Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches

by Mark Twain

  “I never thought o’ dat befo‘! He was only dat little feller to me, yit. I never thought ’bout him growin’ up an’ bein’ big. But I see it den. None o’ de gemmen had run acrost him, so dey couldn’t do nothin’ for me. But all dat time, do’ I didn’t know it, my Henry was run off to de Norf, years an’ years, an’ he was a barber, too, an’ worked for hisse‘f. An’ bymeby, when de waw come, he ups an’ he says, ‘I’s done barberin‘,’ he says; ‘I’s gwyne to fine my ole mammy, less’n she’s dead.’ So he sole out an’ went to whah dey was recruitin‘, an’ hired hisse’f out to de colonel for his servant; an’ den he went all froo de battles everywhah, huntin’ for his ole mammy; yes indeedy, he’d hire to fust one officer an’ den another, tell he’d ransacked de whole Souf; but you see I didn’t know nuffin ‘bout dis. How was I gwyne to know it?

  “Well, one night we had a big sojer ball; de sojers dah at Newbern was always havin’ balls an’ carryin’ on. Dey had ‘em in my kitchen, heaps o’ times, ’ca‘se it was so big. Mine you, I was down on sich doin’s; beca’se my place was wid de officers, an’ it rasp’ me to have dem common sojers cavortin’ roun’ my kitchen like dat. But I alway’ stood aroun’ an’ kep’ things straight, I did; an’ sometimes dey’d git my dander up, an’ den I’d make ’em clar dat kitchen, mine I tell you!

  “Well, one night—it was a Friday night—dey comes a whole plattoon f’m a nigger ridgment dat was on guard at de house,—de house was head-quarters, you know,—an’ den I was jist a-bilin‘! Mad? I was jist a-boomin’! I swelled aroun‘, an’ swelled aroun’; I jist was a-itchin’ for ‘em to do somefin for to start me. An’ dey was a-waltzin’ an a-dancin’! my! but dey was havin’ a time! an’ I jist a-swellin’ an’ a-swellin’ up! Pooty soon, ‘long comes sich a spruce young nigger a-sailin’ down de room wid a yaller wench roun’ de wais’; an’ roun’ an’ roun’ an’ roun’ dey went, enough to make a body drunk to look at ‘em; an’ when dey got abreas’ o’ me, dey went to kin’ o’ balancin’ aroun’, fust on one leg an’ den on t‘other, an’ smilin’ at my big red turban, an’ makin’ fun, an’ I ups an’ says, ‘Git along wid you!—rubbage!’ De young man’s face kin’ o’ changed, all of a sudden, for ’bout a second, but den he went to smilin’ ag‘in, same as he was befo’. Well, ‘bout dis time, in comes some niggers dat played music an’ b’long’ to de ban‘, an’ dey never could git along widout puttin’ on airs. An’ de very fust air dey put on dat night, I lit into ’em! Dey laughed, an’ dat made me wuss. De res’ o’ de niggers got to laughin‘, an’ den my soul alive but I was hot! My eye was jist a-blazin’! I jist straightened myself up, so,—jist as I is now, plum to de ceilin‘, mos’,—an’ I digs my fists into my hips, an’ I says, ‘Look-a-heah!’ I says, ‘I want you niggers to understan’ dat I wa’n’t bawn in de mash to be fool’ by trash! I’s one o’ de ole Blue Hen’s Chickens, I is!’ an’ den I see dat young man stan’ a-starin’ an’ stiff, lookin’ kin’ o’ up at de ceilin’ like he fo’got somefin, an’ couldn’t ‘member it no mo’. Well, I jist march’ on dem niggers,—so, lookin’ like a gen‘l,—an’ dey jist cave’ away befo’ me an’ out at de do’. An’ as dis young man was a-goin’ out, I heah him say to another nigger, ‘Jim,’ he says, ‘you go ’long an’ tell de cap’n I be on han’ ‘bout eight o’clock in de mawnin’; dey’s somefin on my mine,’ he says; ‘I don’t sleep no mo’ dis night. You go ’long,’ he says, ‘an’ leave me by my own se‘f.’

