 XXXIII. Mr. Chairman, and ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for the compliment which has just been tendered me, and to show my appreciation of it, I will not afflict you with many words. It is pleasant to celebrate in this peaceful way, upon this old mother's soil, the anniversary of an experiment which was born of war with this same land so long ago, and wrought out to a successful issue by the devotion of our ancestors. It has taken nearly a hundred years to bring the English and Americans into kindly and mutually appreciative relations, but I believe it has been accomplished at last. It was a great step when the two last misunderstandings were settled by arbitration instead of canon. It is another great step when England adopts our sewing machines without claiming the invention, as usual. It was another when they imported one of our sleeping-cars the other day. And it warmed my heart more than I can tell yesterday, when I witnessed the spectacle of an Englishman ordering an American sherry cobbler of his own free will and accord. And not only that, but with a great brain and level head reminding the barkeeper not to forget the strawberries. With a common origin, a common language, a common literature, a common religion, and common drinks, what is longer needful to the cementing of the two nations together in a permanent bond of brotherhood? This is an age of progress, and ours is a progressive land. A great and glorious land, too, a land which has developed a Washington, a Franklin, a William M. Tweed, a Longfellow, a Motley, a Jay Gould, a Samuel C. Pomeroy, a recent Congress which has never had its equal, in some respects, and a United States Army which conquered sixty Indians in eight months by tiring them out, which is much better than uncivilized slaughter, God knows. We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world, and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read, and I may observe that we have an insanity plea that would have saved Cain. I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world. I refer with effusion to our railway system which consents to let us live, though it might do the opposite, being our owners. It only destroyed three thousand and seventy lives last year by collisions, and twenty-seven thousand two hundred and sixty by running over heedless and unnecessary people at crossings. The companies seriously regretted the killing of these thirty thousand people, and went so far as to pay for some of them, voluntarily of course, for the meanest of us would not claim that we possess a court treacherous enough to enforce a law against a railway company. But thank heaven the railway companies are generally disposed to do the right and kindly thing without compulsion. I know of an instance which greatly touched me at the time. After an accident the company sent home the remains of a dear distant old relative of mine in a basket, with a remark, please state what figure you hold him at, and return the basket. Now there couldn't be anything friendlier than that. But I must not stand here and brag all night. However, you won't mind a body bragging a little about his country on the Fourth of July. It is a fair and legitimate time to fly the eagle. I will say only one more word of brag, and a hopeful one. It is this. We have a form of government which gives each man a fair chance and no favour. With us no individual is born with a right to look down upon his neighbour and hold him in contempt. Let such of us as our not-dukes find our consolation in that. And we may find hope for the future, in the fact that as unhappy as is the condition of our political morality today, England has risen up out of a far fowler, since the days when Charles I ennobled courtesans and all political place was a matter of bargain and sale. There is hope for us yet—Footnote 1. At least the above is the speech which I was going to make, but our minister, General Schenck, presided, and after the blessing got up and made a great long inconceivably dull harangue, and wound up by saying that inasmuch as speech-making did not seem to exhilarate the guests much, all further oratory would be dispensed with during the evening, and we could just sit and talk privately to our elbow-neighbours and have a good sociable time. It is known that in consequence of that remark forty-four perfected speeches died in the womb. The depression, the gloom, the solemnity that reigned over the banquet from that time forth, will be a lasting memory with many that were there. By that one thoughtless remark General Schenck lost forty-four of the best friends he had in England. More than one said that night, and this is the sort of person that is sent to represent us in a great sister empire—end of footnote one—and end of chapter thirty-three. I had heard so much about the celebrated fortune-teller Madame Blank that I went to see her yesterday. She has a dark complexion naturally, and this effect is heightened by artificial aids which cost her nothing. She wears curls, very black ones, and I had an impression that she gave their native attractiveness a lift with rancid butter. She wears a reddish-check handkerchief cast loosely around her neck, and it was plain that her other one is slow getting back from the wash. I presume she takes snuff. At any rate something resembling it had lodged among the hairs sprouting from her upper lip. I know she likes garlic. I knew that as soon as she sighed. She looked at me searchingly for nearly a minute with her black eyes, and then said, It is enough. Come!" She started down a very dark and dismal corridor, eyes stepping close after her. Suddenly she stopped and said that as the way was so crooked and dark perhaps she had better get a light. But it seemed un-gallant to allow a woman to put herself to so much trouble for me, and so I said, It is not worth while, Madame. If you will heave another sigh, I think I can follow it. So we got along all right. Arrived at her official and mysterious den, she asked me to tell her the date of my birth—the exact hour of that occurrence, and the color of my grandmother's hair. I answered as accurately as I could. Then she said, Young man, summon your fortitude. Do not tremble. I am about to reveal the past. Information concerning the future would be, in a general way, more silence. You have had much trouble. Some joy, some good fortune, some bad. Your great-grandfather was hanged. That is a silence. Hanged, sir, but it was not his fault. He could not help it. I am glad you do him justice. Ah, grieve rather that the jury did. He was hanged. His star crosses yours in the fourth division, fifth sphere. Consequently you will be hanged also. In view of this cheerful I must have silence. Yours was not, in the beginning, a criminal nature, but circumstances changed it. At the age of nine you stole sugar. At the age of fifteen you stole money. At twenty you stole horses. At twenty-five you committed arson. At thirty, hardened in crime, you became an editor. You are now a public lecturer. Worse things are in store for you. You will be sent to Congress. Next to the penitentiary. Finally happiness will come again. All will be well. You will be hanged. I was now in tears. It seemed hard enough to go to Congress, but to be hanged this was too sad, too dreadful. The woman seemed surprised at my grief. I told her the thoughts that were in my mind. Then she comforted me. Why, man, she said, hold up your head. You have nothing to grieve about. Listen. In this paragraph the fortune teller details the exact history of the Pike Brown assassination case in New Hampshire, from the succoring and saving of the stranger Pike by the Browns, to the subsequent hanging and coffining of that treacherous miscreant. She adds nothing, invents nothing, exaggerates nothing. See any New England paper for November, 1869. This Pike Brown case is selected merely as a type, to illustrate a custom that prevails, not in New Hampshire alone, but in every state in the Union. I mean the sentimental custom of visiting, petting, glorifying, and snuffling over murderers like this Pike from the day they enter the jail, under sentence of death, until they swing from the gallows. The following extract from the Temple Bar, 1866, reveals the fact that this custom is not confined to the United States. On December 31, 1841, a man named John Jones, a shoemaker, murdered his sweetheart, Mary Hallam, the daughter of a respectable labourer at Mansfield in the county of Nottingham. He was executed on March 23, 1842. He was a man of unsteady habits, and gave way to violent fits of passion. The girl declined his addresses, and he said, if he did not have her, no one else should. After he had inflicted the first wound, which was not immediately fatal, she begged for her life, but seeing him resolved, asked for time to pray. He said that he would pray for both, and completed the crime. The wounds were inflicted by a shoemaker's knife, and her throat was cut barbarously. After this he dropped on his knees some time, and prayed God to have mercy on two unfortunate lovers. He made no attempt to escape, and confessed the crime. After his imprisonment he behaved in a most decorous manner. He won upon the good opinion of the jail chaplain, and he was visited by the Bishop of Lincoln. It does not appear that he expressed any contrition for the crime, but seemed to pass away with triumphant certainty that he was going to rejoin his victim in heaven. He was visited by some pious and benevolent ladies of Nottingham, some of whom declared he was a child of God if ever there was one. One of the ladies sent him a white camellia to wear at his execution. "'You will live in New Hampshire. In your sharp need and distress the Brown family will sucker you, such of them as Pike the assassin left alive. They will be benefactors to you. When you shall have grown fat upon their bounty, and are grateful and happy, you will desire to make some modest return for these things, and so you will go to the house some night and brain the whole family with an axe. You will rob the dead bodies of your benefactors, and disperse your gains in riotous living among the rowdies and courtesans of Boston. Then you will be arrested, tried, condemned to be hanged, thrown into prison. Now is your happy day. You will be converted. You will be converted just as soon as every effort to compass pardon, commutation, or reprieve has failed. And then—why, then, every morning and every afternoon, the best and purest young ladies of the village will assemble in your cell and sing hymns. This will show that assassination is respectable. Then you will write a touching letter in which you will forgive all those recent browns. This will excite the public admiration. No public can withstand magnanimity. Next they will take you to the scaffold with great ecla, at the head of an imposing procession composed of clergymen, officials, citizens generally, and young ladies walking pensively to and bearing bouquets and immortals. You will mount the scaffold, and while the great concourse stand uncovered in your presence, you will read your sappy little speech, which the minister has written for you. And then, in the midst of a grand and impressive silence, they will swing you into per—paradise, my son. There will not be a dry eye on the ground. You will be a hero. Not a rough there, but will envy you. Not a rough there, but will resolve to emulate you. And next a great procession will follow you to the tomb. Will weep over your remains. The young ladies will sing again the hymns made dear by sweet associations connected with the jail, and, as a last tribute of affection, respect, and appreciation of your many sterling qualities, they will walk two and two around your beer, and strew wreaths of flowers on it. And, lo, you are canonized. Think of it, son. In great assassin, robber of the dead, drunken brawler among thieves and harlots in the slums of Boston one month, and the pet of the pure and innocent daughters of the land the next. A bloody