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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Mark Twain's 'The Complete Works of Mark Twain' is a comprehensive collection of the author's legendary works, showcasing his masterful storytelling and keen wit. Twain's literary style, characterized by humor and social commentary, is on full display in this extensive compilation, which includes classics such as 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' and 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'. Through his vivid characters and vivid settings, Twain provides a vivid depiction of American life in the 19th century, shedding light on important social issues of the time. Mark Twain, a prolific and influential American writer, drew inspiration from his own experiences growing up in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri. His work reflects the tumultuous societal changes of his time, while offering timeless insights into the human condition. Twain's sharp observations and biting satire continue to resonate with readers today, making him a seminal figure in American literature. I recommend 'The Complete Works of Mark Twain' to any reader interested in exploring the complexities of American society and experiencing the sharp humor and astute commentary of one of the country's most celebrated authors. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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The Complete Works of Mark Twain
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Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection gathers the complete range of Mark Twain’s major writings as novelist, short story writer, travel correspondent, satirist, lecturer, letter writer, and autobiographer. Organized by genre, it presents the novels, short stories, essays and satires, travel books, non-fiction, letters, speeches, and autobiographical chapters listed herein. The purpose is to make the whole arc of his career available in a single, coherent sequence, allowing readers to see how themes and techniques migrate across forms. Bringing together works of entertainment, inquiry, and testimony, the collection treats Twain not merely as a humorist, but as a writer whose comic intelligence served serious human concerns.
The novels assembled here chart an extraordinary versatility. From social comedy and river-town realism to historical romance and speculative satire, they display an artist continually testing the capacities of narrative. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, a collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, fixes an enduring label on post–Civil War America. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn return to the Mississippi Valley of Twain’s youth. The Prince and the Pauper and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc look to European history, while A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court fuses contemporary know-how with medieval legend to probe authority and progress.
The early masterpieces in this sequence introduce premises that continue to animate Twain’s art. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer follows a boy’s pranks and rites of passage in a small Missouri town, rendering childhood with a mixture of mischief and moral awakening. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn traces a boy’s flight down the Mississippi in the company of an enslaved man, setting a journey against the ethical pressures of a divided society. The Prince and the Pauper imagines two boys of radically different station exchanging places, and A Connecticut Yankee sends a nineteenth-century engineer into Arthurian Britain to test modern ideas in an ancient world.
Other novels extend this range in fresh directions. The American Claimant turns to comedy of status and self-invention. Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective recast familiar figures in parodic adventure and mystery frameworks, one by ballooning to unfamiliar landscapes, the other by playing with detective conventions. Pudd’nhead Wilson examines identity, law, and community tensions in a Missouri town. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc offers a sustained, earnest portrait of sanctity and trial through a narrator close to its heroine. A Horse’s Tale experiments with perspective around a cavalry setting, and The Mysterious Stranger, published posthumously, confronts philosophical doubt through a provocative visitor.
Twain’s short stories reveal the workshop where his humor, pathos, and skepticism are honed at concentrated scale. The alphabetical gathering spans tall tales, sketches, experiments in dialect, burlesques of popular genres, and brief forays into science and detection. It also preserves the vivid newspaper and magazine culture in which he came of age as a writer. Mark Twain’s Library of Humor, the anthology he edited, demonstrates his role as a curator of comic taste, situating his own practice among a broader tradition while shaping what readers of his day encountered as modern American humor.
The essays and satires show Twain thinking aloud in public prose. Here he addresses manners, politics, technology, religion, and the vagaries of language. The pieces often adopt personae, stage hoaxes, or apply relentless literalism to fashionable pretenses, turning logic into a tool of comic exposure. Across these texts he refines a style of irony that invites readers to test their assumptions, not merely to laugh at others. The essays reveal an author who matched mirth with scrutiny, whose moral energies target cruelty, cant, and self-justifying power, and whose plainspoken idiom can carry both indignation and humane sympathy.
The travel writing combines reportage, sketch, and satire to record a world in motion. The Innocents Abroad follows a pleasure cruise to Europe and the Near East, measuring expectations against encountered realities. Roughing It recounts journeys through the American West during the era of overland stages, mining camps, and territorial newspapers. A Tramp Abroad wanders across continental Europe with sustained attention to language and custom. Following the Equator traces a lecture tour that becomes a global survey. Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion preserves a lighter excursionary mode, catching the tone of companionship, observation, and passing whim.
The non-fiction gathered here deepens Twain’s lifelong subjects of memory, work, and belief. Old Times on the Mississippi recalls his apprenticeship as a river pilot, a craft of minute attention and split-second judgment. Life on the Mississippi enlarges that portrait into a broader chronicle of the river before and after the Civil War. Christian Science examines a contemporary religious movement with skeptical vigor. Queen Victoria’s Jubilee captures an occasion of imperial ceremony. My Platonic Sweetheart reflects on recurring dreams and idealized companionship. Editorial Wild Oats returns to newsroom apprenticeship, tracing the making of a writer amid deadlines and improvisation.
The letters offer the most continuous record of Twain’s voice as it adapted to circumstance. Addressed to family, friends, publishers, and fellow writers, they illuminate the daily labor behind books, the finances and logistics of lectures, and the dynamics of fame. They show his wit at spontaneous play, yet also his care for precision, his professional anxieties, and his resilience in adversity. Read alongside the published works, the correspondence clarifies how projects were conceived, interrupted, and resumed, and how observation from life was sifted into fiction, travel narrative, and polemic.
Twain’s speeches capture the living presence of a public performer whose timing and cadence shaped readers’ expectations for his prose. Delivered at dinners, benefit nights, club gatherings, and on formal lecture tours, the speeches range from after-dinner playfulness to earnest social commentary. Many test ideas that reappear in essays and novels; others adapt familiar material for new audiences. Together they record the social settings in which nineteenth-century authors met their public, and the craft by which Twain balanced anecdote with argument, satire with sentiment, and a comic surface with ethical undercurrents.
Chapters from My Autobiography brings a late-career method of remembrance that privileges association over chronology. Published as a series, it mixes scenes of childhood, professional milestones, portraits of contemporaries, and meditations prompted by documents or current events. The result is not a linear life story but a mosaic of recollection and commentary. It allows readers to watch a mind revisiting its own making, to see how the materials of experience, often already transmuted into art elsewhere in this collection, return in reflective form with the wry candor that marks Twain’s mature persona.
