The Life & Times of Mark Twain - 4 Biographical Works in One Edition. Марк Твен
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Название: The Life & Times of Mark Twain - 4 Biographical Works in One Edition

Автор: Марк Твен

Издательство: Bookwire

Жанр: Языкознание

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isbn: 9788027236879

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СКАЧАТЬ him to take a hand, and he could not conceal his gratitude; though his breeding, and the etiquette of his profession, made him try. We explained the game to him, and said that there were forty-one balls, and that the player was privileged to extend his inning and keep on playing until he had used them all up — repeatedly — and that for every ten-strike he got a prize. We didn’t name the prize — it wasn’t necessary, as no prize would ever be needed or called for. He started a sarcastic smile, but quenched it, according to the etiquette of his profession. He merely remarked that he would like to select a couple of medium balls and one small one, adding that he didn’t think he would need the rest.

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

      “What is the prize for the ten-strike?”

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

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

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

      Mark Twain.

      (To be Continued.)

      NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

      No. DCXXV.

      DECEMBER, 1907.

      CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY. — XXV..

       Table of Contents

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

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

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

      Address of Samuel L. Clemens (“Mark Twain”)

      From a report of the dinner given by the Publishers

      of the Atlantic Monthly in honor of the

      Seventieth Anniversary of the

      Birth of John Greenleaf Whittier, at the Hotel Brunswick,

      Boston, December 17, 1877,

      as published in the

      BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT,

      December 18, 1877

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

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

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

      “‘Through the deep cares of thought

      I hear a voice that sings,

      Build thee more stately mansions,

      O my soul!’

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

      “‘Give me agates for my meat;

      Give me cantharids to eat;

      From air and ocean bring me foods,

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