 This is Section 73 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 73, Alta, California, March 1867, Part 2. Alta, California, March 16, 1867, Steamer, San Francisco, New Year's Day, The Twin Mountains. Out of the midst of the beautiful Lake Nicaragua spring two magnificent pyramids, clad in the softest and richest green, all flicked with shadow and sunshine, whose summits pierce the billowy clouds. They look so isolated from the world and its turmoil, so tranquil, so dreamy, so steeped in slumber and eternal repose. Not a home one might make among their shady forests, their sunny slopes, their breezy dells, after he had grown weary of the toil, anxiety, and unrest at the bustling, driving world. These mountains seem to have no level ground at the bases, but rise abruptly from the water. There is nothing rugged about them. They are shapely and symmetrical, and all their outlines are soft, rounded, and regular. One is 4,200 and the other 5,400 feet high, though the highest being the furthest removed makes them look like twins. A stranger would take them to be of equal altitude. Some say they are 6,000 feet high and certainly they look it. When not a cloud is visible elsewhere in the heavens, their tall summits are magnificently draped with them. They are extinct volcanoes, and consequently their soil, decomposed lava, is wonderfully fertile. They are well stocked with cattle ranches and with corn, coffee, and tobacco farms. The climate is delightful, and is the healthiest on the isthmus. Sandwiches, etc. Our boat started across the lake at 2 p.m., and at 4 a.m. the following morning we reached Fort San Carlos, where the San Juan River flows out. A hundred miles and twelve hours—not particularly speedy, but very comfortable. Here they changed us to a long double-decked shell of a stern wheel-boat, without a berth or a bulkhead in her, wide open, nothing to obstruct your view except the slender stanchions that supported the roof. And so we started down the broad and beautiful river in the grey dawn of the balmy summer morning. At 8 we breakfasted. On the lake boat they fed us on coffee and tea, and on sandwiches composed of two pieces of bread and closing one piece of ham. On this boat they gave us tea, coffee, and sandwiches composed of one piece of ham between two pieces of bread. There's nothing like variety. In a little while all parties were absorbed in noting the scenery on shore, trees like cypress, other trees with large red blossoms, great feathery tree ferns and giant cactuses, clumps of tall bamboo, all manner of trees and bushes in fact, webbed together with vines, occasionally a vista that opened, stretched its carpet of fresh green grass far within the jungle, then slowly closed again. The Grave of the Lost Steamer In this land of rank vegetation no spot of soil can be cleared off and kept barren a week. Nature seizes upon every vagrant atom of dust and forces it to relieve her overburdened storehouses. Weeds spring up in the cracks of floors, and clothe the roofs of huts in green. If a handful of dust settles in the crotch of a tree, ferns spring there and wave their graceful plumes in the tropic breeze. Still a bustering walker sunk a steamboat in the river, the sands washed down, filled in around her, built up a little oval island. The wind brought seeds thither, and they closed every inch of it in luxuriant grass. Then trees grew and vines climbed up and hung them with bright garlands, and the steamer's grave was finished. The wreck was invisible to us, save that the two great four-and-aft braces still stood up out of the grass and fenced in the trees. It was a pretty picture. Ancient Castillo. About noon we swept gaily around a bend in the beautiful river, and a stately old adobe castle came into view, a relic of the olden time of the old buccaneering days of Morgan and his merry men. It stands upon a grassy dome-like hill, and the forests loom up beyond. They say that Lord Nelson once captured it, and that this was his first notable feat. It cost him several hours, with two hundred and fifty men, and good, hard, bloody fighting to get it. In our time walker took it with twenty-five men without firing a shot through the treachery of the comandante, they say. There is a little straggling village under the hill, a village composed of a single rank of houses extending some three hundred yards down the shore. There is a dangerous rapid here. It is said to be artificial, formed by man in former times, to keep the pirate boats from penetrating the interior. We had to get ashore here, walk around the rapids, and get on another stern wheeler. Every house we passed was a booth for the sale of fruits and provisions. The bananas, pineapples, coconuts, and coffee were good, and the cigars were passable, but the oranges, although fresh, of course, were of a very inferior quality. Cheapness is the order of the day. You can buy as much of any one article as you can possibly want for a dime and a sumptuous dinner for two or three for half a dollar. Bring along your short bits when you come this way. It is the grand base and foundation of all values, and is better received, and with less suspicion than any other coin. An unpeopled paradise. As we got under way and sped down the narrowing river, all the enchanting beauty of its surroundings came out, all gazed in rapt and silent admiration for a long time as the exquisite panorama unfolded itself, but finally burst into a conversational ecstasy that was alive with excited ejaculations. The character of the vegetation on the banks had changed from a rank jungle to dense lofty majestic forests. There were hills, but the thick drapery of the vines spread upward, terrace upon terrace, and concealed them like a veil. We could not have believed in the hills, except that the upper trees towered too high to be on the bank level. And everywhere in these vine-robed terraces were charming fairy harbors fringed with swinging garlands, and weird grottoes whose twilight depth the eye might not pierce, and tunnels that wound their mysterious course none new wither, and there were graceful temples, columns, towers, pyramids, mounds, domes, walls—all the shapes and forms and figures known to architecture wrought in the pliant, leafy vines, and thrown together in reckless, enchanting confusion. Now and then a rollicking monkey scampered in view, or a bird of splendid plumage floated through the sultry air, or the music of some invisible songster welled up out of the forest depths. The changing vistas of the river ever renewed the intoxicating picture. Wonders and points folding backward revealed new wonders beyond of towering walls of verdure-gleaming cataracts of vines pouring sheer down a hundred and fifty feet, and mingling with the grass upon the earth. Wonderful waterfalls of green leaves as deftly overlapping each other as the scales of a fish—a vast green rampart, solid a moment, and then, as we advanced, changing an opening into gothic windows, colonnades, all manner of quaint and beautiful figures. Sometimes a limbless veteran of the forest stood aloof in his flowing vine-robes like an ivy-clad tower of some old feudal ruin. We came upon another wrecked steamer turned into an emerald island, trees reaching above the great walking-beam framework, and the tireless vines climbing over the rusty and blistered old locomotive-boiler. And by and by a retreating point of land disclosed some lofty hills in the distance, steep and densely grown with forests, each treetop a delicate green dome, touched with a gleam of sunshine, and then shaded off with Indian summery films into darkness. Dome upon dome they rose high into the sunny atmosphere, and contrasted their brilliant tints with the stormy purple of the sky beyond. Along shore huge alligators lay and sunned themselves and slept. Birds with gaudy feathers and villainous hooked bills stood stupidly on overhanging boughs, and startled one suddenly out of his long cherished, dimly defined notion that that sort of bird only lived in menageries. Parrots flew by us—the idea of a parrot flying seemed funny enough, flying abroad, instead of swinging in a tin ring and stooping and nipping that ring with its beak between its feet, and thus displaying itself in most unseemly attitude, flying, silently cleaving the air, and saying never a word. When the first one went by without saying Polly wants a cracker, it seemed as if there was something unnatural about the bird. But it did not immediately occur to me what it was. And there was a prodigiously tall bird that had a beak like a powder-horn, and curved its neck into an S, and stuck its long leg straight out behind like a steering-or when it flew, that I thought would have looked more proper in becoming in the iron cage where it naturally belonged. And I will not deny that from the moment I landed on that isthmus the idea of a monkey up a tree seemed so consumedly absurd and out of all character that I never saw one in such a position, but I wanted to take him and chain him to a wagon-wheel under the Bengal Tiger's cage where he would necessarily feel more at home and not look so ridiculous. The boar. What sort of a crooked, spready, curse-looking tree is that, oh, yonder? I looked at the speaker. He was by nature, constitution, and habit, a boar. I could see that. I said, I don't know. I wanted to say, savagely, how the devil should I know? Do I look like I ever was in this kind of a country before? Looks like it might be an oak, or a slippery alum, or something. But I reckon it ain't, maybe. I don't know. Maybe it is. Maybe it ain't. It's got big blossoms on it like a holly-hock. I don't know. It may be a holly-hock. Oh, no! I didn't mean that. I meant... Chimony! See that monkey jump? What kind of a noise do they make? Do they squawk? Now I don't know anything whatever about monkeys. They may squawk, or they may not. I hope to God they do. Why? I struck my colors. This serene simplicity where I expected to make a telling shot completely nonplussed me. I left without saying a word. This fellow used to corner me and bore the life out of me with trivial reminiscences out of his insignificant history, with trifling scraps of information I had possessed from infancy, with decayed, worm-eaten jokes that made me frantic, and with eternal questions concerning things I knew nothing about and took no earthly interest in. One always meets such people on voyages, but I never met a specimen before that so completely tallied with my idea of a tiresome, exasperating, infernal bore. From this second stern-wheel boat they gave us tea, coffee, and sandwiches formed by ingeniously secreting a slice of ham between two slices of bread. Truly there is nothing like variety. It gives a zest to the simplest diet—sandwiches, etc. The boys smoked, sang, shot at alligators, discussed the lignum vitae, mahogany, bastard cocoa and other curious trees, and gazed at the bewitching panorama of the river the life-long happy day, and at night we tied up at the bank within thirty miles of Greytown. Those who had hammocks swung them, and those who hadn't made beds of their overcoats, and soon the two dingy lanterns hung forward and aft, shed a ghostly glimmer over the thick strewn and vaguely defined multitude of slumberers. As I said before, the whole boiler-deck was wide open. Just before daylight a chilly shower came driving in and roused everybody out. There was some complaining of sore bones by women, and certain gentlemen who were unused to sleeping on hard, bare floors, but these little troubles were soon forgotten when the galley-boys came up and the usual frenzied and famishing rushing and crowding and shouting of, Sandwiches, Sandwiches!