The Autobiography of Mark Twain quotes

I will construct a text:

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.

All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those other things, are his history.

These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. Every day would make a whole book of eighty thousand words—three hundred and sixty-five books a year.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man⁠—the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

I shall not live to see these acres turn to silver and gold, but my children will.”

Thus with the very kindest intentions in the world toward us, he laid the heavy curse of prospective wealth upon our shoulders.

He went to his grave in the full belief that he had done us a kindness. It was a woeful mistake, but, fortunately, he never knew it.

Curious as it may seem, as late as eight years ago there were people living close to Jamestown who never had heard of a railroad and could not be brought to believe in steamboats.

They do not vote for Jackson in Fentress County; they vote for Washington.

My eldest brother was four or five years old when the great purchase was made, and my eldest sister was an infant in arms.

He gathered together his household and journeyed many tedious days through wilderness solitudes, toward what was then the “Far West,” and at last pitched his tent in the little town of Florida, Monroe County, Missouri.

He “kept store” there several years, but had no luck, except that I was born to him.

He presently removed to Hannibal, and prospered somewhat; rose to the dignity of justice of the peace and had been elected to the clerkship of the Surrogate Court, when the summons came which no man may disregard.

The church was perched upon short sections of logs, which elevated it two or three feet from the ground. Hogs slept under there, and whenever the dogs got after them during services, the minister had to wait till the disturbance was over.

In winter there was always a refreshing breeze up through the puncheon floor; in summer there were fleas enough for all.

A slab bench is made of the outside cut of a saw-log, with the bark side down; it is supported on four sticks driven into auger holes at the ends; it has no back and no cushions.

I shook hands, and then there was a pause and silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I merely looked into the general’s grim, immovable countenance a moment or two, in silence, and then I said: “

Mr. President, I am embarrassed. Are you?

” He smiled a smile which would have done no discredit to a cast-iron image, and I got away under the smoke of my volley.

I shook hands, and then there was a pause and silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I merely looked into the general’s grim, immovable countenance a moment or two, in silence, and then I said: “Mr. President, I am embarrassed. Are you?”

He smiled a smile which would have done no discredit to a cast-iron image, and I got away under the smoke of my volley.

I did not see him again for some ten years. In the meantime I had become very thoroughly notorious.

I am not bitter against Jeffreys. I ought to be, but I am not. It indicates that my ancestors of James II’s time were indifferent to him; I do not know why; I never could make it out; but that is what it indicates.

And I have always felt friendly toward Satan. Of course that is ancestral; it must be in the blood, for I could not have originated it.

… And so, by the testimony of instinct, backed by the assertions of Clemenses, who said they had examined the records, I have always been obliged to believe that Geoffrey Clement, the martyr maker, was an ancestor of mine, and to regard him with favor, …

It was a respectable trade then, and monarchs were partners in it. In my time I have had desires to be a pirate myself. The reader, if he will look deep down in his secret heart, will find—but never mind what he will find there.

I am not writing his autobiography, but mine.

Later, according to tradition, one of the procession was ambassador to Spain in the time of James I, or of Charles I, and married there and sent down a strain of Spanish blood to warm us up.

They removed to the remote and secluded village of Jamestown, in the mountain solitudes of east Tennessee. There their first crop of children was born, but as I was of a later vintage, I do not remember anything about it.

I was postponed⁠—postponed to Missouri. Missouri was an unknown new state and needed attractions.

I think that my eldest brother, Orion, my sisters Pamela and Margaret, and my brother Benjamin were born in Jamestown. There may have been others, but as to that I am not sure.

He carried away the company’s promise and many apologies, and we changed the name back to Colonel Mulberry Sellers in the plates.

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen.

Even the existence of two unrelated men wearing the impossible name of Eschol Sellers is a possible thing.

It kept us hoping and hoping during forty years, and forsook us at last. It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us—dreamers and indolent. We were always going to be rich next year—no occasion to work.

It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich⁠—these are wholesome; but to begin it poor and prospectively rich!

The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

It was a long journey in those days, and must have been a rough and tiresome one. The home was made in the wee village of Florida, in Monroe County, and I was born there in 1835.

The village contained a hundred people and I increased the population by 1 percent. It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town.

It may not be modest in me to refer to this, but it is true. There is no record of a person doing as much—not even Shakespeare.

Recently someone in Missouri has sent me a picture of the house I was born in.

Heretofore I have always stated that it was a palace, but I shall be more guarded now.

I used to remember my brother Henry walking into a fire outdoors when he was a week old.

it was not a very large farm—five hundred acres, perhaps—but I could have done it if it had been twice as large. And as for the morality of it, I cared nothing for that;

I would move a state if the exigencies of literature required it.

It was a heavenly place for a boy, that farm of my uncle John’s. The house was a double log one, with a spacious floor (roofed in) connecting it with the kitchen.

Yet there are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is!

It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.

The farmhouse stood in the middle of a very large yard, and the yard was fenced on three sides with rails and on the rear side with high palings; against these stood the smokehouse; beyond the palings was the orchard;

… gravelly bed and curved and frisked in and out and here and there and yonder in the deep shade of overhanging foliage and vines—a divine place for wading, and it had swimming pools, too, which were forbidden to us and therefore much frequented by us.

For we were little Christian children and had early been taught the value of forbidden fruit.

In the little log cabin lived a bedridden white-headed slave woman whom we visited daily and looked upon with awe, for we believed she was upward of a thousand years old and had talked with Moses.

It was a simple speech and made up of small words, but it went home, and Sandy’s noise was not a trouble to me any more.

She never used large words, but she had a natural gift for making small ones do effective work.

She lived to reach the neighborhood of ninety years and was capable with her tongue to the last—especially when a meanness or an injustice roused her spirit.

“I suppose that during all that time you were uneasy about me?”

After a reflective pause⁠—ostensibly to think out the facts⁠—“No⁠—afraid you would.”

The country schoolhouse was three miles from my uncle’s farm. It stood in a clearing in the woods and would hold about twenty-five boys and girls.

A strapping girl of fifteen, in the customary sunbonnet and calico dress, asked me if I “used tobacco”—meaning did I chew it. I said no. It roused her scorn. She reported me to all the crowd, and said:

“Here is a boy seven years old who can’t chew tobacco.”

By the looks and comments which this produced I realized that I was a degraded object, and was cruelly ashamed of myself. I determined to reform. But I only made myself sick; I was not able to learn to chew tobacco.

