Chapters from My Autobiography

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It was only a quarter to eleven when they began to distribute pretexts.
At ten minutes to eleven all those people were out of the house. When
nobody was left but George and me I was cheerful--I had no compunctions
of conscience, no griefs of any kind. But George was beyond speech,
because he held the honor and credit of the family above his own, and he
was ashamed that this smirch had been put upon it. I told him to go to
bed and try to sleep it off. I went to bed myself. At breakfast in the
morning when George was passing a cup of coffee, I saw it tremble in his
hand. I knew by that sign that there was something on his mind. He
brought the cup to me and asked impressively,

"Mr. Clemens, how far is it from the front door to the upper gate?"

I said, "It is a hundred and twenty-five steps."

He said, "Mr. Clemens, 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."

It wasn't true in detail, but in essentials it was.

The subject under discussion on the night in question was Dreams. The
talk passed from mouth to mouth in the usual serene way.

I do not now remember what form my views concerning dreams took at the
time. I don't remember now what my notion about dreams was then, but I
do remember telling a dream by way of illustrating some detail of my
speech, and I also remember that when I had finished it Rev. Dr. Burton
made that doubting remark which contained that word I have already
spoken of as having been uttered by my mother, in some such connection,
forty or fifty years before. I was probably engaged in trying to make
those people believe that now and then, by some accident, or otherwise,
a dream which was prophetic turned up in the dreamer's mind. The date of
my memorable dream was about the beginning of May, 1858. It was a
remarkable dream, and I had been telling it several times every year for
more than fifteen years--and now I was telling it again, here in the
club.

In 1858 I was a steersman on board the swift and popular New Orleans and
St. Louis packet, "Pennsylvania," Captain Kleinfelter. I had been lent
to Mr. Brown, one of the pilots of the "Pennsylvania," by my owner, Mr.
Horace E. Bixby, and I had been steering for Brown about eighteen
months, I think. Then in the early days of May, 1858, came a tragic
trip--the last trip of that fleet and famous steamboat. I have told all
about it in one of my books called "Old Times on the Mississippi." But
it is not likely that I told the dream in that book. It is impossible
that I can ever have published it, I think, because I never wanted my
mother to know about the dream, and she lived several years after I
published that volume.

I had found a place on the "Pennsylvania" for my brother Henry, who was
two years my junior. It was not a place of profit, it was only a place
of promise. He was "mud" clerk. Mud clerks received no salary, but they
were in the line of promotion. They could become, presently, third clerk
and second clerk, then chief clerk--that is to say, purser. The dream
begins when Henry had been mud clerk about three months. We were lying
in port at St. Louis. Pilots and steersmen had nothing to do during the
three days that the boat lay in port in St. Louis and New Orleans, but
the mud clerk had to begin his labors at dawn and continue them into the
night, by the light of pine-knot torches. Henry and I, moneyless and
unsalaried, had billeted ourselves upon our brother-in-law, Mr. Moffet,
as night lodgers while in port. We took our meals on board the boat. No,
I mean _I_ lodged at the house, not Henry. He spent the _evenings_ at
the house, from nine until eleven, then went to the boat to be ready for
his early duties. On the night of the dream he started away at eleven,
shaking hands with the family, and said good-by according to custom. I
may mention that hand-shaking as a good-by was not merely the custom of
that family, but the custom of the region--the custom of Missouri, I may
say. In all my life, up to that time, I had never seen one member of the
Clemens family kiss another one--except once. When my father lay dying
in our home in Hannibal--the 24th of March, 1847--he put his arm around
my sister's neck and drew her down and kissed her, saying "Let me die."
I remember that, and I remember the death rattle which swiftly followed
those words, which were his last. These good-bys of Henry's were always
executed in the family sitting-room on the second floor, and Henry went
from that room and down-stairs without further ceremony. But this time
my mother went with him to the head of the stairs and said good-by
_again_. As I remember it she was moved to this by something in Henry's
manner, and she remained at the head of the stairs while he descended.
When he reached the door he hesitated, and climbed the stairs and shook
hands good-by once more.