—took place, and disclosed the happy truth, that we had not only the usual tea and coffee and sandwiches for breakfast, but also cheese. Verily, variety is the spice of life! Nobody said anything about sore bones any more. A Peopled Paradise We got to Greytown early on the last day of the year, and saw the steamer at anchor that was to take us to New York. The town does not amount to much. There is a good deal of land around there, and it is curious that they didn't build it larger, but somehow they didn't. It is composed of two hundred old frame houses and some nice vacant lots, and its comeliness is greatly enhanced, I may say, as rendered gorgeous by the cluster of stern wheel steamboats at the waterfront. The population is eight hundred, and is mixed, made up of natives, Americans, Spaniards, Germans, English, and Jamaica Negroes. Of course the spoken language is Spanish. Some of the Negro babies do not wear any clothes at all, and the cows march through the public thoroughfares with a freedom which Penn cannot describe. The inhabitants are not vain, and do not care for luxury and furniture. Most of them keep for sale small cigars called Pocotempos, ten cents a grab, and native brandy, tropical fruits, and seagrass hammocks. They sell everything cheap, even excellent foreign wines and such things, for import duties are light. The transit business has made every other house a lodging-camp, and you can get a good bed anywhere for a dollar. It does not cost much to keep a Greyhound bed in order. There is nothing to it but a mattress, two sheets, and a mosquito-bar. The town is ornamented with coconut trees. The outskirts are bordered with chaparral, and everywhere the pink bachelor button-blossoms of the sensitive plant smile among the grass. Smile among the grass is good. M.T. The Santiago de Cuba brought the cholera to the isthmus last trip, and thirty-five people died of it. A young man, a resident of Greyhound, also died of it, which exasperated his mother very much. So the citizens got up aboard of health, and prohibited the cholera from coming ashore there any more. While we were uptown, the stern-wheeler containing our steerage and second cabin passengers arrived, and was at once warned to anchor in the stream and let no one come ashore. Not until we had been there twenty-four hours, and were ready to take final leave, did those crowded and cursing passengers discover what bred the taboo. It then came out that while Brown was drinking some native brandy in one of the saloons, he remarked that he had tasted milder stuff. But then he said he had escaped cholera on the isthmus and smallpox among the steerage folks, and he guessed he could survive that drink. A citizen at once reported the remark to the board of health, and hence the order, when never a steerage passenger got a chance to go ashore at Greyhound. There was some talk in the steerage of hanging Brown, but it never came to anything. Nicaragua The Republic of Nicaragua has some popular cities in it, León, 48,000, Masai, 38,000, Rivas, 30,000, Managua, 24,000, Granada, 18,000, Chinandaga, 18,000, and several other towns of 3,000 and 4,000. The total population is 320,000, all in towns and cities nearly. Only property holders who are declared citizens can vote. Greyhound is not represented in the councils of the nation at all. The property there is held by temporary residents, foreigners, who care nothing about politics. There are a good many gold and silver mines in the country. The Chutales Gold Quartz, English Company, cost 250,000 pounds, is worked by rude native machinery, but has new modern machinery on the way. Its first clean-up, my notes say, was 200,000 pounds. For the sake of our reputation we will consider that that was meant for 20,000 pounds, and it is unquestionably large enough, even at that. A company of Californians have bought two mines, the Albertine and the Petaluma, and have just begun work. They paid $70,000 for one of them. An English company are just beginning work on a mine which they paid 30,000 pounds for. There are also coal, silver, copper, and opal mines. One of the latter, near the road between San Juan and Virgin Bay, has produced opals which, in the rough, were as large as almonds. The Republic also has, among its numerous attractions and sources of commercial prosperity, some lakes and rivers of sulfur, and some extinct volcanoes. An American company has bought one of these and are sinking on it. They think they can make it go again. Nicaragua exports parrots and monkeys, India rubber, logwood, sugar, lids, coconut, coffee, deerskins, mahogany, chocolate, gold, opals, sarsaparilla, tortoiseshells, quite a heavy business, and tropical fruits. The rubber trade is large. Last year, Graytown alone exported $112,000 worth. Rubber is worth $0.28 a pound when it starts, in Europe $0.54. One man does all the mahogany business that is done on the northern coast of Nicaragua. He had one log worth $12,000, which was so large and had to lay several years before there was water enough to float it over the bar. He will clear $500,000 this year, they say. There is a very heavy export trade in logwood, also in cacao, chocolate. Some of the plantations are very extensive. One owned by the Menier Manufacturing Company of France cost $500,000. They could export coconut oil profitably, but no one takes hold of it. There is an ad valorem duty of 10% on imports for Graytown, and a sort of incomprehensible tariff of 40% for the interior. Laborers' wages in the interior are $0.20 to $0.40 a day, and found, but it don't cost anything to board them. They never eat anything but plantons, and they eat them green, ripe, or rotten. They are not particular. They would as soon have them one way as the other. There is an English steamer monthly from Graytown to Jamaica and one or two other points, and thence to Southampton. The transit company's charter has been extended to fifty years, and now it is expected that they will improve the accommodations on the stern-wheel boats. I don't see any room for it, however, unless they can hatch out some more of those happy variations of the sandwiches. The waters of the Colorado and San Juan rivers are to be joined together, however. Dykes built, and other projects instituted tending to the improvement of the Graytown harbor that will eventually make it possible for ships to come inside the reef, no doubt, instead of pitching and charging at anchor in the open roadstead as at present. The boar conquered. We slept ashore in Graytown, and for the want of something better to do I suppose, Brown cornered the boar, and fell to instructing him that an alligator could not climb a tree. The boar said he knew that before, but the philosopher went into elaborate details and demonstrated anyhow, unmindful of protests and interruptions, and finally wore out the victim, and drove him off a frantic and vanquished man. Brown may have done it for a joke, but surely there was no semblance of it in his voice or manner. If he had not really set his heart in good faith on proving that an alligator could not climb a tree, I was not able to discover it. But I never enjoyed anything better. End of Section 73 This is Section 74 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter Articles by Mark Twain, Section 74, Alta, California, March 1867, Part 3 Alta, California, March 17, 1867. Steamer San Francisco, at sea, January 1st. Underway again. All this morning the surf boats were busy bringing New York passengers ashore from the steamer San Francisco, and carrying us out to take their places. And all in the midst of a heavy sea and a drenching rain. We took our places in the surf boat at 8 a.m., and with the first stroke of the oars we were soaked to the skin. Yet it was very pleasant. It was quite a picture to get a misty and momentary glimpse of the boat ahead of us through the driving rain, as it rose high upon the crest of a lofty wave and then sank down, leaving nothing visible in all the wide horizon but the rainy sea. It was dreary enough on the ship when we got there, squatting around on the wet promenade deck, watching baggage and looking soaked, woe be gone, and disconsolate. We were well satisfied, though, for the boat loads that were leaving the vessel every moment were bound for vastly dreary quarters. We sailed at noon. Our confounded choir. Midnight. There goes that choir again. God save the good ship as onward she flies, we're homeward bound, homeward bound. That is well enough, I like that. But usually they do sing the wretchedest old songs in the world. Think of them sitting up there, under these jeweled skies, with all the ocean around them glistening with whitecaps, piping just before the battle-mother, and Johnny comes marching home, and Lillydale, and Dog Tray. When they sing hymns they do well enough and make good music, but perdition catch their other efforts. Homeward bound and the larbored watchahoy nobody objects to, because they are in keeping with our surroundings. But what in the nation is there in common between the shoreless sea, the gemmed and arching heavens, the crested billows, the stately ship plowing her gallant way and leaving a highway of fire behind her, the thousand thoughtful eyes gazing out upon the ocean, lost in dreams of the homes that shall soon bless their sight again? And Dog Tray. Why is Dog Tray to be intruded upon circumstances of such moral and physical sublimity as these? What has Dog Tray got to do with such matters? Confound Dog Tray! Brown delivered of a joke. Key West, Florida, January 6. We soon got accustomed to the new ship and her officers and liked them well, and, behold, we had ice-water. That was a treat. There was plenty of it, and so all hands did little else but drink it while the novelty was fresh. We could not well help liking a ship that kept plenty of ice on board. She was a good ship, but she kept breaking a bolt head or a kingpin or whatever its name was every now and then. The first time it broke, the passengers were in a sweat. They thought it must be something terrible that could keep the ship lying still on the water for two hours at night. Next day it broke again, and again we floated an hour or so till it was mended. Two days afterward it broke again, and again we lost several hours. The passengers getting scared for fear we should get disabled entirely. Disabled, when we had canvas enough to supply two ships. But passengers are usually just about as reasonable as that. The last time the accident happened Brown came up from his orgies in the cabin, late at night. It was storming like everything, and roused me out of my slumbers. What the devil do you want? Why, I want to tell you something! Out with it, quick! Why, I know why they call this the tri-monthly line of steamers. Well, hurry! It's because they go down to Grey Town one month, and then they try all next month to get back again. Leave the room!" And he left. Else I would have brained him on the spot. On the other side, when this lunatic first came in sight of the isthmus, he gazed and gazed and gazed at it, as if he had found something so wonderful he could hardly realize it. Finally he said reflectively, "'The isthmus! And so this is the old, regular, Simon-pure isthmus, the place where all the butter comes from." I suppose you can appreciate that in California. THE WEST SOWESTER! We had a rare good time on the San Francisco. The old captain was jolly and a gentleman, formerly a lieutenant commander in the Navy. The purser was a long, gangly first-rate fellow, perfect gentleman, and told the oldest, rattiest, last-century stories, and told them with the worst grace. We had a very jolly time. The cholera was in the ship, medicines were nearly out, and we had to be jolly. It wouldn't do to get melancholy for a moment. Brown and Smith, my roommates, invented a harmless tropical drink. I thought I had tasted it before. Which they named WEST SOWESTER! And every day before each meal all the boys were drummed forward to take it. It was built thus. R. White sugar, pounds, three-quarters Ice, pounds, one-and-a-half Limes, dozen, one Lemon, one Orange, one Brandy, bottle, one-half Put in three-quarters gallon ice-pitcher and fill up with water. The smoking-room was always full of lovers, teething babies, and seasick women, and so Brown and I had to take it turn about getting sick every night. The idea of this was so that we might have a large ship's lantern in our stateroom instead of the dingy little spark of a swinging lamp usually provided for passengers, and which must be blown out promptly at ten o'clock. Only sick people can have ship lanterns and burn them as long as they want to see how the medicine operates and plays seven up. We never worried much about the medicine. We let it operate or not, just as it came handy. Because it wasn't anything but WEST SOWESTERS anyhow. But we used to be very regular about getting the room crammed full of cigar smoke and boys, and listening to the purser's infamous old stories, and playing pitch seven up till midnight. The Monkey The Monkey was a well-spring of joy. One of the passengers got him at Greytown, and kept him in a locker near our room on the upper deck. And we used to get him as tight as a brick occasionally, on a banana soaked in cherry Brandy. And then it was fun to see him reel away and scamper up the rigging and miscalculate his jumps, and fall thirty feet and catch by his tail on another rope, and save