ear and called me names and said that I brought you eleven miles to look at a sapling? Didn't I explain to you that all the whale-ships in the North Seas had been wooding off of it for more than twenty-seven years? And did you suppose the tree could last forever, confound it? I don't see why you want to keep things back that way and try to injure a person that's never done you any harm. Somehow this man's presence made me uncomfortable, and I was glad when a native arrived at that moment to say that Muckawow, the most companiable and luxurious among the rude war-chiefs of the islands, desired us to come over and help him enjoy a missionary whom he had found trespassing on his grounds. I think it was about ten days afterwards that, as I finished a statement I was making for the instruction of a group of friends and acquaintances, and which made no pretense of being extraordinary. A familiar voice chimed instantly in on the heels of my last word, and said, But my dear sir, there was nothing remarkable about that horse or the circumstance either, nothing in the world. I mean, no sort of offence when I say it, sir, but you really do not know anything whatever about speed. Bless your heart, if you could only have seen my mare Margareta, there was a beast, there was lightning for you. Trot! Trot is no name for it. She flew. How she could whirl a buggy along! I started her out once, sir. Colonel Bilgewater, you recollect that animal perfectly well. I started her out about thirty or thirty-five yards ahead of the awfulest storm I ever saw in my life, and it chased us upwards of eighteen miles. It did by the everlasting hills, and I'm telling you nothing but the unvarnished truth when I say that not one single drop of rain fell on me, not a single drop, sir, and I swear to it. But my dog was a swimming behind the wagon all the way. For a week or two I stayed mostly within doors, for I seemed to meet this person everywhere, and he had become utterly hateful to me. But one evening I dropped in on Captain Perkins and his friends, and we had a sociable time. About ten o'clock I chanced to be talking about a merchant-friend of mine, and without really intending it, the remark slipped out that he was a little mean and parsimonious about paying workmen. Instantly through the steam of a hot whiskey punch on the opposite side of the room, a remembered voice shot, and for a moment I trembled on the imminent verge of profanity. Oh, my dear sir, really you expose yourself when you parade that as a surprising circumstance, and bless your heart and hide you are ignorant of the very A. B. C. of meanness, ignorant as the unborn babe, ignorant as unborn twins, you don't know anything about it. It is pitiable to see you, sir, a well-spoken and prepossessing stranger, making such an enormous pow-wow here about a subject concerning which your ignorance is perfectly ghastly. Look me in the eye, if you please, look me in the eye. John James Gottry was the son of poor but honest parents state of Mississippi, boyhood friend of mine, bosom comrade in later years. Heaven rest his noble spirit, he is gone from us now. John James Gottry was hired by the hay-blossom mining company in California to do some blasting for them, the incorporated company of mean men, the boys used to call it. Well, one day he drilled a hole about four feet deep and put in an awful blast of powder, and was standing over it, ramming it down with an iron crowbar about nine feet long, when the cusset thing struck a spark and fired the powder and scat away John Gottry whizzed like a skyrocket, him and his crowbar. Well, sir, he kept on going up in the air higher and higher till he didn't look any bigger than a boy, and he kept going on up higher and higher till he didn't look any bigger than a doll, and he kept on going up higher and higher till he didn't look any bigger than a little small bee. And then he went out of sight. Presently he came in sight again, looking like a little small bee, and he came along down further and further till he looked as big as a doll again, and down further and further till he was as big as a boy again and further and further till he was a full-sized man once more, and then him and his crowbar came a whizzing down and lit right exactly in the same old tracks, and went to ramming down and ramming down and ramming down again, just the same as if nothing had happened. Now, do you know, that poor cuss weren't gone only sixteen minutes, and yet that incorporated company of mean men docked him for the lost time. I said I had the headache, and so excused myself and went home, and on my diary I entered another night spoiled by this offensive loafer, and a fervent curse was set down with it to keep the item company, and the very next day I packed up out of all patients and left the islands. Almost from the beginning I regarded that man as a liar. The line of points represents an interval of years, at the end of which time the opinion hazarded in that last sentence came to be gratifyingly and remarkably endorsed and by wholly disinterested persons. The man Marcus was found one morning hanging to a beam of his own bedroom. The doors and windows securely fastened on the inside, dead, and on his breast