In the morning, when I awoke I had been dreaming, and the dream was so
vivid, so like reality, that it deceived me, and I thought it was real.
In the dream I had seen Henry a corpse. He lay in a metallic
burial-case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing, and on his breast
lay a great bouquet of flowers, mainly white roses, with a red rose in
the centre. The casket stood upon a couple of chairs. I dressed, and
moved toward that door, thinking I would go in there and look at it, but
I changed my mind. I thought I could not yet bear to meet my mother. I
thought I would wait awhile and make some preparation for that ordeal.
The house was in Locust Street, a little above 13th, and I walked to
14th, and to the middle of the block beyond, before it suddenly flashed
upon me that there was nothing real about this--it was only a dream. I
can still feel something of the grateful upheaval of joy of that moment,
and I can also still feel the remnant of doubt, the suspicion that maybe
it _was_ real, after all. I returned to the house almost on a run, flew
up the stairs two or three steps at a jump, and rushed into that
sitting-room--and was made glad again, for there was no casket there.

We made the usual eventless trip to New Orleans--no, it was not
eventless, for it was on the way down that I had the fight with Mr.
Brown[8] which resulted in his requiring that I be left ashore at New
Orleans. In New Orleans I always had a job. It was my privilege to watch
the freight-piles from seven in the evening until seven in the morning,
and get three dollars for it. It was a three-night job and occurred
every thirty-five days. Henry always joined my watch about nine in the
evening, when his own duties were ended, and we often walked my rounds
and chatted together until midnight. This time we were to part, and so
the night before the boat sailed I gave Henry some advice. I said, "In
case of disaster to the boat, don't lose your head--leave that unwisdom
to the passengers--they are competent--they'll attend to it. But you
rush for the hurricane-deck, and astern to one of the life-boats lashed
aft the wheel-house, and obey the mate's orders--thus you will be
useful. When the boat is launched, give such help as you can in getting
the women and children into it, and be sure you don't try to get into it
yourself. It is summer weather, the river is only a mile wide, as a
rule, and you can swim that without any trouble." Two or three days
afterward the boat's boilers exploded at Ship Island, below Memphis,
early one morning--and what happened afterward I have already told in
"Old Times on the Mississippi." As related there, I followed the
"Pennsylvania" about a day later, on another boat, and we began to get
news of the disaster at every port we touched at, and so by the time we
reached Memphis we knew all about it.

I found Henry stretched upon a mattress on the floor of a great
building, along with thirty or forty other scalded and wounded persons,
and was promptly informed, by some indiscreet person, that he had
inhaled steam; that his body was badly scalded, and that he would live
but a little while; also, I was told that the physicians and nurses were
giving their whole attention to persons who had a chance of being saved.
They were short-handed in the matter of physicians and nurses; and Henry
and such others as were considered to be fatally hurt were receiving
only such attention as could be spared, from time to time, from the more
urgent cases. But Dr. Peyton, a fine and large-hearted old physician of
great reputation in the community, gave me his sympathy and took
vigorous hold of the case, and in about a week he had brought Henry
around. Dr. Peyton never committed himself with prognostications which
might not materialize, but at eleven o'clock one night he told me that
Henry was out of danger, and would get well. Then he said, "At midnight
these poor fellows lying here and there all over this place will begin
to mourn and mutter and lament and make outcries, and if this commotion
should disturb Henry it will be bad for him; therefore ask the physician
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 of a
knife-blade, and the fatal effects were soon apparent. I think he died
about dawn, I don't remember as to that. He was carried to the dead-room
and I went away for a while to a citizen's house and slept off some of
my accumulated fatigue--and meantime something was happening. The
coffins provided for the dead were of unpainted white pine, but in this
instance some of the ladies of Memphis had made up a fund of sixty
dollars and bought a metallic case, and when I came back and entered the
dead-room Henry lay in that open case, and he was dressed in a suit of
my clothing. He had borrowed it without my knowledge during our last
sojourn in St. Louis; and I recognized instantly that my dream of
several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these
details went--and I think I missed one detail; but that one was
immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place
with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the centre
of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast.

