Taming the Bicycle (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By Mark Twain

American life comes under the scrutiny of Mark Twains wit in this delightful collection of short stories. Here, he comments on politics, education, the media, religion, and literature. The true subject of Twains satire and burlesque is that strangest of all animals, the human being. In his novels, travel narratives, stories, essays, and sketches, Twain exposes such a variety of human foibles that one is left either laughing at the folly of human enterprise, blushing with shame at human behavior, or cursing the gods that would create such a silly animal. Twain does all three, often at the same time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411435018

Mark Twain

Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, and Bernard L. Stein are members of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

Book preview

TAMING THE BICYCLE

and Other Essays, Stories, and Sketches

MARK TWAIN

EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION

BY ERIC CARL LINK

Introduction and Suggested Reading

© 2009 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-3501-8

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BOOK I

MARK TWAIN: PUBLIC SERVANT

THE NEW CRIME

RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR

A MYSTERIOUS VISIT

A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

THE PRIVATE HISTORY OF A CAMPAIGN THAT FAILED

HOW TO MAKE HISTORY DATES STICK

DOES THE RACE OF MAN LOVE A LORD?

BOOK II

MARK TWAIN: RIDER OF BICYCLES

HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER ONCE

HOW I ESCAPED BEING KILLED IN A DUEL

AN ENCOUNTER WITH AN INTERVIEWER

TAMING THE BICYCLE

MY FIRST LIE AND HOW I GOT OUT OF IT

BOOK III

MARK TWAIN: THEOLOGIAN

THE STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY WHO DID NOT PROSPER

THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT CARNIVAL OF CRIME IN CONNECTICUT

EXTRACTS FROM ADAM'S DIARY

EVE'S DIARY

TO THE PERSON SITTING IN DARKNESS

CORN-PONE OPINIONS

THE TURNING POINT OF MY LIFE

BOOK IV

MARK TWAIN: LITERARY CRITIC

WHITTIER BIRTHDAY SPEECH

WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF US

FENIMORE COOPER'S LITERARY OFFENSES

BOOK V

MARK TWAIN: STORYTELLER

JIM SMILEY AND HIS JUMPING FROG

CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS

THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG

ENDNOTES

SUGGESTED READING

INTRODUCTION

ON DECEMBER 17, 1877, A FORTY-TWO YEAR OLD MARK TWAIN SAT AT a large U-shaped table in a dining hall in an upscale hotel in Boston. Built only a few years earlier, the Hotel Brunswick—on Boylston Street in the heart of the city, just across from Trinity Church, and within easy walking distance for its patrons to any number of museums and public gardens—already had a reputation as one of the finest high-end hotels in the area. This particular dining hall—one of two within the hotel—gleamed, for it was being dedicated on this Tuesday evening, and its marble-tile floors, deep red walls, and frescoed ceilings contributed to a general atmosphere of lush refinement and splendor. The occasion on this night of dedication was a celebration hosted by one of the bastions of the Boston literary scene, The Atlantic Monthly magazine. The celebration was in honor of John Greenleaf Whittier's seventieth birthday. The esteemed Quaker, poet, and abolitionist was one of New England's literary legends, and The Atlantic Monthly distributed invitations to attend this exclusive dinner to some fifty or so of its contributors, among them some of the greatest literary figures of the period—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It was an august assembly. The party was a staged affair: it was not open to the public, but the public was, in effect, invited to observe the proceedings through the eyes of the numerous newspaper and magazine reporters who were invited into the dining hall so that they might issue glorious tributes to the occasion.

Mark Twain sat near his friend William Dean Howells, editor of The Atlantic Monthly at the time. Howells, Twain's junior by only two years, and Twain were of a much younger generation than the aging luminaries who gave the occasion its gravitas. Indeed, some claimed afterwards that never before had so many of America's literary elite been gathered together at one time. Howells and Twain were only getting started on their storied literary careers in the 1860s, a time when Longfellow, Holmes, Emerson, and the evening's guest of honor, Whittier, had already passed from their prime into secure spots in the annals of American cultural history. In 1877, Howells and Twain were two of America's hottest literary prospects, whereas Holmes, at sixty-eight years old, was the youngest of the four lauded veterans of the literary scene. Celebratory dinners of the sort taking place in the Hotel Brunswick that December night were built for the publicity they generated, and the endless courses of expensive wines and rich entrees were matched by the endless parade of polite toasts and speeches made by guests in tribute of the honoree. They were, to be sure, the kinds of toasts and speeches that one grins and bears patiently, knowing that they are well intended, if boring, and more a product of ritual than substance. The audience did have one thing to look forward to—Mark Twain, his reputation as America's leading humorist on the ascendancy, was slated to speak.

