Book: Sketches New and Old, Part 1.
M >>
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> Sketches New and Old, Part 1.
SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
by Mark Twain
Part 1.
CONTENTS (Entire ebook)
Preface
My Watch
Political Economy
The Jumping Frog
Journalism In Tennessee
The Story Of The Bad Little Boy
The Story Of The Good Little Boy
A Couple Of Poems By Twain And Moore
Niagara
Answers To Correspondents
To Raise Poultry
Experience Of The Mcwilliamses With Membranous Croup
My First Literary Venture
How The Author Was Sold In Newark
The Office Bore
Johnny Greer
The Facts In The Case Of The Great Beef Contract
The Case Of George Fisher
Disgraceful Persecution Of A Boy
The Judges "Spirited Woman"
Information Wanted
Some Learned Fables, For Good Old Boys And Girls
My Late Senatorial Secretaryship
A Fashion Item
Riley-Newspaper Correspondent
A Fine Old Man
Science Vs. Luck
The Late Benjamin Franklin
Mr. Bloke's Item
A Medieval Romance
Petition Concerning Copyright
After-Dinner Speech
Lionizing Murderers
A New Crime
A Curious Dream
A True Story
The Siamese Twins
Speech At The Scottish Banquet In London
A Ghost Story
The Capitoline Venus
Speech On Accident Insurance
John Chinaman In New York
How I Edited An Agricultural Paper
The Petrified Man
My Bloody Massacre
The Undertaker's Chat
Concerning Chambermaids
Aurelia's Unfortunate Young Man
"After" Jenkins
About Barbers
"Party Cries" In Ireland
The Facts Concerning The Recent Resignation
History Repeats Itself
Honored As A Curiosity
First Interview With Artemus Ward
Cannibalism In The Cars
The Killing Of Julius Caesar "Localized"
The Widow's Protest
The Scriptural Panoramist
Curing A Cold
A Curious Pleasure Excursion
Running For Governor
A Mysterious Visit
PREFACE
I have scattered through this volume a mass of matter which has never
been in print before (such as "Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and
Girls," the "Jumping Frog restored to the English tongue after martyrdom
in the French," the "Membranous Croup" sketch, and many others which I
need not specify): not doing this in order to make an advertisement of
it, but because these things seemed instructive.
HARTFORD, 1875.
MARK TWAIN.
SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
MY WATCH--[Written about 1870.]
AN INSTRUCTIVE LITTLE TALE
My beautiful new watch had run eighteen months without losing or gaining,
and without breaking any part of its machinery or stopping. I had come
to believe it infallible in its judgments about the time of day, and to
consider its constitution and its anatomy imperishable. But at last, one
night, I let it run down. I grieved about it as if it were a recognized
messenger and forerunner of calamity. But by and by I cheered up, set
the watch by guess, and commanded my bodings and superstitions to depart.
Next day I stepped into the chief jeweler's to set it by the exact time,
and the head of the establishment took it out of my hand and proceeded to
set it for me. Then he said, "She is four minutes slow-regulator wants
pushing up." I tried to stop him--tried to make him understand that the
watch kept perfect time. But no; all this human cabbage could see was
that the watch was four minutes slow, and the regulator must be pushed up
a little; and so, while I danced around him in anguish, and implored him
to let the watch alone, he calmly and cruelly did the shameful deed. My
watch began to gain. It gained faster and faster day by day. Within the
week it sickened to a raging fever, and its pulse went up to a hundred
and fifty in the shade. At the end of two months it had left all the
timepieces of the town far in the rear, and was a fraction over thirteen
days ahead of the almanac. It was away into November enjoying the snow,
while the October leaves were still turning. It hurried up house rent,
bills payable, and such things, in such a ruinous way that I could not
abide it. I took it to the watchmaker to be regulated. He asked me if I
had ever had it repaired. I said no, it had never needed any repairing.
He looked a look of vicious happiness and eagerly pried the watch open,
and then put a small dice-box into his eye and peered into its machinery.
