Chapters from My Autobiography

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I had supposed, until yesterday, that Orion had frittered away the last
acre, and indeed that was his own impression. But a gentleman arrived
yesterday from Tennessee and brought a map showing that by a correction
of the ancient surveys we still own a thousand acres, in a coal
district, out of the hundred thousand acres which my father left us when
he died in 1847. The gentleman brought a proposition; also he brought a
reputable and well-to-do citizen of New York. The proposition was that
the Tennesseean gentleman should sell that land; that the New York
gentleman should pay all the expenses and fight all the lawsuits, in
case any should turn up, and that of such profit as might eventuate the
Tennesseean gentleman should take a third, the New-Yorker a third, and
Sam Moffett and his sister and I--who are surviving heirs--the remaining
third.

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

[Sidenote: (1867.)]

[Sidenote: (1871.)]

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 sixty per cent.
discount. He and his wife took passage in the steamer for home in
Keokuk. About 1871 or '72 they came to New York. Orion had been trying
to make a living in the law ever since he had arrived from the Pacific
Coast, but he had secured only two cases. Those he was to try free of
charge--but the possible result will never be known, because the parties
settled the cases out of court without his help.

Orion got a job as proof-reader on the New York "Evening Post" at ten
dollars a week. By and by he came to Hartford and wanted me to get him a
place as reporter on a Hartford paper. Here was a chance to try my
scheme again, and I did it. I made him go to the Hartford "Evening
Post," without any letter of introduction, and propose to scrub and
sweep and do all sorts of things for nothing, on the plea that he didn't
need money but only needed work, and that that was what he was pining
for. Within six weeks he was on the editorial staff of that paper at
twenty dollars a week, and he was worth the money. He was presently
called for by some other paper at better wages, but I made him go to the
"Post" people and tell them about it. They stood the raise and kept him.
It was the pleasantest berth he had ever had in his life. It was an easy
berth. He was in every way comfortable. But ill-luck came. It was bound
to come.

A new Republican daily was to be started in a New England city by a
stock company of well-to-do politicians, and they offered him the chief
editorship at three thousand a year. He was eager to accept. My
beseechings and reasonings went for nothing. I said,

"You are as weak as water. Those people will find it out right away.
They will easily see that you have no backbone; that they can deal with
you as they would deal with a slave. You may last six months, but not
longer. Then they will not dismiss you as they would dismiss a
gentleman: they will fling you out as they would fling out an intruding
tramp."

It happened just so. Then he and his wife migrated to Keokuk once more.
Orion wrote from there that he was not resuming the law; that he thought
that what his health needed was the open air, in some sort of outdoor
occupation; that his father-in-law had a strip of ground on the river
border a mile above Keokuk with some sort of a house on it, and his idea
was to buy that place and start a chicken-farm and provide Keokuk with
chickens and eggs, and perhaps butter--but I don't know whether you can
raise butter on a chicken-farm or not. He said the place could be had
for three thousand dollars cash, and I sent the money. He began to raise
chickens, and he made a detailed monthly report to me, whereby it
appeared that he was able to work off his chickens on the Keokuk people
at a dollar and a quarter a pair. But it also appeared that it cost a
dollar and sixty cents to raise the pair. This did not seem to
discourage Orion, and so I let it go. Meantime he was borrowing a
hundred dollars per month of me regularly, month by month. Now to show
Orion's stern and rigid business ways--and he really prided himself on
his large business capacities--the moment he received the advance of a
hundred dollars at the beginning of each month, he always sent me his
note for the amount, and with it he sent, _out of that money, three
months' interest_ on the hundred dollars at six per cent. per annum,
these notes being always for three months.

As I say, he always sent a detailed statement of the month's profit and
loss on the chickens--at least the month's loss on the chickens--and
this detailed statement included the various items of expense--corn for
the chickens, boots for himself, and so on; even car fares, and the
weekly contribution of ten cents to help out the missionaries who were
trying to damn the Chinese after a plan not satisfactory to those
people.

I think the poultry experiment lasted about a year, possibly two years.
It had then cost me six thousand dollars.

Orion returned to the law business, and I suppose he remained in that
harness off and on for the succeeding quarter of a century, but so far
as my knowledge goes he was only a lawyer in name, and had no clients.

[Sidenote: (1890.)]