  “Dis was ‘bout one o’clock in de mawnin’. Well, ’bout seven, I was up an’ on han‘, gittin’ de officers’ breakfast. I was a-stoopin’ down by de stove,—jist so, same as if yo’ foot was de stove,—an’ I’d opened de stove do’ wid my right han’,—so, pushin’ it back, jist as I pushes yo’ foot,—an’ I’d jist got de pan o’ hot biscuits in my han’ an’ was ‘bout to raise up, when I see a black face come aroun’ under mine, an’ de eyes a-lookin’ up into mine, jist as I’s a-lookin’ up clost under yo’ face now; an’ I jist stopped right dah, an’ never budged! jist gazed, an’ gazed, so; an’ de pan begin to tremble, an’ all of a sudden I knowed! De pan drop’ on de flo’ an’ I grab his lef’ han’ an’ shove back his sleeve,—jist so, as I’s doin’ to you,—an’ den I goes for his forehead an’ push de hair back, so, an’ ‘Boy!’ I says, ‘if you an’t my Henry, what is you doin’ wid dis welt on yo’ wris’ an’ dat sk-yar on yo’ forehead? De Lord God ob heaven be praise‘, I got my own ag’in!’

  “Oh, no, Misto C—, I hain’t had no trouble. An’ no joy!”

  November 1874

  An Encounter with an Interviewer

  The nervous, dapper, “peart” young man took the chair I offered him, and said he was connected with the Daily Thunderstorm, and added,—

  “Hoping it’s no harm, I’ve come to interview you.”

  “Come to what?”

  “Interview you.”

  “Ah! I see. Yes,—yes. Um! Yes,—yes.”

  I was not feeling bright that morning. Indeed, my powers seemed a bit under a cloud. However, I went to the bookcase, and when I had been looking six or seven minutes, I found I was obliged to refer to the young man. I said,—

  “How do you spell it?”

  “Spell what?”

  “Interview.”

  “O my goodness! What do you want to spell it for?”

  “I don’t want to spell it; I want to see what it means.”

  “Well, this is astonishing, I must say. I can tell you what it means, if you—if you—”

  “O, all right! That will answer, and much obliged to you, too.”

  “I n, in, t e r, ter, inter—”

  “Then you spell it with an I?”

  “Why, certainly!”

  “O, that is what took me so long.”

  “Why, my dear sir, what did you propose to spell it with?”

  “Well, I—I—I hardly know. I had the Unabridged, and I was ciphering around in the back end, hoping I might tree her among the pictures. But it’s a very old edition.”

  “Why, my friend, they wouldn’t have a picture of it in even the latest e—My dear sir, I beg your pardon, I mean no harm in the world, but you do not look as—as—intelligent as I had expected you would. No harm,—I mean no harm at all.”

  “O, don’t mention it! It has often been said, and by people who would not flatter and who could have no inducement to flatter, that I am quite remarkable in that way. Yes,—yes; they always speak of it with rapture.”

  “I can easily imagine it. But about this interview. You know it is the custom, now, to interview any man who has become notorious.”

  “Indeed! I had not heard of it before. It must be very interesting. What do you do it with?”

  “Ah, well,—well,—well,—this is disheartening. It ought to be done with a club in some cases; but customarily it consists in the interviewer asking questions and the interviewed answering them. It is all the rage now. Will you let me ask you certain questions calculated to bring out the salient points of your public and private history?”

  “O, with pleasure,—with pleasure. I have a very bad memory, but I hope you will not mind that. That is to say, it is an irregular memory,—singularly irregular. Sometimes it goes in a gallop, and then again it will be as much as a fortnight passing a given point. This is a great grief to me.”

  “O, it is no matter, so you will try to do the best you can.”

  “I will. I will put my whole mind on it.”

  “Thanks. Are you ready to begin?”

  “Ready.”

  Q. How old are you?

  A. Nineteen, in June.

  Q. Indeed! I would have taken you to be thirty-five or six. Where were you born?

  A. In Missouri.

  Q. When did you begin to write?

  A. In 1836.

  Q. Why, how could that be, if you are only nineteen now?

  A. I don’t know. It does seem curious, somehow.

  Q. It does, indeed. Who do you consider the most remarkable man you ever
met?

  A. Aaron Burr.

  Q. But you never could have met Aaron Burr, if you are only nineteen years—

  A. Now, if you know more about me than I do, what do you ask me for?

  Q. Well, it was only a suggestion; nothing more. How did you happen to meet Burr?

  A. Well, I happened to be at his funeral one day, and he asked me to make less noise, and—

  Q. But, good heavens! If you were at his funeral, he must have been dead; and if he was dead, how could he care whether you made a noise or not?

