Chapters from My Autobiography

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Mamma has given me a very pleasant little newspaper scrap about
papa, to copy. I will put it in here.

[_Thursday, October 11, 1906._] It was a rather strong compliment; I
think I will leave it out. It was from James Redpath.

The chief ingredients of Redpath's make-up were honesty, sincerity,
kindliness, and pluck. He wasn't afraid. He was one of Ossawatomie
Brown's right-hand men in the bleeding Kansas days; he was all through
that struggle. He carried his life in his hands, and from one day to
another it wasn't worth the price of a night's lodging. He had a small
body of daring men under him, and they were constantly being hunted by
the "jayhawkers," who were proslavery Missourians, guerillas, modern
free lances.

[_Friday, October 12, 1906._] ... I can't think of the name of that
daredevil guerilla who led the jayhawkers and chased Redpath up and
down the country, and, in turn, was chased by Redpath. By grace of the
chances of war, the two men never met in the field, though they several
times came within an ace of it.

Ten or twelve years later, Redpath was earning his living in Boston as
chief of the lecture business in the United States. Fifteen or sixteen
years after his Kansas adventures I became a public lecturer, and he was
my agent. Along there somewhere was a press dinner, one November night,
at the Tremont Hotel in Boston, and I attended it. I sat near the head
of the table, with Redpath between me and the chairman; a stranger sat
on my other side. I tried several times to talk with the stranger, but
he seemed to be out of words and I presently ceased from troubling him.
He was manifestly a very shy man, and, moreover, he might have been
losing sleep the night before.

The first man called up was Redpath. At the mention of the name the
stranger started, and showed interest. He fixed a fascinated eye on
Redpath, and lost not a word of his speech. Redpath told some stirring
incidents of his career in Kansas, and said, among other things:

"Three times I came near capturing the gallant jayhawker chief, and once
he actually captured _me_, but didn't know me and let me go, because he
said he was hot on Redpath's trail and couldn't afford to waste time and
rope on inconsequential small fry."

My stranger was called up next, and when Redpath heard his name he, in
turn, showed a startled interest. The stranger said, bending a caressing
glance upon Redpath and speaking gently--I may even say sweetly:

"You realize that I was that jayhawker chief. I am glad to know you now
and take you to my heart and call you friend"--then he added, in a voice
that was pathetic with regret, "but if I had only known you then, what
tumultuous happiness I should have had in your society!--while it
lasted."

The last quarter of a century of my life has been pretty constantly and
faithfully devoted to the study of the human race--that is to say, the
study of myself, for, in my individual person, I am the entire human
race compacted together. I have found that then is no ingredient of the
race which I do not possess in either a small way or a large way. When
it is small, as compared with the same ingredient in somebody else,
there is still enough of it for all the purposes of examination. In my
contacts with the species I find no one who possesses a quality which I
do not possess. The shades of difference between other people and me
serve to make variety and prevent monotony, but that is all; broadly
speaking, we are all alike; and so by studying myself carefully and
comparing myself with other people, and noting the divergences, I have
been enabled to acquire a knowledge of the human race which I perceive
is more accurate and more comprehensive than that which has been
acquired and revealed by any other member of our species. As a result,
my private and concealed opinion of myself is not of a complimentary
sort. It follows that my estimate of the human race is the duplicate of
my estimate of myself.

I am not proposing to discuss all of the peculiarities of the human
race, at this time; I only wish to touch lightly upon one or two of
them. To begin with, I wonder why a man should prefer a good
billiard-table to a poor one; and why he should prefer straight cues to
crooked ones; and why he should prefer round balls to chipped ones; and
why he should prefer a level table to one that slants; and why he should
prefer responsive cushions to the dull and unresponsive kind. I wonder
at these things, because when we examine the matter we find that the
essentials involved in billiards are as competently and exhaustively
furnished by a bad billiard outfit as they are by the best one. One of
the essentials is amusement. Very well, if there is any more amusement
to be gotten out of the one outfit than out of the other, the facts are
in favor of the bad outfit. The bad outfit will always furnish thirty
per cent. more fun for the players and for the spectators than will the
good outfit. Another essential of the game is that the outfit shall give
the players full opportunity to exercise their best skill, and display
it in a way to compel the admiration of the spectators. Very well, the
bad outfit is nothing behind the good one in this regard. It is a
difficult matter to estimate correctly the eccentricities of chipped
balls and a slanting table, and make the right allowance for them and
secure a count; the finest kind of skill is required to accomplish the
satisfactory result. Another essential of the game is that it shall add
to the interest of the game by furnishing opportunities to bet. Very
well, in this regard no good outfit can claim any advantage over a bad
one. I know, by experience, that a bad outfit is as valuable as the
best one; that an outfit that couldn't be sold at auction for seven
dollars is just as valuable for all the essentials of the game as an
outfit that is worth a thousand.