My mother died, in her eighty-eighth year, in the summer of 1890. She
had saved some money, and she left it to me, because it had come from
me. I gave it to Orion and he said, with thanks, that I had supported
him long enough and now he was going to relieve me of that burden, and
would also hope to pay back some of that expense, and maybe the whole of
it. Accordingly, he proceeded to use up that money in building a
considerable addition to the house, with the idea of taking boarders and
getting rich. We need not dwell upon this venture. It was another of his
failures. His wife tried hard to make the scheme succeed, and if anybody
could have made it succeed she would have done it. She was a good woman,
and was greatly liked. She had a practical side, and she would have made
that boarding-house lucrative if circumstances had not been against her.

Orion had other projects for recouping me, but as they always required
capital I stayed out of them, and they did not materialize. Once he
wanted to start a newspaper. It was a ghastly idea, and I squelched it
with a promptness that was almost rude. Then he invented a wood-sawing
machine and patched it together himself, and he really sawed wood with
it. It was ingenious; it was capable; and it would have made a
comfortable little fortune for him; but just at the wrong time
Providence interfered again. Orion applied for a patent and found that
the same machine had already been patented and had gone into business
and was thriving.

Presently the State of New York offered a fifty-thousand-dollar prize
for a practical method of navigating the Erie Canal with steam
canal-boats. Orion worked at that thing for two or three years, invented
and completed a method, and was once more ready to reach out and seize
upon imminent wealth when somebody pointed out a defect: his steam
canal-boat could not be used in the winter-time; and in the summer-time
the commotion its wheels would make in the water would wash away the
State of New York on both sides.

Innumerable were Orion's projects for acquiring the means to pay off
the debt to me. These projects extended straight through the succeeding
thirty years, but in every case they failed. During all those thirty
years his well-established honesty kept him in offices of trust where
other people's money had to be taken care of, but where no salary was
paid. He was treasurer of all the benevolent institutions; he took care
of the money and other property of widows and orphans; he never lost a
cent for anybody, and never made one for himself. Every time he changed
his religion the church of his new faith was glad to get him; made him
treasurer at once, and at once he stopped the graft and the leaks in
that church. He exhibited a facility in changing his political
complexion that was a marvel to the whole community. Once the following
curious thing happened, and he wrote me all about it himself.

One morning he was a Republican, and upon invitation he agreed to make a
campaign speech at the Republican mass-meeting that night. He prepared
the speech. After luncheon he became a Democrat and agreed to write a
score of exciting mottoes to be painted upon the transparencies which
the Democrats would carry in their torchlight procession that night. He
wrote these shouting Democratic mottoes during the afternoon, and they
occupied so much of his time that it was night before he had a chance to
change his politics again; so he actually made a rousing Republican
campaign speech in the open air while his Democratic transparencies
passed by in front of him, to the joy of every witness present.

He was a most strange creature--but in spite of his eccentricities he
was beloved, all his life, in whatsoever community he lived. And he was
also held in high esteem, for at bottom he was a sterling man.

About twenty-five years ago--along there somewhere--I suggested to Orion
that he write an autobiography. I asked him to try to tell the straight
truth in it; to refrain from exhibiting himself in creditable attitudes
exclusively, and to honorably set down all the incidents of his life
which he had found interesting to him, including those which were burned
into his memory because he was ashamed of them. I said that this had
never been done, and that if he could do it his autobiography would be a
most valuable piece of literature. I said I was offering him a job which
I could not duplicate in my own case, but I would cherish the hope that
he might succeed with it. I recognise now that I was trying to saddle
upon him an impossibility. I have been dictating this autobiography of
mine daily for three months; I have thought of fifteen hundred or two
thousand incidents in my life which I am ashamed of, but I have not
gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet. I think that that
stock will still be complete and unimpaired when I finish these memoirs,
if I ever finish them. I believe that if I should put in all or any of
those incidents I should be sure to strike them out when I came to
revise this book.

Orion wrote his autobiography and sent it to me. But great was my
disappointment; and my vexation, too. In it he was constantly making a
hero of himself, exactly as I should have done and am doing now, and he
was constantly forgetting to put in the episodes which placed him in an
unheroic light. I knew several incidents of his life which were
distinctly and painfully unheroic, but when I came across them in his
autobiography they had changed color. They had turned themselves inside
out, and were things to be intemperately proud of. In my dissatisfaction
I destroyed a considerable part of that autobiography. But in what
remains there are passages which are interesting, and I shall quote from
them here and there and now and then, as I go along.

[Sidenote: (1898.)]

