 There was a good deal of pleasant gossip about old Captain Hurricane Jones of the Pacific Ocean piece to his ashes. Two or three of us present had known him, I particularly well, for I had made four sea voyages with him. He was a very remarkable man. He was born on a ship. He picked up what little education he had among his shipmates. He began life in the folksal, and climbed grade by grade to the captaincy. More than fifty years of his sixty-five were spent at sea. He had sailed all oceans, seen all lands, and borrowed a tint from all climates. When a man has been fifty years at sea, he necessarily knows nothing of men, nothing of the world but its surface, nothing of the world's thought, nothing of the world's learning, but its ABC, and that blurred and distorted by the unfocused lenses of an untrained mind. Such a man is only a gray and bearded child. That is what old Hurricane Jones was, simply an innocent, lovable old infant. When his spirit was in repose, he was as sweet and gentle as a girl. When his wrath was up, he was a hurricane that made his nickname seem tamely descriptive. He was formidable in a fight, for he was of powerful build and dauntless courage. He was frescoed from head to heel with pictures and mottos, tattooed in red and blue India ink. I was with him one voyage when he got his last vacant space tattooed. This vacant space was round his left ankle. During three days he stumped about the ship with his ankle bare and swollen, and this legend gleaming red and angry out from a clouding of India ink. Virtue is its own R.D. There was a lack of room. He was deeply and sincerely pious and swore like a fishwoman. He considered swearing blameless because sailors would not understand an order unillumined by it. He was a profound biblical scholar, that is, he thought he was. He believed everything in the Bible, but he had his own methods of arriving at his beliefs. He was of the advanced school of thinkers and applied natural laws to the interpretation of all miracles, somewhat on the plan of the people who make the six days of creation, six geological epics, and so forth. Without being aware of it, he was a rather severe satirist on modern scientific religionists. Such a man, as I have been describing, is rabidly fond of disquisition and argument. One knows that without being told it. One trip the captain had a clergyman on board, but he did not know he was a clergyman, since the passenger list did not betray the fact. He took a great liking to this reverend Mr. Peters and talked with him a great deal. Told him yarns, gave him toothsome scraps of personal history, and wove a glittering streak of profanity through his garrulous fabric that was refreshing to a spirit weary of the dull neutralities of undecorated speech. One day the captain said, Peters, do you ever read the Bible? Well, yes. I judge it ain't often, by the way you say it. Now you tackle it in dead earnest once, and you'll find it'll pay. Don't you get discouraged, but hang right on. First you won't understand it, but by and by things will begin to clear up, and then you wouldn't lay it down to eat. Yes, I have heard that said, and it's so too. There ain't a book that begins with it. It lays over them all, Peters. There's some pretty tough things in it. There ain't any getting round that, but you stick to them and think them out, and when once you get on the inside everything's plain as day. The Miracles too, Captain? Yes, sir. The Miracles too. Every one of them. Now there's that business with the prophets of Baal. Like enough that stumped you. Well, I don't know, but I'll own up now. It stumped you. Well, I don't wonder. You hadn't any experience in ravelling such things out, and naturally it was too many for you. Would you like to have me explain that thing to you, and show you how to get at the meat of these matters? Indeed I would, Captain, if you don't mind. Then the Captain proceeded as follows. I'll do it with pleasure. First you see, I read and read and thought and thought, till I got to understand what sort of people they were in the old Bible times. And then after that it was clear and easy. Now this was the way I put it to you. Concerning Isaac, note one. This is the Captain's own mistake. And the prophets of Baal. There was some mighty sharp men amongst the public characters of that old ancient day, and Isaac was one of them. Isaac had his failings, plenty of them too. It ain't for me to apologize for Isaac. He played a cold deck on the prophets of Baal, and like enough he was justifiable, considering the odds that was against him. No, all I say is to want any miracle, and that I'll show you, so you can see it yourself. Well, times had been getting rougher and rougher for prophets, that is, prophets of Isaac's denomination. There were 450 prophets of Baal in the community, and only one Presbyterian. That is, if Isaac was a Presbyterian, which I reckon he was, but I don't say. Naturally the prophets of Baal took all the trade. Isaac was pretty low-spirited, I reckon. But he was a good deal of a man, and no doubt he went a-prophesying around, letting on to be doing land off his business. But to want any use, he couldn't run any opposition to amount to anything. By and by things got desperate with him. He sets his head to work and thinks it all out, and then what does he do? Why, he begins to throw out hints that the other parties are this and that and other. Nothing very definite, maybe, but just kind of undermining their reputation in a quiet way. This made talk, of course, and finally got to the king. The king asked Isaac what he meant by his talk. He says, Isaac, oh, nothing particular, only can they pray down fire from heaven on an altar? It ain't much, maybe, Your Majesty, only can they do it? That's the idea. So the king was a good deal disturbed, and he went to the prophets of Baal, and they said pretty airy that if he had an altar ready they were ready, and they intimated he better get it ensured, too. So next morning all the children of Israel and their parents and the other people gathered themselves together. Well, here was that great crowd of prophets of Baal packed together on one side, and Isaac walking up and down all alone on the other, putting up his job. When time was called, Isaac led on to be comfortable and indifferent, told the other team to take the first innings. So they went at it, the whole four hundred and fifty, praying around the altar very hopefully and doing their level best. They prayed an hour, two hours, three hours, and so on. Plumb till noon. It won't any use. They hadn't took a trick. Of course, they felt kind of ashamed before all those people, and well they might. Now, what would a magnanimous man do? Keep still, wouldn't he? Of course. What did Isaac do? He graveled the prophets of Baal every way he could think of. Says he, You don't speak up loud enough. Your God's asleep like enough, or maybe he's taking a walk. You want a holler, you know? Well, words to that effect. I don't recollect the exact language. Mind, I don't apologize for Isaac. He had his faults. Well, the prophets of Baal prayed along the best they knew how all the afternoon and never raised a spark. It last about sundown. They were all tuckered out, and they owned up and quit. What does Isaac do now? He steps up and says to some friends of his there, Pour four barrels of water on the altar. Everybody was astonished. For the other side had prayed at it dry, you know, and got whitewashed. They poured it on. Says he, Heave on four more barrels. Then he says, Heave on four more. Twelve barrels, you see, altogether. The water ran all over the altar and all down the sides and filled up a trench around it that would hold a couple of hogsheads. Measures, it says. I reckon it means about a hogshead. Some of the people were going to put on their things and go. Were they loud? He was crazy. They didn't know Isaac. Isaac knelt down and began to pray. He strung along and strung along about the heathen and distant lands and about the sister churches and about the state and the country at large, and about those that's in authority in the government and all the usual program, you know, till everybody had got tired and gone to thinking about something else. And then, all of a sudden, when nobody was noticing, he outs with a match and rakes it on the underside of his leg and, pfft, up the whole thing blazes like a house of fire. Twelve barrels of water? Petroleum, sir. Petroleum, that's what it was. Petroleum, captain? Yes, sir. The country was full of it. Isaac knew all about that. You read the Bible. Don't you worry about the tough places. They ain't tough when you come to think them out and throw light on them. There ain't a thing in the Bible, but what is true, all you want is to go prayerfully to work and cipher out how it was done. End of The Captain's Story An End of Segment 25 Of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain The Government in the Frying Pan Here in Vienna, in these closing days of 1897, one's blood gets no chance to stagnate. The atmosphere is brimful of political electricity. All conversation is political. Every man is a battery with brushes overworn and gives out blue sparks when you set him going on the common topic. Everybody has an opinion and lets you have it frank and hot and out of this multitude of counsel you get merely confusion and despair. For no one really understands this political situation or can tell you what is going to be the outcome of it. Things have happened here recently, which would set any country but Austria on fire from end to end and upset the government to a certainty, but no one feels confident that such results will follow here. Here, apparently, one must wait and see what will happen. Then he will know, and not before. Guessing is idle. Guessing cannot help the matter. This is what the wise tell you. They all say it. They say it every day, and it is the sole detail upon which they all agree. There is some approach to agreement upon another point, that there will be no revolution. Men say, Look at our history. Revolutions have not been in our line, and look at our political map. Its construction is unfavorable to an organized uprising, and without unity, what could a revolt accomplish? It is disunion, which has held our empire together for centuries, and what it has done in the past it may continue to do now and in the future. The most intelligible sketch I have encountered of this unintelligible arrangement of things was contributed to the traveller's record by Mr. Forrest Morgan of Hartford three years ago. He says, The Austro-Hungarian monarchy is the patchwork quilt, the midway pleasant, the national chain gang of Europe, a state that is not a nation, but a collection of nations, some with national memories and aspirations, and others without, some occupying distinct provinces almost purely their own, and others mixed with alien races, but each with a different language, and each mostly holding the others' foreigners as much as if the link of a common government did not exist. Only one of its races even now comprises so much as one fourth of the whole, and not another so much as one sixth, and each has remained for ages as unchanged in isolation, however mingled together in locality, as globules of oil in water. There is nothing else in the modern world that is nearly like it, though there have been plenty in past ages. It seems unreal and impossible even though we know it is true. It violates all our feeling as to what a country should be in order to have a right to exist, and it seems as though it was too ramshackle to go on holding together any length of time. Yet it has survived, much in its present shape, two centuries of storms that have swept perfectly unified countries from existence and others that have brought it to the verge of ruin, has survived formidable European coalitions to dismember it, and has steadily gained force after each. Forever changing in its exact makeup, losing in the west but gaining in the east, the changes leave the structure as firm as ever, like the dropping off and adding on of logs in a raft, its mechanical union of pieces showing all the vitality of genuine national life. That seems to confirm and justify the prevalent Austrian faith that, in this confusion of unrelated and irreconcilable elements, this condition of incurable disunion, there is strength for the government. Nearly every day someone explains to me that a revolution would not succeed here. It couldn't, you know. Broadly speaking, all the nations in the empire