himself. He was dressed up by the ladies in a gray Scotch cap and pantaloons, gray coat with cuffs and collar of brilliant red and gold, and a belt and wooden dagger, and was as comical and happy spirit of the scoundrel as ever lived. He was never idle, never still, all was prospecting and rummaging in state-rooms, or galloping up the rigging to the very mast-head. The gale and the quivering mast and the plunging ship were nonsense to him on his dizzy perch. One morning, when he was tight, and the weather was cool, he went and got into bed with a sick woman who was asleep, drew the covers down carefully, one after the other, watching her face all the time with his sharp eyes, then turned back the sheet and sprung in. He nestled snugly up to the lady, keeping up his low, gratified squeak all the time, and drew up the bed-clothes till nothing of him was visible but the brim of his cap and the end of his gray nose. His squeaking woke the woman, and she looked once at the diminutive old face on her pillow, and then she screamed like a locomotive and sprang out of bed. The next moment the monkey was at the mast-head, infinitely worse scared than she was. Miss Slimans. When the monkey and all other sources of amusement failed, the passengers talked gossip, but the chief of this was the lady they dubbed Miss Slimans. Not one soul in the cabin escaped her. She told fearful stories about everybody, and she never told one that didn't make her victim wince as if he were skinned. She is a newspaper correspondent, and I think she must be a right spicy one. Everybody was in misery on her account, but the climax that filled every heart with anguish was the poem she wrote, and into which she compressed all her monstrous stories. It scorched them. Human nature could not stand this. It had to be resented. And one of the boys in the after-cabin served her up to the tune of Old Langzine. Everybody read it, but they did not want to go further than she did, and so they never sang it. There were eight verses of Homespun Dogerel. I will give a brief extract. She gave M.T. an awful shot, and kingdom she did lift. From white and thayer the fur did fly. Lord how she snuffed out Smith! She crowded Lewis till he swore, if she would stop the war, he'd take the cusset newspaper she corresponded for. She said, it was funny Baker's charms no woman could withstand, but if she saw where those charms lay, she wished she might be destroyed. Brown always spoke reverently of Slimans as the correspondent, but it was small distinction, because he always spoke of me in the same way and the same way of the monkey. The Cholera. Most of these steerage passengers ate quantities of fruit on Isthmus and drank Aquadiente, a dangerous combination even for a native, and we had hardly got to see before the effects of their imprudence appeared. In my log I find these entries. January 2. Two cases cholera in the steerage reported this morning. 4 p.m. Surgeon has just reported to the captain that two of the cases are mighty bad, and the third awful bad. So there is a new one, it seems. On ten p.m. One of the sick men died a few minutes ago, and was at once sheeted and thrown overboard. Reverend Mr. Fackler read the prayers. Midnight. Another patient at the point of death. They are filling him up with brandy. These are sad times. One a.m. The man is dead. Two a.m. He is overboard. Expedition has to be used in our circumstances. January 4. Off coast of Cuba. Another man died this morning. Of cholera, everybody in the ship said, of course, but it was not. Old case of consumption. January 5. We are to put in at Key West, Florida, to-day, for coal, so they say, but no doubt it is to cool down the fright of the passengers as well. Some are lively, but others are in a terrible way. Seven cases sickness yesterday. One a.m. 1st Cabin Passenger Noon. Another man said to be dying of cholera. The young man they call shape. Half a dozen on the sick list now. The blockheads let the diarrhea run two or three days, and then, getting scared, they run to the surgeon and hope to be cured. And they lie, like all possessed. Swear they have just been taken when the doctor knows better by their symptoms. He asked a patient the other day if he had any money to get some brandy with. No, and so the ship had to furnish it. When the man died they found forty-five dollars in his pocket. Maybe it was all the money the poor fellow had. But then he needn't have spoken falsely about it when the chances were all in favor of his going to the bottom anyway, and then he wouldn't want it. Shape been walking the deck in stocking feet at midnight last night, getting wet, exposing himself, going to die, they say. The disease has got into the second cabin at last, and one case in first cabin. The consternation is so great among some of the passengers that several are going to get off at Key West, if quarantine regulation is permitted, and go north overland. The captain and the surgeon go through with the regular daily inspection of every nook and corner and state room in the ship, as usual. It is a good regulation, and more than ever necessary now. Shape is dead, sick about twelve hours. 2 p.m. the Episcopal clergyman Reverend Mr. Facler is taken, bad diarrhea and griping. He has buried all the dead, and he is a good-hearted man, and it always affected him so to see those poor fellows plunge into the sea. Pure distress of mind has made him sick nothing else. He started out to read prayers over shape, and when he came in sight of the sheeted corpse he fainted, and fell down by the capstan. All hands looking anxiously forward to the cool weather we shall strike twenty-four hours hence to drive away the sickness. 4 p.m. the minister has got a fit, convulsions of some kind. They are nursing him well, everybody likes him, and respects him. Just heard the captain give the order to Purser to put up a sign in letters large enough for all to read, no charge for medical attendance whatever. It is a good idea. We have found some more like that fellow that died and didn't want to buy brandy. 5.30 p.m. as the boys came to the room one after the other I observed a marked change in their demeanor. They report that the minister, only sick such a short time, is already very low, and that a hospital has been fitted up in the steerage and he removed thither. Only the ship is fast becoming a floating hospital herself. Not a single hour passes but brings its new sensation, its melancholy tidings. If ever a group of earnest countenances assemble on any part of the deck, you will see everybody flock there. They know there is some more news of dire import. When I think of poor shape and the preacher, both so well when I saw them yesterday, it makes me feel gloomy. As the last two hours all laughter, all cheerfulness, have died out of the ship. A subtle sadness is upon the faces of the passengers. The last arrival says the minister is dying. The passengers are fearfully exercised and with considerable reason, for we are about to have our fifth death in five days and the sixth of the voyage. That bolthead broke several days ago, and we lost two hours while it was being mended. It broke again the next day and we lost three or four hours. It broke again this afternoon, and again we lay, like a log on the water, headwind, for three or four hours more. These things distress the passengers beyond measure. They are scared about the epidemic, and so impatient to get along that a stoppage of an hour seems a week to them, and gets them nervous and excited. One or two insists that we are out of luck and that we are all going to the very dickens, wherever that may be. Good many patients in the hospital. One well man is in a terrible way, can't bear the idea of dying and being buried at sea, as if his dead carcass would be more comfortable being eaten by grubworms than sharks. Has got sixty-eight articles on Cholera and its treatment, does nothing but read them. He tried hard to get the captain to promise not to throw him overboard in case he died, offered him a hundred dollars. He is determined to quit the ship at Key West, and so are twenty or thirty others. January 6. At two o'clock this morning the Reverend Mr. Fackler died, and half an hour afterwards we landed at Key West. It is Sunday. Two of us attended Episcopal service here, and retired when they prepared to take the sacrament, and left a request at the pastor's house that he would preach the funeral sermon. We visited the cemetery in the edge of town, and then, supposing there was plenty of time, strolled through the principal streets and took some notes. When we got to the ship, a little after one o'clock, they said the funeral was already over. This is Section 75 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 75, Alta, California, March 1867, Part 4. Alta, California, March 23, 1867. Key West. January 6. Key West. This ranks as an excellent harbor, and looks like an open roadstead. They say the hundred little flat islands, or keys, scattered all around, keep off sea and storm. It is a pretty little tropical-looking town, green all over with a coconut tree peculiar to this latitude, which has a short, thick trunk and tall curved branches which give it the semblance of a colossal feather-brush. The gardens have a bastard-looking orange tree in them also, and tamarins, rows of Sharon and oleanders, and something that looks like the Century Plant, and among the chaparral in the outskirts are thousands of gigantic prickly pears. The country is level and is precious few inches above the sea. The formation is a rock that is white, looks like limestone, and is made of infinitesimal spheres, like mustard seed compacted together. There is no soil upon it, of any consequence, and so I do not see how they manage to grow anything. I didn't hear of any farms or vegetable gardens around. If a man wanted to start a farm there, he would have to bring one in a ship. The town has houses enough in it to contain three thousand people, but many of them are not occupied. The place has no commerce with the outside world. It don't raise anything, and don't manufacture anything. And there seems to be no country back of it. And so I march through and through the place, wondering how under heaven the people got their living. Finally it struck me, though after comparing notes with the purser and the passengers, there is a great fortification there, Fort Taylor, a lighthouse or so, a great military barrack, and a custom house. So they live off the government. They keep numberless whiskey mills for the soldier trade, and they make something out of the weekly New Orleans and Havana steamer that touches there, and two or three times a year, a stray ship wanders in there and is a godsend. They scorcher. Everybody was afraid the health officers would not allow us to land there with our cholera, vain delusion, if a health officer were to stand between them and their livelihood in that way they would discharge him. They don't mind pestilences. They have their protection in the solubility and singular healthfulness of their climate and situation. Their doctor called our cholera malignant diarrhea and cheerfully let us land and spend three thousand dollars or four thousand dollars. That will last them till fortune betrays another ship into their hands. For one hundred tons of coal and a few stores and medicines our ship paid two thousand eleven dollars and twenty cents. Labor bill for putting the coal aboard was two hundred and five dollars. It would have been twenty five dollars in New York. But the funniest thing was our restaurant experience. There were ten grown persons and two children at the dinner. We furnished the wines ourselves. And weak soup, ham and eggs, coffee, an abominable stew of some kind or other that no man could eat, and a piece of custard pie all around. The bill was two dollars and a quarter a piece. We left good fare on the vessel to go and eat such a villainous mess as that. If they keep on in that way a Key Wester will be a curiosity in heaven hereafter. I say nothing against Key West's cigars, though. We laid in a heavy stock of them at four dollars a hundred. Real Havana tobacco, and a better cigar than one can get in San Francisco at any price whatever. The tobacco is imported from Havana, and then made into cigars by Spaniards. The duty on raw tobacco is only one-third of its market value, but the duty on the manufactured article is just three times its value. Hence they do not import cigars, but make them. There are few handsome or elegant dwellings in the place—none, I might almost