and hateful devil, a bewept, bewailed, and sainted martyr all in a month. Fool! So noble a fortune, and yet you sit here grieving. No, madam, I said. You do me wrong, you do indeed. I am perfectly satisfied. I did not know before that my great-grandfather was hanged, but it is of no consequence. He has probably ceased to bother about it by this time, and I have not commenced yet. I confess, madam, that I do something in the way of editing and lecturing, but the other crimes you mention have escaped my memory, yet I must have committed them. You would not deceive a stranger. But let the past be as it was, and let the future be as it may. These are nothing. I have only cared for one thing. I have always felt that I should be hanged some day, and somehow the thought has annoyed me considerably. But if you can only assure me that I shall be hanged in New Hampshire, not a shadow of a doubt. Bless you, my benefactress. Excuse this embrace. You have removed a great load from my breast. To be hanged in New Hampshire is happiness. It leaves an honoured name behind a man, and introduces him at once into the best New Hampshire society in the other world. I then took leave of the fortune-teller. But seriously, is it well to glorify a murderous villain on the scaffold, as Pike was glorified in New Hampshire? Is it well to turn the penalty for a bloody crime into a reward? Is it just to do it? Is it safe? This country, during the last thirty or forty years, has produced some of the most remarkable cases of insanity of which there is any mention in history. For instance, there was the Baldwin case in Ohio twenty-two years ago. Baldwin, from his boyhood up, had been of a vindictive, malignant, quarrelsome nature. He put a boy's eye out once, and never was heard upon any occasion to utter a regret for it. He did many such things, but at last he did something that was serious. He called at a house just after dark one evening, knocked, and when the occupant came to the door, shot him dead, and then tried to escape, but was captured. Two days before, he had wantonly insulted a helpless cripple, and the man he afterward took swift vengeance upon, with an assassin bullet, had knocked him down. Such was the Baldwin case. The trial was long and exciting. The community was fearfully wrought up. Men said this spiteful, bad-hearted villain had caused grief enough in his time, and now he should satisfy the law. But they were mistaken. Baldwin was insane when he did the deed. They had not thought of that. By the argument of counsel it was shown that at half-past ten in the morning on the day of the murder, Baldwin became insane, and remained so for eleven hours and a half, exactly. This just covered the case comfortably, and he was acquitted. Thus, if an unthinking and excited community had been listened to instead of the arguments of counsel, a poor, crazy creature would have been held to a fearful responsibility for a mere freak of madness. Baldwin went clear. And although his relatives and friends were naturally incensed against the community for their injurious suspicions and remarks, they said, let it go for this time, and did not prosecute. The Baldwin's were very wealthy. This same Baldwin had momentary fits of insanity twice afterward, and on both occasions killed people he had grudges against. And on both these occasions the circumstances of the killing were so aggravated, and the murders so seemingly heartless and treacherous, that if Baldwin had not been insane he would have been hanged without the shadow of a doubt. As it was, it required all his political and family influence to get him clear in one of the cases, and cost him not less than ten thousand dollars to get clear in the other. One of these men he had notoriously been threatening to kill for twelve years. The poor creature happened, by the merest piece of ill fortune, to come along a dark alley at the very moment that Baldwin's insanity came upon him, and so he was shot in the back with a gun loaded with slugs. Take the case of Lynch Hackett of Pennsylvania. Twice in public he attacked a German butcher by the name of Bemis Feldner, with a cane, and both times Feldner whipped him with his fists. Hackett was a vain, wealthy, violent gentleman who held his blood and family in high esteem, and believed that a reverent respect was due to his great riches. He brooded over the shame of his chastisement for two weeks, and then, in a momentary fit of insanity, armed himself to the teeth, rode into town, waited a couple of hours until he saw Feldner coming down the street with his wife on his arm, and then, as the couple passed the doorway in which he had partially concealed himself, he drove a knife into Feldner's neck, killing him instantly. The widow caught the limp form and eased it to the earth. Both were drenched with blood. Hackett jocosely remarked to her that, as a professional butcher's recent wife, she could appreciate the artistic neatness of the job that left her in condition to marry again, in case she wanted to. This remark, and another, which he made to a friend, that his position in society made the killing of an obscure citizen simply an eccentricity instead of a crime, were shown to be evidences of insanity, and so Hackett escaped punishment. The jury were hardly inclined to accept these as proofs at first, in as much as the prisoner had never been insane before the murder, and under the tranquilizing effect of the butchering had immediately regained his right mind. But when the defense came to show that a third cousin of Hackett's wife's stepfather was insane, and not only insane, but had a nose the very counterpart of Hackett's, it was plain that insanity was hereditary in the family, and Hackett had come by it by legitimate inheritance. Of course the jury then acquitted him, but it was a merciful providence that Mrs. H's people had been afflicted as shown, else Hackett would certainly have been hanged. However, it is not possible to recount all the marvellous cases of insanity that have come under the public notice in the last thirty or forty years. There was the Durgan case in New Jersey three years ago. The servant girl, Bridget Durgan, at dead of night, invaded her mistress's bedroom and carved the lady literally to pieces with a knife. Then she dragged the body to the middle of the floor, and beat and banged it with chairs and such things. Next she opened the feather beds, and strewed the contents around, saturated everything with kerosene, and set fire to the general wreck. She now took up the young child of the murdered woman in her blood-smeared hands, and walked off through the snow, with no shoes on, to a neighbor's house a quarter of a mile off, and told a string of wild, incoherent stories about some men coming and setting fire to the house. And then she cried piteously, and without seeming to think there was anything suggestive about the blood upon her hands, her clothing, and the baby, volunteered the remark that she was afraid those men had murdered her mistress. Afterward, by her own confession and other testimony, it was proved that the mistress had always been kind to the girl, consequently there was no revenge in the murder, and it was also shown that the girl took nothing away from the burning house, not even her own shoes, and consequently robbery was not the motive. Now, the reader says, Here comes that same old plea of insanity again, but the reader has deceived himself this time. No such plea was offered in her defence. The judge sentenced her, nobody persecuted the governor with petitions for her pardon, and she was promptly hanged. There was that youth in Pennsylvania whose curious confession was published some years ago. It was simply a conglomeration of incoherent drivel from beginning to end, and so was his lengthy speech on the scaffold afterward. For a whole year he was haunted with a desire to disfigure a certain young woman so that no one would marry her. He did not love her himself and did not want to marry her, but he did not want anybody else to do it. He would not go anywhere with her, and yet was opposed to anybody else's escorting her. Upon one occasion he declined to go to a wedding with her, and when she got other company, lay in wait for the couple by the road, intending to make them go back or kill the escort. After spending sleepless nights over his ruling desire for a full year, he at last attempted its execution, that is, attempted to disfigure the young woman. It was a success. It was permanent. In trying to shoot her cheek, as she sat at the supper table with her parents and brothers and sisters, in such a manner as to mar its comeliness, one of his bullets wandered a little out of the course, and she dropped dead. To the very last moment of his life he bewailed the ill luck that made her move her face just at the critical moment, and so he died, apparently about half persuaded that somehow it was chiefly her own fault that she got killed. This idiot was hanged. The plea of insanity was not offered. Insanity certainly is on the increase in the world, and crime is dying out. There are no longer any murders, none worth mentioning at any rate. Formerly, if you killed a man, it was possible that you were insane, but now, if you, having friends and money, kill a man, it is evidence that you are a lunatic. In these days too, if a person of good family and high social standing steals anything, they call it kleptomania, and send him to the lunatic asylum. If a person of high standing squanders his fortune in dissipation and closes his career with strychnine or a bullet, temporary aberration is what was the trouble with him. Is not this insanity plea becoming rather common? Is it not so common that the reader confidently expects to see it offered in every criminal case that comes before the courts? And is it not so cheap and so common, and often so trivial, that the reader smiles in derision when the newspaper mentions it? And is it not curious to note how very often it wins a quittle for the prisoner? Of late years it does not seem possible for a man to so conduct himself before killing another man as not to be manifestly insane. If he talks about the stars, he is insane. If he appears nervous and uneasy an hour before the killing, he is insane. If he weeps over a great grief, his friends shake their heads and fear that he is not right. If an hour after the murder he seems ill at ease, preoccupied and excited, he is unquestionably insane. Really, what we want now is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity. There is where the true evil lies. End of Chapter 35 This is Chapter 36 of Sketches New and Old. This Liebervox recording is in the public domain. Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain Chapter 36 A Curious Dream, written about 1870, containing a moral. Night before last I had a singular dream. I seemed to be sitting on a doorstep, in no particular city perhaps, ruminating, and the time of night appeared to be about twelve or one o'clock. The weather was balmy and delicious. There was no human sound in the air, not even a footstep. There was no sound of any kind to emphasize the dead stillness, except the occasional hollow barking of a dog in the distance, and the fainter answer of a further dog. Presently up the street I heard a bony clack-clacking, and guessed it was the castanets of a serenading party. In a minute more, a tall skeleton, hooded, and half-clad in a tattered and moldy shroud, whose shreds were flapping about the ribby latticework of its person, swung by me with a stately stride and disappeared in the gray gloom of the starlight. It had a broken and worm-eaten coffin on its shoulder, and a bundle of something in its hand. I knew what the clack-clacking was, then. It was this party's joints working together, and his elbows knocking against his sides as he walked. I may say I was surprised. Before I could collect my thoughts and enter upon any speculations as to what this apparition might portend, I heard another one coming, for I recognized his clack-clack. He had two-thirds of a coffin on his shoulder, and some foot and head-boards under his arm. I mightily wanted to peer under his hood and speak to him, but when he turned and smiled upon me with his cavernous sockets and his projecting grin as he went by, I thought I would not detain him. He was hardly gone when I heard the clacking again, and another one issued from the shadowy half-light. This one was bending under a heavy gravestone and dragging a shabby coffin after him by a string. When he got to me he gave me a steady look for a moment or two, and then rounded to and backed up to me, saying, "'Ease this down for a fellow, will you?' I eased the gravestone down till it rested on the ground, and in doing so noticed that it bore the name of John Baxter Copman Hearst, with May 1839 as the date of his death. Deceased sat wearily down by me, and wiped his ass frontis with his major maxillary, chiefly from former habit I judged, for I could not see that he brought away any perspiration. "'It is too bad! too bad!' said he, drawing the remnant of the shroud about him and leaning his jaw pensively on his hand. Then he put his left foot up on his knee and fell to scratching his ankle-bone absently with a rusty nail which he got out of his coffin. What is too bad, friend? Oh! everything! everything! I almost wish I never had died. You surprise me. Why do you say this? Has anything gone wrong? What is the matter? Matter! Look at this shroud rags! Look at this gravestone all battered up! Look at that disgraceful old coffin! All a man's property going to ruin and destruction before his eyes, and ask him if anything is wrong! Fire and brimstone! Calm yourself! Calm yourself! I said. It is too bad. It is certainly too bad, but then I had not supposed that you would much mind such matters situated as you are. Well, my dear sir, I do mind them. My pride is hurt, and my comfort is impaired. Destroyed, I might say. I will state my case. I will put it to you in such a way that you can comprehend it, if you will let me," said the poor skeleton, tilting the hood of his shroud back as if he were clearing for action, and thus unconsciously giving himself a jaunty and festive air, very much at variance with the grave character of his position in life, so to speak, and in prominent contrast with his distressful mood. Proceed, said I. I reside in the shameful old graveyard a block or two above you here in this street. There, now I just expected that cartilage would let go. Third rib from the bottom, friend, hitch the end of it to my spine with a string if you have got such a thing about you, though a bit of silver wire is a deal pleasanter, and more durable and becoming if one keeps it polished. To think of shredding out and going to pieces in this way just on account of the indifference and neglect of one's posterity, and the poor ghost grated his teeth in a way that gave me a wrench and a shiver, for the effect is mightily increased by the absence of muffling flesh and cuticle. I reside in that old graveyard and have for these thirty years, and I tell you things are changed since I first laid this old tired frame there, and turned over, and stretched out for a long sleep with a delicious sense upon me of being done with bother and grief and anxiety and doubt and fear, forever and ever, and listening with comfortable and increasing satisfaction to the sexton's work, from the startling clatter of his first spadeful on my coffin till it dulled away to the faint patting that shaped the roof of my new home. Delicious! My! I wish you could try it tonight! And out of my reverie deceased fetched me a rattling slap with a bony hand. Yes, sir, thirty years ago I laid me down there and was happy, for it was out in the country then, out in the breezy, flowery, grand old woods, and the lazy winds gossiped with the leaves, and the squirrels capered over us and around us, and the creeping things visited us, and the birds filled the tranquil solitude with music. Ah, it was worth ten years of a man's life to be dead then. Everything was pleasant. I was in a good neighborhood, for all the dead people that lived near me belonged to the best families in the city. Our posterity appeared to think the world of us. They kept our graves in the very best condition. The fences were always in faultless repair. Headboards were kept painted or whitewashed, and were replaced with new ones as soon as they began to look rusty or decayed. Monuments were kept upright, railings intact and bright. The rose bushes and shrubbery trimmed, trained, and free from blemish. The walks clean and smooth and graveled. But that day is gone by. Our descendants have forgotten us. My grandson lives in a stately house built with money made by these old hands of mine, and I sleep in a neglected grave with invading vermin that gnaw my shroud to build them nests with all. I and friends that lie with me founded and secured the prosperity of this fine city, and the stately bantling of our loves leaves us to rot in a dilapidated cemetery which neighbors curse and strangers scoff at. See the difference between the old time and this. For instance, our graves are all caved in now. Our headboards have rotted away and tumbled down. Our railings reel this way and that, with one foot in the air, after a fashion of unseemly levity. Our monuments lean wearily, and our gravestones bow their heads discouraged. There be no adornments any more, no roses, nor shrubs, nor graveled walks, nor anything that is a comfort to the eye, and even the paintless old bored fence that did make a show of holding us sacred from companionship with beasts and the defilement of heedless feet has tottered till it overhangs the street, and only advertises the presence of our dismal resting place, and invites yet more derision to it. And now we cannot hide our poverty and tatters in the friendly woods, for the city has stretched its withering arms abroad and taken us in, and all that remains of the cheer of our old home is the cluster of legubrious forest trees that stand, bored and weary of a city life, with their feet in our coffins, looking into the hazy distance and wishing they were there. I tell you, it is disgraceful. You begin to comprehend. You begin to see how it is. While our descendants are living sumptuously on our money right around us in the city, we have to fight hard to keep sculling bones together. Bless you, there isn't a grave in our cemetery that doesn't leak, not one. Every time it rains in the night, we have to climb out and roost in the trees, and sometimes we are awakened subtly by the chilly water trickling down the back of our necks. Then I tell you there is a general heaving up of old graves and kicking over of old monuments, and scampering of old skeletons for the trees. Bless me, if you had gone along there some such nights after twelve, you might have seen as many as fifteen of us roosting on one limb, with our joints rattling drearily, and the wind wheezing through our ribs. Many a time we have perched there for three or four dreary hours. And then come down, stiff and chilled through, and drowsy, and borrowed each other's skulls to bail out our graves with. If you will glance up in my mouth now as I tilt my head back, you can see that my headpiece is half full of old dry sediment. How top-heavy and stupid it makes me sometimes. Yes, sir, many a time if you had happened to come along just before the dawn, you'd have caught us bailing out the graves and hanging our shrouds on the fence to dry. Why, I had an elegant shroud stolen from there one morning. Think a party by the name of Smith took it, that resides in a plebeian graveyard over yonder. I think so, because the first time I ever saw him he hadn't anything on but a check-shirt, and the last time I saw him, which was at a social gathering in the new cemetery, he was the best dressed corpse in the company, and it is a significant fact that he left when he saw me, and presently an old woman from here missed her coffin. She generally took it with her when she went anywhere, because she was liable to take cold, and bring on these spasmodic rheumatism that originally killed her if she exposed herself to the night air-match. She was named Hodgkis, Anna Matilda Hodgkis. You might know her. She has two upper-front teeth, is tall, but a good deal inclined to stoop, one rib on the left side gone, has one shred of rusty hair hanging from the left side of her head, and one little tuft just above and a little forward of her right ear, as her under jaw wired on one side where it had worked loose, small bone of left forearm gone, lost in a fight, has a kind of swagger in her gait, and a gallous way of going with her arms akimbo, and her nostrils in the air, has been pretty free and easy, and is all damaged and battered up till she looks like a queen's wear crate in ruins. Maybe you've met her! God forbid! I involuntarily ejaculated, for somehow I was not looking for that form of question, and it caught me a little off my guard. But I hastened to make amends for my rudeness, and say, I simply meant I had not had the honour, for I would not deliberately speak discourteously of a friend of yours. You were saying that you were robbed, and it was a shame, too, but it appears, by what is left of the shroud you have on, that it was a costly one in its day. How did a most ghastly expression began to develop among the decayed features and shriveled integuments of my guest's face, and I was beginning to grow uneasy and distressed when he told me he was only working up a deep sly smile with a wink in it, to suggest that about the time he acquired his present garment, a ghost in a neighbouring cemetery missed one. This reassured me, but I begged him to confine himself to speech, thenceforth, because his facial expression was uncertain. Even with the most elaborate care it was liable to misfire. Smiling should especially be avoided, what he might honestly consider a shining success was likely to strike me in a very different light. I said I'd like to see a skeleton cheerful, even decorously playful, but I did not think smiling was a skeleton's best hold. Yes, friend, said the poor skeleton, the facts are just as I have given them to you. Two of these old graveyards, the one that I resided in, and one further along, have been deliberately neglected by our descendants of to-day, until there is no occupying them any longer. Aside from the osteological discomfort of it, and that is no light matter this rainy weather, the present state of things is ruinous to property. We have got to move, or be content to see our effects wasted away and utterly destroyed. Now, you will hardly believe it, but it is true, nevertheless, that there isn't a single coffin in good repair among all my acquaintance. Now that is an absolute fact. I do not refer to low people who come in a pine box mounted on an express wagon, but I am talking about your high-toned, silver-mounted burial case, your monumental sort that travel under black plumes at the head of a procession and have choice of cemetery lots. I mean folks like the Jarvis's, and the Bledsoes, and Burlings and such. They are all about ruined. The most substantial people in our set they were, and now look at them, utterly used up and poverty-stricken. One of the Bledsoes actually traded his monument to a late barkeeper for some fresh shavings to put under his head. I tell you, it speaks volumes, for there is nothing a corpse takes so much pride in as his monument. He loves to read the inscription. He comes after a while to believe what it says himself, and then you may see him sitting on the fence night after night enjoying it. Epitaphs are cheap, and they do a poor chap a world of good after he is dead, especially if he had hard luck while he was alive. I wish they were used more. Now I don't complain, but, confidentially, I do think it was a little shabby in my descendants to give me nothing but this old slab of a gravestone, and all the more that there isn't a compliment on it. It used to have gone to his just reward on