Howells introduced Mark Twain, and Twain began his Whittier Birthday Speech. For the next ten minutes he recounted a fictional account of a time in Nevada when three rough, hard-drinking, card-playing rogues—who went by the names of Longfellow, Holmes, and Emerson—invaded the humble home of a miner and spent an evening in riotous dissipation. When the three rogues spoke, of course, they spoke in lines of verse from some of the more famous poems of the three renowned poets whose names they used. The Whittier Birthday Speech is vintage Twain, a marvelous piece of satire in which the most penetrating barb at the end was reserved for Twain himself. It is, today, one of Twain's most famous speeches, and the story of his delivery of that speech is one of the favorite set pieces of Twain's many biographers. It is a speech anyone would be happy to have penned. Twain wished he had never delivered it.

To hear Twain tell the story later in his life, the speech was received not with laughter but with an awkward silence. Howells gasped in horror at the sheer impudence of Twain, subjecting the living legends of the New England literary scene to such unabashed mockery. In the days to follow, Twain, with deep regret for having so misjudged his audience and its ability to take a joke, drafted letters of apology to the three principles. Holmes and Longfellow brushed the whole thing off as harmless. Emerson's family was not quite so gracious in their response, but neither were they particularly outraged. The press, however, as presses naturally do, had a heyday—news stories about the affair reached across the country within days, and some of the renditions of the event took exception to Twain's rather undignified portrayal of three of America's cultural treasures. Twain burned with shame over the whole affair and never forgot it.

Truth be told, Twain, the master storyteller, embellished his own account of the evening in his later autobiographical writings. In reality, the speech was perhaps not as coldly received as Twain suggests, and the evening was hardly ruined by Twain's indiscretion. Still, the recrimination Twain heaped upon himself for having made such a fool of himself was palpable and his shame was real. Nevertheless, the affair did not get him blacklisted from future austere celebrations, and within a few years Twain was regularly invited to speak at similar occasions. To be sure, as the reader of this collection of stories, sketches, and essays will see, the episode did not inhibit Twain from taking cultural icons and subjecting them to satire, parody, and burlesque. We are, after all, talking about Mark Twain.

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the small town of Florida, Missouri, in 1835. Four years later his family moved to the small but growing town of Hannibal, Missouri, located on the Mississippi River north of St. Louis. Growing up in Hannibal provided the young Samuel Clemens opportunity to witness slavery, death, disease, river commerce, and, most importantly, the myriad triumphs and failures of hard-working American families struggling to make ends meet in an area of the county far away from the polite manners and refined social graces of coastal New England intellectual culture. Literature in America during Clemens' youth and adolescence was very much dominated by the New England intellectuals, and long-bearded poets such as William Cullen Bryant and the guests of honor whom Twain would poke fun at in 1877 were securing their reputations as literary elite. Prose writing in America was diverse, with the delicately tuned short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne gracing the pages of leading literary magazines alongside immensely popular sentimental and domestic fiction, historical fiction, and tales of sea and frontier adventure. Politics was always big business in American culture, and one could get his or her fill of political opinions within the pages of the numerous newspapers and magazines that seemed to spring from the soil overnight and die just as quickly. In a slave-holding state just a short raft-ride across the Mississippi River from the free state of Illinois, discussions of America's peculiar institution were quick to the lips of the citizens of Hannibal, and it would not be uncommon for the young Clemens to hear tales of fugitive slaves and see pamphlets posted around town for their return. In Hannibal, Clemens watched his family's means gradually diminish as debts took their toll, and when his father died of pneumonia in 1847 the Clemens family made ends meet as best they could, living off of the wages of Samuel's older brother Orion and whatever odd jobs the rest of the family could secure. Eventually, in his late teens, Clemens would leave Hannibal and begin to find his way in the world—as a printer, as a riverboat pilot, as a newspaper correspondent, and, eventually, as America's greatest living humorist and one of her greatest novelists.