say. The dwellings of the plebeians are one-story frame cottages, with cheap colored paints hung on the walls, and neither mats nor carpets on the floors, and without glass windows, nothing but great heavy-board shutters, solid like a door, and an inch thick. I think I saw a hundred such—I couldn't understand it. I meant to ask why they did not use glass windows, but I forgot it. I wish I knew. At a little distance the town looks whitewashed and very pretty, but a closer inspection discovers that the whitewash is dingy, and that the whole concern hath about it a melancholy air of decay. Benbolt. The negroes seem to be concentrated in a single corner of the town, to Lourdes of the Whites, so their fragrance is wasted on the desert air, and blows out to sea. As this fragrance blows straight out from near the lighthouse, it has its value, because the storm-tossed mariner with a delicate sense of smell could follow it in, in case the light chants to go out. We met very few negroes in the town proper, which might have been because it was Sunday and a holiday. The roadways in and about Key West are in triple paths, with belts of grass growing between, a circumstance which might have been suggestive of one-horse vehicles, only there were no horse-tracks in the middle path, and no wheel-tracks in the outside ones. We did see two cows and three horses, but that is not enough to justify me saying there are thousands of them in Key West. I attended Episcopal service, and they gauged me at a glance and gave me a back seat, as usual, and such style, and such fashion. Why, I might have imagined myself in Grace Cathedral or some other metropolitan temple. Three hundred and fifty elegantly dressed ladies and children, and twenty-five men. The men were out selling little groceries and things to our army of rusty-looking passengers from San Francisco, no doubt. But where all that style came from was a mystery to me, in this decaying, windowless town, guiltless of commerce, agriculture, or manufacturers. They must have been families of officers of the Custom House, and of two great military establishments. Several of the gentlemen were unquestionably southern-bloods, though, slim, spruce, long-haired young fellows in broadcloth, black kids, whale-bone canes, ruffled shirts, and funny little cravats, an inch wide, made of flaming yellow silk ribbon. Finally, two gentlemen began to hand around plates that seemed to have large pound cakes on them. Everybody took a slice, but still the cakes grew no smaller. I wondered at that. However, when the cake-passers got toward my end of the church, I saw that those things were only imitation cakes with holes in their tops, and that the people were putting something in them instead of taking from them. I asked a boy what it was all about. He said those were contribution boxes. That had occurred to me a moment before, but I heard nothing rattle in them. You see, they were using postal currency, and it was our first experience in that line. We got better acquainted with it before the day was over, though. In a grocery where Brown bought something, they gave him a five-cent stamp in change, with a portrait of Gideon Wells on it, but he handed it back, with many regrets, and said he couldn't make any use of the grocery man's picture because he didn't keep no photographic album. Our tailor, an immensely strong fortification, sits in the edge of the sea and commands the entrance to the harbour, but we did not visit it. The walk would have been too great. Well, we are really in the States again, but I cannot quite realize it yet. At sea again. New York, January 12. We remained at Key West a day and night, and left on the morning of the 7th, and with a thinned complement of people, for twenty- one passengers had quitted the ship on account of the cholera, among them Isaac, who had laterally so fallen below all esteem or even recognition that he had been going pretty much in a gang by himself ever since we left Graytown, and among them also went the man with the cholera scrapbook, who wanted to pay the captain one hundred dollars to ensure his not being buried at sea if he died. Hilarity restored. But the ship had regained her ancient cheerfulness as by magic. Of the 18 who were sick when we landed, eleven were already well again, and all the fright about the disease was gone, went with the twenty- one. The dismal spell was removed, and it was really jolly at breakfast that morning. Laughter rang out clear and hearty everywhere. They even got to chafing each other about the scare, and telling extravagant stories on each other about things done under the influence of fear. They accused kingdom of being scared, but he denied it, said he had never been scared since he loaded the old Queen Anne's musket for his father once, and he told the legend of the musket. You see, the old man was trying to learn me to shoot blackbirds and beasts that tore up the young corn and such things so that I could be of some use about the farm, because I wasn't big enough to do much. The big gun was a little single-barrel shotgun, and the old man carried an old Queen Anne's musket that weighed a ton, and made a report like a thunderclap and kicked like a mule. The old man wanted me to shoot the old musket sometimes, but I was afraid. One day, though, I got her down, and thought I'd try her one riffle anyhow, and so I took her to the hired man and asked him how to load her, because the old man was out in the fields. The old man said, Do you see them marks on the stock, an X and a V on each side of the Queen's crown? Well, that means ten balls and five slugs, that's her load. But how much powder? Oh, he says, It don't matter, put in three or four handfuls. So I loaded her up that way, and it was an awful charge. I had sense enough to know that, and started out. I leveled her on a good many blackbirds. But every time I went to pull the trigger, I shut my eyes and weakened. I was afraid of her kick. Towards sundown I fetched up at the house, and there was the old man resting himself on the porch. "'Benout hunting, have you?' "'Yes, sir,' says I.' "'What did you kill?' "'Didn't kill anything, sir. Didn't shoot her off. I was afraid she'd kick.' "'I know damn well she would.' "'Give me the gun.' The old man says, mad as sin. And he took aim at a sapling on the other side of the road, and I began to drop back out of danger. And the next minute I heard an earthquake and see the Queen Anne whirling end over end in the air, and the old man spinning around on one heel, with one leg up and both hands on his jaw, and the bark flying from that sapling like there was a hail storm. The old man's shoulder was set back four inches, and his jaw turned black and blue. And he had to lay up for three days. Conor, nor nothing else, can ever scare me the way I was scared that time. The Tale of the Bird of a New Species That reminds me of another of Kingdom's experiments, says a boy. He says, "'One day, when me and my brother were out in the woods, he shot a chicken-hawk and a crow. And while we were lulling in the shade under a tree, he pulled the tails out of the birds, and then, fooling around and talking, he finally built the crow's tail into the chicken-hawk's transom. When we saw what a neat job it was, we thought we would keep it. When we got home, we were late for supper and we just dropped it on the porch and rushed in. We had a sort of sneaking hope that the old man and our uncle would get bit with it anyway, because they were always pattering over geology or natural history or something they didn't know anything about. While we were in supper, they came along and found the bird, and we heard them discussing it and talking all sorts of astonishment. Directly the old man came in, had the birds by the leg, and says, "'Boys, where'd you get this?' "'Shot him in the woods, sir. Did you ever come across any more birds like this round here?' "'No, sir, this is the first one. "'Boys, do you know what you've done? You've discovered something that'll make you known everywhere's. This bird's of a new species.'" And then he walked out, and we heard him and uncle conclude that they'd label it with their names and send it to Professor Hagenbaum at Albany. Pretty soon, though, the old man took hold of the tail and it pulled out, and we heard both of them swear a little. When we came out, the bird was laying on one side of the fence, and the tail on the other. We didn't dare to laugh nor to let on about overhearing their talk, either. But about a month after this there came along the raddiest specimen of a boy you ever saw and wanted to stop with us. He was all rags and tatters, and tired out with running away from his master somewhere. His shirt was hanging at half-mass through his trousers, and two-thirds of the tail of it was a piece of blue flannel that had been sewed on. While the poor devil was eating his dinner, uncle and the old man were studying up what they'd better do with him. And finally they said, by George they didn't know what to do with him. Since then the boy rose up and swung his colors into view, and Brother Bob says, Father, you might send him to Professor Hagenbaum at Albany. It was the first the old man knew we'd overheard the bird talk, and so he wailed us both. He says, I'll earn you to play jokes on your old father! The girl streamed. I go back to my log again. January 8. One named Bel Mame died to-day of drop-sea, and was buried at sea. The temperature of the girl stream here, they tried every two hours for the information of the Navy Department, is seventy-six degrees, atmosphere seventy-two degrees. We are comfortable enough now, while we are in this fluid stove, but when we leave it at Cape Hatteras it will be terribly cold. The speed of the stream varies from one-third of a mile to three and one-half miles an hour. We have been making two-hundred and ten to two-hundred and twenty miles a day here to four, but in this current we can turn off two-hundred and fifty, two-hundred and sixty, and two-hundred and seventy-five miles. The ship has beautiful charts compiled by Lieutenant Maury, which are crammed with shoals, currents, lights, buoys, soundings, and winds and calms and storms, black figures for soundings, and bright spots for beacons and so on, and an interminable tangle, like a spider's web of red lines denoting the tracks of hundreds of ships whose logs were sent to Maury. Everything mapped out so accurately that a man might know what water he had, what current, what beacon he was near, what style of wind he might expect, and from which direction, on any particular day in the year, at any given point on the world's broad surface, they that go down to the sea and ships see the wonders of the great deep, but this modern navigation outwonders any wonder the scriptural writers dreamt of. To see a man stand in the night when everything looks alike, far out in the midst of a boundless sea, and measure from one star to another, and tell to a dot right where the ship is, till the very spot, the little insignificant speck occupies on a vast expanse of land and sea, twenty-five thousand miles in circumference, verily, with his imperial intellect and his deep searching wisdom, man is almost a god. In the strongest current of the Gulf Stream at four o'clock this morning, off Jupiter Inlet, three and a half miles an hour. Numerous bets we wouldn't make two hundred and fifty miles, made two hundred and seventy-one in the twenty-four hours ending at noon. The current for the next twenty-four hours will not be so strong. January 10. At noon shall be off Hatteras. Twenty-six miles out from San Francisco. We shall leave this warming pan of a Gulf Stream today, and then it will cease to be genial summer weather and become wintery cold. We already see the signs. They put feather beds and blankets on the berths this morning. It is warm now, and raining. Eight six five diarrhea, two better, three convalescent. Passing out of the Gulf Stream rapidly. At two p.m. temperature the water had fallen seven degrees and half an hour, from seventy-two degrees down to sixty-five degrees. Already the day is turning cold, and one after another the boys adjourn from the deck a moment and then come back with overcoats on. At two-thirty, temperature of water, two degrees lower, these sixty-three degrees. At three it was sixty-one degrees. It fell eleven degrees in an hour and a half. Then we passed out, and the weather turned bitter cold. More Journalizing. 11.30 p.m., dark, stormy, and villainously cold. Snow blew in my face as I fought the wind and came forward to the wheel-house. 