hate the government, but they all hate each other too, and with devoted and enthusiastic bitterness no two of them can combine. The nation that rises must rise alone. Then the others would joyfully join the government against her, and she would have just a fly's chance against a combination of spiders. This government is entirely independent. It can go its own road, and do as it pleases. It has nothing to fear. In countries like England and America, where there is one tongue and the public interests are common, the government must take account of public opinion. But in Austria-Hungary there are nineteen public opinions, one for each state. No, two or three for each state, since there are two or three nationalities in each. A government cannot satisfy all these public opinions. It can only go through the motions of trying. This government does that. It goes through the motions, and they do not succeed. But that does not worry the government much. The next man will give you some further information. The government has a policy, a wise one, and sticks to it. This policy is tranquility. Keep this hive of excitable nations as quiet as possible. Encourage them to amuse themselves with things less inflammatory than politics. To this end it furnishes them an abundance of Catholic priests, to teach them to be docile and obedient, and to be diligent in acquiring ignorance about things here below, and knowledge about the kingdom of heaven, to whose historic delights they are going to add the charm of their society by and by, and further to the same end it cools off the newspapers every morning at five o'clock whenever warm events are happening. There is a censor of the press, and apparently he is always on duty and hard at work. A copy of each morning paper is brought to him at five o'clock. His official wagons wait at the doors of the newspaper offices, and scud to him with the first copies that come from the press. His company of assistants read every line in these papers, and mark everything which seems to have a dangerous look. Then he passes final judgment upon these markings. Two things conspire to give to the results a capricious and unbalanced look. His assistants have diversified notions as to what is dangerous and what isn't. He can't get time to examine their criticisms in much detail, and so sometimes the very same matter which is suppressed in one paper fails to be damned in another one, and gets published in full feather and unmodified. Then the paper in which it was suppressed blandly copies the forbidden matter into its evening edition, provokingly giving credit and detailing all the circumstances in courteous and inoffensive language, and of course the censor cannot say a word. Sometimes the censor sucks all the blood out of a newspaper, and leaves it colorless and inane. Sometimes he leaves it undisturbed, and lets it talk out its opinions with a frankness and vigor hardly to be surpassed, I think, in the journals of any country. Apparently the censor sometimes revises his verdicts upon second thought, for several times lately he has suppressed journals after their issue and partial distribution. The distributed copies are then sent for by the censor and destroyed. I have two of these, but at the time they were sent for I could not remember what I had done with them. If the censor did his work before the morning edition was printed he would be less of an inconvenience than he is, but of course the papers cannot wait many minutes after five o'clock to get his verdict. They might as well go out of business as do that, so they print and take their chances. Then if they get caught by a suppression they must strike out the condemned matter and print the edition over again. That delays the issue several hours, and is expensive besides. The government gets the suppressed edition for nothing. If it bought it that would be joyful, and would give great satisfaction. Also the edition would be larger. Some of the papers do not replace the condemned paragraphs with other matter. They merely snatch them out and leave blanks behind. Morning blanks. Marked confiscated. The government discourages the dissemination of newspaper information in other ways. For instance, it does not allow newspapers to be sold on the streets. Therefore the news boy is unknown in Vienna, and there is a stamp duty of nearly a cent upon each copy of a newspaper's issue. Every American paper that reaches me has a stamp upon it, which has been pasted there in the post office or downstairs in the hotel office. But no matter who put it there, I have to pay for it, and that is the main thing. Sometimes friends send me so many papers that it takes all I can earn that week to keep this government going. I must take passing notice of another point in the government's measures for maintaining tranquility. Everybody says it does not like to see any individual attained to commanding influence in the country since such a man can become a disturber and an inconvenience. We have as much talent as the other nations, says the citizen, resignedly and without bitterness, but for the sake of the general good of the country we are discouraged from making it over conspicuous, and not only discouraged, but tactfully and skillfully prevented from doing it if we show too much persistence. Consequently we have no renowned men. In centuries we have seldom produced one, that is seldom allowed one to produce himself. We can say today what no other nation of first importance in the family of Christian civilizations can say, that there exists no Austrian who has made an enduring name for himself which is familiar all around the globe. Another helper toward tranquility is the army. It is as pervasive as the atmosphere. It is everywhere. All the mentioned creators, promoters, and preservers of the public tranquility do their several shares in the quieting work. They make a restful and comfortable serenity and reposfulness. This is disturbed sometimes for a little while. A mob assembles to protest against something. It gets noisy, noisier, still noisier, finally too noisy. Then the persuasive soldiery comes charging down upon it, and in a few minutes all is quiet again, and there is no mob. There is a constitution, and there is a parliament. The House draws its membership of 425 deputies from the nineteen or twenty states here to forementioned. These men represent peoples who speak eleven different languages. That means eleven distinct varieties of jealousies, hostilities, and warring interests. This could be expected to furnish forth a parliament of a pretty inharmonious sort, and make legislation difficult at times. And it does that. The parliament is split up into many parties. The clericals, the progressists, the German nationalists, the young Czechs, the social democrats, the Christian socialists, and some others. And it is difficult to get up working combinations among them. They prefer to fight apart sometimes. The recent troubles have grown out of Count Badeni's necessities. He could not carry on his government without a majority vote in the House at his back, and in order to secure it he had to make a trade of some sort. He made it with the Czechs, the Bohemians. The terms were not easy for him. He must issue an ordinance making the Czech tongue the official language in Bohemia in place of the German. This created a storm. All the Germans in Austria were incensed. In numbers they formed but a fourth part of the empire's population, but they urged that the country's public business should be conducted in one common tongue, and that tongue a world language which German is. However, Badeni secured his majority. The German element in parliament was apparently become helpless. The Czech deputies were exultant. Then the music began. Badeni's voyage, instead of being smooth, was disappointingly rough from the start. The government must get the elk-like through. It must not fail. Badeni's majority was ready to carry it through, but the minority was determined to obstruct it and delay it until the obnoxious Czech language measure should be shelved. The elk-like is an adjustment, arrangement, settlement, which holds Austria and Hungary together. It dates from 1867 and has to be renewed every ten years. It establishes the share which Hungary must pay toward the expenses of the imperial government. Hungary is a kingdom. The emperor of Austria is its king. And has its own parliament and governmental machinery. But it has no foreign office, and it has no army, at least. Its army is a part of the imperial army, is paid out of the imperial treasury, and is under the control of the imperial war office. The ten-year arrangement was due a year ago but failed to connect. At least completely. A year's compromise was arranged. A new arrangement must be affected before the last day of this year. Otherwise the two countries become separate entities. The emperor would still be king of Hungary, that is, king of an independent foreign country. There would be Hungarian custom houses on the Austrian border, and there would be a Hungarian army and a Hungarian foreign office. Both countries would be weakened by this. Both would suffer damage. The opposition in the house, although in the minority, had a good weapon to fight with in the pending ausgleich. If it could delay the ausgleich a few weeks, the government would doubtless have to withdraw the hated language ordinance or lose Hungary. The opposition began its fight. Its arms were the rules of the house. It was soon manifest that by applying these rules ingeniously, it could make the majority helpless and keep it so as long as it pleased. It could shut off business every now and then with a motion to adjourn. It could require the A's and No's on the motion and use up thirty minutes on that detail. It could call for the reading and verification of the minutes of the preceding meeting and use up half a day in that way. It could require that several of its members be entered upon the list of permitted speakers previously to the opening of a sitting, and, as there is no time limit, further delays could thus be accomplished. These were all lawful weapons, and the men of the opposition, technically called the Left, were within their rights in using them. They used them to such dire purpose that all parliamentary business was paralyzed. The Right, the government side, could accomplish nothing. Then it had a saving idea. This idea was a curious one. It was to have the President and the Vice Presidents of the Parliament trample the rules underfoot upon occasion. This, for a profoundly embittered minority, constructed out of fire and gun-cotton. It was time for idle strangers to go and ask Leave to look down, out of a gallery, and see what would be the result of it. End of Part 1 of Stirring Times in Austria, and end of Segment 26 of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain. This is Stirring Times in Austria, Part 2, A Memorable Sitting. Now took place that memorable sitting of the House, which broke two records. It lasted the best part of two days and a night, surpassing, by half an hour, the longest sitting known to the world's previous parliamentary history, and breaking the long speech record with Dr. Letcher's 12-hour effort, the longest flow of unbroken talk that ever came out of one mouth since the world began. At 8.45 on the evening of the 28th of October, when the House had been sitting a few minutes short of 10 hours, Dr. Letcher was granted the floor. It was a good place for theatrical effects. I think that no other Senate House is so shapely as this one, or so richly and showily decorated. Its plan is that of an opera house. Up toward the straight side of it, the stage side, rise a couple of terraces of desks for the ministry, and the official clerks or secretaries. Terraces thirty feet long, and each supporting about a half a dozen desks with spaces between them. Above these is the President's Terrace against the Wall. Along it are distributed the proper accommodations for the presiding officer and his assistants. The Wall is of richly colored marble highly polished, its paneled sweep relieved by fluted columns, and pilasters of distinguished grace and dignity, which glow softly and frostily in the electric light. Around the spacious half-circle of the floor bends the great, two-storied curve of the boxes, its frontage elaborately ornamented and sumptuously gilded. On the floor of the House the 425 desks radiate fan-wise from the President's Tribune. The galleries are crowded on this particular evening, for word has gone