I told the dream there in the Club that night just as I have told it
here.

Rev. Dr. Burton swung his leonine head around, focussed me with his eye,
and said:

"When was it that this happened?"

"In June, '58."

"It is a good many years ago. Have you told it several times since?"

"Yes, I have, a good many times."

"How many?"

"Why, I don't know how many."

"Well, strike an average. How many times a year do you think you have
told it?"

"Well, I have told it as many as six times a year, possibly oftener."

"Very well, then you've told it, we'll say, seventy or eighty times
since it happened?"

"Yes," I said, "that's a conservative estimate."

"Now then, Mark, a very extraordinary thing happened to me a great many
years ago, and I used to tell it a number of times--a good many
times--every year, for it was so wonderful that it always astonished the
hearer, and that astonishment gave me a distinct pleasure every time. I
never suspected that that tale was acquiring any auxiliary advantages
through repetition until one day after I had been telling it ten or
fifteen years it struck me that either I was getting old, and slow in
delivery, or that the tale was longer than it was when it was born.
Mark, I diligently and prayerfully examined that tale with this result:
that I found that its proportions were now, as nearly as I could make
oat, one part fact, straight fact, fact pure and undiluted, golden fact,
and twenty-four parts embroidery. I never told that tale afterwards--I
was never able to tell it again, for I had lost confidence in it, and so
the pleasure of telling it was gone, and gone permanently. How much of
this tale of yours is embroidery?"

"Well," I said, "I don't know. I don't think any of it is embroidery. I
think it is all just as I have stated it, detail by detail."

"Very well," he said, "then it is all right, but I wouldn't tell it any
more; because if you keep on, it will begin to collect embroidery sure.
The safest thing is to stop now."

That was a great many years ago. And to-day is the first time that I
have told that dream since Dr. Burton scared me into fatal doubts about
it. No, I don't believe I can say that. I don't believe that I ever
really had any doubts whatever concerning the salient points of the
dream, for those points are of such a nature that they are _pictures_,
and pictures can be remembered, when they are vivid, much better than
one can remember remarks and unconcreted facts. Although it has been so
many years since I have told that dream, I can see those pictures now
just as clearly defined as if they were before me in this room. I have
not told the entire dream. There was a good deal more of it. I mean I
have not told all that happened in the dream's fulfilment. After the
incident in the death-room I may mention one detail, and that is this.
When I arrived in St. Louis with the casket it was about eight o'clock
in the morning, and I ran to my brother-in-law's place of business,
hoping to find him there, but I missed him, for while I was on the way
to his office he was on his way from the house to the boat. When I got
back to the boat the casket was gone. He had conveyed it out to his
house. I hastened thither, and when I arrived the men were just removing
the casket from the vehicle to carry it up-stairs. I stopped that
procedure, for I did not want my mother to see the dead face, because
one side of it was drawn and distorted by the effects of the opium. When
I went up-stairs, there stood the two chairs--placed to receive the
coffin--just as I had seen them in my dream; and if I had arrived two or
three minutes later, the casket would have been resting upon them,
precisely as in my dream of several weeks before.

MARK TWAIN.

(_To be Continued._)

FOOTNOTE:

[8] See "Old Times on the Mississippi."

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

No. DCXIV.

MAY 3, 1907.

CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XVII.

BY MARK TWAIN.

_From Susy's Biography of Me._

_Sept. 9, '85._--Mamma is teaching Jean a little natural history
and is making a little collection of insects for her. But mamma
does not allow Jean to kill any insects she only collects those
insects that are found dead. Mamma has told us all, perticularly
Jean, to bring her all the little dead insects that she finds. The
other day as we were all sitting at supper Jean broke into the room
and ran triumfantly up to Mamma and presented her with a plate full
of dead flies. Mamma thanked Jean vary enthusiastically although
she with difficulty concealed her amusement. Just then Soar Mash
entered the room and Jean believing her hungry asked Mamma for
permission to give her the flies. Mamma laughingly consented and
the flies almost immediately dissapeared.

