Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  16. “Remembers dates perfectly.” Now that is distinctly curious. I do remember dates pretty well—rather unusually well, perhaps—but there is nothing else that I can keep in my memory. Am I to believe that my hand knows that odd fact and is able to communicate it to a palmist?

  18. I will think this over and see if it is true, before committing myself.

  19 and 20. It would be useless for me to deny these; few would believe me.

  21. If the first half of the remark is true, it goes without saying that the other half isn’t.

  23. Philosopher again. This is cumulative evidence, and has high value. It is easy to see that there is something in palmistry. I wrote a philosophy six years ago, after studying my subject fifteen years. All this time I have kept that manuscript hidden away in a secret place, lest its character become known and I get exterminated. And now my hand has betrayed my secret. It is a strange kind of treachery, and not pleasant.

  25 and 26. I have examined this vague generalization in my comments upon Mr. Niblo’s “reading.”

  27. I am not conspicuously reserved; and not secretive at all, except when I have been doing things which are better left unpublished. We are all like that.

  28. We will allow that slander to pass.

  29 and 30. Pretty wide of the mark. Even if it were true, how would my right hand know what my left hand doeth? It is my right hand that is under examination, and is quite too “fresh.” It knows nothing about the matter.

  32. “Fond of joking. Laughs at good ones.” Is that all? It describes the entire human race. So, that elephant has shrunken to next-to-nothing-and-none-to-carry again. The preceding experts overlooked him altogether. I think it is not kind.

  33. This takes away some of the pain, but not all of it.

  34. But this removes the last pang. If I can do that, I am satisfied. To be called a philosopher has pleased me; to be recognized as a theologian fills my cup.

  35. They all agree upon long life for me. I do not much mind the ninety-five, but I do not like the “at least.” Ninety-five is plenty; if I may, I will stand pat at that.

  NOTE. To none of the experts has my hand revealed the fact that I have a passion for music—a passion restricted to a single kind of music: the sombre, the solemn, the melancholy. Indeed, music is not even mentioned. It seems very curious, very strange, that my hand should be so reserved about my couple of dearly-prized and stately possessions, Music and Humor.

  Has there been a mistake? Is it not possible that the experts got my hand-prints mixed with other people’s hand-prints, and have examined some of those for mine and have not examined mine at all? I think it possible; indeed I know it is, for it is a thing which has happened in at least one case, to my knowledge. It occurred in Italy, and is celebrated. Americans who were sojourning in Italy in those days, will remember the stir it made, the joy, the laughter, the rain of delighted tears! The expert mixed his hand-prints, and by accident attached his reading of Queen Marguerite’s to the Countess Raybaudi-Massiglia’s prints—with electrifying results! It painted the Queen’s character as it was, and is: lofty, just, merciful, honest, honorable, gracious, generous, gentle, stainless—and then innocently labeled it with the notorious American’s name!

  Tuesday, January 29, 1907

  Comments on the hand “readings” which precede this instalment—Mr. Clemens’s recent visit to the German clairvoyant, who tells him some correct details of his life—All the experts agree that he is to live to very old age—Appointment with Wilkerson, who says same thing about long life—Remarks about the New Orleans fortune-teller, and letter mentioned which Mr. Clemens wrote to Orion at the time in regard to the visit.

  Those hand “readings” were made two years ago, at the suggestion of Colonel Harvey, who wanted them for Harper’s Weekly. I was to comment upon the “readings;” then Harvey was to comment upon my comments, with the best severity he could command. I liked the scheme. I pressed my hands upon an inked roller in the printing-office; then pressed them upon sheets of white paper; the reproductions were sharp and clear. These were sent to the experts, (with no name attached,) and when the “readings” founded upon them reached Harvey I wrote out my comments upon them, but Harvey went on neglecting his end of the agreement until the manuscript was mislaid and the matter forgotten. But last week a circumstance recalled it to my mind, and we made a search and found my copy of it among my accumulation of unused manuscripts. That circumstance was this: I was invited to come to the house of an acquaintance up town and witness the performance of a clairvoyant who was said to possess extraordinary powers. I gladly went. I found twenty ladies there, but none of the other sex except the host and the clairvoyant. The clairvoyant was a portly middle-aged gentleman with a smooth round face and honest eyes, good eyes, candid eyes. His manner was Germanically simple, unaffected, and engaging. He was on his feet, talking. His English was good, with just enough of his own nationality about it to give it a pleasant alien flavor. There was one vacant place; it was in the middle of a short sofa, between two ladies whom I did not know, but who whispered their names to me and made me properly and comfortably welcome. Ladies generally do this, for I have a winning way with me which I learned in a hand-book of etiquette. The clairvoyant had distributed a number of slips of paper among the ladies, and had asked them to write questions upon the slips and crumple them up in their hands and wait until he called for them. He presently began the call. He said to a lady,

  “Please hold up your fist, with your paper gripped in it, and I will tell you what you have written.”