I was not able to learn to chew tobacco. I learned to smoke fairly well, but that did not conciliate anybody and I remained a poor thing, and characterless. I longed to be respected, but I never was able to rise.

Children have but little charity for one another’s defects.

As I have said, I spent some part of every year at the farm until I was twelve or thirteen years old. The life which I led there with my cousins was full of charm, and so is the memory of it yet.

Her interest in people and other animals was warm, personal, friendly. She always found something to excuse, and as a rule to love, in the toughest of them—even if she had to put it there herself.

She was the natural ally and friend of the friendless.

It was believed that, Presbyterian as she was, she could be beguiled into saying a soft word for the devil himself, and so the experiment was tried. The abuse of Satan began;

However, better these than no pets at all; children must have pets, and we were not allowed to have caged ones. An imprisoned creature was out of the question—my mother would not have allowed a rat to be restrained of its liberty.

In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a boy, everybody was poor, but didn’t know it: and everybody was comfortable, and did know it.

And there were grades of society—people of good family, people of unclassified family, people of no family. Everybody knew everybody, and was affable to everybody, and nobody put on any visible airs;

Everybody knew everybody, and was affable to everybody, and nobody put on any visible airs; yet the class lines were quite clearly drawn and the familiar social life of each class was restricted to that class.

It was a little democracy which was full of liberty, equality, and Fourth of July, and sincerely so, too; yet you perceived that the aristocratic taint was there.

It was there, and nobody found fault with the fact, or ever stopped to reflect that its presence was an inconsistency.

At last, standing on my head, I paused in that attitude to take a minute’s rest. There was a moment’s silence, then Sandy spoke up with excited interest and said:

“Mars Sam, has you ever seed a dried herring?”

“Well, what of it? Anything peculiar about it?”

Dried herrings? The peculiarity of dri … I glanced up. Her face was grave, but there was a dim and shadowy twinkle in her eye which—All of a sudden I knew and far away down in the hoary past I heard a remembered voice murmur.

“Dey eats ’em innards and all!”

“At—last! I’ve found one of you, anyway! Who was the other girl?”

but no matter, mine was a trained Presbyterian conscience and knew but the one duty—to hunt and harry its slave upon all pretexts and on all occasions, particularly when there was no sense nor reason in it.

The tramp⁠—who was to blame⁠—suffered ten minutes; I, who was not to blame, suffered three months.

The shooting down of poor old Smarr in the main street at noonday supplied me with some more dreams;

… in them I always saw again the grotesque closing picture—the great family Bible spread open on the profane old man’s breast by some thoughtful idiot, and rising and sinking to the labored breathings, and adding the torture of its leaden weight to the dying struggles.

We are curiously made.

In all the throng of gaping and sympathetic onlookers there was not one with common sense enough to perceive that an anvil would have been in better taste there than the Bible, less open to sarcastic criticism, and swifter in its atrocious work.

In my age I should never think of wishing to do such a thing. But in my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse.

I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race⁠—never quite sane in the night.

When “Injun Joe” died … But never mind. Somewhere I have already described what a raging hell of repentance I passed through then. I believe that for months I was as pure as the driven snow. After dark.

I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race—never quite sane in the night. When “Injun Joe” died … But never mind. Somewhere I have already described what a raging hell of repentance I passed through then.

I believe that for months I was as pure as the driven snow. After dark.

It was back in those far-distant days—1848 or ’49—that Jim Wolf came to us. He was from a hamlet thirty or forty miles back in the country, and he brought all his native sweetnesses and gentlenesses and simplicities with him.

It’s all in the game. Besides, I had learned, a good while before that, that it is not wise to keep the fires going under a slander unless you can get some large advantage out of keeping it alive.

Few slanders can stand the wear of silence.

But I was not done with “Jim and the Cats” yet. In 1873 I was lecturing in London in the Queen’s Concert Rooms, Hanover Square, and living at the Langham Hotel, Portland Place.

Dolby was large and ruddy, full of life and strength and spirits, a tireless and energetic talker, and always overflowing with good nature and bursting with jollity.

It was a choice and satisfactory menagerie, this pensive poet and this gladsome gorilla.

An indelicate story was a sharp distress to Stoddard; Dolby told him twenty-five a day. Dolby always came home with us after the lecture, and entertained Stoddard till midnight. Me, too.

The thing he sold to Tom Hood’s Annual for three guineas was “Jim Wolf and the Cats.” And he did not put my name to it.

So that small tale was sold three times. I am selling it again now. It is one of the best properties I have come across.

When I was turned twenty I wandered to Cincinnati, and was there several months. Our boardinghouse crew was made up of commonplace people of various ages and both sexes.

The moment he had crutched himself upon his left arm, lodged his right upon his back, and bent himself over his manuscript he raised his face slightly, flashed a glance upon the audience, and bellowed this remark in a thundering bull-voice:

“We are all descended from grandfathers!”

Then he went right on roaring to the end, tearing his ruthless way through the continuous applause and laughter, and taking no sort of account of it.

It was gravely made by a slouching and awkward big miner in the village of Red Dog. The house, very much against his will, forced him to ascend the platform and introduce me. He stood thinking a moment, then said:

“I don’t know anything about this man. At least I know only two things; one is, he hasn’t been in the penitentiary, and the other is [after a pause, and almost sadly], I don’t know why.”

That worked well for a while, then the newspapers printed it and took the juice out of it, and after that I gave up introductions altogether.

He closed one eye impressively and said, loud enough for all the crowd to hear:

“No you don’t. Three of you have got in, up to now, but the next lecturer that goes in here tonight pays.”

Of course we paid; it was the least embarrassing way out of the trouble. The very next morning Keeler had an adventure.

Even if that had been the entire procession, it would have paid.

I am old, now, and may never be an emperor at all; at least in this world.

I have been disappointed so many times that I am growing more and more doubtful and resigned every year; but if it ever should happen, the procession will have a fresh interest for the archbishop, for he will walk.

When a man works up his grammar to that altitude, it is a sign. It shows what he will do if he gets a chance; it shows the kind of disposition he has; I have noticed it often.

I knew one once that did a lot of things. They stop at nothing.

But, anyway, this grammatical coxcomb’s review is interesting, as I said before.

It flaunts itself in the reader’s face all along, and struts and smirks and shows off, and is in a dozen ways irritating and disagreeable. To be serious, I write good grammar myself, but not in that spirit, I am thankful to say.