about that the ausgleich is before the House, that the President, Ritter van Abrahamovitz, has been throttling the rules, that the opposition are in an inflammable state in consequence, and that the night session is likely to be of an exciting sort. The gallery guests are fashionably dressed, and the finery of the women makes a bright and pretty show under the strong electric light, but down on the floor there is no costumery. The deputies are dressed in day clothes, some of the clothes neat and trim, and others not. There may be three members in evening dress, but not more. There are several Catholic priests in their long black gowns, and with crucifixes hanging from their necks. No member wears his hat. One may see by these details that the aspects are not those of an evening sitting of an English House of Commons, but rather those of a sitting of our House of Representatives. In his high place sits the President, Abrahamovitz, object of the opposition's limitless hatred. He is sunk back in the depths of his armchair, and has his chin down. He brings the ends of his spread fingers together in front of his breast, and reflectively taps them together with the air of one who would like to begin business, but must wait and be as patient as he can. It makes you think of Richelieu. Now and then he swings his head up to the left, or to the right, and answers something which someone has bent down to say to him. Then he taps his fingers again. He looks tired, and may be a trifle harassed. He is a grey-haired, long, slender man, with a colourless, long face, which in repose suggests a death-mask. But when not in repose is tossed and rippled with a turbulent smile which washes this way and that, and is not easy to keep up with—a pious smile, a holy smile, a saintly smile, a deprecating smile, a beseeching and supplicating smile—and when it is at work, the large mouth opens, and the flexible lips crumple and unfold and crumple again, and move around in a genial and persuasive and angelic way, and expose large glimpses of the teeth. And that interrupts the sacredness of the smile, and gives it momentarily a mixed worldly and political and satanic cast. It is a most interesting face to watch, and then the long hands and the body. They furnish great and frequent help to the face in the business of adding to the force of the statesman's words. To change the tense. At the time of which I have just been speaking, the crowds in the galleries were gazing at the stage, and the pit with rapt interest and expectancy. One half of the great fan of desks was in effect empty, vacant. In the other half several hundred members were bunched and jammed together as solidly as the bristles in a brush, and they also were waiting and expecting. Presently the chair delivered this utterance. Dr. Lecher has the floor. Then burst out such another wild and frantic and deafening clamour as has not been heard on this planet since the last time the Comanches surprised a white settlement at night. Yells from the left, counter-yells from the right, explosions of yells from all sides at once, and all the air soared and pawed and clawed and cloven by a writhing confusion of gesturing arms and hands. Out of the midst of this thunder and turmoil and tempest rose Dr. Lecher, serene and collected, and the providential length of his hair enabled his head to show out of it. He began his twelve-hour speech. At any rate his lips could be seen to move, and that was evidence. On high sat the president imploring order, with his long hands put together as in prayer, and his lips visibly but not hearably speaking. At intervals he grasped his bell and swung it up and down with vigor, adding its keen clamour to the storm weltering there below. Dr. Lecher went on with his pantomime speech, contented, untroubled. Here and there, and now and then, powerful voices burst above the din, and delivered an ejaculation that was heard. Then the din ceased for a moment or two, and gave opportunity to hear what the chair might answer. Then the noise broke out again. Apparently the president was being charged with all sorts of illegal exercises of power in the interest of the right, the government side, among these with arbitrarily closing in the order of business before it was finished, with an unfair distribution of the right to the floor, with refusal of the floor upon quibble and protest to members entitled to it, with stopping a speaker's speech upon quibble and protest, and with other transgressions of the rules of the house. One of the interrupters who made himself heard was a young fellow of slight build and neat dress who stood a little apart from the solid crowd and leaned negligently with folded arms and feet crossed against a desk. Trim and handsome, strong face and thin features, black hair, roughed up, parsimonious mustache, resonant great voice of good tone and pitch. It is wolf, capable and hospitable, with sword and pistol, fighter of the recent duel with Count Badeni, the head of the government. He shot Badeni through the arm, and then walked over in the politest way and inspected his game, shook hands, expressed regret, and all that. Out of him came early this thundering peel audible above the storm. I demand the floor! I wish to offer a motion! In the sudden lull which followed the president answered, Dr. Lecher has the floor. Wolf, I move the clothes of the sitting! P. Representative Lecher has the floor. Stormy outburst from the left, that is, the opposition. Wolf, I demand the floor for the introduction of a formal notion! Pause. Mr. President, are you going to grant it or not? Crash of approval from the left. I will keep on demanding the floor till I get it. P. I call Representative Wolf to order. Dr. Lecher has the floor. Wolf, Mr. President, are you going to observe the rules of this house? Tempest of applause, and confused ejaculations from the left, a boom and roar which long endured and stopped all business for the time being. Dr. von Pestler. By the rules motions are in order, and the chair must put them to vote. For answer the President, who is a pole, I make this remark in passing, began to jangle his bell with energy at the moment that the wild pandemonium of voices broke out again. Wolf, hearable above the storm, Mr. President, I demand the floor! We intend to find out here and now which is the hardest, a pole's skull or a German's. This brought out a perfect cyclone of satisfaction from the left. In the midst of it someone again moved an adjournment. The President blandly answered that Dr. Lecher had the floor, which was true, and he was speaking too, calmly, earnestly, and argumentatively, and the official stenographers had left their places and were at his elbow taking down his words, he leaning and orating into their ears, a most curious and interesting scene. Dr. von Pestler, to the chair, do not drive us to extremities! The Tempest burst out again, yells of approval from the left, cat-galls an ironical laughter from the right. At this point a new and most effective noisemaker was pressed into service. Each desk has an extension consisting of a removable board eighteen inches long, six wide, and half an inch thick. A member pulled one of these out and began to belabor the top of his desk with it. Instantly other members followed suit and perhaps you can imagine the result. Of all conceivable rackets, it is the most ear-splitting, intolerable, and altogether fiendish. The persecuted President leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, clasped his hands in his lap, and a look of pathetic resignation crept over his long face. It is the way a country schoolmaster used to look in days long past when he had refused his school a holiday, and it had risen against him in ill-mannered riot and violence and insurrection. Twice a motion to adjourn had been offered, a motion always in order in other houses, and doubtless so in this one also. The President had refused to put these motions. By consequence he was not in a pleasant place now and was having a right-hard time. Votes upon motions, whether carried or defeated, could make endless delay, and postpone the Auschgleich to next century. In the midst of these sorrowful circumstances and this hurricane of yells and screams and satanic clatter of desk boards, Representative Dr. Kronevetter unfeelingly reminds the chair that a motion has been offered, and adds, Say yes or no, what do you sit there for and give no answer? Pee! After I have given a speaker the floor I cannot give it to another. After Dr. Lecher is through I will put your motion, storm of indignation from the left. Wolf to the chair. Thunder and lightning! Look at the rule governing the case! Kronevetter, I move the clothes of the sitting, and I demand the A's and Nays. Dr. Lecher, Mr. President, have I the floor? Pee! You have the floor! Wolf to the chair in a stentorian voice which cleaves its way through the storm. It is by such brutalities as these that you drive us to extremities. Are you waiting till someone shall throw into your face the word that shall describe what you are bringing about? Note one, that is, revolution. Tempest of insulted fury from the right. Is that what you are waiting for, old gray head? Long continued clatter of desk boards from the left with shouts of the vote, the vote! An ironical shout from the right. Wolf is boss! Wolf keeps on demanding the floor for his motion at length. Pee! I call Representative Wolf to order. Your conduct is unheard of, sir. You forget that you are in a parliament. You must remember where you are, sir! Applauds from the right. Dr. Lecher is still peacefully speaking. The stenographer is listening at his lips. Wolf, banging on his desk with his desk board, I demand the floor for my motion. I won't stand this trampling of the rules underfoot. No, not if I die for it. I will never yield. You have got to stop me by force. Have I the floor? Pee! Representative Wolf, what kind of behavior is this? I call you to order again. You should have some regard for your dignity. Dr. Lecher speaks on. Wolf turns upon him with an offensive innuendo. Dr. Lecher, Mr. Wolf, I beg you to refrain from that sort of suggestions. Storm of hand clapping from the right. This was applause from the enemy, for Lecher himself, like Wolf, was an obstructionist. Wolf growls to Lecher. You can scrabble that applause in your album! Pee! Once more I call Representative Wolf to order. Do not forget that you are a representative, sir! Wolf, slam-banging with his desk board, I will force this matter. Are you going to grant me the floor or not? And still the sergeant at arms did not appear. It was because there wasn't any. It is a curious thing, but the chair has no effectual means of compelling order. After some more interruptions, Wolf, banging with his board, I demand the floor! I will not yield! Pee! I have no recourse against Representative Wolf. In the presence of behavior like this, it is to be regretted that such is the case. A shout from the right. Throw him out! It is true he had no effective recourse. He had an official called an Ordner whose help he could invoke in desperate cases, but apparently the Ordner is only a persuader, not a compeler. Apparently he is a sergeant at arms who is not loaded. A good enough gun to look at, but not valuable for business. For another twenty or thirty minutes, Wolf went on banging with his board and demanding his rights. Then at last the weary President threatened to summon the dread Ordermaker. But both his manner and his words were reluctant. Evidently it grieved him to have to resort to this dire extremity. He said to Wolf, If this goes on, I shall feel obliged to summon the Ordner and beg him to restore order in the house. Wolf, I'd like to see you do it. Suppose you fetch in a few policemen too. Great tumult. Are you going to put my motion to adjourn or not? Dr. Letcher continues his speech. Wolf accompanies him with his board-clatter. The President dispatches the Ordner, Dr. Lang, himself a deputy, on his order-restoring mission. Wolf, with his board uplifted for defense, confronts the Ordner with a remark which Boss Tweed might have translated into Now let's see what you are going to do about it. Noise and tumult all over the house. Wolf stands upon his rights and says he will maintain them until he is killed in his tracks. Then he resumes his banging. The President jangles his bell and begs for order, and the rest of the house augments the racket the best it can. Wolf, I require an adjournment because I find myself personally threatened, laughter from the