it, and I was proud when I first saw it, but by and by I noticed that whenever an old friend of mine came along he would hook his chin on the railing and pull a long face and read along down till he came to that, and then he would chuckle to himself and walk off, looking satisfied and comfortable. So I scratched it off to get rid of those fools. But a dead man always takes a deal of pride in his monument. Yonder goes half a dozen of the Jarvis's now, with a family monument along, and Smithers and some hired specters went by with his a while ago. Hello, Higgins! Goodbye, old friend! That's Meredith Higgins, died in forty-four, belongs to our set in the cemetery, fine old family. Great grandmother was an engine. I am on the most familiar terms with him. He didn't hear me was the reason he didn't answer me. And I am sorry, too, because I would have liked to introduce you. You would admire him. He is the most disjointed, sway-backed, and generally distorted old skeleton you ever saw, but he is full of fun. When he laughs it sounds like rasping two stones together, and he always starts it off with a cheery screech like raking a nail across a window-pane. Hey, Jones! That is old Columbus Jones. Shroud cost four hundred dollars. Entire Trusso, including Monument 2700. This was in the spring of twenty-six. It was enormous style for those days. Dead people came all the way from the Alleghenies to see his things. The party that occupied the grave next to mine remembers it well. Now, do you see that individual going along with a piece of a headboard under his arm, one leg bone below his knee gone, and not a thing in the world on? That is Barstow Dalhousie, and next to Columbus Jones, he was the most sumptuously outfitted person that ever entered our cemetery. We are all leaving. We cannot tolerate the treatment we are receiving at the hands of our descendants. They open new cemeteries, but they leave us to our ignominy. They mend the streets, but they never mend anything that is about us or belongs to us. Look at that coffin of mine! Yet I tell you in its day it was a piece of furniture that would have attracted attention in any drawing-room in this city. You may have it if you want it. I can't afford to repair it. Put a new bottom in her, and part of a new top, and a bit of fresh lining along the left side, and you'll find her about as comfortable as any receptacle of her species you ever tried. No thanks. No, don't mention it. You have been civil to me, and I would give you all the property I have got before I would seem ungrateful. Now, this winding sheet is a kind of a sweet thing in its way, if you would like to—no? Well, just as you say, but I wish to be fair and liberal. There's nothing mean about me. Goodbye, friend. I must be going. I may have a good way to go to-night. Don't know. I only know one thing for certain, and that is that I am on the emigrant trail now, and I'll never sleep in that crazy old cemetery again. I will travel till I find respectable quarters, if I have to hoof it to New Jersey. All the boys are going. It was decided in public conclave last night to emigrate, and by the time the sun rises there won't be a bone left in our old habitations. Such cemeteries may suit my surviving friends, but they do not suit the remains that have the honour to make these remarks. My opinion is the general opinion. If you doubt it, go and see how the departing ghosts upset things before they started. They were almost riotous in their demonstrations of distaste. Hello, here are some of the blood-soes, and if you will give me a lift with this tombstone I guess I will join company and jog along with them. Mighty respectable old family the blood-soes, and used to always come out in six-horse herces, and all that sort of thing fifty years ago when I walked these streets in daylight. Goodbye, friend! And with his gravestone on his shoulder he joined the grisly procession, dragging his damaged coffin after him, for notwithstanding he pressed it upon me so earnestly, I utterly refused his hospitality. I suppose that for as much as two hours these sad outcasts went clacking by laden with their dismal effects, and all that time I sat pitying them. One or two of the youngest and least dilapidated among them inquired about midnight trains on the railways, but the rest seemed unacquainted with that mode of travel, and merely asked about common public roads to various towns and cities, some of which are not on the map now, and vanished from it and from the earth as much as thirty years ago, and some few of them never had existed anywhere but on maps, and private ones in real estate agencies at that. And they asked about the condition of the cemeteries in these towns and cities, and about the reputation the citizens bore as to reverence for the dead. This whole matter interested me deeply, and likewise compelled my sympathy for these homeless ones. And it all seeming real, and I not knowing it was a dream, I mentioned to one shrouded wanderer an idea that had entered my head to publish an account of this curious and very sorrowful exodus, but said also that I could not describe it truthfully, and just as it occurred, without seeming to trifle with a grave subject, and exhibit an irreverence for the dead, that would shock and distress their surviving friends. But this bland and stately remnant of a former citizen leaned him far over my gate and whispered in my ear, and said, Do not let that disturb you. The community that can stand such graveyards as those we are emigrating from can stand anything a body can say about the neglected and forsaken dead that lie in them. At that very moment a cock crowed, and the weird procession vanished and left not a shred or a bone behind. I awoke, and found myself lying with my head out of the bed and sagging downward considerably, a position favourable to dreaming dreams with morals in them, maybe, but not poetry. Note, the reader is assured that if the cemeteries in his town are kept in good order, this dream is not levelled at his town at all, but is levelled particularly and venomously at the next town. End of Chapter 36 This is Chapter 37 of Sketches New and Old. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain, Chapter 37, A True Story. Repeted word for word as I heard it. Written about 1876. It was summer time, and twilight. We were sitting on the porch of the farmhouse, on the summit of the hill, and Aunt Rachel was sitting respectfully below our level, on the steps, for she was our servant and colored. She was of mighty frame and stature. She was sixty years old, but her eye was undimmed and her strength unabated. She was a cheerful, hearty soul, and it was no more trouble for her to laugh than it is for a bird to sing. She was under fire now, as usual, when the day was done, that is to say, she was being chaffed without mercy and was enjoying it. She would let off peel after peel of laughter, and then sit with her face in her hands and shake with throes of enjoyment which she could no longer get breath enough to express. At such a moment as this a thought occurred to me, and I said, Aunt Rachel, how is it that you've lived sixty years and never had any trouble? She stopped quaking. She paused, and there was a moment of silence. She turned her face over her shoulder toward me and said, without even a smile in her voice, Mr. C., is you, in honest— Surprised me a good deal, and it sobered my manner and my speech, too. I said, Why, I thought, that is, I meant, why, you can't have had any trouble. I've never heard you sigh and never seen your eye when there wasn't a laugh in it. She faced fairly around now, and was full of earnestness. Has I had any trouble? Mr. C., I's going to tell you, then I'll leave it to you. I was born down amongst the slaves, and I was all about slavery, because I've been one in myself. Well, sir, my old man, that's my husband, he was love and kind to me, just as kind as yours to your own wife. And we had children, seven children, and we loved them children, just the same as you love your children. And they was black, but the Lord can't make children so black, but when they mothered loves them and wouldn't give them up—no, not for anything that's in this whole world. Well, sir, I was raised in old Virginia, but in my mother she was raised in Maryland, and my soul's she was terrible when she'd get started. My land, but she'd make the fur fly. When she'd get into them tantrums, she always had one word that she said. She'd straighten herself up, and put her fists in her hips, and say, I want you to understand that I want born in the mash to be fooled by trash, as one of the old Blue Hen's chickens I is. Because, you see, that's what folks that's born in Maryland calls themselves, and they's proud of it. Well, that was her word. I don't ever forget it, because she said it so much, and because she said it one day when my little Henry tore his wrist awful, and most busted his head, right up at the top of his forehead, and the niggas didn't fly round fast enough to tend to him. And when they talk back at her, she up, and she says, Look I hear! She says, I want you niggas to understand that I want born in the mash to be fooled by trash, as one of the old Blue Hen's chickens I is. And then she clared our kitchen and bandaged up to child herself. So I says that word too, when I's riled. Well, bye-bye, my old mistress says she's broke, and she got to sell all the niggas on the place. And when I hear that they're going to sell us all off at auction in Richmond, oh, dig good, gracious, I know what that mean! Aunt Rachel had gradually risen while she warmed to her subject, and now she towered above us, black against the stars. They put chains on us, and put us on a stand as high as this porch, twenty-foot high, and all the people stood round, crowds and crowds, and they'd come up down, and look at us all around, and squeeze our arm, and make us get up, and walk, and then say, This one too old, or this one lame, or this one don't mount too much. And they sold my old man, and took him away, and they began to sell my children, and take them away, and I began to cry, and the man say, Shut up, you damn blubbering, and he hit me on the mouth with his hand, and when the last one was gone, but my little Henry, I grab him close up to my breast, so, and I rise up and says, You shan't take him away, I says, I'll kill the man to touch his hand, I says, but my little Henry whispered and say, I'm going to run away, and then I work and buy your freedom. Oh, blessed child, he all was so good, but they got him, they got him, the man did, but I took and tear the clothes most off of him, and beat him over the head with my chain, and they give it to me, too, but I didn't mind that. Well, that was my old man gone, and all my children, all my seven children, and six of them, I ain't set eyes on again to this day, and that's twenty-two years ago, last Easter, the man that bought me Blong and Newburn, and he took me there. Well, by and by the years roll on, and the war come. My master, he was a confidant colonel, and I was his family cooked, so when the unions took that town, they all run away and left me all by myself with the other niggers, and that monstrous big house. So the big union officers move in there, and they ask me, Would I cook for them? Lord bless you, says I, that what I is for. They want no small fry officers, mind you. They was the biggest they is, and the way they made them soldiers mosey round. The general, he told me to boss that kitchen, and he say, If anybody come meddling with you, you just make them walk chalk, don't you be feared. And he say, Use among friends now. Well, I thinks to myself, if my little Henry ever got a chance to run away, he'd make to the north, of course. So one day, I comes in there, where the big officers was, in the parlor, and I drops a kerchie, so, and I up and told him about my Henry. They are listening to my troubles, just the same as if I was white folks, and I says, What I come for is because if he got away and got up north, where