He said it wanted cleaning and oiling, besides regulating--come in a
week. After being cleaned and oiled, and regulated, my watch slowed down
to that degree that it ticked like a tolling bell. I began to be left by
trains, I failed all appointments, I got to missing my dinner; my watch
strung out three days' grace to four and let me go to protest;
I gradually drifted back into yesterday, then day before, then into last
week, and by and by the comprehension came upon me that all solitary and
alone I was lingering along in week before last, and the world was out of
sight. I seemed to detect in myself a sort of sneaking fellow-feeling
for the mummy in the museum, and a desire to swap news with him. I went
to a watchmaker again. He took the watch all to pieces while I waited,
and then said the barrel was "swelled." He said he could reduce it in
three days. After this the watch averaged well, but nothing more. For
half a day it would go like the very mischief, and keep up such a barking
and wheezing and whooping and sneezing and snorting, that I could not
hear myself think for the disturbance; and as long as it held out there
was not a watch in the land that stood any chance against it. But the
rest of the day it would keep on slowing down and fooling along until all
the clocks it had left behind caught up again. So at last, at the end of
twenty-four hours, it would trot up to the judges' stand all right and
just in time. It would show a fair and square average, and no man could
say it had done more or less than its duty. But a correct average is
only a mild virtue in a watch, and I took this instrument to another
watchmaker. He said the king-bolt was broken. I said I was glad it was
nothing more serious. To tell the plain truth, I had no idea what the
king-bolt was, but I did not choose to appear ignorant to a stranger.
He repaired the king-bolt, but what the watch gained in one way it lost
in another. It would run awhile and then stop awhile, and then run
awhile again, and so on, using its own discretion about the intervals.
And every time it went off it kicked back like a musket. I padded my
breast for a few days, but finally took the watch to another watchmaker.
He picked it all to pieces, and turned the ruin over and over under his
glass; and then he said there appeared to be something the matter with
the hair-trigger. He fixed it, and gave it a fresh start. It did well
now, except that always at ten minutes to ten the hands would shut
together like a pair of scissors, and from that time forth they would
travel together. The oldest man in the world could not make head or tail
of the time of day by such a watch, and so I went again to have the thing
repaired. This person said that the crystal had got bent, and that the
mainspring was not straight. He also remarked that part of the works
needed half-soling. He made these things all right, and then my
timepiece performed unexceptionably, save that now and then, after
working along quietly for nearly eight hours, everything inside would let
go all of a sudden and begin to buzz like a bee, and the hands would
straightway begin to spin round and round so fast that their
individuality was lost completely, and they simply seemed a delicate
spider's web over the face of the watch. She would reel off the next
twenty-four hours in six or seven minutes, and then stop with a bang.
I went with a heavy heart to one more watchmaker, and looked on while he
took her to pieces. Then I prepared to cross-question him rigidly, for
this thing was getting serious. The watch had cost two hundred dollars
originally, and I seemed to have paid out two or three thousand for
repairs. While I waited and looked on I presently recognized in this
watchmaker an old acquaintance--a steamboat engineer of other days, and
not a good engineer, either. He examined all the parts carefully, just
as the other watchmakers had done, and then delivered his verdict with
the same confidence of manner.
He said:
"She makes too much steam-you want to hang the monkey-wrench on the
safety-valve!"
I brained him on the spot, and had him buried at my own expense.
My uncle William (now deceased, alas!) used to say that a good horse was,
a good horse until it had run away once, and that a good watch was a good
watch until the repairers got a chance at it. And he used to wonder what
became of all the unsuccessful tinkers, and gunsmiths, and shoemakers,
and engineers, and blacksmiths; but nobody could ever tell him.
POLITICAL ECONOMY
Political Economy is the basis of all good government. The wisest
men of all ages have brought to bear upon this subject the--
[Here I was interrupted and informed that a stranger wished to see me
down at the door. I went and confronted him, and asked to know his
business, struggling all the time to keep a tight rein on my seething
political-economy ideas, and not let them break away from me or get
tangled in their harness. And privately I wished the stranger was in the
bottom of the canal with a cargo of wheat on top of him. I was all in a
fever, but he was cool. He said he was sorry to disturb me, but as he
was passing he noticed that I needed some lightning-rods. I said, "Yes,
yes--go on--what about it?" He said there was nothing about it, in
particular--nothing except that he would like to put them up for me.