right. Not that I fear for myself. I am only anxious about what will happen to the man who touches me. The Ordner, I am not going to fight with you. Nothing came of the efforts of the Angel of Peace, and he presently melted out of the scene and disappeared. Wolf went on with his noise and with his demands that he be granted the floor, resting his board at intervals to discharge criticisms and epithets at the chair. Once he reminded the Chairman of his violated promise to grant him, Wolf, the floor, and said, Whence I came we call promise-breakers rascals! And he advised the Chairman to take his conscience to bed with him and use it as a pillow. Another time he said that the chair was making itself ridiculous before all Europe. In fact, some of Wolf's language was almost unparliamentary. By and by he struck the idea of beating out a tune with his board. Later he decided to stop asking for the floor and to confer it upon himself, and so he and Dr. Letcher now spoke at the same time, and mingled their speeches with the other noises, and nobody heard either of them. Wolf rested himself now and then from speech-making by reading, in his clarion voice, from a pamphlet. I will explain that Dr. Letcher was not making a twelve-hour speech for past time, but for an important purpose. It was the government's intention to push the alks-like through its preliminary stages in this one sitting, for which it was the order of the day. And then by vote refer it to a select committee. It was the majority scheme, as charged by the opposition, to drown the debate upon the bill by pure noise, drown it out, and stop it. The debate being thus ended, the vote upon the reference would follow, with victory for the government. But into the government's calculation had not entered the possibility of a single-barreled speech, which should occupy the entire time-limit of the setting, and also get itself delivered in spite of all the noise. Goliath was not expecting David. But David was there, and during twelve hours he tranquilly pulled statistical, historical, and argumentative pebbles out of his script, and slung them at the giant, and when he was done he was victor, and the day was saved. In the English house an obstructionist has held the floor with Bible readings and other outside matters, but Dr. Letcher could not have that restful and recuperative privilege, he must confine himself strictly to the subject before the house. More than once, when the President could not hear him because of the general tumult, he sent persons to listen and report as to whether the orator was speaking to the subject or not. The subject was a peculiarly difficult one, and it would have troubled any other deputy to stick to it three hours without exhausting his ammunition, because it required a vast and intimate knowledge, detailed and particularised knowledge of the commercial, railroading, financial, and international banking relations existing between two great sovereignties, Hungary and the Empire. But Dr. Letcher is President of the Board of Trade of his city of Brune, and was master of the situation. His speech was not formally prepared. He had a few notes jotted down for his guidance, he had his facts in his head, his heart was in his work, and for twelve hours he stood there undisturbed by the clamour around him, and with grace and ease and confidence poured out the riches of his mind in closely reasoned arguments, closed in eloquent and faultless phrasing. He is a young man of thirty-seven, he is tall and well proportioned, and has cultivated and fortified his muscle by mountain climbing. If he were a little handsomer, he would sufficiently reproduce for me the chauncey depew of the great New England dinner nights of some years ago, he has depew's charm of manner and graces of language and delivery. There was but one way for Dr. Letcher to hold the floor, he must stay on his legs. If he should sit down to rest a moment the floor would be taken from him by the enemy in the chair. When he had been talking three or four hours he himself proposed an adjournment in order that he might get some rest from his wearing labours, but he limited his motion with the condition that if it was lost he should be allowed to continue his speech, and if it was carried he should have the floor at the next sitting. Wolf was now appeased, and withdrew his own thousand times offered motion, and Dr. Letcher's was voted upon and lost, so he went on speaking. By one o'clock in the morning excitement and noisemaking had tired out nearly everybody but the orator. Gradually the seats of the right underwent depopulation. The occupants had slipped out to the refreshment rooms to eat and drink or to the corridors to chat. Someone remarked that there was no longer a quorum present, and moved a call of the house. The chair, Vice President Dr. Cremars, refused to put it to vote. There was a small dispute over the legality of this ruling, but the chair held its ground. The left remained on the battlefield to support their champion. He went steadily on with his speech, and always it was strong, virile, felicitous, and to the point. He was earning applause, and this enabled his party to turn that fact to account. Now and then they applauded him a couple of minutes on a stretch, and during that time he could stop speaking and rest his voice without having the floor taken from him. At a quarter to two a member of the left demanded that Dr. Letcher be allowed a recess for rest, and said that the chairman was heartless. Dr. Letcher himself asked for ten minutes. The chair allowed him five. Before the time had run out, Dr. Letcher was on his feet again. Wolf burst out again with a motion to adjourn, refused by the chair. Wolf said the whole parliament wasn't worth a pinch of powder. The chair retorted that that was true in a case where a single member was able to make all parliamentary business impossible. Dr. Letcher continued his speech. The members of the majority went out by detachments from time to time, and took naps upon sofas in the reception rooms, and also refreshed themselves with food and drink in quantities nearly unbelievable, but the minority stayed loyally by their champion. Some distinguished deputies of the majority stayed by him too, compelled there too by admiration of his great performance. When a man has been speaking eight hours, is it conceivable that he can still be interesting, still fascinating? When Dr. Letcher had been speaking eight hours, he was still compactly surrounded by friends who would not leave him, and by foes of all parties who could not, and all hung enchanted and wondering upon his words, and all testified their admiration with constant and cordial outbursts of applause. Surely this was a triumph without precedent in history. During the twelve-hour effort friends brought to the orator three glasses of wine, four cups of coffee, and one glass of beer, a most stingy reinforcement of his wasting tissues, but the hostile chair would permit no addition to it. But no matter the chair could not beat that man, he was a garrison holding a fort, and was not to be starved out. When he had been speaking eight hours his pulse was seventy-two. When he had spoken twelve, it was one hundred. He finished his long speech in these terms, as nearly as a permissively free translation can convey them. I will now hasten to close my examination of the subject. I conceive that we of the Left have made it clear to the honourable gentleman of the other side of the house, that we are stirred by no intemperate enthusiasm for this measure in its present shape. What we require and shall fight for with all lawful weapons is a formal, comprehensive, and definitive solution and settlement of these vexed matters. We desire the restoration of the earlier condition of things, the cancellation of all this incapable government's pernicious trades with Hungary, and then, release from the sorry burden of the Badeni Ministry. I voice the hope, I know not if it will be fulfilled, I voice the deep and sincere and patriotic hope that the committee into whose hands this bill will eventually be committed, will take it stand upon high ground, and will return the Ausgleich Provinzorium to this house, in a form which shall make it the protector and promoter alike of the great interests involved and of the honour of our fatherland. After a pause, turning towards the government benches, but in any case, gentlemen of the majority, make sure of this. Henceforth, as before, you find us at our post. The Germans of Austria will neither surrender nor die. Then burst a storm of applause which rose and fell, rose and fell, burst out again and again and explosion after explosion, hurricane after hurricane, with no apparent promise of ever coming to an end, and meantime the whole left was surging and weltering about the champion, all bent upon ringing his hand and congratulating him and glorifying him. Finally he got away, and went home. An eight-five loaves and twelve baskets of fish, read the morning papers, slept three hours, took a short drive, then returned to the house, and sat out the rest of the thirty-three-hour session. To merely stand up in one spot twelve hours on a stretch is a feat which very few men could achieve. To add to the task the utterance of a hundred thousand words would be beyond the possibilities of the most of those few. To superimpose the requirement that the words should be put into the form of a compact, coherent, and symmetrical oration would probably rule out the rest of the few, bar Dr. Lecher. End of Part 2 of Stirring Times in Austria. End of Section 27 of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain. This is Stirring Times in Austria Part 3. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain. Section 28 Stirring Times in Austria Part 3. Curious Parliamentary Etiquette In consequence of Dr. Lecher's twelve-hour speech and the other obstructions furnished by the minority, the famous thirty-three hour sitting of the house accomplished nothing. The government side had made a supreme effort assisting itself with all the helps at hand, both lawful and unlawful, yet had failed to get the Auschgleich into the hands of a committee. This was a severe defeat. The right was mortified. The left jubilant. Parliament was adjourned for a week to let the members cool off, perhaps, a sacrifice of precious time, for but two months remained in which to carry the all-important Auschgleich to a consummation. If I have reported the behavior of the house intelligibly, the reader has been surprised by it, and has wondered whence these lawmakers come, and what they are made of, and he has probably supposed that the conduct exhibited at the long sitting was far out of the common, and due to special excitement and irritation. As to the makeup of the house, it is this. The deputies come from all the walks of life and from all the grades of society. There are princes, counts, barons, priests, peasants, mechanics, laborers, lawyers, judges, physicians, professors, merchants, bankers, shopkeepers. They are religious men, they are earnest, sincere, devoted, and they hate the Jews. The title of doctor is so common in the house that one may almost say that the deputy who does not bear it is by that reason conspicuous. I am assured that it is not a self-granted title, and not an honorary one, but an earned one, that in Austria it is very seldom conferred as a mere compliment, that in Austria the degrees of doctor of music, doctor of philosophy, and so on, are not conferred by the seats of learning. And so when an Austrian is called doctor, it means that he is either a lawyer or a physician, and that he is not a self-educated man, but is college-bred, and has been diplomed for merit. That answers the question of the constitution of the house, now as to the house's curious manners. The manners exhibited by this convention of doctors were not at that time being tried as a wholly new experiment. I will go back to a previous sitting in order to show that the deputies had already had some practice. There had been an incident. The dignity of the house had been wounded by improprieties indulged in, in its presence, by a couple of the members. This matter was placed in the hands of a committee to determine where the guilt lay and the degree of it, and also to suggest the punishment. The chairman of the committee brought in his report. By this it appeared that in the course of a speech Deputy Schrummel said that religion had no proper place in the public schools. It was a private matter, whereupon