you, Jem and comes from, you might have seen him, maybe, and could tell me so I could find him again. He was very little, and he had a scour on his left wrist, and at the top of his forehead. Then they look mournful, and the general say, How long since you loosed him? And I say, Thirteen year? Then the general say, He wouldn't be little no more now, he's a man. I never thought of that before. He was only that little fellow to me yet. I never thought about him growing up and being big. But I see it then. None of the gentlemen had run across to him, so they couldn't do nothing for me. But all that time, though I didn't know it, my Henry was run off to the North, years and years, and he was a barber, too, and worked for himself. And by and by, when the wall come, he ups and he says, I's done barbering, and he says, I's going to find my old mammy, less than she's dead. So he sold out and went to where they was recruiting, and hired himself out to the Colonel for his servant, and then he went all through the battles everywhere, hunting for his old mammy. Yes, indeed, he'd hired to first one officer and then another, till he ransacked the whole south. But you see, I didn't know nothing about this. How was I going to know it? Well, one night we had a big soldier ball. The soldier's dad, Newburn, was always having balls and carrying on. They had him in my kitchen heaps of times, because it was so big. Mind you, I was down on such doings, because my place was with the officers, and it rasped me to have them common soldiers cavorting round in my kitchen like that. But I always stood around and kept things straight, I did, and sometimes they'd get my dander up, and then I'd make them clear that kitchen. Mind I tell you, well, one night it was a Friday night, there comes a whole platoon from a nigger regiment that was on guard at the house. The house was headquarters, you know, and then I was just a violin. Mad? I was just a boomin', and I swelled round and swelled round. I was just a itchin' for him to do something for to start me. And they was a waltzin' and a dancin', my butt they was havin' a time, and I just a swellin' and a swellin' up. But soon long comes such a spruce young nigger, sailin' down the room with a yaller of wench round waste. And round and round and round they went enough to make him body drunk to look at him, and when they got a-bressin' me, they went to a canna, balancein' round first on one leg and then on t'other, and smilin' at my big red turbin' and makin' fun, and I upsin' says, Get along with you, rubbage! The young man's face canna changed all of a sudden, for about a second, but then he went to smilin' again, same as he was before. Well, by this time in comes some niggers that played music and belonged to the band, and they never could get along without puttin' on airs, and the very first air they put on that night, I lit into them. They laughed, and that made me worse. The rest of the niggers got to laughin', and then my soul alive, but I was hot. My eye was just a-blazin', I just straightin' myself up so, just as I is now, plum to the ceiling most. And I digs my fist in my hips, and I says, Look I hear ya! I says, I want you niggers to understand that I want bone in the mash to be full by trash! I is one of the old blue hen's chickens I is, and then I see that young man standin' and starein' and stiff, lookin' kinda up at the ceiling like he forgot something, and couldn't remember it no more. Well, I just march on them niggers, so lookin' like a general, and they just cave away before me, and out at the door. And as this young man are goin' out, I hear him say to the other nigger, Jim, he says, You go long and tell the captain I'll be on hand by eight o'clock in the mornin', there's something on my mind. He says, I don't sleep no more this night. You go long, he says, and leave me by my own self. This was about one o'clock in the mornin', well, about seven. I was up and on hand, gettin' the office's breakfast. I was as stoopin' down by the stove, just so, same as if your foot was the stove, and I'd open the stove door with my right hand, so, pushin' it back, just as I push as your foot, and I'd just got the pan all hot biscuits in my hand, and it was about to raise up when I see a black face come round under mine, and the eyes are lookin' up into mine, just as eyes are lookin' up close under your face now, and I just stopped right there, and never budged, just gazed and gazed so, and the pan began to tremble, and all of a sudden I knowed. The pan dropped on the floor, and I grabbed his left hand and shoved back his sleeve, just so, as I'd doin' to you, and then I goes for his forehead and pushes here back so, and boy, I says, if you ain't my Henry, what is you doin' with this welt on your wrist, and that scar on your forehead, the Lord God of Heaven, be praised, I got my own again. Oh no, Mr. C., I ain't had no trouble, and no joy. END OF CHAPTER XXVII I do not wish to write of the personal habits of these strange creatures solely, but also of certain curious details of various kinds concerning them, which, belonging only to their private life, have never crept into print. Knowing the twins intimately, I feel that I am peculiarly well-qualified for the task I have taken upon myself. The Siamese twins are naturally tender and affectionate in disposition, and have clung to each other with singular fidelity throughout a long and eventful life. Even as children they were inseparable companions, and it was noticed that they always seemed to prefer each other's society to that of any other persons. They nearly always played together, and so accustomed was their mother to this peculiarity that, whenever both of them chanced to be lost, she usually only hunted for one of them. Satisfied that, when she found that one, she would find his brother somewhere in the immediate neighborhood, and yet these creatures were ignorant and unlettered, barbarians themselves, and the offspring of barbarians who knew not the light of philosophy and science. What a withering rebuke is this to our boasted civilization with its quarrelings, its wranglings, and its separations of brothers. As men the twins have not always lived in perfect accord, but still there has always been a bond between them which made them unwilling to go away from each other and dwell apart. They have even occupied the same house as a general thing, and it is believed that they have never failed to even sleep together on any night since they were born. How surely do the habits of a lifetime become second nature to us? The twins always go to bed at the same time, but Chang usually gets up about an hour before his brother. By an understanding between themselves, Chang does all the indoor work, and Aang runs all the errands. This is because Aang likes to go out. Chang's habits are sedentary. However, Chang always goes along. Aang is a Baptist, but Chang is a Roman Catholic. Still to please his brother, Chang consented to be baptized at the same time that Aang was, on condition that it should not count. During the war they were strong partisans, and both fought gallantly all through the great struggle. Aang on the Union side, and Chang on the Confederate. They took each other prisoners at Seven Oaks, but the proofs of capture were so evenly balanced in favour of each that a general army court had to be assembled to determine which one was properly the captor and which the captive. The jury was unable to agree for a long time, but the vexed question was finally decided by agreeing to consider them both prisoners and then exchanging them. At one time Chang was convicted of disobedience of orders, and sentenced to ten days in the guard-house. But Aang, in spite of all arguments, felt obliged to share his imprisonment, notwithstanding he himself was entirely innocent. And so to save the blameless brother from suffering they had to discharge both from custody, the just reward of faithfulness. Upon one occasion the brothers fell out about something, and Chang knocked Aang down, and then tripped and fell on him, whereupon both clinched and began to beat and gouge each other without mercy. The bystanders interfered and tried to separate them, but they could not do it, and so allowed them to fight it out. In the end both were disabled and were carried to the hospital on one and the same shutter. Their ancient habit of going always together had its drawbacks when they reached man's estate, and entered upon the luxury of courting. Both fell in love with the same girl. Each tried to steal clandestine interviews with her, but at the critical moment the other would always turn up. By and by Aang saw, with distraction, that Chang had won the girl's affections, and from that day forth he had to bear with the agony of being a witness to all their dainty billing and cooing. But with a magnanimity that did him infinite credit, he succumbed to his fate and gave countenance and encouragement to a state of things that bad fear to sunder his generous heartstrings. He sat from seven every evening until two in the morning listening to the fond foolishness of the two lovers, and to the concussions of hundreds of squandered kisses for the privilege of sharing only one of which he would have given his right hand. But he sat patiently and waited, and gaped, and yawned, and stretched, and longed for two o'clock to come. And he took long walks with the lovers on moonlight evenings, sometimes traversing ten miles, not withstanding he was usually suffering from rheumatism. He is an inveterate smoker, but he could not smoke on these occasions, because the young lady was painfully sensitive to the smell of tobacco. Aang cordially wanted them married and done with it. But although Chang often asked the momentous question, the young lady could not gather sufficient courage to answer it while Aang was by. However, on one occasion, after having walked some sixteen miles, and sat up till nearly daylight, Aang dropped asleep, from sheer exhaustion, and then the question was asked and answered. The lovers were married. All acquainted with the circumstance applauded the noble brother-in-law. His unwavering faithfulness was the theme of every tongue. He had stayed by them all through their long and arduous courtship. And when at last they were married, he lifted his hands above their heads, and said with impressive unfunction, Bless ye, my children, I will never desert ye. And he kept his word. Fidelity like this is all too rare in this cold world. By and by Aang fell in love with his sister-in-law's sister, and married her. And since that day they have all lived together, night and day, in an exceeding sociability which is touching and beautiful to behold, and is a scathing rebuke to our boasted civilization. The sympathy existing between these two brothers is so close and so refined that the feelings, the impulses, the emotions of the one are instantly experienced by the other. When one is sick, the other is sick. When one feels pain, the other feels it. When one is angered, the other's temper takes fire. We have already seen with what happy facility they both fell in love with the same girl. Now Chang is bitterly opposed to all forms of intemperance on principle. But Aang is the reverse, for while these men's feelings and emotions are so closely wedded, their reasoning faculties are unfettered, their thoughts are free. Chang belongs to the good Templars, and is a hardworking enthusiastic supporter of all temperance reforms. But, to his bitter distress, every now and then Aang gets drunk, and of course that makes Chang drunk too. This unfortunate thing has been a great sorrow to Chang, for it almost destroys his usefulness in his favorite field of effort. As sure as he is to head a great temperance procession, Aang ranges up alongside of him, prompt to the minute, and drunk as a Lord. But yet no more dismally and hopelessly drunk than his brother, who has not tasted a drop. And so the two begin to hoot and yell and throw mud and bricks at the good Templars. And, of course, they