That is to say, my grammar is of a high order, though not at the top. Nobody’s is.

Perfect grammar—persistent, continuous, sustained—is the fourth dimension, so to speak; many have sought it, but none has found it. Even this reviewer, this purist, with all his godless airs, has made two or three slips. At least, I think he has.

To be serious, I write good grammar myself, but not in that spirit, I am thankful to say. That is to say, my grammar is of a high order, though not at the top. Nobody’s is.

Perfect grammar⁠—persistent, continuous, sustained⁠—is the fourth dimension, so to speak; many have sought it, but none has found it.

Even this reviewer, this purist, with all his godless airs, has made two or three slips. At least, I think he has.

It cost me something to restrain myself and say these smooth and half-flattering things to this immeasurable idiot, but I did it and have never regretted it. For it is higher and nobler to be kind to even a shad like him than just.

If we should deal out justice only, in this world, who would escape?

No, it is better to be generous, and in the end more profitable, for it gains gratitude for us, and love, and it is far better to have the love of a literary strumpet like this than the reproaches of his wounded spirit.

Finally in Florence, in 1904, I hit upon the right way to do an Autobiography: Start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.

Also, make the narrative a combined Diary and Autobiography. In this way you have the vivid thing of the present to make a contrast with memories of like things in the past, and these contrasts have a charm which is all their own.

Under certain conditions I should like to go on living in it indefinitely. Indeed, I could reduce the conditions to two and be quite satisfied.

I should wish the owner to move out of Italy; out of Europe; out of the planet.

I realize that there is no way of realizing this and so after two and a half months I have given it up and have been house hunting ever since. House hunting in any country is difficult and depressing;

It takes but a sentence to state that, but it makes an indolent person tired to think of the planning and work and trouble that lie concealed in it.

For it is less trouble and more satisfaction to bury two families than to select and equip a home for one.

The situation of the villa was perfect. It was three miles from Florence, on the side of a hill. The flowery terrace on which it stood looked down upon sloping olive groves and vineyards;

… for ten or twelve persons, and over the little altar is an ancient oil painting which seems to me to be as beautiful and as rich in tone as any of those old-master performances down yonder in the galleries of the Pitti and the Uffizi.

Botticelli, for instance; I wish I had time to make a few remarks about Botticelli⁠—whose real name was probably Smith.

The curious feature of the house is the salon. This is a spacious and lofty vacuum which occupies the center of the house; all the rest of the house is built around it;

These appear to have talons. Wherever they put their foot down they grab. They walk over my head all the time and cause me infinite torture. It is their park, their club, their summer resort.

They have garden parties there, and conventions, and all sorts of dissipation.

And they fear nothing. All flies are daring, but these are more daring than those of other nationalities. These cannot be scared away by any device. They are more diligent, too, than the other kinds; they come before daylight and stay till after dark.

I am equipped with but the merest smattering in these tongues, if I except one or two.

Angelo speaks French⁠—a French which he could get a patent on, because he invented it himself; a French which no one can understand, a French which resembles no other confusion of sounds heard since Babel, a French which curdles the milk.

He prefers it to his native Italian. He loves to talk it; loves to listen to himself; to him it is music; he will not let it alone.

Now I am coming to it.

John Hay was not afraid of Horace Greeley.

I will leave that remark in a paragraph by itself; it cannot be made too conspicuous. John Hay was the only man who ever served Horace Greeley on the Tribune of whom that can be said.

That is to say, he tried to ask me to call again, but at that point his ancient sincerity rose against the fiction and squelched it. Then he tried another remark, and that one he got through with. He said, pathetically and apologetically:

“She is very strict about Sunday.”

More than once in these past years I have heard admiring and grateful people say, and have said it myself:

“He is not afraid of this whole nation of eighty millions when his duty requires him to do an unpopular thing.”

Twenty-five years have gone by since then, and through manifold experiences I have learned that no courage is absolutely perfect; that there is always someone who is able to modify his pluck.

Another incident of that visit was this: in trading remarks concerning our ages I confessed to forty-two and Hay to forty. Then he asked if I had begun to write my autobiography, and I said I hadn’t.

not the portrait he thinks they are painting, but his real portrait, the inside of him, the soul of him, his character.

Without intending to lie, he will lie all the time; not bluntly, consciously, not dully unconsciously, but half-consciously⁠—consciousness in twilight; a soft and gentle and merciful twilight which makes his general form comely, with his virtuous prominences and projections discernible and his ungracious ones in shadow.

His truths will be recognizable as truths, his modifications of facts which would tell against him will go for nothing, the reader will see the fact through the film and know his man.

but always going, and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important, so that the trip is made.

With a pen in the hand the narrative stream is a canal; it moves slowly, smoothly, decorously, sleepily, it has no blemish except that it is all blemish.

It is too literary, too prim, too nice; the gait and style and movement are not suited to narrative. That canal stream is always reflecting; it is its nature, it can’t help it.

I was new, I was ignorant, the mysteries of the human mind were a sealed book to me as yet, and I stupidly looked upon myself as a tough and unforgivable criminal.

I wrote to Doctor Holmes and told him the whole disgraceful affair

, implored him in impassioned language to believe that I never intended to commit this crime, and was unaware that I had committed it until I was confronted with the awful evidence. I have lost his answer.

I wrote to Doctor Holmes and told him the whole disgraceful affair, implored him in impassioned language to believe that I never intended to commit this crime, and was unaware that I had committed it until I was confronted with the awful evidence.

I have lost his answer. I could better have afforded to lose an uncle.

Of these I had a surplus, many of them of no real value to me, but that letter was beyond price and unsparable.

Thomas McGuire, proprietor of several theaters, said that now was the time to make my fortune—strike while the iron was hot—break into the lecture field! I did it. I announced a lecture on the Sandwich Islands, closing the advertisement with the remark:

“Admission one dollar; doors open at half past seven, the trouble begins at eight.”

A true prophecy. The trouble certainly did begin at eight, when I found myself in front of the only audience I had ever faced, for the fright which pervaded me from head to foot was paralyzing.

I used several of them—ten or twelve, perhaps. I wrote the rest of The Innocents Abroad in sixty days, and I could have added a fortnight’s labor with the pen and gotten along without the letters altogether.

I was very young in those days, exceedingly young, marvelously young, younger than I am now, younger than I shall ever be again, by hundreds of years.