Deputy Grigorig shouted, How about free love? To this Deputy Iroh flung out this retort. Soda water at the Wimburger! This appeared to deeply offend Deputy Grigorig, who shouted back at Iroh, You cowardly blather-skite! Say that again! The committee had sat three hours. Grigorig had apologized. Iroh explained that he didn't say anything about soda water at the Wimburger. He explained in writing, and was very explicit. I declare upon my word of honor that I did not say the words attributed to me. Unhappily for his word of honor it was proved by the official stenographers and by the testimony of several deputies that he did say them. The committee did not officially know why the apparently inconsequential reference to soda water at the Wimburger should move Deputy Grigorig to call the utterer of it a cowardly blather-skite. Still, after proper deliberation, it was of the opinion that the house ought to formally censure the whole business. This verdict seems to have been regarded as sharply severe. I think so because Deputy Dr. Luger, Burgermeister of Vienna, felt it a duty to soften the blow to his friend Grigorig by showing that the soda water remark was not so innocuous as it might look. That indeed, Grigorig's tough rhetoric was justifiable, and he proceeded to explain why. He read a number of scandalous postcards which he intimated had proceeded from Iroh, as indicated by the handwriting, though they were anonymous. Some of them were posted to Grigorig at his place of business, and could have been read by all his subordinates. The others were posted to Grigorig's wife. Luger did not say, but everybody knew, that the cards referred to a matter of town gossip which made Mr. Grigorig a chief actor in a tavern scene where siphon squirting played a prominent and humorous part, and wherein women had a share. There were several of the cards. More than several, in fact, no fewer than five were sent in one day. Dr. Luger read some of them and described others. Some of them had pictures on them, one a picture of a hog with a monstrous snout, and beside it a squirting soda siphon. Below it some sarcastic doggerel. Grigorig dealt in shirts, cravats, etc. One of the cards bore these words, much-respected deputy and collar sower or stealer. Another, hurrah for the Christian social work among the women assemblages! Hurrah for the soda squirter! Comment by Dr. Luger, I cannot venture to read the rest of that one, nor the signature either. Another, would you mind telling me if— comment by Dr. Luger, the rest of it is not properly readable. To deputy Grigorig's wife, much-respected Madam Grigorig, the undersigned desires an invitation to the next soda squirt, comment by Dr. Luger, neither the rest of the card nor the signature can I venture to read to the house, so vulgar are they. The purpose of this card, to expose Grigorig to his family, was repeated in others of these anonymous misives. The house, by vote, censured the two improper deputies. This may have had a modifying effect upon the phraseology of the membership for a while, and upon its general exuberance also, but it was not for long. As has been seen, it had become lively once more on the night of the long sitting. At the next sitting after the long one, there was certainly no lack of liveliness. The President was persistently ignoring the rules of the house in the interest of the government side, and the minority were in an unappeasable fury about it. The ceaseless din and uproar, the shouting and stamping and desk-banging, were deafening, but through it all burst voices now and then that made themselves heard. Some of the remarks were of a very candid sort, and I believe that if they had been uttered in our house of representatives, they would have attracted attention. I will insert some samples here, not in their order, but selected on their merits. Mr. Mayreder, to the President, you have lied. You conceded the floor to me. Make it good, or you have lied. Mr. Glockner, to the President, leave! Get out! Wolf, indicating the President, there sits a man to whom a certain title belongs. Unto Wolf, who is continuously reading in a powerful voice from a newspaper, arrive these personal remarks from the majority. Oh, shut your mouth! Put him out! Out with him! Wolf stops reading a moment to shout at Dr. Luger, who has the floor, but cannot get her hearing. Please, betrayer of the people, begin! Dr. Luger, mine hadden! Oh-ho! and groans. Wolf, that's the holy light of the Christian Socialists! Mr. Glexenbauer, Christian Socialist, damn nation! Are you ever going to quiet down? Wolf discharges a galling remark at Mr. Wollmeyer, Wollmeyer responding, You Jew, you! There's a moment's lull, and Dr. Luger begins his speech. Graceful, handsome man, with winning manners and attractive bearing, a bright and easy speaker, and is said to know how to trim his political sails to catch any favouring wind that blows. He manages to say a few words, then the tempest overwhelms him again. Wolf stops reading his paper a moment to say a drastic thing about Luger and his Christian social peaties, which sets the CSS in a sort of frenzy. Mr. Villaluec, you leave the Christian Socialists alone, you word of honor-breaker! Obstruct all you want to, but you leave them alone! You've no business in this house, you belong in a gin mill! Mr. Prochaska, in a lunatic asylum, you mean? Villaluec, it's a pity that such a man should be leader of the Germans, he disgraces the German name. Dr. Scheicher, it's a shame that the like of him should insult us. Straubach, to Wolf, contemptible cub, we will bounce thee out of this! It is inferrable that the thee is not intended to indicate affection this time, but to reinforce and emphasize Mr. Straubach's scorn. Dr. Scheicher, his insults are of no consequence. He wants his ears boxed. Dr. Luger, to Wolf, you'd better worry a trifle over your hero's word of honor. You are behaving like a street Arab. Dr. Scheicher, it is infamous, Dr. Luger, and these shameless creatures are the leaders of the German people's party. Meantime Wolf goes whooping along with his newspaper reading in great contentment. Dr. Patai, shut up, shut up, shut up, you haven't the floor! Straubach, the miserable cub, Dr. Luger, to Wolf, raising his voice strenuously above the storm, you are a holy, honorless street brat! A voice, fire the rapscallion out! But Wolf's soul goes marching noisily on just the same. Scheunerer, vast and muscular, and endowed with the most powerful voice in the Reichsrath, comes plowing down through the standing crowds, red and choking with anger. Haltz before Deputy Wolmeier grabs a rule and smashes it with a blow upon a desk, threatens Wolmeier's face with his fist, and bellows out some personalities and a promise. Only you wait, we'll teach you! A whirlwind of offensive retorts assails him from the band of meek and humble Christian socialists compacted around their leader, that distinguished religious expert Dr. Luger, burgemeister of Vienna. Our breath comes in excited gasps now, and we are full of hope. We imagine that we are back fifty years ago in the Arkansas legislature, and we think we know what is going to happen, and are glad we came, and glad we are up in the gallery out of the way, where we can see the whole thing and yet not have to supply any of the material for the inquest. However, as it turns out, our confidence is abused, our hopes are misplaced. Dr. Patay, wildly excited, You quiet down, or we shall turn ourselves loose. There will be cuffing of ears! Prochazka, in a fury, No, not ear-boxing, but genuine blows! I would rather take my hat off to a Jew than to Wolf. Jew flunky, here we have been fighting the Jews for ten years, and now you are helping them to power again. How much do you get for it? What he wants is a straight jacket. Wolf continues his reading. It is a market report now. Remark flung across the house to Schönerer. Tauphin? Yes, sir Vorden. It will be judicious not to translate that. Its flavour is pretty high in any case, but it becomes particularly gamey when you remember that the first gallery was well stocked with ladies. Apparently it was a great hit. It fetched thunders of joyous enthusiasm out of the Christian socialists, and in their rapture they flung biting epithets with wasteful liberality at specially detested members of the opposition. Among others this one at Schönerer. Bordel in der Krugerstrasse! Then they added these words, which they whooped, howled, and also even sang in a deep-voiced chorus. Schmül lebkern! Schmül lebkern! Schmül lebkern! And made it splentily audible above the banging of deskboards and the rest of the roaring cyclone of fiendish noises. A gallery witticism comes flitting by from mouth to mouth around the Great Curve, the swan song of Austrian representative government. You can note its progress by the applause of smiles and nods it gets as it skims along. Kletzenbauer. Holofarenus, where is Judith? Storm of laughter. Gregorig, the shirt merchant. This wolf theatre is costing six thousand florins. Wolf, with sweetness, notice him, gentlemen. It is Mr. Gregorig. Laughter via Holowick to Wolf. You, Judith! Schneider, brothel knight! Chorus of voices. East German awful tub! And so the war of epithets crashes along with never diminishing energy for a couple of hours. The ladies in the gallery were learning. That was well, for by and by ladies will form a part of the membership of all the legislatures in the world. As soon as they can prove competency they will be admitted. At present men only are competent to legislate. Therefore they look down upon women and would feel degraded if they had to have them for colleagues in their high calling. Wolf is yelling another market report now. Guestman, shut up infamous Lausbrat! During a momentary lull Dr. Luger gets a hearing for three sentences of his speech. They demand and require that the president shall suppress the four noisiest members of the opposition. Wolf, with a that settles it toss of the head, the shifty trickster of Vienna has spoken! Iroh belonged to Schonerer's party. The word of honor incident has given it a new name. Gregorig is a Christian socialist and hero of the postcards and the Wimburgers soda squirting incident. He stands vast and conspicuous and conceited and self-satisfied and roosterish and inconsequential at Luger's elbow and is proud and cocky to be in such a great company. He looks very well indeed really majestic and aware of it. He crows out his little empty remark now and then and looks as pleased as if he had been delivered of the ausgleich. Indeed he does look notably fine. He wears almost the only dress vest on the floor. It exposes a continental spread of white shirt front. His hands are posed at ease and the lips of his trouser pockets. His head is tilted back complacently. He is attitudinizing. He is playing to the gallery. However, they are all doing that. It is curious to see men who only vote and can't make speeches and don't know how to invent witty ejaculations, wander about the vacated parts of the floor, and stop in a good place and strike attitudes—attitudes suggestive of weighty thought, mostly—and glance furtively up at the galleries to see how it works. Or a couple will come together and shake hands in an artificial way and laugh a gay, manufactured laugh, and do some constrained and self-conscious attitudinizing, and they steal glances at the galleries to see if they are getting notice. It is like a scene on the stage, by play by minor actors at the back, while the stars do the great work at the front. Even Count Badani attitudinizes for a moment, strikes a reflective Napoleonic attitude of fine picturesqueness, but soon thinks better of it and desists. There are two who do not attitudinize—poor, harried, and insulted President Abramowitz, who seems wholly miserable, and can find no way to put in the dreary time but by swinging his bell and discharging occasional remarks which nobody can hear, and a resigned and patient priest who sits lonely in a great vacancy on Majority Territory and munches an apple. Schonerer uplifts his foghorn of a voice and shakes the roof with an insult discharged at the Majority. Dr. Luger, the Honourless Party would better keep still here! Gregorio the Echo swelling out his shirt front. Yes, keep quiet, pimp! Schonerer to Luger, political mount-a-bank! Prochazka to Schonerer, drunken clown! During the final hour of the sitting many happy phrases were distributed through the proceedings. Among them were these, and they are strikingly good ones. Blather-skite, Blackguard, scoundrel, brothel-daddy! This