Moments with Mark Twain

“Are you the duck that runs the gospel-mill next door?”

“Am I the—pardon me, I believe I do not understand?”

With another sigh and a half-sob, Scotty rejoined:

“Why, you see, we are in a bit of trouble, and the boys thought maybe you would give us a lift, if we’d tackle you—that is, if I’ve got the rights of it and you are the head clerk of the doxology-works next door.”

“I am the shepherd in charge of the flock whose fold is next door.”

“The which?”

“The spiritual adviser of the little company of believers whose sanctuary adjoins these premises.”

Scotty scratched his head, reflected a moment, and then said:

“You rather hold over me, pard. I reckon I can’t call that hand. Ante and pass the buck.”

“How? I beg pardon. What did I understand you to say?”

“Well, you’ve ruther got the bulge on me. Or may’be we’ve both got the bulge, somehow. You don’t smoke me and I don’t smoke you. You see, one of the boys has passed in his checks, and we want to give him a good send-off, and so the thing I’m on now is to roust out somebody to jerk a little chin-music for us and waltz him through handsome.”

“My friend, I seem to grow more and more bewildered. Your observations are wholly incomprehensible to me. Cannot you simplify them in some way? At first I thought perhaps I understood you, but I grope now. Would it not expedite matters if you restricted yourself to categorical statements of facts, unencumbered with obstructive accumulations of metaphor and allegory?”

Another pause, and more reflection. Then, said Scotty:

“I’ll have to pass, I judge.”

“How?”

“You’ve raised me out, pard.”

“I still fail to catch your meaning.”

“Why, that last lead of yourn is too many for me—that’s the idea. I can’t neither trump nor follow suit.”

The clergyman sank back in his chair perplexed. Scotty leaned his head on his hand and gave himself up to thought. Presently his face came up, sorrowful, but confident.

“I’ve got it now, so’s you can savvy,” he said. “What we want is a gospel-sharp. See?”

“A what?”

“Gospel-sharp. Parson.”

“Oh! Why did you not say so before? I am a clergyman—a parson.”

“Now you talk! You see my blind and straddle it like a man. Put it there!”—extending a brawny paw, which closed over the minister’s small hand and gave it a shake indicative of fraternal sympathy and fervent gratification.

“Now we’re all right, pard. Let’s start fresh. Don’t you mind my shuffling a little—becuz we’re in a power of trouble. You see, one of the boys has gone up the flume——”

“Gone where?”

“Up the flume—throwed up the sponge, you understand.”

“Thrown up the sponge?”

“Yes—kicked the bucket——”

“Ah—has departed to that mysterious country from whose bourne no traveler returns.”

“Return! I reckon not. Why, pard, he’s _dead!_”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Oh, you do? Well I thought maybe you might be getting tangled some more. Yes, you see he’s dead again——”

“_Again!_ Why, has he ever been dead before?”

“Dead before? No! Do you reckon a man has got as many lives as a cat? But you bet you, he’s awful dead now, poor old boy, and I wish I’d never seen this day. I don’t want no better friend than Buck Fanshaw. I knowed him by the back; and when I know a man and like him, I freeze to him—you hear _me_. Take him all round, pard, there never was a bullier man in the mines. No man ever knowed Buck Fanshaw to go back on a friend. But it’s all up, you know, it’s all up. It _ain’t_ no use. They’ve scooped him.”

“Scooped him?”

“Yes—death has. Well, well, well, we’ve got to give him up. Yes, indeed. It’s a kind of a hard world, after all, _ain’t_ it? But pard, he was a rustler! You ought to see him get started once. He was a bully boy with a glass eye! Just spit in his face and give him room according to his strength, and it was just beautiful to see him peel and go in. He was the worst son of a thief that ever drawed breath. Pard, he was _on_ it! He was on it bigger than an Injun!”

“On it? On what?”

“On the shoot. On the shoulder. On the fight, you understand. _He_ didn’t give a continental for _any_ body. _Beg_ your pardon, friend, for coming so near saying a cuss-word—but you see I’m on an awful strain, in this palaver, on account of having to cramp down and draw everything so mild. But we’ve got to give him up. There ain’t any getting around that, I don’t reckon. Now if we can get you to help plant him——”

“Preach the funeral discourse? Assist at the obsequies?”

