 This is Section 83 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 83, Alta, California, June 1867, Part 4. Alta, California, June 23rd, 1867, New York, May 18th, 1867. The Newsense of Advice R.I.P. goes another shirt. Why, Brown? Buy your clothes in Paris! Buy your clothes in Paris! Blame my catch, the next man that tells me to buy my clothes in Paris, I'll break him in two! I've been trying to hold on and buy him in Paris, just as all these thieves tell me. But that Quaker City ain't ever going to sail, I don't believe. And by the time she does, I won't have Neri Ragh left. Brown, calm yourself, your grammar is infamous. Don't talk to me about grammar! I'm fit to cuss or cry, or anything that comes handy now. I was going to get a pair of boots built two weeks ago, and that sniveling Baxter said, hold on and buy him in Paris! Cheaper and better every way! And I've held on till these boots are letting go everywhere, and it rains here every four hours, and I fetch home a bucket of water in them every night. And socks can't stand it, and they get caked to my feet, and the bottoms pull out every night, and I wish I may die if I haven't wore out a hundred and fifty pair and be reasonable, son. I know what I've done. I ain't got but just one sock left, and the bottom of that'll fetch away when I pull that starboard boot off. And don't you see that old corn hanging out at that hole in the port boot? Buy your clothes in Paris! I've hung on, and hung on, and hung on till my coats are all gone to seed, and my pants are all frizzled out of the bottoms, and my boots are busted all out, and my hat is a perfect, outrageous old ruin. It is by George. It looks like the picture of that, their ratty old ancient coliseum at Rome, all sick and sorrowful and rusty and battered up, and gone in generally. Confound the confounded! Brown! Brown! Go slow, lad! Buy your clothes in Paris! There's my last solitary shirt, come back from the wash with all the after-guard clean gone, flush to the waist, and there used to be a thousand buttons on that shirt, and now there ain't nary one of them left. I wished I had a chance to eat a washerwoman once I do. I'd clean her up so good that they couldn't any more identify her at the resurrection than Brown! You can't think how it pains me to hear you talk, so I don't care. I don't care for nothing the way I am now. I want to make trouble. I want to do something that's outrageous. I want to set a house of fire. I want to start a riot. I want to commit a nuisance. Anything that will make Rome howl is what I'm fixed for at this present writing. Buy your clothes in Paris! All the scoundrels I know have told me that, and now I ain't got any more clothes than they wear in the black crook, and I'm a living shame in a degraded lunatic. That's me. Here, you, black them boots, and black the holes in them in particular. I'm glad he has gone to see that the fellow blocks the holes in his boots particular, because I can have some peace now. Between you and I, this thing of swallowing everybody's advice has got one or two drawbacks about it. I have been holding on myself to buy my clothes in Paris, and I have held on so faithfully that I haven't got a rag of everyday clothing left that is fit to wear in the public street hardly. And yet the ship will not sail for three weeks yet. And when we get to Paris, suppose they tell us to buy our clothes in Constantinople. How shall we feel then? The advice we have received from traveled people would fill a volume. We must buy veils for Egypt, saddles for Palestine, field glasses for landscapes, books for the ship. Oh, a thousand and one things we must do when I wouldn't give a cent for anything but a Shakespeare and a deck of cards and a couple of shirts. Perdition take the advice. I will none of it. The Exiles Law You are aware that in New York, after twelve at night, on weekdays, you cannot buy a glass of wine or liquor for lover money, and you cannot buy it on Sunday at any time. It is a great thing for the morals of New York, but it is demoralizing to the vickenage. It inflicts twenty thousand beer-swillers upon Hoboken every sabbath. You remember the pious girl who said, I found that my ribbons and googles were dragging me down to hell, and so I took them off and gave them to my sister. Well, that is the way we are doing for Hoboken. We found that beer-drinkers were debauching our morals, and so we concluded to turn them over to our neighbor. The ferry-boats go over-packed and crammed with people all day Sunday, and the beer and such stuff drank in Hoboken on these occasions amounts to oceans, to speak liberally. They say that they are going to inaugurate an excise law over there next Sunday, and then what will thirsty New York do? Well, it suits me. The excise has made a sort of decent, orderly place out of this once rowdy, noisy immoral town. You don't hear ribbled songs in beer-sellers at dead of night now. You don't hear lawless ruffs prowling and howling through the streets at midnight any more. You don't hear shouts and curses and blows, and the watchman's shrill whistle and the clatter of flying feet under the sorrowing moon in these better times that are upon us. At one o'clock in the morning you may walk fifty blocks sometimes, and not see fifty persons other than policemen, and such citizens as you do see will be orderly and quiet and proper. It used to be very different here. Some of the people growl bitterly because the country governs the city through the legislature, but I cannot see but that the country does it much more wisely than ever the city would. New York in some respects is a big, overgrown, rascally place, but it improves. It improves all the time. Why, they had an election here a week or two ago, and kept the gin mills closed all day, and I never heard of three fights in the twelve hours, and never a sign of a riot. How does that sound for a village with a round million of inhabitants? The Traveller's Club. That is a human institution. It's president is a Californian, and its members hail from more places than there are on the Atlas. They have kindly complimented me with the privileges of the place for a month, and I went up the other night at ten and spent a very pleasant evening till two or three o'clock in the morning. Of course I met pleasant people, because nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people. An Englishman, an Irishman, a Scotchman, an Italian or so, several French men and a number of Americans were present, and you couldn't ask a question about any possible country under the sun but some fellow in the crowd had been there, and could give the information from personal experience. The Club occupies a worshipful five-story brownstone front on ineffable Fifth Avenue, far uptown in the midst of the odor of sanctity that prevails in that thoroughfare, which is so peculiarly sacred to green bags and fashion. The drawing rooms are luxuriously furnished and decorated, and the premises are supplied with a library, reading rooms, billiard tables, supper saloons, and a couple of elegant grand pianos. Of course there is a sufficiency of wines and liquors there, and within those charmed walls the unholy excise intrudeth not. They said they were going to send me a formal invitation to make a speech before the Club, as du chalur did, and I said I would be glad to accept it, but I did not know then that they go and invite a whole raft of ladies to be present on such occasions to look at a poor victim and make him lose his grip, and so I hope they will forget to send the invitation now. You ought to start a traveller's club in San Francisco. You have got an abundance of material, and that sort of an organisation is much pleasanter than political one-idea affairs, such as clubs generally are. The Broadway Bridge The Iron Bridge over Broadway and Fulton Streets is finished at last, and the people troop over it in crowds now, while it is a novelty. It is really only a necessity in the slushy, snowy wintertime, but must be a great convenience at any and all times. There is never a season in daylight when it is not a troublesome job to ferry yourself across Broadway or Fulton Street at that point through the swarming vehicles. Somehow the young ladies haven't taken kindly to it yet, but I suppose they will after a while. But the men and boys and old women hang around it and tramp over it and loiter on it to gaze up Broadway, and so it does a very respectable amount of business. Curiosity runs high here. I saw a washerwoman coming along with three or four hundred pounds on her back today, and eyeing the bridge with great interest, and I said, principally to myself, I wonder if that old scallywag really meditates lugging that clothing store up that tiresome stairway now when the street below is comparatively free from vehicles. And she not only meditated it, but did it. She tugged and sweated and climbed till she reached the top, cast a critical eye up Broadway, went down on the other side, toiled up again, crossed over to her original point of departure, and wed off about her business. There is a great deal of human nature in people. I have not been by that bridge for a month without yearning to cross it. I have abused the tardy workmen in my heart for keeping this pleasure from me. I have fairly ached to cross it, and have thought I would give anything in reason or out of reason for the privilege. But the entrances were pitilessly closed, and I had to move on and sigh and suffer in silence. But today all obstructions were gone, and no soul was there to forbid me. I was free to cross as often as I wanted to. But I didn't want to. As soon as the obstructions were gone the desire went also. Verily there is a large amount of human nature in people. Crowds stand around all day long and criticize that bridge, and find fault with it, and tell with unlimited frankness how it ought to have been planned, and how they would have built it had the city granted them the fourteen thousand dollars it cost. It is really refreshing to hang around these and listen to them. A foreigner would come to the conclusion that all America was composed of inspired professional bridge-builders. I have tried to be odd and refrain from criticism. But it isn't human nature, and I cannot do it. I am bound to say it was absurd to paint such portions of the structure as were untouchable, a good substantial brown, and paint the handrails white, when anybody might know that any inky printer's devil, with a spark of proper human nature in him, would go four blocks out of the way, just for the luxury of defiling those stainless railings with his dingy hands. Why, the things are all black as a hat already, and I could not forbear criticizing the absurdity of putting four grand, costly lamps on the corners of the bridge, when everybody knows that that locality is the most desolate and deserted in New York after nightfall, and that no soul will ever have need of either bridge or lamps between the setting and the rising of the sun from now till doomsday. I have nothing to say against the shape and general style of the bridge, though. Both are good, I think. Both are ornamental, and certainly both are in every way satisfactory to me. In the station house. I have been in the station house. I stay there all night. I don't mind mentioning it, because anybody can get into the station house here without committing an offence of any kind, and so he can anywhere that