Damon Runyon

Johnson City Staff-News/May 11, 1927

 

Give me a dollar for every time a sportswriter has been asked the question “Was John L. Sullivan ever champion of the world,” and I’d have enough money to retire to the Arkansas Valley and raise cantelope. The argument is so old it is always new, wherefore it is with pleasure that I stand aside today for Mr. Charles F. Mathison, veteran sportswriter and judge for the New York Boxing Commission as follows, and Mr. Damon Runyon:

Dear Sir: I seek enlightenment, I crave information to the end that a possible injustice may be lifted from the memory of the late John L. Sullivan, still the pugilistic hero of the old guard who saw him in action and of the countless thousands who never eyed him except in photography. Although an overwhelming majority invariable speak of Sullivan as the “champion of champions” and holder of the world’s title in the heavyweight class, an insignificant minority have the temerity to question the accuracy of those claims and insist that facts should have a place even, in pugilistic history.

The argument of the minority is to the effect that if Sullivan really was the heavyweight champion of the world, the time, place and manner of winning it should be set forth by some member of his great army of admirers, thus silencing the unjust suspicions of the minority. Failure to produce these convincing facts, according to the minority, would constitute an admission that the claims on behalf of Sullivan were not well grounded. The minority do not believe that Sullivan, if alive, would lay claim to any honors he-did not win, and that he would renounce any distinction not supported by the facts of history.

With knowledge of your nationwide clientele of readers, I entreat you to ask the Sullivanite majority to inform the minority when, where and how the Boston Strong Boy captured the world’s heavyweight title.

There does not appear to be an argument over the question as to how a world’s title could have been won in Sullivan’s day, as the pugilistic game was monopolized by three countries: America, England and Australia.

Therefore a fighter would become the world’s champion.

1—By defeating the holder of the title.

2—By winning the title of his own country and then defeating the champion of a foreign nation.

That was the course pursued by Dixon who made himself bantam champion of the world by beating Nunc Wallace, bantam champion of England.

Later Dixon won the American feather title by beating the best Americans in the class and then defeating Willis, Australian champion and Johnson, British title holder. McGovern, Lavigne, Klaus and others won their honors the same way, as did also Jem Mace, champion of England, and the acts sustain the assertions. Mace, English heavyweight champion, defeated Tom Allen, American champion, in 1870, and thus won the world’s title.

Mace retired while still in possession of the world’s and English heavyweight championships. These are incontrovertible facts of boxing history.

A few courageous members of the majority have attempted to explain Sullivan’s worlds title, one declaring that Sullivan defeated KiIrain and that Kilrain had beaten Jem Smith, champion of England. When this man was apprised that the Kilrain fight went 106 rounds to a draw, he subsided.

Another of the majority ventured the assertion that Sullivan had defeated Alf Greenfield, English champion. In reply to a query, Peggy Bettinson, then of the British Board of Boxing Control, assured me that Greenfield never held the English title.

The latest pronouncement by the majority is that Sullivan won the world’s title when he defeated Paddy Ryan in 1882. Thus the minority are compelled to endeavor to ascertain where Paddy Ryan got the title that ostensibly was concealed about his person when he was stopped by Sullivan in nine rounds.

It follows that if Ryan had the world’s title he must have obtained it when be defeated Joe Goss, an aged Englishman, in 87 rounds in 1880. When Goss arrived in America in 1876, his baggage did not contain any championship affidavits for the very good reason that before he left his native heath he had twice been thoroughly thrashed by Jam Mace, the champion of England.

However, the minority continued its investigation as to where Goss got the world’s title. This developed the fact that Goss had won on a foul in 1876 from Tom Allen, the American titleholder. This victory gave Goss the American title only. Mace had in 1870 knocked out Allen in a bout for the world’s championship. Mace was still lugging the world’s title at the time Goss defeated Arlen.

It must be plain even to the majority that Sullivan did not win the world’s championship from Paddy Ryan, that Ryan did not obtain the honor from Goss and that Goss did not get the crown from Alien, for the excellent reason that none of these pugilists ever had such a thing as a world’s championship.

Furthermore, Sullivan never in his career met a foreign champion in the ring, although Peter Jackson, who had knocked out Jem Smith, English title holder and also stopped Frank Slavin, Australian champion, thus becoming the champion of Europe and Australia, was eager for a joust with the Bostonian.

Had Sullivan beaten Jackson, or Smith or Slavin, he would have made himself champion of the world, and all the mystery as to his championship status removed.

Therefore I repeat: Please ask the majority to specify the time, location and result of the battle in which Sullivan won the world’s title.

 

 

Damon Runyon

The Evening News (Harrisburg, PA)/April 1, 1927

That good hound, Damon Runyon, has established himself as one of the fastest canines in the land, a champion, no less. I quote you from the Greyhound Racing Form of a couple of weeks back, relating a remarkable event down Miami way:

“Another world’s record went crashing at Hialeah Park Saturday night, when Damon Runyon, as flashy a thoroughbred as ever came across from England, ran rampant and tore around the. quarter-mile oval in the sensational time of 25 seconds flat,, breaking the mark set by old Skookum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, six years ago.”

It shows you that there is something in a name, after all. I have always disregarded that crack about a rose by any other monicker smelling as sweet. It is inconceivable that as Hype Igoe, for instance, or as Grantland Rice, the good hound, Damon Runyon, could have tore around that old oval in the manner depicted above. No, it took a Damon Runyon.

THIS STORY IS briefly told,” says Racing Form, “for it was all Damon Runyon—one fawn streak from break to wire, with seven speedy greyhounds trying valiantly to match foot with him but unable to get close. Royal Meadows, the nearest one at the end, did himself proud by running second in such fast time, and Professor, the Miles juvenile which has been running so well, took no discredit upon himself by finishing third.”

I believe that this performance makes amends for the shortcomings of the famous race horse, Damon Runyon, and in part for the ingloriousness of the setter dog, Damon Runyon.

I have just received a letter from O’Neill Sevier, the turf expert, owner of the setter dog Damon Runyon. and of 685 other setter dogs in various parts of Maryland, and he informs me that Damon Runyon is certainly a setter, that he sets all the time.

As to the famous race horse, Damon Runyon, I have no information at this time. He was named by John E. Madden, the noted breeder, who has recently announced his retirement. I do not know that Mr. Madden’s retirement is due to mortification and chagrin over the fact that he bred the famous horse, Damon Runyon, but the fact remains that Mr. Madden is retiring. You can draw your own conclusions.

I believe that the race horse, Damon Runyon, also has retired. The last I heard of him he was owned by Mr. McMillan, head of the Thistledown track in Cleveland, and after viewing a few of Damon Runyon’s performances on the turf, Mr. McMillan tossed a coin to see whether he would retire the horse, or shoot him.

Heads won. Damon Runyon Is in dignified retirement.

The trouble with Damon Runyon was that he was bred for three furlong races, and it seems there are no races that short. He would win all his races for three furlongs, but thereafter would seem to meet with defeat. If ever they shorten up the races I shall purchase Damon Runyon and bring him out of retirement.

THE RETIREMENT OF Damon Runyon was of economical value to me, at that. Before I learned that the standard race was too long for him, I used to have a small sentimental wager on him any time he started, say two dollars. Had he raced to a ripe old age, I would have been a pauper. You know you can finally two-dollar yourself into the poor house.

Only yesterday I came upon Billy McCarney, the well known ol’ clo’ man of Fistiana, standing on a Broadway corner, peering at a racing extra with deep interest.

“There’s a horse called Billy McCarney running down south,” he explained. “I’ve had a bet on him every time he started because I appreciate the compliment of his being named for me, but so far he’s been a bust. You know I have to keep three good fighters working every week to provide me with dough to bet on Billy McCarney, the horse, and they’re getting sick of it.”

Still, a man ought to.be reasonably safe betting on a champion of the world like Damon Runyon, the hound. If he can run faster than any other dog in the world, there is practically no risk. I note that he paid $3.60 in the dog mutuels the day he broke the world’s record.

My one regret in connection with Damon Runyon, the world’s champ, is that he isn’t a home bred. He was born in England in 1924, the son of Jerron and Hilda XV, and came to this country in the steerage. He belongs to Cal Miller. I do not know Mr. Miller personally, but I realize that he must be a man of great discernment to give a dog a good name. The popular custom, I believe, is to give ‘em bad names.

IT SEEMS THAT there are other world’s records for racing greyhounds besides that established by Damon Runyon at Miami. These records may interest the reader as showing how fast the dogs can run the different distances as compared to race horses.

Ambrose Bierce

San Francisco Examiner/March 6, 1904

 

Far be it from me to cast a doubt upon the good faith and magnanimity of Representative Shafroth of Colorado, in voluntarily surrendering his seat in Congress to Mr. Bonynge, who was contesting it, when he learned that that gentleman was justly entitled to it. Mr. Shafroth is an honorable man all right; there is no question of that. Still, he could hardly be insensible to the ominous circumstance that he, a Democrat, had for antagonist a Republican appealing to a Republican House. I am told that there have been a few instances of the House seating a minority contestant, though I do not recall any; and I dare say Mr. Shafroth knew entirely well that, be he right or be he wrong, his cake was dough. Retirement with applause was a more graceful and profitable performance than ejection without it. It was the difference between doing his duty and having his duty done to him. The candid astonishment that greeted him would be rather weak evidence of the universality of the particular virtue that inspired his act, but the applause that followed as soon as the members could recover their breath proves that there is still extant so noble a sentiment as admiration without emulation.

With a wiser wisdom than was given to them, our forefathers in making the Constitution would not have provided that each House of Congress “shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members.” They would have foreseen that a ruling majority of Congress could not safely.be trusted to exercise this power justly in the public interest, but would abuse it in the interest of party. A man’s right to sit in a legislative body should be determined, not by that body, which has neither the impartiality, the knowledge of evidence nor the time to determine it rightly, but by the courts of law. That is how it is done in England, where Parliament voluntarily surrendered the right to say by whom the constituencies’ shall be represented, and there is no disposition to resume it. As the vices hunt in packs, so, too, the virtues are gregarious; if our Congress had the righteousness to decide contested elections justly it would have also the self-denial not to wish to decide them at all.