11.00 p.m. January, seven p.m. Been in bed all day, trying to keep warm. Can't get near the steam-pipes in the smoking-room on account of the babies and the sick women. If they like it in there, they're welcome. But they'll freeze if they persist in leaving the windows open. It is Brown's turn to be sick to-night. I will turn out and find him, and drum the boys forward for seven up. January 12, 1 a.m. Man named Peterson is just dead, not cholera. We are nearing New York. He died on soundings, and so we shall not bury him in the ocean. Brown's Logbook. I captured Brown's journal, and I mean to make an extract from it, whether it be fair or not. Monday morning found my old girl setting in her old place by the taff rail, sighing and impensive, just as she always is, and also reading poetry and picking her nose with a fork. I cannot live without her. Tuesday. This purser has got his own way for making out what he calls his custom-house statement. Says they have to have it, but they never read it, so it isn't particular how it's done. He was scratching away at it, busy in his office. I asked him how in the nation he found out every passenger's age and trade and nationality and all that sort of thing. Guess I'm myself, he said. If a man's name's Mullinot, of course he's a Frenchman. If his name's O'Flanagan, of course he's an Irishman. If his name's Smith, set him down for any place that's handy. As to his age or his trade, who the devil's business is that? Put him down what you please. Custom-house people don't read in any way. All pursers do it this way. The Laws of Fars, got up by some ass of a back-country congressman that had never been at sea in his life. Well, says I, let's see how you've got some of us down," and he showed me. William Brown, missionary, age ninety-eight, native of Timbuktu. Mark Twain, short-card sharp, age twenty-four, South Sea Islander. Miss Slimans, milliner and moral philosopher, age sixty-two, native of Terra del Fuego. That is the way that long-legged humbug prejudices government against respectable people. Safe at last in the States. We swore the ship through at Quarantine, which was right, she hadn't had any real cholera on board since we left Greytown, and at eight o'clock this morning we stood in the biting air of the upper deck and sailed by the snow-covered wintry-looking residences on Staten Island, recognized Castle Garden, beheld the vast city spread out beyond, encircled with its palisade of masts, and adorned with its hundred steeples, saw the steam-tug and ferry-boat swarming through the floating ice, instinct with a frenzied energy, as we passed the river, and in a little while we were ashore and safe-housed at the metropolitan. After comparing notes all decided that the voyage had been exceedingly pleasant, not withstanding its little drawbacks, and that we would like very well to leave the cholera ashore and take the trip over again. The Nicaragua Steamship Company are building three splendid new steamers, all of them fast and commodious, and six weeks hence the first one will start around the horn to do duty on the other side. They claim that she will be able to make fifteen knots right along with twenty pounds of steam. I would like to go in one of their new ships, and see that beautiful scenery on the lake, and San Juan River again. End of Section 75 This is Section 76 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 76, Alta, California, March 1867, Part 5 Alta, California, March 28, 1867, New York, February 2, 1867. The Overgrown Metropolis The only trouble about this town is that it is too large. You cannot accomplish anything in the way of business, you cannot even pay a friendly call, without devoting a whole day to it, that is, what people call a whole day who do not get up early. Many businessmen only give audience from eleven to one. Therefore, if you miss those hours, your affair must go over till next day. Now, if you make the time at one place, even though you stay only ten or fifteen minutes, you can hardly get to your next point, because so many things and people will attract your attention and your conversation and curiosity, that the other three-quarters of that hour will be frittered away. You have but one hour left, and my experience is that a man cannot go anywhere in New York in an hour. The distances are too great. You must have another day to it. If you have got six things to do, you have got to take six days to do them in. If you live below 25th Street, you are downtown. And if you live anywhere between that and 775th Street, I don't know how far they run, have quit trying to find out. You will never get downtown without walking the legs off yourself. You cannot ride, I mean, you cannot ride unless you are willing to go in a packed omnibus that labors and plunges and struggles along at the rate of three miles in four hours and a half, always getting left behind by fast walkers, and always apparently hopelessly tangled up with vehicles that are trying to get to some place or other and can't. Or if you can stomach it, you can ride in a horse car and stand up for three-quarters of an hour in the midst of a file of men that extends from front to rear. Seats all crammed, of course. Or you can take one of the platforms, if you please. But they are so crowded you will have to hang on by your eyelashes and your toenails. I roam in East 16th Street, and I walk. It is a mighty honest walk from there to anywhere else, and very destructive to legs. But then the omnibuses are too slow during this mixed rainy, snowy, slushy, and hard frozen weather, and the car is too full. There is never room for another person by the time they get this far downtown. The cars do not run in Broadway, anyhow, and I do not like to wander out of that street. I always get lost when I do. The town is all changed, since I was here 13 years ago, when I was a pure and sinless sprout. The streets wind in and out, and this way and that way, in the most bewildering fashion, and two of them will suddenly come together and clamp the last house between them so close and whittle the end of it down so sharp that it looms up like the bow of a steamship, and you have to shut one eye to see it. The streets are so crooked in the lower end of town, that if you take one and follow it faithfully, you will eventually fetch up right where you started from. The Model Artists When I was here in 53, a model artist's show had an ephemeral existence in Chatham Street, and then everybody growled about it, and the police broke it up. At the same period Uncle Tom's cabin was in full blast in the same street, and had already run 150 nights. Everybody went there in elegant toilets and cried over Tom's griefs, but now things are changed. The Model Artists play nightly to admiring multitudes at famous Nimblo's Garden in Great Broadway, have played 150 nights, and will play 150 nights more, no doubt, and Uncle Tom draws critical, self-possessed groups of Negroes and children at Barnum's Museum. I fear me I shall have to start a moral missionary society here. Don't you suppose those friends of mine in San Francisco were jesting when they warned me to be very choice in my language, if I ever lectured here, lest I might offend? In 53, they called that horrid, immoral show I was speaking of, the Model Artists, and people wouldn't go to see it. But now they call that sort of thing a grand spectacular drama, and everybody goes. It is all in a name. And it is about as spectacular as anything I ever saw without sinking right into the earth with outraged modesty. It is the wickedest show you can think of. You see, there is small harm in exhibiting a pack of painted old harlots swas'd in gauze like the original Model Artists, for no man careth a scent for them, but to laugh and jeer at them. Nakedness itself, in such a case, would be nothing worse than disgusting. But I warn you that when they put beautiful clipper-built girls on the stage in this new fashion, with only just barely clothes enough on to be tantalizing, it is a shrewd invention of the devil. It lays a heavier siege to public morals than all the legitimate Model Artists shows you can bring into action. The name of this new exhibition, that so touches my missionary sensibilities, is the Black Crook. The scenic effects, the waterfalls, cascades, fountains, oceans, fairies, devils, hells, heavens, angels, are gorgeous beyond anything ever witnessed in America, perhaps, and these things attract the women and the girls. Then the endless ballets and splendid tableaux, with seventy beauties arrayed in dazzling half-costumes, and displaying all possible compromises between nakedness and decency, capture the men and boys, and so Nimblo's has taken in twenty-four hundred dollars a night, seven nights and a matinee a week, for five months, and sometimes twenty-seven hundred dollars. It is claimed that a multitude equal to the entire population of the State of California, China men included, have visited this play. The great Herald newspaper pitched into it, and a sensation parson preached a sermon against it. This was sufficient to advertise it all over the Continent, and so the proprietor's fortune was made. The scenery and the legs are everything. The actors, who do the talking, are the wretchedest sticks on the boards, but the fairy scenes, they fascinate the boys. Beautiful bare-legged girls hanging in flower-baskets, others stretched in groups on great seashells, others clustered around fluted columns, others in all possible attitudes, girls, nothing but a wilderness of girls, stacked up, pile on pile, away aloft to the dome of the theatre, diminishing in size and clothing, till the last row, mere children, dangle high up from invisible ropes, arrayed only in a chemissa. The whole tableau resplendent with columns, scrolls, and a vast ornamental work wrought in gold, silver, and brilliant colors, all lit up with gorgeous theatrical fires, and witnessed through a great gauzy curtain that counterfeits a soft silver mist. It is the wonders of the Arabian nights realized. Those girls dance in ballet, dressed with a meagerness that would make a parasol blush, and they prance around and expose themselves in a way that is scandalous to me. Moreover they come trooping on the stage in platoons and battalions in most princely attire, I grant you, but always with more tights in view than anything else. They change their clothes every fifteen minutes for four hours, and their dresses become more beautiful and more rascally all the time. All dramadome affected. I have been sitting here blushing so long that I might as well finish the subject now. The Warhol sisters, at the Broadway, are playing of fairy-piece also, which enables them to undress to suit the popular taste. However, they do not take off enough, by any means, and so they cannot hope to achieve supreme success. But our Sally Hinckley, late of San Francisco, discounts the black crook. She is playing a nude fairy-piece also, and in the last act she makes a lovely statue of herself, and stands aloft before the audience, and dressed about like the Menken. She looks very beautiful, but Heaven help her assistance. She has got about thirty padded, painted, slabs-sided, lantern-jawed old hags with her, who are so mortal homely that nothing tastes good to them. And to see those lank, blear-eyed, leathery old scallywags come out and hop around in melancholy dance with their cheap, ragged, nine-inch dress-tales flapping in the air. Oh! It is worth going miles to see! And when one of them finishes her poor little shindig and makes her wind-up stamp in the orthodox way, sticking out a slipper like a horsetroff with a criminal attempt at grace, I want to snatch a double-barrel shotgun and go after the whole tribe. Edwin Booth and the legitimate drama still draw immense houses, but the signs of the times convince me that he will have to make a little change by and by and peel some women. Nothing else can change the popular taste the way things are going now. The Bewitching New Fashions Who shall describe the exquisite taste and beauty of the new style of ladies' walking dresses? Taken as a class, women can contrive more outlandish and ugly costumes than one would think possible without the gift of inspiration, but this time they have been felicitous in invention. The wretched waterfall still remains, of course, but in a modified form. Every change it has undergone was for the better. First it represented a bladder of scotch snuff, next it hung down the woman's back like a canvas-covered ham, afterwards