was pinned a paper in his own handwriting begging his friends to suspect no innocent person of having anything to do with his death, for that it was the work of his own hand entirely. Yet the jury brought in the astounding that deceased came to his death by the hands of some person or persons unknown. They explained that the perfectly undeviating consistency of Marcus's character for thirty years towered aloft as colossal and indestructible testimony that whatever statement he chose to make was entitled to instant and unquestioning acceptance as a lie, and they further stated their belief that he was not dead and witnessed strong circumstantial evidence of his own word that he was dead, and beseeched the coroner to delay the funeral as long as possible, which was done. And so in the tropical climate of Lahaina the coffin stood open for seven days and then even the loyal jury gave him up. But they sat on him again and changed their verdict to Suicide induced by mental aberration, because, said they, with penetration, he said he was dead and he was dead, and would he have told the truth if he had been in his right mind? No, sir. End of Section 129. This is Section 130 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This entire LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 130. The Galaxy Club Room, August 1871. About Barbers. All things change except Barbers, the ways of Barbers and the surroundings of Barbers. These never change. What one experiences in a barbershop the first time he enters one is what he always experiences in barbershops afterward till the end of his days. I got shaved this morning, as usual. A man approached the door from Jones Street as I approached it from Maine, a thing that always happens. I hurried up, but it was of no use. He entered the door one little step ahead of me, and I followed in on his heels and saw him take the only vacant chair, the one presided over by the best barber. It always happens so. I sat down, hoping that I might fall air to the chair belonging to the better of the remaining two barbers, for he had already begun combing his man's hair while his comrade was not yet quite done rubbing up and oiling his customer's locks. I watched the probabilities with strong interest. When I saw that number two was gaining on number one, my interest grew to solicitude. When number one stopped a moment to make change on a bath ticket for a newcomer and lost ground in the race, my solicitude rose to anxiety. When number one caught up again, and both he and his comrade were pulling the towels away and brushing the powder from their customer's cheeks, and it was about an even thing which one would say, next first, my very breath stood still with the suspense. But when, at the final culminating moment, number one stopped to pass a comb a couple of times through his customer's eyebrows, I saw that he had lost the race by a single instant, and I rose indignant and quitted the shop to keep from falling into the hands of number two. For I have none of that enviable firmness that enables a man to look calmly into the eyes of a waiting barber and tell him he will wait for his fellow barber's chair. I stayed out fifteen minutes and then went back, hoping for better luck. Of course all the chairs were occupied now, and four men sat waiting, silent, unsociable, distraught, and looking bored as men always do who are waiting their turn in a barber's shop. I sat down in one of the iron-armed compartments of an old sofa, and put in the time for a while, reading the framed advertisements of all sorts of quack nostrums for dying and coloring the hair. Then I read the greasy names on the private bay rum bottles, read the names and noted the numbers on the private shaving cups in the pigeon-holes, studied the stained and damaged cheap prints on the walls of battles, early presidents and voluptuous recumbent sultanas, and the tiresome and everlasting young girl putting her grandfather's spectacles on, execrated in my heart the cheerful canary and the distracting parrot that few barber shops are without. Finally I searched out the least dilapidated of the last year's illustrated papers that littered the fowl-center table and conned their unjustifiable misrepresentations of old forgotten events. At last my turn came. A voice said, Next! and I surrendered to number two, of course. It always happened so. I said meekly that I was in a hurry, and it affected him as strongly as if he had never heard it. He shoved up my head and put a napkin under it. He plowed his fingers into my collar and fixed a towel there. He explored my hair with his claws and suggested that it needed trimming. I said, I did not want it trimmed. He explored again and said it was pretty long for the present style, and better have a little taken off. It needed it behind especially. I said I had had it cut only a week before. He yearned over it reflectively a moment, and then asked, with a disparaging manner, Who cut it? I came back at him promptly with a, You did! I had him there. Then he fell to stirring up his lather and regarding himself in the glass, stopping now and then to get close and examine his chin critically or torture a pimple. Then he lathered one side of my