Across these genres, Twain’s work is unified by a few powerful commitments: to the rhythms of spoken American English; to satire that exposes pomposity and cruelty; to sympathy for the powerless; and to the testing of progress against its costs. His pages move between farce and gravity without losing tonal control. River, road, and open horizon serve as recurring figures for freedom and moral trial. The lasting significance of his oeuvre lies in this fusion of vernacular vitality with ethical inquiry. Read entire, it shows an artist who enlarged the possibilities of American prose and shaped conversations that continue today.
Author Biography
Introduction
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known as Mark Twain, was born in 1835 and died in 1910. He became the most recognizable American humorist of his era and a central figure in world literature. The collected works here chart his range: foundational novels such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; historical fictions like The Prince and the Pauper and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc; speculative and satiric narratives including A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; travel classics from The Innocents Abroad to Following the Equator; and an immense body of short stories, essays, letters, speeches, and autobiographical chapters. Together, they reveal a writer who fused vernacular wit with moral scrutiny of his age.
Education and Literary Influences
Twain’s formal schooling in Missouri was modest; he apprenticed as a printer and typesetter, absorbing the cadences of newsrooms and the economy of space demanded by columns and headlines. Training as a Mississippi River pilot disciplined his observational powers and command of technical detail. These experiences became intellectual capital for Old Times on the Mississippi, Life on the Mississippi, and the boyhood novels rooted in Hannibal. Journalism sharpened his sense for scene, timing, and irony, while lecturing taught him to calibrate tone for mixed audiences—skills traceable throughout his fiction and non-fiction.
His literary formation drew on American oral storytelling and the Southwestern humor tradition, whose tall tales and deadpan exaggeration inform early sketches and later short stories. European models also mattered: the picaresque journey shapes Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, while historical romance and chivalric literature supplied foils for The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. He engaged, often combatively, with romanticism associated with Sir Walter Scott, preferring empirical observation and comic demystification. Travel reading and scientific reportage influenced his method in The Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, and Following the Equator, where reportage, satire, and ethical inquiry converge.
Literary Career
Twain’s first major successes came from travel writing. The Innocents Abroad transformed newspaper dispatches into a full-scale satire of tourism and cultural pretension, pairing firsthand description with skeptical humor. Roughing It drew on Western wanderings, prospecting, and newspaper work, while A Tramp Abroad turned European sojourns into comic misadventure and artistic self-mockery. Following the Equator, undertaken during a global lecture tour, widened his canvas to colonial geographies and moral scrutiny. Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion captures lighter travel journalism, testifying to his facility with the vignette. Across these books he developed a hybrid of reportage, stand-up timing, and moral essay that sustained his public voice.
Old Times on the Mississippi first distilled his river years into episodic recollection, later expanded into Life on the Mississippi—a synthesis of memoir, profession, folklore, and regional history. These works codified the river as both factual workplace and figurative current of American life. They also supplied techniques—nautical precision, careful ear for dialect, a cartographer’s attention to place—that feed the boy narratives set in a thinly veiled Hannibal. In parallel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today launched his long-form social satire; its portrait of speculation and public graft proved so resonant that the book’s title became shorthand for a historical era.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer established a mythic boyhood along the Mississippi, balancing comic set pieces with affectionate ethnography of small-town routines. Twain later revisited the character in Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective, playful sequels that transpose the familiar cast into exotic adventure and comic mystery. The trilogic arc showcases Twain’s capacity to recombine stock figures with new environments, sustaining humor while testing the elasticity of American vernacular storytelling. Across these works, he refined point of view and the staging of practical jokes, while quietly registering the social codes of community, masculinity, and performance.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn deepened Twain’s method: a sustained vernacular voice, a river-journey structure, and a moral center that exposed American hypocrisies. Without belaboring plot, the novel’s craft—oral idiom, shifting registers of comedy and menace—secured its place in literary modernity. Pudd’nhead Wilson, with its courtroom apparatus and attention to forensic logic, returned to questions of identity and legal fiction. The Prince and the Pauper used Tudor pageantry to examine class and empathy through exchanged stations. Together these books crystallize Twain’s mastery of perspective, his fascination with social masks, and his willingness to press comic surfaces against serious ethical concerns.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court countered romantic medievalism with a technologist’s pragmatism, staging collisions between machinery, myth, and governance. Its brisk shifts between farce and catastrophe expose Twain’s growing skepticism about progress and power. The American Claimant, a transatlantic comedy of pretensions and mistaken status, complements that critique by lampooning inherited rank and American self-invention. Both novels use bureaucratic absurdity, legalism, and entrepreneurial optimism as engines for satire, demonstrating Twain’s gift for dramatizing ideas through comic contraption and narrative set-pieces.
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc marks a striking tonal pivot: a seriocomic writer attempting sustained historical reverence and psychological sympathy. A Horse’s Tale compresses sentiment, military milieu, and pathos into a compact narrative that tests the limits of anthropomorphic storytelling. The Mysterious Stranger explores metaphysical doubt and moral indeterminacy; although extant in variant posthumous forms, it signals Twain’s late preoccupation with cosmic irony. In short stories (represented here in an Alphabetical List), he honed experimental frames and tall-tale rhythms, while Mark Twain’s Library of Humor codified an aesthetic of American comic prose through curation as well as creation.
Twain’s Essays and Satires, sampled in this collection, display his polemical range: Christian Science applies investigative skepticism to religious claims; Queen Victoria’s Jubilee uses ceremonial spectacle to calibrate political judgment; Editorial Wild Oats surfaces the craft lessons of newsroom life; My Platonic Sweetheart blends dream memoir with reflective prose. The Complete Letters of Mark Twain and The Complete Speeches document a performative mind working in real time—quick to seize topical irony, yet attentive to audience. Chapters from My Autobiography, assembled episodically, embraces digression as method, treating memory as a conversational art. Across these forms, Twain’s voice remains recognizably incisive, humane, and theatrically precise.
Beliefs and Advocacy
Twain’s public convictions emerge most clearly from his travel books, essays, and speeches. He distrusted cant, pomp, and the unexamined authority of church, crown, or corporate power. In Following the Equator he scrutinized the human costs of imperial expansion; in Christian Science he challenged credulity with reportage and parody. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The American Claimant mock hereditary privilege, while The Prince and the Pauper and Pudd’nhead Wilson probe the accidents of status and race. As a celebrated lecturer and essayist, he used humor to extend civic argument, advancing a practical ethics grounded in sympathy, free expression, and a commitment to seeing through euphemism.