I worked every night from eleven or twelve until broad day in the morning, and as I did 200,000 words in the sixty days the average was more than 3,000 words a day—nothing for Sir Walter Scott, nothing for Louis Stevenson, nothing for plenty of …

Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force:

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

… But it was on a bench in Washington Square that I saw the most of Louis Stevenson. It was an outing that lasted an hour or more and was very pleasant and sociable.

An author may have a reputation which is confined to the surface, and lose it and become pitied, then despised, then forgotten, entirely forgotten—the frequent steps in a surface reputation.

A surface reputation, however great, is always mortal, and always killable if you go at it right⁠—with pins and needles, and quiet slow poison, not with the club and the tomahawk.

But it is a different matter with the submerged reputation—down in the deep water; once a favorite there, always a favorite; once beloved, always beloved; once respected, always respected, honored, and believed in.

My nephew, the late Samuel E. Moffett—himself a literary man—felt in the same way, naturally enough; but I only mention him to recall and revivify a happy remark which he made, and which traveled around the globe:

“Honor knows no statute of limitations.”

So it was decided. I must cease from idling and take up work again. I must write a book; also I must return to the lecture platform. My wife said I could clear off the load of debt in four years. Mr.

I often gave him fresh financial ideas, quite uninvited; and in return—uninvited—he told me how to write my literature better; but nothing came of it, both of us remained as poor as ever.

Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities which we ourselves lack.

Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are the men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do.

Our heroes are the men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else.

If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.

Mr. Rogers was endowed with many great qualities;

He should set one of the lamps by the Morris incident, for it indicates character. It is a thing which probably could not have happened in the White House under any other President who has ever occupied those premises.

Washington wouldn’t call the police and throw a lady out over the fence!

I don’t mean that Roosevelt would. I mean that Washington wouldn’t have any Barneses in his official family. It is the Roosevelts that have the Barneses around.

My mother knew that art. When I was seven or eight or ten or twelve years old—along there—a neighbor said to her, “Do you ever believe anything that that boy says?”

My mother said, “He is the wellspring of truth, but you can’t bring up the whole well with one bucket”

—and she added, “I know his average, therefore he never deceives me. I discount him 90 percent for embroidery, and what is left is perfect and priceless truth, without a flaw in it anywhere.”

He said,

“Mr. Clemens, you know, you can start at the front door and you can go plumb to the upper gate and tread on one of them cigars every time.”

Now by this roundabout and gradual excursion I have arrived at that meeting of the club at Rev.

But this time that I speak of, the burly and magnificent Reverend Doctor Burton sat with his eyes fixed upon Greene from the beginning of the sentence until the end of it.

He looked as the lookout on a whaleship might look who was watching where a whale had gone down and was waiting and watching for it to reappear

; and no doubt that was the figure that was in Burton’s mind, because, when at last Greene finished, Burton threw up his hands and shouted, “There she blows!”

therefore ask the physicians on watch to give him an eighth of a grain of morphine, but this is not to be done unless Henry shall show signs that he is being disturbed.”

Oh, well, never mind the rest of it.

The physicians on watch were young fellows hardly out of the medical college, and they made a mistake—they had no way of measuring the eighth of a grain of morphine, so they guessed at it and gave him a vast quantity heaped on the end …

Rev. Mr. Goodwin put out his left hand and shut off the alarm and went on sleeping peacefully, but the burglars bounded out of the place and left all their swag behind them.

A burglar alarm is a valuable thing if you know how to utilize it.

When Reverend Frank was finishing his father’s mansion, I was passing by one day. I thought I would go in and see how the house was coming along, and in the first room I entered I found Mr. Goodwin and a paperhanger. Then Mr.

That text, when I am done with it—if I ever get done with it, and I don’t seem to get done with any text—but it doesn’t matter, I am not interested in getting done with anything.

I am only interested in talking along and wandering around as much as I want to, regardless of results to the future reader.

By consequence, here we have diary and history combined; because as soon as I wander from the present text—the thought of today—that digression takes me far and wide over an uncharted sea of recollection, and the result of that is history.

The general thanked him courteously. I am sure Sickles must have been always polite.

It takes training to enable a person to be properly courteous when he is dying. Many have tried it. I suppose very few have succeeded.

Senator Tillman of South Carolina has been making a speech—day before yesterday—of frank and intimate criticism of the President—the President of the United States, as he calls him;

Goodman’s Virginia City Enterprise for a matter of two years. I was twenty-nine years old. I was ambitious in several ways, but I had entirely escaped that particular fashion. I had had no desire to fight a duel. I had no intention of provoking one.

I did not feel respectable, but I got a certain amount of satisfaction out of feeling safe.

I was ashamed of myself, the rest of the staff were ashamed of me—but I got along well enough. I had always been accustomed to feeling ashamed of myself, for one thing or another, so there was no novelty for me in the situation.

I had no intention of provoking one. I did not feel respectable, but I got a certain amount of satisfaction out of feeling safe. I was ashamed of myself, the rest of the staff were ashamed of me—but I got along well enough.

I had always been accustomed to feeling ashamed of myself, for one thing or another, so there was no novelty for me in the situation.

I bore it very well. Plunkett was on the staff. R. M. Daggett was on the staff. These had tried to get into duels, but, for the present, had failed and were waiting.

… the Cyclopedia and examined it, and found out who Shakespeare was and what he had done, and I borrowed all that and laid it before a community that couldn’t have been better prepared for instruction about Shakespeare than if they had been prepared by art.

There wasn’t enough of what Shakespeare had done to make an editorial of the necessary length, but I filled it out with what he hadn’t done⁠—which in many respects was more important and striking and readable than the handsomest things he had really accomplished.

But next day I was in trouble again. There were no more Shakespeares to work up. There was nothing in past history, or in the world’s future possibilities, to make an editorial out of suitable to that community; so there was but one theme left.

Steve said, languidly, “Oh, about four times out of five!”

I knew the little rascal was lying, but I didn’t say anything.

The second said:

“Why, that is wonderful shooting! Why, I supposed he couldn’t hit a church!”

He was supposing very sagaciously, but I didn’t say anything.

Well, they said good morning. The second took Mr. Laird home, a little tottery on his legs, and Laird sent back a note in his own hand declining to fight a duel with me on any terms whatever.

