 This is Section 79 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 79, Alta, California, May 1867. Alta, California, May 13, 1867. St. Louis, March 15, 1867. HAPPY! EDITORS, ALTA. We took passage in the cars of the New Jersey Central at 8 p.m. of the 3rd of March, and left port in the midst of a cheerful snowstorm. I call it cheerful, because there is something exquisitely satisfactory in whistling along through a shrouded land, following blindly wherever the demon in the lead may take you, yet sensible that he knows the way, and will steer his unerring course as faithfully as if it were noonday. Sensible also that you are as safe there as anywhere, sitting with back against the bulkhead, and feet crossed on the next seat, and hat drawn down to shade the eyes from the lamp overhead, sitting thus by the comfortable fire, smoking placidly, and dreaming of other times and other scenes, making small heed of the storm without, yet scarcely conscious that it is snowing, and is blowing drearily across the bleak moor as well, and that some people are out there suffering in it and distressed, but that you ain't. That, on the contrary, you are perfectly happy, and tranquil, and satisfied, sitting thus, and smoking, and dreaming, and being timed and soothed by the clatter of the wheels. Well, you know there is something unspeakably comfortable about it. Unhappy. That was the way I felt from eight till a little after twelve. The sleeping cars were full, and I had to sit up all night. I had been talking laterally to a young soldier who had been all through the wars, from Bull Run to Lee's Surrender, a beardless veteran full of battle experiences and tales of camp and prison life, and was now within a hundred miles of his home almost, for the first time in six years. Handsome, modest, honest, good-hearted boy of twenty-three, and more ready to tell about his schoolboy days than his six charges at Antietam, but gone the war he was, and I was alone. Then I began to feel crampy a little, and then chilly, and presently I noticed that the fire was very low, and remembered that I had seen no one doctor it for over three hours. I got up and tried to open the stove door, but could not do it. A drowsy neighbor said it was locked to keep the passengers from burning too much coal. I looked again and found the keyhole, so it was true. The man said this was done on all them damn Jersey Monopolar Roads. I grew chilly fast, then, and gradually grew peevish and fretful also. I observed that the furniture was mean and old, and that the train moved slowly and stopped to land a passenger every three hundred yards. After that, every time we stopped, I cursed the railroad till we started again, and that afforded me some little satisfaction. I observed also that the usual mean man was aboard, who kept his window a little open to distress his fellows, and after that I noticed how fearfully dismal and unhappy the passengers looked, doubled up in uncomfortable attitudes on short seats in the dim, funereal light, like so many corpses they looked, of people who had died of care and weariness. And then I said I would rather walk than travel that route again, and I wished the company would burst up so completely that there wouldn't be enough money left to give the director's Christian burial, but I hoped they might need it shortly. I shall never be able to express how glad I was when the grey dawn stole over the plane, and the sun followed and cheered the scene, and the train stopped, and I gave my limbs a grateful stretch, and steeped my sorrowful soul in inspiring coffee. INSIGNIFICANCE IN OFFICE The conductor was pompous and discourteous, as natural wood-soyers in office are apt to be. Your dog, with a brass collar with his master's name on it, is ever prone to snub the undecorated dog. Brown plied the fellow with questions at every opportunity, and scorned all rebuffs. He asked him, with fine irony, if that train ever ran by a town before they could stop it, and when he was fiercely answered, No! he said he thought such a thing might be possible, but he had not gone so far as to consider it probable, and he wanted to know if this was the country where the Jersey lightning of history came from, and if they had any of it aboard that train. When we finally ran over a cow he felt better satisfied about the speed of the train, because, as he said, he knew we must be going along tolerably lively else we could not have overtaken the cow. Brown said to the breakman, Your brother, the conductor, gets forty or fifty thousand dollars a year, maybe, I reckon. No! he gets ten or fifteen hundred, if it's anything to you. Possible? Why, I wouldn't have thought that a man could afford to put on forty-five thousand dollars worth of frills for fifteen hundred without losing money and getting discouraged! Photograph of Pittsburgh, et cetera. We got to Pittsburgh at two p.m., four hundred and thirty-one miles, eighteen hours out, twenty-five miles an hour. Pittsburgh, as we saw it, is a vast impenetrable bank of black smoke, and two or three long bridges stretching across a river. It is very picturesque. All through Pennsylvania the houses looked old and shabby, that is, all through the country. We slept at Alliance, Ohio, and took sleeping-cars for Indianapolis, and what a luxury the birth was, both in anticipation and reality. Knowing I had a bed, sure I had no occasion to hurry. So I smoked till three in the morning, and then undressed and turned in. It was a sort of palace. The birth was wide enough for three, and I had the whole stateroom to myself. I compelled Brown to sit up all night so that he could come and tell me in case the train ran off the track. It was worth the forty hours I had gone without sleep to feel the luxury of lying down between clean sheets and stretching out at full length, and drawing up and stretching out again, and turning over and fetching another celestial latch. The music of the wheels was so tranquilizing, too. I dropped off to sleep, lulled by the ceaseless racket, and woke up at Indianapolis at 9 a.m. I will mention here that one does not need a map to tell him when he crosses the boundary of one state and enters another. He can discover it in a moment by the appearance of the passengers that come on board. If they had Ohio or Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana or Illinois written on their foreheads, one could not detect their abiding places much easier. From Indianapolis to St. Louis we did as we had from the first, stopped at some shanty or other every fifteen minutes to discharge or take in forty cents worth of passengers, and if there is anything more aggravating than that I do not know what it is. We reached St. Louis, eleven hundred miles from New York, fifty-two hours out, and if we had come straight through we might have done it in half the time. I went straight home and sat up till breakfast time, talking and telling other lies. Californians I find S. R. Weed, an ancient California newspaper man, of the days when Kendall and Frank Sol and some of the rest of you were in your frolicsome youth. He is in the insurance business now, but still corresponds with the Alta and the New York Tribune, and sends telegrams to the Chicago Tribune, Cincinnati Commercial, and New Orleans Times. He was on the Democrat here for a long time, and they say that he was war correspondent of the Herald and Tribune both for four years, and worked up his battle so differently for each by making them rebel victories for one, and union victories for the other, that he was not suspected by his employers. He is doing quite a lively insurance trade now, and is gradually cutting loose from newspaperdom. Moe's Flanagan, formerly of San Francisco, owns considerably in the Olympic Theater here, and built it. This reminds me that Felix McCluskey, another San Franciscan, and an innocent matter-of-fact man, is in Washington, and holds, or did hold, an office there which did not require that its occupant should know more than thirty-five or forty men ought to know. He had charge of the heating apparatus of the capital. They say that he had a steam engine in his department, which he was very proud of, and was always showing it and expatiating upon it to visitors. One day one of these asked him what its capacity was, how many horsepower? Horsepower? Hail! he says. It goes by steam! And that reminds me about an anecdote concerning General Sherman, who is now a resident of St. Louis. On his march down toward Atlanta he constantly astonished the rebels with the facility with which he restored the railroad bridges they destroyed at his approach. They would annihilate a bridge just before he arrived, and the next morning there it was again, just as it had been before they touched it. At last a light dawned upon them. The original plans for the bridges had all been furnished from Cleveland, Ohio, and before Sherman started he took those plans, had each bridge duplicated in all its timbers and ironwork, took the pieces in a shook state on his trains, and so, when he found a bridge gone, he had nothing to do but get its mate out of the freight cars, bolt it together, and put it up. This thing worried the rebels a good deal when they found it out. One day they proposed to destroy the Dalton Tunnel to hinder Sherman's march, but an exasperated confederate said, What in the nation's the use? That damned old Sherman's probably fetched another one along with him from Cleveland. Sociables. Sociables appear to be the rage here. They are pretty well named. From fifty to a hundred lady members of a church meet at a private house or in the lecture-room of a church, and all day long they sow. All day long they make pink cravats and ruffle shirts for the poor heathen in distant lands, and discuss their neighbor's characters likely, and at night they serve up an elegant ungodly supper of cold turkey and salads and hot coffee and pies, and about that time a crowd of gentlemen arrive, and each lady is privileged to choose any gentleman she pleases, and escort him down to the table and wait on him. And after that they talk and get more and more sociable until an hour of un-Christian lateness, and then they go home satisfied that they have been helping the poor heathen along powerfully. They go home feeling as the girl felt when the minister asked her how she felt when he was waiting out with her after baptizing her and washing her pure of the sins that had so long stained her girlish innocence. She said she felt bully. The sociables are usually held on Thursday evenings, and each congregation gives one every week or two. They are considered to be altogether the pleasantest things yet invented for the comfort of people who are debarred from the charms of the dance and the intoxicating bottle. Characteristic. In San Francisco as soon as you arrive some friend hails, how'd you do? When'd you get down? How's things in the mountains? When you're going back? How'd you like San Francisco? Take a drink? So long! See you again! In New York they say, ah, when'd you arrive? How long are you going to stay? How do you like New York? Good morning. Here they say, hello, glad to see you by George. When'd