Events in the Orient have now so matured as to make a forecast of the result of the war comparatively easy to the military mind. Destruction of the Russian fleet at Port Arthur is a matter of the gravest importance, owing to the great expense of putting the ships together again. In order to do that in time to accomplish something before the necessity has passed Russia must negotiate a loan of at least one hundred thousand roubles or more. In the meantime Japan will have taken Tokyo. After that there will be but two courses open to the Czar: he can have the Baltic fleet chopped out of the ice in the harbor of Kronstadt and then chopped in again, or he can remove the vessels in the Black Sea to Vladivostok. Either course will be fatal. Japan’s sphere of action, too, is greatly restricted. To offset the Baltic fleet (if the Czar’s ruse of chopping it out should deceive anybody) the Mikrto must reinforce his army from the moon–no very difficult task, for Japan’s astronomers are the most skillful in the world. The effect of such a coup de main would be a distinct result. On land the chances are more nearly even; victory will probably perch upon the banners of the army that overcomes its antagonist in the least time. But that leaves the Cossacks out of the reckoning, an unwise thing to do. One can never calculate what steppes the Cossacks will take. The problem is complicated, too, by Japan’s proposal to enlist our Rough Riders for service in the commissary department, making it a department that will surely depart. Even at this early stage of the war it is easy to forecast the result of the first great land engagement that follows the others, for already ten thousand Russians are reported to be marching from Wyo Ming to Pen Yan with a view to intercepting the retreat of the Japanese fleet from Picka Li Li, a fatal mistake, for they will undoubtedly be assailed by the fortress Mulligatawny and overthrown, even if not actually surrounded. No nation could recover from so disastrous a reverse as that. So all is clear.

Only one element of uncertainty remains to be considered: the possibility of the great European Powers being drawn into the war. This, it is believed, is remote. Turkey’s espousal of the other side would of itself be sufficient to prevent it. She has the immemorial alliance of the Dardanelles, a most powerful tribe, holding all the approaches to the theatre of war and having an efficient navy, amply manned with mounted sailors, Japan wins.

I acknowledge receipt of a poem entitled “The Dawn of a Better Day,” It seems to be a rather long poem, so I select a single passage for quotation, believing it gives a fairly good notion of the whole, in thought and expression:

Universal Natural Law

The most marvelous agency that ever I saw

All-pervading, without a flaw,

A fountain of wisdom from which to draw;

If we were not much too blind,

What a teacher we here would find.

 

Carefully typewritten on my intelligent machine, those lines look so much better than they read that I cannot forbear to transcribe some more:

When we shall have worked out a plan

Which will eliminate the middleman.

And say to the parasites who nothing produce:

“Get a move on, drones, be of some use.”

Ah then, my friend, this nation will be fine,

A personal possession, ours, your, mine;

And every inhabitant will be what nought.

A whole-souled, generous patriot.

When we shall have worked out a plan

I am asked (apparently by the author) if these remarkable lines are “rot” or “not,” and if he “should continue to write or desist.” Well, in my judgment they are not “not,” and he should continue to desist. But I don’t mind saying, for his encouragement, that a poet can do more profitable things than write good poetry. I know one who writes no better than he, who nevertheless, but all the more, can get his work into any newspaper that knows no better than to print it. He flourishes by looking the freak that he is not; that way prosperity lies. Let my anxious friend put the following lines into his memory, along with “Thirty days hath September” and other useful knowledge:

The bard who’d prosper must carry a book,

   Do his thinking in prose and wear

A crazy cravat, a far-away look

   And a head of hexameter hair.

Be lean in your thought and your body’ll be fat

If you wear your hair long you needn’t your hat

 

When an eminent man is suffering from a long illness we hear a good deal about his “tremendous will power,” his “heroic battle for life,” and the rest of it. There is nothing in it all, nothing corresponding to the facts, nothing complimentary to the patient. It does not give one a particularly agreeable impression, this conception of a soul so dreadfully concerned to keep itself in the clay to avert for a little longer the natural and not unfriendly fate that comes to all. He who should consciously “struggle” to do this would not be a very great man, nor would his pitiful “battle” be an inspiring spectacle. As a matter of fact, one in the clutch of a fatal disease is mercifully spared the desire to do any such thing. He is either unconscious of his danger or unconcerned about it, the one apathetic actor in the tragedy. The “battling”‘ is all done by the physicians and nurses. If the persons who write these things would be good enough to refrain, but how can one refrain from ignorance, bad taste and destitution of sense?

Mr. Nicola Tesla, always on the point .of perfecting some electrical invention that is to “revolutionize” everything, affirms his fatherhood of a torpedo dirigible without wires and equally effective on sea and land. His notion, as he is good enough to expound it, is “to make war bloodless by making its possibilities so terrible that all battles will be between mere automatic machines. After a battle hat been fought between these machines,” he goes on to say, “the nation deprived of its automatons will be forced to surrender because it will be absolutely defenseless.”

What a charming picture: war carried on by machines so destructive that nobody dares to encounter it by riding in the machine! While these metal mongers are destroying one another under the intelligent generalship of a Tesla, each sitting miles away and manipulating a keyboard, the industries of the belligerent nations proceed without interruption: the farmer jocundly drives his team afield, the financier exploits the pocket of his dupe, the writer of paragraphs in the newspaper pours out, unafraid, the incalculable jewels of his mind. It is a great scheme, is the soldierless war–a conception almost worthy of the great Edison himself. It appears to have but one defect: there is no place in it for the magic metal, radium, How could Mr. Tesla overlook the supreme need of the situation?

An excellent gentleman who has had the distinction to shake the hand of President Roosevelt and the tidiness to abstain from washing his own hand ever since affirms his wish to “take that splendid grip” with him “out of this world into the next.” He can’t do that. Long after both he and the President are gone before, long after their immortal parts have fled away beyond the blazing suns and the swirling nebulae, long after the hand that gave it and the hand that took have moldered to dust and the plowshare has passed without obstruction through them, that grip will remain in its terrestrial environment waiting for another chance at the reins of power and the rights of a friendly republic.

At last the fighting between Japan and Russia has produced something worthwhile, something really interesting and worthy to take the attention of heroes of commerce and kings of finance. Here it is: a scare-headed newspaper article on “The Effect of the War on Raw Siik!” Now let the harp of trade be tuned and “the commercial spirit of the age” heard in a song o’ sixpence that shall drown the brazen strains cf the military band and silence forever the braying bards of battle! Come, come, who will be the first to sing the fortunes of Raw Silk?

As was foreshadowed in these columns, the decision of the New York Court of Appeals on Mr. Roland B. Molineaux’ petition to have his photographs and Bertillon measurements removed from “the Rogues’ Gallery” was adverse. So here we have another free American citizen, who, accused of crime, acquitted and “leaving the court without a stain upon his character,” has to endure with what fortitude he may the now purposeless and continuing indignity of official classification as an identified criminal. If he do not henceforth love the country for which his honored old father fought on many a “stubborn field,” who will have the right of rebuke? His case recalls the memorable words of a negro slave of pre-rebellion days: “On Lake Champlain my father fought in blood up to his ankles to gain for me the liberty of which I am now deprived by law.”

A vulture sat on a barren rock

   Overlooking the River Yaloo.

He said: “It gives me a terrible shock

   To think what the Japs will do.

 

“They’re after the Russians to eat them

   And I really can’t concur,

For ’twill leave me neither bite nor sup

   Of the diet that I prefer. 

 

“The Russian is fat and soft and big,

   Excelled as a viand by none;

With a flavor of vodka-soaken pig

   He is meat and drink in one.

 

“True, having eaten the Russian, the Jap

   Will be, in monopoly, mine. 

But he’s not a satisfactory chap

   Upon whom to perch and dine

 

“I’m a good provider of meats unfresh

   And I never dine alone; 

She’s hungry too–my old woman, the flea

   Of my flesh and bone of my bone.

 

“The man of the Land of the Rising Sun

   As a family meal won’t do;  

He’s altogether too much for one, 

And not nearly enough for two.”

. 

 

This “legal holiday” business is overdone, with great possibilities of more overdoing. We have, for example, in some of the states a “legal holiday” on the 22nd of February, in honor of Washington. The 12th day of the same month supplies us with another in honor of Lincoln. Many fervent patriots feel that Grant should be honored in the same way, others that Jefferson, Hamilton, Jackson, Franklin and so forth should be officially “remembered.” The fertility’of our political soil, it is hoped, is not exhausted; it will grow many another Great Man. (Outside of politics the Great-Man crop in this country is not abundant; in political eminence lies the American’s only hope of lasting fame.) Unless we add to the number of days in the year how shall we provide for all these increasing needs without too disastrous interference with trade and industries? The best answer that I have heard is given by a thoughtful young woman who teaches school in the District of Columbia. She proposes a single “legal holiday” for all–an All Heroes Day, corresponding to the All Saints Day in the calendar of the church. That would economize time and give to every devout American citizen a chance to worship the hero of his choice, according to the dictates of his political conscience, without seeming to disparage the choice of his neighbors as in the British army before Sebastopol .

Each heart recalled a different name.

But all sang “Annie Laurie.”   

 

Another advantage of this plan is that under it even such dei minores as men of letters might obtain silent recognition if clearly remembered and sufficiently dead. Their admirers need not openly profess devotion, thereby bringing derision upon themselves; while secretly and harmlessly enough adoring the memory of Poe or Longfellow they would appear to be making genuflexion to Jefferson or Schuyler Colfax or James Hamilton Lewis (when he shall have passed away) and so retain the respect of his fellows, along with as much of his own as is compatible with his queer preference. Let Congress and the State Legislatures enact the needful laws to set up All Heroes’ Day and I’ll undertake to procure the approval of the bills by the young woman who devised the plan.

In the course of a hearing which a Senate committee accorded the other day to advocates of a Constitutional amendment establishing woman suffrage a former Governor of a Western State explained that be was “personally acquainted with ten thousand women voters” and “was prepared to assert that the right to vote did not detract from their womanly instincts as mothers and wives, nor mar their feminine refinement.” One hardly knows which is the more surprising the singularly extensive “circle” of this gentleman’s female personal acquaintance, or his marvelously minute knowledge of the characters of his “lady friends.” When one thinks of the magnitude of the studies that are necessary in order to be “prepared to assert” a thing ;t that kind one is consumed with envy of the intellect that could endure the strain! It is not surprising that such a man became Governor; the wonder is that he did not become two.

Ambrose Bierce

San Francisco Examiner/August 6, 1899

 
Our unfortunate townsman, Lucky Baldwin, being “in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” may well beweep his outcast state, and trouble deaf heaven with his bootless cries, and look upon himself and curse his fate –which is a good deal for a lucky man to do. A few months ago he experienced the mischance of losing a costly hotel by fire and his fellow citizens find it hard to forgive him. It had been the ugliest edifice in seven cities, but big and grandiose; and its remnant is at war with the human eye. Its incineration was a public benefaction, but we have been accustomed to seeing something there and the void offends like a missing phrase in music.

Hence our bitterness toward poor Mr. Baldwin, whom, truth to tell, we loved none too well before. The embers of his hotel had not done glowing when the voice of public opinion was lifted up in a raucous demand for their instant removal. And now, when for lack of money to comply with our austere command to rebuild he timidly proposes to roof his ruin one storey above the mortgage he finds himself the focal point of so copious a dead-catting that he is like to be suffocated with fur!

