 II. The Senate and House of Representatives of the United States in Congress assembled. We, your petitioners, do respectfully represent as follows, these, that justice, plain and simple, is a thing which right-feeling men stand ready at all times to accord to brothers and strangers alike. All such men will concede that it is but plain simple justice, that American authors should be protected by copyright in Europe. Also, that European authors should be protected by copyright here. Both divisions of this proposition being true, it behooves our government to concern itself with that division of it which comes peculiarly within its province, the latter moody, and to grant to foreign authors, with all convenient despatch, a full and effective copyright in America without marring the grace of the act, by stopping to inquire whether a similar justice will be done, our own authors, by foreign governments. If it were even known that those governments would not extend this justice to us, it would still not justify us in withholding this manifest right from their authors. If a thing is right, it ought to be done. The thing called expediency or policy has no concern with such a matter, and we desire to repeat, with all respect, that it is not a grace or a privilege we ask for our foreign brethren, but a right, a right received from God, and only denied them by man. We hold no ownership in these authors, and when we take their work from them, as at present, without their consent, it is robbery. The fact that the handiwork of our own authors is seized in the same way in foreign lands neither excuses nor mitigates our sin. With your permission, we will say here, over our signatures, and earnestly and sincerely, that we very greatly desire that you shall grant a full copyright to foreign authors, the copyright fee for the entry in the office of the Congressional Librarian, to be the same as we pay ourselves, and we also, as greatly desire, that this grant shall be made without a single hampering stipulation that American authors shall receive in turn an advantage of any kind from foreign governments. Since no author who was applied to hesitate it for a moment to append his signature to this petition, we are satisfied that if time had permitted, we could have procured the signature of every writer in the United States, great and small, obscure or famous. As it is, the list comprises the names of about all our writers whose works have, at present, a European market, and who are, therefore, chiefly concerned in this matter. No objection to our proposition can come from any reputable publisher among us, or does come from such a quarter, as the appended signatures of our greatest publishing firms will attest. A European copyright here would be a manifest advantage to them. As the matter stands now, the moment they have thoroughly advertised a desirable foreign book, and thus, at great expense, aroused public interest in it, some small-spirited speculator, who has lain still in his kennel and spent nothing, rushes the same book on the market, and robs the respectable publisher of half the gains. Then, since neither our authors nor the decent among our publishing firms will object to granting an American copyright to foreign authors and artists, who can there be to object? Surely nobody whose protest is entitled to any weight. Trusting in the righteousness of our cause, we, your petitioners, will ever pray, et cetera, with great respect, your obedient servants. Circular to American authors and publishers. Dear sir, we believe that you will recognize the justice and righteousness of the thing we desire to accomplish through the accompanying petition, and we believe that you will be willing that our country shall be the first in the world to grant to all authors alike the free exercise of their manifest right to do as they please with the fruit of their own labour, without inquiring what flag they live under. If the sentiments of the petition meet your views, will you do us the favour to sign it, and forward it, by post, at your earliest convenience, to our secretary. Committee. Address. Blank. Secretary of the Committee. Two. Communications supposed to have been written by the Tsar of Russia and the Sultan of Turkey to Mark Twain on the subject of international copyright about 1890. Saint Petersburg, February. Colonel Mark Twain, Washington. Your cable-gram received. It should have been transmitted through my minister but let that pass. I am opposed to international copyright. At present American literature is harmless here, because we doctor it in such a way as to make it approve the various beneficent devices which we use to keep our people favourable to fetters as jewellery, and pleased with Siberia as a summer resort. But your bill would spoil this. We should be obliged to let you say your say in your own way. Voila! My empire would be a republic in five years, and I should be sampling Siberia myself. If you should run across Mr. Kennan, George Kennan, who had graphically pictured the fearful conditions of Siberian exile, please ask him to come over and give some readings. I will take good care of him. Alexander III. 144. Collect. John Stantonopoul, February. Dr. Mark Twain, Washington. Great Scott, no! By the beard of the Prophet, no! How can you ask such a thing of me? I am a man of family. I cannot take chances, like other people. I cannot let a literature come in here which teaches that a man's wife is as good as the man himself. Such a doctrine cannot do any particular harm, of course, where the man has only one wife. For then it is a dead level between them, and there is no humiliating inequality and no resulting disorder. But you take an extremely married person, like me, and go to teaching that his wife is nine hundred and sixty-four times as good as he is. And what's held to that harem, dear friend? I never saw such a fool as you. Do not mind that expression. I already regret it, and would replace it with a softer one if I could do it without debauching the truth. I beseech you, do not pass that bill. Robert's College is quite all the American product we can stand just now. On top of that, do you want to send us a flood of freedom-shrinking literature which we can't edit the poison out of, but must let it go among our people just as it is? My friend, we should be a republic inside of ten years. Abdual II. III. Mark Twain's last suggestion on copyright. A memorial respectfully tendered to the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Prepared early in 1909 at the suggestion of Mr. Champ Clack, but not offered. A bill adding fourteen years to the copyright period was passed about this time. The Policy of Congress. Nineteen or twenty years ago, James Russell Lowell, George Haven Putnam and the Undersigned appeared before the Senate Committee on Patents in the interest of copyright. Up to that time, as explained by Senator Platt of Connecticut, the Policy of Congress had been to limit the life of a copyright by a term of years with one definite end in view and only one, to it that after an author had been permitted to enjoy for a reasonable length of time the income from literary property created by his hand and brain, the property should then be transferred to the public as a free gift. That is still the policy of Congress today. The Purpose in View. The purpose in view was clear, to so reduce the price of the book as to bring it within the reach of all purses and spread it among the millions who had not been able to buy it while it was still under the protection of copyright. The Purpose Defeated. This purpose has always been defeated, that is to say, that while the death of a copyright has sometimes reduced the price of a book by a half for a while, and in some cases by even more, it has never reduced it vastly nor accomplished any reduction that was permanent and secure. The Reason. The reason is simple. Congress has never made a reduction compulsory. Congress was convinced that the removal of the author's royalty and the book's consequent, or at least probable, dispersal among several competing publishers would make the book cheap by force of the competition. It was an error. It has not turned out so. The reason is, a publisher cannot find profit in an exceedingly cheap