Final Years & Legacy
Late work darkened in outlook—seen in The Mysterious Stranger—yet he also achieved surprising earnestness in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Financial setbacks and global lecturing informed Following the Equator and enriched The Complete Speeches, while his episodic Chapters from My Autobiography modeled an influential, memory-driven approach to life writing. Twain died in 1910, by then an international celebrity. His novels, travel narratives, short stories, essays, letters, and speeches remain central to discussions of language, race, satire, and national myth. The Mississippi books and the Tom-Huck cycle shaped American narrative voice; the travelogues broadened moral horizons; the non-fiction keeps his presence vivid in public discourse.
Historical Context
Mark Twain’s career unfolded across the most rapid transformations in nineteenth‑ and early twentieth‑century America: from the slaveholding borderlands before the Civil War to Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the early Progressive Era. Industrialization, urban growth, mass print culture, and expanding transportation networks shaped both his subjects and his audiences. These works register the shift from riverboats and overland stages to railroads and steamships, from local newspapers to international syndication, and from provincial communities to an interconnected, imperial world. The collection’s novels, travelogues, essays, stories, letters, speeches, and autobiographical writings collectively trace how those upheavals refracted through American humor, realism, reformist critique, and a steadily widening global horizon.
Samuel L. Clemens’s formative years in Missouri and his apprenticeship as a Mississippi steamboat pilot before the Civil War gave him firsthand knowledge of river commerce, slave society, and the precise technical culture of navigation. The war’s outbreak halted river traffic and pushed him west to Nevada and California, where boomtown journalism, mining speculation, and the lecture platform molded his public voice. The newspaper ecosystem of the 1860s—cheap weeklies, telegraphed dispatches, and syndicated humor—provided the stage for early fame with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), establishing the vernacular style and satiric stance that underwrite the collection’s later achievements.
The Innocents Abroad (1869) emerged when steamship travel and organized tours made Europe and the Holy Land accessible to middle‑class Americans. It surveys Old World art, relics, and rituals through a New World sensibility sharpened by postwar confidence and skepticism. Twain’s blend of travel reportage and comic demystification suited subscription publishing and a readership hungry for worldly experience. The book captures a transatlantic moment: American tourists measuring themselves against European authority, Protestant readers evaluating Catholic and Orthodox sites, and a democratizing travel industry—Thomas Cook excursions, guidebooks, and rail links—reshaping how strangers moved, looked, and judged abroad.
Roughing It (1872) places Twain in the U.S. West of the 1860s, amid the Comstock Lode, overland stage lines, and the fluid legal and journalistic cultures of mining camps. It registers the volatility of speculation, the improvisational justice of vigilante committees, and the environmental and social costs of extractive booms. The narrative mirrors national arguments about the frontier: its promise of self‑making and its realities of violence, fraud, and failure. Telegraph lines, territorial newspapers, and mail routes knit far‑flung communities into national markets, while Twain’s comic perspective exposes the gap between promotional myth and everyday experience.
A Tramp Abroad (1880) and Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion (1877) reflect a mature mass‑tourism infrastructure: transatlantic steamers, rail passes, alpine guides, and resort colonies like Bermuda. Twain surveys German universities, Swiss mountaineering, and Anglo‑American expatriate habits, staging collisions between earnest cultural aspiration and practical observation. The books draw on the illustrated magazine culture that popularized picturesque Europe, yet they also question the authority of guidebooks and the etiquette of sightseeing. They map how Americans learned to be tourists, reading landscapes and museums while negotiating language, nationalism, and the commercial choreography of hospitality.
Old Times on the Mississippi (1875) and Life on the Mississippi (1883) are memory projects shaped by Reconstruction and by the eclipse of steamboat primacy. They reconstruct antebellum river life—its apprenticeship systems, pilot hierarchies, and cartographies of channel and shoal—while acknowledging how railroads, levees, and postwar commerce altered the river’s economy and lore. The works bridge personal reminiscence and regional history, turning professional jargon and navigational technique into literature. They also register the cultural work of remembering: how a modern nation, accelerating into industrial time, looked back to a river culture already becoming historical.
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner, satirized postwar speculation, government patronage, and the entanglement of business and politics. Appearing amid scandals like Crédit Mobilier and debates over railroad subsidies and western land policy, it furnished the era’s enduring label. Land bubbles, lobbying, and boosterism supplied its targets, while subscription publishing spread its critique widely. The novel exemplifies a moment when fiction, newspapers, and the lecture platform formed an integrated public sphere in which humor could expose systemic graft and the vicissitudes of rapid economic growth and uneven reconstruction.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896) adapt emerging genres to American boyhood. Tom Sawyer memorializes pre‑Civil War small‑town life—schooling, revival meetings, and peer hierarchies—at a time when the nation debated compulsory education and childrearing. Tom Sawyer Abroad draws on technological spectacle and adventure fiction’s global reach, while Tom Sawyer, Detective parodies the detective craze that magazines popularized. Across them, the Mississippi Valley becomes a laboratory for realism and mythmaking, where local customs, dialect, and juvenile ingenuity are tested against modern print culture’s appetite for sensation and serialized exploits.
The Prince and the Pauper (1881) reflects transatlantic fascination with monarchy and the rise of historical fiction for younger readers. Setting its tale in Tudor England, it examines class inequity, penal severity, and the symbolic power of the crown, while inviting American readers to measure hereditary privilege against republican ideals. The book appeared as industrialization sharpened class consciousness in the United States and as the Victorian cult of the past—via museums, pageants, and historiography—dominated cultural imagination. Its moral inquiries into justice and identity use a foreign court to illuminate domestic debates about law, dignity, and social mobility.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (published in the 1880s) looks back to the antebellum Mississippi even as post‑Reconstruction America codified segregation. Its vernacular style and polyphonic dialects align with American realism and regionalism; its depiction of slavery, violence, and everyday prejudice engaged readers amid the rollback of federal protections after 1877. Early controversies—including library bans—testify to anxieties over language, class, and propriety in public schooling. The novel’s river journey crosses a national memoryscape, where legal doctrines about personhood and property had only recently been overturned, yet their social afterlives remained palpable in law, custom, and vigilante practice.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) arises from the era of electrification, mass production, and managerial capitalism. It tests the promises and perils of technical expertise by transplanting an American engineer into a romanticized medieval England widely celebrated in popular culture. The book’s satire targets both feudal authority and unexamined faith in progress, mirroring late nineteenth‑century debates over trusts, labor unrest, and the social consequences of new technologies. Its fascination with telephones, factories, and modern weaponry registers the speed with which invention rearranged everyday life, while its catastrophe imagines how power, myth, and machinery interact in crises.
Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and The American Claimant (1892) scrutinize identity, law, and status. Pudd’nhead Wilson’s use of fingerprint evidence reflects contemporary criminology’s newfound interest in identification systems, while its plot turns on racial classification and the one‑drop rule in a Missouri community. The American Claimant lampoons hereditary titles and American fantasies of instant elevation, echoing economic volatility surrounding the Panic of 1893. Both books emerged as Twain experimented with dictation and dramatic adaptation, and as copyright, international markets, and serialized publication shaped how authors navigated professional authorship under the pressures of modern publishing.
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (serialized in the mid‑1890s) shows Twain in archival, historical mode, drawing on trial records and chronicles to narrate sanctity, nationhood, and persecution. Its earnest tone contrasts with the satire elsewhere, signaling his range and the era’s fascination with medieval sources. A Horse’s Tale (1907) participates in growing transatlantic animal‑welfare campaigns—organizations founded since the 1860s—and debates over blood sports, spectacle, and ethical modernity. Both works relocate moral inquiry to European settings, using distant pasts and foreign arenas to weigh contemporary questions of authority, cruelty, and the politics of memory.
The Mysterious Stranger stories, drafted between the late 1890s and 1908 and published posthumously in edited form, reflect Twain’s late engagement with religious doubt, moral philosophy, and the problem of suffering. Their early modern European settings allowed him to probe censorship, superstition, and theodicy at a historical remove. The complicated textual history—manuscripts and editorial constructions appearing in the 1910s and later scholarly restorations—reminds readers that the work stands at the intersection of composition, loss, and posthumous editing. The pieces belong to a fin‑de‑siècle atmosphere marked by scientific determinism, higher biblical criticism, and public controversies over belief.
The short stories and Mark Twain’s Library of Humor (1888) exemplify the magazine economy that nurtured American regionalism and comic writing. Periodicals like The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The Century brokered national conversations about taste, reform, and entertainment. Stories ranging from frontier tall tales to social satires trace how local color, dialect, and formal experiment traveled through an expanding print marketplace. The anthology mapped a canon of American humor rooted in oratory, newspapers, and the lecture platform, elevating vernacular wit to cultural heritage. These forms fit a society negotiating mass literacy, urban audiences, and the commercial rhythms of illustrated monthly magazines.
The essays and satires collected here register Twain’s interventions in public debates over literature, religion, medicine, race, and empire. In the decades bracketing 1900, he wrote strenuously against missionary triumphalism and the brutalities of imperial ventures, while also lampooning literary pretension and pseudoscience. Christian Science (1907), treated at length elsewhere in the collection, belongs to this skeptical turn. His polemical pieces coincided with the Progressive Era’s investigative journalism, reform organizations, and new social sciences, which supplied language and evidence for critiques of corporate power, state violence, and credulity. Humor served as both rhetorical sugar and corrosive solvent.
Following the Equator (1897) documents a global lecture tour undertaken after financial catastrophes related to publishing setbacks and investment in typesetting technology. It surveys the British Empire’s routes—from the Pacific to South Asia and southern Africa—amid rising anticolonial movements and debates over racial hierarchy. Observations about indenture, dispossession, and official euphemism align with contemporary exposés of imperial administration. The book’s structure, interleaving travel observation with aphoristic asides, mirrors how readers encountered the wider world through steamship lines, telegraph cables, and imperial news networks that stitched distant events to metropolitan publics in Britain and the United States. A Tramp Abroad already done earlier; ensure no duplication; good. Wait: We already had A Tramp Abroad earlier; This paragraph only Following the Equator; travel writing category included earlier; ensure coherence. We'll keep it focused on Following the Equator and imperialism. Let's continue the JSON later.
Synopsis (Selection)
Early American Society Satires: The Gilded Age; The American Claimant
These novels lampoon speculative booms, political graft, and the chase for status, following characters whose self-invention collides with entrenched institutions. The Gilded Age skewers land schemes and legislative corruption, while The American Claimant turns the dream of title and rank into farce to probe democracy’s anxieties about class. The tone blends exuberant comedy with sharp social critique, foreshadowing Twain’s deepening skepticism about wealth and reputation.
Tom Sawyer Cycle: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Tom Sawyer Abroad; Tom Sawyer, Detective
Together these books chart Tom Sawyer’s leap from small-town pranks to genre pastiche, first capturing boyhood mischief and moral tests, then sending the boys on a high-flying travel burlesque, and finally into a comic whodunit. Each adventure escalates the stakes without abandoning the playful voice, showcasing Twain’s knack for parodying travelogues and detective tales. Nostalgia and exuberance sit alongside hints of danger and conscience.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A runaway boy narrates a river journey that becomes a test of loyalty and conscience as he confronts the hypocrisies of a slaveholding society. Episodic encounters expose frauds, feuds, and pretenses, pushing him toward choices that redefine his sense of right and wrong. The vernacular voice and shifting tones—comic, suspenseful, and somber—anchor Twain’s most searching meditation on freedom and identity.
Historical Romances and Role Reversals: The Prince and the Pauper; Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
One tale swaps a royal child with a lookalike to examine justice and empathy through mistaken identity, while the other offers an earnest portrait of a visionary leader’s courage and martyrdom. Together they reveal Twain’s range with historical material, from playful moral experiments to reverent, character-driven narrative. The tone moves from pageantry and satire to solemn admiration, exploring innocence, authority, and faith.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
A modern technologist is cast into Arthurian legend and tries to remake a feudal world with ingenuity and industry. His schemes raise practical and ethical dilemmas as progress collides with myth, church, and crown. The novel’s inventiveness sharpens into caustic satire of romanticized history and unexamined faith in technology.
Identity, Race, and Law: Pudd’nhead Wilson
A small river town’s obsession with status and lineage entangles a mystery of switched identities, drawing an eccentric lawyer into a trial that exposes local prejudice. Twain uses legal maneuvering and social observation to question how race and reputation are constructed. The tone is taut and ironic, mixing suspense with moral inquiry.
Late Experiments and Fables: A Horse’s Tale; The Mysterious Stranger
These late works test fable and allegory: one channels a horse’s perspective to confront loyalty, cruelty, and the costs of spectacle, while the other introduces an uncanny visitor whose revelations unsettle easy certainties about good and evil. Both pieces pare down plot to amplify idea and mood. The result is somber, speculative, and provocative, pressing toward philosophical skepticism.
