Autobiography Of Mark Twain, Volume 1

by Mark Twain

  BABY ADVICE IN A CAR.

  Old Man Got It, 5-Year-Old Gave It, Mother Said, “Shut Up.”

  A benevolent-looking old man clung to a strap in a crowded Broadway car bound uptown Saturday afternoon. In a corner seat in front of him huddled a weak-looking little woman who clasped a baby to her breast. Beside her sat another child, a girl perhaps 5 years old, who seemed to be attracted by the old man’s kindly face, for she gazed at him and the baby with her bright, intelligent eyes opened wide. He smiled at her interest and said to her:

  “My! What a nice baby! Just such a one as I was looking for. I am going to take it.”

  “You can’t,” declared the little girl, quickly. “She’s my sister.”

  “What! Won’t you give her to me?”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “But,” he insisted, and there was real wistfulness in his tones, “I haven’t a baby in my home.”

  “Then write to God. He’ll send you one,” said the child, confidently.

  The old man laughed. So did the other passengers. But the mother evidently scented blasphemy.

  “Tillie,” said she, “shut up and behave yourself!”

  That is a scrap which I have cut from this morning’s Times. It is very prettily done, charmingly done; done with admirable ease and grace—with the ease and grace that are born of feeling and sympathy, as well as of practice with the pen. Every now and then a newspaper reporter astonishes me with felicities like this. I was a newspaper reporter myself forty-four years ago, and during three subsequent years—but as I remember it I and my comrades never had time to cast our things in a fine literary mould. That scrap will be just as touching and just as beautiful three hundred years hence as it is now.

  I intend that this autobiography shall become a model for all future autobiographies when it is published, after my death, and I also intend that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its form and method—a form and method whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along like contact of flint with steel. Moreover, this autobiography of mine does not select from my life its showy episodes, but deals merely in the common experiences which go to make up the life of the average human being, and the narrative must interest the average human being because these episodes are of a sort which he is familiar with in his own life, and in which he sees his own life reflected and set down in print. The usual, conventional autobiographer seems to particularly hunt out those occasions in his career when he came into contact with celebrated persons, whereas his contacts with the uncelebrated were just as interesting to him, and would be to his reader, and were vastly more numerous than his collisions with the famous.

  Howells was here yesterday afternoon, and I told him the whole scheme of this autobiography and its apparently systemless system—only apparently systemless, for it is not that. It is a deliberate system, and the law of the system is that I shall talk about the matter which for the moment interests me, and cast it aside and talk about something else the moment its interest for me is exhausted. It is a system which follows no charted course and is not going to follow any such course. It is a system which is a complete and purposed jumble—a course which begins nowhere, follows no specified route, and can never reach an end while I am alive, for the reason that if I should talk to the stenographer two hours a day for a hundred years, I should still never be able to set down a tenth part of the things which have interested me in my lifetime. I told Howells that this autobiography of mine would live a couple of thousand years without any effort and would then take a fresh start and live the rest of the time.

  He said he believed it would, and asked me if I meant to make a library of it.

  I said that that was my design, but that if I should live long enough the set of volumes could not be contained merely in a city, it would require a State, and that there would not be any Rockefeller alive, perhaps, at any time during its existence who would be able to buy a full set, except on the instalment plan.

  Howells applauded, and was full of praises and endorsement, which was wise in him and judicious. If he had manifested a different spirit I would have thrown him out of the window. I like criticism, but it must be my way.