“Obs’quies is good. Yes. That’s it—that’s our little game. We are going to get the thing up regardless, you know. He was always nifty himself, and so you bet you his funeral ain’t going to be no slouch—solid silver door-plate on his coffin, six plumes on the hearse, and one nigger on the box in a biled shirt and a plug hat—how’s that for high? And we’ll take care of _you_ pard. We’ll fix you all right. There’ll be a kerridge for you; and whatever you want, you just ’scape out and we’ll ’tend to it. We’ve got a shebang fixed up for you to stand behind, in No. 1’s house, and don’t you be afraid. Just go in and toot your horn, if you don’t sell a clam. Put Buck through as bully as you can, pard, for anybody that knowed him will tell you that he was one of the whitest men that was ever in the mines. You can’t draw it too strong. He never could stand it to see things going wrong. He’s done more to make this town quiet and peaceable than any man in it. I’ve seen him lick four Greasers in eleven minutes, myself. If a thing wanted regulating, _he_ warn’t a man to go browsing around for somebody to do it, but he would prance in and regulate it himself. He warn’t a Catholic. Scasely. He was down on ’em. His word was ‘No Irish need apply!’ But it didn’t make no difference about that when it came down to what a man’s rights was—and so, when some roughs jumped the Catholic boneyard and started in to stake out town lots in it he _went_ for ’em! And he _cleaned_ ’em, too! I was there, pard, and I seen it myself.”

“That was very well, indeed—at least the impulse was—whether the act was strictly defensible or not. Had deceased any religious convictions? That is to say, did he feel a dependence upon, or acknowledge allegiance to a higher power?”

More reflection.

“I reckon you’ve stumped me again, pard. Could you say it over once more, and say it slow?”

“Well, to simplify it somewhat, was he, or rather had he ever been connected with any organization sequestered for secular concerns and devoted to self-sacrifice in the interests of morality?”

“All down but nine—set ’em up on the other alley, pard.”

“What did I understand you to say?”

“Why, you’re most too many for me, you know. When you get in with your left I hunt grass every time. Every time you draw, you fill; but I don’t seem to have any luck. Let’s have a new deal.”

“How? Begin again?”

“That’s it.”

“Very well. Was he a good man, and——”

“There—I see that; don’t put up another chip till I look at my hand. A good man, says you? Pard, it ain’t no name for it. He was the best man that ever—pard, you would have doted on that man. He could lam any galoot of his inches in America. It was him that put down the riot last election before it got a start; and everybody said he was the only man that could have done it. He waltzed in with a spanner in one hand and a trumpet in the other, and sent fourteen men home on a shutter in less than three minutes. He had that riot all broke up and prevented nice before anybody ever got a chance to strike a blow. He was always for peace, and he would _have_ peace—he could not stand disturbances. Pard, he was a great loss to this town. It would please the boys if you would chip in something like that and do him justice. Here once when the Micks got to throwing stones through the Methodis’ Sunday-school windows, Buck Fanshaw, all of his own notion, shut up his saloon and took a couple of six-shooters and mounted guard over the Sunday-school. Says he, ‘No Irish need Apply!’ And they didn’t. He was the bulliest man in the mountains, pard! He could run faster, jump higher, hit harder, and hold more tanglefoot whisky without spilling than any man in seventeen counties. Put that in, pard—it’ll please the boys more than anything you could say. And you can say, pard, that he never shook his mother.”

“Never shook his mother?”

“That’s it—any of the boys will tell you so.”

“Well, but why _should_ he shake her?”

“That’s what _I_ say—but some people does.”

“Not people of any repute.”

“Well, some that averages pretty so-so.”

“In my opinion the man that would offer personal violence to his own mother ought to——”

“Cheese it, pard; you’ve banked your ball clean outside the string. What I was drivin’ at, was, that he never _throwed_ off on his mother—don’t you see? No indeedy. He give her a house to live in, and town lots, and plenty of money; and he looked after her and took care of her all the time; and when she was down with the smallpox I’m d—d if he didn’t set up nights and nuss her himself! _Beg_ your pardon for saying it, but it hopped out too quick for yours truly. You’ve treated me like a gentleman, pard, and I ain’t the man to hurt your feelings intentional. I think you’re white. I think you’re a square man, pard. I like you, and I’ll lick any man that don’t. I’ll lick him till he can’t tell himself from a last year’s corpse! Put it _there_!” (Another fraternal hand-shake—and exit).