addition, if he must divide the market with competitors. Proposed Remedy. The natural remedy would seem to be amended law requiring the issue of cheap additions. Copyright Extension. I think the remedy could be accomplished in the following way, without injury to author or publisher, and with extreme advantage to the public. By an amendment to the existing law providing as follows. To it, that at any time between the beginning of a book's forty-first year and the ending of its forty-second, the owner of the copyright may extend its life thirty years by issuing and placing on sale an edition of the book at one-tenth the price of the cheapest addition hitherto issued at any time during the ten immediately preceding years. This extension to lapse and become null and void if at any time during the thirty years he shall fail during the space of three consecutive months to furnish the ten percent book upon demand of any person or persons desiring to buy it. The result? The result would be that no American classic enjoying the thirty-year extension would ever be out of the reach of any American purse. Let its uncompulsory price be what it might. He would get a two-dollar book for twenty cents, and he could get none but copyright expired classics at any such rate. The final result? At the end of the thirty-year extension the copyright would again die, and the price would again advance. This by a natural law, the excessively cheap addition no longer carrying with it an advantage to any publisher. Reconstruction of the present law not necessary. A clause of the suggested amendment could read about as follows, and would obviate the necessity of taking the present law to pieces and building it over again. All books and all articles enjoying forty-two years copyright life under the present law shall be admitted to the privilege of the thirty-year extension upon complying with the condition requiring the producing and placing upon the permanent sale of one grade or form of said book or article at a price of ninety percent below the cheapest rate at which said book or article had been placed upon the market at any time during the immediately preceding ten years. Remarks. If the suggested amendment shall meet with the favor of the present Congress and become law, and I hope it will, I shall have personal experience of its effects very soon. Next year, in fact, in the person of my first book, The Innocence Abroad, for its forty-two-year copyright life will then cease, and its thirty-year extension begin, and with the latter the permanent low-rate addition. At present the highest price of the book is eight dollars, and its lowest price is three dollars per copy. Thus the permanent low-rate will be thirty cents per copy. A sweeping reduction like this is what Congress from the beginning has desired to achieve, but has not been able to accomplish because no inducement was offered to publishers to run the risk. Respectfully submitted, S. L. Clemens. A full and interesting elucidation of Mark Twain's views on copyright may be found in an article entitled Concerning Copyright, published in the North American Review for January 1905. End of Appendix N. Mark Twain and Copyright. Read by John Greenman. Section 100 of Mark Twain, A Biography. Appendix O. C. CHAPTER 114 Address of Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain, from a report of the dinner given by the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly in honour of the 70th anniversary of the birth of John Greenleaf Whittier at the Hotel Brunswick, Boston, December 17, 1877, as published in the Boston Evening Transcript, December 18, 1877. Mr. Chairman, this is an occasion peculiarly meet for the digging up of pleasant reminiscences concerning literary folk, therefore I will drop lightly into history myself. Standing here on the shore of the Atlantic, and contemplating certain of its largest literary billows, I am reminded of a thing which happened to me thirteen years ago, when I had just succeeded in stirring up a little Navadian literary puddle myself whose spewing flakes were beginning to blow thinly California word. I started an inspection tramp through the southern mines of California. I was callow and conceited, and I resolved to try the virtue of my norm de guerre. I very soon had an opportunity. I knocked at a miner's lonely log cabin in the foothills of the Sierras just at nightfall. It was snowing at the time. A jaded, melancholy man of fifty barefooted opened the door to me. When he heard my norm de guerre he looked more dejected than before. He let me in, pretty reluctantly, I thought, and after the customary bacon and beans, black coffee and hot whiskey, I took a pipe. This sorrowful man had not said three words up to this time. Now he spoke up and said, in the voice of one who is secretly suffering, you're the fourth. I'm going to move. The fourth what, said I? The fourth literary man that has been here in twenty-four hours. I'm going to move. You don't tell me, said I. Who were the others? Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson, and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Consound a lot. You can easily believe I was interested. I supplicated. Three hot whiskies did the twist, and finally the melancholy minor began. Said he, they came here just at dark yesterday evening. And I let them in, of course. Said they were going to Yosemite. They were a rough lot. But that's nothing. Everybody looks rough that travels a foot. Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, redheaded. Mr. Holmes was as fat as a balloon. He weighed as much as three hundred, and had double chins all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow was built like a prize fighter. His head was cropped and bristly, like as if he had a wig made of hairbrushes. His nose lay straight down in his face, like a finger with the end joint tilted up. They had been drinking, I could see that. And what queer talk they used. Mr. Holmes inspected this cabin. Then he took me by the buttonhole and says he, through the deep caves of thought, I hear a voice that sings. Build the more stately mansions, oh my soul. Says I, I can't afford it, Mr. Holmes. And moreover, I don't want to. Blamed if I liked it pretty well, either, coming from a stranger that way. However, I started to get out my bacon and beans when Mr. Emerson came and looked on awhile, and then he takes me aside by the buttonhole and says, give me agates for my meat. Give me cantherids to eat from air and ocean. Bring me foods from all zones and altitudes. Says I, Mr. Emerson, if you'll excuse me, this ain't no hotel. You see, it sort of riled me. I weren't used to the ways of jittery swells. But I went on a sweating over my work. And next comes Mr. Longfellow, and buttonholes me, and interrupts me. Says he, honor be to Majiquis. You shall hear how Paul Puckiewis. But I broke in. And says I, beg your pardon, Mr. Longfellow, if you'll be so kind as to hold your yelp for about five minutes, and let me get this grub ready. You'll do me proud. Well, sir, after they'd filled up I set out the jug. Mr. Holmes looks at it, and then he fires up all of a sudden and yells, flash out a stream of blood-red wine, for I would drink to other days. By George I was getting kind of worked up. I don't deny it. I was getting kind of worked up. I turns to Mr. Holmes, and says I, lookie here, my fat friend. I'm a-running this shanty. And if the court knows herself, you'll take Whiskey straight, or you'll go dry. Them's the very words I said to him. I don't want to sass such famous literary people. But you see, they kind of forced me. There ain't nothing unreasonable about me. I don't mind a parcel of guests treading on my tail three or four times. But when it comes to standing on it, it's different. And if the court knows herself, I says, you'll take Whiskey straight, or you'll go dry. Well, between drinks they'd swell around the cabin and strike attitudes and spout, and pretty soon they got out a greasy old deck and went to playing hooker at ten cents a corner, on trust. I began to notice some pretty suspicious things. Mr. Emerson dealt, looked at his hand, shook his head, says I am the doubter and the doubt. And Conley bunched the hands and went to shuffling for a new layout. Says