  Day before yesterday there was another of those happy literary efforts of the reporters, and I meant to cut it out and insert it to be read with a sad pleasure in future centuries, but I forgot and threw the paper away. It was a brief narrative, but well stated. A poor little starved girl of sixteen, clothed in a single garment, in mid-winter, (albeit properly speaking this is spring) was brought in her pendent rags before a magistrate by a policeman, and the charge against her was that she had been found trying to commit suicide. The Judge asked her why she was moved to that crime, and she told him, in a low voice broken by sobs, that her life had become a burden which she could no longer bear; that she worked sixteen hours a day in a sweat-shop; that the meagre wage she earned had to go toward the family support; that her parents were never able to give her any clothes or enough to eat; that she had worn this same ruined garment as long back as she could remember; that her poor companions were her envy because often they had a penny to spend for some pretty trifle for themselves; that she could not remember when she had had a penny for such a purpose. The court, the policemen, and the other spectators cried with her—a sufficient proof that she told her pitiful tale convincingly and well. And the fact that I also was moved by it, at second-hand, is proof that that reporter delivered it from his heart through his pen, and did his work well.

  In the remote parts of the country the weekly village newspaper remains the same curious production it was when I was a boy, sixty years ago, on the banks of the Mississippi. The metropolitan daily of the great city tells us every day about the movements of Lieutenant General so and so and Rear-Admiral so and so, and what the Vanderbilts are doing, and what hedge beyond the frontiers of New York John D. Rockefeller is hiding behind to keep from being dragged into court and made to testify about alleged Standard Oil iniquities. These great dailies keep us informed of Mr. Carnegie’s movements and sayings; they tell us what President Roosevelt said yesterday and what he is going to do to-day. They tell us what the children of his family have been saying, just as the princelings of Europe are daily quoted—and we notice that the remarks of the Roosevelt children are distinctly princely in that the things they say are rather notably inane and not worth while. The great dailies kept us overwhelmed, for a matter of two months, with a daily and hourly and most minute and faithful account of everything Miss Alice and her fiancé were saying and doing and what they were going to say and what they were going to do, until at last, through God’s mercy they got married and went under cover and got quiet.

  Now the court-circular of the remote village newspaper has always dealt, during these sixty years, with the comings and goings and sayings of its local princelings. They have told us during all those years, and they still tell us, what the principal grocery man is doing and how he has bought a new stock; they tell us that relatives are visiting the ice-cream man, that Miss Smith has arrived to spend a week with the Joneses, and so on, and so on. And all that record is just as intensely interesting to the villagers as is the record I have just been speaking of, of the doings and sayings of the colossally conspicuous personages of the United States. This shows that human nature is all alike; it shows that we like to know what the big people are doing, so that we can envy them. It shows that the big personage of a village bears the same proportion to the little people of the village that the President of the United States bears to the nation. It shows that conspicuousness is the only thing necessary in a person to command our interest and, in a larger or smaller sense, our worship. We recognize that there are no trivial occurrences in life if we get the right focus on them. In a village they are just as prodigious as they are when the subject is a personage of national importance.

  The Swangos.

  From T
he Hazel Green (Ky.) Herald.

  Dr. Bill Swango is able to be in the saddle again.

  Aunt Rhod Swango visited Joseph Catron and wife Sunday.

  Mrs. Shiloh Swango attended the auction at Maytown Saturday.

  W. W. Swango has a nice bunch of cattle ready for the Mount Sterling market.

  James Murphy bought ten head of cattle from W. W. Swango last week.

  Mrs. John Swango of Montgomery County visited Shiloh Swango and family last week.

  Mrs. Sarah Ellen Swango, wife of Wash, the noted turkey trader of Valeria, was the guest of Mrs. Ben Murphy Saturday and Sunday.

  Now that is a very genuine and sincere and honest account of what the Swangos have been doing lately in the interior of Kentucky. We see at a glance what a large place that Swango tribe hold in the admiration and worship of the villagers of Hazel Green, Kentucky. In this account, change Swango to Vanderbilt; then change it to Carnegie; next time change it to Rockefeller; next time change it to the President; next time to the Mayor of New York; next time to Alice’s new husband. Last change of all, change Mrs. Shiloh Swango to Mrs. Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Then it’s a court-circular, all complete and dignified.

  CAPT. E. L. MARSH.