I am new to housekeeping; have been used to hotels and boarding-houses
all my life. Like anybody else of similar experience, I try to appear
(to strangers) to be an old housekeeper; consequently I said in an
offhand way that I had been intending for some time to have six or eight
lightning-rods put up, but--The stranger started, and looked inquiringly
at me, but I was serene. I thought that if I chanced to make any
mistakes, he would not catch me by my countenance. He said he would
rather have my custom than any man's in town. I said, "All right," and
started off to wrestle with my great subject again, when he called me
back and said it would be necessary to know exactly how many "points" I
wanted put up, what parts of the house I wanted them on, and what quality
of rod I preferred. It was close quarters for a man not used to the
exigencies of housekeeping; but I went through creditably, and he
probably never suspected that I was a novice. I told him to put up eight
"points," and put them all on the roof, and use the best quality of rod.
He said he could furnish the "plain" article at 20 cents a foot;
"coppered," 25 cents; "zinc-plated spiral-twist," at 30 cents, that would
stop a streak of lightning any time, no matter where it was bound, and
"render its errand harmless and its further progress apocryphal." I said
apocryphal was no slouch of a word, emanating from the source it did,
but, philology aside, I liked the spiral-twist and would take that brand.
Then he said he could make two hundred and fifty feet answer; but to do
it right, and make the best job in town of it, and attract the admiration
of the just and the unjust alike, and compel all parties to say they
never saw a more symmetrical and hypothetical display of lightning-rods
since they were born, he supposed he really couldn't get along without
four hundred, though he was not vindictive, and trusted he was willing to
try. I said, go ahead and use four hundred, and make any kind of a job
he pleased out of it, but let me get back to my work. So I got rid of
him at last; and now, after half an hour spent in getting my train of
political-economy thoughts coupled together again, I am ready to go on
once more.]
richest treasures of their genius, their experience of life, and
their learning. The great lights of commercial jurisprudence,
international confraternity, and biological deviation, of all ages,
all civilizations, and all nationalities, from Zoroaster down to
Horace Greeley, have--
[Here I was interrupted again, and required to go down and confer further
with that lightning-rod man. I hurried off, boiling and surging with
prodigious thoughts wombed in words of such majesty that each one of them
was in itself a straggling procession of syllables that might be fifteen
minutes passing a given point, and once more I confronted him--he so calm
and sweet, I so hot and frenzied. He was standing in the contemplative
attitude of the Colossus of Rhodes, with one foot on my infant tuberose,
and the other among my pansies, his hands on his hips, his hat-brim
tilted forward, one eye shut and the other gazing critically and
admiringly in the direction of my principal chimney. He said now there
was a state of things to make a man glad to be alive; and added, "I leave
it to you if you ever saw anything more deliriously picturesque than
eight lightning-rods on one chimney?" I said I had no present
recollection of anything that transcended it. He said that in his
opinion nothing on earth but Niagara Falls was superior to it in the way
of natural scenery. All that was needed now, he verily believed, to make
my house a perfect balm to the eye, was to kind of touch up the other
chimneys a little, and thus "add to the generous 'coup d'oeil' a soothing
uniformity of achievement which would allay the excitement naturally
consequent upon the 'coup d'etat.'" I asked him if he learned to talk
out of a book, and if I could borrow it anywhere? He smiled pleasantly,
and said that his manner of speaking was not taught in books, and that
nothing but familiarity with lightning could enable a man to handle his
conversational style with impunity. He then figured up an estimate, and
said that about eight more rods scattered about my roof would about fix
me right, and he guessed five hundred feet of stuff would do it; and
added that the first eight had got a little the start of him, so to
speak, and used up a mere trifle of material more than he had calculated
on--a hundred feet or along there. I said I was in a dreadful hurry,
and I wished we could get this business permanently mapped out, so that I
could go on with my work. He said, "I could have put up those eight
rods, and marched off about my business--some men would have done it.
But no; I said to myself, this man is a stranger to me, and I will die
before I'll wrong him; there ain't lightning-rods enough on that house,
and for one I'll never stir out of my tracks till I've done as I would be
done by, and told him so. Stranger, my duty is accomplished; if the
recalcitrant and dephlogistic messenger of heaven strikes your--"
"There, now, there," I said, "put on the other eight--add five hundred
feet of spiral-twist--do anything and everything you want to do; but calm
your sufferings, and try to keep your feelings where you can reach them
with the dictionary. Meanwhile, if we understand each other now, I will
go to work again."