I don’t know what the bird thought about that interposition of Providence, but I felt very, very comfortable over it—satisfied and content. Now we found out, later, that Laird had hit his mark four times out of six, right along.

If the duel had come off, he would have so filled my skin with bullet holes that it wouldn’t have held my principles.

By breakfast time the news was all over town that I had sent a challenge and Steve Gillis had carried it. Now that would entitle us to two years apiece in the penitentiary, according to the brand-new law.

Last night he was a mulatto. I didn’t notice it until he turned, while he was speaking, and said something to me. It was a great surprise to me to see that he was a mulatto and had blue eyes.

How unobservant a dull person can be!

Always, before, he was black, to me, and I had never noticed whether he had eyes at all, or not. He has accomplished a wonderful work in this quarter of a century.

… people who used to know my mother intimately in Arkansas, in New Jersey, in California, in Jericho—and I have to seem so glad and so happy to meet these persons who knew in this intimate way one who was so near and dear to me.

And this is the kind of thing that gradually turns a person into a polite liar and deceiver, for my mother was never in any of those places.

One pretty creature was glad to see me again, and remembered being at my house in Hartford—I don’t know when, a great many years ago, it was. Now she was mistaking herself for somebody else. It couldn’t have happened to her.

These episodes used to vex me, years and years ago. But they don’t vex me now. I am older.

If a person thinks that he has known me at some time or other, all I require of him is that he shall consider it a distinction to have known me; and then, as a rule, I am perfectly willing to remember all about it and add some things that he has forgotten.

Twichell came down from Hartford to be present at that meeting, and we chatted and smoked after we got back home. And reference was made again to that disastrous Boston speech which I made at Whittier’s seventieth-birthday dinner;

For years people and carriages used to wait there nightly as much as twenty minutes on a stretch while New England trains monopolized that crossing. I used to hear men use vigorous language about that insolent wrong—but they waited, just the same.

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.

We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one—the one we use—which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs.

You would have supposed he was describing the Cid, and Greatheart, and Sir Galahad, and Bayard the Spotless all rolled into one. Was he sincere? Yes—by that time; and therein lies the pathos of it all, the hopelessness of it all.

It shows at what trivial cost of effort a man can teach himself to lie, and learn to believe it, when he perceives, by the general drift, that that is the popular thing to do.

Does he believe his lie yet? Oh, probably not; he has no further use for it. It was but a passing incident; he spared to it the moment that was its due, then hastened back to the serious business of his life.

All the talk about tolerance, in anything or anywhere, is plainly a gentle lie. It does not exist. It is in no man’s heart; but it unconsciously, and by moss-grown inherited habit, drivels and slobbers from all men’s lips.

Intolerance is everything for oneself, and nothing for the other person.

The mainspring of man’s nature is just that—selfishness. Let us skip the other lies, for brevity’s sake.

He was vehement in his denunciation of Blaine, his relative, and said he should never vote for him.

But he was so used to revising New Testaments that it took him only a few days to revise this one.

I had hardly finished with him when I came across James G. Batterson. Batterson was president of the great Travelers’ Insurance Company. He was a fine man, a strong man, and a valuable citizen.

For she had taught them, and they drew their fortitude from her. The love which she bestowed upon those whom she loved took the form of worship, and in that form it was returned—returned by relatives, friends, and the servants of her household.

It was a strange combination which wrought into one individual, so to speak by marriage⁠—her disposition and character and mine.

She poured out her prodigal affections in kisses and caresses, and in a vocabulary of endearments whose profusion was always an astonishment to me.

I was reared in that atmosphere of reserve. As I have already said, I never knew a member of my father’s family to kiss another member of it except once, and that at a deathbed. And our village was not a kissing community.

The kissing and caressing ended with courtship⁠—along with the deadly piano-playing of that day.

She had the heart-free laugh of a girl. It came seldom, but when it broke upon the ear it was as inspiring as music.

And our village was not a kissing community. The kissing and caressing ended with courtship—along with the deadly piano-playing of that day.

She had the heart-free laugh of a girl. It came seldom, but when it broke upon the ear it was as inspiring as music.

I heard it for the last time when she had been occupying her sick bed for more than a year, and I made a written note of it at the time—a note not to be repeated.

Katy said she had served the family longer than Patrick had. Patrick said it was nothing of the kind; that he had already served the family ten years when Katy came, and that he had now served it thirty-six years.

He was just as brisk there in the New Hampshire hills as he was thirty-six years ago.

He was sixty-four years old, but was just as slender and trim and handsome, and just as alert and springy on his feet, as he was in those long-vanished days of his youth.

Three days later, when my wife and Clara were about halfway across the ocean, I was standing in our dining-room, thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, “Susy was peacefully released today.”

It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.

There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their full import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss—that is all.

As a result of this thinking she had stopped praying. She qualified this statement—that is, she modified it—saying she did not now pray “in the same way” as she had formerly done. Her mother said, “Tell me about it, dear.”

“Well, mamma, the Indians believed they knew, but now we know they were wrong. By and by it can turn out that we are wrong. So now I only pray that there may be a God and a heaven⁠—or something better.”

I wrote down this pathetic prayer in its precise wording, at the time, in a record which we kept of the children’s sayings, and my reverence for it has grown with the years that have passed over my head since then.

The hope was disappointed, of course—for the reason that the size of a misfortune is not determinable by an outsider’s measurement of it, but only by the measurements applied to it by the person specially affected by it.

The king’s lost crown is a vast matter to the king, but of no consequence to the child.

The lost toy is a great matter to the child, but in the king’s eyes it is not a thing to break the heart about.

But the better witness of the two was on the affirmative side, and the quarrel stood proved, and no candy due to either side. There seemed to be no defense for Clara—yet there was, and Susy furnished it; and Clara went free.

Susy said, “I don’t know whether she felt wrong in her heart, but I didn’t feel right in my heart.”

It was a fair and honorable view of the case, and a specially acute analysis of it for a child of six to make. There was no way to convict Clara now, except to put her on the stand again and review her evidence.

The scheme which we began with on the first round of visits was the one which was maintained until the end—and was based upon this remark, which he made when he was disembarking from the carriage at his first stopping place, to visit a patient,

“Entertain yourselves while I go in here and reduce the population.”

As a child, Susy had a passionate temper; and it cost her much remorse and many tears before she learned to govern it, but after that it was a wholesome salt, and her character was the stronger and healthier for its presence.