break up the procession. It would be manifestly wrong to punish Chang for what Aang does, and therefore the good Templars accept the untoward situation and suffer in silence and sorrow. They have officially and deliberately examined into the matter and find Chang blameless. They have taken the two brothers and filled Chang full of warm water and sugar, and Aang full of whiskey, and in twenty-five minutes it was not possible to tell which was the drunkest. Both were as drunk as loons, and on hot whiskey punches by the smell of their breath. Yet all the while Chang's moral principles were unsullied, his conscience clear. And so all just men were forced to confess that he was not morally but only physically drunk. By every right and by every moral evidence the man was strictly sober, and, therefore, it caused his friends all the more anguished to see him shake hands with the pump and try to wind his watch with his night-key. There is a moral in these solemn warnings, or at least a warning in these solemn morals, one or the other, no matter it is somehow. Let us heed it. Let us profit by it. I could say more of an instructive nature about these interesting beings, but let what I have written suffice. Having forgotten to mention it sooner, I will remark in conclusion that the ages of the Siamese twins are respectively fifty-one and fifty-three years. CHAPTER XXIX Speech at the Scottish Banquet in London, written about 1872. At the anniversary festival of the Scottish Corporation of London on Monday evening, in response to the toast of The Ladies, Mark Twain replied, The following is his speech as reported in the London Observer. I am proud, indeed, of the distinction of being chosen to respond to this special toast to The Ladies, or to women, if you please, for that is the preferable term, perhaps. It is certainly the older, and therefore the more entitled to reverence, laughter. I have noticed that the Bible, with that plain, blunt honesty, which is such a conspicuous characteristic of the scriptures, is always particular to never refer to even the illustrious mother of all mankind herself as a lady, but speaks of her as a woman, laughter. It is odd, but you will find it is so. I am peculiarly proud of this honour, because I think that the toast to women is one which, by right and by every rule of gallantry, should take precedence of all others, of the army, of the navy, of even royalty itself, perhaps, though the latter is not necessary in this day and in this land, for the reason that, tacitly, you do drink a broad general health to all good women when you drink the health of the Queen of England and the Princess of Wales. Loud cheers! I have in mind a poem, just now, which is familiar to you all, familiar to everybody. And what an inspiration that was, and how instantly the present toast recalls the verses to all our minds, when the most noble, the most gracious, the purest, and sweetest of all poets says, Woman, oh, woman, uh, woman, laughter. However, you remember the lines, and you remember how feelingly, how daintly, how almost imperceptibly the verses raise up before you, feature by feature, the ideal of a true and perfect woman, and how, as you contemplate the finished marvel, your homage grows into worship of the intellect that could create so fair a thing out of mere breath, mere words, and you call to mind now, as I speak, how the poet, with stern fidelity to the history of all humanity, delivers this beautiful child of his heart and his brain over to the trials and sorrows that must come to all sooner or later, that abide in the earth, and how the pathetic story culminates in that apostrophe, so wild, so regretful, so full of mournful retrospection. The lines run thus, alas, alas, alas, alas, alas, and so on, laughter. I do not remember the rest, but, taken together, it seems to me that poem is the noblest tribute to woman that human genius has ever brought forth, laughter, and I feel that if I were to talk hours, I could not do my great theme-completer or more graceful justice than I have now done in simply quoting that poet's matchless words, renewed laughter. The phases of the womanly nature are infinite in their variety. Take any type of woman, and you shall find in it something to respect, something to admire, something to love, and you shall find the whole joining you heart and hand. Who was more patriotic than Joan of Arc? Who was braver? Who has given us a grander instance of self-sacrificing devotion? Ha-ha! You remember! You remember well what a throb of pain, what a great tidal wave of grief swept over us all when Joan of Arc fell at Waterloo? Much laughter! Who does not sorrow for the loss of Safo, the sweet singer of Israel? Laughter. Who among us does not miss the gentle administrations, the softening influences, the humble piety of Lucretia Borgia? Laughter. Who can join in the heartless libel that says, Woman is extravagant in dress when he can look back and call to mind our simple and lowly mother Eve, arrayed in her modification of the Highland costume, roars of laughter. Sir, women have been soldiers, women have been painters, women have been poets. As long as language lives the name of Cleopatra will live, and not because she conquered George III, laughter, but because she wrote those divine lines, let dogs delight to bark and bite, for God hath made them so. More laughter. The story of the world is adorned with the names of illustrious ones of our own sex, some of them sons of Saint Andrew too. Scott, Bruce, Burns, the warrior Wallace, Ben Nevis, laughter, the gifted Ben Lomond, and the great new Scotchman, Ben Disraeli, great laughter. Footnote one, Mr. Benjamin Disraeli, at that time Prime Minister of England, had just been elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University, and had made a speech which gave rise to a world of discussion. End of footnote one. Out of the great planes of history, tower-hole, mountain ranges of sublime women, the Queen of Sheba, Josephine, Samirimus, Sarri Gamp, the list is endless, laughter. But I will not call the mighty roll, the names rise up in your own memories at the mere suggestion, luminous with the glory of deeds that cannot die, hallowed by the loving worship of the good and the true of all epics and all climbs. Cheers! Suffice it for our pride and our honour, that we in our day have added to it such names as those of Grace Darling and Florence Nightingale. Cheers! Woman is all that she should be, gentle, patient, long-suffering, trustful, unselfish, full of generous impulses. It is her blessed mission to comfort the sorrowing, plead for the airing, encourage the faint of purpose, succour the distressed, uplift the fallen, befriend the friendless, in a word afford the healing of her sympathies and a home in her heart for all the bruised and persecuted children of misfortune, that knock at its hospitable door. Cheers! And when I say God bless her, there is none among us who has known the ennobling affection of a wife or the steadfast devotion of a mother, but in his heart will say Amen, loud and prolonged cheering. End of Chapter 39 This is Chapter 40 of Sketches New and Old. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain. Chapter 40 A Ghost Story I took a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years until I came. The place had long been given up to dust and cobwebs, to solitude and silence. I seemed groping among the tombs and invading the privacy of the dead that first night I climbed up to my quarters. For the first time in my life a superstitious dread came over me, and as I turned a dark angle of the stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its lazy woof in my face and clung there, I shuddered as one who had encountered a phantom. I was glad enough when I reached my room and locked out the mold and the darkness. A cheery fire was burning in the grate, and I sat down before it with a comforting sense of relief. For two hours I sat there, thinking of bygone times, recalling old scenes and summoning half-forgotten faces out of the mists of the past, listening in fancy to voices that long ago grew silent for all time, and to once familiar songs that nobody sings now. And as my reverie softened down to a sadder and sadder pathos, the shrieking of the winds outside softened to a wail, the angry beating of the rain against the panes diminished to a tranquil patter, and one by one the noises in the streets subsided until the hurrying footsteps of the last belated straggler died away in the distance and left no sound behind. The fire had burned low, a sense of loneliness crept over me. I arose and undressed, moving on tiptoe about the room, doing stealthily what I had to do, as if I were environed by sleeping enemies who slumbers it would be fatal to break. I covered up in bed and lay listening to the rain and wind and the faint creaking of distant shutters till they lulled me to sleep. I slept profoundly, but how long I do not know. All at once I found myself awake and filled with a shuddering expectancy. All was still. All but my own heart I could hear it beat. Presently the bed clothes began to slip away slowly toward the foot of the bed as if someone were pulling them. I could not stir. I could not speak. Still the blankets slipped deliberately away till my breast was uncovered. Then, with a great effort, I seized them and drew them over my head. I waited, listened, waited. Once more that steady pull began, and once more I lay torpid a century of dragging seconds till my breast was naked again. At last I roused my energies and snatched the covers back to their place and held them with a strong grip. I waited. By and by I felt a faint tug and took a fresh grip. The tug strengthened to a steady strain. It grew stronger and stronger. My hold parted, and for the third time the blankets slid away. I groaned. An answering groan came from the foot of the bed. Beaded drops of sweat stood upon my forehead. I was more dead than alive. Presently I heard a heavy footstep in my room. The step of an elephant, it seemed to me. It was not like anything human. But it was moving from me. There was relief in that. I heard it approach the door, pass out without moving bolt or lock, and wander away among the dismal corridors, straining the floors and joists till they creaked again as it passed, and then silence reigned once more. When my excitement had calmed I said to myself, this is a dream, simply a hideous dream. And so I lay thinking it over until I convinced myself that it was a dream, and then a comforting laugh relaxed my lips, and I was happy again. I got up and struck a light, and when I found that the locks and bolts were just as I had left them another soothing laughed welled in my heart and rippled from my lips. I took my pipe and lit it, and was just sitting down before the fire when, down went the pipe out of my nervous fingers, the blood forsook my cheeks, and my placid breathing was cut short with a gasp. In the ashes on the hearth, side by side with my own bare footprint was another, so vast that in comparison mine was but an infant. Then I had had a visitor, and the elephant-tread was explained. I put out the light and returned to bed, palsied with fear. I lay a long time peering into the darkness and listening. Then I heard a grating noise overhead, like the dragging of a heavy body across the floor, then the throwing down of the body, and the shaking of my windows in response to the concussion. In distant parts of the building I heard the muffled slamming of doors. I heard at intervals stealthy footsteps creeping in and out among the corridors and up and down the stairs. Sometimes these noises approached my door, hesitated, and went away again. I heard the clanking of chains faintly in remote passages, and listened while the clanking grew nearer, while it wearily climbed the stairways, marking each move by the loose surplus of chain that fell with an accented rattle upon each succeeding step as the goblin that bore it advanced. I heard muttered sentences, half uttered