While we were living in Vienna in 1898 a cablegram came from Keokuk
announcing Orion's death. He was seventy-two years old. He had gone down
to the kitchen in the early hours of a bitter December morning; he had
built the fire, and had then sat down at a table to write something; and
there he died, with the pencil in his hand and resting against the paper
in the middle of an unfinished word--an indication that his release from
the captivity of a long and troubled and pathetic and unprofitable life
was mercifully swift and painless.

[_Dictated in 1904._] A quarter of a century ago I was visiting John Hay
at Whitelaw Reid's house in New York, which Hay was occupying for a few
months while Reid was absent on a holiday in Europe. Temporarily also,
Hay was editing Reid's paper, the New York "Tribune." I remember two
incidents of that Sunday visit particularly well. I had known John Hay a
good many years, I had known him when he was an obscure young editorial
writer on the "Tribune" in Horace Greely's time, earning three or four
times the salary he got, considering the high character of the work
which came from his pen. In those earlier days he was a picture to look
at, for beauty of feature, perfection of form and grace of carriage and
movement. He had a charm about him of a sort quite unusual to my Western
ignorance and inexperience--a charm of manner, intonation, apparently
native and unstudied elocution, and all that--the groundwork of it
native, the ease of it, the polish of it, the winning naturalness of it,
acquired in Europe where he had been Charge d'Affaires some time at the
Court of Vienna. He was joyous and cordial, a most pleasant comrade. One
of the two incidents above referred to as marking 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. He said that I ought to begin at once, and that I had
already lost two years. Then he said in substance this:

"At forty a man reaches the top of the hill of life and starts down on
the sunset side. The ordinary man, the average man, not to particularize
too closely and say the commonplace man, has at that age succeeded or
failed; in either case he has lived all of his life that is likely to be
worth recording; also in either case the life lived is worth setting
down, and cannot fail to be interesting if he comes as near to telling
the truth about himself as he can. And he _will_ tell the truth in spite
of himself, for his facts and his fictions will work loyally together
for the protection of the reader; each fact and each fiction will be a
dab of paint, each will fall in its right place, and together they will
paint his portrait; 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.

"There is a subtle devilish something or other about autobiographical
composition that defeats all the writer's attempts to paint his portrait
_his_ way."

Hay meant that he and I were ordinary average commonplace people, and I
did not resent my share of the verdict, but nursed my wound in silence.
His idea that we had finished our work in life, passed the summit and
were westward bound down-hill, with me two years ahead of him and
neither of us with anything further to do as benefactors to mankind, was
all a mistake. I had written four books then, possibly five. I have been
drowning the world in literary wisdom ever since, volume after volume;
since that day's sun went down he has been the historian of Mr. Lincoln,
and his book will never perish; he has been ambassador, brilliant
orator, competent and admirable Secretary of State.

MARK TWAIN.

(_To be Continued._)

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

No. DCX.

MARCH 1, 1907.

CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XIII.

BY MARK TWAIN.

[Sidenote: (1847.)]

... As I have said, that vast plot of Tennessee land[6] was held by my
father twenty years--intact. When he died in 1847, we began to manage it
ourselves. Forty years afterward, we had managed it all away except
10,000 acres, and gotten nothing to remember the sales by. About
1887--possibly it was earlier--the 10,000 went. My brother found a
chance to trade it for a house and lot in the town of Corry, in the oil
regions of Pennsylvania. About 1894 he sold this property for $250. That
ended the Tennessee Land.

If any penny of cash ever came out of my father's wise investment but
that, I have no recollection of it. No, I am overlooking a detail. It
furnished me a field for Sellers and a book. Out of my half of the book
I got $15,000 or $20,000; out of the play I got $75,000 or $80,000--just
about a dollar an acre. It is curious: I was not alive when my father
made the investment, therefore he was not intending any partiality; yet
I was the only member of the family that ever profited by it. I shall
have occasion to mention this land again, now and then, as I go along,
for it influenced our life in one way or another during more than a
generation. Whenever things grew dark it rose and put out its hopeful
Sellers hand and cheered us up, and said "Do not be afraid--trust in
me--wait." 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 _prospectively_ rich!
The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

My parents removed to Missouri in the early thirties; I do not remember
just when, for I was not born then, and cared nothing for such things.
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 one per cent. It is more than
the best man in history ever did for any other 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. But I did it for Florida,
and it shows that I could have done it for any place--even London, I
suppose.