  Former Elmiran Who Died at Des Moines, Iowa, Recently.

  Captain E. L. Marsh, aged sixty-four years, died at Des Moines, Iowa, a week ago Friday—February 23—after a long illness. The deceased was born in Enfield, Tompkins county, N. Y., in 1842, later came to Elmira to live with his parents and in 1857 left Elmira to locate in Iowa, where he has lived the greater part of the time since, the only exception being brief times of residence in the south and east. He enlisted in Company D, of the Second Iowa at Des Moines, and was elected a captain in that regiment. He served throughout the war with marked courage and efficiency. After the war Captain Marsh went to New Orleans, where he remained during most of the reconstruction period and then went to New York, where he engaged in paving business for several years. He went back to Des Moines in 1877 and resided there during the almost thirty years since. He engaged in the real estate business there with great success. He was married in 1873 and is survived by his wife and two children. Captain Marsh was a member of the Loyal legion, Commandery of Iowa, and was senior vice commander of the order for Iowa. He was a member of the G.A.R. also, and a member of the Congregational church. Captain Marsh was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Sheppard Marsh, and Mrs. Marsh was twin sister of the late Mrs. Jervis Langdon of this city. Captain Marsh was a very dear and close friend of his cousin, General Charles J. Langdon, of Elmira.

  This clipping from a Des Moines, Iowa, newspaper, arrives this morning. Ed Marsh was a cousin of my wife, and I remember him very well. He was present at our wedding thirty-six years ago, and was a handsome young bachelor. Aside from my interest in him as a cousin of my young bride, he had another interest for me in the fact that in his Company of the Second Iowa Infantry was Dick Higham. Five years before the war Dick, a good-natured, simpleminded, winning lad of seventeen, was an apprentice in my brother’s small printing-office in Keokuk, Iowa. He had an old musket and he used to parade up and down with it in the office, and he said he would rather be a soldier than anything else. The rest of us laughed at him and said he was nothing but a disguised girl, and that if he were confronted by the enemy he would drop his gun and run.

  But we were not good prophets. By and by when President Lincoln called for volunteers Dick joined the Second Iowa Infantry, about the time that I was thrown out of my employment as Mississippi River pilot and was preparing to become an imitation soldier on the Confederate side in Ralls County, Missouri. The Second Iowa was moved down to the neighborhood of St. Louis and went into camp there. In some way or other it disgraced itself—and if I remember rightly the punishment decreed was that it should never unfurl its flag again until it won the privilege by gallantry in battle. When General Grant, by and by—February ’62—was ordering the charge upon Fort Donelson the Second Iowa begged for the privilege of leading the assault, and got it. Ed Marsh’s Company, with Dick in it serving as a private soldier, moved up the hill and through and over the felled trees and other obstructions in the forefront of the charge, and Dick fell with a bullet through the centre of his forehead—thus manfully wiping from the slate the chaffing prophecy of five or six years before. Also, what was left of the Second Iowa finished that charge victorious, with its colors flying, and never more to be furled in disgrace.

  Ed Marsh’s sister also was at our wedding. She and her brother bore for each other an almost idolatrous love, and this endured until about a year ago. About the time of our marriage, that sister married a blatherskite by the name of Talmage Brown. He was a smart man, but unscrupulous and intemperately religious. Through his smartness he acquired a large fortune, and in his will, made shortly before his death, he appointed Ed Marsh as one of the executors. The estate was worth a million dollars or more, but its affairs were in a very confused condition. Ed Marsh and the other one or two executors performed their duty faithfully, and without remuneration. It took them years to straighten out the estate’s affairs, but they accomplished it. During the succeeding years all went pleasantly. But at last, about a year ago, some relatives of the late Talmage Brown persuaded the widow to bring suit against Ed Marsh and his fellow executors for a large sum of money which it was pretended they had either stolen or had wasted by mismanagement. That severed the devoted relationship which had existed between the brother and sister throughout their lives. The mere bringing of the suit broke Ed Marsh’s heart, for he was a thoroughly honorable man and could not bear even the breath of suspicion. He took to his bed and the case went to court. He had no word of blame for his sister, and said that no one was to blame but the Browns. They had poisoned her mind. The case was heard in court. Then the Judge threw it out with many indignant comments. The Browns rose to leave the court room but he commanded them to wait and hear what else he had to say. Then in dignified language he skinned them alive, pronounced them frauds and swindlers and let them go. But the news of the rehabilitation reached Marsh too late to save him. He did not rally. He has been losing ground gradually for the past two months, and now at last the end has come.

