Fetch me the shotgun; this thing has gone along far enough. He issued forth with his weapon, and chanced to step upon the tail of the original poodle, who promptly bit him in the leg. Now the great and good work which this poodle had been engaged in had engendered in him such a mighty and augmenting enthusiasm as to turn his weak head at last and drive him mad. A month later, when the benevolent physician lay in the death-throes of hydrophobia, he called his weeping friends about him, and said:.
They tell but half of the story. Whenever a poor wretch asks you for help, and you feel a doubt as to what result may flow from your benevolence, give yourself the benefit of the doubt and kill the applicant. A poor and young literary beginner had tried in vain to get his manuscripts accepted. At last, when the horrors of starvation were staring him in the face, he laid his sad case before a celebrated author, beseeching his counsel and assistance.
This generous man immediately put aside his own matters and proceeded to peruse one of the despised manuscripts. Having completed his kindly task, he shook the poor young man cordially by the hand, saying, "I perceive merit in this; come again to me on Monday.
What was the poor young man's astonishment to discover upon the printed page his own article. The celebrated author was the renowned Snodgrass; the poor young beginner thus rescued from obscurity and starvation was the afterward equally renowned Snagsby. Let this pleasing incident admonish us to turn a charitable ear to all beginners that need help. The next week Snagsby was back with five rejected manuscripts. The celebrated author was a little surprised, because in the books the young struggler had needed but one lift, apparently.
However, he plowed through these papers, removing unnecessary flowers and digging up some acres of adjective stumps, and then succeeded in getting two of the articles accepted. A week or so drifted by, and the grateful Snagsby arrived with another cargo.
The celebrated author had felt a mighty glow of satisfaction within himself the first time he had successfully befriended the poor young struggler, and had compared himself with the generous people in the books with high gratification; but he was beginning to suspect now that he had struck upon something fresh in the noble-episode line.
His enthusiasm took a chill. Still, he could not bear to repulse this struggling young author, who clung to him with such pretty simplicity and trustfulness. Well, the upshot of it all was that the celebrated author presently found himself permanently freighted with the poor young beginner.
All his mild efforts to unload this cargo went for nothing. He had to give daily counsel, daily encouragement; he had to keep on procuring magazine acceptances, and then revamping the manuscripts to make them presentable. When the young aspirant got a start at last, he rode into sudden fame by describing the celebrated author's private life with such a caustic humor and such minuteness of blistering detail that the book sold a prodigious edition, and broke the celebrated author's heart with mortification.
With his latest gasp he said, "Alas, the books deceived me; they do not tell the whole story. Beware of the struggling young author, my friends. Whom God sees fit to starve, let not man presumptuously rescue to his own undoing. One day a lady was driving through the principal street of a great city with her little boy, when the horses took fright and dashed madly away, hurling the coachman from his box and leaving the occupants of the carnage paralyzed with terror.
But a brave youth who was driving a grocery-wagon threw himself before the plunging animals, and succeeded in arresting their flight at the peril of his own. William Ferguson called the next week and asked Mr. McSpadden to use his influence to get him a higher employment, he feeling capable of better things than driving a grocer's wagon. McSpadden got him an underclerkship at a good salary.
McSpadden consented to take her into his house. When Samuel Clemens was 11, his year-old father died of pneumonia. In , he moved over to a typesetting job at a local paper owned by his older brother, Orion, and eventually penned a handful of short, satirical items for the publication. In , year-old Clemens left Hannibal and spent the next several years living in places such as New York City, Philadelphia and Keokuk, Iowa, and working as a printer.
In , Clemens became an apprentice steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. The following year, while employed on a boat called the Pennsylvania, he got his younger brother, Henry, a job aboard the vessel.
Samuel Clemens worked on the Pennsylvania until early June. Then, on June 13, disaster struck when the Pennsylvania, traveling near Memphis, experienced a deadly boiler explosion; among those who perished as a result was year-old Henry. He worked on steamboats until the outbreak of the American Civil War in , when commercial traffic along the Mississippi was halted. His time with the group turned out to be brief: After two weeks of conducting drills, the poorly supplied Marion Rangers disbanded upon hearing a rumor that a Union force—led by Ulysses Grant, as Clemens eventually learned—was headed their way.
The following month, Clemens left Missouri and the war behind and journeyed west with his brother Orion, who had been named the territorial secretary of Nevada. Once there, Clemens tried his hand at silver mining and then, after failing to strike it rich, took a job as a reporter with a Virginia City, Nevada, newspaper in the fall of The following February, he used the pen name Mark Twain for the first time.
Prior to that, he had tried out other pseudonyms, including W. In one of the great battles of the Civil War ten per cent of the forces engaged on the two sides were killed and wounded. At Waterloo, where four hundred thousand men were present on the two sides, fifty thousand fell, killed and wounded, in five hours, leaving three hundred and fifty sound and all right for further adventures.
Eight years ago, when the pathetic comedy called the Cuban War was played, we summoned two hundred and fifty thousand men. We fought a number of showy battles, and when the war was over we had lost two hundred sixty-eight men out of our two hundred and fifty thousand, in killed and wounded in the field, and just fourteen times as many by the gallantry of the army doctors in the hospitals and camps.
We did not exterminate the Spaniards-far from it. In each engagement we left an average of two per cent of the enemy killed or crippled on the field. Contrast these things with the great statistics which have arrived from that Moro crater!
There, with six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-two wounded. The enemy numbered six hundred-including women and children-and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother.
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