he, they reckon ill who leave me out. They know not well the subtle ways I keep. I pass, and deal again. Hanged if he didn't go ahead and do it too. Oh, he was a cool one. Well, in about a minute things were running pretty tight. But all of a sudden I see by Mr. Emerson's eye he judged he had him. He had already corralled two tricks and each of the others one. So now he kind of lifts a little in his chair and says, I tire of globes and aces. Too long the game is played. And down he fetched a ripe bower. Mr. Long fellow smiles as sweet as pie and says, Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, for the lesson thou hast taught. And blamed if he didn't down with another ripe bower. Emerson claps his hand on his bowie. Long fellow claps his on his revolver. And I went under a bunk. There was going to be trouble. But that monstrous Holmes rose up, wobbling his double-chins, and says he, Order, gentlemen, the first man that draws I'll lay down on him and smother him. All quiet on the Potomac, you bet. They were pretty. How come you so, by now? And they begun to blow. Emerson says, The noblest thing I ever wrote was Barbara Fritchie. Says Long fellow, Don't begin with my Bigelow papers. Says Holmes, My Thanatopsis lays over in both. They might near ended in a fight. Then they wished they had some more company. And Mr. Emerson pointed to me and says, Is yonder squalid peasant all that this proud nursery could breed? He was a-letting his bowie on his foot. So I let it pass. Well, sir, next they took it into their heads that they would like some music. So they made me stand up and sing, When Johnny comes marching home till I dropped at thirteen minutes past four this morning. That's what I've been through, my friend. When I woke up at seven they were leaving, thank goodness. And Mr. Long fellow had my only boots on and hisen under his arm. Says I, Hold on there, Evangeline. What are you going to do with them? He says, Going to make tracks with them. Because lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime. And departing leave behind us footprints on the sands of time. As I said, Mr. Twain, you are the fourth in twenty-four hours, and I'm going to move. I ain't suited to a literary atmosphere. I said to the minor, Why, my dear sir, these were not the gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage. These were imposters. The minor investigated me with a calm eye for a while. Then said he, Ah, imposters, were they? Are you? I did not pursue the subject, and since then I have not traveled on my norm de guerre enough to hurt. Such was the reminiscence I was moved to contribute, Mr. Chairman. In my enthusiasm I may have exaggerated the details a little, but you will easily forgive me that fault, since I believe it is the first time I have ever deflected from perpendicular fact on an occasion like this. End of Appendix O. Red by John Greenman. Section 101 of Mark Twain a Biography. Appendixes. To the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives of the United States in Congress assembled. Whereas a number of citizens of the city of Elmira, in the state of New York, having covenanted among themselves to erect in that city a monument in the memory of Adam, the father of mankind, being moved there too by a sentiment of love and duty, and these having appointed the undersigned to communicate with your honorable body, we beg leave to lay before you the following facts and append to the same our humble petition. One. As far as is known no monument has ever been raised in any part of the world to commemorate the services rendered to our race by this great man, whilst many men of far less note and worship have been rendered immortal by means of stately and indestructible memorials. Two. The common father of mankind has been suffered to lie in entire neglect, although even the father of our country has now, and has had for many years, a monument in course of construction. Three. No right feeling human being can desire to see this neglect continued, but all just men, even to the farthest regions of the globe, should and will rejoice to know that he to whom we owe existence is about to have reverent and fitting recognition of his works at the hands of the people of Elmira. His labours were not in behalf of one locality, but for the extension of humanity at large, and the blessings which go therewith. Hence all races and all colours and all religions are interested in seeing that his name and fame shall be placed beyond the reach of the blight of oblivion by a permanent and suitable monument. Four. It will be to the imperishable credit of the United States if this monument shall be set up within her borders. Moreover, it will be a peculiar grace to the beneficiary if this testimonial of affection and gratitude shall be the gift of the youngest of the nations that have sprung from his loins after six thousand years of unappreciation on the part of its elders. Five. The idea of this sacred enterprise having originated in the city of Elmira, she will be always grateful if the general government shall encourage her in the good work by securing to her a certain advantage through the exercise of its great authority. Therefore your petitioners beg that your honourable body will be pleased to issue a decree restricting to Elmira the right to build a monument to Adam and inflicting a heavy penalty upon any other community within the United States that shall propose or attempt to erect a monument or other memorial to the said Adam, and to this end we will ever pray. Names. One Hundred Signatures. End of Appendix P. The Adam Monument Petition. Read by John Greenman. Section 102 of Mark Twain of Biography. Appendixes. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain of Biography by Albert Bigelow Payne. Appendix Q. General Grant's Grammar. Written in 1886. Delivered at an Army and Navy club dinner in New York City. Lately a great and honoured author, Matthew Arnold, has been finding fault with General Grant's English. That would be fair enough, maybe, if the examples of imperfect English averaged more instances to the page in General Grant's book than they do in Arnold's criticism on the book, but they do not. It would be fair enough, maybe, if such instances were commoner in General Grant's book than they are in the works of the average standard author, but they are not. In fact, General Grant's derelictions in the matter of grammar and construction are not more frequent than such derelictions in the works of a majority of the professional authors of our time, and of all previous times. Authors as exclusively and painstakingly trained to the literary trade as was General Grant to the trade of war. This is not a random statement. It is a fact, and easily demonstrable. I have a book at home called Modern English Literature, Its Blemishes and Defects, by Henry H. Breen, a countryman of Mr. Arnold. In it I find examples of bad grammar and slovenly English from the pens of Sidney Smith, Sheridan, Hallam, Waitley, Carlisle, Disraeli, Allison, Junius, Blair, Macaulay, Shakespeare, Milton, Gibbon, Southie, Lamb, Lander, Smollett, Walpole, Walker of the Dictionary, Christopher North, Kirk White, Benjamin Franklin, Sir Walter Scott, and Mr. Lindley Murray, who made the grammar. In Mr. Arnold's criticism on General Grant's book, we find two grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly English—enough of them—to entitle him to a lofty place in the illustrious list of delinquents just named. The following passage all by itself ought to elect him. Mead suggested to Grant that he might wish to have immediately under him Sheridan, who had been serving with Grant in the West. He begged him not to hesitate if he thought it for the good of the service. Grant assured him that he had not thought of moving him, and in his memoirs, after relating what had passed, he adds, etc. To read that passage a couple of times would make a man dizzy. To read it four times would make him drunk. Mr. Breen makes this discriminating remark. To suppose that because a man is a poet or a historian, he must be correct in his grammar, is to suppose that an architect must be a joiner or a physician, a compounder of medicine. People may hunt out what microscopic moats they please, but after all