The obsequies were all that “the boys” could desire. Such a marvel of funeral pomp had never been seen in Virginia. The plumed hearse, the dirge-breathing brass bands, the closed marts of business, the flags drooping at half-mast, the long, plodding procession of uniformed secret societies, military battalions and fire companies, draped engines, carriages of officials, and citizens in vehicles and on foot, attracted multitudes of spectators to the sidewalks, roofs, and windows; and for years afterward, the degree of grandeur attained by any civic display in Virginia was determined by comparison with Buck Fanshaw’s funeral.

Scotty Briggs, as a pall-bearer and a mourner, occupied a prominent place at the funeral, and when the sermon was finished and the last sentence of the prayer for the dead man’s soul ascended, he responded in a low voice, but with feeling:

“AMEN. No Irish need apply.”

AN ABANDONED TOWN

We lived in a small cabin on a verdant hillside, and there were not five other cabins in view over the wide expanse of hill and forest. Yet a flourishing city of two or three thousand population had occupied this grassy dead solitude during the flush times of twelve or fifteen years before, and where our cabin stood had once been the heart of the teaming hive, the center of the city. When the mines gave out the town fell into decay, and in a few years wholly disappeared—streets, dwellings, shops, everything—and left no sign. The grassy slopes were as green and smooth and desolate of life as if they had never been disturbed. The mere handful of miners still remaining had seen the town spring up, spread, grow, and flourish in its pride; and they had seen it sicken and die, and pass away like a dream. With it their hopes had died, and their zest of life. They had long ago resigned themselves to their exile, and ceased to correspond with their distant friends or turn longing eyes toward their distant homes. They had accepted banishment, forgotten the world and been forgotten of the world. They were far from telegraphs and railroads, and they stood, as it were, in a living grave, dead to the events that stirred the globe’s great populations, dead to the common interests of men, isolated and outcast from brotherhood with their kind. It was the most singular, and almost the most touching and melancholy exile that fancy can imagine.

A HAWAIIAN TEMPLE

Near by is an interesting ruin—the meager remains of an ancient temple—a place where human sacrifices were offered up in those old by-gone days when the simple child of nature, yielding momentarily to sin when sorely tempted, acknowledged his error when calm reflection had shown it to him, and came forward with noble frankness and offered up his grandmother as an atoning sacrifice—in those old days when the luckless sinner could keep on cleansing his conscience and achieving periodical happiness as long as his relations held out; long, long before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there; and showed the poor native how dreary a place perdition is and what unnecessarily liberal facilities there are for going to it; showed him how, in his ignorance, he had gone and fooled away all his kinsfolk to no purpose; showed him what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for next day with, as compared with fishing for a pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal summer, and eating of the bounty that nobody labored to provide but Nature. How sad it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell.

A HAWAIIAN STATESMAN

The President is the King’s father. He is an erect, strongly built, massive-featured, white-haired, tawny old gentleman of eighty years of age, or thereabouts. He was simply but well dressed, in a blue cloth coat and white vest, and white pantaloons, without spot, dust, or blemish upon them. He bears himself with a calm, stately dignity, and is a man of noble presence. He was a young man and a distinguished warrior under that terrific fighter, Kamehameha I., more than half a century ago. A knowledge of his career suggested some such thought as this: “This man, naked as the day he was born, and war-club and spear in hand, has charged at the head of a horde of savages against other hordes of savages more than a generation and a half ago, and reveled in slaughter and carnage; has worshiped wooden images on his devout knees; has seen hundreds of his race offered up in heathen temples as sacrifices to wooden idols, at a time when no missionary’s foot had ever pressed this soil, and he had never heard of the white man’s God; has believed his enemy could secretly pray him to death; has seen the day, in his childhood, when it was a crime punishable by death for a man to eat with his wife, or for a plebeian to let his shadow fall upon the king—and now look at him an educated Christian; neatly and handsomely dressed; a high-minded, elegant gentleman; a traveler, in some degree, and one who has been the honored guest of royalty in Europe; a man practiced in holding the reins of an enlightened government, and well versed in the politics of his country and in general, practical information. Look at him, sitting there presiding over the deliberations of a legislative body, among whom are white men—a grave, dignified, statesmanlike personage, and as seemingly natural and fitted to the place as if he had been born in it and had never been out of it in his lifetime. How the experiences of this old man’s eventful life shame the cheap inventions of romance!”