  This morning arrives a letter from my ancient silver-mining comrade, Calvin H. Higbie, a man whom I have not seen nor had communication with for forty-four years. Higbie figures in a chapter of mine in “Roughing It,” where the tale is told of how we discovered a rich blind lead in the “Wide West Mine” in Aurora—or, as we called that region then, Esmeralda—and how instead of making our ownership of that exceedingly rich property permanent by doing ten days’ work on it, as required by the mining laws, he went off on a wild goose chase to hunt for the mysterious cement mine; and how I went off nine miles to Walker River to nurse Captain John Nye through a violent case of spasmodic rheumatism or blind staggers, or some malady of the kind; and how Cal and I came wandering back into Esmeralda one night just in time to be too late to save our fortune from the jumpers.

  I will insert here this letter, and as it will not see the light until Higbie and I are in our graves, I shall allow myself the privilege of copying his punctuation and his spelling, for to me they are a part of the man. He is as honest as the day is long. He is utterly simple-minded and straightforward, and his spelling and his punctuation are as simple and honest as he is himself. He makes no apology for them, and no apology is needed. They plainly state that he is not educated, and they as plainly state that he makes no pretense to being educated.

  Greenville, Plumas co. California

  March 15—1906

  Saml. L. Clemens.

  New York city, N.Y.

  My Dear Sir—

  Two or three parties have ben after me to write up my recolections of Our associations in Nevada, in the early 60s and have come to the conclusion to do so, and have ben jocting down incidents that came to mind, for several years. What I am in dout is, the date you came to Aurora, Nevada—allso, the first trip you made over thee Sieras
to California, after coming to Nev. allso as near as passable date, you tended sick man, on, or near Walker River, when our mine was jumped, dont think for a moment that I intend to steal any of your Thunder, but onely to mention some istnstances that you failed to mention, in any of your articles, Books & c. that I ever saw. I intend to submit the articles to you so that you can see if anything is objectionabl, if so to erase, same, and add anything in its place you saw fit—

  I was burned out a few years since, and all old data, went up in smoke, is the reason I ask for above dates. have ben sick more or less for 2 or 3 years, unable to earn anything to speak of, and the finances are getting pretty low, and I will admit that it is mainly for the purpose of Earning a little money, that my first attempt at writing will be made—and I should be so pleased to have your candid opinion, of its merits, and what in your wisdom in such matters, would be its value for publication. I enclose a coppy of Herald in answer to enquiry I made, if such an article was desired.

  Hoping to hear from you as soon as convenient, I remain with great respect,

  Yours & c

  C. H. Higbie.

  [Copy.]

  New York, Mar. 6—/06

  C. H. Higbie,

  Greenville—Cal.

  Dr Sir

  I should be glad indeed to receive your account of your experiences with Mark Twain, if they are as interesting as I should imagine they would be the Herald would be quite willing to pay you verry well for them, of course, it would be impassible for me to set a price on the matter until I had an opertunity of examining it. if you will kindly send it on, with the privilege of our authenticating it through Mr Clemens, I shall be more than pleased, to give you a Quick decision and make you an offer as it seems worth to us. however, if you have any particular sum in mind which you think should be the price I would suggest that you communicate with me to that effect.