the fact remains, and cannot be dislodged, that General Grant's book is a great end in its peculiar department, a unique and unapproachable literary masterpiece. In their line there is no higher literature than those modest, simple memoirs. Their style is at least flawless, and no man could improve upon it, and great books are weighed and measured by their style and matter, and not by the trimmings and shadings of their grammar. There is that about the sun, which makes us forget its spots, and when we think of General Grant, our pulses quicken and his grammar vanishes. We only remember that this is the simple soldier who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools, and put into them a something which will still bring to American ears as long as America shall last, the role of his vanished drums, and the tread of his marching hosts. What do we care for grammar when we think of those thunderous phrases, unconditional and immediate surrender? I propose to move immediately upon your works. I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer. Mr. Arnold would doubtless claim that that last phrase is not strictly grammatical, and yet it did certainly wake up this nation as a hundred million tons of a number one fourth proof hard-boiled, hide-bound grammar from another mouth could not have done, and finally we have that gentler phrase, that one which shows you another true side of the man, shows you that in his soldier heart there was room for other than glory war mottos, and in his tongue the gift to fitly phrase them, let us have peace. End of Appendix Q. General Grant's Grammar, read by John Greenman. Section 103 of Mark Twain, A Biography, Appendixes. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain, A Biography, by Albert Bigelow Payne. Appendix R. Party Allegiance. Being a portion of a paper on consistency, read before the Monday Evening Club in 1887. See Chapter 163. I have referred to the fact that when a man retires from his political party, he is a traitor, that he is so pronounced in plain language. That is bold, so bold as to deceive many into the fancy that it is true. Desertion, treason. These are the terms applied. Their military form reveals the thought in the man's mind who uses them. To him, a political party, is an army. Well, is it? Are the two things identical? Do they even resemble each other? Necessarily, a political party is not an army of conscripts, for they are in the ranks by compulsion. Then it must be a regular army or an army of volunteers. Is it a regular army? No, for these enlist for a specified and well-understood term, and can retire without reproach when the term is up. Is it an army of volunteers who have enlisted for the war, and may righteously be shot if they leave before the war is finished? No, it is not even an army in that sense. Those fine military terms are high sounding, empty lies, and are no more rationally applicable to a political party than they would be to an oyster bed. The volunteer soldier comes to the recruiting office and strips himself and proves that he is so many feet high, and has sufficiently good teeth, and no fingers gone, and is sufficiently sound in body generally. He is accepted. But not until he has sworn a deep oath, or made other solemn form of promise, to march under that flag until that war is done, or his term of enlistment completed. What is the process when a voter joins a party? Must he prove that he is sound in any way, mind, or body? Must he prove that he knows anything, is capable of anything, whatever? Does he take an oath, or make a promise of any sort, or doesn't he leave himself entirely free? If he were informed by the political boss that if he join it must be forever, that he must be that party's chattel, and where its brass collar the rest of his days, would not that insult him? It goes without saying. He would say some rude, unprintable thing, and turn his back on that preposterous organization. But the political boss puts no conditions upon him at all, and this volunteer makes no promises, enlists for no stated term. He has in no sense become a part of an army. He is in no way restrained of his freedom. Yet he will presently find that his bosses and his newspapers have assumed just the reverse of that, that they have blandly aggregated to themselves an iron-clad military authority over him, and, within twelve months, if he is an average man, he will have surrendered his liberty, and will actually be silly enough to believe that he cannot leave that party for any cause whatever, without being a shameful traitor, a deserter, a legitimately dishonored man. There you have the just measure of that freedom of conscience, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech and action which we hear so much inflated foolishness about as being the precious possession of the Republic, whereas, in truth, the surest way for a man to make of himself a target for almost universal scorn, obliquy, slander, and insult, is to stop twaddling about these priceless independencies and attempt to exercise one of them. If he is a preacher, half his congregation will clamor for his expulsion and will expel him, except they find it will injure real estate in the neighborhood if he is a doctor, his own dead will turn against him. I repeat that the new party member who supposed himself independent will presently find that the party have somehow got a mortgage on his soul, and that within a year he will recognize the mortgage, deliver up his liberty, and actually believe he cannot retire from that party, from any motive howsoever high and right in his own eyes, without shame and dishonor. Is it possible for human wickedness to invent a doctrine more infernal and poisonous than this? Is there imaginable a baser servitude than it imposes? What slave is so degraded as the slave that is proud that he is a slave? What is the essential difference between a life-long Democrat and any other kind of life-long slave? Is it less humiliating to dance to the lash of one master than another? This infamous doctrine of allegiance to party plays directly into the hands of politicians of the baser sort, and doubtless for that it was borrowed or stolen from the monarchial system. It enables them to foist upon the country officials whom no self-respecting man would vote for if he could but come to understand that loyalty to himself is his first and highest duty, not loyalty to any party name. Shall you say the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say that it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter and become a mouthing lunatic besides? Oh, no, you say. It does not demand that. But what if it produced that in spite of you? There is no obligation upon a man to do things which he ought not to do when drunk. But most men will do them just the same. And so we hear no arguments about obligations in the matter. We only hear men warned to avoid the habit of drinking. Get rid of the thing that can betray men into such things. This is a funny business all around. The same men who enthusiastically preach loyal consistency to church and party are always ready and willing and anxious to persuade a Chinaman or an Indian or a Kanaka to desert his church or a fellow American to desert his party. The man who deserts to them is all that is high and pure and beautiful, apparently. The man who deserts from them is all that is foul and despicable. This is consistency with a capital C, with the daintiest and self-complacentist sarcasm, the lifelong loyalist scoffs at the independent, or, as he calls him, with cutting irony, the mugwump makes himself too killingly funny for anything in this world about him. But the mugwump can stand it, for there is a great history at his back stretching down the centuries, and he comes of a mighty ancestry. He knows that in the whole history of the race of men no single great and high and beneficent thing was ever done for the souls and bodies, the hearts and the brains of the children of this world, but a mugwump started it and mugwumps carried it to victory, and their names are the stateliest in history. Washington, Garrison, Galileo, Luther, Christ, loyalty to petrified opinions, never yet broke a chain, or freed a human soul in this world, and never will. 172 My