you get here? Why, you look as natural as a cow. How do you like St. Louis since you got back? Come, go to my room. I want to have a smoke with you. But don't you observe, they all ask that same old question, how do you like San Francisco? How do you like New York? How do you like St. Louis? It is all mighty aggravating. Can't people think of something else besides that? It wouldn't make any difference if only one or two people asked the question, but to be bored with it twenty times a day is insufferable. It has set me to speculating about the other world. A man who has lived a long life and been around a good deal will probably meet as many as twenty or thirty thousand people there he was acquainted with on earth. They say we shall preserve our natural instincts. Now, think of being bored all through paradise or perdition with that same wretched old question of how you like it. Why, it wouldn't make any difference which locality you landed in. You would get so harried and badgered that you would wish you had gone to the other place. And yet, that would not mend the matter because communication is open between the two. You remember that Dives easily recognized Lazarus and hailed him? I wish I knew if Lazarus asked. However, it is no matter. The subject distresses me beyond measure. I do wish they would invent a new formula to inflict on strangers, because even if it were no more interesting than the old one it would at least bear the effervescent charm of novelty. I hate that question as I do the hackneyed topic of the weather. However, when one is tired, hating anything, he can always go to bed. I will. The Eukerhorns. P.S. But I must not go to bed till I have spoken of the Eukerhorns. This is what they would call a stag sociable in the mountains. Twelve to sixteen or twenty gentlemen composing the Eukerhorns Club meet once a week at each other's residences and play Eukerh for a little of gilded and ribbed dear horns. The partners for scoring seventeen games are declared champions. Two gentlemen may then challenge them for the next meeting. Of course, all the other parties are playing in the meantime, but only for amusement. A party challenging for the horns and failing to win them cannot challenge again for several meetings. This gives all a chance in turn. This club has existed over two years, and its records have been strictly kept in a small, minute book. One brace of gentlemen held the horns for six successive meetings. These are the very pleasantest entertainments I have attended in a long time. There are no ladies present, and so you haven't got to be kept under the tiresome restraints of proper conduct all the time. The ladies of the house stay in the dining-room, where wines and a cold collation are set out, and wait on the gentlemen who drop in, in small squads every now and then, to refresh between games. You are not obliged to go in every time you finish a game, but then it is just as convenient to do it, and it makes things more uniform, you know. I never have won the horns yet, but I always beat the free lunch. The items of each contest are published in the morning papers next day. Suppose you try the Eukerhorns in San Francisco. You might make it the Pokerhorns, if Euker is too mild. ALTA California May 19, 1867. St. Louis, March 25, 1867. AT HOME AGAIN. EDITORS ALTA. I landed here in my old home more than three weeks ago, and have been very busy visiting old friends ever since. The changes that years have wrought in the city are not apparent to me. It is because they have chiefly been made at both ends of the town, and I have not been out of its center yet. And also the buildings that have been put up all through my part of the city are so blackened and begrimed with cold smoke that I cannot persuade myself that I have not been perfectly familiar with them in the old times. When I left St. Louis she had a population of a hundred and fifty thousand, and that they called it a hundred and seventy-five thousand. Now she has a population of two hundred and four thousand, and they call it two hundred and fifty thousand. But you will admit that an increase of over fifty thousand in less than seven years is remarkable for an inland town. Bremen and Carandelet are great cities now, and are so knitted to the main city that the dividing lines are obliterated. They tell me that one may ride ten or twelve miles in a straight line north and south without changing streetcars. I mean to test the truth of it. One of the things that is constantly surprising me is the way the reality diminishes sizes and distances that have been lying on record in my memory so long. In my recollection the courthouse was something prodigious, almost awe-inspiring, but when I came to look at it the other day it had shrunken so much that I could not understand how it had ever held so large a place in my memory. The house I had always lived in had undergone the same wonderful process of seeming reduction, but you who have revisited your homes after years of absence understand this. Localities which in my memory were long distances apart I am astounded to find close together now. I start out for a moderate walk and am amazed to find myself at the mound, or the shot-tower, and right in town at that. Or I go in another direction and stumble on the Soulard Market when I thought it was miles away. I find the cave and Camp Springs and Lafayette Park when I am no more expecting them than I am expecting to stumble upon Great Salt Lake City. Why, sixteen or seventeen years ago nobody thought of walking to these distant places. We made important Sunday excursions to them in omnibuses, at long intervals. Where the change is? I find no change of consequence in grown people, I do miss the dead. It does not surprise me to hear that this friend or that friend died at such and such a time because I fully expected that sort of news. But somehow I had made no calculation on the infants. It had never occurred to me that infants grow up to be men and women in the course of years, and so I caught myself making such inquiries as, Well, how is little Johnny? Does he eat as much candy as ever? And getting replies that made me feel inexpressibly old, such as, No, little Johnny is married now, and is captain of a steamboat. Infants I had not seen for twelve or fifteen years had remained infants to me during all that time. These unexpected changes, from infancy to youth, and from youth to maturity, are by far the most startling things I meet with. Girls I used to trot on my knee could trot me that way now, if they wanted to, but somehow they don't. I meet these infants every day, and in place of the little short dresses and bibs and neglected noses I cherished in my memory, I find stately women, and long trails, and awful waterfalls. It is perfectly stunning. However I am generally allowed a kiss for old acquaintance's sake, and I am sorry now that I didn't know all the female babies in the country when I left. One of my old sweethearts I have been dreaming of so long has got five children now. It was a great blow to me. If she had had fifty I couldn't have stood it at all. Steamboating I find the long levee bordered with steamboats its entire length, as formerly, and now that the Mobile and Ohio Railroad is mostly under water they are doing a heavy business south. The other river trades are good also. A great daily line of splendid boats, which connects with European steamers at New Orleans, does most of the carrying, both in freight and passengers, but it has not paid, and it is thought that the company will sell out this summer and quit. The lower river boats are being made larger and larger every year. The great Republic, just finished at Louisville, will carry in the neighbourhood of three thousand tonnes, possibly more. Even her custom house measurement is twenty-five hundred tonnes. The largest load I ever saw one steamboat take into New Orleans was eighteen hundred tonnes, and that was bragged about for a long time. Female Suffrage The women of Missouri have started a sensation on their own hook. They are petitioning the legislature to so provide for the amending of the Constitution as to extend to them the privilege of voting, along with us and the nigs, you know. They published one of these petitions a few days ago, with about two hundred names to it, and among them were those of some of the best known and most influential ladies of St. Louis. Thirty-nine members of the legislature have declared in favour of the movement. Don't you know that such a showing as that is amazing in view of the colossal dimensions of the proposed innovation? It strikes me that way. If four or five hen-pecked husbands, or badgered and bully-ragged old bachelors, had been driven into a support of the measure, nobody would have been surprised. But when the list soars up to thirty-nine, it is time for all good men to tremble for their country. I attacked the monster in the public prints, and raised a small female storm. But it occurred to me that it might get uncommon warm for one poor devil against all the crinolin in the camp, and so I antied up and passed out, as the Sabbath school children say. I don't want to say much about this subject in the altar, because the ladies may take it up on the Pacific next, and I don't want to get myself into trouble there also. Nothing again. I went to church twice last Sunday, and to Sunday school three times. All my folks live here, and I have got to go mighty slow, you know. I infest all the prayer meetings and church sociables, and conduct myself in a manner which is as utterly unexceptional as it is outrageously irksome. I have kept up my licks so far, as the missionaries say, but I don't think I can stand it much longer. I never could bear to be respectable long at a stretch. Sunday afternoon, the superintendent of one of those populist Sunday schools came round to my pew and asked me if I had ever had any experience in instructing the young, in addressing Sunday schools. I said, My son, it is my strong suit! I was still keeping up my lick, as the missionaries say. He said he would be glad if I would get up in the altar and make a few remarks, and I said it would be the proudest moment of my life. So I got up there and told that admiring multitude all about Jim Smiley's jumping frog, and I will do myself the credit to say that my efforts were received with the most rapturous applause, and that those of the solemn deacons, to stop it, were entirely unheeded by the audience. I honestly intended to draw an instructive moral from that story, but when I got to the end of it I couldn't discover that there was any particular moral sticking out around it anywhere, and so I just let it slide. However, it don't matter. I suppose those children will cipher a moral out of it somehow, because they are so used to that sort of thing. I gained my main point anyhow, which was to make myself respected in California, because, you know, you cannot help but respect a man who makes speeches to Sunday schools, and devotes his time to instructing youth. I did not intend to lecture in St. Louis, but I got a call to do something of that kind for the benefit of a Sunday school, and