[_Monday, October 15, 1906._] Sour Hash's presence indicates that this
adventure occurred at Quarry Farm. Susy's Biography interests itself
pretty exclusively with historical facts; where they happen is not a
matter of much concern to her. When other historians refer to the Bunker
Hill Monument they know it is not necessary to mention that that
monument is in Boston. Susy recognizes that when she mentions Sour Mash
it is not necessary to localize her. To Susy, Sour Mash is the Bunker
Hill Monument of Quarry Farm.

Ordinary cats have some partiality for living flies, but none for dead
ones; but Susy does not trouble herself to apologize for Sour Mash's
eccentricities of taste. This Biography was for _us_, and Susy knew that
nothing that Sour Mash might do could startle us or need explanation, we
being aware that she was not an ordinary cat, but moving upon a plane
far above the prejudices and superstitions which are law to common
catdom.

Once in Hartford the flies were so numerous for a time, and so
troublesome, that Mrs. Clemens conceived the idea of paying George[9] a
bounty on all the flies he might kill. The children saw an opportunity
here for the acquisition of sudden wealth. They supposed that their
mother merely wanted to accumulate dead flies, for some aesthetic or
scientific reason or other, and they judged that the more flies she
could get the happier she would be; so they went into business with
George on a commission. Straightway the dead flies began to arrive in
such quantities that Mrs. Clemens was pleased beyond words with the
success of her idea. Next, she was astonished that one house could
furnish so many. She was paying an extravagantly high bounty, and it
presently began to look as if by this addition to our expenses we were
now probably living beyond our income. After a few days there was peace
and comfort; not a fly was discoverable in the house: there wasn't a
straggler left. Still, to Mrs. Clement's surprise, the dead flies
continued to arrive by the plateful, and the bounty expense was as
crushing as ever. Then she made inquiry, and found that our innocent
little rascals had established a Fly Trust, and had hired all the
children in the neighborhood to collect flies on a cheap and
unburdensome commission.

Mrs. Clemens's experience in this matter was a new one for her, but the
governments of the world had tried it, and wept over it, and discarded
it, every half-century since man was created. Any Government could have
told her that the best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in
Australia, and snakes in India, is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then
every patriot goes to raising them.

_From Susy's Biography of Me._

_Sept. 10, '85._--The other evening Clara and I brought down our
new soap bubble water and we all blew soap bubles. Papa blew his
soap bubles and filled them with tobacco smoke and as the light
shone on then they took very beautiful opaline colors. Papa would
hold them and then let us catch them in our hand and they felt
delightful to the touch the mixture of the smoke and water had a
singularly pleasant effect.

It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon
the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of
form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little
puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory--and sometimes not even that.
I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the
night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess
that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making.

I remember those days of twenty-one years ago, and a certain pathos
clings about them. Susy, with her manifold young charms and her
iridescent mind, was as lovely a bubble as any we made that day--and as
transitory. She passed, as they passed, in her youth and beauty, and
nothing of her is left but a heartbreak and a memory. That long-vanished
day came vividly back to me a few weeks ago when, for the first time in
twenty-one years, I found myself again amusing a child with
smoke-charged soap-bubbles.

[Sidenote: (1885.)]

