The $30,000 Bequest by Mark Twain (best e reader for manga TXT) 📕
"You have said quite enough," said Aleck, coldly; "let the subject be dropped."
"I'M willing," fervently responded Sally, wiping the sweat from his forehead and looking the thankfulness he had no words for. Then, musingly, he apologized to himself. "I certainly held threes-- I KNOW it--but I drew and didn't fill. That's where I'm so often weak in the game. If I had stood pat--but I didn't. I never do. I don't know enough."
Confessedly defea
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- Author: Mark Twain
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“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 said, eagerly:
“There is no need to consider”; and he chose Pleasure.
He went out into the world and sought out the pleasures that youth
delights in. But each in its turn was short-lived and disappointing,
vain and empty; and each, departing, mocked him. In the end he said:
“These years I have wasted. If I could but choose again, I would
choose wisely.”
The fairy appeared, and said:
“Four of the gifts remain. Choose once more; and oh, remember—
time is flying, and only one of them is precious.”
The man considered long, then chose Love; and did not mark the tears
that rose in the fairy’s eyes.
After many, many years the man sat by a coffin, in an empty home.
And he communed with himself, saying: “One by one they have gone
away and left me; and now she lies here, the dearest and the last.
Desolation after desolation has swept over me; for each hour
of happiness the treacherous trader, Love, as sold me I have paid
a thousand hours of grief. Out of my heart of hearts I curse him.”
“Choose again.” It was the fairy speaking.
“The years have taught you wisdom—surely it must be so.
Three gifts remain. Only one of them has any worth—remember it,
and choose warily.”
The man reflected long, then chose Fame; and the fairy, sighing,
went her way.
Years went by and she came again, and stood behind the man where he
sat solitary in the fading day, thinking. And she knew his thought:
“My name filled the world, and its praises were on every tongue,
and it seemed well with me for a little while. How little a while
it was! Then came envy; then detraction; then calumny; then hate;
then persecution. Then derision, which is the beginning of the end.
And last of all came pity, which is the funeral of fame. Oh,
the bitterness and misery of renown! target for mud in its prime,
for contempt and compassion in its decay.”
“Chose yet again.” It was the fairy’s voice.
“Two gifts remain. And do not despair. In the beginning there
was but one that was precious, and it is still here.”
“Wealth—which is power! How blind I was!” said the man.
“Now, at last, life will be worth the living. I will spend,
squander, dazzle. These mockers and despisers will crawl in the
dirt before me, and I will feed my hungry heart with their envy.
I will have all luxuries, all joys, all enchantments of the spirit,
all contentments of the body that man holds dear. I will buy,
buy, buy! deference, respect, esteem, worship—every pinchbeck
grace of life the market of a trivial world can furnish forth.
I have lost much time, and chosen badly heretofore, but let that pass;
I was ignorant then, and could but take for best what seemed so.”
Three short years went by, and a day came when the man sat shivering
in a mean garret; and he was gaunt and wan and hollow-eyed,
and clothed in rags; and he was gnawing a dry crust and mumbling:
“Curse all the world’s gifts, for mockeries and gilded lies!
And miscalled, every one. They are not gifts, but merely lendings.
Pleasure, Love, Fame, Riches: they are but temporary disguises for
lasting realities—Pain, Grief, Shame, Poverty. The fairy said true;
in all her store there was but one gift which was precious,
only one that was not valueless. How poor and cheap and mean I
know those others now to be, compared with that inestimable one,
that dear and sweet and kindly one, that steeps in dreamless and
enduring sleep the pains that persecute the body, and the shames
and griefs that eat the mind and heart. Bring it! I am weary,
I would rest.”
The fairy came, bringing again four of the gifts, but Death was wanting.
She said:
“I gave it to a mother’s pet, a little child. It was ignorant,
but trusted me, asking me to choose for it. You did not ask me
to choose.”
“Oh, miserable me! What is left for me?”
“What not even you have deserved: the wanton insult of Old Age.”
***
THE FIRST WRITING-MACHINES
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 entirely stopped using
the typewriter, for the reason that I never could write a letter
with it to anybody without receiving a request by return mail that I
would not only describe the machine, but state what progress I had
made in the use of it, etc., etc. I don’t like to write letters,
and so I don’t want people to know I own this curiosity-breeding
little joker.”
A note was sent to Mr. Clemens asking him if the letter was genuine
and whether he really had a typewriter as long ago as that.