I think I have been sitting here a full hour this time, trying to get
back to where I was when my train of thought was broken up by the last
interruption; but I believe I have accomplished it at last, and may
venture to proceed again.]
wrestled with this great subject, and the greatest among them have
found it a worthy adversary, and one that always comes up fresh and
smiling after every throw. The great Confucius said that he would
rather be a profound political economist than chief of police.
Cicero frequently said that political economy was the grandest
consummation that the human mind was capable of consuming; and even
our own Greeley had said vaguely but forcibly that "Political--
[Here the lightning-rod man sent up another call for me. I went down in
a state of mind bordering on impatience. He said he would rather have
died than interrupt me, but when he was employed to do a job, and that
job was expected to be done in a clean, workmanlike manner, and when it
was finished and fatigue urged him to seek the rest and recreation he
stood so much in need of, and he was about to do it, but looked up and
saw at a glance that all the calculations had been a little out, and if a
thunder-storm were to come up, and that house, which he felt a personal
interest in, stood there with nothing on earth to protect it but sixteen
lightning-rods--"Let us have peace!" I shrieked. "Put up a hundred and
fifty! Put some on the kitchen! Put a dozen on the barn! Put a couple
on the cow! Put one on the cook!--scatter them all over the persecuted
place till it looks like a zinc-plated, spiral-twisted, silver-mounted
canebrake! Move! Use up all the material you can get your hands on, and
when you run out of lightning-rods put up ramrods, cam-rods, stair-rods,
piston-rods--anything that will pander to your dismal appetite for
artificial scenery, and bring respite to my raging brain and healing to
my lacerated soul!" Wholly unmoved--further than to smile sweetly--this
iron being simply turned back his wrist-bands daintily, and said he would
now proceed to hump himself. Well, all that was nearly three hours ago.
It is questionable whether I am calm enough yet to write on the noble
theme of political economy, but I cannot resist the desire to try, for it
is the one subject that is nearest to my heart and dearest to my brain of
all this world's philosophy.]
economy is heaven's best boon to man." When the loose but gifted
Byron lay in his Venetian exile he observed that, if it could be
granted him to go back and live his misspent life over again, he
would give his lucid and unintoxicated intervals to the composition,
not of frivolous rhymes, but of essays upon political economy.
Washington loved this exquisite science; such names as Baker,
Beckwith, Judson, Smith, are imperishably linked with it; and even
imperial Homer, in the ninth book of the Iliad, has said:
Fiat justitia, ruat coelum,
Post mortem unum, ante bellum,
Hic facet hoc, ex-parte res,
Politicum e-conomico est.
The grandeur of these conceptions of the old poet, together with the
felicity of the wording which clothes them, and the sublimity of the
imagery whereby they are illustrated, have singled out that stanza,
and made it more celebrated than any that ever--
["Now, not a word out of you--not a single word. Just state your bill
and relapse into impenetrable silence for ever and ever on these
premises. Nine hundred, dollars? Is that all? This check for the
amount will be honored at any respectable bank in America. What is that
multitude of people gathered in the street for? How?--'looking at the
lightning-rods!' Bless my life, did they never see any lightning-rods
before? Never saw 'such a stack of them on one establishment,' did I
understand you to say? I will step down and critically observe this
popular ebullition of ignorance."]
THREE DAYS LATER.--We are all about worn out. For four-and-twenty hours
our bristling premises were the talk and wonder of the town. The
theaters languished, for their happiest scenic inventions were tame and
commonplace compared with my lightning-rods. Our street was blocked
night and day with spectators, and among them were many who came from
the country to see. It was a blessed relief on the second day when a
thunderstorm came up and the lightning began to "go for" my house, as the
historian Josephus quaintly phrases it. It cleared the galleries, so to
speak. In five minutes there was not a spectator within half a mile of
my place; but all the high houses about that distance away were full,
windows, roof, and all. And well they might be, for all the falling
stars and Fourth-of-July fireworks of a generation, put together and
rained down simultaneously out of heaven in one brilliant shower upon one
helpless roof, would not have any advantage of the pyrotechnic display
that was making my house so magnificently conspicuous in the general
gloom of the storm.