policemen are allowed to cumber the earth. I complimented this police force in a letter some time ago, and felt like a guilty degraded wretch when I was doing it, and now I am glad I got into the station house, because it will teach me never to so far forget all moral principle as to compliment a police force again. I was on my way home with a friend a week ago. It was about midnight, when we came upon two men who were fighting. We interfered like a couple of idiots and tried to separate them, and a brace of policemen came up and took us all off to the station house. We offered the officers two or three prices to let us go. Policemen generally charge five dollars in assault and battery cases, and twenty-five dollars for murder in the first degree, I believe. But there were too many witnesses present, and they actually refused. They put us in separate cells, and I enjoyed the thing considerably, for an hour or so, looking through the bars at the dilapidated old hags, and battered and ragged bummers, sorrowing and swearing in the stone-paved halls. But it got rather tiresome after a while. I fell asleep on my stone bench at three o'clock, and was called at dawn and marched to the police court, with a vile policeman at each elbow, just as if I had been robbing a church, or saying a complimentary word about the police, or doing some other supernaturally mean thing. We sat on wooden benches in a lock-up partitioned off from the courtroom for four hours, awaiting judgment. Not awaiting trial, because they don't try people there, but only just take a percentage of their cash and let them go without further ceremony. We were a pretty cheerful crowd, but a rather haggard and sleepy one. Three first-rate young fellows, and well-dressed, were in the lot. One a clerk, one a college student, and one an Indiana merchant. Two had been soldiers on the Union side, and one on the other, and all had battled at Antietam together. The merchant was arrested for being drunk, and the other two for assault and battery. An old seedy, scarred, bloated and bleeding bummer was present, who had been kicked out of a gin mill by the barkeeper, he said, and got arrested for it. He said he had been in the station house a good many times before. I said, what will they do with you? Ten days, likely, with a jerk of his thumb over his shoulder and an expressive shrug. An negro man was there, with his head badly battered and bleeding profusely. He had nothing to say. A bloated old hag sat in the corner with a wholesome black eye, a drunken leer in the sound one, and nothing in the world on but a dingy calico dress, a shocking shawl, and a pair of slippers that had seen better days, but long enough ago to have forgotten them. I thought I might as well prospect my company thoroughly while time dragged along, and so I went over and started a conversation with her. She was very communicative. Said she lived in the five points, and must have been particularly drunk to have wandered so far from home. Said she used to have a husband, but he had drifted off somewhere, and so she had taken up with another man. She had had a child also, a little boy, but it took all her time to get drunk and keep drunk, and so he starved one winter's night, or froze, she didn't know which, both maybe, because it snowed in horrible through the roof, and he hadn't any bedclothes but a window shutter. But it was a damn good thing for him, anyway, said she, because he'd have had a miserable, rough time of it if he'd have lived. And then she chuckled a little and asked me for a chew of tobacco and a cigar. I gave her a cigar and borrowed the tobacco for her, and then she winked a wink of wonderful mystery and drew a flask of gin from under her shawl, and said the police thought they were awful smart when they searched her, but she wasn't born last week. I didn't drink with her, not withstanding she invited me. She said she was good for ten days, but she guessed she could stand it, because if she had as many dollars, as she had been in limbo, she could buy a gin mill. Two flash girls of sixteen and seventeen were of our little party, and they said they had been arrested for stopping gentlemen in the street in pursuance of their profession, but avert that the charge was false, and that the gentlemen had made the first advances, and then they cried, not because they felt ashamed of having been locked up in a station-house, but because they would have to suffer in jail for several days in company a little rougher than they were used to. I felt sorry for those two poor girls, and thought it was a pity that the merciful snow had not frozen them into a peaceful rest and forgetfulness of life, and its weary troubles too. Towards eight o'clock fresh jailbirds began to arrive, and my three young gentlemen grew cheerful, and sang out to each newcomer, Another delegate, your credentials, if you please, sir. The clerk will enter the gentleman's name on the records and make honorable mention of it, assault and battery, sir, or disorderly, theft, arson, highway robbery? Ah, drunk, is it? Set him down drunk, but pertinent. Rum, gentlemen and ladies, rum for the honorable delegate from the Perlews of the Five Points! And so we chafed the cheerful hours away. At last I beheld a handwriting on the wall that made me start. I felt as if an accusing spirit had been raised up to mock me. The legend read, how familiar it was, the trouble will begin at eight o'clock. How well I remembered inventing that sentence in the morning call-office when I was writing the advertisement for my first lecture in San Francisco, and behold how little did I think then that I should live to see it inscribed upon the walls of a prison-house many and many a hundred miles away. I smiled at the conceit when I first wrote it, but when I thought how sad-hearted and how full of dreams of a happier time the poor fellow might have been who scribbled it here, there was a touching pathos about it that I had never suspected it possessed before. I am not writing a fancy sketch now, but simply jotting down things just as they occurred in that villainous receptacle for rascals and unfortunate's downtown yonder. At nine o'clock we went out, one by one, under guard, and stood up before the judge. I consulted with him about the practicability of contesting my case on the ground of unjust imprisonment, but he said it would be troublesome and not worth the bother in as much as nobody would ever know I had been in the station-house unless I told it myself, and then he let me go. I stayed by and watched them dispense justice a while, observed that in all small offences the policeman's charge on the books was received as entirely sufficient, and sentence passed without a question being asked of either accused or witnesses, and then departed, glad I had been in the station-house, because I knew all about it now from personal experience, but not anxious to pursue my investigations any further in that line. Personal Inquiry. I am to visit two more of the great churches next Sunday in company with a California preacher, and Monday night I am to go through the hardest and vilest underground dens and hotbeds of crime round about the five points with two detective policemen. I may chance to stumble upon some of my late fellow lodgers there, possibly. It is well. They were pretty good sort of people, anyhow, though a little under the weather as to respectability. But even the worst in the lot freely offered to divide her gin with me—it isn't everybody without a cent that would do so much. End of Section 83. California wines. California wines are coming more and more into favor here in the East, and are to be found on sale pretty much everywhere. I see the sign about as often as I see the signs for shoe stores or candy shops. The Catawba wines had a great hold on public favor several years ago, but it seems to be conceded now that all Native American brands must yield precedence to the California wines. Some of the wholesale California wine establishments here are quite extensive. One of the largest, if not the largest, is that of Messers Perkins, Stern and Company, which is the New York Department of the Kohler and Frolling House in San Francisco. The two houses were formerly distinct from each other, but are united now. It looks like business here to go through their wine vaults and see the mighty array of boxes, barrels, casks, and hogsheads all filled with California wines, and note the machinery they bring into play for handling it with facility and filling orders with alacrity. Last year this house sold California wines to the amount of $250,000, and nearly is great an amount the year before. They say that this year the New York agencies will sell the whole California crop, and continue to do it every succeeding year without fail. It is destined to become a very important article of trade, and the firm I speak of hope to get it all into their own hands eventually. It is certainly worth the effort. Not going to Paris. The people are leaving here by shiploads for France. It is a perfect exodus. Every sailing vessel goes out full, a thing which is a pleasant novelty to them, no doubt, for they have long been unused to it, and if you want to travel by the great steamer lines you must engage your stateroom a month beforehand and pay for it. The idea of the exposition proving a failure, as was the talk a while back, is absurd, if other countries are rushing money and people over there as fast as we are doing. We are shipping ten and maybe even twelve thousand persons a month from the port of New York alone, and if all our other ports together are doing half as much, America will have sent considerably over a hundred thousand persons to Europe, chiefly to Paris, this year, before the time for travel in that direction is up. It is as much as I can do to scare up an individual who will acknowledge in a calm, unprejudiced manner that he is not going to Paris this year. I cannot begin to estimate the number of people to whom I have given the probable date of my arrival in the French capital, and who said I must hunt them up there. It is wonderful! Thought I had run across about all acquaintances who were going, and yet when I took a lady friend down last Saturday to ship her on the Ville de Paris, I found quite a number housed on board who never had said anything about going. Mr. Brown, of whom you have heard, has come finally to consider the whole nation as packing up for emigration to France. He bought a handkerchief yesterday, and when the man could not make change Brown said, Never mind, I'll hand it to you in Paris. But I am not going to Paris. How is—what did I understand you to say? I said I am not going to Paris. Not going to Paris? Not go—well, then, where in the very nation are you going to? Nowhere at all. Not anywhere whatsoever? Honest engine now. Not any place on earth but this? Not any place at all, but just this. Stay here all summer." I looked for an explosion here, a boisterous display of admiration on Brown's part, a ringing of the man's hand, and all that sort of thing, but nothing of the kind occurred. My comrade took his purchase and walked out of the store without a word, walked out with an injured look upon his countenance. Up the street a piece he broke silence and said impressively, It was a low, mean, disgraceful lie, that is my opinion of it. New York weather. Sometimes it makes me mad, sometimes it makes me fearfully mad, but