  The lady held up her fist, and the clairvoyant said,

  “I cannot make out this writing very well; there is a word in it which I do not know. If I see it right, it is c-r-o-i-s-e-t.” (The ladies all laughed.) The clairvoyant continued: “You laugh at my spelling, but that is as I see it, although I may be wrong. The question says, ’Shall I receive it in time from Croiset?’ “

  A quiet, happy, and unanimous laugh followed this, and the clairvoyant said:

  “Now I understand; Croiset is the name of a person, and that person is making a gown for the lady and she wishes to know if she is going to receive it in time—the time stipulated. I am glad to be able to inform her that she will receive it in time.”

  The lady was asked if the reading was correct, and she said it was. After this, several fists were held up; the clairvoyant read their contents; the accuracy of his readings was verified by inspection. Three of these papers were passed to me, and I saw that the clairvoyant had read them correctly. No doubt all the others present were familiar with this kind of miracle, but as I had never encountered it before, it filled me with wonder and admiration. By and by the clairvoyant said,

  “But this is monotonous. I would like to do something better—something better entitled to your attention. I would like to tell a little part of somebody’s biography. Would that gentleman permit it, in his case?”—indicating me. “I do not know his name; I have never seen him before; I have never heard of him; he is a total stranger to me, but if he will go into a private room with me I will tell him some of his history.”

  It didn’t ring true. It probably didn’t ring true to anybody present there. I knew it could easily be true, nevertheless, and that it was not fair to give hospitality to my suspicions; still he had seemed to me to protest too much. I said I should be glad to go to the private room with him, so we went. He tore some slips from a small pad, and said,

  “Write on one of them the maiden name of your mother. Write upon each of the others a question—any question you please.” He pulled aside the cloth and exposed the naked surface of the polished mahogany table. He said “You must have nothing underneath the paper but a hard surface like that. If you wrote upon a soft surface the pencil would leave an indentation which a person with an abnormally delicate touch could read with his fingers.”

  Then he stepped to the other side of the room and said to a housemaid who was at some kind of work there, “Sprechen Si
e Deutsch?” The girl said she couldn’t speak it much, but she could understand it. Then the conversation went on, in German, and I presently said,

  “I have finished.”

  He said “Crumple the slips of paper up, put one of them in your vest pocket, hide one in your spectacle-case, shove another inside of your glove, and hold the other two in your fists.”

  I did as he directed. Then he came and sat at the table and rapidly wrote some sentences on a pad, then turned the pad upside-down, and said:

  “Your mother’s maiden name was Jane Lampton. Is that so?”

  “Yes.”

  “She had nine children?”

  “Yes, I think she had. I know she had eight, and I think there were nine.”

  “In what part of this procession was your place?”

  “I was No. 5, if there were eight children; I was No. 6, if there were nine.”

  “Were you twelve years old when you began to earn your living?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you thirty-four when you married?”

  “Yes.”

  “You became the father of four children?”

  “Yes.”

  Then he said, “The paper in your vest pocket gives your mother’s maiden name, Jane Lampton; the one in your spectacle-case asks how many children she had; the one in your glove—”

  And so on. I took the crumpled papers from their concealment and found that he had located them correctly, and had delivered their contents with accuracy. He then turned his pad right-side up and handed it to me. What he had written upon it was this:

  Your mother, Jane Lampton, had nine children and you were her sixth child. At the age of twelve years you began to earn your own way of living and when thirty-four years old you married and became the father of four children, and you have surprised many people who have known you from childhood, by your success.

  I was full of astonishment—an astonishment which lasted me the rest of the afternoon; but at dinner, in the evening, when I was telling about this adventure, a new suspicion rose in my mind, for I remembered that only a week or two ago I had published a chapter of this Autobiography in which I had stated my mother’s maiden name, and the names of her children, up to eight, and that either in that chapter or in one which preceded it, I had told how old I was when I began to earn my own living, and all about my marriage and my children. And so my doubts crowded in upon me and spoiled the pleasure which the clairvoyant’s surprising performance had furnished me.

  Still there was one remark of his whose interest for me survived. He said it over twice, and assured me that it would come exactly true. This is it:

  “You will live to be ninety-eight years, ten months, and two days old, and will not have a serious illness in all that time, and you will die in a foreign land.”

  This had an interest for me—a distinctly depressing interest—for I do not wish to live forever, either here or elsewhere. It had another interest for me, too, for I remembered that those experts whose “readings” of my hands, two years ago, I have already mentioned, had been in irritating and offensive agreement upon that very thing—my liability to overstay my time here—much as they differed about me in other regards. One of them had said I was to outlive the Scriptural time-limit, and it has since come true. Another, whom I will call Wilkerson, which is not his name, said I had a long life-line; and the third expert—whom I take to be a man without a conscience—said I would live to be ninety-five.

  This vicious unanimity moved me to examine into the matter further, so I made an appointment with Wilkerson and went to his place, under my own proper name, and he examined my hands for me. He said he had seen me more than once on the platform, years ago, and had often wanted to read my hands. During the next hour he told me all about my character, and I found that it still remained about as he had discovered it to be two years ago. Of course he couldn’t refrain from malignities about my old-age possibilities; toward the end, I was going to ask him about them, but he forestalled me, and said,

  “You will live to be close upon a century old, and you will not die in your own country.”