In this journey toward literary success, his boyhood adventures in Hannibal provided a wealth of texture and material for some of his greatest works. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) are rooted in Mark Twain's Hannibal upbringing. But their humor—a humor one finds throughout Twain's works, from his first great work, The Innocents Abroad (1869), to Roughing It (1872), to Life on the Mississippi (1883), and beyond—is not the humor of the great novelists and poets of the mid-nineteenth century. Certainly, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Longfellow, Emerson, Lydia Maria Child, Fanny Fern, and the other renowned and popular novelists of Twain's youth and young adulthood were not humorless—Poe even fancied himself a great comic writer at times—but Twain's brand of dead-pan, unapologetic, unsubtle satire and burlesque could not be found among this older generation. Meanwhile, among the novelists of his own generation, noted American realists William Dean Howells and Henry James are clearly of a different breed than Twain. They simply do not share common literary DNA.

Twain did have literary forefathers. From the 1830s through the 1860s a group of writers from Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and throughout the Deep South—a group who have become known as the Southwest Humorists—wrote a uniquely unfashionable but popular brand of comic sketch and short story. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, George Washington Harris, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and a host of others abandoned the refined prose of the tidewater tradition and the delicate symbolism and metaphysical musings of the New England poets and essayists, and, instead, wrote outrageous burlesques and satires about the foibles of real people, people one might pass on the streets of Macon, Georgia, or Chattanooga, Tennessee. People one would find on the opposite side of a fire pit at night after a day hunting deer or bear in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, telling impossible tales of the one that got away. They wrote in the vernacular, attempting to capture the speech patterns of hunters and horse traders, and they wrote with an exaggerated, tall-tale brand of humor that paints human nature in broad comic strokes. They wrote stories as American as bluegrass music and backyard barbeques, indistinguishable from the rough, untamed frontier landscape from which they emerged. When Twain, after having published numerous essays and letters as a correspondent for various periodicals in the early 1860s, published Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog in 1865, the story not only catapulted an author whose fame was primarily a western spectacle to national prominence, it also served as a clarion call that the tradition of American comic writing that had been manufactured by the Southwest Humorists of the previous generation had found its rightful heir. At the end of Twain's pen, the Southwest Humor tradition was transformed from cultural curiosity into cultural phenomenon. In fact, Twain was so good, so diverse in his talents, so masterful at dialogue, at description, at capturing the pulse of American life with keen wit and intellect, that his body of work can no longer be considered as the product of a prior generation of humorists. Twain did more. He did it better. Long before he passed away in 1910, Twain had stamped his name on American culture like no other author before or since.

America needed Mark Twain as much as Twain needed America. When Twain's Jumping Frog sketch worked its way—magazine by magazine—across America in 1865, the country was just concluding four years of bloody Civil War which saw the deaths of over six hundred thousand American soldiers, and the years of political reconstruction in the South that followed were characterized by a complex matrix of social tensions as an emancipated population of former slaves found their way in the American socio-economic landscape. During the 1870s and 1880s, cities across America experienced explosive growth as agricultural communities shifted toward manufacturing, but by the 1890s this growth had produced a host of unchecked sanitation and pollution problems, and the lower economic tiers of American society began to congregate in evolving slum districts. During these decades, America solidified itself as a world economic, political, and military power—but this growth in stature didn't come without cost, and the Gilded Age, as this period has come to be called—named after an 1873 novel of that title co-authored by Twain and Charles Dudley Warner—became synonymous with political and economic corruption as well as the shallow cultural pretensions of the new rich in America's growing economy. Of course, Twain was not the only author critical of these aspects of America's evolving socio-political landscape, but no other author could match Twain's wit, the nimbleness of his mind, or the sheer strength of his talent.

The reader will witness the broad range of these talents in the pieces collected in this volume. Here, one will find Twain commenting—usually with Twain's unique brand of humor—on politics, education, the media, religion, and literature. Broadly speaking, American life itself comes under the scrutiny of Twain's wit. Nor, as one will discover, is European history and culture protected from Twain's intellectual flaying knife. But politics, education, the media, even world history and culture, are, in the end, merely the byproducts of human endeavor. The true subject of Twain's satire and burlesque is that strangest of all animals, the human being. In his novels, travel narratives, stories, essays, and sketches, Twain exposes such a variety of human foibles that one is left either laughing at the folly of human enterprise, blushing with shame at human behavior, or cursing the god that would create such a silly animal. Twain does all three, often at the same time.