as a general thing I like it. When May dawned upon us I said, Behold, there is no gain saying that this is genuine springtime, with a good two months margin to back it, and now, of course, we can shed our overcoats. That was three weeks ago, and yet, if I have seen one evening since then, which could pass muster without an overcoat and a heavy one at that, I have no recollection of it now. I went out to-night without one, and shivered all the way downtown and shivered all the way back. It is wretchedly cold every night, and a good many of the days too, most of them, I think. And, as for rain, well, it is California in winter all over again, and all the time, only with this difference, that there you know when it is going to rain, and here you don't know when it isn't. When it don't know anything else to do here, to put in the time, it rains. If you haven't got an umbrella, it rains. If you have got an umbrella, and leave it at home, it rains. You cannot keep it from raining in any way, but just to carry an umbrella along with you all the time. The sun will dog you then, until you are sick of it. If there was a cloud overhead, with fifty oceans of rain in it then, it would go off and rain in Pennsylvania somewhere. These things aggravate me beyond measure sometimes. I have got an umbrella at the Everett House. It is a very fine one. I bought it from a peddler to stop a thunderstorm with. He said he could recommend it because he got it of a man who had used it twelve years, but whenever it rains, I am a mile downtown, and when I go up after my umbrella, it always stops before I can get there. It has only rained once tonight, but there is nothing in that. It is probably just fixing. And yet when you come to add it all up, this uncertain climate has its pleasant features. All life demands change, variety, contrast. Else is there small zest to it. Here you have rain, snow, bleakness, but after it is all gone, what an imperial green all vegetation puts on. It is worth the winter of suffering to see the rich coloring even these city-bread trees and lawns robe themselves in. No feeble dingy grass and dusty leaves, but dewy, dense, luxurious carpets, and a gleaming magnificence of foliage fit to shelter the beloved of God in the bowers of Eden. And perhaps you know how sick one gets of the eternal fair weather of San Francisco, and how he longs for lightning, thunder, and tempest, how he feels as if he wanted to tear the glaring sun out of the sky, and blot the firmament with a purple pall, and cleanse it down from zenith to horizon with shafts of fire. Ah me! this lifeless nature vexes my heart and brain! Oh! for a storm and tempest and lightning and wild fierce rain! I don't suppose I have quoted that right, because remembering verses is not my strong suit. It is good poetry, though, and carries well the idea of that impatient Egyptian wench Cleopatra, who has grown tired of walling in a hammock, gazing out upon a dreamy, listless summer landscape, and stirs herself up, and gets off an explosion to the above effect. Herald. Personals. You may sit in a New York restaurant in the morning for a few hours, and you will observe that the very first thing each man does before ordering his breakfast is to call for the herald, and the next thing he does is to look at the top of the first column and read the personals. Which is the fascination mystery has for the human race. Your man has not the least idea in the world that there is ever going to be a personal in the paper that will be of private individual interest to himself, and he knows very well that he cannot make head or tail of those he finds there, and that as a vehicle for fun they do not amount to much. Yet, as I have said, he is bound to read those personals the very first thing. There is such a toothsome flavor of mystery about them. It is the whole secret. The advertising public appreciate the value of a word under that personal head, and many are the dodges they invent to get an airing for their wares there, but it don't succeed. The ingeniously worded scribs are ruthlessly set aside and buried in the midst of solid cases of advertisements in the desert wastes of the paper, where a man might hunt them with a bloodhound and not find them. True, I have seen three of these dodges win, lately, but they never hinted at a single attraction in the matters they were meant to advertise. Mentioned places of business, that was all. Nothing but the barest mention. For instance, Caroline, be in the same place at Worrell's sister's performance tonight. White Rose, left Temple, do not fail, dearest Robert. And again, if the gentlemanly manager of the New York Theatre, who was smiled upon by a lady in the dress circle last night, and who was generously befriended by him in Philadelphia two years ago, will approach the footlights again tonight, he will recognize her by the lily in the parting of her hair. And get smiled on again, likely poor devil. Here is the third. The lady who left a pair of gloves at Mrs. Mills' memorial balm and bust elevator establishment, Washington Place, can have them returned by calling or sending a dress. I will bet a million dollars, seller ten, no deposit, that that advertisement read, celebrated memorial, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, originally, and the herald people scratched it out. That worried Mrs. Mills, no doubt, it must have made the old bust elevator feel a little humiliated. Which reminds me that I have not been through the memorial bust establishments yet. I must make a note of that. I might as well go there and get busted as anywhere else. The sick kind of personals are very frequent. For instance, this. Oh, dear, how anxious I am to hear from you. W. D'Angelo. And this. Henry, don't kill me. Remember, Fourth Avenue car runs all night. Sweet Kate. That is suggestive, to say the least. She don't want to be killed, but if he is determined to do it, why, he knows where she puts up, and the Fourth Avenue car offers every facility for murder. And how is this? H. Have recovered from accident. We'll see you at the old place in 13th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues on Friday at half-past four, rain or shine. Emma Francis W. She calls it an accident. Well, accidents will happen, even in the best regulated families, but this is the usual style, and altogether the most nauseating. 6 p.m. Bleaker Street car, up from Fulton Ferry. Will the lady who was embarrassed in making change and was kindly assisted by a gentleman whom she smiled upon and who smiled upon her and bowed when she got out, please address Harold, Harold Office, stating where an interview may be had. There seems to be a pack of wooden-headed louts about this town who fall in love with every old strumpet who smiles a flabby smile at them in a street-car, and, fourth with, they pop a personal into the Harold, beseeching an interview—a favour they could have had with infinitely less circumlocution if they were half as full of gab as they are of self-complacency. And behold, if a respectable woman dares to look at one of these by accident, or to see if he has got hind legs and a brass collar on, up comes the inevitable personal, with a lot of stuff in it about the lady who kindly took notice of a gentleman, and so forth and so on, and the equally inevitable supplication for an interview. Perdition catch these welps! But how is this one? Mr. William F. Lawler, late-landsman U.S. Navy, will call at 271 Broadway to receive some money—Chipman, Hosmer and Company. That has got a very comfortable ring about it, after all, that gruel and nonsense. Is only a landsman in the Navy yet they call him Mr. Lawler? That appears to me to suggest that Lawler is to receive something more than a month's back wages. These Broadway firms do not call a plebeian Mr. without due and sufficient cause. And here is a sad one. It tells its own story. Mary, come back home, and all will be forgiven. My old heart is breaking. Your mother." Many a New Yorker is proof against the seductions of the cable's dispatches, but none of them can resist the Herald's personal. The Philadelphia Commercial List says that California will have exported 230,000 tons of flour and wheat during the statistical year which will end on the 30th of next month. This sounds like an astonisher to me, and I guess on the whole it isn't so. I know that California has been shipping flour to the States ever since I landed here, and I know, also, that I have heard four or five bakers and restaurant people say that they preferred California flour to any other, but when we come to talk about such figures as those I have quoted, I have to confess that I think someone has been imposing upon that Philadelphia paper. If that were all flour instead of flour and wheat, it would make two million and three hundred thousand barrels. I wish the statement were correct, because there is a fine opening here for flour, and I would like to see California prosper, and besides, they cut their bread mighty thin in New York, and I would like it if something could induce them to liberalize the slices some. Hotels. Flour brings me easily and comfortably to the subject of hotels. New York has inaugurated a new fashion in the way of hotels, at least it is new for America. She has adopted the European system. Room in the house, and eat where you please. If you choose to eat in the hotel very well, ring for a servant, specify the dishes you want for breakfast, and by the time you are washed and dressed it will be on the table. And in the cheerfulest breakfast-room you can imagine, too. Not a great public square in the second story, with an army of hyenas camped round you, grinding bones and clattering spoons and forks, but an elegant little apartment, richly furnished, glistening with burnished silverware and bright warm colors, a few little round tables clad in snowy cloths and garnished like a jeweler's window, and everything quiet and gentile and orderly. And you are on the main floor, too, and close to beautiful plate-glass windows, only one pane to the whole side of the house. I stretched it a little, then, and you can read your paper and sip your coffee and look out at the fellows caught far from home in the rain, and enjoy it ever so much. That is the style. It is costly, but it is comfortable, prodigiously comfortable. The great caravan hotels do an immense transient business—try to get a room at one of them, if you doubt it—but when a man of good sound judgment gets ready to settle down and live and be happy, he goes to one of the dozen little palaces kept on the European plan. Personal. I have got a flattering lot of invitations to lecture before various and sundry literary societies, but I have to forego the pleasure—and what is more, the profit—of complying, because literary contracts have got to be fulfilled, and I have got rather more of that kind of work. Together with laying in cider and other supplies for the Mediterranean, then I can get through with anyhow between this and the eighth of June. End of Section 84. This is Section 85 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 85, Alta, California, July 7, 1867. New York. May 20, 1867. For Christians to read. I was to have gone with a detective policeman through all the underground dens of vice and rascality in the five points, and other and still more infamous localities of New York last night, but orders from headquarters employed the officer