last was the contribution of Dr. Guesman, and gave great satisfaction, and, deservedly, it seems to me that it was one of the most sparkling things that was said during the whole evening. At half-past two in the morning the house adjourned. The victory was with the opposition. No, not quite that. The effective part of it was snatched away from them by an unlawful exercise of presidential force, another contribution toward driving the mistreated minority out of their minds. At other sittings of the Parliament, gentlemen of the opposition, shaking their fists toward the President, addressed him as Polish dog. At one sitting an angry deputy turned upon a colleague and shouted, Blank! You must try to imagine what it was. If I should offer it even in the original it would probably not get by the editor's blue pencil. To offer a translation would be to waste my ink, of course. This remark was frankly printed in its entirety by one of the Vienna dailies, but the others disguised the toughest half of it with stars. If the reader will go back over this chapter and gather its array of extraordinary epithets into a bunch and examine them, he will marvel at two things. How this convention of gentlemen could consent to use such gross terms and why the users were allowed to get out of the place alive. There is no way to understand this strange situation. If every man in the house were a professional Black Guard and had his home in a sailor boarding-house, one could still not understand it. For although that sort do use such terms, they never take them. These men are not professional Black Guards. They are mainly gentlemen and educated, yet they use the terms and take them too. They really seem to attach no consequence to them. One cannot say that they act like schoolboys, for that is only almost true, not entirely. Schoolboys Black Guard each other fiercely and by the hour, and one would think that nothing would ever come of it but noise. But that would be a mistake. Up to a certain limit the result would be noise only, but that limit overstepped, trouble would follow right away. There are certain phrases, phrases of a peculiar character, phrases of the nature of that reference to Shunnerer's grandmother, for instance, which not even the most spiritless schoolboy in the English-speaking world would allow to pass unavenged. One difference between schoolboys and the lawmakers of the Reichsrath seems to be that the lawmakers have no limit, no danger line. Apparently they may call each other what they please and go home unmutilated. Now, in fact, they did have a scuffle on two occasions, but it was not on account of names called. There has been no scuffle where that was the cause. It is not to be inferred that the house lacks a sense of honor because it lacks delicacy. That would be an error. Iroh was caught in a lie and it profoundly disgraced him. The house cut him, turned its back upon him. He resigned his seat. Otherwise he would have been expelled, but it was lenient with Grigorig, who had called Iroh a cowardly blather Skype in debate. It merely went through the form of mildly censuring him. That did not trouble Grigorig. The Viennese say of themselves that they are an easy-going, pleasure-loving community, making the best of life, and not taking it very seriously. Nevertheless they are grieved about the ways of their parliament, and say quite frankly that they are ashamed. They claim that the low condition of the parliament's manners is new, not old. A gentleman who was at the head of the government twenty years ago confirms this, and says that in his time the parliament was orderly and well behaved. An English gentleman of long residence here endorses this, and says that a low order of politicians originated the present forms of questionable speech on the stump some years ago, and imported them into the parliament. Note two. In that gracious bygone time when a mild and good-tempered spirit was the atmosphere of our house, when the manner of our speakers was studiously formal and academic, and the storms and explosions of today were wholly unknown, etc., etc. Translation of the opening remark of a leading article in this morning's Nefré Presse, December 11. End of note two. However, some day there will be a minister of etiquette and a sergeant-at-arms, and then things will go better. I mean if parliament and the Constitution survive the present storm. End of part three of Stirring Times in Austria, and end of section twenty-eight of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain. This is part four of Stirring Times in Austria. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain, segment twenty-nine, Stirring Times in Austria, part four, The Historic Climax. During the whole of November, things went from bad to worse. The all-important Ausgleich remained hard aground and could not be spied off. But Danny's government could not withdraw the language ordinance and keep its majority, and the opposition could not be placated on easier terms. On one night, while the customary pandemonium was crashing and thundering along at its best, a fight broke out. It was a surging, struggling, shoulder-to-shoulder scramble. A great many blows were struck. Twice, Schonerer lifted one of the heavy ministerial foothills—some say with one hand—and threatened members of the majority with it. But it was wrenched away from him. A member hammered wolf over the head with a president's bell, and another member choked him. A professor was flung down and belabored with fists and choked. He held up an open pen-knife as a defense against the blows. It was snatched from him and flung to a distance. It hit a peaceful Christian socialist who wasn't doing anything, and brought blood from his hand. This was the only blood drawn. The men who got hammered and choked looked sound and well next day. The fists and the bell were not properly handled, or better results would have been apparent. I am quite sure that the fighters were not in earnest. On Thanksgiving Day the sitting was a history-making one. On that day the harried, bedeviled, and despairing government went insane. In order to free itself from the throldom of the opposition it committed this curiously juvenile crime. It moved an important change of the rules of the house. For bad debate, upon the motion, put it on a stand-up vote instead of eyes and nose, and then gravely claimed that it had been adopted. Whereas to even the dullest witness, if I without immodesty may pretend to that place, it was plain that nothing legitimately to be called a vote had been taken at all. I think that Salt Peter never uttered a truer thing than when he said, whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. Evidently the government's mind was tottering when this bald insult to the house was the best way it could contrive for getting out of the frying-pan. The episode would have been funny if the matter at stake had been a trifle, but in the circumstances it was pathetic. The usual storm was raging in the house. As usual, many of the majority and most of the minority were standing up to have a better chance to exchange epithets and make other noises. Into this storm Count Falconhane entered with his paper in his hand, and at once there was a rush to get near him and hear him read his motion. In a moment he was walled in by listeners. The several clauses of his motion were loudly applauded by these allies and as loudly disaplotted, if I may invent a word, by such of the opposition as could hear his voice. When he took his seat the President promptly put the motion. Persons desiring to vote in the affirmative, stand up. The house was already standing up, had been standing for an hour, and before a third of it had found out what the President had been saying he had proclaimed the adoption of the motion. And only a few heard that. In fact, when that house is legislating, you can't tell it from artillery practice. You will realize what a happy idea it was to sidetrack the lawful A's and No's and substitute a stand-up vote by this fact that a little later, when a deputation of deputies waited upon the President and asked him if he was actually willing to claim that that measure had been passed, he answered, Yes, and unanimously. It shows that in effect the whole house was on its feet when that trick was sprung. The Lex Falconhine, thus strangely born, gave the President power to suspend for three days any deputy who should continue to be disorderly after being called to order twice. And it also placed at his disposal such force as might be necessary to make the suspension effective. So the house had a sergeant of arms at last, and a more formidable one as to power than any other legislature in Christendom had ever possessed. The Lex Falconhine also gave the house itself authority to suspend members for thirty days. On these terms the ausgleich could be put through in an hour apparently. The opposition would have to sit meek and quiet and stop obstructing or be turned into the street deputy after deputy, leaving the majority an unvexed field for its work. Certainly the thing looked well. The government was out of the frying pan at last. It congratulated itself and was almost girlishly happy. Its stock rose suddenly from less than nothing to a premium. It confessed to itself with pride that its Lex Falconhine was a masterstroke, a work of genius. However there were doubters. Men who were troubled and believed that a grave mistake had been made. It might be that the opposition was crushed and profitably for the country too, but the manner of it, the manner of it. That was the serious part. It could have far-reaching results. Results whose gravity might transcend all guessing. It might be the initial step toward a return to government by force, a restoration of the irresponsible methods of obsolete times. There were no vacant seats in the galleries next day. In fact, standing room outside the building was at a premium. There were crowds there, and a glittering array of helmeted and brass-buttoned police on foot and on horseback to keep them from getting too much excited. No one could guess what was going to happen, but everyone felt that something was going to happen and hoped he might have a chance to see it, or at least get the news of it while it was fresh. At noon the house was empty, for I do not count myself. Half an hour later the two galleries were solidly packed, the floor still empty. Another half-hour later Wolf entered and passed to his place. Then other deputies began to stream in. Among them many forms and faces grown familiar of late. By one o'clock the membership was present in full force. A band of socialists stood grouped against the ministerial desks in the shadow of the presidential tribune. It was observable that these official strongholds were now protected against rushes by bolted gates, and that these were in ward of servants wearing the house's livery. Also the removable desk boards had been taken away, and nothing left for disorderly members to slat with. There was a pervading anxious hush, at least what stood very well for a hush in that house. It was believed by many that the opposition was cowed, and that there would be no more obstruction, no more noise. That was an error. Presently the president entered by the distant door to the right, followed by Vice President Fuchs, and the two took their way down past the Polish benches toward the tribune. Instantly the customary storm of noises burst out and rose higher and higher, and wilder and wilder, and really seemed to surpass anything that had gone before it in that place. The president took his seat and begged for order, but no one could hear him. His lips moved, one could see that. He bowed his head forward appealingly, and spread his great hand eloquently over his breast, one could see that. But as concerned his uttered words, he probably could not hear them himself. Below him was that crowd of two dozen socialists glaring up at him, shaking their fists at him, roaring implications and insulting epithets at him. This went on for some time. Suddenly the socialists burst through the gates and stormed up through the ministerial benches, and a man in a red cravat reached up and snatched the documents that lay on the president's desk, and flung them abroad. The next moment he and his allies were struggling and fighting with a half-dozen uniformed servants who were there to protect the new gates. Meantime a detail of socialists had swarmed up the sidesteps and overflowed the president and the vice, and