Mr. Clemens replied that his best answer is the following chapter
from his unpublished autobiography:
1904. VILLA QUARTO, FLORENCE, JANUARY.
Dictating autobiography to a typewriter is a new experience for me,
but it goes very well, and is going to save time and “language”—
the kind of language that soothes vexation.
I have dictated to a typewriter before—but not autobiography.
Between that experience and the present one there lies a mighty gap—
more than thirty years! It is sort of lifetime. In that wide interval
much has happened—to the type-machine as well as to the rest of us.
At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity.
The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the
other way about: the person who DOESN’T own one is a curiosity.
I saw a type-machine for the first time in—what year? I suppose it
was 1873—because Nasby was with me at the time, and it was in Boston.
We must have been lecturing, or we could not have been in Boston,
I take it. I quitted the platform that season.
But never mind about that, it is no matter. Nasby and I saw
the machine through a window, and went in to look at it.
The salesman explained it to us, showed us samples of its work,
and said it could do fifty-seven words a minute—a statement
which we frankly confessed that we did not believe. So he put
his type-girl to work, and we timed her by the watch. She actually
did the fifty-seven in sixty seconds. We were partly convinced,
but said it probably couldn’t happen again. But it did.
We timed the girl over and over again—with the same result always:
she won out. She did her work on narrow slips of paper, and we
pocketed them as fast as she turned them out, to show as curiosities.
The price of the machine was one hundred and twenty-five dollars.
I bought one, and we went away very much excited.
At the hotel we got out our slips and were a little disappointed
to find that they contained the same words. The girl had economized
time and labor by using a formula which she knew by heart.
However, we argued—safely enough—that the FIRST type-girl must
naturally take rank with the first billiard-player: neither of them
could be expected to get out of the game any more than a third or a
half of what was in it. If the machine survived—IF it survived—
experts would come to the front, by and by, who would double the girl’s
output without a doubt. They would do one hundred words a minute—
my talking speed on the platform. That score has long ago been beaten.
At home I played with the toy, repeated and repeating and repeated “The
Boy stood on the Burning Deck,” until I could turn that boy’s adventure
out at the rate of twelve words a minute; then I resumed the pen,
for business, and only worked the machine to astonish inquiring visitors.
They carried off many reams of the boy and his burning deck.
By and by I hired a young woman, and did my first dictating (letters,
merely), and my last until now. The machine did not do both capitals
and lower case (as now), but only capitals. Gothic capitals they were,
and sufficiently ugly. I remember the first letter I dictated.
it was to Edward Bok, who was a boy then. I was not acquainted
with him at that time. His present enterprising spirit is not new—
he had it in that early day. He was accumulating autographs, and was
not content with mere signatures, he wanted a whole autograph LETTER.
I furnished it—in typewritten capitals, SIGNATURE AND ALL.
It was long; it was a sermon; it contained advice; also reproaches.
I said writing was my TRADE, my bread-and-butter; I said it was
not fair to ask a man to give away samples of his trade; would he
ask the blacksmith for a horseshoe? would he ask the doctor for
a corpse?
Now I come to an important matter—as I regard it. In the year
‘74 the young woman copied a considerable part of a book of mine
ON THE MACHINE. In a previous chapter of this Autobiography I
have claimed that I was the first person in the world that ever had
a telephone in the house for practical purposes; I will now claim—
until dispossess—that I was the first person in the world to APPLY
THE TYPE-MACHINE TO LITERATURE. That book must have been THE
ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER. I wrote the first half of it in ‘72,
the rest of it in ‘74. My machinist type-copied a book for me
in ‘74, so I concluded it was that one.
That early machine was full of caprices, full of defects—devilish ones.
It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues.
After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character,
so I thought I would give it to Howells. He was reluctant, for he
was suspicious of novelties and unfriendly toward them, and he remains
so to this day. But I persuaded him. He had great confidence in me,
and I got him to believe things about the machine that I did not
believe myself. He took it home to Boston, and my morals began
to improve, but his have never recovered.
He kept it six months, and then returned it to me. I gave it away
twice after that, but it wouldn’t stay; it came back. Then I
gave it to our coachman, Patrick McAleer, who was very grateful,
because he did not know the animal, and thought I was trying to
make him wiser and better. As soon as he got wiser and better he
traded it to a heretic for a side-saddle which he could not use,
and there my knowledge of its history ends.
***
ITALIAN WITHOUT A MASTER
It is almost a fortnight now that I am domiciled in a medieval
villa in the country, a mile or two from Florence. I cannot speak
the language; I am too old not to learn how, also too busy when I
am busy, and too indolent when I am not; wherefore some will
imagine that I am having
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