as long as I had to keep up my lick anyway, I thought I had better go ahead. So I preached twice in the Mercantile Library Hall. I haven't vanity enough to print all that the newspaper said, but I will venture to extract a fourth of the Republicans' notice. The audience was large and appreciative, and financially, and every other way the entertainment proved a complete success. In fact, Mark Twain achieved a very decided success. He succeeded in doing what we have seen Emerson and other literary magnates fail in attempting. He interested and amused a large and promiscuous audience. We shall attempt no synopsis of his entertainment. Ostensibly it was on the Sandwich Islands, but while it contained not a little valuable information and many passages of felicitous description, it also embraced many other topics geographically and otherwise foreign to the matter in hand, and had many a pequant piece of humor interwoven, which, with the right flash of genuine wit, startled with laughter and kept alive the attention of the audience. I think that is pretty complementary, considering that when I delivered that lecture I was not acquainted with a single newspaper man in St. Louis. I do not do anything here but gad around among old friends. But if you want to know the places where audiences are jolly and where they snap up a joke before you can fairly get it out of your mouth, they are St. Louis, San Francisco, San Jose, and Carson City. BAD GOVERNMENT The mayor of St. Louis is elected by the people, and the Board of Police Commissioners is appointed by the Governor of the State. The Commissioners appoint the Chief of Police, the Street Inspector, the Police Force, etc. This plan pretty effectually prevents the turning of the police part of the city government into a machine for hoisting demagogues and politicians into power, and is a good feature. But for some reason or other the mayor and the Commissioners have fallen out with each other and do nothing but fight like cats and dogs all the time. One part he accuses the other of all sorts of outrageous things in newspaper publications, and the next day out comes a furious reply from the other side. It spices our breakfast handsomely anyhow. The Commissioners say that during the cholera season, when people were dying so fast that carts were sent around and dead bodies dumped in by the dozen without the formality of being shrouded first, the mayor kept two hundred corpses stacked up on a sandbar at the lower end of the city and refused for four days to let them be buried by the servants of the city. Said it was the county government's place to bury them. The county held out obstinately, and so did the mayor. So the Commissioners had to fill a detachment of policemen full of whiskey so they wouldn't mind the lively flavor of the departed, and stand guard over them as long as they held together, and they say that all those twenty-two policemen had to be kept full of whiskey during all that four days at a ruinous expense, and you know yourself that you could bury a whole community for less money than it would cost to keep twenty-two policemen in soak for four days, and stands to reason that you could. And finally the citizens in the neighborhood, not being fortified with whiskey, began to consider the perfume from the dead house as rather disagreeable, and so they went to work and burned it down with all its fearful cargo, since I have been in the city, the child of an indigent woman has lain four days unburied because of this quarrel between the police, the mayor, and the county. However, the child was not dead, and so I suppose there wasn't really any occasion to bury it. But it showed the animus of the thing, you know. The Commissioners say the mayor shelters the gamblers and thieves, protects them from arrest when he can, and gets them out of prison when they are incarcerated. In return the mayor says the Commissioners do not make the street officer do his duty. That dead falls and pit holes are left exposed everywhere with not even a lantern near them at night to warn the stranger. Says they lie about him, and never attend to their own duties, and he says he disguised himself one night and walked eight squares without ever finding a policeman, except a squad of half a dozen whom he caught warming themselves at a stove in a gin mill. I guess that story is pretty straight. You know yourself that when a policeman is cold he is going to hunt a place to warm himself, the first thing, and when he is warm he will skirmish around for a cool place, and whenever things get dull, and you can't find anything in the world to do to pass away the time, he will just get reckless and go on his beat a while, maybe. You can't tell me anything about the police, because I know them by the back. I like the police well enough, but I don't consider it judgment to bet on them. This mayor here is a mighty plain-spoken man. He wrote to the convention that he had never sought an office and never wanted one, that he had served two terms as mayor, but never thanked the people for electing him, and never thanked the convention for nominating him. Said he didn't want the office now, and wouldn't thank them to nominate him, and wouldn't thank the people if they elected him. He wanted that understood plainly beforehand. He was not going to be under obligations to anybody. And they went ahead nevertheless and nominated him by a vote of about ten to one. He will be elected, I suppose, and if he has got a spark of humanity in him he will start a graveyard on his own private account to bury disputed corpses in. PUBLIC SCHOOLS The public schools of St. Louis are in a far more flourishing condition than those of any other southern city or state. A two-mil tax and the revenues from ample school lands furnish all the money necessary to build or rent all the school houses needed and furnish them with teachers and other furniture. The total value of property used for school purposes in St. Louis is $533,440.95. The average number of teachers employed is 204. The number of pupils enrolled is 14,556. This is an increase of 5,009 years. Two-thirds of the pupils were born in St. Louis. The normal school shows a graduating class of 26 this year. The high school graduating class numbers 27. The total number of public school houses in the city is 30. The superintendent's report, now before me, says of the colored schools ordered by state law that the efforts of the board to establish schools for colored children have not as yet been successful, but that a special committee has been ordered to rent proper buildings and open such schools without any delay that can possibly be avoided. The new Webster and Carroll school houses just completed rank among the finest edifices in the city. They cost, respectively, $35,000 and $40,000. As to wages of teachers, the female principal of the normal school gets $2,000 a year, one female assistant $1,100 and one $850. The male principal of the high school gets $2,750, one male assistant $2,000, one female assistant $1,700 each, one female assistant $1,200, two female assistants $1,000 each, and another $700. Nine male principles of the district schools get $1,700 each, three others get $1,500 each, three female principals get $1,000 each, eight female principals get $900 each, and then there is a whole raft of small fry female teachers who get from $550 to $700, two music teachers get $1,500 each. They don't teach French or Latin or such things in the district schools, but they run a good deal of German and mental arithmetic and a newfangled study they call moral culture. I don't recollect it in our school. Alta California May 26, 1867. New York. April 16, 1867. Notable things in St. Louis. Editors Alta. Well, I had to bid goodbye to St. Louis at last. I found it and left it the same happy, cheerful, contented old town, a town where the people are kind and polite even to strangers, where you can go into a business-house you never saw before and speak to a man you never heard of before and get a perfectly civil answer. It reminded me of the Pacific Coast. Of course I noticed some little unusual odds and ends of things that set me to thinking. I heard people say Prink to express that they had been fixing up, and heard them say that they had been peaking through a crack, for instance, instead of peeping, and heard them say Kaleit instead of Rechen, which latter is a perfectly legitimate word, as the Alta readers may see by reference to the eighteenth verse of the eighth chapter of Romans, and heard them say, I admire to do so and so, which is barbarous, and heard them say, Boscot for basket, and Gloss for glass, and be you going home, for are you going home, and heard them say, she is quite pretty, when they meant she is right pretty, the one expressing perfection and the other merely a degree of excellence. I heard those, and many other unhappy provincialisms, which warned me that many New England people have gone westward and are going to mar the ancient purity of the Missouri in dialect if somebody don't put a stop to it. But the funniest thing to me was to hear those same immigrants criticizing our manners of speaking, and calling attention to what they honestly considered infelicities of language on our part. I couldn't stand that right well. And I noticed, and was glad to see that the Nicholson pavement was used a good deal in St. Louis. And I also noticed that the ladies did not dress in full fashion, which is a thing that always distresses me. No woman can look as well out of the fashion as in it. And I noticed that the children in St. Louis have thin legs as a general thing. You see, they haven't any hills to climb. And I noticed that few young men were bald-headed, which is not the case, on the Pacific coast. And I noticed that whenever people hadn't anything to do, they washed their hands. They used a great deal of coal there, and the air is always filled with invisible coal dust that soils everything it touches. And I noticed that flour was $19 a barrel. And I observed that the political bitternesses engendered during the war are still about as strong as they ever were. Individual friends and whole families of old, tried friends are widely separated yet. Don't visit and don't hold any intercourse with each other. If you give a dinner party for either gentlemen or ladies or both, it is much the best policy to invite Democrats only or Republicans only. Even church congregations are organized, not on religious but on political bases. And the creed begins, I believe in Abraham Lincoln, the martyr president of the United States, or I believe in Jefferson Davis, the founder of the Confederate States of America. The genuine creeds begin that way, although to keep up appearances they still go through the motions and use the ancient formula, I believe in Jesus Christ, etc. And one of the pleasantest things I noticed was that those old-fashioned twilight still remain and enrich all the landscape with a dreamy vagueness for two hours after the sun has gone down. It is such a pity they forgot to put in the twilight when they made the Pacific coast. And it is another pity that they forgot to put in any splendid