were crowding and shouldering and shoving them out of the place. They crowded them out, and down the steps, and across the house, past the Polish benches, and all about them swarmed hostile poles and checks who resisted them. One could see fists go up and come down, with other signs and shows of a heady fight. Then the president and the vice disappeared through the door of entrance, and the victorious socialists turned and marched back, mounted the tribune, flung the president's bell and his remaining papers abroad, and then stood there in a compact little crowd, eleven strong, and held the place as if it were a fortress. Their friends on the floor were in a frenzy of triumph, and manifested it in their deafening way. The whole house was on its feet amazed and wondering. It was an astonishing situation and imposingly dramatic. Nobody had looked for this. The unexpected had happened. What next? But there can be no next. The play is over. The grand climax is reached. The possibilities are exhausted. Ring down the curtain. Not yet. That distant door opens again, and now we see what history will be talking of five centuries hence. A uniformed and helmeted battalion of bronzed and stalwart men, marching in double file down the floor of the house, a free parliament profaned by an invasion of brute force. It was an odious spectacle, odious and awful. For one moment it was an unbelievable thing, a thing beyond all credibility. It must be a delusion, a dream, a nightmare, but no, it was real, pitifully real, shamefully real, hideously real. These sixty policemen had been soldiers, and they went at their work with the cold, unsentimentality of their trade. They ascended the steps of the tribune, laid their hands upon the inviolable persons of the representatives of the nation, and dragged and tugged and hauled them down the steps and out at the door. Then ranged themselves in stately military array in front of the ministerial astrade, and so stood. It was a tremendous episode. The memory of it will outlast all the thrones that exist today. In the whole history of free parliaments the like of it had been seen but three times before. It takes its imposing place among the world's unforgettable things. I think that in my lifetime I have not twice seen abiding history made before my eyes, but I know that I have seen it once. Some of the results of this wild freak followed instantly. The Badeni government came down with a crash. There was a popular outbreak or two in Vienna. There were three or four days of furious rioting in Prague, followed by the establishing there of martial law. The Jews and Germans were harried and plundered, and their houses destroyed. In other Bohemian towns there was rioting, in some cases the Germans being the rioters, in others the Czechs, and in all cases the Jew had to roast, no matter which side he was on. We are well along in December now. Note 3. It is the 9th. M.T. The next new Minister President has not been able to patch up a piece among the warring factions of the parliament. Therefore there is no use in calling it together again for the present. Public opinion believes that parliamentary government and the Constitution are actually threatened with extinction, and that the permanency of the monarchy itself is a not absolutely certain thing. Yes, the Lex Falkenhayn was a great invention, and did what was claimed for it. It got the government out of the frying pan. End of Part 4 of Stirring Times in Austria, and end of Segment 29 of The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain. This is the private history of the jumping frog story. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain, for more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org. The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain. Section 30 Private History of the Jumping Frog Story Five or six years ago a lady from Finland asked me to tell her a story in our negro dialect so that she could get an idea of what that variety of speech was like. I told her one of Hopkins and Smith's negro stories, and gave her a copy of Harper's monthly containing it. She translated it for a Swedish newspaper, but by an oversight named me as the author of it instead of Smith. I was very sorry for that, because I got a good lashing in the Swedish press, which would have fallen to his share but for that mistake, for it was shown that Boccaccio had told that very story in his curt and meager fashion five hundred years before Smith took hold of it and made a good and tellable thing out of it. I have always been sorry for Smith, but my own turn has come now. A few weeks ago Professor Van Dyke of Princeton asked this question. Do you know how old your jumping frog story is? And I answered, yes, forty-five years. The thing happened in Calaveras County in the spring of 1849. No, it happened earlier. A couple of thousand years earlier. It is a Greek story. I was astonished and hurt. I said, I am willing to be a literary thief if it has been so ordained. I am even willing to be caught robbing the ancient dead alongside of Hopkins and Smith, for he is my friend and a good fellow, and I think would be as honest as anyone if he could do it without occasioning remark. But I am not willing to antidate his crimes by fifteen hundred years. I must ask you to knock off part of that. But the Professor was not chafing. He was in earnest, and could not abate a century. He offered to get the book and send it to me and the Cambridge textbook containing the English translation also. I thought I would like the translation best, because Greek makes me tired. January thirtieth he sent me the English version, and I will presently insert it in this article. It is my jumping frog tale in every essential. It is not strung out as I have strung it out, but it is all there. To me this is very curious and interesting, curious for several reasons. For instance, I heard the story told by a man who was not telling it to his hearers as a thing new to them, but as a thing which they had witnessed and would remember. He was a dull person and ignorant. He had no gift as a storyteller and no invention. In his mouth this episode was merely history, history and statistics, and the gravest sort of history too. He was entirely serious, for he was dealing with what to him were austere facts, and they interested him solely because they were facts. He was drawing on his memory, not his mind. He saw no humor in his tale, neither did his listeners. Neither he nor they ever smiled or laughed. In my time I have not attended a more solemn conference. To him and to his fellow gold-miners there were just two things in the story that were worth considering. One was the smartness of its hero, Jim Smiley, in taking the stranger in with a loaded frog, and the other was Smiley's deep knowledge of a frog's nature, for he knew, as the narrator asserted and the listeners conceded, that a frog likes shot and is already ready to eat it. Those men discussed those two points and those only. They were hearty in their admiration of them, and none of the party was aware that a first-rate story had been told in a first-rate way, and that it was brimful of a quality whose presence they never suspected—humour. Now then, the interesting question is, did the frog episode happen in Angel's camp in the spring of 49, as told in my hearing that day in the fall of 1865? I am perfectly sure that it did. I am also sure that its duplicate happened in Boitia, a couple of thousand years ago. I think it must be a case of history actually repeating itself, and not a case of a good story floating down the ages and surviving, because too good to be allowed to perish. I would now like to have the reader examine the Greek story, and the story told by the dull and solemn Californian, and observe how exactly alike they are in essentials. Translation. The Athenian and the Frog. Note 1. Siegwick, Green Pro's composition, page 116. An Athenian once fell in with a Boitian who was sitting by the roadside looking at a frog. Seeing the other approach, the Boitian said his was a remarkable frog, and asked if he would agree to start a contest of frogs on condition that he whose frogs jumped farthest should receive a large sum of money. The Athenian replied that he would, if the other would fetch him a frog, for the lake was near. To this he agreed, and when he was gone the Athenian took the frog, and, opening its mouth, poured some stones into its stomach so that it did not indeed seem larger than before, but could not jump. The Boitian soon returned with the other frog and the contest began. The second frog first was pinched and jumped moderately. Then they pinched the Boitian frog, and he gathered himself for a leap and used the utmost effort, but he could not move his body the least. So the Athenian departed with the money. When he was gone the Boitian, wondering what was the matter with the frog, lifted him up and examined him, and, being turned upside down, he opened his mouth and vomited out the stones. And here is the way it happened in California. From the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County. Well, this hair smiley had rat tires and chicken cocks and tomcats and all that kind of things till you couldn't rest, and you couldn't fetch nothing for him to bet on, but he'd match you. He catched the frog one day and took him home, and said he calculated to educate him, and so he never done nothing for three months but said in his backyard and learned that frog to jump. And you bet you he did learn him too. He'd given him a little punch behind, and the next minute you'd seen that frog whirling in the air like a donut. See him turn one Somerset? Man, or maybe a couple if you got a good start, and come down flat-footed and all right like a cat. He got him up so in the manner of catching flies, and kept him in practice so constant that he'd nail a fly every time as far as he could see him. Smiley said all the frog wanted was education, and he could do most anything and I believe him. Why, I've seen him set Daniel Webster down here on this floor. Daniel Webster was the name of the frog, and sing out, flies, Daniel, flies! And quicker than you could wink, he'd spring straight up and snake a fly off in the counter there, and flop down on the floor again as solid as a gob of mud, and fall to scratch in the side of his head with his high and foot as indifferent as if he had no idea he'd been doing any more than any frog might do. You never see a frog so modest and straightforward as he was for all he was so gifted, and when it come to fire and squire jumping on a dead level, he could get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you ever see. Jumping on a dead level was his strong suit, you understand, and when it came to that, Smiley would ante up money on him as long as he had a red. Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he might be, for fellers that had traveled and been everywhere's all said he laid over any frog that ever they see. Well, Smiley kept the beast in a little lattice box, and he used to fetch him downtown sometimes, and lay for a bet. One day a fellow, a stranger in the camp he was, come crossed him with his box and says, what might it be that you've got in the box? And Smiley says, sort of indifferent like, it might be a parrot, or it might be a canary maybe, but it ain't, it's only just a frog. And the fellow took it and looked at it careful, and turned it round this way and that, and says, so it is. Well, what's it good for? Well, Smiley says, easy and careless. He's good enough for one thing, I should judge. He cannot jump any frog in Calaveras County. The fellow took the box again, and took another long particular look, and give it back to Smiley and says, very deliberate. Well, he says, I don't see no pints about that frog that's any better than any other frog. Maybe you don't, Smiley says. Maybe you understand frogs and maybe you don't understand them. Maybe you've had experience and maybe you ain't only a amateur as it were. Anyways, I got my opinion and I'll risk $40 that he can out jump any frog in Calaveras County. And the fellow studies a minute and then he says, kind of sad like, well, I'm only a stranger here and ain't got no frog. But if I had a frog, I'd bet you. And then Smiley says, that's all right. That's all right. If you'll hold my box a minute, I'll go and get you a frog. So the fellow took the box and put up his $40, along with Smiley's, and sat down to wait. So he sat there a good while, thinking and thinking to himself. And then he got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a teaspoon and filled him full of quail shot, filled him pretty near up to his chin, and set him on the floor. Smiley, he went to the swamp and swapped around in the mud for a long time. And finally, he catched a frog and fetched him in and give him to this fellow and says, now, if you're ready, set him alongside a Daniel with his four paws, just even with Daniels, and I'll give the word. Then he says, one, two, three, get him and the fellow touched up the frogs from behind and the new frog hopped off lively. But Daniel gave a heave and heisted up his shoulders so, like a Frenchman, but it weren't no use. He couldn't budge. He was planted as solid as a church and he couldn't do no more stir than if he was anchored out. Smiley was a good deal surprised and he was disgusted too, but he didn't have no idea what the matter was, of course. The fellow took the money and started away, and when he was going out at the door, he sort of jerked his thumb over his shoulder, so, at Daniel, and says again, very deliberate, well, he says, I don't see no pints about that frog that's any better than any other frog. Smiley, he stood scratching his head and looking down at Daniel a long time, and at last he says, I do wonder what in the nation that frog throwed off for. I wonder if there ain't something to matter with him. He appears to look mighty baggy somehow, and he catched Daniel by the nape of the neck and hefted him and says, why, blame my cats if he don't weigh five pound, and turned him upside down and he belched out a double handful of shot, and then he see how it was, and he was the maddest man. He set the frog down and took out after that fellow, but he never catched him. The resemblances are deliciously exact. There you have the Wiley Boytian and the Wiley Jim Smiley waiting, two thousand years apart, and waiting, each equipped with his frog and laying for the stranger. A contest is proposed for money. The Athenian would take a chance if the other would fetch him a frog. The Yankee says, I'm only a stranger here and I ain't got a frog, but if I had a frog I'd bet you. The Wiley Boytian and the Wiley Californian, with that vast gulf of two thousand years between, retire eagerly and go frogging in the marsh. The Athenian and the Yankee remain behind and work the best advantage. The one with pebbles, the other with shot. Presently the contest began. In the one case, they pinched the Boytian frog, and the other him and the feller touched up the frogs from behind. The Boytian frog gathered himself for a leap. You can just see him, but could not move his body in the least. The Californian frog gave a heave, but it weren't no use. He couldn't budge. In both the ancient and the modern cases the strangers departed with the money. The Boytian and the Californian wonder what is the matter with their frogs. They lift them and examine, they turn them upside down, and out spills the informing ballast. Yes, the resemblances are curiously exact. I used to tell the story of the jumping frog in San Francisco, and presently Artemis Ward came along and wanted it to help fill out a little book which he was about to publish. So I wrote it out and sent it to his publisher, Carlton. But Carlton thought the book had enough matter in it, so he gave the story to Henry Clap as a present, and Clap put it in his Saturday press. And it killed that paper with a suddenness that was beyond praise. At least the paper died with that issue, and none but envious people have ever tried to rob me of the honor and credit of killing it. The jumping frog was the first piece of writing of mine that spread itself through the newspapers and brought me into public notice. Consequently the Saturday press was a cocoon, and I the worm in it. Also I was the gay-colored literary moth which its death set free. This simile has been used before. Early in sixty-six the jumping frog was issued in book form with other sketches of mine. A year or two later Madame Blanc translated it into French and published it in the Revue des Deux Monde. But the result was not what should have been expected, for the Revue struggled along and pulled through and is alive yet. I think the fault must have been in the translation. I ought to have translated it myself. I think so because I examined into the matter and finally retranslated the sketch from the French back into English to see what the trouble was. That is, to see just what sort of a focus the French people got upon it. Then the mystery was explained. In French the story is too confused and chaotic and unreposeful and ungrammatical and insane. Consequently it could only cause grief and sickness. It could not kill. A glance at my retranslation will show the reader that this must be true. My retranslation. The frog jumping of the county of Calaveras. Eh bien! This smiley nourished some terriers, a rats, and some cocks of combat, and some cats, and all sorts of things. And with his rage of betting one no had more of repose. He trapped one day a frog, and him imported with him, et l'important chez lui, saying that he pretended to make his education. You me believe, if you will, but during three months he not has nothing done, but to him apprehend to jump, apprendre à sauter. In a court retired of her mansion, de sa maison. And I you respond that he have succeeded. He him gives a small blow by behind, and the instant after you shall see the frog turn in the air like a grease biscuit, make one somersault, sometimes two, when she was well restarted, and refall upon his feet like a cat. He him had accomplished in the art of to gobble the flies, gober des mouches, and him there exercised continually. So, well, that a fly at the most far, that she appeared, was a fly lost. Smiley had custom to say that all which lacked to a frog it was the education. But with the education she could do nearly all, and I him believe. Tene, I him have seen pose Daniel Webster there upon this plank, Daniel Webster was the name of the frog, and to him sing, Some flies, Daniel, some flies. In a flash of the eye, Daniel had bounded and seized a fly here upon the counter, then jumped anew at the earth, where he rested truly to himself, scratched the head with his behind foot, as if he no had not the least idea of his superiority. Never you not have seen frog as modest, as natural, sweet as she was, and when he himself agitated to jump purely and simply upon plain earth, she does more ground in one jump than any beast of his species than you can know. To jump plain this was his strong, when he himself agitated for that Smiley multiplied the bests upon her as long as there to him remained a red. It must to know Smiley was monstrously proud of his frog, and he of it was right, for some men who were traveled, who had all seen, said that they to him would be injurious to him compared to another frog. Smiley guarded Daniel in a little box, lattice, which he carried betimes to the village for some bet. One day an individual stranger at the camp, him arrested with his box, and him said, What is this that you have then shut up there within? Smiley said, with an air indifferent, that could be a paroquet, or a syringe, or a serrin. But this no is nothing of such, it not his but a frog. The individual it took, it regarded with care, it turned from one side and from the other, then he said, Tiens, in effect, at what is she good? My God, responded Smiley, always with an air disengaged, she is good for one thing, to my notice, a mon avis. She can bet her in jumping, elle peut batté en sauté, all frogs of the county of Calaveras. The individual retook the box, it examined of new lonely, and it rendered to Smiley in saying, with an air deliberate, Eh bien, I know saut not that that frog had nothing of better than each frog. If that isn't grammar gone to seed, then I count myself no judge. M.T. Possible that you not it saut not, said Smiley, possible that you, you comprehend frogs, possible that you not you there comprehend nothing, possible that you had of the experience and possible that you not be but an amateur. Of all manner, to Tout manier, I bet forty dollars, that she batter in jumping no matter which frog of the county of Calaveras. The individual reflected a second and said like sad, I not am but a stranger here, I know have not a frog, but if I of it had one, I would embrace the bet. Strong, well, responds Smiley, nothing of more facility. If you will hold my box a minute, I go you to search a frog. J'irai vous chercher. Behold, then, the individual who guards the box, who puts his forty dollars upon those of Smiley and who attends, et qui attendre, he attended enough long times reflecting all solely, and figure you that he takes Daniel, him opens the mouth by force and with a teaspoon, him fills with shot of the hunt, even him fills just to the chin, then he him puts by the earth. Smiley, during these times, was at slopping in a swamp. Finally he trapped, a trap, a frog. Him carried to that individual and said, now, if you be ready, put him all against Daniel with their before feet upon the same line, and I give the signal, then he added one, two, three, advance. Him and the individual touched their frogs by behind, and the frog knew but to jump smartly. But Daniel himself lifted ponderously, exalted the shoulders thus like a Frenchman to what good he could not budge. He is planted solid like a church. He not advanced no more than if one him had put at the anchor. Smiley was surprised and disgusted, but he not himself doubted not of the turn being intended, mais il ne se doutait pas du tour bien tendre. The individual and pocketed the silver himself with it went, and of it himself in going, is that he no gives not a jerk of the thumb over the shoulder like that, at the poor Daniel, in saying with his ear deliberate, l'individu empoche l'argent, s'en va et en s'en allons, est-ce qu'il te ne donne pas un coût de poche par-dessus l'épaule, comme ça, au pauvre Daniel, en disant de son air d'illibère. Eh bien, I know see not that that frog has nothing of better than another. Smiley himself scratched long times the head, the eyes fixed upon Daniel, until that which, at last, he said, I me demand how the devil it makes itself that this beast has refused. Is it that she had something? One would believe that she is stuffed. He grasped Daniel by the skin of the neck, him lifted and said, The wolf me bite if he no way not five pounds. He him reversed and the unhappy belched two handfuls of shot, et le malheureux, et cetera. When Smiley recognized how it was, he was like mad. He deposited his frog by the earth and ran after that individual, but he not him caught never. It may be that there are people who can translate better than I can, but I am not acquainted with them. So ends the private and public history of the jumping frog of Calaveras County, an incident which has this unique feature about it, that it is both old and new, a chestnut and not a chestnut, for it was original when it happened two thousand years ago, and was again original when it happened in California in our own time. P.S. London July 1900. Twice recently I have been asked this question. Have you seen the Greek version of the jumping frog? And twice I have answered, No. Has Professor Van Dyke seen it? I suppose so. Then your supposition is at fault. Why? Because there isn't any such version. Do you mean to intimate that the tale is modern and not borrowed from some ancient Greek book? Yes, it is not permissible for any, but the very young and innocent to be so easily beguiled as you and Van Dyke have been. Do you mean that we have fallen a prey to our ignorance and simplicity? Yes, is Van Dyke a Greek scholar? I believe so. Then he knew where to find the ancient Greek version if one existed. Why didn't he look? Why did he jump to conclusions? I don't know. And was it worth the trouble anyway? As it turns out, now, it was not claimed that the story had been translated from the Greek, it had its place among other uncredited stories, and was there to be turned into Greek by students of that language. Greek prose composition, that title, is what made the confusion, it seemed to mean that the originals were Greek. It was not well chosen, for it was pretty sure to mislead. Thus vanishes the Greek frog, and I am sorry, for he loomed fine and grand across the sweep of the ages, and I took a great pride in him. M.T. End of the private history of the jumping frog story, and end of segment 30 of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories by Mark Twain.