Short Stories: Alphabetical List of Short Stories
This comprehensive gathering spans tall tales, parlor sketches, burlesques, and moral vignettes, distilling Twain’s comic timing and ear for American speech. Short forms let him test hoaxes and reversals, often turning a single conceit into social observation. The variety showcases his agility with voice, from deadpan to exuberant.
Mark Twain’s Library of Humor
A compendium of jokes, sketches, and comic studies that highlights Twain’s principles of setup, surprise, and satiric inversion. The pieces play with dialect, misdirection, and exaggerated logic to expose social pretensions. Lighthearted surfaces often carry pointed barbs, illustrating how amusement and critique intertwine.
Collected Essays and Satires: List of Twain’s Essays and Satires
Across these essays and squibs, Twain tackles piety, patriotism, manners, and fashion with irony that alternates between genial and scalding. Arguments build through mock logic and anecdote, steadily revealing contradictions in public life. The grouping maps a mind honing its skepticism into a versatile rhetorical toolkit.
Early Travelogues: The Innocents Abroad; Roughing It
One narrative follows curious Americans confronting Old World art, ritual, and tourism, while the other recounts a young writer’s wanderings in the American West amid booms, busts, and deserts. Twain offsets bravado with self-mockery, turning guidebook expectations inside out. Together they blend reportage with comic set pieces that probe mythmaking and national character.
European Wanderings: A Tramp Abroad; Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion
These companionable travels favor digression over destination, finding humor in misread maps, linguistic mishaps, and the theater of sightseeing. Observations of architecture, food, and custom become prompts for satire and affectionate caricature. The tone is leisurely and wry, more interested in perspective than in itinerary.
Following the Equator
A circumnavigating journey frames reflections on commerce, empire, and the human oddities encountered along the route. Anecdotes accumulate into a skeptical critique of received wisdom and racial hierarchies. The travel writing here is mature and reflective, balancing curiosity with ethical unease.
River Writings: Old Times on the Mississippi; Life on the Mississippi
These river books combine apprenticeship memoir with documentary impulse, tracing the craft, code, and peril of piloting before the war and the river’s transformation afterward. Twinned portraits of memory and current survey a nation in motion, from sandbars and snags to towns remade. Technical precision coexists with lyric nostalgia and humor.
Cultural and Topical Nonfiction: Christian Science; Queen Victoria’s Jubilee; My Platonic Sweetheart; Editorial Wild Oats
These pieces range from a skeptical examination of a religious movement and a wry look at a royal celebration to a dreamy meditation on ideal companionship and lively recollections of newspaper life. The throughline is inquiry—sometimes forensic, sometimes playful—into belief, spectacle, and the making of stories. Tone shifts from polemical to wistful, unified by clear-eyed irony.
The Complete Letters of Mark Twain
This correspondence traces daily concerns, friendships, travels, and the business of authorship, revealing how observation becomes prose. Public wit and private candor intersect as he tests jokes, registers grievances, and refines ideas. The letters chart evolving viewpoints while preserving the spontaneity of voice.
The Complete Speeches
Occasional addresses display the craft of timing, understatement, and mock solemnity shaped for audiences from banquets to benefit halls. Setups swell into polysyllabic absurdity before pivoting to earnest points, using humor to win attention for serious matters. The collection demonstrates how performance sharpens argument.
Chapters from My Autobiography
An episodic self-portrait assembled by association rather than chronology, these chapters mix anecdote, portraiture, and sidebar essays. Twain contemplates memory, fame, grief, and the practicalities of writing, interrupting himself whenever a better story beckons. The tone is intimate yet guarded, balancing self-satire with moments of plainspoken feeling.
The Complete Works of Mark Twain
The Novels
THE GILDED AGE: A TALE OF TODAY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
CHAPTER XL.
CHAPTER XLI.
CHAPTER XLII.
CHAPTER XLIII.
CHAPTER XLIV.
CHAPTER XLV.
CHAPTER XLVI.
CHAPTER XLVII.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
CHAPTER XLIX.
CHAPTER L.
CHAPTER LI.
CHAPTER LII.
CHAPTER LIII.
CHAPTER LIV.
CHAPTER LV.
CHAPTER LVI.
CHAPTER LVII.
CHAPTER LVIII.
CHAPTER LIX.
CHAPTER LX.
CHAPTER LXI.
CHAPTER LXII.
CHAPTER LXIII.
APPENDIX.
CHAPTER I.
June 18 — . Squire Hawkins sat upon the pyramid of large blocks, called the “stile,” in front of his house, contemplating the morning.
The locality was Obedstown, East Tennessee. You would not know that Obedstown stood on the top of a mountain, for there was nothing about the landscape to indicate it — but it did: a mountain that stretched abroad over whole counties, and rose very gradually. The district was called the “Knobs of East Tennessee,” and had a reputation like Nazareth, as far as turning out any good thing was concerned.
The Squire’s house was a double log cabin, in a state of decay; two or three gaunt hounds lay asleep about the threshold, and lifted their heads sadly whenever Mrs. Hawkins or the children stepped in and out over their bodies. Rubbish was scattered about the grassless yard; a bench stood near the door with a tin wash basin on it and a pail of water and a gourd; a cat had begun to drink from the pail, but the exertion was overtaxing her energies, and she had stopped to rest. There was an ash-hopper by the fence, and an iron pot, for soft-soap-boiling, near it.
This dwelling constituted one-fifteenth of Obedstown; the other fourteen houses were scattered about among the tall pine trees and among the cornfields in such a way that a man might stand in the midst of the city and not know but that he was in the country if he only depended on his eyes for information.
“Squire” Hawkins got his title from being postmaster of Obedstown — not that the title properly belonged to the office, but because in those regions the chief citizens always must have titles of some sort, and so the usual courtesy had been extended to Hawkins. The mail was monthly, and sometimes amounted to as much as three or four letters at a single delivery. Even a rush like this did not fill up the postmaster’s whole month, though, and therefore he “kept store” in the intervals.
The Squire was contemplating the morning. It was balmy and tranquil, the vagrant breezes were laden with the odor of flowers, the murmur of bees was in the air, there was everywhere that suggestion of repose that summer woodlands bring to the senses, and the vague, pleasurable melancholy that such a time and such surroundings inspire.