Let us make a mighty effort to achieve the virtue of patience. A one-storey structure standing on that mortgage will not pay interest in rents. Eventually Mr. Baldwin must obtain money to build it higher or surrender it to the Hibernia Bank. Whoever remains in possession of a costly site must put up a costly structure on it—that is a law. Human laws are inevitable, but that is not: the fine for infraction is too heavy. We may confidently count upon a building as high and hideous as its predecessor. In the meantime let us bear Mr. Baldwin’s adversity with as charitable a fortitude as we can summon, remembering for our comfort that he feels it a good deal more keenly than we, and that in his efforts to evade “the bludgeoning of chance” God sees him and will not let him altogether escape.

The pugnant gentlemen down there in Clay County, Kentucky, appear to have grown weary of fighting: two of them have enlisted to serve under Otis in Luzon.

Having amused ourselves by lynching some Italian subjects on suspicion, we find ourselves confronted by their government with a demand for explanation. We have no explanation to give, further than that it is our national custom to lynch. If that is not satisfactory, coupled with an humiliating apology by the president, we shall pay out of the national treasury, and the treasury of the State of Louisiana, where the lynching was done, will be none the leaner.

As to punishing the lynchers (if Italy should demand that) the general government is without power to comply: but if an Italian man-of-war should bombard New Orleans the general government would have to mix matters with that thunder-boat—that is, it would have to side with the lynchers. It is a beautiful scheme, this government of ours: It seems to have been invented for the purpose of shirking responsibility to foreign powers. They have been pretty patient, as a rule—have been content with dollars and apologies; but some day one will demand life for life, and in the blood of our sailors and soldiers we shall pay for the privilege of living under a government that does not govern.

Two men-of-war were lying peacefully at anchor, side by side, when one fired into the other, killing some of her crew. The captain of the aggrieved vessel immediately boarded the other.

“Sir,” he said to the captain of the offender, “you have wantonly killed some of my men.”

“Let us be accurate,” was the reply; “some of my gunners have done so. I assure you they acted without orders.”

“Very well, sir: I demand that they be hanged at the yard-arm forthwith.”

“You will have to be content with a sum of money and an apology. By the terms of my agreement with my crew they are independent of my orders, and I have no authority to punish them.”

“The devil! What ship is this anyhow?”

“The United States.”

“And who is your owner?”

“The crew.”

“You are a queer outfit. If it is a fair question have you, for example, a compass?”

“My friend, the suspicion wrongs us—we steer by the will of God.”

So Sampson wants prize money! Well. I declare
I know not what Sampson e’er captured, nor where.
Cervera surrendered to Schley, so they tell.
And the Mule of Matanzas still lies where he fell.

A Los Angeles man who had been living dishonestly on the money for his funeral expenses committed suicide the other day when it was all gone. He left a diary, in which he explained that he had bought a book by Harold Frederic, adding that the purchase cut short his life by one day. I don’t see why he bought that book; he could have paid the same price for one by Beatrice Harraden. That would have brought him just much nearer, my God, to thee, and if he read it made him twice as willing to go.

Mrs. Adams, who had the misfortune to poison her child, has been convicted of murder and will serve what is humorously called a “life sentence,” which in this state averages about seven years. Light as her punishment will be it ought to teach her the expedience of killing adult males, henceforth. It is hoped, though, that she may be persuaded to eschew both the potion and the poniard, and with malice toward none and charity for all go down South and lynch niggers. That is almost as restful as taking human life.

William Waldorf Astor is destined to excite the mirth of the nation for a brief space; he will be a passing fad in the comic weeklies and a temporary subject for the jibe of the newspaper paragrapher; thereafter, Oblivion will swallow William Waldorf Astor, name and all, at one fell gulp.—Evening Post.

In order that the gentleman from Mars may understand the real enormity of this malefactor’s crime it may be explained that he is very wealthy. In this country that is regarded as an offence against the people. Finding himself exceedingly unpopular because of his wealth, and subject to all manner of insult and misrepresentation, he removed to London, where he has been intelligently and industriously pursuing an honourable vocation and living a blameless life, still followed by the ribald jests of the American press and by the falsehood that he went away in resentment of the taxman’s just assessment of his property. If the gentleman from Mars is still insufficiently enlightened as to how (and why) things are done on this planet he will please be good enough to know that Mr. Astor is on friendly terms in England with persons of rank and consequence; and this is not easily forgiven by those to whose wish that distinction is denied. In short, by renouncing his allegiance to the United States and becoming a subject of Great Britain the Astor person has shown wicked disregard of some of the most tender sensibilities of the human soul.

In defense of Mr. Astor’s change of residence and allegiance it might be urged (if one had the hardihood) that in his native country there is no adequate protection of human life—the primary purpose of government. More human beings are criminally killed in every year in the United States than have died in any modern battle. In England murder is punished, and is therefore seldom committed.

In the United States suspected persons, frequently innocent, are put to death by their neighbors with impunity, and in one large section of the country it is customary to mutilate the victim before killing him, to burn him with red-hot irons, to tear his flesh from him in strips and afterward to carry away parts of his body as souvenirs. In England lynching is unknown. In the United States mobs of laborers on strike are permitted to murder other laborers in the streets and in their homes, to destroy their employers’ property and that of others without effective opposition. In England nothing of this kind is allowed. In the United States no person’s good name is secure from the oral or the printed lie. In England the slanderer and the libeller are silent under the menace of law. In the United States the courts and legislative bodies are, as a rule, corrupt. In England the judges are just and legislators honest. In the United States ignorant vulgarians and bawling demagogues are found everywhere enjoying the distinction of high political preferment. In England the holding of an important office is presumptive evidence of education and good breeding. In an American city the public service is controlled and the public revenues looted by coarse unlettered thieves known as “bosses.” In English cities the “boss” is
unknown.

When charting so confidently and with such precision the motives impelling Mr. Astor to a change of allegiance his star-spangled critics might profitably consider whether some of these facts may not unconsciously have affected his decision. Not theirs, of course, nor mine, would be affected by considerations so trivial, but to an understanding enfeebled by possession of “the Astor millions” they might seem relevant and important.

The United States were good enough, as doubtless Hades is good enough, for the old original John Jacob, but the degenerate William Waldorf may have an unmanly weakness for security, peace and self-respect.

In draughting the Scheme of Things the Creator made no provision for good government. It is a hope, a dream, “a radiant and adored deceit,” a “light that never was on sea nor land.” They have it in Heaven, doubtless, and by the way Heaven is a pure autocracy, neither saints nor angels sharing the cares of state; but here on earth we shall have it only when so good and wise as to require no government at all. Good government is too precious to be bestowed upon a people so unworthy as to need it. But there are degrees of bad government, and as an American who has lived and observed in both countries I am of the solemn conviction that of all the governments of great nations that of the United States is the most senseless, corrupt and inefficient, and that of England the least. That there is anything discreditable in a change of allegiance from the one country to the other, according to interest or taste—or for that matter from any country to any other—is a proposition of so monstrous unreason that it could win assent from nobody but a malicious idiot or a patriot. I fear that the gentleman whom I have quoted is the latter.

When a person who gets his living by pretending to be somebody else gives judgment on a person who gets his by telling stories that arer not true one naturally expects “something out of the common.” That is the situation when an actor reviews a book of fiction, as did Mr. Edwin Stevens in last Sunday’s Call: he reviewed a volume of tales by Dr. Doyle. And something “out of the common” occurred. Observe this: When Dr. Doyle fled to India to escape the ghost of Sherlock Holmes he did well. In introducing us to his delightful Ram Deen in “The Taming of the Jungle” he places us under such deep obligations that we feel the amende honourable has been made and find it in our hearts to forgive him for Holmes’ untimely demise.

“Under such deep obligations” is good! A metaphor wherein one is considered as placed “under” something “deep” is imperfectly thinkable, but it makes one feel cool and dim and nice, like a fish at the bottom of the sea. It is cheering, too, to observe the word “demise” used for “death,” reminding, as it does, that the King of Shadows has a vulgar name, unfit for ears polite, and is a low person whom one does not care to meet. How is this for an amendment?

There is a reaper whose name is “Demise.” –Or this?
Hell shuddered at the hideous name and sighed
From all her caves and back resounded: “Demise!”

Mr. Stevens is a brilliant writer: he burns with a peculiar splendour—“a still and awful red”—from the sentence quoted, clean through his review to the concluding line: “Taming of the Jungle,’ by R. Conan Doyle.”

That reminds me of what I had to say. The book is by Dr. C. W. Doyle of Santa Cruz, California. Surely it is somewhat “out of common” for even a man that gets his living by pretending to be somebody else to read and review a book without looking at cover or title-page.

Let me ask Mr. Stevens how he would think he felt if after one of his admirable impersonations of “Juliet” Professor Syle should solemnly congratulate him on his success as “The Nurse.”

Mr. Markham—he of the Hoe—concludes a gorgeous article on strikes, trusts and all that he knows least about as follows:

Meanwhile every patriot should find his work in whatever tends to put down class hatred—in whatever tends to spread the sentiment of justice and brotherhood among the people.

This from the author of “Armageddon”?—this from the author of “The Man with the Hoe”! Now, Lord, let thy servant depart in peace, for he has heard enough. If any two words stand for “class hatred”—for blind, brutal, reasonless animosity, all the more mischievous because lodged in the heart and brain of a great poet, those words are “Edwin Markham.” I do not at all doubt the sincerity of his conviction that he preaches a gospel of fraternity, any more that I doubt that the Spanish Inquisitors, the red-handed citizens of Nauvoo and all other pious persecutors honestly believed themselves promoters of the law of love and faithful followers of the Prince of Peace. It is very easy to persuade oneself of the nobility of one’s motive in doing evil, and I don’t doubt that Judas Iscariot (a well-meaning chap who owed thirty pieces of silver to his tailor) was firmly persuaded of his own exceeding worth. It is easy, too, to repudiate a threat by calling it at need a warning or a prophecy, but Markham the Fraternalist follows rather
tardily after Markham the Incendiary.

It is ingenious of Mr. Markham to justify his wrath against the “masters, lords and rulers of all lands” by showing how some of them, ages ago, slanted back the brow of the French peasant and let down the jaw of him; but the apologia is lacking in breadth. Moreover, it hardly squares with his confession that “it is no man’s fault” that “the world is locked in a system of social injustice.” On the whole, I prefer the candid voice of Mr. Markham’s muse—petroleuse that she is—to the afterthought prose in which he clothes her dirty nakedness.