HAWAIIAN RELIGION

Quite a broad tract of land near the temple, extending from the sea to the mountain, was sacred to the god Lono in olden times—so sacred that if a common native set his sacrilegious foot upon it, it was judicious for him to make his will, because his time had come. He might go around it by water, but he could not cross it. It was well sprinkled with pagan temples and stocked with awkward, homely idols carved out of logs of wood. There was a temple devoted to prayers for rain—and with fine sagacity it was placed at a point so well up on the mountain side that if you prayed there twenty-four times a day for rain you would be likely to get it every time. You would seldom get to your Amen before you would have to hoist your umbrella.

THE CRATER OF HALEAKALA

Presently, vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea and the valley; then they came in couples and groups; then in imposing squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves solidly together, a thousand feet under us, and _totally shut out land and ocean_—not a vestige of _anything_ was left in view, but just a little of the rim of the crater, circling away from the pinnacle whereon we sat (for a ghostly procession of wanderers from the filmy hosts without had drifted through a chasm in the crater wall and filed round and round, and gathered and sunk and blended together till the abyss was stored to the brim with a fleecy fog). Thus banked, motion ceased, and silence reigned. Clear to the horizon, league on league, the snowy floor stretched without a break—not level, but in rounded folds, with shallow creases between, and here and there stately piles of vapory architecture lifting themselves aloft out of the common plain—some near at hand, some in the middle distances, and others relieving the monotony of the remote solitudes. There was little conversation, for the impressive scene overawed speech. I felt like the Last Man, neglected of the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a vanished world.

_FROM_ “THE GILDED AGE” (1873)

COLONEL SELLER’S GREAT IDEA

Washington was not able to ignore the cold entirely. He was nearly as close to the stove as he could get, and yet he could not persuade himself that he felt the slightest heat, notwithstanding the isinglass door was still gently and serenely glowing. He tried to get a trifle closer to the stove, and the consequence was he tripped the supporting poker and the stove-door tumbled to the floor. And then there was a revelation—there was nothing in the stove but a lighted tallow candle!

The poor youth blushed and felt as if he must die with shame. But the Colonel was only disconcerted for a moment—he straightaway found his voice again:

“A little idea of my own, Washington—one of the greatest things in the world! You must write and tell your father about it—don’t forget that, now. I have been reading up some European scientific reports—friend of mine, Count Fugier sent them to me—sends me all sorts of things from Paris—he thinks the world of me, Fugier does. Well, I saw that the Academy of France had been testing the properties of heat, and they came to the conclusion that it was a non-conductor or something like that, and of course its influence must necessarily be deadly in nervous organizations with excitable temperaments, especially where there is any tendency toward rheumatic affections. Bless you, I saw in a moment what was the matter with us, and says I, out goes your fires!—no more slow torture and certain death for me, sir. What you want is the _appearance_ of heat, not the heat itself—that’s the idea. Well, how to do it was the next thing. I just put my head to work, pegged away a couple of days, and here you are! Rheumatism? Why a man can’t any more start a case of rheumatism in this house than he can shake an opinion out of a mummy! Stove with a candle in it and transparent door—that’s it—it has been the salvation of this family. Don’t you fail to write your father about it, Washington. And tell him the idea is mine—I’m no more conceited than most people, I reckon, but you know it is human nature for a man to want credit for a thing like that.”

COLONEL SELLERS LETS HIMSELF OUT

The supper at Colonel Sellers’s was not sumptuous, in the beginning, but it improved on acquaintance. That is to say, that what Washington regarded at first sight as mere lowly potatoes, presently became awe-inspiring agricultural productions that had been reared in some ducal garden beyond the sea, under the sacred eye of the duke himself, who had sent them to Sellers; the bread was from corn which could be grown in only one favored locality in the earth and only a favored few could get it; the Rio coffee, which at first seemed execrable to the taste, took to itself an improved flavor when Washington was told to drink it slowly and not hurry what should be a lingering luxury in order to be fully appreciated—it was from the private stores of a Brazilian nobleman with an unrememberable name. The Colonel’s tongue was a magician’s wand that turned dried apples into figs and water into wine as easily as it could change a hovel into a palace and present poverty into imminent future riches.