Presently the United States mail arrived, on horseback. There was but one letter, and it was for the postmaster. The long-legged youth who carried the mail tarried an hour to talk, for there was no hurry; and in a little while the male population of the village had assembled to help. As a general thing, they were dressed in homespun “jeans,” blue or yellow — here were no other varieties of it; all wore one suspender and sometimes two — yarn ones knitted at home, — some wore vests, but few wore coats. Such coats and vests as did appear, however, were rather picturesque than otherwise, for they were made of tolerably fanciful patterns of calico — a fashion which prevails thereto this day among those of the community who have tastes above the common level and are able to afford style. Every individual arrived with his hands in his pockets; a hand came out occasionally for a purpose, but it always went back again after service; and if it was the head that was served, just the cant that the dilapidated straw hat got by being uplifted and rooted under, was retained until the next call altered the inclination; many hats were present, but none were erect and no two were canted just alike. We are speaking impartially of men, youths and boys. And we are also speaking of these three estates when we say that every individual was either chewing natural leaf tobacco prepared on his own premises, or smoking the same in a corn-cob pipe. Few of the men wore whiskers; none wore moustaches; some had a thick jungle of hair under the chin and hiding the throat — the only pattern recognized there as being the correct thing in whiskers; but no part of any individual’s face had seen a razor for a week.
These neighbors stood a few moments looking at the mail carrier reflectively while he talked; but fatigue soon began to show itself, and one after another they climbed up and occupied the top rail of the fence, hump-shouldered and grave, like a company of buzzards assembled for supper and listening for the death-rattle. Old Damrell said:
“Tha hain’t no news ‘bout the jedge, hit ain’t likely?”
“Cain’t tell for sartin; some thinks he’s gwyne to be ‘long toreckly, and some thinks ‘e hain’t. Russ Mosely he tote ole Hanks he mought git to Obeds tomorrer or nex’ day he reckoned.”
“Well, I wisht I knowed. I got a ‘prime sow and pigs in the cote-house, and I hain’t got no place for to put ‘em. If the jedge is a gwyne to hold cote, I got to roust ‘em out, I reckon. But tomorrer’ll do, I ‘spect.”
The speaker bunched his thick lips together like the stem-end of a tomato and shot a bumblebee dead that had lit on a weed seven feet away. One after another the several chewers expressed a charge of tobacco juice and delivered it at the deceased with steady, aim and faultless accuracy.
“What’s a stirrin’, down ‘bout the Forks?” continued Old Damrell.
“Well, I dunno, skasely. Ole Drake Higgins he’s ben down to Shelby las’ week. Tuck his crap down; couldn’t git shet o’ the most uv it; hit wasn’t no time for to sell, he say, so he ‘fotch it back agin, ‘lowin’ to wait tell fall. Talks ‘bout goin’ to Mozouri — lots uv ‘ems talkin’ that — away down thar, Ole Higgins say. Cain’t make a livin’ here no mo’, sich times as these. Si Higgins he’s ben over to Kaintuck n’ married a high-toned gal thar, outen the fust families, an’ he’s come back to the Forks with jist a hell’s-mint o’ whoopjamboree notions, folks says. He’s tuck an’ fixed up the ole house like they does in Kaintuck, he say, an’ tha’s ben folks come cler from Turpentine for to see it. He’s tuck an gawmed it all over on the inside with plarsterin’.”
“What’s plasterin’?”
“I dono. Hit’s what he calls it. Ole Mam Higgins, she tole me. She say she wasn’t gwyne to hang out in no sich a dern hole like a hog. Says it’s mud, or some sich kind o’ nastiness that sticks on n’ covers up everything. Plarsterin’, Si calls it.”
This marvel was discussed at considerable length; and almost with animation. But presently there was a dog-fight over in the neighborhood of the blacksmith shop, and the visitors slid off their perch like so many turtles and strode to the battlefield with an interest bordering on eagerness.
The Squire remained, and read his letter. Then he sighed, and sat long in meditation. At intervals he said:
“Missouri. Missouri. Well, well, well, everything is so uncertain.”
At last he said:
“I believe I’ll do it. — A man will just rot, here. My house my yard, everything around me, in fact, shows’ that I am becoming one of these cattle — and I used to be thrifty in other times.”
He was not more than thirty-five, but he had a worn look that made him seem older. He left the stile, entered that part of his house which was the store, traded a quart of thick molasses for a coonskin and a cake of beeswax, to an old dame in linsey-woolsey, put his letter away, and went into the kitchen. His wife was there, constructing some dried apple pies; a slovenly urchin of ten was dreaming over a rude weather-vane of his own contriving; his small sister, close upon four years of age, was sopping cornbread in some gravy left in the bottom of a frying-pan and trying hard not to sop over a finger-mark that divided the pan through the middle — for the other side belonged to the brother, whose musings made him forget his stomach for the moment; a negro woman was busy cooking, at a vast fireplace. Shiftlessness and poverty reigned in the place.
“Nancy, I’ve made up my mind. The world is done with me, and perhaps I ought to be done with it. But no matter — I can wait. I am going to Missouri. I won’t stay in this dead country and decay with it. I’ve had it on my mind sometime. I’m going to sell out here for whatever I can get, and buy a wagon and team and put you and the children in it and start.”
“Anywhere that suits you, suits me, Si. And the children can’t be any worse off in Missouri than, they are here, I reckon.”
Motioning his wife to a private conference in their own room, Hawkins said: “No, they’ll be better off. I’ve looked out for them, Nancy,” and his face lighted. “Do you see these papers? Well, they are evidence that I have taken up Seventy-five Thousand Acres of Land in this county — think what an enormous fortune it will be some day! Why, Nancy, enormous don’t express it — the word’s too tame! I tell your Nancy — — ”
“For goodness sake, Si — — ”
“Wait, Nancy, wait — let me finish — I’ve been secretly bailing and fuming with this grand inspiration for weeks, and I must talk or I’ll burst! I haven’t whispered to a soul — not a word — have had my countenance under lock and key, for fear it might drop something that would tell even these animals here how to discern the gold mine that’s glaring under their noses. Now all that is necessary to hold this land and keep it in the family is to pay the trifling taxes on it yearly — five or ten dollars — the whole tract would not sell for over a third of a cent an acre now, but some day people will be glad to get it for twenty dollars, fifty dollars, a hundred dollars an acre! What should you say to” [here he dropped his voice to a whisper and looked anxiously around to see that there were no eavesdroppers,] “a thousand dollars an acre!