Ambrose Bierce

San Francisco Examiner/August 6, 1899

 

In replying to some of his critics, Mr. Alger made a judicious selection of critics to reply to. As chief of these he chose the London Times. The censorious voice of that journal is imperfectly heard in this country “across waves’ tumultuous roar,” and for the matter and manner of its remarks on Mr. Alger the American people have to depend on Mr. Alger himself, who is apparently more sensitive to British opinion than to that of his countrymen. Quite a number of American journals of repute, many of them belonging to his own political party, have for a long time manifested a strong sense of Mr. Alger’s moral and intellectual delinquencies without evoking a “reply.” Perhaps he did not know where to begin.

In replying to his overseas critic Mr. Alger confines himself almost wholly to two points—appointment of incompetent military officers from civil life and misappropriation of money by officers of the supply departments. As to the latter nobody, I believe, has made any specific accusations; and the general ones have not been very insistently urged. If Mr. Alger had affirmed himself and his heads of departments guiltless of cheating at cards his “reply” would have been quite as interesting and enlightening.

Nor need we especially concern ourselves about the other matter. It is obvious without demonstration that a volunteer army of more than two hundred thousand men could not be officered altogether, or even mainly by graduates of the national Military Academy, even if the Secretary of War had a free hand in selections, which he had not. It was already known that officers of state volunteer regiments of the several states were appointed by the governors.

Of the 1,032 volunteer officers appointed by the President, 591 were taken from civil life. It is with regard to these that most complaint has been made. That a majority of them were “somebody’s sons” having a political pull has been shown many times by publication of their names and family connections, and no attempt at refutation or justification is recalled. Perhaps Mr. Alger had little to do with it; perhaps nothing better could have been done; but at least the facts of their appointment are not altered, nor the charges of their incompetence met, by pointing out that there were less than six hundred of them. There were always one too many, and it was the one that was attempting to perform some kind of military service. When doing nothing for their keep they were redundant but not insupportable.

Mr. Alger knows well enough that what has chiefly stirred the country against him in the matter of appointments is not the selection of incapable civilians to be soldiers, but of incapable soldiers to be commanders of armies and heads of departments. It is interesting to observe that in his defense against a less grave accusation he makes much of the fact that of thirteen Colonelcies (three of Engineers and ten of “Immunes”) no fewer than eleven were given to graduates of the Military Academy. This is a distinct admission of the value of the education given at that great school. Why, then, was not its value recognized in appointing officers to high authority and command? Why is it that the Chief Commissary of Subsistence, an officer charged with duties of capital mportance at such a time, was not a West Point man, but an Eagan? Why was the army of invasion in Cuba entrusted to Shafter the Fat? Why was Merritt removed from Manila before he was permitted to strike a blow and replaced by Otis the Odious?

We need not ask why Miles, who also is not a graduate of the Military Academy, headed the war in Porto Rico; as senior Major General he had a right to be there and has now a right to be at Manila. If not in Manila he has a right to control, under the president, the army of which he is titular commander. He is the only one of our major generals not educated as a soldier who has shown marked ability; and in that is found, doubtless, the reason why his energies are in arrest, while in his name, but without his assent or knowledge, the fussy Corbin issues orders governing the army. Corbin is civilian-bred, as is Wood, who without even military experience was set over so many gray-headed West Point campaigners at Santiago, where he still commands. In short, of all the administration’s military pets not one is a graduate of the Military Academy, and not one has done creditable service; while the only non-graduate of whom creditable service could be confidently predicted, and who as head of the army has a natural right
to perform it, is kept under the slab. In the face of such facts as these Mr. Alger’s defence of himself by showing that the right thing was done in eleven minor matters out of thirteen is no less than impudent. If henceforth he employ any part of his well earned leisure in “replying” it is to be hoped that he will not overlook the sins that he is seriously accused of committing. He might properly enough manifest his memory of them if, only to throw the blame upon the wicked president, who is culpable enough, God knows.

Mr. Alger is no longer of national importance, but the evil that he has done lives after him as a warning to his successor, and he cannot be permitted to thrust his decaying pate out of his political tomb with a mouthful of denials that do not go to the heart of the matter.

 

Mark Twain

The Atlantic

January, 1877

When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.

Once a day a cheap, gaudy packet arrived upward from St. Louis, and another downward from Keokuk. Before these events had transpired, the day was glorious with expectancy; after they had transpired, the day was a dead and empty thing. Not only the boys, but the whole village, felt this. After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep—with shingle-shavings enough around to show what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk, doing a good business in water-melon rinds and seeds; two or three lonely little freight piles scattered about the “levee;” a pile of “skids” on the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them; two or three wood fiats at the head of the wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side; the “point” above the town, and the “point” below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one. Presently a film of dark smoke appears above one of those remote “points;” instantly a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up the cry, “S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin’!” and the scene changes! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving. Drays, carts, men, boys, all go hurrying from many quarters to a common centre, the wharf. Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time. And the boat is rather a handsome sight, too. She is long and sharp and trim and pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys, with a gilded device of some kind swung between them; a fanciful pilot-house, all glass and “gingerbread” perched on top of the “texas” deck behind them; the paddle-boxes are gorgeous with a picture or with gilded rays above the boat’s name; the boiler deck, the hurricane deck, and the texas deck are fenced and ornamented with clean white railings; there is a flag gallantly flying from the jack-staff; the furnace doors are open and the fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys—a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just before arriving at a town; the crew are grouped on the forecastle; the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied deck-hand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in his hand; the pent steam is screaming through the gauge-cocks; the captain lifts his band, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning the water to foam, and the steamer is at rest. Then such a scramble as there is to get aboard, and to get ashore, and to take in freight and to discharge freight, all at one and the same time; and such a yelling and cursing as the mates facilitate it all with! Ten minutes later the steamer is under way again, with no flag on the jack-staff and no black smoke issuing from the chimneys. After ten more minutes the town is dead again, and the town drunkard asleep by the skids once more.This creature’s career could produce but one result, and it speedily followed. Boy after boy managed to get on the river. The minister’s son became an engineer. The doctor’s and the post-master’s sons became “mud clerks”; the wholesale liquor dealer’s son became a bar-keeper on a boat; four sons of the chief merchant, and two sons of the county judge, became pilots. Pilot was the grandest position of all. The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary—from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay. Two months of his wages would pay a preacher’s salary for a year. Now some of us were left disconsolate. We could not get on the river—at least our parents would not let us.

My father was a justice of the peace, and I supposed he possessed the power of life and death over all men and could hang anybody that offended him. This was distinction enough for me as a general thing; but the desire to be a steamboatman kept intruding, nevertheless. I first wanted to be a cabin-boy, so that I could come out with a white apron on and shake a table-cloth over the side, where all my old comrades could see me; later I thought I would rather be the deck-hand who stood on the end of the stage-plank with the coil of rope in his hand, because he was particularly conspicuous. But these were only daydreams—they were too heavenly to be contemplated as real possibilities. By and by one of our boys went away. He was not heard of for a long time. At last he turned up as apprentice engineer or “striker” on a steamboat. This thing shook the bottom out of all my Sunday-school teachings. That boy had been notoriously worldly, and I just the reverse; yet he was exalted to this eminence, and I left in obscurity and misery. There was nothing generous about this fellow in his greatness. He would always manage to have a rusty bolt to scrub while his boat tarried at our town, and he would sit on the inside guard and scrub it, where we could all see him and envy him and loathe him. And whenever his boat was laid up he would come home and swell around the town in his blackest and greasiest clothes, so that nobody could help remembering that he was a steamboatman; and he used all sorts of steamboat technicalities in his talk, as if he were so used to them that he forgot common people could not understand them. He would speak of the “lab-board” side of a horse in an easy, natural way that would make one wish he was dead. And he was always talking about “St. Looy” like an old citizen; he would refer casually to occasions when he “was coming down Fourth Street,” or when he was passing by the Planter’s House, or when there was a fire and he took a turn on the brakes of “the old Big Missouri;” and then he would go on and lie about how many towns the size of ours were burned down there that day. Two or three of the boys had long been persons of consideration among us because they had been to St. Louis once and had a vague general knowledge of its wonders, but the day of their glory was over now. They lapsed into a humble silence, and learned to disappear when the ruthless “cub”-engineer approached. This fellow had money, too, and hair oil. Also an ignorant silver watch and a showy brass watch chain. He wore a leather belt and used no suspenders. If ever a youth was cordially admired and hated by his comrades, this one was. No girl could withstand his charms. He “cut out” every boy in the village. When his boat blew up at last, it diffused a tranquil contentment among us such as we had not known for months. But when he came home the next week, alive, renowned, and appeared in church all battered up and bandaged, a shining hero, stared at and wondered over by everybody, it seemed to us that the partiality of Providence for an undeserving reptile had reached a point where it was open to criticism.

So by and by I ran, away. I said I never would come home again till I was a pilot and could come in glory. But somehow I could not manage it. I went meekly aboard a few of the boats that lay packed together like sardines at the long St. Louis wharf, and very humbly inquired for the pilots, but got only a cold shoulder and short words from mates and clerks. I had to make the best of this sort of treatment for the time being, but I had comforting day-dreams of a future when I should be a great and honored pilot, with plenty of money, and could kill some of these mates and clerks and pay for them.

 

Mark Twain

Chicago Tribune
February 7, 1892

 

This place is the village of Marienbad, Bohemia. It seems no very great distance from Annecy, in Haute-Savoie, to this place–you make it in less than thirty hours by these continental express trains–but the changes in the scenery are great; they are quite out of proportion to the distance covered. From Annecy by Aix to Geneva, you have blue lakes, with bold mountains springing from their borders, and far glimpses of snowy wastes lifted against the horizon beyond, while all about you is a garden cultivated to the last possibility of grace and beauty–a cultivation which doesn’t stop with the handy lower levels, but is carried right up the sheer steeps and propped there with ribs of masonry, and made to stay there in spite of Newton’s law. Beyond Geneva–beyond Lausanne, at any rate–you have for a while a country which noticeably resembles New England, and seems out of place and like an intruder–an intruder who is wearing his every-day clothes at a fancy-dress ball. But presently on your right, huge green mountain ramparts rise up, after that for hours you are absorbed in watching the rich shadow effects which they furnish, and are only dully aware that New England is gone and that you are flying past quaint and unspeakable old towns and towers. Next day you have the lake of Zurich, and presently the Rhine is swinging by you. How clean it is! How clear it is! How blue it is! How green it is! How swift and rollicking and insolent are its gait and style! How vivid and splendid its colors–beautiful wreck and chaos of all the soap bubbles in the universe! A person born on the Rhine must worship it.

I saw the blue Rhine sweep along; I heard, or seemed to hear,
The German songs we used to sing in chorus sweet and clear.

Yes, that is where his heart would be, that is where his last thoughts would be, the “soldier of the legion” who “lay dying in Algiers.”

And by and by you are in a German region, which you discover to be quite different from the recent Swiss lands behind you. You have a sea before you, that is to say; the green land goes rolling away, in ocean swells, to the horizon. And there is another new feature.