  A. I don’t know. He was always a particular kind of a man that way.

  Q. Still, I don’t understand it at all. You say he spoke to you and that he was dead.

  A. I didn’t say he was dead.

  Q. But wasn’t he dead?

  A. Well, some said he was, some said he wasn’t.

  Q. What did you think?

  A. O, it was none of my business! It wasn’t any of my funeral.

  Q. Did you—However, we can never get this matter straight. Let me ask about something else. What was the date of your birth?

  A. Monday, October 31, 1693.

  Q. What! Impossible! That would make you a hundred and eighty years old. How do you account for that?

  A. I don’t account for it at all.

  Q. But you said at first you were only nineteen, and now you make yourself out to be one hundred and eighty. It is an awful discrepancy.

  A. Why, have you noticed that? (Shaking hands.) Many a time it has seemed to me like a discrepancy, but somehow I couldn’t make up my mind. How quick you notice a thing!

  Q. Thank’you for the compliment, as far as it goes. Had you, or have you, any brothers or sisters?

  A. Eh! I—I—I think so,—yes,—but I don’t remember.

  Q. Well, that is the most extraordinary statement I ever heard!

  A. Why, what makes you think that?

  Q. How could I think otherwise? Why, look here! who is this a picture of on the wall? Isn’t that a brother of yours?

  A. Oh! yes, yes, yes! Now you remind me of it, that was a brother of mine. That’s William,—Bill we called him. Poor old Bill!

  Q. Why? Is he dead, then?

  A. Ah, well, I suppose so. We never could tell. There was a great mystery about it.

  Q. That is sad, very sad. He disappeared, then?

  A. Well, yes, in a sort of general way. We buried him.

  Q. Buried him! Buried him without knowing whether he was dead or not?

  A. O no! Not that. He was dead enough.

  Q. Well, I confess that I can’t understand this. If you buried him and you knew he was dead—

  A. No! no! we only thought he was.

  Q. O, I see! He came to life again?

  A. I bet he didn’t.

  Q. Well, I never heard anything like this. Somebody was dead. Somebody was buried. Now, where was the mystery?

  A. Ah, that’s just it! That’s it exactly. You see we were twins, —defunct and I,—and we got mixed in the bath-tub when we were only two weeks old, and one of us was drowned. But we didn’t know which. Some think it was Bill, some think it was me.

  Q. Well, that is remarkable. What do you think?

  A. Goodness knows! I would give whole worlds to know. This solemn, this awful mystery has cast a gloom over my whole life. But I will tell you a secret now, which I never have revealed to any creature before. One of us had a peculiar mark, a large mole on the back of his left hand,—that was me. That child was the one that was drowned.

  Q. Very well, then, I don’t see that there is any mystery about it, after all.

  A. You don’t? Well, I do. Anyway I don’t see how they could ever have been such a blundering lot as to go and bury the wrong child. But, ’sh!—don’t mention it where the family can hear of it. Heaven knows they have heart-breaking troubles enough without adding this.

  Q. Well, I believe I have got material enough for the present, and I am very much obliged to you for the pains you have taken. But I was a good deal interested in that account of Aaron Burr’s funeral. Would you mind telling me what particular circumstance it was that made you think Burr was such a remarkable man?

  A. O, it was a mere trifle! Not one man in fifty would have noticed it at all. When the sermon was over, and the procession all ready to start for the cemetery, and the body all arranged nice in the hearse, he said he wanted to take a last look at the scenery, and so he got up and rode with the driver.

  Then the young man reverently withdrew. He was very pleasant company, and I was sorry to see him go.

  1874

  from Old Times on the Mississippi

  THE BOYS’ AMBITION

  When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village3 on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that ever came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that, if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.