“Well, mamma, I’ll make it the hay wagon, because, you know, the other things might not make me remember not to do it again, but if I don’t get to ride on the hay wagon I can remember it easily.”

In this world the real penalty, the sharp one, the lasting one, never falls otherwise than on the wrong person.

It was not I that corrected Clara, but the remembrance of poor Susy’s lost hay ride still brings me a pang—after twenty-six years.

for she hoped to teach the child a lesson in gentle pity and mercifulness which she would remember. Apparently her desire was accomplished, for the tears came into Susy’s eyes and she was deeply moved.

Then she said, “Poor little kid!”

A child’s frank envy of the privileges and distinctions of its elders is often a delicately flattering attention and the reverse of unwelcome, but sometimes the envy is not placed where the beneficiary is expecting it to be placed.

And when her pretty labors were finished, and she stood at last perfect, unimprovable, clothed like Solomon in his glory, she paused, confident and expectant, to receive from Susy’s tongue the tribute that was burning in her eyes.

Susy drew an envious little sigh and said, “I wish I could have crooked teeth and spectacles!”

Once, when Susy was six months along in her eighth year, she did something one day in the presence of company which subjected her to criticism and reproof.

Afterward, when she was alone with her mother, as was her custom she reflected a little while over the matter. Then she set up what I think—and what the shade of Burns would think—was a quite good philosophical defense:

“Well, mamma, you know I didn’t see myself, and so I couldn’t know how it looked.”

In homes where the near friends and visitors are mainly literary people—lawyers, judges, professors, and clergymen—the children’s ears become early familiarized with wide vocabularies. It is natural for them to pick up any words that fall in their way;

Once—aged nine or ten—she came to her mother’s room when her sister Jean was a baby and said Jean was crying in the nursery, and asked if she might ring for the nurse. Her mother asked, “Is she crying hard?”—meaning cross, ugly.

“Well, no, mamma. It is a weary, lonesome cry.”

It is a pleasure to me to recall various incidents which reveal the delicacies of feeling which were so considerable a part of her budding character. Such a revelation came once in a way which, while creditable to her heart, was defective in another direction.

Seeing that she was not understood, she reluctantly pointed to that word “Deer.” It was her orthography that was at fault, not her heart. She had inherited both from her mother.

The ability to spell is a natural gift.

The person not born with it can never become perfect in it. I was always able to spell correctly. My wife and her sister, Mrs. Crane, were always bad spellers.

When her mother returned, she praised Clara’s letters. Then she said, “But in one of them, Clara, you spelled a word wrong.”

Clara said, with quite unconscious brutality, “Why, mamma, how did you know?”

More than a quarter of a century has elapsed, and Mrs. Crane is under our roof here in New York for a few days.

Those little chaps, Susy and Clara, invented charades themselves in their earliest years, and played them for the entertainment of their mother and me. They had one high merit—none but a high-grade intellect could guess them.

Obscurity is a great thing in a charade.

These babies invented one once which was a masterpiece in this regard. They came in and played the first syllable, which was a conversation in which the word red occurred with suggestive frequency.

she learned history easily, she learned music easily; she learned all things easily, quickly, and thoroughly—except spelling. She even learned that, after a while. But it would have grieved me but little if she had failed in it—for, although good spelling was my one accomplishment,

I was never able to greatly respect it.

When I was a schoolboy, sixty years ago, we had two prizes in our school. One was for good spelling, the other for amiability. These things were thin, smooth, silver disks, about the size of a dollar.

Howells had not found—there wasn’t a man behind a pen in America that had spirit enough to say a brave and original thing about the book on his own responsibility.

I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value⁠—certainly no large value.

When Charles Dudley Warner and I were about to bring out The Gilded Age, the editor of the Daily Graphic persuaded me to let him have an advance copy, he giving me his word of honor that no notice of it should appear in his …

Even the great Chicago Tribune, the most important journal in the Middle West, was not able to invent anything fresh, but adopted the view of the humble Daily Graphic, dishonesty charge and all. However, let it go.

It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.

What I have been traveling toward all this time is this: The first critic that ever had occasion to describe my personal appearance littered his description with foolish and inexcusable errors whose aggregate furnished the result that I was distinctly and distressingly unhandsome.

This is a frank biographer, and an honest one; she uses no sandpaper on me. I have, to this day, the same dull head in the matter of conundrums and perplexities which Susy had discovered in those long-gone days.

Complexities annoy me; then irritate me; then this progressive feeling presently warms into anger.

I cannot get far in the reading of the commonest and simplest contract—with its “parties of the first part,” and “parties of the second part,” and “parties of the third part,”—my temper is all gone.

She said, “Was it a burglar, do you think?”

“Yes,” I said, “of course it was. Do you suppose it was a Sunday-school superintendent?”

She said, “What do you suppose he wants?”

“No,” I said; “I could not be of any assistance.

Let him select for himself.

”

“No,” I said; “I am no more interested than I was before.

These are experienced people. They know what they want. I should be no help to him.

I think he is after ceramics and bric-a-brac and such things. If he knows the house he knows that that is all that he can find on the dining-room floor.”

She said, “What shall we do then?”

I said, “Climb out of the window.”

She said, “Well, what is the use of a burglar alarm for us?”

She said, “Well, what is the use of a burglar alarm for us?”

I said, “You have seen that it has been useful up to the present moment, and I have explained to you how it will be continuously useful after he gets up here.”

That was the end of it. He didn’t ring any more alarms.

I said, “You have seen that it has been useful up to the present moment, and I have explained to you how it will be continuously useful after he gets up here.”

That was the end of it. He didn’t ring any more alarms.

Presently I said: “He is disappointed, I think. He has gone off with the vegetables and the bric-a-brac and I think he is dissatisfied.”

I augmented my language to meet the emergency and threw that shirt out of the window. I was too angry—too insane—to examine the third shirt, but put it furiously on. Again the button was absent, and that shirt followed its comrades out of the window.

Then I straightened up, gathered my reserves, and let myself go like a cavalry charge.

In the midst of that great assault, my eye fell upon that gaping door, and I was paralyzed.

I felt myself shrinking away to nothing under that accusing gaze. I stood silent under that desolating fire for as much as a minute, I should say—it seemed a very, very long time. Then my wife’s lips parted, and from them issued—my latest bathroom remark.

The language perfect, but the expression unpractical, apprentice-like, ignorant, inexperienced, comically inadequate, absurdly weak and unsuited to the great language.