  In the course of our talk, coincidences were mentioned. He said,

  “When your secretary telephoned me about this appointment, yesterday evening, I had just read in the evening paper of the death of Mrs. Hooker; it brought you to my mind, for of course you would know Mrs. Hooker, you and she being residents of Hartford for so many years.” I said,

  “Now we have come upon another coincidence. Fifteen minutes before my secretary telephoned you, she had answered a long-distance telephone call from Dr. Hooker in Hartford, asking me to act as a pall-bearer at his mother’s funeral. And there is still another one. Mr. Paine has been at his country home for a week, and on Thursday my secretary was writing him, and asked me if I had any word to send. At five o’clock on the previous afternoon I had fallen up the front steps of this house and peeled off from my starboard shin a ribbon of skin three inches long. This disaster being still in my mind, where it had persistently and urgently been for twenty-four hours, I said,

  “‘Tell him I am sorry he fell and skinned his shin at five o’clock yesterday afternoon.’

  “When his answering letter came, next day, it said,

  “‘I did fall and skin my shin at five o’clock yesterday afternoon, but how did Mr. Clemens find it out?’”

  These shin-skinnings had actually occurred at the same hour, on the same day, and if it were not so serious a matter, it would be funny.

  Two years ago, when my secretary was examining my brother Orion’s autobiography, she found in it a copy of a letter which I had written from a steamboat on the Mississippi River to my brother Orion in February 1861 when I was twenty-five years old—as I cipher it. I was born almost at the extreme end of 1835, and I hope to never be born again, it is so much trouble to me to cipher from my birth-date and find out how old I am; oftener than any other way, I am a year out in the calculation one way or the other. Evidently my letter had impressed Orion very much, and he had copied it faithfully, word for word, and put it into his autobiography. It was an account of a visit which I had paid to a fortune-teller in New Orleans, by request of an old Hannibal friend of ours, Mrs. Holliday, who was always consulting fortune-tellers and believing everything they said. The day after my visit to Mr. Wilkerson we hunted up that old letter, to find out what my character had been forty-six years ago, and how long that New Orleans experimenter had condemned me to hold down this planet. I will append that letter here, and it will be seen that that woman, in that early day, had postponed my funeral until the completion of my eighty-sixth year,—so there is one thing that all the experts agree upon in my case: I am not to die young. Very well, let it go. I do not care anything more about it.

  The New Orleans lady did certainly paint my brother’s character with astonishing accuracy. She could not have done her work any better if she had had access to the chapter which I dictated about Orion’s character a few months ago, and which was lately published in the North American Review. According to my letter, this lady began to read me at once, and very volubly—as if she had a great deal to say and not time enough at her disposal to say it in; according to my letter she was impatient of my interruptions. These things would indicate that she didn’t ask me any questions, but read me off-hand out of her own head. I am obliged to accept my own testimony, because I am not able at this distant day to refute it. I know that fortune-tellers who followed after her, in later years, did not read me off-hand, but befooled me into talking, and that afterward, when I came to think their performances over, I was vexed with myself by discovering that they hadn’t furnished me any information at first hand, but had slyly pumped it out of me, in my innocence and credulity, and then had handed it back to me as being original discoveries of their own, and had astonished me with the wonderful results of their penetration. If my own testimony in the New Orleans lady’s case is true and trustworthy, she was surely a marvelous creature. She did not deal
much in prophecy, and what she did furnish in that line was poor—so poor that I could have beaten it myself; but she was undeniably and quite strikingly accurate when she was dealing with my history and with my brother’s character. Her references to my sweetheart, and her description of the sweetheart, and of how our estrangement was brought about, is so exactly in accordance with the facts, that I feel sure she pumped these things out of me without my being aware of it; anybody can be tempted to talk about his sweetheart, the only thing that is difficult is to get him to stop some time or other. The sweetheart was Laura Wright—the same who wrote me a letter last summer, from California, and from whom I had not heard for forty-seven years. I injected her, and that incident, into this Autobiography at that time.

  I now offer for examination the letter which I wrote my brother Orion forty-six years ago.

  I have just received the following letter from Sam:

  Steamer “Alonzo Child.”

  Cairo, Ill., Feb. 6th, 1861

  My Dear Brother:

  After promising Mrs. Holliday a dozen times (without anything further than a very remote intention of fulfilling the same)—to visit the fortune teller, Madame Caprell—I have at last done so. We lay in New Orleans a week, and towards the last, novelties began to grow alarmingly scarce; I did not know what to do next. Will Bowen had given the matter up, and gone to bed for the balance of the trip; the Captain was on the Sugar Levee, and the clerks were out on business. I was revolving in my mind another foray among the shipping in search of beautiful figure-heads or paragons of nautical architecture, when I happened to think of Mrs. Holliday; and as the Devil never comes unattended, I naturally thought of Madame Caprell immediately after, and then I started toward the St. Charles Hotel for the express purpose of picking up one of the enchantress’s bills, with a view to ascertaining her whereabouts. The bill said 37 Conti, above Tchoupitoulas—terms, $2 for gentlemen in my situation, i.e., unaccompanied by a lady.