otherwise, and we had to put off the expedition until next Saturday night. So, as human nature delights and contrasts, and I have considerable human nature in me, I thought I would go through one of the chief among the fountain heads of civilization in this great city, if not the chief, and then compare today's experiences with next Saturdays and see which I like best. I wandered through the great Bible House for nearly three hours today, in company with one of its officers, and without meaning to be irreverent, I can say that I enjoyed the time more than I could possibly have done in any circus. The Bible House is a huge, handsome brick structure five stories high, and fills up one small block by itself. It was built by the American Bible Society, out of funds secured by special donation for that particular purpose, and therefore the association's regular finances were in no way concerned in the matter. The American Bible Society is fifty years old, having been organized in 1816. Its first president was Elias Boldenot of New Jersey, and its seventh and present president is James Lennox of New York. Its business is to translate, print, publish, and distribute Bibles to all the nations of the earth, and at cost price, no penny being made on any volume. They print the Bible now in nearly fifty different languages and dialects. Some of these lingoes are curious enough. For instance, they print Bibles in the Arawak, South America, Hawaiian, Hindu, Hindi, Urdu, Zulu, the Sheik, the Hindustani, the Tamil, the Telugu, Creoleese, the Syriac, the Arabic, Micronesian Islands, the Estonian, the Bihar, and so on. The Benga, the Grebo, Fucao Colloquial, and Mandarin Colloquial, and the Armeno Turkish, and now are stereotyping Bibles to print in Slavonic and also the ancient Bulgarian. The Arabic plates, now being prepared under the supervision of the translator, Reverend Dr. Van Dyke, will give the Bible to a hundred and twenty millions of people. When I tell you that over a million Bibles a year are now printed in the Bible-house, and that a large portion of these are for our private home consumption, and that the supply cannot possibly be kept up to the demand with all their immense facilities, you will easily understand that while this is the case with our little forty millions of population, it would hardly be worthwhile to try to supply those thirsty myriads of Arabs with the water of life without outside help. So the society are making electrotype plates for the Bible-house, also for the establishment in Beirut, and also for the British society in London. When they all get started, then let the Arabs stand from under. Now I will give you another dose of languages in which the Bible is printed at the Bible-house and its branches. Modern Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Turkish, Maratha, Armenian, Gujarati, some kind of Irish I suppose, Sanskrit, Portuguese, Persian, Siamese, Mele, Buggis, Dayak, Japanese, Marquesas, Pongwe, Dikele, Zulu-Kafir, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Assage, Ojibre, Ottawa, Seneca, Abeneke, Sioux, or Dakota, Pony, and three languages in Oregon. On the first floor of the building is the Bible Society's library. It is very extensive, and appropriately enough there isn't a solitary thing in it but Bibles. I shall send them a copy of my book so as to make a little variety. In that library they have got Bibles in every tongue that was spoken at the Tower of Babel, and some that have been invented since, and Bibles in all sorts of crooked characters, Bibles in raised letters for the blind, and even Bibles in shorthand. It makes a man cross-eyed to go through it. I suppose next they will get up a Bible loud enough for the deaf and dumb to use. They have got Bibles there which were printed when Caxton was an apprentice, and other Bibles, Hebrew rolls on vellum, musty and yellow with age, that may have been used in Solomon's Temple. Who shall be able to say they were not? But the Hansonist of all are the beautiful Arabic and Armenian Bibles, beautiful as Italian script. The Armenian ones have been compared with fine manuscripts in the Aster Library, 800 years old, and found to be a know-wise inferior to them in execution. The Arabs consider it profanation to put their language in vulgar print for a Bible, but the Arabic Bible I have mentioned so fascinates them by its wonderful elegance that they gracefully yield and eagerly read it. And in truth, born Christian as I am, it fascinated me rather more than the old regular Bible I am accustomed to does. I have got an Arabic Bible, and it has its little drawbacks, but it has its advantages too, because you have to begin at the fag end of it and read it backwards and left-handed. It was a sort of a fresh new sensation to see the last end of the Good Book, because I hadn't been there before for some time. Sift out the nonsense and go after the wholesome facts. I have necessarily got to comment some. Since its organisation, the American Bible Society has printed and distributed 22,640,404 Bibles, and the British Society in London, 12 years older, has printed and distributed 50 million. The two societies work a good deal together, and together they have sent out over 70 million Bibles. And now at this day, with the demands from the old regular quarters, fearfully augmenting all the time, comes this new Arabic contract for about 100 million more, and when they are fully underway with China, I suppose there will be a call for three times as many more. Has the world gone mad after Bibles? It looks like it. Suppose the descendants of the sacred historians still held the copyrights. Dividends? The war brought the Bible House an immense business, a prodigious business added to the already colossal labours of the Bible House presses. The Christian Commission ordered and distributed to rebels, freedmen, and United States soldiers 1500,000 Bibles. And during the pressure of 1863, 64, and part of 65, the Bible House printers turned out, all bound and ready for shipment, 10 Bibles a minute. It looks large. It is 6,000 a day, counting 10 hours to the day. But with their present increased facilities, they turn out 5,000 a day and do not run late at night. They had to go night and day then, however, and probably produce 10,000 or 12,000 a day. They have got to go to working harder than ever now, though, because orders flow in faster than their 19 great Adam's Steam presses can print the books. And yet the society has branches in Germany, India, China, Beirut, everywhere almost, whose presses are chattering all the time. The departments. 250 women and 150 men, 400 operatives in all, are employed in the Bible House. In the fifth story I found all sorts of compositors setting type in all manner of barbarous languages. Among them, the Reverend Father Agapius, a Cossack by birth, and a priest of the Greek Church, was setting up the Gospels in tangled up Arabic type. A printed page of his work looks like ever so many elegant fishing worms out on a spree. A Circassian, a scholar of mighty learning, and in former times a soldier of the Emperor Nicholas Bodyguard, was setting up the Bible in Russian. In a room close by, Reverend Dr. Van Dyke was reading proofs of the Arabic Bible. Japs and Indians and Kanakas all around. In a great hall adjoining, vast piles of paper were being wet down for the presses. In a small room on the same floor, they were making matrices and molding Arabic type. One man can mold about a thousand an hour. They have to have 1,100 matrices for the Arabic characters. Our alphabet and accompanying points only requires about fifty. Fancy an Arab printer prowling around through a case with 1,100 boxes in it and hoping to live the allotted years of man. Still, on this fifth floor, is a huge room with nineteen large atoms, steam presses, all manned by women, for them confounded pretty too. Snatching off Bibles in Dutch, Hebrew, yam-yam, Cherokee, etc., at a rate which it was truly fructifying to contemplate. I don't really know the meaning of that word, but I heard it used somewhere yesterday and it struck me as being an unusually good word. Any time that I put in a word that doesn't balance the sentence good, I would be glad if you would take it out and put in that one. Adjoining was another huge room for drying the printed sheets, very pretty girls in there too, and young, and pressing them, the sheets not the girls. They use hydraulic presses. The three prettiest of them wore curls and never a sign of a waterfall—the girls, I mean. And each of them is able to come down with the almost incredible weight of 800 tons of solid Simon-pure pressure—the hydraulics I am referring to now, of course—and one has got blue eyes and both of the others brown. Ah, me! I have got this hydraulic business tangled a little, but I can swear it is no fault of mine. You needn't go to blaming me about it. You have got to pay for this letter just the same as if it were as straight as a shingle. I can't afford to go into dangerous places and then get my wages docked into the bargain. On the fifth floor is, likewise, the electrotyping department—nobody but men in there. On the fourth floor is the immense folding room—eighty girls there—some of them very pretty—folding book sheets at the rate of over five thousand forms a day apiece. Book folding is one of the most interesting operations I ever witnessed. I stayed there about four hours and a half. In the next room was the gathering department—a woman stands inside of a long oval pen, the top of which looks enough like a bar counter to rivet the interest of even the most thoughtless. On this counter are laid piles of folded chapters of the Bible side by side—piles of the books of Esau, Isaac, and Jacob, Matthew, Mark, and Genesis—chapter one, two, and three, and so on—each chapter to itself. And that woman shins around inside of that counter and snakes off a chapter from each pile as fast as a printer picks up types, and before you could ask her out to drink, she has stacked up a complete Bible straight through from Exodus to Deuteronomy. It went ahead of anything that I ever saw. There were about a dozen of these book-stackers in as many pens, but they don't allow outsiders to go in the pens. You have to stay on your side of the fence and keep your hands off. And when a Bible is properly stacked together it is pressed in another lot of those same hydraulic arrangements—1,300 tons pressure—and conveyed to the adjoining stitching room, where, of course, the volumes are stitched together, and where you don't see anything but waterfalls, waterfalls, waterfalls. They don't turn round when you pass through—that is, only in a very general sort of way. On the third floor was the place where they put the covers on the books. Next to it was the room where they put on the gold leaf in the rough, and in another room they add the gorgeous finishing touches with all sorts of furnaces and complicated instruments. And down on the second floor was the repository—dead loads of books all piled up ready for shipment to all quarters of the globe. On the first story is the packing and shipping department, sales rooms, offices, library, convention room of the society officers, and so on. The Bible House is a wonderful institution, truly. It turns out the cheapest books in America and the most of them. You can buy a Bible there of any size, from a flagstone down to a cake of soap, and buy it cheaper than you can let it