it contracted and counterfeited a turnip on the back of the head, now it sticks straight out behind and looks like a wire muzzle on a gray hound. Nestling in the midst of this long stretch of head and hair reposes the little batter cake of a bonnet, like a jockey saddle on a race-horse. You will readily perceive that this looks very unique and pretty and coquettish, but the glory of the costume is the robe, the dress. No furblows, no flounces, no biases, no ruffles, no gores, no flutter-wheels, no hoops to speak of, nothing but a rich, plain, narrow black dress, terminating just below the knees in long saw-teeth, points downwards, and under it a flaming red skirt, enough to put your eyes out, that reaches down only to the ankle-bone, and exposes the restless little feet, charming, fascinating, seductive, bewitching to see a lovely girl of seventeen with her saddle on her head and her muzzle on behind, and her veil just covering the end of her nose, come tripping along in her hoopless, red-bottomed dress, like a churn on fire, is enough to set a man wild. I must drop this subject. I can't stand it. THE CENTRARY CLUB By permission, I visited the sentry club last night, the most unspeakably respectable club in the United States, perhaps. It was storming like everything, and I thought there would necessarily be a small attendance, but this was not the case. The reading and supper rooms were crowded, and with the distinguished artists, authors, and amateurs of New York. I averaged the heads, and they went three sizes larger than the style of heads I have been accustomed to. In one of the smaller rooms they averaged best. Thirteen heads out of the twenty-seven present were what I choose to call prodigious. I never felt so subjugated in my life, and I was never so ashamed of wearing an eight-and-a-quarter before. Many of these gentlemen were old, but very few of them bald. Isn't that singular? It isn't that way in California. Most men are bald, they're young and old. You know, of a Sunday when it rains, and the women cannot go out, a church congregation looks like a skating-pond. It is just an account of the shiny bald heads. Nothing else. Article I of the Constitution will inform you of the character of the sentry club. This association shall be composed of authors, artists, and amateurs of letters and the fine arts. This has a tendency to exclude parties who have bank accounts and pedigree, but no brains. It is too thundering exclusive. The club is ten years old. Its membership is limited to five hundred. Its list is full. And when vacancies occur there are always a number of candidates patiently waiting to fill them. One visitor told me he had been waiting three years but expected to get in some time or other. I have some idea of putting in my application. I won't need to belong till I get old. The initiation fee is one hundred dollars and dues three dollars a month. The club owns the premises, a three storey brick, and forty feet of vacant ground adjoining, whereon they mean to build, and forty thousand dollars in bank. Conversation there is instructive and entertaining, and the brandy punches are good, and so are the lunches. What more could a man want? Bancroft, the historian, is president of the club, and was on duty last night. Among the list of members I observed the following names. Many others are distinguished both here and on your side of the Continent, but you know these best, perhaps. Edwin Booth William H. Aspenwall H. W. Bellows C. Aster Bristad Albert Bierstadt William Cullen Bryant E. H. Chapin J. H. Cheever Church, the painter F. O. C. Darley Frederick S. Cousins George W. Curtis Asher B. Durand Cyrus W. Field Park Godwin Wilson G. Hunt Thomas McElrath Frederick Law Olmsted Putnam, the publisher Edmund C. Stedman A. T. Stewart Stoddard, the poet Launt Thompson Bayard Taylor Julian C. Vertplank Lester Wallach and so forth and so on. There is a constellation of celebrated names for you. I carried away some of the hats with me for specimens. They average about number eleven. End of Section 76 This is Section 77 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain Section 77, Alter California, March 1867, Part 6 Alter California, March 30, 1867 New York, February 18, 1867 My Ancient Friends, The Police The police of Broadway seem to have been selected with special reference to size. They are nearly all large, fine-looking men, and their blue uniforms, well-studded with brass buttons, their jackboots, and their batons, worn like a dagger. Give them an imposing military aspect. They are gentlemanly in appearance and conduct. These remarks will apply pretty well to the police force throughout the city. I hear them praised on every hand for their efficiency, integrity, and watchful attention to business. It seems like an extravagant compliment to pay a policeman, don't it? I am charmed with the novelty of it. One cannot walk a hundred yards in any part of the city day or night without stumbling upon one of these soldierly officials. In Broadway, especially down below the City Hall Park, where drays, carriages, carts, and pedestrians keep the great thoroughfare in a constant state of crowding, struggling, chaotic confusion, the police are as thick as they are at headquarters in San Francisco at the changing of the evening watch, and how they work, how they charge through the tangled vehicles and order this one to go this way, another that way, and a third to stand still or back. How they wade through mud and slush, piloting women safely through the fearful jams, they are extremely useful. In fact, they present the anomaly of a police force that is an absolute necessity to the well-being of the city, and they earn every cent they get. From one end of town to the other, they march to and fro across Broadway with women on their arms the whole day long. The women like it. I stood by for two hours and watched one of them cross seven or eight times on various pretenses, and all was on the same handsome policeman's arm. Sunday Amusements You know they have got a new excise law here, which closes up all places on Sunday where liquor is sold. You cannot get a taste of the villainous wines and liquors of New York on the Sabbath for love or money. You cannot even keep them on private account, in your own house, if the police find it out. And all possible places of amusement and public resort are closed up also. The town looks dead and deserted. I could not even find a boot-black yesterday, or a news-boy, or a place open where I could buy a newspaper. What was left for me to do? Simply to follow the fashionable mania and go to church. You cannot imagine what an infatuation church-going has become in New York. Youths and young misses, young gentlemen and ladies, the middle-aged and the old, all swarm to church morning, noon, and night every Sunday. If it rains or snows, or turns biting cold, they stay away from the theatres, but an earthquake could not keep them from the churches. They brave miles of stormy weather to worship and sing praises at the altar and criticize each other's costumes. Concerning the weather, a bad little boy once said it was too rainy to go to school, but just about rainy enough to go fishing. When that kind of weather prevails here, it is considered too rainy to go fishing, but just about rainy enough to go to church. In the theatres, a certain new-fangled reserved seat system has been reduced to a state of rascally perfection, and you can enter at ten o'clock, when the place seems crowded, and get one of the reserved seats in the front part of the parkette, or the second row of the dress circle, by paying a dollar and a half for it. And you can select and buy the seat from a peddler in the streets, or in Brooklyn, or Albany, and find it all correct. Buy it for any night you want it, a fortnight ahead if you want to. The theatre has been paid for it long ago by the peddler, or the storekeeper who sells it. But they haven't any reserved system in the churches, but the old, regular one, and so, if you do not know an accommodating pew-owner, you have got to go before breakfast and sit in the gallery. Crowds cross the river on the coldest mornings to hear Henry Ward Beecher. I have been in a pious frenzy myself for a while. I went over two weeks ago. The thermometer was at one hundred and eighty degrees below zero, I should judge, and I walked as stiff-legged as a Chinaman, because the nerves all through me were frozen as taught as fiddle-strings. I had been promised a seat in the pew of a New York editor who told me to come early. I was at the church at ten o'clock Sunday morning. I thought that was early. And I knew precious well it was earlier than any Christian ought to be out of his bed on such a morning. The pavements were crowded with people trying to get in, and when I told the usher I was accredited to pew number forty-six, he answered with an offended air, forty-six! Pretty time of day to come for forty-six! Full an hour ago! I said, apologetically, I tried to get over a day before yesterday, sir, but scorning the sarcasm, go upstairs where the galleries are, and when they're done praying, maybe you can get a chance. I said humbly, but I don't want a chance to pray. I only—now move on! Don't stand there bothering me with your cusset foolishness. There's five hundred people behind you, waiting to get in, and you're blocking the way! He did not say that, but he looked it, with two hundred horsepower. So I went upstairs and crowded in and captured a little stool from an usher, and jammed it into a vacancy among the multitude, about large enough to accommodate a spittoon, and had the satisfaction of knowing I was the last individual that got a seat in Mr. Beecher's church that day. The church was large, and the wide gallery extended around three sides of it. Every pew above and below was filled with elegantly dressed people, and the aisles and odd spaces in both places occupied with stools like mine. Mr. Beecher's altar is an elevated, carpeted, unrailed platform, a sort of stage, with a little pedestal at its front edge for a pulpit. Mr. B sat in a chair against the wall, his head and body inclining backward, with the comfortable air of a manager, who has got a good house and expected it. The choir over his head sang charmingly, and then he got up and preached one of the liveliest and most sensible sermons I ever listened to. He has a rich, resonant voice, and a distinct denunciation, and makes himself heard all over the church without very apparent effort. His discourse sparkled with felicitous similes and metaphors. It is his strong suit to use the language of the worldly, and might be called a striking mosaic work wherein poetry, pathos, humor, satire, and eloquent declamation were happily blended upon a groundwork of earnest exposition of the great truths involved in his text. Whenever he forsook his notes and went marching up and down his stage, sawing his arms in the air, hurling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry and exploding minds of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point, I could have started the audience with a single clap of the hands and brought down the house. I had a suffocating desire to do it. To illustrate some point in his discourse he spoke of how he had watched a wonderful loom in Lowell once, how, all alone and with no apparent intelligence but its own to guide it, it went steadily on about its business, weaving all manner of beautiful and intricate figures, always preserving a faultless harmony in the designs, yet never hesitating a moment or making a mistake. And then, pausing impressively a second or two, he said that, reflecting upon the mental calibre of some of the people to whom the elective franchise is accorded in America, he had never been able to get rid of the notion that it was a sin and a shame that that machine wasn't allowed to vote. Then the congregation let go and laughed like all possessed. Mr. Beecher is a remarkably handsome man, when he is in the full tide of sermonizing, and his face is lit up with animation, but he is as homely as a singed cat when he isn't doing anything. Bishop Southgate's Matinee I attended Bishop Southgate's Matinee yesterday afternoon, in pursuance of my desire to test all the amusements of the metropolis. The ungodly are not slow to get up nicknames for sacred things here. All the pretty girls, and also all the young men who doad on them, go to the Sunday afternoon services at Bishop Southgate's Church, in 38th Street, and they call it the Bishop's Matinee. And there is