  Once a day a cheap, gaudy packet arrived upward from St. Louis, and another downward from Keokuk. Before these events, the day was glorious with expectancy; after them, the day was a dead and empty thing. Not only the boys, but the whole village, felt this. After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep—with shingle-shavings enough around to show what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk, doing a good business in watermelon rinds and seeds; two or three lonely little freight piles scattered about the “levee;” a pile of “skids” on the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them; two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side; the “point” above the town, and the “point” below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one. Presently a film of dark smoke appears above one of those remote “points;” instantly a negro dray-man, famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up the cry, “S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin’!” and the scene changes! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving. Drays, carts, men, boys, all go hurrying from many quarters to a common centre, the wharf. Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time. And the boat is rather a handsome sight, too. She is long and sharp and trim and pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys, with a gilded device of some kind swung between them; a fanciful pilot-house, all glass and “gingerbread,” perched on top of the “texas” deck behind them; the paddle-boxes are gorgeous with a picture or with gilded rays above the boat’s name; the boiler deck, the hurricane deck, and the texas deck are fenced and ornamented with clean white railings; there is a flag gallantly flying from the jack-staff; the furnace doors are open and the fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys—a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just before arriving at a town; the crew are grouped on the forecastle; the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied deck-hand stan
ds picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in his hand; the pent steam is screaming through the gauge-cocks; the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning the water to foam, and the steamer is at rest. Then such a scramble as there is to get aboard, and to get ashore, and to take in freight and to discharge freight, all at one and the same time; and such a yelling and cursing as the mates facilitate it all with! Ten minutes later the steamer is under way again, with no flag on the jack-staff and no black smoke issuing from the chimneys. After ten more minutes the town is dead again, and the town drunkard asleep by the skids once more.

  My father was a justice of the peace, and I supposed he possessed the power of life and death over all men and could hang anybody that offended him. This was distinction enough for me as a general thing; but the desire to be a steamboatman kept intruding, nevertheless. I first wanted to be a cabin-boy, so that I could come out with a white apron on and shake a table-cloth over the side, where all my old comrades could see me; later I thought I would rather be the deck-hand who stood on the end of the stage-plank with the coil of rope in his hand, because he was particularly conspicuous. But these were only day-dreams,-they were too heavenly to be contemplated as real possibilities. By and by one of our boys went away. He was not heard of for a long time. At last he turned up as apprentice engineer or “striker” on a steamboat. This thing shook the bottom out of all my Sunday-school teachings. That boy had been notoriously worldly, and I just the reverse; yet he was exalted to this eminence, and I left in obscurity and misery. There was nothing generous about this fellow in his greatness. He would always manage to have a rusty bolt to scrub while his boat tarried at our town, and he would sit on the inside guard and scrub it, where we all could see him and envy him and loathe him. And whenever his boat was laid up he would come home and swell around the town in his blackest and greasiest clothes, so that nobody could help remembering that he was a steamboatman; and he used all sorts of steamboat technicalities in his talk, as if he were so used to them that he forgot common people could not understand them. He would speak of the “labboard” side of a horse in an easy, natural way that would make one wish he was dead. And he was always talking about “St. Looey” like an old citizen; he would refer casually to occasions when he was “coming down Fourth Street,” or when he was “passing by the Planter’s House,” or when there was a fire and he took a turn on the brakes of “the old Big Missouri;” and then he would go on and lie about how many towns the size of ours were burned down there that day. Two or three of the boys had long been persons of consideration among us because they had been to St. Louis once and had a vague general knowledge of its wonders, but the day of their glory was over now. They lapsed into a humble silence, and learned to disappear when the ruthless “cub”-engineer approached. This fellow had money, too, and hair oil. Also an ignorant silver watch and a showy brass watch-chain. He wore a leather belt and used no suspenders. If ever a youth was cordially admired and hated by his comrades, this one was. No girl could withstand his charms. He “cut out” every boy in the village. When his boat blew up at last, it diffused a tranquil contentment among us such as we had not known for months. But when he came home the next week, alive, renowned, and appeared in church all battered up and bandaged, a shining hero, stared at and wondered over by everybody, it seemed to us that the partiality of Providence for an undeserving reptile had reached a point where it was open to criticism.