Susy's next date is November 29th, 1885, the eve of my fiftieth
birthday. It seems a good while ago. I must have been rather young for
my age then, for I was trying to tame an old-fashioned bicycle nine feet
high. It is to me almost unbelievable, at my present stage of life, that
there have really been people willing to trust themselves upon a dizzy
and unstable altitude like that, and that I was one of them. Twichell
and I took lessons every day. He succeeded, and became a master of the
art of riding that wild vehicle, but I had no gift in that direction and
was never able to stay on mine long enough to get any satisfactory view
of the planet. Every time I tried to steal a look at a pretty girl, or
any other kind of scenery, that single moment of inattention gave the
bicycle the chance it had been waiting for, and I went over the front of
it and struck the ground on my head or my back before I had time to
realise that something was happening. I didn't always go over the front
way; I had other ways, and practised them all; but no matter which way
was chosen for me there was always one monotonous result--the bicycle
skinned my leg and leaped up into the air and came down on top of me.
Sometimes its wires were so sprung by this violent performance that it
had the collapsed look of an umbrella that had had a misunderstanding
with a cyclone. After each day's practice I arrived at home with my skin
hanging in ribbons, from my knees down. I plastered the ribbons on where
they belonged, and bound them there with handkerchiefs steeped in Pond's
Extract, and was ready for more adventures next day. It was always a
surprise to me that I had so much skin, and that it held out so well.
There was always plenty, and I soon came to understand that the supply
was going to remain sufficient for all my needs. It turned out that I
had nine skins, in layers, one on top of the other like the leaves of a
book, and some of the doctors said it was quite remarkable.

I was full of enthusiasm over this insane amusement. My teacher was a
young German from the bicycle factory, a gentle, kindly, patient
creature, with a pathetically grave face. He never smiled; he never made
a remark; he always gathered me tenderly up when I plunged off, and
helped me on again without a word. When he had been teaching me twice a
day for three weeks I introduced a new gymnastic--one that he had never
seen before--and so at last a compliment was wrung from him, a thing
which I had been risking my life for days to achieve. He gathered me up
and said mournfully: "Mr. Clemens, you can fall off a bicycle in more
different ways than any person I ever saw before."

[Sidenote: (1849.)]

A boy's life is not all comedy; much of the tragic enters into it. The
drunken tramp--mentioned in "Tom Sawyer" or "Huck Finn"--who was burned
up in the village jail, lay upon my conscience a hundred nights
afterward and filled them with hideous dreams--dreams in which I saw his
appealing face as I had seen it in the pathetic reality, pressed against
the window-bars, with the red hell glowing behind him--a face which
seemed to say to me, "If you had not give me the matches, this would not
have happened; you are responsible for my death." I was _not_
responsible for it, for I had meant him no harm, but only good, when I
let him have the matches; 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
or 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[10] at noonday
supplied me with some more dreams; and 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 nightmares I gasped and struggled for breath under
the crush of that vast book for many a night.

All within the space of a couple of years we had two or three other
tragedies, and I had the ill-luck to be too near by on each occasion.
There was the slave man who was struck down with a chunk of slag for
some small offence; I saw him die. And the young California emigrant who
was stabbed with a bowie knife by a drunken comrade: I saw the red life
gush from his breast. And the case of the rowdy young Hyde brothers and
their harmless old uncle: one of them held the old man down with his
knees on his breast while the other one tried repeatedly to kill him
with an Allen revolver which wouldn't go off. I happened along just
then, of course.

Then there was the case of the young California emigrant who got drunk
and proposed to raid the "Welshman's house" all alone one dark and
threatening night.[11] This house stood half-way up Holliday's Hill
("Cardiff" Hill), and its sole occupants were a poor but quite
respectable widow and her young and blameless daughter. The invading
ruffian woke the whole village with his ribald yells and coarse
challenges and obscenities. I went up there with a comrade--John Briggs,
I think--to look and listen. The figure of the man was dimly risible;
the women were on their porch, but not visible in the deep shadow of its
roof, but we heard the elder woman's voice. She had loaded an old musket
with slugs, and she warned the man that if he stayed where he was while
she counted ten it would cost him his life. She began to count, slowly:
he began to laugh. He stopped laughing at "six"; then through the deep
stillness, in a steady voice, followed the rest of the tale: "seven ...
eight ... nine"--a long pause, we holding our breath--"ten!" A red spout
of flame gushed out into the night, and the man dropped, with his breast
riddled to rags. Then the rain and the thunder burst loose and the
waiting town swarmed up the hill in the glare of the lightning like an
invasion of ants. Those people saw the rest; I had had my share and was
satisfied. I went home to dream, and was not disappointed.

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