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A BURLESQUE BIOGRAPHY
Two or three persons having at different times intimated that if I
would write an autobiography they would read it when they got leisure,
I yield at last to this frenzied public demand and herewith tender
my history.
Ours is a noble house, and stretches a long way back into antiquity.
The earliest ancestor the Twains have any record of was a friend of
the family by the name of Higgins. This was in the eleventh century,
when our people were living in Aberdeen, county of Cork, England.
Why it is that our long line has ever since borne the maternal
name (except when one of them now and then took a playful
refuge in an alias to avert foolishness), instead of Higgins,
is a mystery which none of us has ever felt much desire to stir.
It is a kind of vague, pretty romance, and we leave it alone.
All the old families do that way.
Arthour Twain was a man of considerable note--a solicitor on the
highway in William Rufus's time. At about the age of thirty he went
to one of those fine old English places of resort called Newgate,
to see about something, and never returned again. While there he
died suddenly.
Augustus Twain seems to have made something of a stir about the
year 1160. He was as full of fun as he could be, and used to take his old
saber and sharpen it up, and get in a convenient place on a dark night,
and stick it through people as they went by, to see them jump.
He was a born humorist. But he got to going too far with it;
and the first time he was found stripping one of these parties,
the authorities removed one end of him, and put it up on a nice high
place on Temple Bar, where it could contemplate the people and have
a good time. He never liked any situation so much or stuck to it so long.
Then for the next two hundred years the family tree shows
a succession of soldiers--noble, high-spirited fellows,
who always went into battle singing, right behind the army,
and always went out a-whooping, right ahead of it.
This is a scathing rebuke to old dead Froissart's poor witticism
that our family tree never had but one limb to it, and that that
one stuck out at right angles, and bore fruit winter and summer.
Early in the fifteenth century we have Beau Twain, called "the Scholar."
He wrote a beautiful, beautiful hand. And he could imitate anybody's
hand so closely that it was enough to make a person laugh his head
off to see it. He had infinite sport with his talent. But by and
by he took a contract to break stone for a road, and the roughness
of the work spoiled his hand. Still, he enjoyed life all the time
he was in the stone business, which, with inconsiderable intervals,
was some forty-two years. In fact, he died in harness. During all
those long years he gave such satisfaction that he never was through
with one contract a week till the government gave him another. He was
a perfect pet. And he was always a favorite with his fellow-artists,
and was a conspicuous member of their benevolent secret society,
called the Chain Gang. He always wore his hair short, had a
preference for striped clothes, and died lamented by the government.
He was a sore loss to his country. For he was so regular.
Some years later we have the illustrious John Morgan Twain.
He came over to this country with Columbus in 1492 as a passenger.
He appears to have been of a crusty, uncomfortable disposition.
He complained of the food all the way over, and was always threatening
to go ashore unless there was a change. He wanted fresh shad.
Hardly a day passed over his head that he did not go idling about
the ship with his nose in the air, sneering about the commander,
and saying he did not believe Columbus knew where he was going
to or had ever been there before. The memorable cry of "Land ho!"
thrilled every heart in the ship but his. He gazed awhile through a
piece of smoked glass at the penciled line lying on the distant water,
and then said: "Land be hanged--it's a raft!"
When this questionable passenger came on board the ship, he brought
nothing with him but an old newspaper containing a handkerchief
marked "B. G.," one cotton sock marked "L. W. C.," one woolen one
marked "D. F.," and a night-shirt marked "O. M. R." And yet during
the voyage he worried more about his "trunk," and gave himself more
airs about it, than all the rest of the passengers put together.
If the ship was "down by the head," and would not steer, he would
go and move his "trunk" further aft, and then watch the effect.
If the ship was "by the stern," he would suggest to Columbus to detail
some men to "shift that baggage." In storms he had to be gagged,
because his wailings about his "trunk" made it impossible for the
men to hear the orders. The man does not appear to have been
openly charged with any gravely unbecoming thing, but it is noted
in the ship's log as a "curious circumstance" that albeit he brought
his baggage on board the ship in a newspaper, he took it ashore in
four trunks, a queensware crate, and a couple of champagne baskets.
But when he came back insinuating, in an insolent, swaggering way,
that some of this things were missing, and was going to search
the other passengers' baggage, it was too much, and they threw
him overboard. They watched long and wonderingly for him to
come up, but not even a bubble rose on the quietly ebbing tide.
But while every one was most absorbed in gazing over the side,
and the interest was momentarily increasing, it was observed with
consternation that the vessel was adrift and the anchor-cable hanging
limp from the bow. Then in the ship's dimmed and ancient log we
find this quaint note:
"In time it was discouvered yt ye troblesome passenger hadde gone
downe and got ye anchor, and toke ye same and solde it to ye dam
sauvages from ye interior, saying yt he hadde founde it, ye sonne
of a ghun!"