sunsets, too, when the country is so large and there would have been such a fine opening for them. Up the Mississippi. I went up to Hannibal, Quincy, and Keokuk on the Upper Mississippi. The first and the last named are enjoying a season of rest, but not refreshment. The railroads have stricken them dead for a year or two, and I cannot help fearing for Quincy also, now that she is going to build a bridge and let her trade cross the Mississippi and go through without stopping. St. Louis is doing the same, and somebody has got to suffer for it some day, no doubt. The railroads have badly crippled the trade of the Keokuk packets, too. They used to go crowded with passengers and freight all the time, but they have room and to spare now. And they don't set a good table any more, either. They never did set a very good table, for that matter, but it was at least better than it is now. Their officers are princes, though. Hannibal by a native historian. Hannibal has had a hard time of it ever since I can reflect, and I was raised there. First it had me for a citizen, but I was too young then to really hurt the place. Next Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, reformed, and that broke up the only saloon in the village. But the temperance people liked it. They were willing enough to sacrifice public prosperity to public morality. And so they made much of Jimmy Finn, dressed him up in new clothes, and had him out to breakfast and a dinner and so forth, and showed him off as a great living curiosity, a shining example of the power of temperance doctrines when earnestly and eloquently set forth. Which was all very well, you know, and sounded well, and looked well in print. But Jimmy Finn couldn't stand it. He got remorseful about the loss of his liberty, and then he got melancholy from thinking about it so much, and after that he got drunk. He got awfully drunk in the chief citizen's house, and the next morning that house was as if the swine had tarried in it. That outraged the temperance people and delighted the opposite faction. The former rallied and reformed Jim once more, but in an evil hour temptation came upon him, and he sold his body to a doctor for a quart of whisky, and that ended all his earthly troubles. He drank it all at one sitting, and his soul went to its long account, and his body went to Dr. Grant. This was another blow to Hannibal. Jimmy Finn had always kept the town in a sweat about something or other, and now had nearly died from utter inhibition. After this Joe Dutting, a reckless speculator, started a weekly stage to the town of Florida thirty miles away, where a couple of families were living, and Hannibal revived very perceptively under this wild new sensation. But then the scarlet fever came, and the hives, and between them they came near-hiving all the children in the camp, and so Hannibal took another back-set. But pretty soon a weekly newspaper was started, which bred a fierce spirit of enterprise in the neighboring farmers, because when they had any small potatoes left over that they couldn't sell, they didn't throw them away as they used to do. But they took them to the editor and traded them off for subscriptions to his paper. But finally the potato-rot got him, and Hannibal was floored again. However, somebody started a pork-house, and the little village showed signs of life once more, and then came the measles and blighted it. It stayed blighted a good while, too. After a while they got to talking about building a plank road to New London, ten miles away, and after another while they built it. This made business. Then they got excited and built a gravel road to Paris, thirty or forty miles, more business. They got into a perfect frenzy and talked of a railroad, an actual railroad, a railroad two hundred miles long, a railroad from Hannibal to St. Joseph, and, behold, in the fullness of time, in ten or fifteen years, they built it. A sure enough prosperity burst upon the community now. Property went up. It was noted as a significant fact that instead of selling town-lots by the acre, people began to sell them by the front foot. Hannibal grew fast, doubled its population in two years, started a daily paper or two, and came to be called a city. Sent for a fire-engine and had her out, bedecked with ribbons, on Fourth of July, but the engine-house burnt down one night and destroyed her, which cast a gloom over the whole community. And they started militia companies, and sons of temperance, and cadets of temperance. Hannibal always had a weakness for the temperance cause. I joined the cadets myself, although they didn't allow a boy to smoke or drink or swear, but I thought I never could be truly happy till I wore one of those stunning red scarves and walked in procession when a distinguished citizen died. I stood at four months, but never an infernal distinguished citizen died during the whole time, and when they finally pronounced old Dr. Norton Convalescent, a man I had been depending on for seven or eight weeks, I just drew out. I drew out in disgust, and pretty much all the distinguished citizens in the camp died within the next three weeks. Well, Hannibal's prosperity seemed to be of a permanent nature, but St. Louis built the North Missouri Railroad and hurt her, and Quincy tapped the Hannibal and St. Joe in one or two places, which hurt her still worse. And then the war came, and the closing years of it almost finished her. Now they are trying to build a branch railroad to some place in the interior they call Moberly, at a cost of half a million, and after that fails some of the citizens will move. They only talk Moberly now, the church members still talk about religion, but they mix up a good deal of Moberly in it. The young ladies talk fashion and Moberly, and the old ones talk of charity and temperance, piety, the grave, and Moberly. Hannibal will get Moberly and it will save her, it will bring back the old prosperity, but won't they have to build another road to protect the Moberly, and another and another to protect each enterprise of the kind? A railroad is like a lie, you have to keep building to it to make it stand. A railroad is a ravenous destroyer of towns, unless those towns are put at the end of it in a sea beyond, so that you can't go further and find another terminus. And it is shaky trusting them even then, for there is no telling what may be done with trestle work. Which reminds me of Jim Townsend's Tunnel. He was a stockholder in the Daily Mine in Virginia City, and he heard that his company had led a contract to run a tunnel two hundred and fifty feet to strike the ledge. He visited the premises, and found a man starting a tunnel in very near the top of a very sharp hill. He said, You're the man that's got the contract to run this tunnel, I reckon. Yes. Two hundred and fifty feet, I hear. Yes. Well, it's going to be a mighty troublesome tunnel, and expensive. Why? Because you've got to build the last hundred and sixty-five feet of it on trestle work. It's only eighty-five feet through the hill. Keokuk and Quincy. The ups and downs I have exaggerated a little in Hannibal's case will fit a good many towns in the Mississippi Valley, and Marysville, and one or two others on the Pacific Coast. Keokuk, Iowa, was one of the most stirring and enterprising young cities in America seven years ago, but railroads and land speculations killed it in a single night almost, and for six years it has been sleeping. It is reviving now, though, and a new and vigorous prosperity has promised it. Its chances are more to be depended upon than Hannibal's, I think. But Quincy is a wonderful place. It has always thrived, sometimes slowly and steadily, sometimes with a rush, but always making an unquestionable progress. It claims a population of twenty-five thousand now, and it looks as if the claim were well founded. It is the second city of Illinois in population, business, activity, and enterprise, and high promise for the future. I have small faith in their project of bridging the Mississippi, but they ought to know their own business. I spent a night at General Singleton's, one of the Farmer Princes of Illinois. He lives two miles from Quincy in a very large and elegantly furnished house, and does an immense farming business, and is very wealthy. He lights up his house with gas made on the premises, made from the refuse of petroleum by pressure. The apparatus could be stowed in a bathroom very conveniently. All you have to do is to pour a gallon or two of the petroleum into a brass cylinder, and give a crank a couple of turns, and the business is done for the next two days. He uses seventy burners in his house, and his gas bills are only a dollar and a quarter a week. I don't take any interest in prize bulls, astonishing jackasses, and prodigious crops, but I took a strong fancy to that gas apparatus. End of Section 79. This is Section 80 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 80, Alta, California, June 1867, Part 1. Alta, California, June 2, 1867. New York, April 19, 1867. The Mormons. Editors, Alta. The Mormons were holding a grand pow-wow at Kee-a-cuck, when I was there a week ago, the object of which was to devise ways and means of ousting Brigham Young from office and putting young Joe Smith in his place. Four hundred of the saints were present, from various places in Missouri and Illinois, and young Joe, a simple well-meaning and very dull preacher, was with them. They came to town dressed in homely jeans and bringing horns and symbols and trumpets and all the ungodly paraphernalia of their choir service as I used to hear it performed in the Mormon Church in St. Louis years ago. They are good, honest people, believe thoroughly in their religion, and are earnest in their hope of getting Joe Smith placed at the head of the whole church. They say they will accomplish it. They call Brigham a wicked impostor, and his new fangled Mormonism a swindle. They claim that polygamy is not a tenet of genuine Mormonism. It is strange how this lost tribe has kept its faith through so many years of sorrow and disaster. These are people who were scattered in tents for miles and miles along the roads through Iowa when the Mormons were driven out of Nauvoo with fire and sword twenty-five years ago. Their heavy misfortunes appealed so movingly to the kindly instincts of the Iowa people that they rescued them from starvation and gave them houses and food and employment, and gradually they became absorbed into the population and lost sight of, forgotten entirely in fact till this convention of young Joes called them out, and then from every unsuspected nook and cranny crept a Mormon, a Mormon who had for many a year been taken for a Baptist or a Methodist or some other kind of Christian. But young Joe had better look out for it has been a well-accredited rumour in Keokuk for two years or more that Brigham has set a price upon his head and keeps a destroying angel or so on his track all the time, ready to kill him when the opportunity offers, and they say that if these Mormons were to start to Salt Lake young Joe would never get out of sight of council bluffs alive. Bad hotel, but gifted porter. I stopped at