“Well you may open your eyes and stare! But it’s so. You and I may not see the day, but they’ll see it. Mind I tell you; they’ll see it. Nancy, you’ve heard of steamboats, and maybe you believed in them — of course you did. You’ve heard these cattle here scoff at them and call them lies and humbugs, — but they’re not lies and humbugs, they’re a reality and they’re going to be a more wonderful thing some day than they are now. They’re going to make a revolution in this world’s affairs that will make men dizzy to contemplate. I’ve been watching — I’ve been watching while some people slept, and I know what’s coming.
“Even you and I will see the day that steamboats will come up that little Turkey river to within twenty miles of this land of ours — and in high water they’ll come right to it! And this is not all, Nancy — it isn’t even half! There’s a bigger wonder — the railroad! These worms here have never even heard of it — and when they do they’ll not believe in it. But it’s another fact. Coaches that fly over the ground twenty miles an hour — heavens and earth, think of that, Nancy! Twenty miles an hour. It makes a man’s brain whirl. Some day, when you and I are in our graves, there’ll be a railroad stretching hundreds of miles — all the way down from the cities of the Northern States to New Orleans — and its got to run within thirty miles of this land — may be even touch a corner of it. Well, do you know, they’ve quit burning wood in some places in the Eastern States? And what do you suppose they burn? Coal!” [He bent over and whispered again:] “There’s world — worlds of it on this land! You know that black stuff that crops out of the bank of the branch? — well, that’s it. You’ve taken it for rocks; so has every body here; and they’ve built little dams and such things with it. One man was going to build a chimney out of it. Nancy I expect I turned as white as a sheet! Why, it might have caught fire and told everything. I showed him it was too crumbly. Then he was going to build it of copper ore — splendid yellow forty-per-cent. ore! There’s fortunes upon fortunes of copper ore on our land! It scared me to death, the idea of this fool starting a smelting furnace in his house without knowing it, and getting his dull eyes opened. And then he was going to build it of iron ore! There’s mountains of iron ore here, Nancy — whole mountains of it. I wouldn’t take any chances. I just stuck by him — I haunted him — I never let him alone till he built it of mud and sticks like all the rest of the chimneys in this dismal country. Pine forests, wheat land, corn land, iron, copper, coal — wait till the railroads come, and the steamboats! We’ll never see the day, Nancy — never in the world — never, never, never, child. We’ve got to drag along, drag along, and eat crusts in toil and poverty, all hopeless and forlorn — but they’ll ride in coaches, Nancy! They’ll live like the princes of the earth; they’ll be courted and worshiped; their names will be known from ocean to ocean! Ah, well-a-day! Will they ever come back here, on the railroad and the steamboat, and say, ‘This one little spot shall not be touched — this hovel shall be sacred — for here our father and our mother suffered for us, thought for us, laid the foundations of our future as solid as the hills!’“
“You are a great, good, noble soul, Si Hawkins, and I am an honored woman to be the wife of such a man” — and the tears stood in her eyes when she said it. “We will go to Missouri. You are out of your place, here, among these groping dumb creatures. We will find a higher place, where you can walk with your own kind, and be understood when you speak — not stared at as if you were talking some foreign tongue. I would go anywhere, anywhere in the wide world with you. I would rather my body would starve and die than your mind should hunger and wither away in this lonely land.”
“Spoken like yourself, my child! But we’ll not starve, Nancy. Far from it. I have a letter from Beriah Sellers — just came this day. A letter that — I’ll read you a line from it!”
He flew out of the room. A shadow blurred the sunlight in Nancy’s face — there was uneasiness in it, and disappointment. A procession of disturbing thoughts began to troop through her mind. Saying nothing aloud, she sat with her hands in her lap; now and then she clasped them, then unclasped them, then tapped the ends of the fingers together; sighed, nodded, smiled — occasionally paused, shook her head. This pantomime was the elocutionary expression of an unspoken soliloquy which had something of this shape:
“I was afraid of it — was afraid of it. Trying to make our fortune in Virginia, Beriah Sellers nearly ruined us and we had to settle in Kentucky and start over again. Trying to make our fortune in Kentucky he crippled us again and we had to move here. Trying to make our fortune here, he brought us clear down to the ground, nearly. He’s an honest soul, and means the very best in the world, but I’m afraid, I’m afraid he’s too flighty. He has splendid ideas, and he’ll divide his chances with his friends with a free hand, the good generous soul, but something does seem to always interfere and spoil everything. I never did think he was right well balanced. But I don’t blame my husband, for I do think that when that man gets his head full of a new notion, he can outtalk a machine. He’ll make anybody believe in that notion that’ll listen to him ten minutes — why I do believe he would make a deaf and dumb man believe in it and get beside himself, if you only set him where he could see his eyes tally and watch his hands explain. What a head he has got! When he got up that idea there in Virginia of buying up whole loads of negroes in Delaware and Virginia and Tennessee, very quiet, having papers drawn to have them delivered at a place in Alabama and take them and pay for them, away yonder at a certain time, and then in the meantime get a law made stopping everybody from selling negroes to the south after a certain day — it was somehow that way — mercy how the man would have made money! Negroes would have gone up to four prices. But after he’d spent money and worked hard, and traveled hard, and had heaps of negroes all contracted for, and everything going along just right, he couldn’t get the laws passed and down the whole thing tumbled. And there in Kentucky, when he raked up that old numskull that had been inventing away at a perpetual motion machine for twenty-two years, and Beriah Sellers saw at a glance where just one more little cog-wheel would settle the business, why I could see it as plain as day when he came in wild at midnight and hammered us out of bed and told the whole thing in a whisper with the doors bolted and the candle in an empty barrel.
Oceans of money in it — anybody could see that. But it did cost a deal to buy the old numskull out — and then when they put the new cog wheel in they’d overlooked something somewhere and it wasn’t any use — the troublesome thing wouldn’t go. That notion he got up here did look as handy as anything in the world; and how him and Si did sit up nights working at it with the curtains down and me watching to see if any neighbors were about. The man did honestly believe there was a fortune in that black gummy oil that stews out of the bank Si says is coal; and he refined it himself till it was like water, nearly, and it did burn, there’s no two ways about that; and I reckon he’d have been all right in Cincinnati with his lamp that he got made, that time he got a house full of rich speculators to see him exhibit only in the middle of his speech it let go and almost blew the heads off the whole crowd.