object has been to group together some of the most odious laws which have had vogue in the Christian countries within the past eight or ten centuries, and illustrate them by the incidence of a story. There was never a time when America applied the death penalty to more than 14 crimes, but England, within the memory of men still living, had in her list of crimes 223 which were punishable by death, and yet, from the beginning of our existence down to a time within the memory of babes, England has distressed herself piteously over the un gentleness of our Connecticut blue laws. Those blue laws should have been spared English criticism for two reasons. One, they were so insipidly mild, by contrast with the bloody and atrocious laws of England of the same period, as to seem characterless and colorless when one brings them into that awful presence. Two, the blue laws never had any existence. They were the fancy work of an English clergyman. They were never part of any statute book, and yet they could have been made to serve a useful and merciful purpose. If they had been injected into the English law, the delusion would have given to the whole a less lured aspect, or to figure the effect in another way, they would have been coca mixed into vitriol. I have drawn no laws and no illustrations from the twin civilizations of hell and Russia. To have entered into that atmosphere would have defeated my purpose, which was to show a great and genuine progress in Christendom in these few later generations toward mercifulness, a wide and general relaxing of the grip of the law. Russia had to be left out because exile to Siberia remains, and in that single punishment is gathered together and concentrated all the bitter inventions of all the black ages for the infliction of suffering upon human beings. Exile for life from one's hearthstone and one's idols. This is rack, thumbscrew, the water drop, faggot and steak, tearing asunder by horses, flaying alive, all these in one, and not compact into ours, but drawn out into years, each year a century, and the whole a mortal immortality of torture and despair. While exile to Siberia remains, one will be obliged to admit that there is one country in Christendom where the punishments of all the ages are still preserved and still inflicted, that there is one country in Christendom where no advance has been made toward modifying the medieval penalties for offenses against society and the state. End of Appendix S. Original Preface for a Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court. Red by John Greenman. Section 105 of Mark Twain a Biography. Appendixes. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain a Biography by Albert Bigelow Payne. Appendix T. Attribute to Henry H. Rogers. See Chapter 200 and earlier. April 25, 1902. I owe more to Henry Rogers than to any other man whom I have known. He was born in Fairhaven, Connecticut, in 1839, and is my junior by four years. He was graduated from the high school there in 1853, when he was 14 years old, and from that time forward he earned his own living, beginning at first as the bottom subordinate in the village store with hard work privileges and a low salary. When he was 24 he went out to the newly discovered petroleum fields in Pennsylvania and got work, then returned home with enough money to pay passage, married a schoolmate, and took her to the oil regions. He prospered, and by and by established the standard oil trust with Mr. Rockefeller and others, and is still one of its managers and directors. In 1893 we fell together by accident one evening in the Murray Hill Hotel, and our friendship began on the spot and at once. Ever since then he has added my business affairs to his own and carried them through, and I have had no further trouble with them. Obstructions and perplexities which would have driven me mad were simplicities to his mastermind, and furnished him no difficulties. He released me from my entanglements with Page and stopped that expensive outgo. When Charles L. Webster and Company failed, he saved my copyrights for Mrs. Clemens when she would have sacrificed them to the creditors, although they were in no way entitled to them. He offered to lend me money wherewith to save the life of that worthless firm. When I started lecturing around the world to make the money, to pay off the Webster debts, he spent more than a year trying to reconcile the differences between Harper and Brothers and the American Publishing Company, and patch up a working contract between them, and succeeded where any other man would have failed. As fast as I earned money and sent it to him, he banked it at interest and held onto it, refusing to pay any creditor until he could pay all of the ninety-six alike. When I had earned enough to pay dollar for dollar, he swept off the indebtedness and sent me the whole batch of complimentary letters which the creditors wrote in return. When I had earned twenty-eight thousand five hundred dollars more, eighteen thousand five hundred dollars of which was in his hands, I wrote him from Vienna to put the latter into federal steel and leave it there. He obeyed to the extent of seventeen thousand five hundred dollars, but sold it in two months at twenty-five thousand dollar profit, and said it would go ten points higher, but that it was his custom to give the other man a chance. And that was a true word. There was never a truer one spoken. That was at the end of ninety-nine and beginning of nineteen hundred, and from that day to this he has continued to break up my bad schemes and put better ones in their place, to my great advantage. I do things which ought to try man's patience, but they never seem to try his. He always finds a colourable excuse for what I have done. His soul was born superhumanly sweet, and I do not think anything can sour it. I have not known his equal among men for lovable qualities, but for his cool head and wise guidance I should never have come out of the Webster difficulties on top. It was his good steering that enabled me to work out my salvation and pay a hundred cents on the dollar, the most valuable service any man ever did me. His character is full of fine graces, but the finest is this, that he can load you down with crushing obligations, and then so conduct himself that you never feel their weight. If he would only require something in return, but that is not in his nature. It would not occur to him. With the Harpers and the American Company at war those copyrights were worth but little. He engineered a piece, and made them valuable. He invests one hundred thousand dollars for me here, and in a few months returns a profit of thirty-one thousand dollars. I invest, in London and here, sixty-six thousand dollars, and must wait considerably for results, in case there shall be any. I tell him about it, and he finds no fault, utter's not a sarcasm. He was born serene, patient, all enduring, where a friend is concerned, and nothing can extinguish that great quality in him. Such a man is entitled to the high gift of humour. He has it at its very best. He is not only the best friend I have ever had, but is the best man I have known. S. L. Clemens. End of Appendix T. A Tribute to Henry H. Rogers. Section 106 of Mark Twain, A Biography, Appendixes. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain, A Biography, by Albert Bigelow Payne. Appendix U. From Mark Twain's Last Poem. Began at Riverdale, New York. Finished at York Harbor, Maine. August 18, 1902. C. Chapter 223. A bereft and demented mother speaks. Oh, I can see my darling yet. The little form in slip of flimsy stuff, all creamy white. Pink belted waist with ample bows. Blue shoes scarce bigger than the house cat's ears. Capering in delight and choked with glee. It was a summer afternoon. The hill rose green above me and about, and in the veil below the distant village slept, and all the world was steeped in dreams. Upon me lay this piece, and I forgot my sorrow in its spell, and now my little maid passed by, and she was deep in thought upon a solemn thing, a disobedience, and my reproof. Upon my face she must not look until the day was done, for she was doing penance. She? Oh, it was I. What mother knows not that. And so she passed. I, worshipping and longing, it was not wrong. You do not think me wrong? I did it for the best. Indeed, I meant it so. She flits before me now, the peach bloom of her gauzy crepe, the plaited tails of hair, the ribbons floating from the summer hat, the grieving face dropped head absorbed with care. Oh, dainty little form! I see it move, receding slow along the path, by hovering butterflies besieged. I see it reach the breezy top clear cut against the sky, then pass beyond and sink from sight forever. Within was light and cheer, without a blustering winter's night. There was a play. It was her own, for she had wrought it out unhelped from her own head, and she but turned sixteen, a pretty play, all graced with cunning fantasies, and happy songs and peopled all with faeces, and sylvan gods and goddesses, and shepherds too, that piped and danced, and wore the guileless hours away in carefree romps and games. Her girlhood mates played in the peace, and she is well, a goddess she, and looked it, as it seems to me. To us Fairyland restored so beautiful it was and innocent. It made us cry, we elder ones, to live our lost youth or again with these its happy heirs. Slowly at last the curtain fell. Before us there she stood, all wreathed and draped in roses, purled with dew, so sweet, so glad, so radiant, and flung us kisses through the storm of praise that crowned her triumph. Oh, across the mists of time I see her yet, my goddess of the flowers. The curtain hid her. Do you comprehend? Till time shall end. Out of my life she vanished while I looked. Ten years are flown. Oh, I have watched so long, so long, but she will come no more. No, she will come no more. It seems so strange, so strange, struck down unwarned. In the unbought grace of youth laid low, in the glory of her fresh young bloom laid low. In the morning of her life cut down, and not by, not by when the shadows fell, the night of death closed down, the sun that lit my life went out. Not by to answer when the latest whisper passed the lips that were so dear to me, my name, from far my post, the world's whole breadth away. Oh, sinking in the waves of my foremother, help and, god for answer, silence. We that are old, we comprehend, even we that are not mad, whose grown-up scions still abide their tale complete. Their earlier selves we glimpse at intervals far in the dimming past. We see the little forms as once they were, and whilst we ache to take them to our hearts, the vision fades. We know them lost to us, forever lost. We cannot have them back. We miss them as we miss the dead. We mourn them as we mourn the dead. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A MICROBE WHO, IN A FORMER EXISTENCE, HAD BEEN A MAN, HIS PRESENT HABITAT BEING THE ORGANISM OF A TRAMP, BLITZAUTSKI, written at Dublin, New Hampshire, 1905, CHAPTER 235. OUR WORLD, THE TRAMP, IS AS LARGE AND GRAND, AND ALL COMPELLING TO US MICROSCOPIC CREATURES, AS IS MAN'S WORLD TO MAN. OUR TRAMP IS MOUNTAINESS. There are vast oceans in him, and lakes that are sea-like for size. There are many rivers, veins and arteries, which are fifteen miles across, and of a length so stupendous as to make the Mississippi and the Amazon trifling little road-island brooks by comparison. As for our minor rivers, they are multitudinous, and the dutiable commerce of disease which they carry is rich beyond the dreams of the American custom house. Take a man like Sir Oliver Lodge, and what secret of nature can be hidden from him? He says, a billion, that is, a million millions, editor note, trillion, of atoms is truly an immense number, but the resulting aggregate is still excessively minute. A portion of substance consisting of a billion atoms is only barely visible with the highest power of a microscope, and a speck, or granule, in order to be visible to the naked eye, like a grain of lycopodium dust, must be a million times bigger still. The human eye could see it then, that dainty little speck, but with my microbe eye I could see every individual of the whirling billions of atoms that compose the speck. Nothing is ever at rest. Wood, iron, water, everything is alive. Everything is raging, whirling, whizzing, day and night, and night and day. Nothing is dead. There is no such thing as death. Everything is full of bristling life, tremendous life, even the bones of the crusader that perished before Jerusalem eight centuries ago. There are no vegetables. All things are animal. Each electron is an animal. Each molecule is a collection of animals, and each has an appointed duty to perform and a soul to be saved. Heaven was not made for man alone, and oblivion and neglect reserved for the rest of his creatures. He gave them life. He gave them humble services to perform. They have performed them, and they will not be forgotten. They will have their reward. Man, always vain, windy, conceited, thinks he will be in the majority there. He will be disappointed. Let him humble himself. But for the despised microbe and the persecuted bacillus, who needed a home and nourishment, he would not have been created. He has a mission, therefore a reason for existing. Let him do the service he was made for, and keep quiet. Three weeks ago I was a man myself, and thought and felt, as men think and feel. I have lived three thousand years since then, microbic time, and I see the foolishness of it now. We live to learn, and fortunate are we when we are wise enough to profit by it. In matters pertaining to microscopy we necessarily have an advantage here over the scientist of the earth, because, as I have just been indicating, we see with our naked eyes my newtness which no man-made microscope can detect, and are therefore able to register as facts many things which exist for him as theories only. Indeed, we know as facts several things which he has not yet divined even by theory. For example, he does not suspect that there is no life but animal life, and that all atoms are individual animals endowed each with a certain degree of consciousness, great or small, each with likes and dislikes, predilections, and aversions, that, in a word, each has a character, a character of its own. Yet such is the case. Some of the molecules of a stone have an aversion, for some of those of a vegetable or any other creature, and will not associate with them, and would not be allowed to if they tried. Nothing is more particular about society than a molecule, and so there are no end of casts. In this matter India is not a circumstance. Tell me, Franklin, a microbe of great learning, is the ocean an individual, an animal, a creature? Yes. Then water, any water, is an individual? Yes. Suppose you remove a drop of it. Is what is left an individual? Yes, and so is the drop. Suppose you divide the drop. Then you have two individuals. Suppose you separate the hydrogen and the oxygen. Again, you have two individuals, but you haven't water any more. Of course, certainly. Well, suppose you combine them again, but in a new way. Make the proportions equal, one part oxygen to one of hydrogen. But you know you can't. They won't combine on equal terms. I was ashamed to have made that blunder. I was embarrassed. To cover it, I started to say we used to combine them like that, where I came from, but thought better of it, and stood pat. Now then, I said, it amounts to this. Water is an individual, an animal, and is alive. Remove the hydrogen, and it is an animal, and is alive. The remaining oxygen is also an individual, an animal, and is alive. Recapitulation. The two individuals combined constitute a third individual, and yet each continues to be an individual. I glanced at Franklin, but upon reflection held my peace. I could have pointed out to him that here was mutant nature explaining the sublime mystery of the trinity so luminously that even the commonest understanding could comprehend it, whereas many a trained master of words had labored to do it with speech and failed. But he would not have known what I was talking about. After a moment I resumed. Listen, and see if I have understood you rightly to it. All the atoms that constitute each oxygen molecule are separate individuals, and each is a living animal. All the atoms that constitute each hydrogen molecule are separate individuals, and each one is a living animal. Each drop of water consists of millions of living animals. The drop