the Hemming House in Keokuk. It used to be a good hotel, but that proves nothing. I used to be a good boy for that matter. Both of us have lost character of late years. The Hemming is not a good hotel. The Hemming lacks a very great deal of being a good hotel. Perdition is full of better hotels than the Hemming. It was late at night when I got there and I told the clerk I would like plenty of lights because I wanted to read an hour or two. When I reached number fifteen with the porter, we came along a dim hall that was clad in ancient carpeting, faded, worn out in many places, and patched with old scraps of oil cloth, a hall that sank under one's feet, creaked dismally to every footstep. He struck a light, two inches of sallow, sorrowful, consumptive tallow candle, that burned blue and sputtered, and got discouraged, and went out. The porter lit it again, and I asked if that was all the light the clerk sent. He said, Oh, no! I've got another one here! And he produced another couple of inches of tallow candle. I said, Light them both. I'll have to have one to see the other by. He did it, but the result was drearyer than darkness itself. He was a cheery, accommodating rascal. He said he would go somewheres and steal a lamp. I bet it and encouraged him in his criminal design. I heard the landlord get after him in the hall ten minutes afterward. Where are you going with that lamp? Fifteen wants it, sir. Fifteen! Why, he's got a double lot of candles. Does the man want to illuminate the house? Does he want to get up a torch-like procession? What is he up to, anyhow? He don't like them candles, says he wants a lamp. Why, what in the nation does— I never heard of such a thing. What on earth can he want with that lamp? Well, he only wants to read, that's what he says. Wants to read, does he? Ain't satisfied with a thousand candles, but has to have a lamp. I do wonder what the devil that fellow wants that lamp for. Take him another candle, and then if—but he wants the lamp. Says he'll burn the damned old house down if he don't get a lamp. A remark which I never made. I'd like to see him at it once. Well, you take it along, but I swear it beats my time, though, and see if you can't find out what in the very nation he wants with that lamp. And he went off growling to himself and still wondering and wondering over the unaccountable conduct of number fifteen. The lamp was a good one, but it revealed some disagreeable things. A bed in the suburbs of a desert of room. A bed that had hills and valleys in it, and you'd have to accommodate your body to the impression left in it by the man that slept there last, before you could lie comfortably. A carpet that had seen better days, a melancholy wash-stand in a remote corner, and a dejected pitcher on it, sorrowing over a broken nose. A looking-glass split across the center, which chopped your head off at the chin, and made you look like some dreadful unfinished monster or other, the paper peeling in shreds from the walls. I sighed and said, Oh, this is charming! And now don't you think you could get me something to read? The porter said, Oh, certainly! The old man's got dead loads of books! And he was gone before I could tell him what sort of literature I would rather have. And yet his countenance expressed the utmost confidence in his ability to execute the commission with credit to himself. The old man made a dissent on him. What are you going to do with that pile of books? Fifteen wants them, sir. Fifteen, is it? He'll want a warming pan next. He'll want a nurse. Take him everything there is in the house. Take him the barkeeper. Take him the baggage wagon. Take him a chamber maid. Confound me, I never saw anything like it. What do you say he wants with those books? Wants to read them like enough. It ain't likely he wants to eat them, I don't reckon. Wants to read them. Wants to read them this time of night for the infernal lunatic. Well, he can't have them. But he says he's more like bound to have them. He says he'll just go on a raring in a chagrin through this house and raise more hell. There's no telling what he won't do if he don't get them. Because he's drunk and crazy and desperate, and nothing will soothe him down but then cuss at books. I had not made any threats, and was not in the condition ascribed to me by the porter. Well, go on. But I will be around when he goes to raring and charging, and the first rare he makes, I'll make him rare out of the window. And then the old gentleman went off and growling as before. The genius of that porter was something wonderful. He put an armful of books on the bed and said, Good night, as confidently as if he knew perfectly well that those books were exactly my style of reading matter. And well, he might. His selection covered the whole range of legitimate literature. It comprised the great consummation by Reverend Dr. Cummings, theology, revised statutes of the State of Missouri Law, the complete horse-doctor medicine, the toilers of the sea by Victor Hugo, romance, the works of William Shakespeare, poetry. I shall never cease to admire the tact and the intelligence of that gifted porter. I move to the tepfer-house next day, a hotel which is well furnished, well conducted, and altogether a satisfactory place to live in. Marion City is hardly worth mentioning, but there are thousands in California who know the place well, and would like to learn its fate, maybe. I find it thus described among my notes. Half a dozen ruined frame-houses just ready to cave into the river, a ruined framed church with roof full of holes. It has grown weak in the knees from floods and neglect, and has settled clear down till its eaves rest upon the ground, just as if it had sunk. Nothing is left of it but the roof and the crazy leaning steeple. The poor thing looks like a melancholy hen, sitting on a hopeless nest of eggs. Marion City used to be an important shipping-point. The railroads killed it. Bound East again. We came east in an express train this time. It had fewer inconvenient features about it than that gravel train we went west in. It had one important one, though. We never could get a complete meal. We could eat a few minutes at a time, very often, but there was not a great deal of satisfaction about that. About the time you get fairly to eating, they yell, all aboard for Cleveland! And you have to start. Brown said he ate eleven dollars worth the first day, and then got into the sleeping-car, hungry. And there were the peddlers. I bought out the popcorn boy to get rid of him, because I was trying to compose a poem for a young lady's album. But he came right back with a stock of peanuts. I took a few and hurried him away, and he returned with some ice-cream candy. I do not like ice-cream candy and peanuts together, but I invested at once because a lucky rhyme had been born to me, and I wanted to set it down before it slipped me. Then the scoundrel came back with tobacco and cigars, and afterwards with oranges, imitation ivory baby-wistles, fig-paste and apples. And then he went away and was gone some time, and I was encouraged to hope the train had run over him. Such was not the case. He was only keeping his most malignant outrage for the last. He was getting his literature ready. And from that time onward that degraded youth did nothing but march from one car to the other, and afflict the passengers with specimen copies of the vilest blood-and-thunder romances on earth, Lionel Warbarten, or the Perjurer's Doom, Godfrey Delangley, or the Carnival of Blood, One-Eyed Bill, or the Desperato's Revenge, those were some of his mildest works, and on their backs were pictures of stabbing affrays and duels, and people shoving other people down precipices, and wretched woodcuts of women being rescued from terrific perils of all possible kinds. And they were always women who were so disgracefully homely that any right-minded man would take a placid satisfaction in seeing them suffer a sudden and violent death. But that peddler peddled those books right along for hours together, and I gave up my poem and devoted all my energies to driving him away and trying to say things that would make him unhappy. Such wonderful cities, as we saw, all the way through Ohio, New York, and New Jersey. It seemed to me that every fifteen minutes we passed through a Sacramento, and every hour and a half through a San Francisco, and verily I believe we did. And they looked so flourishing and so cheerful and handsomely built and so fiercifully busy. Ah, my boy, it is good to come to the States occasionally and see what a great country it is. Now I always thought that Cleveland and Columbus and Newark and Patterson were only villages, and so do thousands of other people. But they are great cities. And we passed through many a city like Sacramento that I had always imagined was little more than a blacksmith's shop and a post office. And we saw any number of towns of five thousand to eight thousand inhabitants that I honestly believe I had never heard of before. I was just in a condition of lively astonishment all through those three States. No wonder Englishmen make mistakes about America when we know so little about it ourselves. And speaking of Cleveland reminds me that I saw flaming posters there announcing Miss Lottas last night. A man who got on the cars there told me that Miss Lottas was the best actress that ever lived, and he didn't care ascent where the next one came from. Well, she is a California girl, and I hope she will make everybody think as that man did. I heard Lottas acting well spoken of in St. Louis. But isn't it funny that there are no drinking saloons in the depots? I have no recollection of seeing a solitary gin mill in a depot building from St. Louis to New York, a distance of nearly twelve hundred miles by the route I came. At Cincinnati there were two hundred and fifty thousand people moderately drunk, but that was an accident. At a great fire a large number of barrels of whiskey had been burst open and the stuff ran down to the river, got into an eddy, was pumped into the water works, and was distributed throughout the city in the form of weak whiskey punches. It was said that there was more water drank in Cincinnati that day than was ever drank there in one day before. It is likely. Personal George Butler has been working hard at Washington to get the consulship at Panama, but did not succeed because his uncle, General Butler, is so unpopular at the White House. George said he worked all possible purchases, but they failed. He proved himself a good Democrat at the White House, and a good radical at the Capitol, and became so expert in duplicity at last and so admirably plausible that he couldn't tell himself when he was lying and when he wasn't. Somebody told him to keep up the dodge of pretending to belong to both parties. It was first-rate Washington policy to carry water on both shoulders. George said as long as he only had to carry the water on his shoulders he could stand it, but he was too good a Democrat to carry any in his stomach. Good, wasn't it? He said that at first he tried to buy off all candidates for the consulship, but they came so fast he found it would break