I acquired some of this learning in Jackass Gulch, California, more than
forty years ago. Jackass Gulch had once been a rich and thriving
surface-mining camp. By and by its gold deposits were exhausted; then
the people began to go away, and the town began to decay, and rapidly;
in my time it had disappeared. Where the bank, and the city hall, and
the church, and the gambling-dens, and the newspaper office, and the
streets of brick blocks had been, was nothing now but a wide and
beautiful expanse of green grass, a peaceful and charming solitude. Half
a dozen scattered dwellings were still inhabited, and there was still
one saloon of a ruined and rickety character struggling for life, but
doomed. In its bar was a billiard outfit that was the counterpart of the
one in my father-in-law's garret. The balls were chipped, the cloth was
darned and patched, the table's surface was undulating, and the cues
were headless and had the curve of a parenthesis--but the forlorn
remnant of marooned miners played games there, and those games were more
entertaining to look at than a circus and a grand opera combined.
Nothing but a quite extraordinary skill could score a carom on that
table--a skill that required the nicest estimate of force, distance, and
how much to allow for the various slants of the table and the other
formidable peculiarities and idiosyncrasies furnished by the
contradictions of the outfit. Last winter, here in New York, I saw Hoppe
and Schaefer and Sutton and the three or four other billiard champions
of world-wide fame contend against each other, and certainly the art and
science displayed were a wonder to see; yet I saw nothing there in the
way of science and art that was more wonderful than shots which I had
seen Texas Tom make on the wavy surface of that poor old wreck in the
perishing saloon at Jackass Gulch forty years before. Once I saw Texas
Tom make a string of seven points on a single inning!--all calculated
shots, and not a fluke or a scratch among them. I often saw him make
runs of four, but when he made his great string of seven, the boys went
wild with enthusiasm and admiration. The joy and the noise exceeded that
which the great gathering at Madison Square produced when Sutton scored
five hundred points at the eighteen-inch game, on a world-famous night
last winter. With practice, that champion could score nineteen or
twenty on the Jackass Gulch table; but to start with, Texas Tom would
show him miracles that would astonish him; also it might have another
handsome result: it might persuade the great experts to discard their
own trifling game and bring the Jackass Gulch outfit here and exhibit
their skill in a game worth a hundred of the discarded one, for profound
and breathless interest, and for displays of almost superhuman skill.

In my experience, games played with a fiendish outfit furnish ecstasies
of delight which games played with the other kind cannot match.
Twenty-seven years ago my budding little family spent the summer at
Bateman's Point, near Newport, Rhode Island. It was a comfortable
boarding-place, well stocked with sweet mothers and little children, but
the male sex was scarce; however, there was another young fellow besides
myself, and he and I had good times--Higgins was his name, but that was
not his fault. He was a very pleasant and companionable person. On the
premises there was what had once been a bowling-alley. It was a single
alley, and it was estimated that it had been out of repair for sixty
years--but not the balls, the balls were in good condition; there were
forty-one of them, and they ranged in size from a grapefruit up to a
lignum-vitae sphere that you could hardly lift. Higgins and I played on
that alley day after day. At first, one of us located himself at the
bottom end to set up the pins in case anything should happen to them,
but nothing happened. The surface of that alley consisted of a rolling
stretch of elevations and depressions, and neither of us could, by any
art known to us, persuade a ball to stay on the alley until it should
accomplish something. Little balls and big, the same thing always
happened--the ball left the alley before it was half-way home and went
thundering down alongside of it the rest of the way and made the
gamekeeper climb out and take care of himself. No matter, we persevered,
and were rewarded. We examined the alley, noted and located a lot of its
peculiarities, and little by little we learned how to deliver a ball in
such a way that it would travel home and knock down a pin or two. By and
by we succeeded in improving our game to a point where we were able to
get all of the pins with thirty-five balls--so we made it a
thirty-five-ball game. If the player did not succeed with thirty-five,
he had lost the game. I suppose that all the balls, taken together,
weighed five hundred pounds, or maybe a ton--or along there
somewhere--but anyway it was hot weather, and by the time that a player
had sent thirty-five of them home he was in a drench of perspiration,
and physically exhausted.