By actual count, the lightning struck at my establishment seven
hundred and sixty-four times in forty minutes, but tripped on one of
those faithful rods every time, and slid down the spiral-twist and shot
into the earth before it probably had time to be surprised at the way the
thing was done. And through all that bombardment only one patch of slates
was ripped up, and that was because, for a single instant, the rods in
the vicinity were transporting all the lightning they could possibly
accommodate. Well, nothing was ever seen like it since the world began.
For one whole day and night not a member of my family stuck his head out
of the window but he got the hair snatched off it as smooth as a
billiard-ball; and; if the reader will believe me, not one of us ever
dreamt of stirring abroad. But at last the awful siege came to an
end-because there was absolutely no more electricity left in the clouds
above us within grappling distance of my insatiable rods. Then I sallied
forth, and gathered daring workmen together, and not a bite or a nap did
we take till the premises were utterly stripped of all their terrific
armament except just three rods on the house, one on the kitchen, and one
on the barn--and, behold, these remain there even unto this day. And
then, and not till then, the people ventured to use our street again.
I will remark here, in passing, that during that fearful time I did not
continue my essay upon political economy. I am not even yet settled
enough in nerve and brain to resume it.
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.--Parties having need of three thousand two
hundred and eleven feet of best quality zinc-plated spiral-twist
lightning-rod stuff, and sixteen hundred and thirty-one silver-tipped
points, all in tolerable repair (and, although much worn by use, still
equal to any ordinary emergency), can hear of a bargains by addressing
the publisher.
THE JUMPING FROG [written about 1865]
IN ENGLISH. THEN IN FRENCH. THEN CLAWED BACK INTO A CIVILIZED LANGUAGE
ONCE MORE BY PATIENT, UNREMUNERATED TOIL.
Even a criminal is entitled to fair play; and certainly when a man who
has done no harm has been unjustly treated, he is privileged to do his
best to right himself. My attention has just beep called to an article
some three years old in a French Magazine entitled, 'Revue des Deux
Mondes' (Review of Some Two Worlds), wherein the writer treats of "Les
Humoristes Americaines" (These Humorist Americans). I am one of these
humorists American dissected by him, and hence the complaint I am making.
This gentleman's article is an able one (as articles go, in the French,
where they always tangle up everything to that degree that when you start
into a sentence you never know whether you are going to come out alive or
not). It is a very good article and the writer says all manner of kind
and complimentary things about me--for which I am sure thank him with all
my heart; but then why should he go and spoil all his praise by one
unlucky experiment? What I refer to is this: he says my jumping Frog is
a funny story, but still he can't see why it should ever really convulse
any one with laughter--and straightway proceeds to translate it into
French in order to prove to his nation that there is nothing so very
extravagantly funny about it. Just there is where my complaint
originates. He has not translated it at all; he has simply mixed it all
up; it is no more like the jumping Frog when he gets through with it than
I am like a meridian of longitude. But my mere assertion is not proof;
wherefore I print the French version, that all may see that I do not
speak falsely; furthermore, in order that even the unlettered may know my
injury and give me their compassion, I have been at infinite pains and
trouble to retranslate this French version back into English; and to tell
the truth I have well-nigh worn myself out at it, having scarcely rested
from my work during five days and nights. I cannot speak the French
language, but I can translate very well, though not fast, I being
self-educated. I ask the reader to run his eye over the original English
version of the jumping Frog, and then read the French or my
retranslation, and kindly take notice how the Frenchman has riddled the
grammar. I think it is the worst I ever saw; and yet the French are
called a polished nation. If I had a boy that put sentences together as
they do, I would polish him to some purpose. Without further
introduction, the jumping Frog, as I originally wrote it, was as follows
[after it will be found the French version--(French version is deleted
from this edition)--, and after the latter my retranslation from the
French]
THE NOTORIOUS JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY [Pronounced Cal-e-va-ras]
In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the
East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired
after my friend's friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to do, and I
hereunto append the result. I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas W.
Smiley is a myth that my friend never knew such a personage; and that he
on conjectured that if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him
of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me to death
with some exasperating reminiscence him as long and as tedious as it
should be useless to me. If that was the design, it succeeded.