a mint to succeed in that way. Next he tried moral suasion on them, and that failed. And finally he concluded to whip all the applicants that came, but he soon found that there were not hours enough in the day or days enough in the year for that. So the office has gone into other hands, and I am not the only man who is sorry George did not get it. McGuire is here, and his japs are playing in Philadelphia and Washington. Hingston is making great preparations for their reception in London, and says they will draw $1,500 houses every night for a good many weeks. Webb, in a go, has fixed up a volume of my sketches, and he and the American News Company will publish it on Thursday the 25th of the present month. He has gotten it up in elegant style, and has done everything to suit his own taste, which is excellent. I have made no suggestions. He calls it The Celebrated Jumping Frog and Other Sketches by Mark Twain, edited by C. H. Webb. Its price is $1.50 a copy. It will have a truly gorgeous gold frog on the back of it, and that frog alone will be worth the money. I don't know but what it would be well to publish the frog and leave the book out. Mail your orders either to C. H. Webb or the American News Company, New York. As per Order of the Alta, just received by Telegraph, I have taken passage in the great pleasure excursion to Europe, the exposition, and the Holy Land, and will sail on the 8th of June. You could not have suited me better. The ship is the Quaker City, and she is being sumptuously fitted up. CHAPTER XIII one of the most praiseworthy institutions in New York, and one which must plead eloquently for it, when its wickedness shall call down the anger of the gods, is the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Its office is located on the corner of Twelth Street and Broadway, and its affairs are conducted by humane men who take a genuine interest in their work, and who have got worldly wealth enough to make it unnecessary for them to busy themselves about anything else. They have already put a potent check upon the brutality of Dremen and others to their horses, and in future will draw a still tighter reign upon such abuses, a late law of the legislature having quadrupled their powers and distinctly marked and specified them. You seldom see a horse beaten or otherwise cruelly used in New York now, so much has the Society made itself feared and respected. Its members promptly secure the arrest of guilty parties and relentlessly prosecute them. The new law gives the Society power to designate an adequate number of agents in every county, and these are appointed by the sheriff, but work independently of all other branches of the civil organization. They can make arrests of guilty persons on the spot without calling upon the regular police, and what is better, they can compel a man to stop abusing his horse, his dog, or any other animal at a moment's warning. The object of the Society, as its name implies, is to prevent cruelty to animals rather than punish men for being guilty of it. They are going to put up hydrants and water tanks at convenient distances all over the city for drinking places for men, horses, and dogs. Mr. Berg, the President of the Society, is a sort of enthusiast on the subject of cruelty to animals, or perhaps it would do him better justice to say he is full of honest earnestness upon the subject. Nothing that concerns the happiness of a brute is a trifling matter with him. No brute of whatever position or standing, however plebeian or insignificant, is beneath the range of his merciful interest. I have in my mind an example of his kindly solicitude for his dumb and helpless friends. He went to see the dramatic version of Griffith Gaunt at Wallach's Theatre. The next morning he entered the manager's office, and the following conversation took place. Mr. Berg, are you the manager of this theatre? Manager, I am, sir. What can I do for you? Mr. B., I am President of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and I have come to remonstrate against your treatment of that pig in the last act of the play last night. It is cruel and wrong, and I beg that you will leave the pig out in future. That is impossible! The pig is necessary to the play. But it is cruel, and you could alter the play in some way so as to leave the pig out. It cannot possibly be done, and besides I do not see anything wrong about it at all. What is it you complain of? Why, it is plain enough. They punch the pig with sticks, and chase him, and harass him, and contrive all manner of means to make him unhappy. The poor thing runs about in its distress, and tries to escape, but is met at every turn by its tormentors, and its hopes blighted. The pig does not understand it. If the pig understood it, it might be well enough, but the pig does not know it is a play, but takes it all as reality, and is frightened, and bewildered by the crowd of people and the glare of the lights, and yet no time has given it for reflection. No time has given it to arrive at a just appreciation of its circumstances. But its persecutors constantly assail it, and keep its mind in such a chaotic state that it can form no opinion upon any point in the case. And besides, the pig is cast in the play without its consent, is forced to conduct itself in a manner which cannot but be humiliating to it, and leaves that stage every night with a conviction that it would rather die than take a character in a theatrical performance again. Pigs are not fitted for the stage. They have no dramatic talent. All their inclinations are towards a retired and unastentatious career in the humblest walks of life, and manager. Say no more, sir. The pig is yours. I meant to have educated him for tragedy, and made him a blessing to mankind and an ornament to his species, but I am convinced now that I ought not to do this in the face of his marked opposition to the stage, and so I present him to you, who will treat him well. I am amply satisfied. I am the more willing to part with him since the play he performs in was taken off the stage last night, and I could not conveniently arrange a part for him in the one we shall run for the next three weeks, which is Richard III. Mr. Berg does everything in the behest of the society with the very best of intentions and the most honest motives. He makes mistakes, sometimes like all other men. He complained against a Jewish butcher and required his arrest for cutting the throat of an ox instead of knocking it on the head, said he was cruelly slow about terminating the animal's life. Of course, people smiled, because the religious law which compels Jewish butchers to slaughter with a consecrated knife is as old as the pyramids of Egypt, and Mr. Berg would have to overthrow the Pentateuch itself to accomplish his point. THE MIDNIGHT MISSION This is peculiarly New Yorkish. The midnight mission is composed of sincere and zealous religious men who, in a good work, are iron clad against jeers and insult, and they go about these streets at dead of night trying to rope in the prostitutes that infest the alleys and by-ways of this teeming hive of humanity and bring them back to the walk of virtue. Talk about courage. I had rather face the guns of fortress Monroe than brave the tongues of those foul-mouthed she-dragons. Such dauntless intrepidity smacks of the crusading days of coeur de Lyon and his mailed legions. The midnight mission flourishes and accomplishes actual results. It has reclaimed many girls and set them to earning honest livings, as servants in respectable families and in other capacities. It seems wonderful and very improbable, too, but it is true nevertheless. The office of the mission is in the same building as the cruelty society I have been talking about, and I visited both on the same day. I had some notion of joining the mission, but then I thought I had better continue to hold on to my position as a sandwich island missionary, and let these people worry along the best way they can. I wish them well, though. Their main depot is next door to one of the largest houses of ill-fame in the city, and so you can see they mean business. Singular. Considering the gigantic war the country has just passed through, I am constantly surprised at the utter absence of military beggars. I fully expected to find legless heroes begging their bread at every corner. I haven't seen the very first one so occupied yet, not one. I see a cripple with a soldier coat on occasionally, but always working for a living, never begging. We import our beggars chiefly, by some wonderful process or other. The soldiers of both armies have been quietly and mysteriously absorbed into civil life and can no more be distinguished from the children of peace. It is hard even for an American to understand this, but it is a toiling, thinking, determined nation this of ours, and little given to dreaming. It appreciates the fact that the moment one thing is ended it must be crossed out and dropped, and something else begun. Our Alexanders do not sit down and cry because there are no more worlds to conquer, but snatch off their coats and fall to shinning around and raising corn and cotton and improving sewing machines. A Harold's War correspondent told me he was in Richmond when the rebel forces were disbanded, and that a party of Confederate officers discarded their uniforms and got up a great express company within twenty-four hours afterward, and that three days only had transpired when he saw rebel colonels, majors, and captains connected with the new express enterprise, helping the porters handle heavy boxes and barrels, and with their coats off and sleeves rolled up, too. He said that sort of thing came easy enough in America and could occur in France, but that an English colonel could not come down to such a thing as that without many a heartache and many a twinge of wounded pride. I saw this harmless old humbug in Broadway yesterday. His knee britches are gone, his black velvet coat is seedy, his long white hair waves in the wind, all guiltless of powder or cue. His cocked hat has given place to a battered plug. From head to foot he is seedy and dilapidated, and his ancient self-complacency has departed out of his countenance, and age and weariness, and a sort of dreary sadness reigned there instead. Poor old fellow, it made me feel sorry when I contrasted his desolate figure of yesterday with the gay and gorgeous Washington II of San Francisco so picturesque in his faultless legs and his benign dignity. Old Uncle Freddie has outlived the day of his pride, outlived his usefulness, outlived all those whom he cared for, or who cared for him, and to-day he stands solitary and alone in the midst of this unpitying city, a helpless, hopeless, melancholy old man. The mossy marbles rest on the lips that he has pressed in their bloom, and the names he loved to hear have been carved for many a year on the tomb. He still goes about, in an absent sort of way, tracking up Tom McGuire and proclaiming, as formerly, that McGuire owes him forty thousand dollars. But I fear me that death will soothe away all his sorrows, and bring peace to his troubled spirit before many months shall pass