Next, we started cocked hat--that is to say, a triangle of three pins,
the other seven being discarded. In this game we used the three smallest
balls and kept on delivering them until we got the three pins down.
After a day or two of practice we were able to get the chief pin with an
output of four balls, but it cost us a great many deliveries to get the
other two; but by and by we succeeded in perfecting our art--at least we
perfected it to our limit. We reached a scientific excellence where we
could get the three pins down with twelve deliveries of the three small
balls, making thirty-six shots to conquer the cocked hat.

Having reached our limit for daylight work, we set up a couple of
candles and played at night. As the alley was fifty or sixty feet long,
we couldn't see the pins, but the candles indicated their locality. We
continued this game until we were able to knock down the invisible pins
with thirty-six shots. Having now reached the limit of the candle game,
we changed and played it left-handed. We continued the left-handed game
until we conquered its limit, which was fifty-four shots. Sometimes we
sent down a succession of fifteen balls without getting anything at all.
We easily got out of that old alley five times the fun that anybody
could have gotten out of the best alley in New York.

One blazing hot day, a modest and courteous officer of the regular army
appeared in our den and introduced himself. He was about thirty-five
years old, well built and militarily erect and straight, and he was
hermetically sealed up in the uniform of that ignorant old day--a
uniform made of heavy material, and much properer for January than July.
When he saw the venerable alley, and glanced from that to the long
procession of shining balls in the trough, his eye lit with desire, and
we judged that he was our meat. We politely invited him to take a hand,
and he could not conceal his gratitude; though his breeding, and the
etiquette of his profession, made him try. We explained the game to him,
and said that there were forty-one balls, and that the player was
privileged to extend his inning and keep on playing until he had used
them all up--repeatedly--and that for every ten-strike he got a prize.
We didn't name the prize--it wasn't necessary, as no prize would ever be
needed or called for. He started a sarcastic smile, but quenched it,
according to the etiquette of his profession. He merely remarked that he
would like to select a couple of medium balls and one small one, adding
that he didn't think he would need the rest.

Then he began, and he was an astonished man. He couldn't get a ball to
stay on the alley. When he had fired about fifteen balls and hadn't yet
reached the cluster of pins, his annoyance began to show out through his
clothes. He wouldn't let it show in his face; but after another fifteen
balls he was not able to control his face; he didn't utter a word, but
he exuded mute blasphemy from every pore. He asked permission to take
off his coat, which was granted; then he turned himself loose, with
bitter determination, and although he was only an infantry officer he
could have been mistaken for a battery, he got up such a volleying
thunder with those balls. Presently he removed his cravat; after a
little he took off his vest; and still he went bravely on. Higgins was
suffocating. My condition was the same, but it would not be courteous to
laugh; it would be better to burst, and we came near it. That officer
was good pluck. He stood to his work without uttering a word, and kept
the balls going until he had expended the outfit four times, making four
times forty-one shots; then he had to give it up, and he did; for he was
no longer able to stand without wobbling. He put on his clothes, bade us
a courteous good-by, invited us to call at the Fort, and started away.
Then he came back, and said,

"What is the prize for the ten-strike?"

We had to confess that we had not selected it yet.

He said, gravely, that he thought there was no occasion for hurry about
it.