Recently some one 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 remember only one circumstance connected with my life in it. I
remember it very well, though I was but two and a half years old at the
time. The family packed up everything and started in wagons for
Hannibal, on the Mississippi, thirty miles away. Toward night, when they
camped and counted up the children, one was missing. I was the one. I
had been left behind. Parents ought always to count the children before
they start. I was having a good enough time playing by myself until I
found that the doors were fastened and that there was a grisly deep
silence brooding over the place. I knew, then, that the family were
gone, and that they had forgotten me. I was well frightened, and I made
all the noise I could, but no one was near and it did no good. I spent
the afternoon in captivity and was not rescued until the gloaming had
fallen and the place was alive with ghosts.

My brother Henry was six months old at that time. I used to remember his
walking into a fire outdoors when he was a week old. It was remarkable
in me to remember a thing like that, which occurred when I was so young.
And it was still more remarkable that I should cling to the delusion,
for thirty years, that I _did_ remember it--for of course it never
happened; he would not have been able to walk at that age. If I had
stopped to reflect, I should not have burdened my memory with that
impossible rubbish so long. It is believed by many people that an
impression deposited in a child's memory within the first two years of
its life cannot remain there five years, but that is an error. The
incident of Benvenuto Cellini and the salamander must be accepted as
authentic and trustworthy; and then that remarkable and indisputable
instance in the experience of Helen Keller--however, I will speak of
that at another time. For many years I believed that I remembered
helping my grandfather drink his whiskey toddy when I was six weeks old,
but I do not tell about that any more, now; I am grown old, and my
memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could
remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are
decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the
things that happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all
have to do it.

My uncle, John A. Quarles, was a farmer, and his place was in the
country four miles from Florida. He had eight children, and fifteen or
twenty negroes, and was also fortunate in other ways. Particularly in
his character. I have not come across a better man than he was. I was
his guest for two or three months every year, from the fourth year after
we removed to Hannibal till I was eleven or twelve years old. I have
never consciously used him or his wife in a book, but his farm has come
very handy to me in literature, once or twice. In "Huck Finn" and in
"Tom Sawyer Detective" I moved it down to Arkansas. It was all of six
hundred miles, but it was no trouble, 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. In the summer the table was set in the middle of
that shady and breezy floor, and the sumptuous meals--well, it makes me
cry to think of them. Fried chicken, roast pig, wild and tame turkeys,
ducks and geese; venison just killed; squirrels, rabbits, pheasants,
partridges, prairie-chickens; biscuits, hot batter cakes, hot buckwheat
cakes, hot "wheat bread," hot rolls, hot corn pone; fresh corn boiled on
the ear, succotash, butter-beans, string-beans, tomatoes, pease, Irish
potatoes, sweet-potatoes; buttermilk, sweet milk, "clabber";
watermelons, musk-melons, cantaloups--all fresh from the garden--apple
pie, peach pie, pumpkin pie, apple dumplings, peach cobbler--I can't
remember the rest. The way that the things were cooked was perhaps the
main splendor--particularly a certain few of the dishes. For instance,
the corn bread, the hot biscuits and wheat bread, and the fried chicken.
These things have never been properly cooked in the North--in fact, no
one there is able to learn the art, so far as my experience goes. The
North thinks it knows how to make corn bread, but this is gross
superstition. Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern
corn bread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite so bad as the
Northern imitation of it. The North seldom tries to fry chicken, and
this is well; the art cannot be learned north of the line of Mason and
Dixon, nor anywhere in Europe. This is not hearsay; it is experience
that is speaking. In Europe it is imagined that the custom of serving
various kinds of bread blazing hot is "American," but that is too broad
a spread; it is custom in the South, but is much less than that in the
North. In the North and in Europe hot bread is considered unhealthy.
This is probably another fussy superstition, like the European
superstition that ice-water is unhealthy. Europe does not need
ice-water, and does not drink it; and yet, notwithstanding this, its
word for it is better than ours, because it describes it, whereas ours
doesn't. Europe calls it "iced" water. Our word describes water made
from melted ice--a drink which we have but little acquaintance with.

It seem a pity that the world should throw away so many good things
merely because they are unwholesome. I doubt if God has given us any
refreshment which, taken in moderation, is unwholesome, except microbes.
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;
beyond the orchard were the negro quarter and the tobacco-fields. The
front yard was entered over a stile, made of sawed-off logs of graduated
heights; I do not remember any gate. In a corner of the front yard were
a dozen lofty hickory-trees and a dozen black-walnuts, and in the
nutting season riches were to be gathered there.

Down a piece, abreast the house, stood a little log cabin against the
rail fence; and there the woody hill fell sharply away, past the barns,
the corn-crib, the stables and the tobacco-curing house, to a limpid
brook which sang along over its 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.

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