alone, too. Their highest-priced Bible, a splendid affair in Morocco on exquisite paper, beautiful letterpress and gilt edges, is sold at $14—worth $40 if anybody else published it—and they will sell you a complete Bible well-bound in sheep for forty-five cents. Therefore why need men be ignorant of the word? The great city of New York has within her limits no institution she has more reason to be proud of than this colossal Bible association. I had almost forgotten to mention that the heavy pressure now crowding the presses is occasioned by unlimited orders from the south. The orders are received faster than they can be filled. They appear to have run pretty short of Bibles down there, especially among the freedmen. The freedmen are literally voracious for Bibles. They are feeding them upon shiploads of St. John now, till they can get ahead far enough with the presses to let loose a freshet of New Testament's entire upon them. Missionary business. While I am on this religious subject—I might as well make a clean deal of it, I suppose—there are thousands of Christians on the Pacific Coast, and they will read it. I don't write for the sinful altogether. In the Bible House are the headquarters of the American Church Missionary Society, the Children's American Church Missionary Society, and the Evangelical Knowledge Society. The object of the American Church Missionary Society is to send preachers around wherever they may be needed. It was established in 1860 and is a creation of the evangelical portion of the Protestant Episcopal Church. A yearly membership in it costs $3, and a life membership $100. A donation of $500 lifts a man to the dignity of patron. Admiral DuPont was president of the Society at the time of his death. Jay Cook holds the office now. George D. Morgan is treasurer. Reverend Franklin S. Rising, well known and esteemed in California and Nevada, is financial secretary and general agent. Office Three Bible House, where orders for missionaries will be attended to with promptness and dispatch, either in small lots or by the cargo. The latter preferred, of course. At present the Society is engaged only in supplying orders for home consumption. However, the facilities afforded by the government for exporting duty-free may induce them to enlarge their business and embark in the foreign trade to some extent hereafter. The Society publishes a monthly pamphlet, periodical, called the American Church Missionary Register, priced $0.50 a year. She used to be issued sometimes every now and then, sometimes bimonthly, and occasionally seldom, but they have got her regulated down to a monthly now, and they can depend on her. She don't misfire any more. Mr. Rising edits her, and she is a credit to him. I do not write for her, but would, if so requested. Her circulation is extending rapidly. She has added nearly 3,000 paid subscribers to her lists in the last five months. The receipts of the Society, the first year, were $4,000. Last year they were $50,000. This year, from last October to the end of this month of May, they put up $67,000. It is good stock. Mr. Rising got up the Children's American Missionary Society himself, and it is flourishing. A yearly membership costs $0.50, and a life membership $10. To each is given an exquisite chromolithographic certificate worth double the money. Every three months a children's illustrated paper is issued, and forwarded to the members of the Society gratis. The membership is immense, naturally enough, because nothing pleases a child so much as to be a member of something or other. Your rightly constituted child don't care shucks what it is, either. I joined the cadets of temperance once, when I was a boy. That was an awful taken. No smoking, or anything allowed. Not even any bad language. But they had beautiful red scarves. I stood at three months, and then sidled out. I liked the red scarves well enough, but I could not stand the morality. But, as I was saying about this Children's Missionary Society, Bishop Lee of Iowa is the President of it, they just turn out the Society every now and then for drill and to recruit, and the young people come forward in armies. They filled Steinway's Hall here on the 24th of April. On the 17th of May they filled Concordia Building in Baltimore, and on the 18th they crammed the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. And what do they do? Sing. Sing like all possessed. Two thousand voices in chorus. They sing, and they join the Society. And they badger their parents for pennies to contribute. Because, you know, a child likes to contribute to things. I know about these things, because when I was young I never could keep a cent. I used to bet it away on the missionaries and come home broke every Sunday regularly. And so with these children. It is well. The pennies come from their fathers, and go to a good and worthy cause instead of being spent for liquors and other luxuries. There is good sense in it. These unthinking children, however that is a slander, for I believe they do think some and feel more heartily, and take a warmer, hotter interest in their benevolent enterprises than the large majority of adults do, are doing much to send the gospel abroad into the waste places of the land, and will do vastly more yet, for this flourishing new society is nothing, either in numbers, ability or influence, to what it will be a few years hence. Come, do your share towards moving it along. Now I have got down to the Evangelical Knowledge Society. How these societies slather the syllables around, don't they? If the prodigal son's fortune consisted of seven jointed words, he could have come to New York and run through his property precious soon putting up names for religious societies. I haven't got the half of that name up there. I couldn't recollect it. The object of the society is to publish and distribute books and all sorts of tracks for the use of the Evangelical something or other. My notes are blurred. But the books are for the use of the church. The people I am writing for will understand what I mean. I am rusty on these matters, but I am doing the best I can. Reverend Dr. Dwyer is Secretary of the Society. The organization is twenty years old, and during that time has printed and published some six hundred different works, large editions of each. It publishes the Book of Common Prayer in several different sizes, and also a book called the Mission Service, which is a prayer book with a church service attached, and is intended for the use of struggling communities in out-of-the-way places where people become unfamiliar with the routine of the service. Last year the Society issued ten thousand five hundred copies of the prayer book and ten thousand copies of the Mission Service. They began to publish these books eight years ago, and since that time they have issued over a hundred and forty thousand copies of the former and a hundred thousand of the latter. This Society works in harmony with the American Church Missionary Society, and Dr. Dyer is corresponding Secretary for both. One association sends out the printed word, and the other forwards a man to preach it. The particular institution I am writing about publishes a couple of monthly periodicals, the parish visitor for adults, and the standard bearer for children. Their combined circulation reach somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty thousand copies. The total cash receipts of the Society last year from all sources were forty thousand dollars. I believe I am done. I haven't had such a moral siege for a year. I will now go out and blackguard somebody till I begin to feel natural again. P.S. I am growing more worthy every day. I have mailed to Father Damon in the Sandwich Islands, the Hawaiian history I stole from him a year ago. Everywhere I have been here in the States the papers have mentioned my arrival in complementary terms, and then published that crime against me so as to put the hotel-keepers on their guard, I suppose. The consequence was I haven't been able to carry off a solitary spoon yet, but I have yielded to the pressure and sent the book home. The Blind Asylum I was loafing around that part of town this afternoon and stumbled upon it. I recognized it in a moment. I went out there once when I was stopping near the City Hall thirteen years ago. It was a great journey then, those two and a half miles, and my recollection of it is that the place was isolated and had a seeming as of belonging to the country rather than to the city. It is in the heart of the town now, though, and is walled in with elegant brownstone dwellings of the first class. It was unruly to admit me, today, because it was not visiting day, but they let me in because I was a newspaper reptile and a stranger. A young woman, quick of gesture and speech, and a nimble walker, conducted me through the school rooms, music rooms, work rooms, map rooms, chapel, sleeping wards, dining room, factories, and so forth, and I never suspected that she was blind until it was all over. She was not entirely blind, but she might as well have been. They said she would not run over a chair in daylight because she would detect a dark shape in her way, though she would not be able to say what it was without feeling it. And this reminds me that throughout that large establishment everything that one could run over seemed carefully kept out of the way. I watched a dozen boys weaving mats, some on looms and some by hand. They worked fast and with decision, and as they generally seemed to look at what they were doing, I could not feel satisfied somehow that they were sightless. We stopped at the foot of a stairway, and the girl told me to go up and see the boys making brooms. I went up softly and stood on the landing without having made a noise. The workmen were noisy, and all were gossiping freely and chafing each other. Presently one of them, half a dozen steps in front of me and with his back to me, leaned over and looked intently at some object at the other end of the room and also seemed to be listening. Then he shook his head and fell to work again. Presently he took another long look, and then went softly and spoke to his neighbors, and then stopped talking. So did they all a moment after. And I said to myself, surely this fellow sees me in a mirror somewhere, though I don't see one. I felt like a detected eavesdropper, however, and went up and asked him what he had been looking at. At you, he said. But you looked almost in the opposite direction from where I was, I said. He smiled and made no reply. I spoke to the girl about the matter when I went down, and she said he probably could see a little out of the extreme back corner of his eye, but was blind to all objects before or beside him. She said such a case was not unusual. In another place I talked some time with three women and a man who were making hair mattresses, and I thought they were gifted with sight. The fact is, one needs to be reminded all the time that he is among blind folks. Their dreadful eyes shock him once, and after that he looks at those organs no more. And so there is nothing left save a stoop in the shoulders, a painful one-sided twist in the face, and a sort of sideways inclination of the head to suggest to him that there is something unusual of the matter with these people. But at the same time these things need not necessarily suggest to him that their trouble is blindness. They walk about the rooms freely, go from