Here and there at wide intervals you have islands, hills 200 and 300 feet high, of a haystack form, that rise abruptly out of the green plain, and are wooded solidly to the top. On the top there is just room for a ruined castle, and there it is, every time; above the summit you see the crumbling arches and broken towers projecting.

Beyond Stuttgart, next day, you find other changes still. By and by, approaching and leaving Nuremberg and down by Newhaus, your landscape is humped everywhere with scattered knobs of rock, unsociable crags of a rude, towerlike look, and thatched with grass and vines and bushes. And now and then you have gorges, too, of a modest pattern as to size, with precipice walls curiously carved and honeycombed by–I don’t know what–but water, no doubt.

The changes are not done yet, for the instant the country finds it is out of Wurtemberg and into Bavaria it discards one more thickness of soil to go with previous disrobings, and then nothing remains over the bones but the shift. There may be a poorer soil somewhere, but it is not likely.

A couple of hours from Bayreuth you cross into Bohemia, and before long you reach this Marienbad, and recognize another sharp change, the change from the long ago to to-day; that is to say from the very old to the spick and span new; from an architecture totally without shapeliness or ornament to an architecture attractively equipped with both; from universal dismalness as to color to universal brightness and beauty as to tint; from a town which seems made up of prisons to a town which is made up of gracious and graceful mansions proper to the light of heart and crimeless. It is like jumping out of Jerusalem into Chicago.

The more I think of these many changes, the more surprising the thing seems. I have never made so picturesque a journey before, and there cannot be another trip of like length in the world that can furnish so much variety and of so charming and interesting a sort.

There are only two or three streets here in this snug pocket in the hemlock hills, but they are handsome. When you stand at the foot of a street and look up at the slant of it you see only block fronts of graceful pattern, with happily broken lines and the pleasant accent of bay projections and balconies in orderly disorder and harmonious confusion, and always the color is fresh and cheery, various shades of cream, with softly contrasting trimmings of white, and now and then a touch of dim red. These blocks are all thick walled, solid, massive, tall for this Europe; but it is the brightest and newest looking town on the Continent, and as pretty as anybody could require. The steep hills spring high aloft from their very back doors and are clothed densely to their tops with hemlocks.

In Bavaria everybody is in uniform, and you wonder where the private citizens are, but here in Bohemia the uniforms are very rare. Occasionally one catches a glimpse of an Austrian officer, but it is only occasionally. Uniforms are so scarce that we seem to be in a republic. Almost the only striking figure is the Polish Jew. He is very frequent. He is tall and of grave countenance and wears a coat that reaches to his ankle bones, and he has a little wee curl or two in front of each ear. He has a prosperous look, and seems to be as much respected as anybody.

The crowds that drift along the promenade at music time twice a day are fashionably dressed after the Parisian pattern, and they look a good deal alike, but they speak a lot of languages which you have not encountered before, and no ignorant person can spell their names, and they can’t pronounce them themselves.

Marienbad–Mary’s Bath. The Mary is the Virgin. She is the patroness of these curative springs. They try to cure everything–gout, rheumatism, leanness, fatness, dyspepsia, and all the rest. The whole thing is the property of a convent, and has been for six or seven hundred years. However, there was never a boom here until a quarter of a century ago.

If a person has the gout, this is what they do with him: they have him out at 5.30 in the morning, and give him an egg and let him look at a cup of tea. At 6 he must be at his particular spring, with his tumbler hanging at his belt–and he will have plenty of company there. At the first note of the orchestra he must lift his tumbler and begin to sip his dreadful water with the rest. He must sip slowly and be a long time at it. Then he must tramp about the hills for an hour or so, and get all the exercise and fresh air possible. Then he takes his tub or wallows in his mud, if mud baths are his sort. By noon he has a fine appetite, and the rules allow him to turn himself loose and satisfy it, so long as he is careful and eats only such things as he doesn’t want. He puts in the afternoon walking the hills and filling up with fresh air. At night he is allowed to take three ounces of any kind of food he doesn’t like and drink one glass of any kind of liquor that he has a prejudice against; he may also smoke one pipe if he isn’t used to it. At 9:30 sharp he must be in bed and his candle out. Repeat the whole thing the next day. I don’t see any advantage in this over having the gout.

In the case of most diseases that is about what one is required to undergo, and if you have any pleasant habit that you value, they want that. They want that the first thing. They make you drop everything that gives an interest to life. Their idea is to reverse your whole system of existence and make a regenerating revolution. If you are a Republican, they make you talk free trade. If you are a Democrat they make you talk protection; if you are a Prohibitionist, you have got to go to bed drunk every night till you get well. They spare nothing, they spare nobody. Reform, reform, that is the whole song. If a person is an orator, they gag him; if he likes to read, they won’t let him; if he wants to sing, they make him whistle. They say they can cure any ailment, and they do seem to do it; but why should a patient come all the way here? Why shouldn’t he do these things at home and save the money? No disease would stay with a person who treated it like that.

I didn’t come here to take baths, I only came to look around. But first one person, then another began to throw out hints, and pretty soon I was a good deal concerned about myself. One of these goutees here said I had a gouty look about the eye; next a person who has catarrh of the intestines asked me if I didn’t notice a dim sort of stomach ache when I sneezed. I hadn’t before, but I did seem to notice it then. A man that’s here for heart disease said he wouldn’t come downstairs so fast if he had my build and aspect. A person with an old gold complexion said a man died here in the mud bath last week that had a petrified liver–good deal such a looking man as I am, and the same initials, and so on, and so on.

Of course, there was nothing to be uneasy about, and I wasn’t what you may call really uneasy; but I was not feeling very well–that is, not brisk–and I went to bed. I suppose that that was not a good idea, because then they had me. I started in at the upper end of the mill and went through. I am said to be all right now, and free from disease, but this does not surprise me. What I have been through in these two weeks would free a person of pretty much everything in him that wasn’t nailed there–any loose thing, any unattached fragment of bone, or meat or morals, or disease or propensities or accomplishments, or what not. And I don’t say but that I feel well enough, I feel better than I would if I was dead, I reckon. And, besides, they say I am going to build up now and come right along and be all right. I am not saying anything, but I wish I had enough of my diseases back to make me aware of myself, and enough of my habits to make it worth while to live. To have nothing the matter with you and no habits is pretty tame, pretty colorless. It is just the way a saint feels, I reckon; it is at least the way he looks. I never could stand a saint. That reminds me that you see very few priests around here, and yet, as I have already said, this whole big enterprise is owned and managed by a convent. The few priests one does see here are dressed like human beings, and so there may be more of them than I imagine. Fifteen priests dressed like these could not attract as much of your attention as would one priest at Aix-les-Bains. You cannot pull your eye loose from the French priest as long as he is in sight, his dress is so fascinatingly ugly.

I seem to be wandering from the subject, but I am not. This is about the coldest place I ever saw, and the wettest, too. This August seems like an English November to me. Rain? Why, it seems to like to rain here. It seems to rain every time there is a chance. You are strictly required to be out airing and exercising whenever the sun is shining, so I hate to see the sun shining because I hate air and exercise–duty air and duty exercise taken for medicine. It seems ungenuine, out of season, degraded to sordid utilities, a subtle spiritual something gone from it which one can’t describe in words, but–don’t you understand? With that gone what is left but canned air, canned exercise, and you don’t want it.

When the sun does shine for a few moments or a few hours these people swarm out and flock through the streets and over the hills and through the pine woods, and make the most of the chance, and I have flocked out, too, on some of these occasions, but as a rule I stay in and try to get warm.

And what is there for means, besides heavy clothing and rugs, and the polished white tomb that stands lofty and heartless in the corner and thinks it is a stove? Of all the creations of human insanity this thing is the most forbidding. Whether it is heating the room or isn’t, the impression is the same–cold indifference. You can’t tell which it is doing without going and putting your hand on it. They burn little handfuls of kindlings in it, no substantial wood, and no coal.

The fire bums out every fifteen minutes, and there is no way to tell when this has happened. On these dismal days, with the rain steadily falling, it is no better company than a corpse. A roaring hickory fire, with the cordial flames leaping up the chimney–but I must not think of such things, they make a person homesick. This is a most strange place to come to get rid of disease.

That is what you think most of the time. But in the intervals, when the sun shines and you are tramping the hills and are comparatively warm, you get to be neutral, maybe even friendly. I went up to the Aussichtthurm the other day. This is a tower which stands on the summit of a steep hemlock mountain here; a tower which there isn’t the least use for, because the view is as good at the base of it as it is at the top of it. But Germanic people are just mad for views–they never get enough of a view–if, they owned Mount Blanc, they would build a tower on top of it.

The roads up that mountain through that hemlock forest are hard packed and smooth, and the grades are easy and comfortable. They are for walkers, not for carriages. You move through deep silence and twilight, and you seem to be in a million-columned temple; whether you look up the hill or down it you catch glimpses of distant figures flitting without sound, appearing and disappearing in the dim distances, among the stems of the trees, and it is all very spectral, and solemn and impressive. Now and then the gloom is accented and sized up to your comprehension in a striking way; a ray of sunshine finds its way down through and suddenly calls your attention, for where it falls, far up the hillslope in the brown duskiness, it lays a stripe that has a glare like lightning. The utter stillness of the forest depths, the soundless hush, the total absence of stir or motion of any kind in leaf or branch, are things which we have no experience of at home, and consequently no name for in our language. At home there would be the plaint of insects and the twittering of birds and vagrant breezes would quiver the foliage.

Here it is the stillness of death. This is what the Germans are forever talking about, dreaming about, and despairingly trying to catch and imprison in a poem, or a picture, or a song–they adored Waldeinsamkeit, loneliness of the woods. But how catch it? It has not a body; it is a spirit. We don’t talk about it in America, or dream of it, or sing about it, because we haven’t it. Certainly there is something wonderfully alluring about it, beguiling, dreamy, unworldly. Where the gloom is softest and richest, and the peace and stillness deepest, far up on the side of that hemlock mountain, a spot where Goethe used to sit and dream, is marked by a granite obelisk, and on its side is carved this famous poem, which is the master’s idea of Waldeinsamkeit:

Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln spurest du
Kaum einen Hauch:
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde,
Warte nur–Balde
Ruhest du auch.

It is raining again now. However, it was doing that before. I have been over to the establishment and had a tub bath with two kinds of pine juice in it. These fill the room with a pungent and most pleasant perfume; they also turn the water to a color of ink and cover it with a snowy suds, two or three inches deep. The bath is cool–about 75° or 80° F., and there is a cooler shower bath after it. While waiting in the reception room all by myself two men came in and began to talk. Politics, literature, religion? No, their ailments. There is no other subject here, apparently. Wherever two or three of these people are gathered together, there you have it, every time. The first that can get his mouth open contributes his disease and the condition of it, and the others follow with theirs. The two men just referred to were acquaintances, and they followed the custom.