screams that seemed smothered violently, and a swish of invisible garments, the rush of invisible wings. Then I became conscious that my chamber was invaded, that I was not alone. I heard sighs and breathings about my bed, and mysterious whisperings. Three little spheres of soft phosphorescent light appeared on the ceiling directly over my head, clung and glowed there a moment, and then dropped two of them upon my face, and one upon the pillow. They spattered, liquidy, and felt warm. Intuition told me they had turned to gouts of blood as they fell. I needed no light to satisfy myself of that. Then I saw pallid faces, dimly luminous and white uplifted hands, floating bodyless in the air, floating a moment and then disappearing, the whispering ceased, and the voices and the sounds, and a solemn stillness followed. I waited and listened. I felt that I must have light or die. I was weak with fear. I slowly raised myself toward a sitting posture, and my face came in contact with a clammy hand. All strength went from me, apparently, and I fell back like a stricken invalid. Then I heard the rustle of a garment. It seemed to pass to the door and go out. When everything was still once more I crept out of bed, sick and feeble, and lit the gas with a hand that trembled as if it were aged with a hundred years. The light brought some little cheer to my spirits. I sat down and fell into a dreamy contemplation of that great footprint in the ashes. By and by its outlines began to waver and grow dim. I glanced up, and the broad gas flame was slowly wilting away. In the same moment I heard that elephantine tread again. I noted its approach, nearer and nearer, along the musty halls, and dimmer and dimmer the light waned. The tread reached my very door and paused. The light had dwindled to a sickly blue, and all things about me lay in a spectral twilight. The door did not open, and yet I felt a faint gust of air fan my cheek, and presently was conscious of a huge, cloudy presence before me. I watched it with fascinated eyes. A pale glow stole over the thing. Gradually its cloudy folds took shape. An arm appeared, then legs, then a body, and last a great, sad face looked out of the vapor. Stripped of its filmy housings, naked, muscular and comely, the majestic, cardiff giant loomed above me. All my misery vanished. For a child might know that no harm could come with that benignant countenance. My cheerful spirits returned at once, and in sympathy with them the gas flamed up brightly again. Never a lonely outcast was so glad to welcome company as I was to greet the friendly giant. I said, Why? Is it nobody but you? Do you know I have been scared to death for the last two or three hours? I am most honestly glad to see you. I wish I had a chair. Here, here, don't try to sit down in that thing. But it was too late. He was in it before I could stop him, and down he went. I never saw a chair shivered so in my life. Stop! Stop! You'll ruin it! Too late again. There was another crash, and another chair was resolved into its original elements. Confounded! Haven't you got any judgment at all? Do you want to ruin all the furniture on the place? Here! Here, you petrified fool! But it was no use. Before I could arrest him he had sat down on the bed, and it was a melancholy ruin. Now what sort of a way is that to do? First you come lumbering about the place, bringing a legion of vagabond goblins along with you to worry me to death, and then when I overlook an indelicacy of costume which would not be tolerated anywhere by cultivated people except in a respectable theatre, and not even there if the nudity were of your sex, you repay me by wrecking all the furniture you can find to sit down on. And why will you? You damage yourself as much as you do me. You have broken off the end of your spinal column, and littered up the floor with chips of your hams till the place looks like a marble-yard. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You are big enough to know better. Well, I will not break any more furniture. But what am I to do? I have not had a chance to sit down for a century. And the tears came into his eyes. Poor devil, I said. I should not have been so harsh with you. And you are an orphan, too, no doubt. But sit down on the floor here. Nothing else can stand your weight. And besides, we cannot be sociable with you away up there above me. I want you down where I can perch on this high counting-house stool and gossip with you face to face. So he sat down on the floor and lit a pipe, which I gave him, threw one of my red blankets over his shoulders, inverted my sits-bath on his head, helmet-fashioned, and made himself picturesque and comfortable. Then he crossed his ankles while I renewed the fire and exposed the flat, honey-combed bottoms of his prodigious feet to the grateful warmth. What is the matter with the bottom of your feet and the back of your legs that they are gouged up so? Infernal chill-blanes. I caught them clear up to the back of my head, roosting out there under Newell's farm, but I love the place. I love it as one loves his old home. There is no peace for me like the peace I feel when I am there. We talked along for half an hour and then I noticed that he looked tired and spoke of it. Tired, he said. Well, I should think so. And now I will tell you all about it, since you have treated me so well. I am the spirit of the petrified man that lies across the street there in the museum. I am the ghost of the Cardiff Giant. I can have no rest, no peace, till they have given that poor body burial again. Now, what was the most natural thing for me to do to make men satisfy this wish? Terrify them into it. Haunt the place where the body lay. So I haunted the museum night after night. I even got other spirits to help me, but it did no good, for nobody ever came to the museum at midnight. Then it occurred to me to come over the way and haunt this place a little. I felt that if I ever got a hearing I must succeed, for I had the most efficient company that perdition could furnish. Night after night we have shivered around through these mildewed halls, dragging chains, groaning, whispering, tramping up and downstairs, till, to tell you the truth, I am almost worn out. But, when I saw a light in your room tonight, I roused my energies again and went at it with a deal of the old freshness. But I am tired out, entirely fagged out. Give me, I beseech you, give me some hope. I lit off my perch in a burst of excitement and exclaimed, this transcends everything, everything that ever did occur. Why, you poor, blundering old fossil, you have had all your trouble for nothing. You have been haunting a plaster cast of yourself. The real card of giant is in Albany. A fact. The original fraud was ingeniously and fraudulently duplicated and exhibited in New York as the only genuine card of giant, to the unspeakable disgust of the owners of the real Colossus, at the very same time that the latter was drawing crowds at a museum in Albany. Confounded, don't you know your own remains? I never saw such an eloquent look of shame, of pitiable humiliation overspread accountants before. The petrified man rose slowly to his feet and said, Honestly, is that true? As true as I am sitting here. He took the pipe from his mouth and laid it on the mantle, then stood, irresolute a moment, unconsciously, from old habit, thrusting his hands where his pantaloons pockets should have been, and meditatively dropping his chin on his breast, and finally said, Well, I never felt so absurd before. The petrified man has sold everybody else, and now the mean fraud has ended by selling its own ghost. My son, if there is any charity left in your heart for a poor, friendless phantom like me, don't let this get out. Think how you would feel if you had made such an ass of yourself. I heard his stately tramp die away, step by step down the stairs and out into the deserted street, and felt sorry that he was gone, poor fellow, and sorry or still that he had carried off my red blanket and my bathtub. End of Chapter 40 This is Chapter 41 of Skeches New and Old. This Liebervox recording is in the public domain. Skeches New and Old by Mark Twain. Chapter 41 The Capitoline Venus Chapter 1 Seen an Artist's Studio in Rome Oh, George, I do love you! Bless your dear heart, Mary, I know that. Why is your father so obdurate? George, he means well, but art is folly to him. He only understands groceries. He thinks you would starve me. Khan found his wisdom. It savers of inspiration. Why am I not a money-making, bowelless grocer instead of a divinely gifted sculptor with nothing to eat? Do not despond, Georgie dear. All his prejudices will fade away. As soon as you shall have acquired fifty thousand demons, child, I am in arrears for my brood. Chapter 2 Seen a Dwelling in Rome My dear sir, it is useless to talk. I haven't anything against you, but I can't let my daughter marry a hash of love, art, and starvation. I believe you have nothing else to offer. Sir, I am poor, I grant you. But his fame nothing? The honourable Bellamy Foodle of Arkansas says that my new statue of America is a clever piece of sculpture, and he is satisfied that my name will one day be famous. Bosh! What does that Arkansas ass know about it? Fames nothing. The market price of your marble skier crow is the thing to look at. It took you six months to chisel it, and you can't sell it for a hundred dollars. No sir, show me fifty thousand dollars, and you can have my daughter, otherwise she marries young Simper. You have just six months to raise the money in. Good morning, sir. Alas! Woe is me! Chapter 3 Seen the Studio Oh, John, friend of my boyhood, I am the unhappiest of men. You're a simpleton! I have nothing left to love but my poor statue of America, and see, even she has no sympathy for me in her cold marble countenance. So beautiful and so heartless. You're a dummy! Oh, John! Oh, Fudge! Didn't you say you had six months to raise the money in? Don't deride my agony, John. If I had six centuries, what good would it do? How could it help a poor wretch without name, capital, or friends? Idiot! Coward! Baby! Six months to raise the money in, and five will do. Are you insane? Six months! An abundance! Leave it to me. I'll raise it. What do you mean, John? How on earth can you raise such a monstrous sum for me? Will you let that be my business and not meddle? Will you leave the thing in my hands? Will you swear to submit to whatever I do? Will you pledge me to find no fault with my actions? I am dizzy, bewildered, but I swear— John took a hammer and deliberately smashed the nose of America. He made another pass and two of her fingers fell to the floor. Another and part of an ear came away. Another and a row of toes was mangled and dismembered. Another and a left leg from the knee down lay a fragmentary ruin. John put on his hat and departed. George gazed speechless upon the battered and grotesque nightmare before him for the space of thirty seconds, and then wilted to the floor and went into convulsions. John returned presently with a carriage, got the broken-hearted artist and the broken-legged statue aboard, and drove off, whistling low and tranquilly. He left the artist at his lodgings, and drove off and disappeared down the Via Quirinalis with the statue. Chapter 4 Scene The Studio The six months will be up two o'clock today. Oh, agony, my life is blighted! I would that I were dead. I had no supper yesterday. I have had no breakfast to-day. I dare not enter an eating-house. And, hungry, don't mention it. My bootmaker dunns me to death. My tailor dunns me. My landlord haunts me. I am miserable. I haven't seen John since that awful day. She smiles on me tenderly when we meet in the great thoroughfares, but her old flint of a father makes her look in the other direction in short order. Now, who is knocking at that door? Who has come to persecute me? That malignant villain, the bootmaker, I'll warrant. Come in. Ah, happiness, attend your highness. Heaven be propitious to your grace. I have brought my lord's new