itself is an individual, a living animal, and the wide ocean is another. Is that it? Yes, that is correct. By George it beats the band. He liked the expression, and set it down in his tablets. Franklin, we've got it down fine. Then to think. There are other animals that are still smaller than a hydrogen atom, and yet it is so small that it takes five thousand of them to make a molecule. A molecule so minute that it could get into a microbes eye, and he wouldn't know it was there. Yes, the wee creatures that inhabit the bodies of us germs and feed upon us and rot us with disease, what could they have been created for? They give us pain, they make our lives miserable, they murder us. And where is the use of it all? Where the wisdom? Ah, friend, bishop, mycrobic orthography. We live in a strange and unaccountable world. Our birth is a mystery. Our little life is a mystery. A trouble. We pass and are seen no more. All is mystery, mystery, mystery. We know not whence we came, nor why. We know not wither we go, nor why we go. We only know we were not made in vain. We only know we were made for a wise purpose. And that all is well. We shall not be cast aside incontumely and unblessed after all we have suffered. Let us be patient. Let us not repine. Let us trust. The humblest of us is cared for. Oh, believe it! And this fleeting stay is not the end. You notice that? He did not suspect that he also was engaged in gnawing, torturing, defiling, rotting, and murdering a fellow creature. He and all the swarming billions of his race. None of them suspects it. That is significant. It is suggestive, irresistibly suggestive, insistently suggestive. It hints that the possibility that the procession of known and listed devours and persecutors is not complete. It suggests the possibility, and substantially the certainty, that man is himself a microbe, and his globe, a blood corpuscle drifting with its shiny brethren of the milky way, down a vein of the master and maker of all things whose body may hap, glimpsed part-wise from the earth by night, and receding and lost to view in the measureless remoteness of space, is what men name the universe. Yes, that was all old to me, but to find that our little old familiar microbes were themselves loaded up with microbes that fed them, enriched them, and persistently and faithfully preserved them and their poor old tramp planet from destruction. Oh, that was new and too delicious. I wanted to see them. I was in a fever to see them. I had lenses to two million power, but of course the field was no bigger than a person's fingernail, and so it wasn't possible to compass a considerable spectacle or a landscape with them, whereas what I had been craving was a thirty-foot field which would represent a spread of several miles of country and show up things in a way to make them worth looking at. The boys and I had often tried to contrive this improvement, but had failed. I mentioned the matter to the Duke, and it made him smile. He said it was a quite simple thing. He had it at home. I was eager to bargain for the secret, but he said it was a trifle and not worth bargaining for. He said, hasn't it occurred to you that all you have to do is to bend an x-ray to an angle value of eight point four and refract it with a parabolism, and there you are? Upon my word I had never thought of that simple thing. You could have knocked me down with a feather. We rigged a microscope for an exhibition at once, and put a drop of my blood under it, which got mashed flat when the lens got shut down upon it. The result was beyond my dreams. The field stretched miles away, green and undulating, threaded with streams and roads, and bordered all down the mellowing distances with picturesque hills. And there was a great white city of tents, and everywhere were parks of artillery and divisions of cavalry and infantry waiting. We had hit a lucky moment. Evidently there was going to be a march past, or something like that. At the front where the chief banner flew, there was a large and showy tent with showy guards on duty, and about it were some other tents of a swell kind. The warriors, particularly the officers, were lovely to look at. They were so trim-built and so graceful and so handsomely uniformed. They were quite distinct, vividly distinct, for it was a fine day, and they were so immensely magnified that they looked to be fully a fingernail high. My own expression, and a quite happy one, I said to the Duke, your grace, they're just about finger-milers. How do you mean, my lord? This, you notice the stately general standing there with his hand resting upon the muzzle of a cannon? Well, if you stick your little finger down against the ground alongside of him, his plumes would just reach up to where your nail joins the flesh. The Duke said finger-milers was good, good and exact, and he afterward used it several times himself. Everywhere you could see officers moving smartly about, and they looked gay, but the common soldiers looked sad. Many wife-swinks, swinks, an atomic race, and daughter-swinks and sweetheart-swinks were about, crying mainly. It seemed to indicate that this was a case of war, not a summer camp for exercise, and that the poor labor-swinks were being torn from their planet-saving industries to go and distribute civilization and other forms of suffering among the feeble benighted somewhere else. Why should the swinkuses cry? The cavalry was very fine, shiny black horses shapely and spirited, and presently when a flash of light struck a lifted bugle, delivering a command which we couldn't hear, and a division came tearing down on a gallop, it was a stirring and gallant sight, until the dust rose an inch, the Duke thought more, and swallowed it up in a rolling and tumbling long grey cloud, with bright weapons glinting and sparkling in it. Before long the real business of the occasion began. A battalion of priests arrived, carrying sacred pictures. That settled it. This was war. These far-stretching masses of troops were bound for the front. Their little monarch came out now, the sweetest little thing that ever travestied the human shape, I think, and he lifted up his hands and blessed the passing armies, and they looked as grateful as they could, and made signs of humble and real reverence as they drifted by the holy pictures. It was beautiful, the whole thing, and wonderful too, when those serried masses swung into line, and went marching down the valley under the long array of fluttering flags. Evidently they were going somewhere to fight for their king, which was the little manny that blessed them, and to preserve him and his brethren that occupied the other swell tents, to civilize and grasp a valuable little unwatched country for them somewhere. But the little fellow and his brethren didn't fall in. That was a noticeable particular. They didn't fight. They stayed at home where it was safe and waited for the swag. Very well, then, what ought we to do? Had we no moral duty to perform? Ought we to allow this war to begin? Was it not our duty to stop it in the name of right and righteousness? Was it not our duty to administer a rebuke to this selfish and heartless family? The duke was struck by that and greatly moved. He felt as I did about it, and was ready to do whatever was right, and thought we ought to pour boiling water on the family and extinguish it, which we did. It extinguished the armies too, which was not intended. We both regretted this, but the duke said that these people were nothing to us, and deserved extinction anyway, for being so poor-spirited as to serve such a family. He was loyally doing the like himself, and so was I, but I don't think we thought of that. And it wasn't just the same anyway, because we were suflaskeys, and they were only swings. Franklin realizes that no atom is destructible, that it has always existed and will exist forever. But he thinks all atoms will go out of this world someday, and continue their life in a happier one. Old Tolliver thinks no atom's life will ever end, but he also thinks Blitzowski is the only world it will ever see, and that at no time in its eternity will it be either worse off or better off than it is now, and always has been. Of course he thinks the planet Blitzowski is itself eternal and indestructible. At