place to place, and lean over and speak to each other, and yet never grope or hesitate or stumble or bump their heads. They act a good deal as other people do. We went into a room where fifteen or twenty girls from nine years to sixteen were making little fancy bead baskets and such things. Most of them were cheerful and chatty, but some looked very sober and were silent. One or two looked sad, I thought, and one child, sitting by a window, with her tedious basket in one hand half finished, had dropped her head upon her arm and forgotten all her troubles in slumber. Those little ornamental open-work baskets look simple enough, but when you come to understand how they are made, and how the little wire must wind its devious course and be passed many times through the same mustard seed of a bead, you comprehend that the workmanship is wearisome and intricate. One girl had arrived at a point in her labours where the wire had travelled its course many times through the handles and sides and top and bottom, and had to be thrust for the fourth time through a tiny bead. And every time she tried she failed. The wire bent or the bead slipped, or something else happened that prevented the consummation. But patiently and without a word, the girl tried and tried again, and in anxiety and tribulation I watched the operation, and my spirits rose as she almost succeeded, and fell again when the cursed bead slipped. And when at last she did get it through, I wanted to give a good round three cheers with a will. In another part of the house, a dozen or so of blind young ladies were knitting all manner of elaborately-figured tidies and such things. One of them was pretty, the only pretty girl I saw, except the wide-awake one at the office down below who admitted me. It seemed strange to me that nature should have so sorely afflicted these unfortunate girls, and then made them so fearfully and wonderfully homely into the bargain—a thing in itself which the sex hold in proper horror. The knitters were talking with all their might, and seemed perfectly jolly and contented—at least the majority of them did—but it didn't cheer me up a particle. It was the saddest place I ever got into. I don't mind blind boys—they ought all to be blind for that matter, and deaf and dumb, and lame and halt and paralyzed, and shaken up by earthquakes and struck by lightning—just to make them behave themselves, you know—but I felt so sorry for those girls. They could not see the sun, or the moon, or the ocean, the green trees, or the flowers, the gilded clouds, or the rainbow. They could not even see the faces they loved. It were better to be dead and buried. They seemed to be happy, but I could not understand how they managed to come at it. A matron gave a girl a needle in order to show how deftly she could thread it—a girl who was blind as a brick-bat. The needle was a number six, the matron said, and I judged that the thread was about number fourteen—it was thick enough to be. The girl did it, and quickly, then the same service was required at the hands of another girl, and she performed it too, but in an unusual way. She put the end of the needle in her mouth, and worked the thread through the eye with her tongue. The matron said either of them could thread a number ten needle with great facility. I expressed cordial surprise at that, although my admiration was modified some by the fact that I didn't know just what style of a needle a number ten might be. Several methods of teaching the blind to write are used. In some cases the paper is placed upon a board in which groove-like depressions have been made, and these grooves prevent the pen from wandering abroad. But this is but a shabby system at best, because after the poor devil has spent months and years in learning to write, he cannot read his own work when it gets cold, because he cannot see it. A new method has come into vogue in the New York and Missouri asylums, which is in high favor with the blind. By it they learn to write in a few months, and another blind person can read the manuscript easily. It consists in punching a series of letters and signs—they were suggested by the telegraphic signs—with a blunt all. Then they turn the paper over and spell out the sense of the raised perforations with the finger ends. But see how many difficulties the blind have to labor under anyhow. Of course when they turn the paper over to read all the writing is reversed, so the pupil must learn to write one way and read another, must write upside down, and read right side up. Still this new system, which is called the Braille, is immensely popular with these unfortunates. The blind have books to read, of course—books printed on coarse paper in heavy-raised, lowercase, sharply angular letters, no capitals, without ink. They have a Bible in eight monstrous volumes, each one a heavy load for a schoolgirl, and the whole set a cargo for a packmuil. And they have the history of England and of America, but that seems to be about all. The deaf and dumb scholar can smooch a poem or a sensation novel and revel in it in secret, but they have got the blind child in the door. It has to confine itself to the most substantial literature. One of the girls read the ninth chapter of Second Corinthians for me. She spelled the words rapidly with her fingers, and when she came to familiar Biblical words like wherefore, therefore, low, behold, etc., she recognized them with a single nervous touch and went on. She made no mistakes. One room was hung with great maps of all parts of the globe, carved out of wood, with raised knobs for islands, nail heads for cities, veins or grooves for rivers, etc., but no names written anywhere. On a table was a great map of the United States, all sawed to pieces. Each state sawed apart, and the whole put together like a puzzle. A little girl pulled this map to pieces and jumbled the states up like a pile of bricks, and then the young disunionist repented of her work and quickly reconstructed her country again, did it about as fast as she could pick up the several states, pass her hand across their face and lay them down again. And she mentioned the capital of each state and described its location correctly. I was granted the privilege of questioning her and testing her geographical knowledge, but did not try it. Those blank wooden maps were a little more intelligible to me than a flagstone pavement would have been. Another girl played on the piano and played very sweetly and without any flourishes. They use no written music in the asylum, but are taught bar after bar till they know a piece by heart. It is a tedious process. What blinded them? There are 124 pupils on the books of the asylum, about half boys and half girls. These statistics which show the various causes of their blindness are curious enough, out of 844 blind persons who have been cared for at the asylum, 150 inherited blindness from their parents. The cases of Aptalema No. 196, Amorosis 77, Cataract 21, Smallpox 22, Scarlet Fever 16, Measles 16, Syphilis 19, Malpractice 10, Overdose of Arsenic 1, Vaccination 1, Penknife Wounds 11, Gunshot Wounds 16. Then we have blindness resulting from all sorts of accidents. Blowing glass, blow of an arrow, blow of a stone, blow of a hammer, blast, fall, kick of a horse, looking at the sun, pitchfork wound, run over, sawdust in the eyes, sand in the eyes, silver in the eyes, sting of insect, scissors wound, singing broadcloth, sunstroke, whiplash, vertegris. Singular instances. In two cases repulsive sight seen by mothers caused their infants to be born blind. In one case the mother frequently saw a house servant who had very sore eyes, and in the other the mother looked at the skinned head of a calf with the eyes in it. In both instances the eyes of the children were like those of the objects of dislike. You're a fraud! That is the new word for deadbeat and the other slang expressions used to express the same thing. If any slang term can have a merit, this one has, in that it may succeed in entirely expelling two or three frightful vulgarisms from our dialect as spoken outside of drawing-rooms. Yes, and sometimes in them. You are a fraud! He is a fraud. They are frauds. You hear the term used here every day and at all hours of the day and night. Sometimes drunken men get it. You are a frog! And then it sounds funny. If you cannot get along without adopting eastern slang, adopt this. And if you must invent slang yourselves, invent none that is more repulsive. Soot Loving-Good. It was reported years ago that this writer was dead, accidentally shot in a Tennessee doggery before the war. But he has turned up again, and is a conductor on a railway train that travels somewhere between Charleston, South Carolina and Memphis. His real name is George Harris. I have before me his book, just forwarded by Dick and Fitzgerald, the publishers, New York. It contains all his early sketches that used to be so popular in the West, such as his story of his father, Acton Haas, the lizards in the camp meeting, etc., together with many new ones. The book abounds in humor and is said to represent the Tennessee dialect correctly. It will sell well in the West, but the eastern people will call it course, and possibly taboo it. The Boot Blacks. Sometimes down about the City Hall Park, it does seem to me that every little ragamuffin in New York has bought a brush and a footbox and gone in the boot-blacking business. Black and sir, black and I, shine sir, night shine sir, only five cents! So they assail a man at every step and persecute him from the rising of the sun till the going down thereof. If you give one of them a job, half a dozen of them will crowd around and sit on the ground and see it done and criticize it, and to blackguard each other in a slang that no Christian can understand, and make remarks about the sensation of the day, and speak familiarly and disrespectfully of the gentlemen of the city government, and abuse their stupidity, and drop critiques concerning the Japs, discuss the leaders in the Herald, the Tribune and Times, and even find fault with Mr. Seward's statesmanship and the general conduct of the national government. And notice that they usually speak of great personages as old Seward, old Johnson, etc. It is because these free-sold young black guards scorn to be respectful to anything or anybody. After they have got through discussing the new Russian possession purchase, they fall to pitch in pennies and engaging in other disreputable species of gambling and combine business with it as before, in the matter of persecuting pastors by. I saw a sign on a house in an obscure street yesterday which read, Boot Black Brigade Chapel, and found out that some well-meaning enthusiast is in the habit of drumming a lot of these gammons to New York together two or three times a week, and preaching to them and praying for them under the extraordinary impression that he can save their souls. I certainly wish him well, but I bet nothing on his success. I went in and found a preacher earnestly exhorting about two hundred of the ratious lot of little outlaws that any city can produce. Most of the time they listened pretty intently, but critically—always critically, for behold, the Boot Black is nothing if not critical. Part of what the preacher said they seemed to receive as square and proper enough, and part they seemed to receive under mild protest. But when he said that Lazarus was brought to life after