away. Personal Webb has gotten up my jumping frog in excellent style, and it is selling rapidly. A lot of copies will go to San Francisco per this steamer. I hope my friends will all buy a few copies each, and more especially am I anxious to see the book in all the Sunday School libraries in the land. I don't know that it would instruct youth much, but it would make them laugh, anyway, and therefore no Sunday School library can be complete without the jumping frog. But candidly, now, joking aside, it is really a very handsome book, and you know yourself that it is a very readable one. I have sent a copy to Honolulu for my old friend Father Damon. Our ship, in which we are to sail for the Holy Land, is to be furnished with a battery of guns for firing salutes by order of the Secretary of the Navy, and Mr. Seward has addressed a letter to all foreign powers, requesting that every attention be shown General Sherman and his party. We have got a piano and a parlor organ in the cabin, and a snare-drummer, a bass-drummer, and a pfeifer, and passengers are instructed to fetch along all their old guitars, fiddles, hutes, and sheet music. If they have a choir in that ship, I mean to run it. I have got a handsome stateroom on the upper deck, and a regular brick for a roommate. We have got the pleasantest and jolliest party of passengers that ever sailed out of New York, and among them a good many young ladies and a couple of preachers, but we don't mind them. Young ladies are well enough anywhere, and preachers are always pleasant company when they are off-duty. We sail the 8th of June, positively. I am to lecture here at the Cooper Institute next Monday evening. This is Section 82 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This Lieber Vox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 82, Alta, California, June 1867, Part 3. Alta, California, June 16, 1867. New York, May 17, 1867. Jefferson Davis. It was just a lucky circumstance that I happen to be out late, night before last, else I might never have been permitted to see the chief of the late Confederacy in life. I was standing in front of the New York Hotel at midnight, or thereabouts, talking with a clerk of the establishment, when the Davis party arrived, and I got a tolerably good look at the man who has been raising such a dust in this country for years. He is tall and spare. That was all I could make of him, and then he disappeared. There was no crowd around, no torchlight processions, no music, no welcoming cannon, and better than all, no infuriated mob thirsting for blood and vengeance. The man, whose arrival in New York a year or two ago would have set the city wild with excitement from its center to its circumference, had ceased to rank as a sensation, and went to his hotel as unheralded and unobserved as any country merchant from the far west. He was a fallen chief. He was an extinguished son. We all know that. And yet it seems strange that even an unsuccessful man with such a limitless celebrity could drop in our midst in that way and go out as meekly as a far-thin candle. Yesterday it was the same. There were no lion-hunters gaping around the hotel doors inquiring in infamous grammar. Which is him! The autographers were not on hand. A few personal friends called on the ex-president. That was all. The newspapers gave column after column of songs of praise to the old worn-out, played-out, ragged and thread-beer sensation of eight months ago, a restory, the wretched foreign woman who has come over here and humbug the people into the notion that because sweet music is sweet music still, whether one can understand the words to it or not, a good story must be a good story also, even if the audience can't comprehend a word of it, and don't know what of the mischief the teller of it is driving at. The newspapers, I say, gave the usual acres of laudation to restory yesterday, and only a dozen meager lines to Jefferson Davis, head and heart and soul, of the mightiest rebellion of modern times, and with the fact patent that the one was an old sensation, and the other a brand new one. Verily some things are stranger than others, and man is but grass, and a very poor article of grass at that. I am glad I am not, Jefferson Davis, and I could show him a hundred good reasons why he ought to be glad he ain't me. Mr. Davis is going to Canada in a day or two. Billy Fall William C. Fall, well known in San Francisco, Marysville, and Carson, and whom we all call Billy for short, got into a quarrel with Harry Newton, an old citizen of Esmeralda, in the palmy days of that camp, in Broad Street, day before yesterday, and they fired several pistol shots at each other, but without wounding anybody but a telegraph operator, who had nothing to do with a matter, and was both surprised and mortified when he received a bullet in his ribs. Two eyewitnesses of the fracas told me that Fall and Newton met in a crowd, and commenced abusing each other, when Newton struck Fall with his fist, and immediately drew his pistol and fired. Fall followed suit, and they fired four or five shots between them in very quick succession, but damaged nobody but the telegraph operator, as above mentioned. The crowd was very large, it always is in Broad Street, but they took no interest in bombardments, and went away, and all went first, as near as they could come at it. Newton made his escape, and Fall tried to, but failed. He hid in the fourth story of a neighbouring building, but was ferreted out by the police, and imprisoned. All I can learn of the cause of the quarrel is that Fall wrote Newton a letter about a matter of business, and Newton returned no reply. His conduct exasperated Fall, and he sought the opportunity of expressing his opinion personally to Newton. To fire pistols at people, or even to carry such furniture about the streets, is a grave offence in New York, and both these men are in a very unenviable situation at present. THE MENKIN A newspaper friend has been showing me some photographs taken in Paris of Alexander Dumas, the novelist, and Ada Isaacs Menkin, the poor woman who has got so much money but not any clothes. In one of them Dumas is sitting down with his head thrown back, and great gross face rippled with smiles, and Ada is leaning on his shoulder, and just beaming on him like a moon, beaming on him with the expression of a moon that is no better than it ought to be. In another picture the eminent mulatto is in his shirt sleeves, and Ada has her head on his breast, and arms clasping his neck, and this time she is beaming up at him, beaming up at him in a way which is destructive of all moral principle. On the backs of these photographs is written in French to my dearest love, A. Dumas, and Menkin's note accompanying the pictures betrays that she is extravagantly well pleased with the photographer for publishing and selling thousands and thousands of these pictures to the Parisian public. She knows the value of keeping herself before the world in new and startling situations. Somehow I begin to regard Menkin's conduct as questionable occasionally. She has a passion for connecting herself with distinguished people, and then discarding them as soon as the world has grown ruckensiled to the novelty of it, and stopped talking about it. Heenan suited her caprice well enough for a while, and then he had to vacate. The same was Orpheus C. Kerr's experience, and the same was the Davenport Brothers, and the same was the experience of some less notorious favourites of hers. And now comes the great mulatto in the iron mask, and he is High Chief for the present. But can he hold his position against all comers? Would he stand any chance against a real live gorilla from the wilds of Africa? I don't know. Menkin is mighty shaky. Menkin can't resist. A splendid new astonisher. Menkin is a good-hearted, free-handed, charitable soul, a woman who does white deeds enough, kindly Christian deeds enough, every day of her life, to blot out a swarming multitude of sins, but heaven help us what desperate chances she takes on her reputation. The latest news is that Dumas is prosecuting the photographer for publishing those pictures. But maybe that is only a regular part of the sensation program. These photographs are to be reproduced here. A bit of history. I have attended social reunions of various kinds since I have been here, but one of the pleasantest was a club dinner with a party of Nantucket people. A good many good things were said during the evening, but the thing that struck me most was a bit of ancient Nantucket history dropped by one of the gentlemen. He said that in our old wars with Great Britain Nantucket was the object of a vast amount of solicitude on the part of both nations, more in fact than the importance of the place really justified. It contained a population made up pretty equally of English and Americans, and of course neither government could gracefully desert its own children, and yet the place was so situated that it would have required all the ships of one navy to besiege it, and all of the other to defend it. That wouldn't pay, of course. And so the two countries wisely agreed to just leave Nantucket clear out of the quarrel, remove all implements of war from it, disarm its citizens, and consider the place neutral ground entirely. So the middle-aged waxed old and died as neutrals, and the young grew up and flourished as neutrals. All were imbued with the neutral spirit. All respected the ancient compacts, and none desired to do anything to impair the time-honored hallowed good faith. Years swept by, and Nantucket felt within herself one day a yearning to do as other communities did, and have a fine squad of militia to show off on great days. They raised one. They armed it and equipped it. But when they came to frame the bylaws, the honest reverence for the spirit of neutrality which had lived in their bosom so long, cropped out in gravest phrase in their military constitution thus. Article 1. This company shall be called the Nantucket Guard. Article 2. It shall be kept at all times completely armed and equipped and ready for service in the field. Article 3. In case of war, it shall immediately disband. No member of the Nantucket Guard ever seemed to understand that those bylaws read wonderfully like a broad joke. They dropped that absurd, third article, as a matter of course, and nothing more than an earnest of their fidelity to the ancient good faith of their fathers. Another gentleman present said that Nantucket horses were celebrated for their general worthlessness, imbecility, and marvelous slowness. He said a citizen sold one to a cavalry officer during the war, and warranted him to be a good war-horse. The soldier came back afterwards in a towering passion and said he had been swindled. "'As how?' said the Nantucketer. "'Why, there's not a bit of go in him. And yet you warranted him as a good war-horse. Yes, I did, and by George he is a good war-horse. He'd sooner die than run!' Restory. Well, it is a marvel to me. It shows what determined newspapers and shrewd managers can do. Max Moretzak drew upon himself the hostility of several of the city newspapers, and among them that colossal