Yet this ancestor had good and noble instincts, and it is with
pride that we call to mind the fact that he was the first white
person who ever interested himself in the work of elevating
and civilizing our Indians. He built a commodious jail and put
up a gallows, and to his dying day he claimed with satisfaction
that he had had a more restraining and elevating influence on
the Indians than any other reformer that ever labored among them.
At this point the chronicle becomes less frank and chatty,
and closes abruptly by saying that the old voyager went to see
his gallows perform on the first white man ever hanged in America,
and while there received injuries which terminated in his death.
The great-grandson of the "Reformer" flourished in sixteen hundred
and something, and was known in our annals as "the old Admiral,"
though in history he had other titles. He was long in command of
fleets of swift vessels, well armed and manned, and did great service
in hurrying up merchantmen. Vessels which he followed and kept
his eagle eye on, always made good fair time across the ocean.
But if a ship still loitered in spite of all he could do,
his indignation would grow till he could contain himself no longer--
and then he would take that ship home where he lived and keep it
there carefully, expecting the owners to come for it, but they never did.
And he would try to get the idleness and sloth out of the sailors
of that ship by compelling them to take invigorating exercise and
a bath. He called it "walking a plank." All the pupils liked it.
At any rate, they never found any fault with it after trying it.
When the owners were late coming for their ships, the Admiral always
burned them, so that the insurance money should not be lost.
At last this fine old tar was cut down in the fullness of his years
and honors. And to her dying day, his poor heart-broken widow believed
that if he had been cut down fifteen minutes sooner he might have
been resuscitated.
Charles Henry Twain lived during the latter part of the seventeenth
century, and was a zealous and distinguished missionary.
He converted sixteen thousand South Sea islanders, and taught them
that a dog-tooth necklace and a pair of spectacles was not enough
clothing to come to divine service in. His poor flock loved
him very, very dearly; and when his funeral was over, they got up
in a body (and came out of the restaurant) with tears in their eyes,
and saying, one to another, that he was a good tender missionary,
and they wished they had some more of him.
Pah-go-to-wah-wah-pukketekeewis (Mighty-Hunter-with-a-Hog-Eye-Twain)
adorned the middle of the eighteenth century, and aided General
Braddock with all his heart to resist the oppressor Washington.
It was this ancestor who fired seventeen times at our Washington
from behind a tree. So far the beautiful romantic narrative
in the moral story-books is correct; but when that narrative goes
on to say that at the seventeenth round the awe-stricken savage
said solemnly that that man was being reserved by the Great Spirit
for some mighty mission, and he dared not lift his sacrilegious rifle
against him again, the narrative seriously impairs the integrity
of history. What he did say was:
"It ain't no (hic) no use. 'At man's so drunk he can't stan'
still long enough for a man to hit him. I (hic) I can't 'ford
to fool away any more am'nition on him."
That was why he stopped at the seventeenth round, and it was a good,
plain, matter-of-fact reason, too, and one that easily commends itself
to us by the eloquent, persuasive flavor of probability there is about it.
I also enjoyed the story-book narrative, but I felt a marring misgiving
that every Indian at Braddock's Defeat who fired at a soldier
a couple of times (two easily grows to seventeen in a century),
and missed him, jumped to the conclusion that the Great Spirit
was reserving that soldier for some grand mission; and so I somehow
feared that the only reason why Washington's case is remembered
and the others forgotten is, that in his the prophecy came true,
and in that of the others it didn't. There are not books enough
on earth to contain the record of the prophecies Indians and other
unauthorized parties have made; but one may carry in his overcoat
pockets the record of all the prophecies that have been fulfilled.
I will remark here, in passing, that certain ancestors of mine are
so thoroughly well-known in history by their aliases, that I have
not felt it to be worth while to dwell upon them, or even mention
them in the order of their birth. Among these may be mentioned
Richard Brinsley Twain, alias Guy Fawkes; John Wentworth Twain,
alias Sixteen-String Jack; William Hogarth Twain, alias Jack Sheppard;
Ananias Twain, alias Baron Munchausen; John George Twain,
alias Captain Kydd; and then there are George Francis Twain,
Tom Pepper, Nebuchadnezzar, and Baalam's Ass--they all belong
to our family, but to a branch of it somewhat distinctly removed
from the honorable direct line--in fact, a collateral branch,
whose members chiefly differ from the ancient stock in that, in order
to acquire the notoriety we have always yearned and hungered for,
they have got into a low way of going to jail instead of getting hanged.
It is not well, when writing an autobiography, to follow your ancestry
down too close to your own time--it is safest to speak only vaguely
of your great-grandfather, and then skip from there to yourself,
which I now do.
I was born without teeth--and there Richard III. had the advantage
of me; but I was born without a humpback, likewise, and there I
had the advantage of him. My parents were neither very poor nor
conspicuously honest.
But now a thought occurs to me. My own history would really seem
so tame contrasted with that of my ancestors, that it is simply wisdom
to leave it unwritten until I am hanged. If some other biographies I
have read had stopped with the ancestry until a like event occurred,
it would have been a felicitous thing for the reading public.
How does it strike you?
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