I haven’t got over grieving for the money that cost yet. I am sorry enough Beriah Sellers is in Missouri, now, but I was glad when he went. I wonder what his letter says. But of course it’s cheerful; he’s never downhearted — never had any trouble in his life — didn’t know it if he had. It’s always sunrise with that man, and fine and blazing, at that — never gets noon, though — leaves off and rises again. Nobody can help liking the creature, he means so well — but I do dread to come across him again; he’s bound to set us all crazy, of course. Well, there goes old widow Hopkins — it always takes her a week to buy a spool of thread and trade a hank of yarn. Maybe Si can come with the letter, now.”
And he did:
“Widow Hopkins kept me — I haven’t any patience with such tedious people. Now listen, Nancy — just listen at this:
“‘Come right along to Missouri! Don’t wait and worry about a good price but sell out for whatever you can get, and come along, or you might be too late. Throw away your traps, if necessary, and come empty-handed. You’ll never regret it. It’s the grandest country — the loveliest land — the purest atmosphere — I can’t describe it; no pen can do it justice. And it’s filling up, every day — people coming from everywhere. I’ve got the biggest scheme on earth — and I’ll take you in; I’ll take in every friend I’ve got that’s ever stood by me, for there’s enough for all, and to spare. Mum’s the word — don’t whisper — keep yourself to yourself. You’ll see! Come! — rush! — hurry! — don’t wait for anything!’
“It’s the same old boy, Nancy, jest the same old boy — ain’t he?”
“Yes, I think there’s a little of the old sound about his voice yet. I suppose you — you’ll still go, Si?”
“Go! Well, I should think so, Nancy. It’s all a chance, of course, and, chances haven’t been kind to us, I’ll admit — but whatever comes, old wife, they’re provided for. Thank God for that!”
“Amen,” came low and earnestly.
And with an activity and a suddenness that bewildered Obedstown and almost took its breath away, the Hawkinses hurried through with their arrangements in four short months and flitted out into the great mysterious blank that lay beyond the Knobs of Tennessee.
CHAPTER II.
Toward the close of the third day’s journey the wayfarers were just beginning to think of camping, when they came upon a log cabin in the woods. Hawkins drew rein and entered the yard. A boy about ten years old was sitting in the cabin door with his face bowed in his hands. Hawkins approached, expecting his footfall to attract attention, but it did not. He halted a moment, and then said:
“Come, come, little chap, you mustn’t be going to sleep before sundown”
With a tired expression the small face came up out of the hands, — a face down which tears were flowing.
“Ah, I’m sorry I spoke so, my boy. Tell me — is anything the matter?”
The boy signified with a scarcely perceptible gesture that the trouble was in the house, and made room for Hawkins to pass. Then he put his face in his hands again and rocked himself about as one suffering a grief that is too deep to find help in moan or groan or outcry. Hawkins stepped within. It was a poverty stricken place. Six or eight middle-aged country people of both sexes were grouped about an object in the middle of the room; they were noiselessly busy and they talked in whispers when they spoke. Hawkins uncovered and approached. A coffin stood upon two backless chairs. These neighbors had just finished disposing the body of a woman in it — a woman with a careworn, gentle face that had more the look of sleep about it than of death. An old lady motioned, toward the door and said to Hawkins in a whisper:
“His mother, po’ thing. Died of the fever, last night. Tha warn’t no sich thing as saving of her. But it’s better for her — better for her. Husband and the other two children died in the spring, and she hain’t ever hilt up her head sence. She jest went around brokenhearted like, and never took no intrust in anything but Clay — that’s the boy thar. She jest worshiped Clay — and Clay he worshiped her. They didn’t ‘pear to live at all, only when they was together, looking at each other, loving one another. She’s ben sick three weeks; and if you believe me that child has worked, and kep’ the run of the med’cin, and the times of giving it, and sot up nights and nussed her, and tried to keep up her sperits, the same as a grownup person. And last night when she kep’ a sinking and sinking, and turned away her head and didn’t know him no mo’, it was fitten to make a body’s heart break to see him climb onto the bed and lay his cheek agin hern and call her so pitiful and she not answer. But bymeby she roused up, like, and looked around wild, and then she see him, and she made a great cry and snatched him to her breast and hilt him close and kissed him over and over agin; but it took the last po’ strength she had, and so her eyelids begin to close down, and her arms sort o’ drooped away and then we see she was gone, po’ creetur. And Clay, he — Oh, the po’ motherless thing — I cain’t talk about it — I cain’t bear to talk about it.”
Clay had disappeared from the door; but he came in, now, and the neighbors reverently fell apart and made way for him. He leaned upon the open coffin and let his tears course silently. Then he put out his small hand and smoothed the hair and stroked the dead face lovingly. After a bit he brought his other hand up from behind him and laid three or four fresh wild flowers upon the breast, bent over and kissed the unresponsive lips time and time again, and then turned away and went out of the house without looking at any of the company. The old lady said to Hawkins:
“She always loved that kind o’ flowers. He fetched ‘em for her every morning, and she always kissed him. They was from away north somers — she kep’ school when she fust come. Goodness knows what’s to become o’ that po’ boy. No father, no mother, no kin folks of no kind. Nobody to go to, nobody that k’yers for him — and all of us is so put to it for to get along and families so large.”
Hawkins understood. All eyes were turned inquiringly upon him. He said:
“Friends, I am not very well provided for, myself, but still I would not turn my back on a homeless orphan. If he will go with me I will give him a home, and loving regard — I will do for him as I would have another do for a child of my own in misfortune.”
One after another the people stepped forward and wrung the stranger’s hand with cordial good will, and their eyes looked all that their hands could not express or their lips speak.
“Said like a true man,” said one.
“You was a stranger to me a minute ago, but you ain’t now,” said another.
“It’s bread cast upon the waters — it’ll return after many days,” said the old lady whom we have heard speak before.
“You got to camp in my house as long as you hang out here,” said one. “If tha hain’t room for you and yourn my tribe’ll turn out and camp in the hay loft.”
A few minutes afterward, while the preparations for the funeral were being concluded, Mr. Hawkins arrived at his wagon leading his little waif by the hand, and told his wife all that had happened, and asked her if he had done right in giving to her and to himself this new care? She said:
“If you’ve done wrong, Si Hawkins, it’s a wrong that will shine brighter at the judgment day than the rights that many a man has done before you. And there isn’t any compliment you can pay me equal to doing a thing like this and finishing it up, just taking it for granted that I’ll be willing to it. Willing? Come to me; you poor motherless boy, and let me take your grief and help you carry it.”