he had been dead three days, there was a pretty general telegraphing of incredulity from eye to eye about the assemblage, and one boy, with a shock of head and rags all over to match, nudged his neighbor and said in a coarse whisper, I don't go that build you, because he'd stink, wouldn't he? And when the preacher told how the five thousand were miraculously fed with twelve loaves and several little fishes, a boy said, Say, Jimmy, do you suck that? Well, I don't know. I might have been, maybe, if they weren't many of them hungry. I'd seen the time, though, when I could have at them twelve loaves myself, I could, less than they was busters. And so they criticized all the while, and cast disrepute upon every statement that seemed a little shaky to them, and the longer I stayed the less confidence I had in the speculation of trying to get material for salvation out of the Boot Black Brigade. I attended the old Bowery Theatre in the evening, and there, in the pit, I found the whole tribe. I suppose there were three hundred of them present, closely packed together in their rags and dirt, and the way they guide the actors and criticize the performance was interesting. They applauded all the ranting passages furiously, and hurled uncompromising scorn and contempt upon the sentimental ones. I asked one of them what he thought of the leading man as an actor. Oh, he ain't no force. You ought to hear Proctor. Oh, Jimmy, why, you can hear Proctor from here to Central Park when he lays himself out in the Richard Third. Up in the fifth tier, the gallery, there was a multitude of Negroes, and a sprinkling of Boot Blacks and women of the town. There was a bar up there, and two of the women came forward and asked us to treat. The Boot Black, who had just blacked my boots and perhaps felt a personal interest in my welfare on that account, tipped at me a wink of wonderful complexity and mystery, and I went and asked him to translate it. He said, You keep away from them women. I've been around here four years, and I know all about them. Don't you go nowhere with that curly-headed one? Nor tell the one either. They'd go through you for everything you've got. That's their style. You ask any cop—policemen. They'll tell you. Why, that curly girl's rid in the Black Maria. Conveyance for prisoners. Often her she's rid in the street-cars. And don't you touch that liquor in there. Don't tell anybody I told you, because they'd heist me out of this, you know. But don't you drink that Dern Swipes. It's pison. I thanked the philosopher for his advice and followed it. The Boot Blacks and news boys, who did not happen to be present at the play, were all outside in front of the theatre, I think. There were dozens of them, all holding out their hands for checks, when we started home between the acts. We delivered up hours, and a noisy, struggling scramble ensued for their possession. They are a wild, lawless, independent lot, those Boot Blacks and street boys, and would make good desperado stuff to stock a new mining-camp with. Boot Black Scripturist. It was a cultivated Boot Black, a Boot Black who had attended the chapel I spoke of above, and become learned, in sacred history and felicitous, in explaining and expounding it, who so happily accounted for the absence of all apparent fear on the part of both Daniel and the lion, in a picture representing the prophet in the den. Another Boot Black could not understand what it was that gave both so much confidence, could not understand what made each seem so serenely indifferent to the other. This wise boy explained it. He said, Hmm, the lion don't give a damn for Daniel, and Daniel don't give a damn for the lion. Both of them relies on the protection of Providence. End of Section 86. This is Section 87 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. Section 87, Alta, California, July 21, 1867. New York, May 26, 1867. The Sex in New York. Editor's Alta. They do not treat women with as much deference in New York as we of the provinces think they ought. This is painfully apparent in the street-cars. Authority winks at the overloading of the cars, authority being paid for so winking in political influence, possibly, for I cannot bring myself to think that any other species of bribery would be entertained for a moment. Authority, I say, winks at this outrage, and permits one car to do the work of at least two, instead of compelling the companies to double the number of their cars, and permits them also to cruelly overwork their horses too, of course, in the face of the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. The result of this overcrowding is to set the people back along stride toward semi-civilization. What I mean by that dreadful assertion is that the overcrowding of the cars has impelled men to adopt the rule of hanging on to a seat when they get it, though twenty beautiful women came in and stood in their midst. That is going back toward original barbarism, I take it. A car's proper cargo should be twenty-two inside and three upon each platform, twenty-eight, and no crowding. I have seen fifty-six persons on a car here, but a large portion of them were hanging on by the teeth. Some of the men inside had to go four or five miles, and naturally enough did not like to give up their seats and stand in a packed mass of humanity all that distance. So, when a lady got in, no man offered her a seat. No man dreamt of doing such a thing. No citizen, I mean. Occasionally I have seen a man, under such circumstances, get up and give his place to a lady, but the act betrayed, like spoken words, that he was from the provinces. I have seen negroes sitting stuck up comfortably in a car and lovely young white ladies standing up before them, block after block, clinging to the leather supports that depended from the roof, and then I wanted a contraband for breakfast. When I am with the Romans I try to do as the Romans do. I generally succeed reasonably well. I have got so that I can sit still and let a homely old maid stand up and nurse her poodle till she is ready to drop, but the young and the blooming, alas, are too many for me. I have to get up and vacate the premises when they come. Someday, though, maybe I shall acquire a New York fortitude and be as shameless as any. The other day an ill-bred boy in a streetcar refused to give up his seat to a lady. The conductor very properly snatched him out and seated the lady. Consequence, Justice Dowling fined that conductor a month's wages, sixty dollars, and read him a lecture worth sixty dollars more. Now I think that was shameful. I think that was perfectly shameful, if the lady was young and beautiful, and it was just as shameful if the woman was old and feeble too, no doubt. In other cities men make way for women to their own discomfort but complain that they get no thanks for it, not even a smile or a bow, but they don't make way here. I suppose the sex in New York have learned by hard experience how to value a concession from a strange gentleman. They thank one in unmistakable terms for such a kindness, even at the risk of being called on for a personal interview through the Herald's personals the next day for it. A lady must not so far forget herself as to kindly notice a human puppy in a streetcar here if she does not want to figure in the personals. Now I hate to say it, but women even have to stand up in omnibuses here when those vehicles are overcrowded, especially if she be so dead to all principle as to be sinfully homely. New York is fast arriving at a state of things. That is my opinion. I have no business to express it perhaps, and I may get myself in trouble by it, but I care not, even though I perish. I shall still say it, and stick to it, that this town is arriving at a state of things, and in that day what will become of the wretched place? Verily no man knoweth. Harris. Well, surely there is no accounting for things in this world. It is published that Harris, his excellency, C.C. Harris of Honolulu, is to visit Washington as a sort of envoy extraordinary to engineer a reciprocity treaty between the Hawaiian government and ours. I have got to call on Harris. I owe it to my country to do it. I must conjure Harris by the new dignity that has been conferred upon him of the grand cross of the legion of something or other, and by this other dignity of being by far the most extraordinary envoy extraordinary that ever was created by any government history hath mentioned, and by the love and the respect he once bore this land of his nativity, before he was born again as a royalty worshipping Kanaka, not to lay his unsanctified hand upon anything here that he can't carry. It is his unhappy instinct to gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble up and carry off, whether it be to gouge native chiefs, or seek distinction on high as an elder in Bishop Staley's Church and pass around the hat, oh, blind and deluded congregation that would trust him with it, or grab all the heavy offices, from minister of finance down to attorney general by brevet, and try to run the whole Hawaiian government by himself—his instinct is the same, and it is always to gobble. So I must warn him. And he must not swell around Washington and make eloquent speeches that seem to be splendid flights of oratory, but won't stand a fire assay for sense, and won't wash for coherence either, because we have got people in Congress who are just as good as he is at that, and so he won't attract any attention. I must tell him to mind his own business, to mind his reciprocity treaty, and keep his hands off the things. If he does his work just exactly as he wants to do it, and as only his tireless industry and his marvelous cheek can do it, he can succeed in clinching a treaty that will make American interests very sick in the Sandwich Islands. The herald's Honolulu correspondence of this morning rather warns Congress to look out for Harris, and I am inclined to think the warning was very well put in, and would find an echo from every American in the islands. I still continue in my set opinion that Harris won't do. That singular shipwreck. Californians talk wickedly about the beaching of the Santiago de Cuba a day or two ago, and the passengers by that ship are loud in their denunciations of the mismanagement that caused that accident. They say it is on record that the Santiago had a narrow escape off Hatteras, and actually touched bottom, and further that she touched on her two preceding trips. Some say that Captain Bem was drunk. All agree that the ship was running a curious course, considering that the weather was foggy, and that there was considerable room in the Atlantic Ocean further eastward, and no shoals to imperil her. The Captain himself says that the ship was steering a proper course, but that an unknown current must have carried her in those nineteen miles from where she ought to have been. A miss is as good as a mile, that we all know, but it is questionable whether a miss is as good as nineteen miles. They say the Captain was below, drunk, and not attending to his business. Part of that charge is rather far-fetched, because the accident occurred out of the Captain's watch, and at a time when he had a right to be below, or in bed, or anywhere else he pleased. I suppose the ship's log will show where the vessel was at noon, and the course she was put upon at eight in the evening, and every few hours in the night, so if there was anything wrong about