boots. Say nothing about the pay. There is no hurry. None in the world shall be proud if my noble lord will continue to honor me with his custom. Ah, dear, brought the boots himself. Don't want his pay. Takes his leave with a bow and a scrape fit to honor majesty with all. Desires a continuance of my custom. Is the world coming to an end? Of all the— Come in. Pardon, senor. But I have brought your new suit of clothes for— Come in. A thousand pardons for this intrusion, your worship. But I have prepared the beautiful suit of rooms below for you. These wretched dan is but ill- suited to— Come in. I have called to say that your credit at our bank, sometimes since unfortunately interrupted, is entirely and most satisfactorily restored, and we shall be most happy if you will draw upon us for any— Come in. My noble boy, she is yours. She'll be here in a moment. Take her. Marry her. Love her. Be happy. God bless you both. Hip, hip, her. Come in. Oh, George, my own darling, we are saved. Oh, Mary, my own darling, we are saved. But I'll swear I don't know why, nor how. Chapter 5 Seen a Roman Café One of a group of American gentlemen reads and translates from the weekly edition of Il Sanghuange di Roma, as follows. Wonderful discovery! Some six months ago, Sr. John Smeeth, an American gentleman now some years a resident of Rome, purchased for a trifle a small piece of ground in the Campania, just beyond the tomb of the Scipio family, from the owner, a bankrupt relative of the Princess Borghese. Mr. Smith afterward went to the minister of the public records and had the piece of ground transferred to a poor American artist named George Arnold, explaining that he did it as payment and satisfaction for pecuniary damage accidentally done by him long since upon property belonging to Sr. Arnold, and further observed that he would make additional satisfaction by improving the ground for Sr. A. at his own charge and cost. Four weeks ago, while making some necessary excavations upon the property, Sr. Smith unearthed the most remarkable ancient statue that has ever been added to the opulent art treasures of Rome. It was an exquisite figure of a woman, and though sadly stained by the soil and the mold of ages, no eye can look unmoved upon its ravishing beauty. The nose, the left leg from the knee down, an ear, and also the toes of the right foot and two fingers of one of the hands were gone. But otherwise the noble figure was in a remarkable state of preservation. The government at once took military possession of the statue and appointed a commission of art critics, antiquaries, and cardinal princes of the church to assess its value and determine the remuneration that must go to the owner of the ground in which it was found. The whole affair was kept a profound secret until last night. In the meantime the commission sat with closed doors and deliberated. Last night they decided unanimously that the statue is a Venus and the work of some unknown but sublimely gifted artist of the third century before Christ. They consider it the most faultless work of art the world has any knowledge of. At midnight they held a final conference and decided that the Venus was worth the enormous sum of ten million francs. In accordance with Roman law and Roman usage, the government being half owner in all works of art found in the Campania, the state has not to do but pay five million francs to Mr. Arnold and take permanent possession of the beautiful statue. This morning the Venus will be removed to the capital there to remain, and at noon the commission will wait upon Sr. Arnold with his holiness the Pope's order upon the treasury for the princely sum of five million francs in gold. Chorus of voices. Luck! It's no name for it! Another voice. Gentlemen, I propose that we immediately form an American joint stock company for the purchase of lands and excavations of statues here, with proper connections in Wall Street to bull and bear the stock. All. Agreed! Chapter 6 Seen The Roman Capital Ten Years Later Dearest Mary, this is the most celebrated statue in the world. This is the remowned capitaline Venus you've heard so much about. Here she is with her little blemishes restored, that is, patched, by the most noted Roman artists, and the mere fact that they did the humble patching of so noble a creation will make their names illustrious while the world stands. How strange it seems, this place! The day before I last stood here ten happy years ago, I wasn't a rich man, bless your soul, I hadn't a cent, and yet I had a good deal to do with making Rome mistress of this grandest work of ancient art the world contains. The worshiped, the illustrious capitaline Venus, and what a sum she is valued at, ten millions of francs! Yes, now she is. And oh, Georgie, how divinely beautiful she is! Ah, yes! But nothing to what she was before that blessed John Smith broke her leg and battered her nose. In genius Smith, gifted Smith, noble Smith, author of all our bliss. Hark! Do you know what that wheeze means? Mary, that cub has got the whooping cough! Would you never learn to take care of the children? The end. The capitaline Venus is still in the capital at Rome, and is still the most charming and most illustrious work of ancient art the world can boast of. But if average shall be your fortune to stand before it and go into the customary ecstasies over it, don't permit this true and secret history of its origin to mar your bliss, and when you read about a gigantic petrified man being dug up near Syracuse, in the state of New York, or near any other place, keep your own counsel, and if the barnum that buried him there offers to sell to you at an enormous sum, don't you buy? Send him to the Pope. Note, the above sketch was written at the time the famous swindle of the petrified giant was the sensation of the day in the United States. End of Chapter 41 This is Chapter 42 of Sketches New and Old. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain, Chapter 42, Speech on Accident Insurance, delivered in Hartford at a dinner to Cornelius Walford of London. Gentlemen, I am glad indeed to assist in welcoming the distinguished guest of this occasion to a city whose fame as an insurance centre has extended to all lands, and given us the name of being a quadruple band of brothers working sweetly hand in hand. The Colts Arms Company making the destruction of our race easy and convenient, our life insurance citizens paying for the victims when they pass away, Mr. Batterson perpetuating their memory with his stately monuments, and our fire insurance comrades taking care of their hereafter. I am glad to assist in welcoming our guest, first because he is an Englishman, and I owe a heavy debt of hospitality to certain of his fellow countrymen, and secondly because he is in sympathy with insurance, and has been the means of making many other men cast their sympathies in the same direction. Certainly there is no nobler field for human effort than the insurance line of business, especially accident insurance. Ever since I have been a director in an accident insurance company, I have felt that I am a better man. Life has seemed more precious. Accidents have assumed a kindlier aspect. Distressing special providences have lost half their horror. I look upon a cripple now with affectionate interest, as an advertisement. I do not seem to care for poetry any more, I do not care for politics, even agriculture does not excite me, but to me now there is a charm about a railway collision that is unspeakable. There is nothing more beneficent than accident insurance. I have seen an entire family lifted out of poverty and into affluence by the simple boon of a broken leg. I have had people come to me on crutches, with tears in their eyes, to bless this beneficent institution. In all my experience of life I have seen nothing so seraphic as the look that comes into a freshly mutilated man's face when he feels in his vest pocket with his remaining hand and finds his accident ticket all right, and I have seen nothing so sad as the look that came into another splintered customer's face when he found he couldn't collect on a wooden leg. I will remark here, by way of advertisement, that that noble charity which we have named the Hartford Accident Insurance Company—the speaker is a director of the company named—is an institution which is peculiarly to be depended upon. A man is bound to prosper who gives it his custom. No man can take out a policy in it and not get crippled before the year is out. Now there was one indigent man who had been disappointed so often with other companies that he had grown disheartened. His appetite left him, he ceased to smile. Life was but a weariness. Three weeks ago I got him to insure with us, and now he is the brightest, happiest spirit in this land, has a good steady income and a stylish suit of new bandages every day, and travels around on a shutter. I will say in conclusion that my share of the welcome to our guest is nonetheless hearty because I talk so much nonsense, and I know that I can say the same for the rest of the speakers. As I passed along by one of those monster American tea-stores in New York, I found a Chinaman sitting before it, acting in the capacity of a sign. Everybody that passed by gave him a steady stare as long as their heads would twist over their shoulders without dislocating their necks, and a group had stopped to stare deliberately. Is it not a shame that we, who prait so much about civilization and humanity, are content to degrade a fellow being to such an office as this? Is it not time for reflection when we find ourselves willing to see in such a being matter for frivolous curiosity instead of regret and grave reflection? Here was a poor creature whom hard fortune had exiled from his natural home beyond the seas, and whose troubles ought to have touched these idle strangers that thronged about him. But did it? Apparently not. Men calling themselves the superior race, the race of culture and of gentle blood, scanned his quaint Chinese hat, with peaked roof and ball on top, and his long queue dangling down his back, his short silken blouse, curiously frogged and figured, and like the rest of his raiment, rusty, dilapidated and awkwardly put on. His blue cotton, tight-legged pants tied close around the ankles, and his clumsy, blunt-toed shoes with thick cork soles, and having so scanned him from head to foot, cracked some unseemly joke about his outlandish attire or his melancholy face, and passed on. In my heart I pity the friendless Mongol. I wondered what was passing behind his sad face, and what distant scene his vacant eye was dreaming of, were his thoughts with his heart ten thousand miles away, beyond the billowy wastes of the Pacific, among the rice fields and the plume palms of China, under the shadows of remembered mountain peaks, or in groves of gloomy shrubs and strange forest trees unknown to climbs like ours. And now and then, rippling among his visions and his dreams, did he hear familiar laughter and half-forgotten voices? And did he catch fitful glimpses of the friendly faces of a bygone time? A cruel fate it is, I said, that his befallen this bronzed wanderer, in order that the group of idlers might be touched, at least by the words of the poor fellow, since the appeal of his pauper dress and his dreary exile was lost upon them. I touched him on the shoulder and said, Cheer up! Don't be downhearted. It is not America that treats you in this way. It is merely one citizen whose greed of gain has eaten the humanity out of his heart. America has a broader hospitality for the exiled and oppressed. America and Americans are always ready to help the unfortunate. Money shall be raised. You shall go back to China. You shall see your friends again. What wages do they pay you here? Dively-scent but four dollars a week and find myself, but it's easy, barrenly, troublesome, fur-and-clothes that so expensive. The exile remains at his post. The New York team merchants who need picturesque signs are not likely to run out of Chinaman.