I believe Bateman's alley was a better one than any other in America, in
the matter of the essentials of the game. It compelled skill; it
provided opportunity for bets; and if you could get a stranger to do the
bowling for you, there was more and wholesomer and delightfuler
entertainment to be gotten out of his industries than out of the finest
game by the best expert, and played upon the best alley elsewhere in
existence.

MARK TWAIN.

(_To be Continued._)

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

No. DCXXV.

DECEMBER, 1907.

CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XXV.

BY MARK TWAIN.

_January 11, 1906._ Answer to a letter received this morning:

DEAR MRS. H.,--I am forever your debtor for reminding me of that
curious passage in my life. During the first year or two after it
happened, I could not bear to think of it. My pain and shame were
so intense, and my sense of having been an imbecile so settled,
established and confirmed, that I drove the episode entirely from
my mind--and so all these twenty-eight or twenty-nine years I have
lived in the conviction that my performance of that time was
coarse, vulgar and destitute of humor. But your suggestion that you
and your family found humor in it twenty-eight years ago moved me
to look into the matter. So I commissioned a Boston typewriter to
delve among the Boston papers of that bygone time and send me a
copy of it.

It came this morning, and if there is any vulgarity about it I am
not able to discover it. If it isn't innocently and ridiculously
funny, I am no judge. I will see to it that you get a copy.

Address of Samuel L. Clemens ("Mark Twain")
From a report of the dinner given by the Publishers
of the Atlantic Monthly in honor of the
Seventieth Anniversary of the
Birth of John Greenleaf Whittier, at the Hotel Brunswick,
Boston, December 17, 1877,
as published in the
BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT,
December 18, 1877

Mr. Chairman--This is an occasion peculiarly meet for the digging
up of pleasant reminiscences concerning literary folk; therefore I
will drop lightly into history myself. Standing here on the shore
of the Atlantic and contemplating certain of its largest literary
billows, I am reminded of a thing which happened to me thirteen
years ago, when I had just succeeded in stirring up a little
Nevadian literary puddle myself, whose spume-flakes were beginning
to blow thinly Californiawards. I started an inspection tramp
through the southern mines of California. I was callow and
conceited, and I resolved to try the virtue of my _nom de guerre._
I very soon had an opportunity. I knocked at a miner's lonely log
cabin in the foothills of the Sierras just at nightfall. It was
snowing at the time. A jaded, melancholy man of fifty, barefooted,
opened the door to me. When he heard my _nom de guerre_ he looked
more dejected than before. He let me in--pretty reluctantly, I
thought--and after the customary bacon and beans, black coffee and
hot whiskey, I took a pipe. This sorrowful man had not said three
words up to this time. Now he spoke up and said, in the voice of
one who is secretly suffering, "You're the fourth--I'm going to
move." "The fourth what!" said I. "The fourth littery man that has
been here in twenty-four hours--I'm going to move." "You don't tell
me!" said I; "who were the others!" "Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson
and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes--consound the lot!"

You can easily believe I was interested. I supplicated--three hot
whiskeys did the rest--and finally the melancholy miner began. Said
he--

"They came here just at dark yesterday evening, and I let them in
of course. Said they were going to the Yosemite. They were a rough
lot, but that's nothing; everybody looks rough that travels afoot.
Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed. Mr.
Holmes as fat as a balloon; he weighed as much as three hundred,
and double chins all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow
built like a prize-fighter. His head was cropped and bristly, like
as if he had a wig made of hair-brushes. His nose lay straight down
his face, like a finger with the end joint tilted up. They had been
drinking, I could see that. And what queer talk they used! Mr.
Holmes inspected this cabin, then he took me by the buttonhole, and
says he--

"'Through the deep cares of thought
I hear a voice that sings,
Build thee more stately mansions,
O my soul!'

"Says I, 'I can't afford it, Mr. Holmes, and moreover I don't want
to.' Blamed if I liked it pretty well, either, coming from a
stranger, that way. However, I started to get out my bacon and
beans, when Mr. Emerson came and looked on awhile, and then he
takes me aside by the buttonhole and says--

"'Give me agates for my meat;
Give me cantharids to eat;
From air and ocean bring me foods,
From all zones and altitudes.'