power the New York Herald. The consequence is that those papers take a genuine pleasure in giving any manager a lift who is a rival of his. So Restory, who had been a great light in Europe, but had long ago begun to burn dimly and had almost flickered out laterally, is brought over here by Mr. Grow, and straightway the newspapers fall to work and set every man, woman, and child in the country crazy about her, jam her houses at three or four dollars ahead with people who don't know any more about what she is raving about in her unearthly Italian than if she were talking Chinese. People who gape and stare and wish to heaven they knew what she was up to, till an incomprehensible harangue winds up with a grand climax of sound and fury and foreign jabbering, and then the house comes down. And so heralded she goes abroad into the innocent interior, besieges Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Rochester, St. Louis, Memphis, goes everywhere and charges just what she pleases, and deceives the people into the belief that they have been blessed with a bliss beyond all price in being permitted to listen for three hours to a frenzied clattering of words that carried no possible meaning under the sun to their dazed and yet the same Americans flock to the Academy of Music here and show no appreciation of the able Japanese speeches of the manager of the wonderful jugglers. It is a shame. They understand that eloquent jab just as much as they understood Restory, and yet, if he were to play Queen Elizabeth, ten to one, they would complain of his incomprehensible language and even go so far as to say it was a radical defect. It beats me entirely. I believe the newspapers can do anything now. Without them Restory would not have made her board in America. With them she has made a fortune. She can command. She says no one who is not in full evening dress shall enter her sacred theater tonight, and she will be obeyed. The place will be crowded and not a soul except it be some newspaper man who knows his strength and scorns all laws of men's making will dare to present himself there in any unholy costume. It is curious. The newspapers could have set the city boiling and surging about Jefferson Davis, but they did not choose to do it, and so Jefferson Davis is powerless to make a stir on his own account. A thing he is very glad of, no doubt, for if any man longs for rest and quiet and oblivion it is he, we can all believe. REVEREND DOCTOR CHAPAN Now there is a preacher for you. There is a man who can just seize a congregation and hold on to it as many hours as he wants to. There is an invisible wire leading from every auditor's soul straight to a battery hidden away somewhere in that preacher's head, and down those wires travels in ceaseless flow the living spirit of words that might fall cold and empty and meaningless from other lips. I do not know that I ever looked upon faces so eager, so rapt, so fascinated as those I see in Chapan's church. I have wondered what it was that chained the congregation so, because I couldn't believe that every Tom, Dick, and Harry who came there had sense enough to appreciate his magnificent orations, but at last I have concluded that it must be Mr. Chapan's strong, deep, unmistakable earnestness. There is nothing like that to convince people. Nobody can have confidence in cold monotonous inanimate utterances, though they were teeming with truth and wisdom. Manor is everything in these cases. Matter is nothing. The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a man only tells them with all his might. Now there is Governor Nye, however I will not go into particulars. Mr. Chapan is large and rather stout, is about forty-five or thereabouts, is full of action and energy and has a noble voice and knows how to use it. His eloquence is genuine, free from show and unsubstantial flummery, meant for use, not ornament. I think one of his own illustrations of a point in his sermon last Sunday might not describe it ungracefully. He said, A king and an Italian knight were riding together upon a lonely road in the old crusading days, and the king could not refrain from remarking upon the rusty battered old sword the night wore, and calling attention to his own, which was brightly burnished and brilliant with precious stones. The knight said quietly, Mine is the more beautiful sire. The king smiled and drew his splendid weapon and flashed it in the sun. Behold, sir knight! Behold, sir king! The knight drew his, and in the self-same instant six hundred-minute arms sprang from an ambush and said, Command us to the death, my lord! I yield, thy sword is more beautiful, sir knight. There is no fuss and nonsense about Chapan's eloquence. It is the true steel. It is a power, and he knows well how to wield it. He has a large and handsome church at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Fifth Street, and a full congregation. He is a man of widespread and potent influence, and a recognized leader in all the progressive movements of the day. He never moves till his mind is made up for good and all, and then he moves like an avalanche. San Francisco Showmen. Make your mark in New York, and you are a made man. With a New York endorsement you may travel the country over, like Restory, without fear, but without it you are speculating upon a dangerous issue. Our old San Francisco minstrels have made their mark here most unquestionably. They located themselves boldly in Broadway, right opposite the Metropolitan Hotel, and their very first performance gave them a hold upon the popular favor which has never loosened its grip to this day. Every night of their lives they play to packed houses, every single seat full and dozens of people standing up. I have good reason to know, because I have been there pretty often, have always paid my way but once, and I had to buy a box the last time I went. They go straight ahead from month to month, like the black crook, and their receipts for the last twelve months, as furnished to the revenue officers, were only a fraction under $110,000. What do you think of that? The firm remains the same, Birch, Bacchus, Wombolt and Bernard. They have made an extraordinary success, and wisely they try to keep up with the spirit of the times and deserve a continuance of it. Tom McGuire's Japanese jugglers have taken New York by storm. They threw all the other popular sensations completely in the shade, shed a perfect gloom over them. It has to be a colossal sensation that is able to set everybody talking in New York, but the Japs did it, and I got precious tired of it for the first few days. No matter where I went, they were the first subject mentioned. If I stopped a moment in a hotel, I heard people talking about them. If I lunched in a Dutch restaurant, there was one constantly recurring phrase which I understood, and only one, Das Japs. In French restaurants it was Les Japs. In Irish restaurants it was Dim Japs. After church the sermon was discussed five minutes, and then the Japs for half an hour. McGuire plays them in the great Academy of Music and charges heavy prices, but the first night he turned hundreds away after finding accommodations for 3,000 spectators, and the seventh day at eight in the morning I saw fifty people strung down the pavement, post office fashion, waiting to secure seats, each in his regular turn when they knew the box office would not open till nine o'clock. The Japs are a prodigious success. The Warall girls have come back and taken the New York Theatre a sort of half-frog, half-tadpole affair which used to be a church and hasn't got entirely overlooking like a church yet. I am told the girls have fine houses, are doing well, and are as popular as they were at the Broadway. At the Broadway those were great days for them. They turned the heads of half the young men in the country, not in New York alone, but all around. Love-sick youths from far in the interior of Jersey, Connecticut, New York, and everywhere about came in on the trains and basked in the beauty of their idols every night, and went sleepless to work next day, driveled along through it, and fetched up in the Broadway again at night as far gone as ever. There was even an institution called the Warall Brigade, a great company of devoted youths and young men, who wore a handsome badge composed of red, white, and blue enamel, upon which was wrought the Cipher W, in fancy work of some kind. They were faithful attendants of the theatre every night, were a regularly organized military sort of institution with officers bearing such titles as Colonel, Captain, Lieutenant, etc., and were always suffering for a chance to destroy somebody by way of showing and proving their devotion. They were always on hand to assist the Waralls from their carriage before the evening's performance, and hand them back to it when the play was over. I have first-rate authority for all this, otherwise I should be inclined to doubt it. The Waralls must have done well, because I know of a fabulous offer that was made them, and they refused it. Also, that they had bought the dwelling two-hundred and nine-and-a-half Ninth Street. So one good authority said, and another good authority said they had only rented it. But in either case liberal money would have to be forthcoming, because I have been in the house often, last January, and know that to buy it or rent it either would break me easy enough. I saw little Miss Lotta yesterday. She is stopping at the Metropolitan with her father and mother. Her voice is very husky, and she says she cannot sing at all hardly, but hopes to be able to appear shortly again. She has an engagement at one of the city theatres. Lotta looks as young as ever, and just as pretty. I am talking pretty freely about our show people, and pretty strongly too, but I am telling only the truth. I so seldom speak of them at all that I don't like to mince matters when I do speak of their first-rate successes. I had a first-rate success myself at the Cooper Institute the other night, but I am not going to say much about that, because you can get it out of the newspapers. The Californians worked the thing up and got about 2,500 people into the house, which was well, because on my own merits I could not have accomplished it, perhaps. I lectured once in Brooklyn afterwards, and here again last night, and came out handsomely, notwithstanding I managed to get everything wrong and foremost and hopelessly tangled in the matter of announcing last night's performance. It will keep me jumping now to write up promised sketches and correspondence in time to sail on the 8th of June, and so I shall not lecture any more, except perhaps in one or two neighboring towns where engagements have already been made, and to which I can go and return to New York the same night. But I do want to say one thing. Governor Nye promised to introduce me to my audience at Cooper Institute, and I published it. But he was not at his hotel when the carriage went for him, has not been seen since, and has never sent a word of explanation. However it is a matter of no consequence. Introduced myself as well as he could have done it, that is, without straining himself.