Dr. Bellows Church in Fourth Avenue, somewhere above 20th Street. It is the wildest piece of architecture you ever saw, grid-ironed all over with alternate short bars of showy red and white, like a Confederate flag, so the ungodly call it the Church of the Holy Zebra. It was fearfully cold yesterday, but nevertheless the Bishop's Matinee was a success. There were platoons of lovely girls there, and all arrayed in the charming new street costume, with its loosely hanging jacket, its short narrow dress, terminating well up in long bugle-fringed points over a red underdress, trimmed with bugles all over, I should rather say. Bless me, when the girls filed up the aisles yesterday, rattling their fringes against the pews. You could shut your eyes and imagine you were out in a hail storm. When I see a pretty girl in this charming costume, I want to fall down and worship her. And yet she is bound to look a good deal like a China woman when her back is toward you. This costume will provoke many a smile in San Francisco, where the China women abound. The Bishop's Church is not large, but its fancy altar, its gas-lights, and its stained windows, brilliant with yellow saints and scarlet martyrs, make it very showy. All the side windows are for memorials. They are to be painted with sacred to the memory of such and such parties as may die worthy of the honour. I told this to Brown, and he said, if I had a grudge against one of them saints, and he was to die before I got even with him, I'd break his window the first thing. At three o'clock the performance commenced. The organist played a shotish first and then changed to an exquisite waltz that set the young people's feet itching, and their heads to swaying to the undulating movement of the harmony. This soon changed to the loveliest air from Trovatore, and the full-toned choir awoke. It was beautiful music, and the voices seemed so rich and mellow to my uncultivated ears. The Bishop sat on one side of the chancel, facing the orchestra, and looked as if he were thinking, Now you dare to make a false note and I'll dock your wages for you. I know that was what he was thinking, without being told it. The choir chanted the litany, and a young fellow read a chapter from the Bible, another man preached a very good sermon, and then the Bishop read some verses from the sermon on a mount, gave out a multitude of religious advertisements about forthcoming meetings, society assemblages, etc., pronounced the benediction, and the organist fiddled the people out of the church to a tune that sounded like the sailor's hornpipe with variations. All the time the portly, complacent Bishop was reading his handful of scripture verses, the organ accompanied him with a mixture of funeral and fandango music to suit the sense of the text. Perhaps I can aid you in conceiving of the effect. Bishop, blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit the earth. Organ. Max Welton's, Bray's, Arbonne, being suggestive of the property inherited by the defendant. Bishop, blessed are the peacemakers for, organ, your little hands were never made to tear each other's eyes. Bishop, blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after, organ, give me three grains of corn, mother, and so forth and so on. I have used an extravagant simile, maybe, but it is not far out of the way. The truth was, the organ drowned the Bishop out, generally, so that you could not hear him at all. Brown said he had been siphering on the matter, and he was satisfied the church could get along without the Bishop, that he didn't do anything to speak of except read advertisements for meetings, and so it would be economy to discharge him and set up a bulletin board. The man is not responsible for what he says. He does not know any better. I like the sermon. I thought some of the organ's flights of fancy were a little startling, considering the character of the place, but I shall not soon forget the beautiful music of the choir. The Bishop's matinee is well calculated to seduce the sinner into coming within the sound of the preached gospel. There is wisdom in the idea, no doubt. St. Albans. I went to that church last night, walked all the way from sixteenth to fourty-seventh street in the bitter coal to do it. Behold, what religious enthusiasm, just flavoured with worldly curiosity, can do. Bishop Southgate's is high church, but St. Albans is higher. I should say that the latter was Roman Catholic in disguise. The altar is showy with bright colours and pictures, and tall wax lights towering up from seven branched candlesticks. It lacked a picture of the Virgin, though. Presently the organ began to murmur in soft dreamy cadences, and a sound of distant singing floated up from below. It grew stronger and closer, and soon a dozen surplus little boys, bearing a tall cross, and half a dozen surplus clergymen, filed up from the basement, making all the building resound with music. They bowed as they passed the altar, and ranged themselves on opposite sides of the chancel. The boys chanted the litany, and there was something infinitely thrilling and inexpressive in the ringing bugletones of their young voices. It was worth the pilgrimage to hear. I must not speak further of the services. My bishop's performances in the sandwich islands were as a mere sideshow to a circus in comparison. The vagaries of an innocent. This simple comrade of mine keeps me in hot water all the time. He takes a fancy to every sort of foolishness. He wants to hire a mulatto and put him in livery like the Nabobs of the town. He had almost consummated his diabolism when I discovered his intent. I said, What is that fellow doing in the hall with that blacking box label on his hat and that fantastic costume on? Him? Why, he's my foot-man! He's in livery! Well, you can get him out of livery just as quick as you can, that's all. Saturday, when I was talking with a young lady in Broadway, he touched me on the shoulder and said, How's this? He was dressed like a tartar-chief, and was shouldering a vast wreck-poison sign around. I hunted everywhere for the fellow this morning, and found him at last in full police uniform, lugging young women across Broadway at the junction of Easy Street. I was speechless, but he chirped out in his cheerful way. Oh, no! This ain't no good thing, I don't reckon! And seized a young girl and charged through the confusion of vehicles with her, ordering the drivers to stand still, and thus checking the tide of three miles of commerce and wasting hundreds of dollars worth of mercantile time. For you know, when one cart stops there, the endless procession must wait till it moves again. I have got to kill this fellow, I foresee that. Stereotyping Machine I have been examining a machine today, partly owned by a Californian, which will greatly simplify cheapen and expedite stereotyping. With a single alphabet of type, arranged around a wheel, the most elaborate book may be impressed, letter after letter, in plaster plates, ready for the reception of the melted metal, and do it faster than a printer could compose the matter. It works with a treadle and a bank of keys, like a melodian. It does away with cases of types, setting up and distributing, and all the endless paraphernalia of a printing office. The little machine could prepare Webster's unabridged for the press in a space no larger than a common bathroom. By this invention, a man could set up, as a stereotyper, on a large scale, on a capital of two hundred dollars. It will either print or stereotype music with the utmost accuracy. An elaborate border may be printed in three minutes, by repeated impressions of a single type. The funniest part of it is that the inventor does not know anything about the art of printing, but then he has invented all sorts of curious machines, among them a flying ship, without any mechanical education, and paints well in oils, and performs on the guitar and piano without having ever received musical instruction. The stereotyping machine has been patented in the United States, England, and Prussia, and is to be exhibited at the Paris Exposition. The patent rights have been sold for fabulous sums. I send a rough specimen of the machine's work. End of Section 77. This is Section 78 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 78, Alta, California, April 9, 1867. Alta, California, April 9, 1867. New York, March 2, 1867. Grand European Pleasure Trip. Prominent Brooklynites are getting up a great European pleasure excursion for the coming summer, which promises a vast amount of enjoyment for a very reasonable outlay. The passenger list is filling up pretty fast. The steamer to be used will be fitted up comfortably and supplied with a library, musical instruments, and a printing press, for a small daily paper is to be printed on board. The ship is to have ample accommodations for 150 cabin passengers, but in order that there may be no crowding, she will only carry 110. The steamer fare is fixed at $1,250 currency. The vessel will stop every day or two to let the passengers visit places of interest in the interior of the various countries, and this will involve an additional expense of about $500 in gold. The voyage will begin the 1st of June and end near the beginning of November, five months, but may be extended by a unanimous vote of the passengers. Outward bound a day or two will be spent at Gibraltar and about ten days at Marseilles, which latter will give an opportunity of looking in at the Paris fare. If desired, passengers may tarry longer at Paris, and then pass down through Switzerland and rejoin the ship at Genoa, where she will remain ten days. From Genoa excursions will be made to Milan, the lakes of Como and Maggiore, and to Verona, Padua, and Venice. Also the party may visit Parma, Bologna, and Florence, and rejoin the vessel at Leghorn. Pisa and Luca can likewise be added to the programme. From Leghorn to Naples, the route will be along the coast of Italy, close by Camprera, Elba, and Corsica, and arrangements have been made to pay Garibaldi a visit. Eight days will be spent at Naples, and visits will be made to Herculaneum, Pompeii, Vesuvius, Virgil's Tomb, and the ruins of ancient Pestum. A day will next be spent at Palermo in Sicily. Hence through the group of Aeolian Isles, inside of the volcanoes of Stromboli and Volcania, through the Straits of Messina, with Silla on the one hand and Caribdis on the other, along the east coast of Sicily and inside of Mount Etna. Along the south coast of Italy, the west and south coast of Greece, in sight of ancient Crete, up Athens' Gulf into the Piraeus, Athens will be reached. A day will be given to Corinth, and then the voyage will be extended through the Grecian Archipelago, the Dardanelles, and the Sea of Marmara to Constantinople. After a day or two at the latter place, a sail through the Bosporus and across the Black Sea will bring the party to Sebastopol and Balaclava. Hence back again and along the coasts of ancient Troy and Lydia in Asia to Smyrna, from which point Ephesus will be visited. The steamer will stop at Beirut, and time allowed to visit Damascus, and then proceed to Joppa, and remain there ten or twelve days, so that the passengers can go to Jericho, I mean to Jerusalem, and to the other side of Jordan, the Sea of Tiberius, Nazareth, Bethany, Bethlehem, and other points of interest in the Holy Land. A stop of four or five days will be made at Alexandria in Egypt, and the ruins of Caesar's palace, Pompey's pillar, Cleopatra's needle, the catacombs, the sight of ancient Memphis, Joseph's granaries, and the pyramids. They don't go to Cairo, but I do not mind that, because I have been to Cairo once, in Illinois, and that was enough for the subscriber. In the remainder of the program I find mention of such points as Malta, Cagliari, in Sardinia, Palma in Majorca, Valencia in Spain, Alicante, Carthagina, Palos, Malaga, Madeira, the peak of Tenerife, the Bermudas, and so forth and so on, to the Crack of Doom. A man may stay aboard the ship all the time he wants to. It is essentially a pleasure excursion, and so private caprices will be allowed full scope. Isn't it a most attractive scheme? Five months of utter freedom from care and anxiety of every kind, and in company with a set of people who will go only to enjoy themselves, and will never mention a word about business during the whole voyage. It is very pleasant to contemplate. Reverend Mr. Twain. I started down with a Tribune man to make some inquiries about this trip. We met a friend, and he said it was a very stylish affair, was not