There are truly poignant moments among these essays. One witnesses the recognition—too late, perhaps—of the simple joys of honest human love in the diaries of Adam and Eve. One feels the self-doubt and despair that follows the shooting of the Union scout (if, indeed, it was a Union scout who was killed in the night) during Twain's brief adventure as a Confederate soldier in The Private History of a Campaign That Failed. One reads with almost guilty pleasure the hysterical dismantling of the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper in Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses. On occasion, one finds Twain tackling difficult social problems without flinching, even when the pursuit of these problems leads him into dark thematic territory, as in To the Person Sitting in Darkness and the biting critique of human hypocrisy in the short story The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.

Although Twain could, when he desired—and he often did so desire—engage in penetrating critique of human shortcomings, he also recognized the necessity of pausing, taking a deep breath, and simply sharing a laugh with his readers, often at his own expense. One may wring one's hands at the philosophical riddles of the universe and lament the corruption of human society, but in the cool of the evening, when the day is done, one will sometimes wheel a dusty bicycle out of one's crowded garage, mount it, begin to pedal, anticipating the gentle breeze of a summer's dusk, and promptly fall. Perhaps running over a dog in the process. One may not be able to tame the universe, or God, or one's neighbor, or the federal government—but sometimes one can take what pleasure there is to be found by joining Mark Twain in taming a bicycle.

Eric Carl Link is Professor of American Literature and Chair of the Department of English at The University of Memphis. He is the author of The Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century and co-author of Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy.

BOOK I

MARK TWAIN:

PUBLIC SERVANT

THE NEW CRIME (1870)

LEGISLATION NEEDED

THIS COUNTRY, DURING THE LAST THIRTY OR FORTY YEARS, HAS produced some of the most remarkable cases of insanity of which there is any mention in history. For instance, there was the Baldwin case, in Ohio, twenty-two years ago. Baldwin, from his boyhood up, had been of a vindictive, malignant, quarrelsome nature. He put a boy's eye out, once, and never was heard upon any occasion, to utter a regret for it. He did many such things. But at last he did something that was serious. He called at a house just after dark, one evening, knocked, and when the occupant came to the door, shot him dead and then tried to escape but was captured. Two days before, he had wantonly insulted a helpless cripple, and the man he afterward took swift vengeance upon with an assassin bullet knocked him down. Such was the Baldwin case. The trial was long and exciting; the community was fearfully wrought up. Men said this spiteful, bad-hearted villain had caused grief enough in his time, and now he should satisfy the law. But they were mistaken. Baldwin was insane when he did the deed—they had not thought of that. By the arguments of counsel it was shown that at half-past ten in the morning on the day of the murder, Baldwin became insane, and remained so for eleven hours and a half exactly. This just covered the case comfortably, and he was acquitted. Thus, if an unthinking and excited community had been listened to instead of the arguments of counsel, a poor, crazy creature would have been held to a fearful responsibility for a mere freak of madness. Baldwin went clear, and although his relatives and friends were naturally incensed against the community for their injurious suspicions and remarks, they said let it go for this time, and did not prosecute. The Baldwins were very wealthy. This same Baldwin had momentary fits of insanity twice afterward, and on both occasions killed people he had grudges against. And on both these occasions the circumstances of the killing were so aggravated, and the murders so seemingly heartless and treacherous, that if Baldwin had not been insane he would have been hanged without the shadow of a doubt. As it was, it required all his political and family influence to get him clear in one of the cases, and cost him not less than $10,000 to get clear in the other. One of these men he had notoriously been threatening to kill for twelve years. The poor creature happened, by the merest piece of ill-fortune, to come along a dark alley at the very moment that Baldwin's insanity came upon him, and so he was shot in the back with a gun loaded with slugs. It was exceedingly fortunate for Baldwin that his insanity came on him just when it did.