In my lifetime I had never heard anything so out of tune, so inharmonious, so incongruous, so ill suited to each other as were those mighty words set to that feeble music.

These revelations and exposures are searching, but they are just.

If I am as transparent to other people as I was to Susy, I have wasted much effort in this life.

Grandma couldn’t make papa go to school, so she let him go into a printing-office to learn the trade. He did so, and gradually picked up enough education to enable him to do about as well as those who were more studious in early life.

… with my brother Henry, who was two years younger than I, and I think that the unbroken monotony of his goodness and truthfulness and obedience would have been a burden to her but for the relief and variety which I furnished in the other direction.

I was a tonic. I was valuable to her.

I never thought of it before, but now I see it. I never knew Henry to do a vicious thing toward me, or toward anyone else—but he frequently did righteous ones that cost me as heavily.

He was old and white-headed, but the boy of fifteen was still visible in him. He came up to me, made a trumpet of his hands at my ear, nodded his head toward the citizens, and said, confidentially—in a yell like a fog horn—

“Same damned fools, Sam.”

Papa was about twenty years old when he went on the Mississippi as a pilot.

We could turn out and march and show the red sashes on May Day with the Sunday schools, and on the Fourth of July with the Sunday schools, the independent fire company, and the militia company.

But you can’t keep a juvenile moral institution alive on two displays of its sash per year.

As a private, I could not have held out beyond one procession, but I was Illustrious Grand Worthy Secretary and Royal Inside Sentinel, and had the privilege of inventing the passwords and of wearing a rosette on my sash.

This brand was very popular on account of its extreme cheapness. Mr. Garth had other brands which were cheap, and some that were bad, but the supremacy over them enjoyed by this brand was indicated by its name.

It was called “Garth’s damnedest.”

We used to trade old newspapers (exchanges) for that brand.

I said: “

Because he would have lied just as straightforwardly on the other side. The others gave me all the vices; Goodman would have given me all the virtues.

You wanted unprejudiced testimony, of course. I knew you wouldn’t get it from Goodman. I did believe you would get it from those others, and possibly you did. But it was certainly less complimentary than I was expecting.”

Mamma couldn’t have had a greater sorrow than that of dear grandpa’s death, or any that could equal it exept the death of papa. Mamma helped take care of grandpa during his illness and she couldn’t give up hope till the end had realy come.

Surely nothing is so astonishing, so unaccountable, as a woman’s endurance.

Mrs. Clemens and I went down to Elmira about the 1st of June to help in the nursing of Mr. Langdon. Mrs. Clemens, her sister (Susy Crane), and I did all the nursing both day and night, during two months until the end.

I was well and strong, but

I was a man and afflicted with a man’s infirmity⁠—lack of endurance.

But neither of those young women was well nor strong: still, I never found either of them sleepy or unalert when I came on watch; yet, as I have said, they divided seventeen hours of watching between them in every twenty-four.

“

Avoid inferiors. Seek your comradeships among your superiors in intellect and character; always climb.

”

If we had paid out of our existing means, and the price had been a single million apiece, we should have had to sit up, for there wasn’t a man among us who could have met the obligation completely. The contract was never signed.

We had traded a Bank of England for ten minutes’ extra sleep⁠—a very small sleep, an apparently unimportant sleep, but it has kept us tired ever since.

When you’ve got your contract right, this afternoon, sign it.”

He was quite right.

In her mouth that word “disapprove” was as blighting and withering and devastating as another person’s damn.

One or two days ago I was talking about our sorrowful and pathetic brief sojourn in Buffalo, where we became hermits, and could have no human comradeship except that of young David Gray and his young wife and their baby boy.

Again I didn’t deny it. I would not have had that superstition dissipated for anything. It supplied a long-felt want.

We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.

Susy comes to New York with her mother and father—Aunt Clara visits them at the Everett House—Aunt Clara’s ill luck with horses—The omnibus incident in Germany—Aunt Clara now ill at Hoffman House, result of horseback accident thirty years ago—Mr.

I said: “

It’s no matter. Better that than a long one⁠—because the audience could stand a bad short one, but couldn’t stand a good long one.

”

I was always heedless.

I was born heedless, and therefore I was constantly, and quite unconsciously, committing breaches of the minor proprieties, which brought upon me humiliations which ought to have humiliated me, but didn’t, because I didn’t know anything had happened.

But Livy knew; and so the humiliations fell to her share, poor child, who had not earned them and did not deserve them. She always said I was the most difficult child she had. She was very sensitive about me.

Of course my resentment did not extend to the students, and so I had an unforgettable good time talking to them. And I think they had a good time, too, for they responded as one man, to use Susy’s unimprovable phrase.

Girls are charming creatures. I shall have to be twice seventy years old before I change my mind as to that.

I am to talk to a crowd of them this afternoon, students of Barnard College (the sex’s annex to Columbia University), and I think I shall have just as pleasant a time with those lassies as I had with the Vassar girls twenty-one years ago.

“Well no,” he said. “No, I can’t say that I am always cheerful, but—

Well, you know that kind of a night that comes; you wake up way in the night and the whole world is sunk in gloom

and there are storms and earthquakes and all sorts of disasters in the air threatening and you get cold and chill;

… I was in again, and that apprentice had to come along just at the wrong time, and he plunged in and dived, pawed around on the bottom and found me, and dragged me out, emptied the water out of me, and I was saved again.

I was drowned seven times after that before I learned to swim⁠—once in Bear Creek and six times in the Mississippi.

I do not now know who the people were who interfered with the intentions of a Providence wiser than themselves, but I hold a grudge against them yet.

“Death List is Now 900.”

I was never so enthusiastically proud of the flag till now!

The next heading explains how safely our daring soldiers were located. It says:

I hope that this silence will continue. It is about as eloquent and as damaging and effective as the most indignant words could be, I think.

When a man is sleeping in a noise, his sleep goes placidly on; but if the noise stops, the stillness wakes him.

This silence has continued five days now. Surely it must be waking the drowsy nation. Surely the nation must be wondering what it means. A five-day silence following a world-astonishing event has not happened on this planet since the daily newspaper was invented.

He believed it would destroy the Republican party and President Roosevelt. I cannot believe that the prediction will come true, for the reason that prophecies which promise valuable things, desirable things, good things, worthy things, never come true.