"Says I, 'Mr. Emerson, if you'll excuse me, this ain't no hotel.'
You see it sort of riled me--I warn't used to the ways of littery
swells. But I went on a-sweating over my work, and next comes Mr.
Longfellow and buttonholes me, and interrupts me. Says he,

"'Honor be to Mudjekeewis!
You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis--'

"But I broke in, and says I, 'Beg your pardon, Mr. Longfellow, if
you'll be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes and
let me get this grub ready, you'll do me proud.' Well, sir, after
they'd filled up I set out the jug. Mr. Holmes looks at it and then
he fires up all of a sudden and yells--

"'Flash out a stream of blood-red wine!
For I would drink to other days.'

"By George, I was getting kind of worked up. I don't deny it, I was
getting kind of worked up. I turns to Mr. Holmes, and says I,
'Looky here, my fat friend, I'm a-running this shanty, and if the
court knows herself, you'll take whiskey straight or you'll go
dry.' Them's the very words I said to him. Now I don't want to sass
such famous littery people, but you see they kind of forced me.
There ain't nothing onreasonable 'bout me; I don't mind a passel of
guests a-treadin' on my tail three or four times, but when it comes
to _standing_ on it it's different, 'and if the court knows
herself,' I says, 'you'll take whiskey straight or you'll go dry.'
Well, between drinks they'd swell around the cabin and strike
attitudes and spout; and pretty soon they got out a greasy old deck
and went to playing euchre at ten cents a corner--on trust. I began
to notice some pretty suspicious things. Mr. Emerson dealt, looked
at his hand, shook his head, says--

"'I am the doubter and the doubt--'

and ca'mly bunched the hands and went to shuffling for a new
layout. Says he--

"'They reckon ill who leave me out;
They know not well the subtle ways I keep.
I pass and deal _again_!'

Hang'd if he didn't go ahead and do it, too! O, he was a cool one!
Well, in about a minute, things were running pretty tight, but all
of a sudden I see by Mr. Emerson's eye he judged he had 'em. He had
already corralled two tricks and each of the others one. So now he
kind of lifts a little in his chair and says--

"'I tire of globes and aces!--
Too long the game is played!'

--and down he fetched a right bower. Mr. Longfellow smiles as sweet
as pie and says--

"'Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught,'

--and blamed if he didn't down with _another_ right bower! Emerson
claps his hand on his bowie, Longfellow claps his on his revolver,
and I went under a bunk. There was going to be trouble; but that
monstrous Holmes rose up, wobbling his double chins, and says he,
'Order, gentlemen; the first man that draws, I'll lay down on him
and smother him!' All quiet on the Potomac, you bet!

"They were pretty how-come-you-so, by now, and they begun to blow.
Emerson says, 'The nobbiest thing I ever wrote was Barbara
Frietchie.' Says Longfellow, 'It don't begin with my Biglow
Papers.' Says Holmes, 'My Thanatopsis lays over 'em both.' They
mighty near ended in a fight. Then they wished they had some more
company--and Mr. Emerson pointed to me and says--

"'Is yonder squalid peasant all
That this proud nursery could breed?'

He was a-whetting his bowie on his boot--so I let it pass. Well,
sir, next they took it into their heads that they would like some
music; so they made me stand up and sing 'When Johnny Comes
Marching Home' till I dropped--at thirteen minutes past four this
morning. That's what I've been through, my friend. When I woke at
seven, they were leaving, thank goodness, and Mr. Longfellow had my
only boots on, and his'n under his arm. Says I, 'Hold on, there,
Evangeline, what are you going to do with _them_! He says, 'Going
to make tracks with 'em; because--

"'Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime;
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.'

As I said, Mr. Twain, you are the fourth in twenty-four hours--and
I'm going to move; I ain't suited to a littery atmosphere."

I said to the miner, "Why, my dear sir, _these_ were not the
gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and
homage; these were impostors."

The miner investigated me with a calm eye for a while; then said
he, "Ah! impostors, were they? Are _you_?

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