any rate he says he thinks that. It could make me sad, only I know better. D.T. will fetch Blitzy yet one of these days, but these are alien thoughts, human thoughts, and they falsely indicate that I do not want this tramp to go on living. What would become of me if he should disintegrate? My molecules would scatter all around and take up new quarters in hundreds of plants and animals. Each would carry its special feelings along with it. Each would be content in its new estate. But where should I be? I should not have a rag of a feeling left after my disintegration with his was complete. Nothing to think with, nothing to grieve or rejoice with, nothing to hope or despair with. There would be no more me. I should be musing and thinking and dreaming somewhere else, in some distant animal maybe, perhaps a cat. By proxy of my oxygen I should be raging and fuming and some other creatures, a rat perhaps. I should be smiling and hoping in still another child of nature, air to my hydrogen, a weed or a cabbage or something. My carbonic acid, ambition, would be dreaming dreams in some lowly wood violet that was longing for a showy career. Thus my details would be doing as much feeling as ever, but I should not be aware of it. It would all be going on for the benefit of those others, and I not in it at all. I should be gradually wasting away, atom by atom, molecule by molecule as the years went on, and at last I should be all distributed and nothing left of what had once been me. It is curious and not without impressiveness. I should still be alive, intensely alive, but so scattered that I would not know it. I should not be dead. No, one cannot call it that, but I should be the next thing to it, and to think what centuries and ages and eons would drift over me before the disintegration was finished. The last bone turned to gas and blown away. I wish I knew what it was going to feel like to lie helpless, such a weary, weary time, and see my faculties decay and depart one by one, like lights which burn low and flicker and perish, until the ever-deepening gloom and darkness which, oh, away, away with these horrors, and let me think of something wholesome. My tramp is only eighty-five. There is good hope that he will live ten years longer, five hundred thousand of my microbe years, so may it be. Oh, dear, we are all so wise. Each of us knows it all, and knows he knows it all. The rest, to a man, are fools and deluded. One man knows there is a hell, the next one knows there isn't. One man knows high tariff is right, the next man knows it isn't. One man knows monarchy is best, the next one knows it isn't. One age knows there are witches, the next one knows there aren't. One sect knows its religion is the only true one. There are sixty-four thousand five hundred million sects that know it isn't so. There is not a mind present among this multitude of verdict deliverers that is the superior of the minds that persuade and represent the rest of the divisions of the multitude. Yet this sarcastic fact does not humble the arrogance nor diminish the know-it-all bulk of a single verdict-maker of the lot by so much as a shade. Mind is plainly an ass, but it will be many ages before it finds it out, no doubt. Why do we respect the opinions of any man or any microbe that ever lived? I swear I don't know. Why do I respect my own? Well, that is different. End of Appendix V. Selection is from an unfinished book, Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes, read by John Greenman. Section 108 of Mark Twain, A Biography. Appendixes. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain, A Biography. By Albert Bigelow Payne. Appendix W. Little Bessie would assist Providence. See Chapter 282. It is dull, and I need wholesome excitements and destructions, so I will go lightly excursioning along the primrose path of theology. Little Bessie was nearly three years old. She was a good child, and not shallow, not frivolous, but meditative, and thoughtful, and much given to thinking out the reasons of things, and trying to make them harmonize with results. One day she said, Mama, why is there so much pain and sorrow and suffering? What is it all for? It was an easy question, and Mama had no difficulty in answering it. It is for our good, my child. In his wisdom and mercy the Lord sends us these afflictions to discipline us and make us better. Is it he that sends them? Yes. Does he send all of them, Mama? Yes, dear, all of them. None of them comes by accident. He alone sends them, and always out of love for us, and to make us better. Isn't it strange? Strange? Why, no, I have never thought of it in that way. I have not heard any one call it strange before. It has always seemed natural and right to me, and wise, and most kindly and merciful. Who first thought of it like that, Mama? Was it you? Oh, no, child, I was taught it. Who taught you so, Mama? Why, really, I don't know. I can't remember. My mother, I suppose, or the preacher. But it's a thing that everybody knows. Well, anyway, it does seem strange. Did he give Billy Norris the typhus? Yes. What for? Why, to discipline him and make him good. But he died, Mama, and so it couldn't make him good. Well, then, I suppose, it was for some other reason. We know it was a good reason, whatever it was. What do you think it was, Mama? Oh, you ask so many questions. I think it was to discipline his parents. Well, then, it wasn't fair, Mama. Why should his life be taken away for their sake, when he wasn't doing anything? Oh, I don't know. I only know it was for a good and wise and merciful reason. What reason, Mama? I think—I think—well, it was a judgment. It was to punish them for some sin they had committed. But he was the one that was punished, Mama. Was that right? Certainly, certainly, he does nothing that isn't right and wise and merciful. You can't understand these things now, dear, but when you are grown up, you will understand them, and then you will see that they are just and wise. After a pause, did he make the roof fall in on the stranger that was trying to save the crippled old woman from the fire, Mama? Yes, my child. Wait. Don't ask me why, because I don't know. I only know it was to discipline someone, or be a judgment upon somebody, or to show his power. That drunken man that stuck a pitchfork into Mrs. Welch's baby? Never mind about it. You needn't go into particulars. It was to discipline the child. That much is certain, anyway. Mama, Mr. Burgess said in his sermon that billions of little creatures are sent into us to give us cholera and typhoid and lockjaw, and more than a thousand other sicknesses, and, Mama, does he send them? Oh, certainly, child, certainly. Of course. What for? Oh, to discipline us. Haven't I told you so? Over and over again? It's awful cruel, Mama, and silly. And if I— Hush! Oh, hush! Do you want to bring the lightning? You know the lightning did come last week, Mama, and struck the new church, and burnt it down. Was it to discipline the church? Wearily. Oh, I suppose so. But it killed a hog that wasn't doing anything. Was it to discipline the hog, Mama? Dear child, don't you want to run out and play a while? If you would like to, Mama, only think. Mr. Hollister says there isn't a bird or fish or reptile or any other animal that hasn't got an enemy that Providence has sent to bite it, and chase it, and pester it, and kill it, and suck its blood, and discipline it, and make it good and religious. Is that true, Mother? Because if it is true, why did Mr. Hollister laugh at it? That Hollister is a scandalous person, and I don't want you to listen to anything he says. Why, Mama? He is very interesting, and I think he tries to be good. He says the wasps catch spiders, and cram them down into their nests in the ground. Alive, Mama! And there they live, and suffer, days and days and days, and the hungry little wasps chewing their legs, and gnawing into their bellies all the time to make them good and religious, and praise God for His infinite mercies. I think Mr. Hollister is just lovely, and ever so kind, for when I asked him if he would treat a spider like that, he said he hoped to be damned if he would, and then he, dear Mama, have you fainted? I will run and bring help. Now this comes of staying in town this hot weather.