Prophecies of this kind are like wars fought in a good cause⁠—they are so rare that they don’t count.

Day before yesterday the cable note from the happy General Doctor Wood was still all glorious.

Twichell tried again. He got almost to the last word safely, when somebody trod on a dog and the dog let out a howl of anguish that could be heard beyond the frontier.

The major said, “God damn that dog!”⁠—and Twichell said, “Amen.”

Schoolmates of sixty years ago: Mary Miller, one of Mr. Clemens’s first sweethearts—Artimisia Briggs, another—Mary Lacy, another—Jimmie McDaniel, to whom Mr. Clemens told his first humorous story—Mr.

It brought me within a shade of death’s door. It brought me to where I no longer felt any interest in anything, but, on the contrary, felt a total absence of interest—which was most placid and tranquil and sweet and delightful and enchanting.

I have never enjoyed anything in my life any more than I enjoyed dying that time.

I was, in effect, dying. The word had been passed and the family notified to assemble around the bed and see me off. I knew them all. There was no doubtfulness in my vision. They were all crying, but that did not affect me.

I wanted to get aboard ship and be done with him. How childish it all seems now! And how brutal—that I could not be moved to confer upon my wife a precious and lasting joy because it would cause me a small inconvenience.

I have known few meaner men than I am.

By good fortune this feature of my nature does not often get to the surface, and so I doubt if any member of my family except my wife ever suspected how much of that feature there was in me.

His nose was enlarged and broken up by a disease which made it look like a cauliflower. The first time our little Susy ever saw him she encountered him on the street near our house and came flying wide-eyed to her mother and said, “

Santa Claus has got loose.

”

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.

… he did he did with conviction and enthusiasm and with a vainglorious pride in the thing he was doing—and no matter what that thing was, whether good, bad, or indifferent, he repented of it every time in sackcloth and ashes before twenty-four hours had sped.

Pessimists are born, not made. Optimists are born, not made.

But I think he was the only person I have ever known in whom pessimism and optimism were lodged in exactly equal proportions. Except in the matter of grounded principle, he was as unstable as water. You could dash his spirits with a single word;

But at last I saw the right one coming. It was my brother Henry. He was the best boy in the whole region. He never did harm to anybody, he never offended anybody.

He was exasperatingly good. He had an overflowing abundance of goodness⁠—but not enough to save him this time.

I watched his approach with eager interest. He came strolling along, dreaming his pleasant summer dream and not doubting but that Providence had him in His care. If he had known where I was he would have had less confidence in that superstition.

I need not go into any particulars about Helen Keller.

She is fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare, and the rest of the immortals.

She will be as famous a thousand years from now as she is today.

The government of the new Territory of Nevada was an interesting menagerie. Governor Nye was an old and seasoned politician from New York—politician, not statesman. He had white hair. He was in fine physical condition.

He had a winningly friendly face and deep lustrous brown eyes that could talk as a native language the tongue of every feeling, every passion, every emotion.

His eyes could outtalk his tongue, and this is saying a good deal, for he was a very remarkable talker, both in private and on the stump. He was a shrewd man.

He was a shrewd man. He generally saw through surfaces and perceived what might be going on inside without being suspected of having an eye on the matter.

When grown-up persons indulge in practical jokes, the fact gauges them.

They have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job lot of leftover standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader …

Is the incident now closed? Again we cannot tell.

The smell of it may linger in American history a thousand years yet.

This autobiography of mine differs from other autobiographies—differs from all other autobiographies, except Benvenuto’s, perhaps. The conventional biography of all the ages is an open window.

… notice the people that pass along at my back—I get glimpses of them in the mirror—and whenever they say or do anything that can help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation, I set these things down in my autobiography.

I rejoice when a king or a duke comes my way and makes himself useful to this autobiography, but they are rare customers, with wide intervals between.

I can use them with good effect as lighthouses and monuments along my way, but for real business I depend upon the common herd.

But this autobiography of mine is not that kind of an autobiography.

This autobiography of mine is a mirror, and I am looking at myself in it all the time.

Incidentally I notice the people that pass along at my back—I get glimpses of them in the mirror—and whenever they say or do anything that can help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation, I set these things down in …

Lincoln’s pen will outsell a whole basketful of my letters. A time will come when a scratch of the pens of those immortal soldiers, Sherman and Sheridan, will outsell a thousand scratches of mine, and so I shall enjoy my supremacy now, while I may.

I shall read that clipping over forty or fifty times, now, while it is new and true, and let the desolating future take care of itself.

Day before yesterday all Vassar, ancient and modern, packed itself into the Hudson Theater, and I was there. The occasion was a benefit arranged by Vassar and its friends to raise money to aid poor students of that college in getting through the college course.

The other day I furnished a sentiment in response to a man’s request—to wit:

“The noblest work of God?” Man.

“Who found it out?” Man.

This attitude would have settled his case for him without further effort, but he had another spasm of virtue on the same day, and that made it absolutely sure.

It had been his habit for a great many years to change his religion with his shirt, and his ideas about temperance at the same time.

He would be a teetotaler for a while and the champion of the cause; then he would change to the other side for a time.

Camp was going to deal fairly and honestly with those poor people from Europe or not?—and so, without waiting to find out, he quashed the whole trade, and there it fell, never to be brought to life again.

The land, from being suddenly worth two hundred thousand dollars, became as suddenly worth what it was before⁠—nothing, and taxes to pay.

I had paid the taxes and the other expenses for some years, but I dropped the Tennessee land there, and have never taken any interest in it since, pecuniarily or otherwise, until yesterday.

This time I hope we shall get rid of the Tennessee land for good and all and never hear of it again.

It was created under a misapprehension; my father loaded himself up with it under a misapprehension; he unloaded it on to us under a misapprehension, and I should like to get rid of the accumulated misapprehensions and what is left of the land as soon as possible.

I came East in January, 1867. Orion remained in Carson City perhaps a year longer. Then he sold his twelve-thousand-dollar house and its furniture for thirty-five hundred in greenbacks at about 30 percent discount.

But at last when among those details I found twenty-five dollars for pew rent I struck.

I told him to change his religion and sell the pew.

Mr. Clemens’s present house unsatisfactory because of no sunshine—Mr. Clemens meets Etta in Washington Square. Recalls ballroom in Virginia City forty-four years ago—Orion resumed; he invents wood-sawing machine; invents steam canal boat—Orion’s autobiography—His death.