face thoroughly, and was about to lather the other when a dog-fight attracted his attention. And he ran to the window and stayed and sought out, losing two shillings on the result in bets with the other barbers, a thing which gave me great satisfaction. He finished lathering, meantime getting the brush into my mouth only twice, and then began to rub in the suds with his hand. And as he now had his head turned, discussing the dog-fight with the other barbers, he naturally shoveled considerable lather into my mouth without knowing it, but I did. He now began to sharpen his razor on an old suspender, and was delayed a good deal on account of a controversy about a cheap masquerade ball he had figured at the night before, in red cambrick and bogus ermen as some kind of a king. He was so gratified with being chafed about some damsel whom he had smitten with his charms, that he used every means to continue the controversy by pretending to be annoyed at the chafing of his fellows. This matter begot more surveying of himself in the glass, and he put down his razor and brushed his hair with elaborate care, plastering an inverted arch of it down on his forehead, accomplishing an accurate part behind, and brushing the two wings forward over his ears with nice exactness. In the meantime the lather was drying on my face and apparently eating into my vitals. Now he began to shave, digging his fingers into my countenance to stretch the skin, making a handle of my nose now and then, bundling and tumbling my head this way and that, as convenience in shaving demanded, and hawking and expectorating pleasantly all the while. As long as he was on the tough sides of my face I did not suffer, but when he began to rake and rip and tug at my chin the tears came. I did not mind his getting so close down to me, I did not mind his garlic, because all barbers eat garlic, I suppose, but there was an added something that made me fear that he was decaying inwardly while still alive, and this gave me much concern. He now put his finger into my mouth to assist him in shaving the corners of my upper lip, and it was by this bit of circumstantial evidence that I discovered that a part of his duties in the shop was to clean the kerosene lamps. I had often wondered in an indolent way whether the barbers did that, or whether it was the boss. About this time I was amusing myself trying to guess where he would be most likely to cut me this time, but he got ahead of me and sliced me on the end of the chin before I had got my mind made up. He immediately sharpened his razor, he might have done it before. I do not like a close shave and would not let him go over me a second time. I tried to get him to put up his razor, dreading that he would make for the side of my chin my pet tender spot, a place which a razor cannot touch twice without making trouble. But he said he only wanted to just smooth off one little roughness, and in that same moment he slipped his razor along the forbidding ground, and the dreaded pimple signs of a close shave rose up smarting and answered to the call. Now he soaked his towel in Bayrum, and slapped it all over my face nastily, slapped it over as if a human being ever yet washed his face in that way. Then he dried it by slapping with the dry part of the towel, as if a human being ever dried his face in such a fashion. But a barber seldom rubs you like a Christian. Next he poked Bayrum into the cut place with his towel, then choked the wound with powdered starch, then soaked it with Bayrum again, and would have gone on soaking and powdering it for evermore, no doubt, if I had not rebelled and begged off. He powdered my whole face now, coming up and began to plow my hair thoughtfully with his hands and examine his fingers critically. Then he suggested a shampoo, and said my hair needed it badly, very badly. I observed that I had shampooed it myself very thoroughly in the bath yesterday. I had him again. He next recommended some of Smith's Hair Glorifier, and offered to sell me a bottle. I declined. He praised the new perfume, Jones's Delight of the Toilet, and proposed to sell me some of that. I declined again. He tendered me a tooth-wash atrocity of his own invention, and when I declined offered to trade knives with me. He returned to business after the miscarriage of this last enterprise, sprinkled me all over, legs and all, greased my hair in defiance of my protests against it, rubbed and scrubbed a good deal of it out by the roots, and combed and brushed the rest, parting it behind, and plastering the eternal inverted arch of hair down on my forehead, and then, while combing my scant eyebrows and defiling them with pomade, strung out an account of the achievements of a six-ounce black-and-tan terrier of his till I heard the whistles blow for noon, and I knew I was five minutes too late for the train. Then he snatched away the towel, brushed it lightly about my face, passed his comb through my eyebrows once more, and gaily sang out, Next! This barber fell down and died of apoplexy two hours later. I am waiting over a day for my revenge. I am going to attend his funeral. End of Section 130 and End of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain Read by John Greenman