[Written about 1870.] An Instructive Little Tale My beautiful new watch had run eighteen months without losing or gaining, and without breaking any part of its machinery or stopping. I had come to believe it infallible in its judgments about the time of day, and to consider its constitution and its anatomy imperishable. But at […]

Some months ago I published a magazine article[1] descriptive of a remarkable scene in the Imperial Parliament in Vienna. Since then I have received from Jews in America several letters of inquiry. They were difficult letters to answer, for they were not very definite. But at last I have received a definite one. It is […]

CHAPTER I Well, when I had been dead about thirty years I begun to get a little anxious. Mind you, had been whizzing through space all that time, like a comet. LIKE a comet! Why, Peters, I laid over the lot of them! Of course there warn’t any of them going my way, as a […]

Conversation As it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors INTRODUCTION “Born irreverent,” scrawled Mark Twain on a scratch pad, “–like all other people I have ever known or heard of–I am hoping to remain so while there are any reverent irreverences left to make fun of.” –[Holograph manuscript of Samuel […]

Note.–The assassination of the Empress of Austria at Geneva, September 10, 1898, occurred during Mark Twain’s Austrian residence. The news came to him at Kaltenleutgeben, a summer resort a little way out of Vienna. To his friend, the Rev. Jos. H. Twichell, he wrote: “That good and unoffending lady, the Empress, is killed by a […]

Marion City, on the Mississippi River, in the State of Missouri–a village; time, 1845. La Bourboule-les-Bains, France –a village; time, the end of June, 1894. I was in the one village in that early time; I am in the other now. These times and places are sufficiently wide apart, yet today I have the strange […]

Interlaken, Switzerland, 1891. It is a good many years since I was in Switzerland last. In that remote time there was only one ladder railway in the country. That state of things is all changed. There isn’t a mountain in Switzerland now that hasn’t a ladder railroad or two up its back like suspenders; indeed, […]

Bayreuth, Aug. 2d, 1891 It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music- mad strangers that was rolling down upon Bayreuth. It had been long since we had seen such multitudes of excited and struggling people. It took a good half-hour to pack them and pair them into the train–and it was the […]

Is it true that the sun of a man’s mentality touches noon at forty and then begins to wane toward setting? Doctor Osler is charged with saying so. Maybe he said it, maybe he didn’t; I don’t know which it is. But if he said it, I can point him to a case which proves […]

In the appendix to Croker’s Boswell’s Johnson one finds this anecdote: CATO’S SOLILOQUY.–One day Mrs. Gastrel set a little girl to repeat to him [Dr. Samuel Johnson] Cato’s Soliloquy, which she went through very correctly. The Doctor, after a pause, asked the child: “What was to bring Cato to an end?” She said it was […]

(This article, written during the autumn of 1899, was about the last writing done by Mark Twain on any impersonal subject.) I have had a kindly feeling, a friendly feeling, a cousinly feeling toward Simplified Spelling, from the beginning of the movement three years ago, but nothing more inflamed than that. It seemed to me […]

I This line of hieroglyphics was for fourteen years the despair of all the scholars who labored over the mysteries of the Rosetta stone: [Figure 1] After five years of study Champollion translated it thus: Therefore let the worship of Epiphanes be maintained in all the temples, this upon pain of death. That was the […]

As concerns tobacco, there are many superstitions. And the chiefest is this–that there is a STANDARD governing the matter, whereas there is nothing of the kind. Each man’s own preference is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept, the only one which can command him. A congress of all the […]

In the early eighties Mark Twain learned to ride one of the old high-wheel bicycles of that period. He wrote an account of his experience, but did not offer it for publication. The form of bicycle he rode long ago became antiquated, but in the humor of his pleasantry is a quality which does not […]

The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer stand at the head of Cooper’s novels as artistic creations. There are others of his works which contain parts as perfect as are to be found in these, and scenes even more thrilling. Not one can be compared with either of them as a finished whole. The defects in both […]

Consider that a conversation by telephone–when you are simply siting by and not taking any part in that conversation–is one of the solemnest curiosities of modern life. Yesterday I was writing a deep article on a sublime philosophical subject while such a conversation was going on in the room. I notice that one can always […]

These two were distantly related to each other–seventh cousins, or something of that sort. While still babies they became orphans, and were adopted by the Brants, a childless couple, who quickly grew very fond of them. The Brants were always saying: “Be pure, honest, sober, industrious, and considerate of others, and success in life is […]

Once or twice a year I get a letter of a certain pattern, a pattern that never materially changes, in form and substance, yet I cannot get used to that letter–it always astonishes me. It affects me as the locomotive always affects me: I saw to myself, “I have seen you a thousand times, you […]

THE FIVE BOONS OF LIFE Chapter I In the morning of life came a good fairy with her basket, and said: “Here are gifts. Take one, leave the others. And be wary, chose wisely; oh, choose wisely! for only one of them is valuable.” The gifts were five: Fame, Love, Riches, Pleasure, Death. The youth […]

From My Unpublished Autobiography Some days ago a correspondent sent in an old typewritten sheet, faded by age, containing the following letter over the signature of Mark Twain: “Hartford, March 10, 1875. “Please do not use my name in any way. Please do not even divulge that fact that I own a machine. I have […]