One of them was built like a gasometer and is here to reduce his girth; the other was built like a derrick and is here to fat up, as they express it, at this resort. They were well satisfied with the progress they were making. The gasometer had lost a quarter of a ton in ten days, and showed the record on his belt with pride, and he walked briskly across the room, smiling in a vast and luminous way, like a harvest moon, and said he couldn’t have done that when he arrived here. He buttoned his coat around his equator and showed how loose it was. It was pretty to see his happiness, it was so childlike and honest. He set his feet together and leaned out over his person and proved that he could see them. He said he hadn’t seen them from that point before for fifteen years. He had a hand like a boxing glove. And on one of his fingers he had just found a diamond ring which he had missed eleven years ago.

The minute the derrick got a chance he broke in and began to tell how he was piling on blubber right along-three-quarters of an ounce every four days; and he was still piping away when I was sent for. I left the fat man standing there panting and blowing, and swelling and collapsing like a balloon, his next speech all ready and urgent for delivery.

The patients are always at that sort of thing, trying to talk one another to death. The fat ones and the lean ones are nearly the worse at it, but not quite; the dyspeptics are the worst. They are at it all day and all night, and all along. They have more symptoms than all the others put together and so there is more variety of experience, more change of condition, more adventure, and consequently more play for the imagination, more scope for lying, and in every way a bigger field to talk. Go where you will, hide where you may, you cannot escape that word liver; you overhear it constantly–in the street, in the shop, in the theater, in the music grounds. Wherever you see two or a dozen people of ordinary bulk talking together, you know they are talking about their livers. When you first arrive here your new acquaintances seem sad and hard to talk to, but pretty soon you get the lay of the land and the hand of things, and after that you haven’t any more trouble. You look into the dreary dull eye and softly say:

“Well, how’s your liver?”

You will see that dim eye flash up with a grateful flame, and you will see that jaw begin to work, and you will recognize that nothing is required of you from this out but to listen as long as you remain conscious. After a few days you will begin to notice that out of these people’s talk a gospel is framing itself and next you will find yourself believing it. It is this–that a man is not what his rearing, his schooling, his beliefs, his principles make him, he is what his liver makes him; that with a healthy liver he will have the clear-seeing eye, the honest heart, the sincere mind, the loving spirit, the loyal soul, the truth and trust and faith that are based as Gibraltar is based, and that with an unhealthy liver he must and will have the opposite of all these, he will see nothing as it really is, he cannot trust anybody, or believe in anything, his moral foundations are gone from under him. Now, isn’t that interesting? I think it is.

Two days ago, perceiving that there was something unusual the matter with me, I went around from doctor to doctor, but without avail; they said they had never seen this kind of symptoms before–at least not all of them. They had seen some of them, but differently arranged. It was a new disease, as far as they could see. Apparently it was scrofulous, but of a new kind. That was as much as they felt able to say. Then they made a stethescopic examination and decided that if anything would dislodge it a mud bath was the thing. It was a very ingenious idea. I took the mud bath, and it did dislodge it. Here it is:

Love Song

I ask not, “Is they heart still sure,
They love still warm, thy faith secure?”
I ask not, “Dream’st thou still of me?
Long’st away to fly with me?”
Ah, no-but as the sun includeth all
The good gifts of the giver,
I sum all these in asking thee.
“O, sweetheart, how’s your liver?”
For if they liver worketh right,
Thy faith stands sure, thy hope is bright,
Their dreams are sweet and I their god.
Doubt threats in vain–thou scorn’st his rod.
Keep only thy digestion clear,
No other foe my love doth fear.
But indigestion hath the power
To mar the soul’s serenest hour–
To crumble adamantine trust,
And turn its certainties to dust,
To dim the eye with the nameless grief,
To chill the heart with unbelief,
To banish hope, and faith, and love,
Place heaven below and hell above.
Then list–details are naught to me
So thou’st the sum-gift of the giver–
I ask thee all in asking thee,
“O darling, how’s your liver?”

Yes, it is easy to say it is scrofulous, but I don’t see the signs of it. In my opinion it is as good poetry as I have ever written. Experts say it isn’t poetry at all, because it lacks the element of fiction, but that is the voice of envy, I reckon. I call it good medical poetry, and I consider that I am a judge.

One of the most curious things in these countries is the street manners of the men and women. In meeting you they come straight on without swerving a hair’s breadth from the direct line and wholly ignoring your right to any part of the road. At the last moment you must yield up your share of it and step aside, or there will be a collision. I noticed this strange barbarism first in Geneva twelve years ago.

In Aix-les-Bains, where sidewalks are scarce and everybody walks in the streets, there is plenty of room, but that is no matter; you are always escaping collisions by mere quarter inches. A man or woman who is headed in such a way as to cross your course presently without a collision will actually alter his direction shade by shade and compel a collision unless at the last instant you jump out of the way. Those folks are not dressed as ladies and gentlemen. And they do not seem to be consciously crowding you out of the road; they seem to be innocently and stupidly unaware that they are doing it. But not so in Geneva. There this class, especially the men, crowd out men, women, and girls of all rank and raiment consciously and intentionally–crowd them off the sidewalk and into the gutter.

There was nothing of this sort in Bayreuth. But here–well, here the thing is astonishing. Collisions are unavoidable unless you do all the yielding yourself. Another odd thing–here this savagery is confined to the folk who wear the fine clothes; the others are courteous and considerate. A big burly Comanche, with all the signs about him of wealth and education, will tranquilly force young ladies to step off into the gutter to avoid being run down by him. It is a mistake that there is no bath that will cure people’s manners. But drowning would help.

However, perhaps one can’t look for any real showy amount of delicacy of feeling in a country where a person is brought up to contemplate without a shudder the spectacle of women harnessed up with dogs and hauling carts. The woman is on one side of the pole, the dog on the other, and they bend to the work and tug and pant and strain–and the man tramps leisurely alongside and smokes his pipe. Often the woman is old and gray, and the man is her grandson. The Austrian national ornithological device ought to be replaced by a grandmother harnessed to a slush cart with a dog. This merely in the interest of fact. Heraldic fancy has been a little too much overworked in these countries, anyway.

Lately one of those curious things happened here which justify the felicitous extravagances of the stage and help us to accept them. A despondent man, bankrupt, friendless, and desperate, dropped a dose of strychnia into a bottle of whisky and went out in the dusk to find a handy place for his purpose, which was suicide. In a lonely spot he was stopped by a tramp, who said he would kill him if he didn’t give up his money. Instead of jumping at the chance of getting himself killed and thus saving himself the impropriety and annoyance of suicide, he forgot all about his late project and attacked the tramp in a most sturdy and valiant fashion. He made a good fight, but failed to win.

The night passed, the morning came, and he woke out of unconsciousness to find that he had been clubbed half to death and left to perish at his leisure. Then he reached for his bottle to add the finishing touch, but it was gone. He pulled himself together and went limping away, and presently came upon the tramp stretched out stone dead with the empty bottle beside him. He had drunk the whisky and committed suicide innocently.

Now, while the man who had been cheated out of his suicide stood there bemoaning his hard luck and wondering how he might manage to raise money enough to buy some more whisky and poison, some people of the neighborhood came by and he told them about his curious adventure. They said that this tramp had been the scourge of the neighborhood and the dread of the constabulary. The inquest passed off quietly and to everybody’s satisfaction, and then the people, to testify their gratitude to the hero of the occasion, put him on the police, on a good-enough salary, and he is all right now and is not meditating suicide any more. Here are all the elements of the naivest Arabian tale; a man who resists robbery when he hasn’t anything to be robbed of does the very best to save his life when he has come out purposely to throw it away; and finally is victorious in defeat, killing his adversary in an effectual and poetic fashion after being already hors de combat himself. Now if you let him rise in the service and marry the chief of police’s daughter it has the requisite elements of the Oriental romance, lacking not a detail so far as I can see.

Chicago Tribune

January 3, 1892

Playing the Courier

A time would come when we must go from Aix-les-Bains to Geneva, and from thence, by a series of day-long and tangled journeys, to Bayreuth in Bavaria. I should have to have a courier, of course, to take care of so considerable a party as mine.

But I procrastinated. The time slipped along, and at last I woke up one day to the fact that we were ready to move and had no courier. I then resolved upon what I felt was a foolhardy thing, but I was in the humor of it. I said I would make the first stage without help–I did it.

I brought the party from Aix to Geneva by myself–four people. The distance was two hours and more, and there was one change of cars. There was not an accident of any kind, except leaving a valise and some other matters on the platform–a thing which can hardly be called an accident, it is so common. So I offered to conduct the party all the way to Bayreuth.

This was a blunder, though it did not seem so at the time. There was more detail than I thought there would be: 1. Two persons whom we had left in a Genevan pension some weeks before must be collected and brought to the hotel; 2. I must notify the people on the Grand Quay who store trunks to bring seven of our stored trunks to the hotel and carry back seven which they would find piled in the lobby; 3. I must find out what part of Europe Bayreuth was in and buy seven railway tickets for that point; 4. I must send a telegram to a friend in the Netherlands; 5. It was now 2 in the afternoon, and we must look sharp and be ready for the first night train and make sure of sleeping-car tickets; 6. I must draw money at the bank.

It seemed to me that the sleeping-car tickets must be the most important thing, so I went to the station myself to make sure; hotel messengers are not always brisk people. It was a hot day, and I ought to have driven, but it seemed better economy to walk. It did not turn out so, because I lost my way and trebled the distance. I applied for the tickets, and they asked me which route I wanted to go by, and that embarrassed me and made me lose my head, there were so many people standing around, and I not knowing anything about the routes and not supposing there were going to be two; so I judged it best to go back and map out the road and come again.

I took a cab this time, but on my way up-stairs at the hotel I remembered that I was out of cigars, so I thought it would be well to get some while the matter was in my mind. It was only round the corner, and I didn’t need the cab. I asked the cabman to wait where he was. Thinking of the telegram and trying to word it in my head, I forgot the cigars and the cab, and walked on indefinitely. I was going to have the hotel people send the telegram, but as I could not be far from the post office by this time, I thought I would do it myself. But it was further than I had supposed. I found the place at last and wrote the telegram and handed it in. The clerk was a severe-looking, fidgety man, and he began to fire French questions at me in such a liquid form that I could not detect the joints between his words, and this made me lose my head again. But an Englishman stepped up and said the clerk wanted to know where he was to send the telegram. I could not tell him, because it was not my telegram, and I explained that I was merely sending it for a member of my party. But nothing would pacify the clerk but the address; so I said that if he was so particular I would go back and get it.

However, I thought I would go and collect those lacking two persons first, for it would be best to do everything systematically and in order, and one detail at a time. Then I remembered the cab was eating up my substance down at the hotel yonder; so I called another cab and told the man to go down and fetch it to the post office and wait till I came.