gotten up for a speculation, it was not intended that its projectors should make any money out of it, and that the character and standing of every applicant for passage had to undergo the strictest assay by a committee before his money would be received and his name booked. This was an appalling state of affairs. However, we went on, and were received at the office of the concern with that distant politeness proper toward men who travel muddy streets on foot, go unshaven, and carry countenances like ours, for instance. My friend Smith, for short, said, I suppose you are the Chief Officer of the European Pleasure Excursion, sir? We have called to make some inquiries about it. Allow me to introduce the Reverend Mark Twain, who is a clergyman of some distinction, lately arrived from San Francisco. I am glad to meet you, sir. Be seated, gentlemen. Twain. Twain. Oh, you probably have not heard of me. I have latterly been in the missionary business. Smith interrupting. Oh, devil take it! Don't use those villainous slang expressions, you'll expose everything! And then he said aloud, Yes, he has been a missionary to the Sandwich Islands during a part of the last year, but officiating in the open air has injured his health, and my congregation concluded to start me out travelling for my health. I would like to take some stock. I mean, I would like to ship, that is, book my name for this pleasure trip. I hear that Mr. Beecher is going. Is that so? The reply was affirmative. And then Smith said, We felt some solicitude about that, because my friend would naturally like to take part in the services on board, and we feared that possibly Mr. Beecher might not be willing to permit ministers of other denominations to do any of the preaching. I said with a show of humility. Yes, that's it. I am only a Baptist, you see. But I'd like to have a show. Oh, damn it! Smith whispered, You'll ruin everything with that slang! Then aloud, Yes, my friend is a Baptist clergyman, and we feared that inasmuch as Mr. Beecher is a universalist, he— Universalist? Why, he is a Congregationalist. But never mind that. I have no doubt he would be sincerely glad to have Mr. Twain assist him in the vessel's pulpit of all times. No doubt in the world about that. I had to laugh out strong here, I could not well help it. The idea of my preaching time about with Beecher was so fresh, so entertaining, so delightful. However, Smith said, Now, you are laughing again at that same old occurrence up the street. Well, it was funny. This saved us from exposure, and I sat there and said no more. But listened to instructive remarks about my missionary services and my Baptist congregation in San Francisco, till the misery of trying to keep from laughing was unbearable, and we left. I went back yesterday with another friend, acknowledged my true occupation, entered my name for the voyage, and paid the forfeit money required to secure a birth. The remainder of the one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars is not to be paid until the fifteenth of April, when all such accounts have to be squared. I also left references as to my high moral character for that committee to chaw on, as Brown expressed it, and I do not envy them the job. They have got about all they can attend to for the next six weeks to get up a spotless character for me. If they succeed, I will get a copy of it and have it framed. Among others I referred to Reverend Mr. Damon of Honolulu, and it lies heavy on my conscience, because I stole a book from him, which I have not returned yet. For my other references I chose men of bad character in order that my mild virtues might shine luminously by contrast with their depravity. There was sagacity in the idea. I expect to go on this excursion to the Holy Land and the chief countries of Europe, provided I receive no vetoing orders from the Alta, and against all such I fervently protest beforehand. No veto. He has been telegraphed to go ahead. Eds, Alta. How are the mighty fallen? Now that Barnum is running for Congress, anything connected with him is imbued with a new interest. Therefore I went to his museum yesterday, along with the other children. There is little or nothing in the place worth seeing, and yet how it draws! It was crammed with both sexes and all ages. One could keep on going upstairs from floor to floor, and still find scarcely room to turn. There are numerous trifling attractions there, but if there was one grand, absorbing feature—I failed to find it—there is a prodigious woman, eight feet high, and well proportioned. But there was no one to stir her up and make her show her points, so she sat down all the time. And there is a giant also, just her own size, but he appeared to be sick with love for her, and so he sat morosely on his platform in his astonishing military uniform, and wrought no wonders. If I was impresario of that menagerie, I would make that couple prance around some, or I would dock their rations. Two dwarfs, unknown to fame, and a speckled negro, complete the list of human curiosities. They profess to have a Circassian girl there, but I could not find her. I think they have moved her out to make room for another peanut stand. In fact, Barnum's Museum is one vast peanut stand now, with a few cases of dried frogs and other wonders scattered here and there to give variety to the thing. You can't go anywhere without finding a peanut stand and an impudent negro sweeping up hulls. When peanuts and candy are low, they sell newspapers and photographs of the dwarfs and the giants. There are some cages of ferocious lions and other wild beasts, but they sleep all the time, and also an automaton cardwriter. But something about it is broken and it don't go now. Also a good many bugs, with pins stuck through them, but the people do not seem to enjoy bugs any more. There is a photograph gallery in one room, and an oyster saloon in another, and some news depots and soda fountains, a pistol gallery, and a raffling department for cheap jewelry, but not any barbershop. A plaster of parastatruvenous, with little stacks of dust on her nose and her eyebrows, stands neglected in a corner, and in some large glass cases are some atrocious waxen images done in the very worst style of the art. Queen Victoria is dressed in faded red velvet and glass jewelry, and has a bloated countenance and a drunken leer in her eye that reminds one of convivial Mary Holt when she used to come in from Spree to get her ticket for the county jail. And that accursed eyesore to me, Tom Thumb's wedding party, which airs its smirking imbecility in every photograph album in America, is not only set forth here in ghastly wax, but repeated. Why does not some philanthropist burn the museum again? The happy family remains, but robbed of its ancient glory. A poor, spiritless old bear, sixteen monkeys, half a dozen sorrowful raccoons, two mangy puppies, two unhappy rabbits, and two meek tomcats that have had half the hair snatched out of them by the monkeys, composed the happy family, and certainly it was the most subjugated looking party I ever saw. The entire happy family is bossed and bullied by a monkey that any one of the victims could whip, only that they lack the courage to try it. He grabs a tomcat by the nape of the neck and bounces him on the ground. He cuffs the rabbits and the coons and snatches his own tribe from end to end of the cage by the tail. When the dinner-tub is brought in, he gets bodily into it, and the other members of the family sit patiently around till his hunger is satisfied, or steal a morsel and get bored heels overhead for it. The world is full of families as happy as that. The boss monkey has even proceeded so far as to nip the tail short off of one of his brethren, and now half the pleasures of the poor devil's life are denied him, because he ain't got anything to hang by. It almost moves one to tears to see that bob-tailed monkey work his stump and try to grab a beam with it that is a yard away, and when his stump naturally misses fire and he falls, none but the heartless can laugh. Why cannot he become a philosopher? Why cannot he console himself with a reflection that tails are but a delusion and a vanity at best? Barnum puts a play on his stage called The Christian Martyr, and in the third act all the mules and lions and sheep and tigers and pet bulls and other ferocious wild animals are marched about the stage in grand procession, preparatory to going through the Christian. In the final act they throw the Christian into a cage with a couple of lions, but they were asleep, and all the punching that Martyr could do, and all the cursing he could get off under his breath, failed to wake them. But the ignorant Roman populace on the stage took their indifference for providential interference, and so they let the doomed Christian slide. Barnum's lions prefer fresh beef to Martyr's. I suspect they are of the same breed as those we read of that were too stuck up to eat good ol' Daniel. Barnum's show is not a very good one. If he has no better show to get to Congress he ought to draw out of the canvas. The Arabian Nights Repeated History repeats itself, and so does romance. There is some thing in the Arabian Nights, if my memory serves me, which is a little like the incident I am going to set down here, with the difference that this is true, and the story in the book was doubtless an invention. Two weeks ago a woman in great distress applied to a lady's benevolent society here for means to bury her husband. They made due inquiry, and then gave her the necessary amount of money. One of these ladies had for a long time been praying to her Heavenly Father for a questionable blessing in the shape of a child, and contracting that if her prayers were answered she would perform some deed of notable benevolence as a standoff. Her prayers were answered in the most complimentary manner, she had triplets. She had triplets and naturally her husband shut down on her devotions. But that has got nothing to do with my story. She heard of this sorrowing woman, and she thought at a good time to comply with her contract. She went to the house of mourning and counted out one hundred dollars in greenbacks on the dead man's coffin, and the weeping widow blessed her. It is considered the fair thing here to pay praying debts in greenbacks. The charitable lady had not been gone many minutes before she discovered she had left her gloves behind her. She rushed back to the abode of death, and found that infernal corpse sitting up in the coffin examining the greenbacks with a bank note report her. They plague the benevolent lady a good deal, but she does not mind it. In fact she is rather proud of raising the dead with a handful of greenbacks. The Great Masquerade The grand Baldopera came off at the new Academy of Music last night. I suppose there may have been ten or twelve hundred people present, but it was hard to make estimate in so large a building. The great majority of both sexes wore neither masks nor fancy costumes, and yet were allowed to come on the floor long before the hour for unmasking. This had an embarrassing effect, of course, and consequently what should have been a hilarious carnival was a good deal more like a funeral for the first two hours. I got myself up in flowing royal robes and purported to be a king of some country or other, but I only felt like a highly ornamental butcher. If everybody else felt as solemn and absurd as I did, they have my sympathy. I could not dance with any comfort, because I was in danger of tripping in my petticoats and breaking my neck every moment, and so I deserted soon, and went to promenading in the broad halls in the rear of the balconies. Dukes and princes and queens and fairies met me at every turn, and I might have managed to imagine myself in a land of enchantment, but for remarks I was constantly overhearing. For instance, I heard Joan of Arc say she would give the world for a mess of raw oysters, and Martin Loosler said he didn't feel well, because he had been playing poker for the last forty-eight hours. The wandering Jew chatted and laughed like a schoolgirl, and vivacious Charles II was as dismal as an owl. Dukes and emperors called each other Jim and Joe and spoke in the most plebeian way of going out to take a drink. I even heard the Queen of the Fairies say she wished she had some cheese. These little things have a tendency to destroy the pleasant illusions created by deceptive costumes. I did not feel happy at that ball, but I never felt so particularly unhappy in my life, as I do at this moment.