the direction the Captain ordered that she should be steered, it is easy to determine it. I sailed with Captain Ben in the San Francisco, from Greytown to New York, and saw a good deal of him. I never saw him drunk, or any approach to it. I did see him eternally figuring out his navigation books and charts, though, or looking up his subordinates and keeping them to their duties. It seemed to me at the time that he was a singularly faithful officer, and I know that no one thought of such a thing as feeling concerned for the safety of the ship while she was under his management. What they may say now, however, when he is unfortunate, is another matter. I have talked with several of the Santiago's passengers, but of course no satisfactory solution of the problem of this curious accident could be arrived at. I expect, though, that if the truth were known, the officer on watch, or the man at the wheel, misunderstood the instructions by a point of the compass, or possibly even a couple of points, and it is also possible that the wheel's man may have been drowsy. It was the sleepiest watch in all the six, and didn't steer by instructions or anything else. A sleepy steersman often gets so far off his course on a sailing vessel that the sails flap in the wind and stir up the heedless officer of the deck, but on a steamer he might drows on for hours if no warning canvas were spread. I hope Captain Bem will come out of this difficulty with a clear record, and somehow I cannot help but think he will. All who have sailed with him would be glad to see him found blameless in this matter. The pressure. Dull times begin to tell. The monstrous rents I spoke of some time ago are diminishing. Mayday told the story. Everybody offered to remain in rented houses and apartments at reduced rates, and were refused, and so everybody moved. Where the mischief they went to nobody knows, but certainly rooms to rent and houses and even stores to let are quite plenty now, whereas they were wonderfully scarce three months ago. Rents of rooms and dwellings have fallen off forty percent since the first of this month of May, and if business does not grow better there must be a still further reduction. Even stores are renting considerably cheaper now than they were before the first inst. For rent and to let are getting to be quite common signs now about the city. Blood. The old Washu instincts that have lain asleep in my bosom so long are waking up again here in the midst of this late and unaccountable freshet of bloodletting that has broken loose in the east. The papers, all of a sudden, are being filled with assassinations, and second-degree murders, and prize fights, and suicides. It is a wonderful state of things. From a careless indifference to such matters I have been roused up to an old time delight in them, and now I have to have my regular suicide before breakfast, like a cocktail, and my side-dish of murder in the first degree for a relish, and my savory assassination to top off with while I pick my teeth and smoke. Breakfast would be insipid now without these condiments. If I were to order a beef steak rare and a murder in the first degree and only got the former, I believe I would have to retire and wait for the evening papers. All the air is filled with blood and crime. In this morning's paper is a suicide, with bloody details, a stabbing affray, a tremendous forgery case, two prize fights, a church robbed, a grave desecrated, a lot of minor crimes, and a continuation of the evidence in the case of Bridget Durgan, who is charged with murdering her mistress some time ago in Jersey. A day or two ago an ex-policeman stepped out from behind a tree-box in a lonely place in Brooklyn, and blew a hole through a worthy citizen with a sinful air-gun, and for ten days we have been assailed with paragraphs charging our detectives with being partners with a gang of thieves and rascals, and helping them commit sundry great crimes, but which it couldn't be, you know. It is a dreadful state of things. I do not know whether I am in the heart of morality and civilization or not. I begin to waver. All things look shaky to me, and I sigh for a holier land. But that Durgan case is a curious one. Mrs. Correll's husband left her at home with her young child and the servant, Bridget Durgan, on a snowy winter's night. Toward midnight neighbors heard sounds of struggling and of beating and banging and smashing of furniture and cries as of someone in mortal distress. They covered up their heads with the bedclothes to shut out these horrid noises. Some took a frightened glance toward Mrs. Correll's house, saw the shadow of figures darting hither and thither, a thwarply window-curtains, and ran, shuttering to bed again. Finally, Bridget, in her stocking-feet and half-dressed, came with a baby in her arms, after all, was still, and called for admission at a house, and said there was trouble at Dr. Correll's. Then she went to a preacher's house, and waited dismally, and they let her in, and she said before she was asked that she believed Mrs. Correll had been murdered. She didn't know, but she thought so, but she didn't know whether the house was on fire or not. She made a pretty good stagger at it in the way of a gas, though, for it had been set on fire by somebody. Bridget sat down in her night-dress, and when she noticed that the astonished preacher was staring at a great splotch of blood as big as two hands upon its front, she quietly rose up and folded that portion under her, and sat down on it. The poor baby's eyes were fixed, and it made no sound. Was scared the preacher's wife thought, well, when the neighbors gathered in Mrs. Correll's house, they found her lying gashed and battered, and sweltering in her blood dead. And the furniture was smashed and turned upside down, and the bed had been saturated with camphine and set on fire and was still burning. The points of bloody fingers were upon the door-facing, fingers that had been cut in three places with a knife, and corresponding wounds were found upon Bridget's fingers. The savage murderer had bitten the dead woman's cheek. The thoughtful preacher took a neat cast of the wound, and afterwards a plaster cast taken of Bridget's teeth was found to be exactly like it, and exactly like nobody's else. Snow was on the ground, and Bridget's shoeless tracks were in it, but not anybody's else. Yet Bridget says two men came at eight in the evening and scared her mistress, and then came later, and her mistress told her to seize the child and run, and she did so, and that is all she knows about the matter. It is in evidence that Bridget is a mild, amiable, well-conducted girl, who loved her mistress and her household, and bore a blameless character among all who knew her. I suppose the world has never produced so strong a case of pure circumstantial evidence against any creature, as is against Bridget Durgan. For mind you, there is none whatever but circumstantial evidence, and will not be as the prosecution has closed its case. And I suppose that stronger evidence of temporary insanity on the part of the accused has seldom been met with, and yet Bridget's counsel announces his intention to prove that she did not commit this murder, is utterly innocent of having had any hand in the killing, and sets this forth as his line of defence. He remotely hints at weak-mindedness or idiocy on her part, and barely mentions her having speculated in fits to some extent, but says never a word about trying to clear her on the ground of insanity. That looks very singular. I don't know how he is going to get around that bite and those teeth, and that bloody hand on the door, and the absence of all tracks going from the house or approaching it, save Bridget's. This line of defence, this claiming of innocence, where a plea of insanity would fit so much better, gives this trial a splendid interest, and all the East will watch it closely to the end. It is perfectly invaluable to me, since I have become so bloodthirsty. Information for the cholera. By an inspector's report for 1864, it was shown that one half the population of New York City, in round numbers five hundred thousand souls, lived in tenement houses, lived in fifteen thousand tenement houses, an average of eight families to a house, though some houses contained fewer, and some swarmed with two or three hundred persons. The city is said to contain over a million inhabitants now, and half of them are packed away in these holes and dens and cellars of tenement houses, where unimaginable dirt is the rule, and cleanliness is a miracle. Would be a miracle, I mean, but they don't have it. They are going to have these tenement houses all whitewashed inside, but that will hardly save the occupants when the cholera comes. It will be here soon, and it will sweep those sinks of corruption like a conflagration. We know how the Telegraph thrilled us every day a year ago, with accounts of the scourging of the Great Plague here, in Cincinnati, St. Louis, and other places. I find now—at least they tell me—that respectable people did not die from it. The term is a hard one, but it describes well. Only the poor, the criminally, sinfully, wickedly poor and destitute starvelings in the perlius of the great cities suffered, died, and were hauled out to the potter's field, the well-to-do were seldom attacked. It seems hard, but truly humiliation, hunger, persecution, and death are the wages of poverty in the mighty cities of the land. No man can say ought against honest poverty. The books lauded. The instructors of the people praise it. All men glorify it and say it hath its reward here and will have it hereafter. Honest poverty is a gem that even a king might feel proud to call his own. But I wish to sell out. I have sported that kind of jewelry long enough, I want some variety. I wish to become rich so that I can instruct the people and glorify honest poverty a little like those good, kind-hearted, fat, benevolent people do. But as I was saying, there is a place here for the cholera, its lodgings are set apart and made ready for it, and in the fullness of time it will enter in and occupy them. It is no need to growl at the government, either state or municipal, about the pestilence-breeding tenement houses, for they cannot help the matter much. They are doing all they can. They are making the landlords go to the expense of whitewashing the tenement houses throughout, and when the landlord has done that he will gently raise the rent, and that will raise some of the tenants out, and then how much better off will they be? The cholera will follow them to the street. Personal R. L. Ogden Poggers San Francisco correspondent of the New York Times arrived here yesterday from Panama and is at the Metropolitan. Also, Johnny Ske and many other Californians and Washoo people whom I have not yet met. They are all going to Europe, of course. So is everybody else. I am afraid the French language will not be spoken in France much this year. I shall feel mighty sick if, after rubbing up my rusty French so diligently, I have to run the legs off myself skirmishing around Paris, hunting for such a sign as ici on par Français. Marshall, the painter of the famous Lincoln portrait, and the engraver of it also, is hard at work on a portrait of General Grant now, from life. It is to be engraved on copper, and I suppose it will be published by Tickner and Fields, the publishers of the Lincoln picture. End of Section 87