I had a long, hot walk to collect those people, and when I got there they couldn’t come with me because they had heavy satchels and must have a cab. I went away to find one, but before I ran across any I noticed that I had reached the neighborhood of the Grand Quay–at least I thought I had–so I judged I could save time by stepping around and arranging about the trunks. I stepped around about a mile, and although I did not find the Grand Quay, I found a cigar shop, and remembered about the cigars. I said I was going to Bayreuth, and wanted enough for the journey. The man asked me which route I was going to take. I said I did not know. He said he would recommend me to go by Zurich and various other places which he named, and offered to sell me seven second-class through tickets for $22 apiece, which would be throwing off the discount which the railroads allowed him. I was already tired of riding second-class on first-class tickets, so I took him up.

By and by I found Natural & Co.’s storage office, and told them to send seven of our trunks to the hotel and pile them up in the lobby. It seemed to me that I was not delivering the whole of the message, still it was all I could find in my head.

Next I found the bank and asked for some money, but I had left my letter of credit somewhere and was not able to draw. I remembered now that I must have left it lying on the table where I wrote my telegram; so I got a cab and drove to the post office and went up-stairs, and they said that a letter of credit had indeed been left on the table, but that it was now in the hands of the police authorities, and it would be necessary for me to go there and prove property. They sent a boy with me, and we went out the back way and walked a couple of miles and found the place; and then I remembered about my cabs, and asked the boy to send them to me when he got back to the post office. It was nightfall now, and the Mayor had gone to dinner. I thought I would go to dinner myself, but the officer on duty thought differently, and I stayed.

The Mayor dropped in at half past 10, but said it was too late to do anything to-night–come at 9.30 in the morning. The officer wanted to keep me all night, and said I was a suspicious-looking person, and probably did not own the letter of credit, and didn’t know what a letter of credit was, but merely saw the real owner leave it lying on the table, and wanted to get it because I was probably a person that would want anything he could get, whether it was valuable or not. But the Mayor said he saw nothing suspicious about me, and that I seemed a harmless person and nothing the matter with me but a wandering mind, and not much of that. So I thanked him and he set me free, and I went home in my three cabs.

As I was dog-tired and in no condition to answer questions with discretion, I thought I would not disturb the Expedition at that time of night, as there was a vacant room I knew of at the other end of the hall; but I did not quite arrive there, as a watch had been set, the Expedition being anxious about me. I was placed in a galling situation. The Expedition sat stiff and forbidding on four chairs in a row, with shawls and things all on, satchels and guide-books in lap. They had been sitting like that for four hours, and the glass going down all the time. Yes, and they were waiting–waiting for me. It seemed to me that nothing but a sudden, happily contrived, and brilliant tour de force could break this iron front and make a diversion in my favor; so I shied my hat into the arena and followed it with a skip and a jump, shouting blithely:

“Ha, ha, here we all are, Mr. Merryman!”

Nothing could be deeper or stiller than the absence of applause which followed. But I kept on; there seemed no other way, though my confidence, poor enough before, had got a deadly check and was in effect gone.

I tried to be jocund out of a heavy heart, I tried to touch the other hearts there and soften the bitter resentment in those faces by throwing off bright and airy fun and making of the whole ghastly thing a joyously humorous incident, but this idea was not well conceived. It was not the right atmosphere for it. I got not one smile; not one line in those offended faces relaxed; I thawed nothing of the winter that looked out of those frosty eyes. I started one more breezy, poor effort, but the head of the Expedition cut into the center of it and said:

“Where have you been?”

I saw by the manner of this that the idea was to get down to cold business now. So I began my travels, but was cut short again.

“Where are the two others? We have been in frightful anxiety about them.”

“Oh, they’re all right. I was to fetch a cab. I will go straight off, and – ”

“Sit down! Don’t you know it is 11 o’clock? Where did you leave them?”

“At the pension.”

“Why didn’t you bring them?”

“Because we couldn’t carry the satchels. And so I thought – ”

“Thought! You should not try to think. One cannot think without the proper machinery. It is two miles to that pension. Did you go there without a cab?”

“I–well, I didn’t intend to; it only happened so.”

“How did it happen so?”

“Because I was at the postoffice and I remembered that I had left a cab waiting here, and so, to stop that expense, I sent another cab to – to – ”

“To what?”

“Well, I don’t remember now, but I think the new cab was to have the hotel pay the old cab, and send it away.”

“What good would that do?”

“What good would it do? It would stop the expense, wouldn’t it?”

“By putting the new cab in its place to continue the expense?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Why didn’t you have the new cab come back for you?”

“Oh, that is what I did. I remember now. Yes, that is what I did. Because I recollect that when I – ”

“Well, then, why didn’t it come back for you?”

“To the post office? Why, it did.”

“Very well, then, how did you come to walk to the pension?”

“I – I don’t quite remember how that happened. Oh, yes, I do remember now. I wrote the dispatch to send to the Netherlands, and – ”

“Oh, thank goodness, you did accomplish something! I wouldn’t have had you fail to send–what makes you look like that! You are trying to avoid my eye. That dispatch is the most important thing that –You haven’t sent that dispatch!”

“I haven’t said I didn’t send it.”

“You don’t need to. Oh, dear, I wouldn’t have had that telegram fail for anything. Why didn’t you send it?”

“Well, you see, with so many things to do and think of, I–they’re very particular there, and after I had written the telegram – ”

“Oh, never mind, let it go, explanations can’t help the matter now–what will he think of us?”

“Oh, that’s all right, that’s all right, he’ll think we gave the telegram to the hotel people, and that they – ”

“Why, certainly! Why didn’t you do that? There was no other rational way.”

“Yes, I know, but then I had it on my mind that I must be sure and get to the bank and draw some money – ”

“Well, you are entitled to some credit, after all, for thinking of that, and I don’t wish to be too hard on you, though you must acknowledge yourself that you have cost us all a good deal of trouble, and some of it not necessary. How much did you draw?”
“Well, I–I had an idea that–that – ”

“That what?”

“That–well, it seems to me that in the circumstances–so many of us, you know, and–and – ”

“What are you mooning about? Do turn your face this way and let me–why, you haven’t drawn any money!”

“Well, the banker said – ”

“Never mind what the banker said. You must have had a reason of your own. Not a reason, exactly, but something which – ”

“Well, then, the simple fact was that I hadn’t my letter of credit.”

“Hadn’t your letter of credit?”

“Hadn’t my letter of credit.”

“Don’t repeat me like that. Where was it?”

“At the post-office.”

“What was it doing there?”

“Well, I forgot it and left it there.”

“Upon my word, I’ve seen a good many couriers, but of all the couriers that ever I – ”

“I’ve done the best I could.”

“Well, so you have, poor thing, and I’m wrong to abuse you so when you’ve been working yourself to death while we’ve been sitting here only thinking of our vexations instead of feeling grateful for what you were trying to do for us. It will all come out right. We can take the 7:30 train in the morning just as well. You’ve bought the tickets?”

“I have–and it’s a bargain, too. Second class.”

“I’m glad of it. Everybody else travels second class, and we might just as well save that ruinous extra charge. What did you pay?”

“Twenty-two dollars apiece–through to Bayreuth.”

“Why, I didn’t know you could buy through tickets anywhere but in London and Paris.”

“Some people can’t, maybe; but some people can–of whom I am one of which, it appears.”

“It seems a rather high price.”

“On the contrary, the dealer knocked off his commission.”

“Dealer?”

“Yes–I bought them at a cigar shop.”

“That reminds me. We shall have to get up pretty early, and so there should be no packing to do. Your umbrella, your rubbers, your cigars–what is the matter?”

“Hang it, I’ve left the cigars at the bank.”

“Just think of it! Well, your umbrella?”

“I’ll have that all right. There’s no hurry.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Oh, that’s all right; I’ll take care of – ”

“Where is that umbrella?”

“It’s just the merest step–it won’t take me – ”

“Where is it?”

“Well, I think I left it at the cigar shop; but anyway – ”

“Take your feet out from under that thing. It’s just as I expected! Where are your rubbers?”

“They–well – ”

“Where are your rubbers?”

“It’s got so dry now–well, everybody says there’s not going to be another drop of – ”

“Where – are – your – rubbers?”

“Well, you see–well, it was this way. First, the officer said – ”

“What officer?”

“Police officer but the Mayor, he – ”

“What Mayor?”

“Mayor of Geneva but I said – ”

“Wait. What is the matter with you?”

“Who, me? Nothing. They both tried to persuade me to stay, and – ”

“Stay where?”

“Well, the fact is – ”

“Where have you been? What’s kept you out till half past 10 at night?”

“O, you see, after I lost my letter of credit, I – ”

“You are beating around the bush a good deal. Now, answer the question in just one straightforward word. Where are those rubbers?”

“They–well, they’re in the county jail.”

I started a placating smile, but it petrified. The climate was unsuitable. Spending three or four hours in jail did not seem to the Expedition humorous. Neither did it to me, at bottom.

I had to explain the whole thing, and, of course, it came out then that we couldn’t take the early train, because that would leave my letter of credit in hock still. It did look as if we had all got to go to bed estranged and unhappy, but by good luck that was prevented. There happened to be mention of the trunks, and I was able to say I had attended to that feature.

“There, you are just as good and thoughtful and painstaking and intelligent as you can be, and it’s a shame to find so much fault with you, and there sha’n’t be another word of it. You’ve done beautifully, admirably, and I’m sorry I ever said one ungrateful word to you.”

This hit deeper than some of the other things and made me uncomfortable, because I wasn’t feeling as solid about that trunk errand as I wanted to. There seemed somehow to be a defect about it somewhere, though I couldn’t put my finger on it, and didn’t like to stir the matter just now, it being late and maybe well enough to let well enough alone.

Of course there was music in the morning, when it was found that we couldn’t leave by the early train. But I had no time to wait; I got only the opening bars of the overture, and then started out to get my letter of credit.

It seemed a good time to look into the trunk business and rectify it if it needed it, and I had a suspicion that it did. I was too late. The concierge said he had shipped the trunks to Zurich the evening before. I asked him how he could do that without exhibiting passage tickets.

“Not necessary in Switzerland. You pay for your trunks and send them where you please. Nothing goes free but your hand-baggage.”

“How much did you pay on them?”

“A hundred and forty francs.”

“Twenty-eight dollars. There’s something wrong about that trunk business, sure.”

Next I met the porter. He said:

“You have not slept well, is it not? You have the worn look. If you would like a courier, a good one has arrived last night, and is not engaged for five days already, by the name of Ludi. We recommend him; das heiss, the Grand Hotel Beau Rivage recommends him.”

I declined with coldness. My spirit was not broken yet. And I did not like having my condition taken notice of in this way. I was at the county jail by 9 o’clock, hoping that the Mayor might chance to come before his regular hour; but he didn’t. It was dull there. Every time I offered to touch anything, or look at anything, or do anything, or refrain from doing anything, the policeman said it was “defendee.” I thought I would practice my French on him, but he wouldn’t have that either. It seemed to make him particularly bitter to hear his own tongue.

The Mayor came at last, and then there was no trouble; for the minute he had convened the Supreme Court–which they always do whenever there is valuable property in dispute–and got everything shipshape and sentries posted, and had prayer by the chaplain, my unsealed letter was brought and opened, and there wasn’t anything in it but some photographs; because, as I remembered now, I had taken out the letter of credit so as to make room for the photographs, and had put the letter in my other pocket, which I proved to everybody’s satisfaction by fetching it out and showing it with a good deal of exultation. So then the court looked at each other in a vacant kind of way, and then at me, and then at each other again, and finally let me go, but said it was imprudent for me to be at large, and asked me what my profession was. I said I was a courier. They lifted up their eyes in a kind of reverent way and said, “Du lieber Gott!” and I said a word of courteous thanks for their apparent admiration and hurried off to the bank.

However, being a courier was already making me a great stickler for order and system and one thing at a time and each thing in its own proper turn; so I passed by the bank and branched off and started for the two lacking members of the Expedition. A cab lazied by, and I took it upon persuasion. I gained no speed by this, but it was a reposeful turnout and I liked reposefulness. The week-long jubilations over the 600th anniversary of the birth of Swiss liberty and the Signing of the Compact was at flood tide, and all the streets were clothed in fluttering flags.

The horse and the driver had been drunk three days and nights, and had known no stall nor bed meantime. They looked as I felt–dreamy and seedy. But we arrived in course of time. I went in and rang, and asked a housemaid to rush out the lacking members. She said something which I did not understand, and I returned to the chariot. The girl had probably told me that those people did not belong on her floor, and that it would be judicious for me to go higher, and ring from floor to floor till I found them; for in those Swiss flats there does not seem to be any way to find the right family but to be patient and guess your way along up. I calculated that I must wait fifteen minutes, there being three details inseparable from an occasion of this sort: 1. put on hats and come down and climb in; 2. return of one to get “my other glove”; 3. presently, return of the other one to fetch “my ‘French Verbs at a Glance’.” I would muse during the fifteen minutes and take it easy.

A very still and blank interval ensued, and then I felt a hand on my shoulder and started. The intruder was a policeman. I glanced up and perceived that there was new scenery. There was a good deal of a crowd, and they had that pleased and interested look which such a crowd wears when they see that somebody is out of luck. The horse was asleep, and so was the driver, and some boys had hung them and me full of gaudy decorations stolen from the innumerable banner-poles. It was a scandalous spectacle. The officer said:

“I’m sorry, but we can’t have you sleeping here all day.”

I was wounded, and said with dignity:

“I beg your pardon, I was not sleeping; I was thinking.”

“Well, you can think if you want to, but you’ve got to think to yourself; you disturb the whole neighborhood.”

It was a poor joke, and it made the crowd laugh. I snore at night sometimes, but it is not likely that I would do such a thing in the daytime and in such a place. The officer undecorated us, and seemed sorry for our friendlessness, and really tried to be humane, but he said we mustn’t stop there any longer or he would have to charge us rent–it was the law, he said, and he went on to say in a sociable way that I was looking pretty moldy, and he wished he knew –

I shut him off pretty austerely, and said I hoped one might celebrate a little these days, especially when one was personally concerned.

“Personally?” he asked. “How?”

“Because 600 years ago an ancestor of mine signed the compact.”

He reflected a moment, then looked me over and said:

“Ancestor! It’s my opinion you signed it yourself. For of all the old ancient relics that ever I–but never mind about that. What is it you are waiting here for so long?”

I said:

“I’m not waiting here so long at all. I’m waiting fifteen minutes till they forget a glove and a book and go back and get them.” Then I told him who they were that I had come for.

He was very obliging, and began to shout inquiries to the tiers of heads and shoulders projecting from the windows above us. Then a woman away up there sang out:

“O, they? Why, I got them a cab and they left here long ago–half past eight, I should say.”

It was annoying. I glanced at my watch, but didn’t say anything. The officer said:

“It is a quarter of 12, you see. You should have inquired better. You have been asleep three-quarters of an hour, and in such a sun as this. You are baked–baked black. It is wonderful. And you will miss your train, perhaps. You interest me greatly. What is your occupation?”

I said I was a courier. It seemed to stun him, and before he could come to we were gone.

When I arrived in the third story of the hotel I found our quarters vacant. I was not surprised. The moment a courier takes his eye off his tribe they go shopping. The nearer it is to train-time the surer they are to go. I sat down to try and think out what I had best do next, but presently the hall boy found me there, and said the Expedition had gone to the station half an hour before. It was the first time I had known them to do a rational thing, and it was very confusing. This is one of the things that make a courier’s life so difficult and uncertain. Just as matters are going the smoothest, his people will strike a lucid interval, and down go all his arrangements to wreck and ruin.

The train was to leave at 12 noon sharp. It was now ten minutes after 12. I could be at the station in ten minutes. I saw I had no great amount of leeway, for this was the lightning express, and on the Continent the lightning expresses are pretty fastidious about getting away some time during the advertised day. My people were the only ones remaining in the waiting-room; everybody else had passed through and “mounted the train,” as they say in those regions. They were exhausted with nervousness and fret, but I comforted them and heartened them up, and we made our rush.

But no; we were out of luck again. The doorkeeper was not satisfied with the tickets. He examined them cautiously, deliberately, suspiciously; then glared at me awhile, and after that he called another official. The two examined the tickets and called another official. These called others, and the convention discussed and discussed, and gesticulated and carried on, until I begged that they would consider how time was flying, and just pass a few resolutions and let us go. Then they said very courteously that there was a defect in the tickets, and asked me where I got them.

I judged I saw what the trouble was now. You see, I had bought the tickets in a cigar shop, and, of course, the tobacco smell was on them; without doubt, the thing they were up to was to work the tickets through the Custom House and to collect duty on that smell. So I resolved to be perfectly frank; it is sometimes the best way. I said:

“Gentlemen, I will not deceive you. These railway tickets – ”

“Ah, pardon, monsieur! These are not railway tickets.”

“O,” I said, “is that the defect?”

“Ah, truly yes, monsieur. These are lottery tickets, yes; and it is a lottery which has been drawn two years ago.”

I affected to be greatly amused; it is all one can do in such circumstances; it is all one can do, and yet there is no value in it; it deceives nobody, and you can see that everybody around pities you and is ashamed of you. One of the hardest situations in life, I think, is to be full of grief and a sense of defeat and shabbiness that way, and yet have to put on an outside of archness and gaiety, while all the time you know that your own Expedition, the treasures of your heart, and whose love and reverence you are by the custom of our civilization entitled to, are being consumed with humiliation before strangers to see you earning and getting a compassion which is a stigma, a brand–a brand which certifies you to be–O, anything and everything which is fatal to human respect.

I said, cheerily, it was all right, just one of those little accidents that was likely to happen to anybody–I would have the right tickets in two minutes, and we would catch the train yet, and, moreover, have something to laugh about all through the journey. I did get the tickets in time, all stamped and complete, but then it turned out that I couldn’t take them, because in taking so much pains about the two missing members I had skipped the bank and hadn’t the money. So then the train left, and there didn’t seem to be anything to do but go back to the hotel, which we did; but it was kind of melancholy and not much said. I tried to start a few subjects, like scenery and transubstantiation, and those sorts of things, but they didn’t seem to hit the weather right.

We had lost our good rooms, but we got some others which were pretty scattering, but would answer. I judged things would brighten now, but the Head of the Expedition said, “Send up the trunks.” It made me feel pretty cold. There was a doubtful something about that trunk business. I was almost sure of it. I was going to suggest –

But a wave of the hand sufficiently restrained me, and I was informed that we would now camp for three days and see if we could rest up.

I said all right, never mind ringing; I would go down and attend to the trunks myself. I got a cab and went straight to Mr. Charles Natural’s place, and asked what order it was I had left there.

“To send seven trunks to the hotel.”

“And were you to bring any back?”

“No.”

“You are sure I didn’t tell you to bring back seven that would be found piled in the lobby?”

“Absolutely sure you didn’t.”

“Then the whole fourteen are gone to Zurich or Jericho or somewhere, and there is going to be more debris around that hotel when the Expedition – ”

I didn’t finish, because my mind was getting to be in a good deal of a whirl, and when you are that way you think you have finished a sentence when you haven’t, and you go mooning and dreaming away, and the first thing you know you get run over by a dray or a cow or something.

I left the cab there–I forgot it–and on my way back I thought it all out and concluded to resign, because otherwise I should be nearly sure to be discharged. But I didn’t believe it would be a good idea to resign in person; I could do it by message. So I sent for Mr. Ludi and explained that there was a courier going to resign on account of incompatibility or fatigue or something, and as he had four or five vacant days, I would like to insert him into that vacancy if he thought he could fill it. When everything was arranged I got him to go up and say to the Expedition that, owing to an error made by Mr. Natural’s people, we were out of trunks here, but would have plenty in Zurich, and we’d better take the first train, freight, gravel, or construction, and move right along.

He attended to that and came down with an invitation for me to go up–yes, certainly; and, while we walked along over to the bank to get money, and collect my cigars and tobacco, and to the cigar shop to trade back the lottery tickets and get my umbrella, and to Mr. Natural’s to pay that cab and send it away, and to the county jail to get my rubbers and leave p. p. c. cards for the Mayor and Supreme Court, he described the weather to me that was prevailing on the upper levels there with the Expedition, and I saw that I was doing very well where I was.

I stayed out in the woods till 4 p. m., to let the weather moderate and then turned up at the station just in time to take the 3 o’clock express for Zurich along with the Expedition, now in the hands of Ludi, who conducted its complex affairs with little apparent effort or inconvenience.

Well, I had worked like a slave while I was in office, and done the very best I knew how; yet all that these people dwelt upon or seemed to care to remember was the defects of my administration, not its creditable features. They would skip over a thousand creditable features to remark upon and reiterate and fuss about just one fact, till it seemed to me they would wear it out; and not much of a fact, either, taken by itself–the fact that I elected myself courier in Geneva, and put in work enough to carry a circus to Jerusalem and yet never even got my gang out of the town. I finally said I didn’t wish to hear any more about the subject, it made me tired. And I told them to their faces that I would never be a courier again to save anybody’s life. And, if I live long enough I’ll prove it. I think it’s a difficult, brain racking, overworked and thoroughly ungrateful office, and the main bulk of its wages is a sore heart and a bruised spirit.