Take the case of Lynch Hackett, of Pennsylvania. Twice, in public, he attacked a German butcher by the name of Bemis Feldner, with a cane, and both times Feldner whipped him with his fists. Hackett was a vain, wealthy, violent gentleman, who held his blood and family in high esteem and believed that a reverent respect was due his great riches. He brooded over the shame of his chastisement for two weeks, and then, in a momentary fit of insanity armed himself to the teeth, rode into town, waited a couple of hours until he saw Feldner coming down the street with his wife on his arm, and then, as the couple passed the doorway in which he had partially concealed himself, he drove a knife into Feldner's neck, killing him instantly. The widow caught the limp form and eased it to the earth. Both were drenched with blood. Hackett jocosely remarked to her that as a professional butcher's recent wife she could appreciate the artistic neatness of the job that left her in a condition to marry again, in case she wanted to. This remark, and another which he made to a friend, that his position in society made the killing of an obscure citizen simply an eccentricity instead of a crime, were shown to be evidences of insanity, and so Hackett escaped punishment. The jury were hardly inclined to accept these as proofs, at first, inasmuch as the prisoner had never been insane before the murder, and under the tranquilizing effect of the butchering had immediately regained his right mind—but when the defense came to show that a third cousin of Hackett's wife's stepfather was insane, and not only insane but had a nose the very counterpart of Hackett's, it was plain that insanity was hereditary in the family and Hackett had come by it by legitimate inheritance. Of course the jury then acquitted him. But it was a merciful providence that Mrs. H.'s people had been afflicted as shown, else Hackett would certainly have been hanged.

However, it is not possible to account all the marvelous cases of insanity that have come under the public notice in the last thirty or forty years. There was the Durgin case in New Jersey three years ago. The servant girl, Bridget Durgin, at dead of night invaded her mistress' bedroom and carved the lady literally to pieces with a knife. Then she dragged the body to the middle of the floor and beat and banged it with chairs and such things. Next she opened the feather beds and strewed the contents around, saturated everything with kerosene and set fire to the general wreck. She now took up the young child of the murdered woman in her blood-smearing hands, and walked off, through the snow, with no shoes on, to a neighbor's house a quarter of a mile off, and told a string of wild, incoherent stories about some men coming and setting fire to the house; and then she cried piteously, and without seeming to think there was anything suggestive about the blood upon her hands, her clothing and the baby, volunteered the remark that she was afraid those men had murdered her mistress! Afterward, by her own confession and other testimony, it was proved that the mistress had always been kind to the girl, consequently there was no revenge in the murder; and it was also shown that the girl took nothing away from the burning house, not even her own shoes, and consequently robbery was not the motive. Now the reader says, Here comes that same old plea of insanity again. But the reader has deceived himself this time. No such plea was offered in her defense. The judge sentenced her, nobody persecuted the governor with petitions for her pardon, and she was promptly hanged.

There was that youth in Pennsylvania, whose curious confession was published a year ago. It was simply a conglomeration of incoherent drivel from beginning to end—and so was his lengthy speech on the scaffold afterward. For a whole year he was haunted with a desire to disfigure a certain young woman so that no one would marry her. He did not love her himself, and did not want to marry her, but he did not want anybody else to do it. He would not go anywhere with her, and yet was opposed to anybody else's escorting her. Upon one occasion he declined to go to a wedding with her, and when she got other company, lay in wait for the couple by the road, intending to make them go back or kill the escort. After spending sleepless nights over his ruling desire for a full year, he at last attempted its execution—that is, attempted to disfigure the young woman. It was a success. It was permanent. In trying to shoot her cheek (as she sat at the supper table with her parents and brothers and sisters) in such a manner as to mar its comeliness, one of his bullets wandered a little out of the course and she dropped dead. To the very last moment of his life he bewailed the ill luck that made her move her face just at the critical moment. And so he died apparently about half persuaded that somehow it was chiefly her own fault that she got killed. This idiot was hanged. The plea of insanity was not offered.

The recent case of Lady Mordaunt, in England, had proved beyond cavil that the thing we call common prostitution in America is only insanity in Great Britain. Her husband wanted a divorce, but as her cheerful peculiarities were the offspring of lunacy and consequently she could not be held responsible for them, he had to take her to his bosom again. It is sad to think of a dozen or two of great English lords taking advantage of a poor crazy woman. In this country, if history be worth anything to judge by, the husband would have rented a graveyard and stocked it, and then brought the divorce suit afterward. In which case the jury would have brought him in insane, not his wife.

Insanity certainly is on the increase in the world, and crime is dying out. There are no longer any murders—none worth mentioning, at any rate. Formerly, if you killed a man, it was possible that you were insane—but now if you kill a man it is evidence that you are a lunatic. In these days, too, if a person of good family and high social standing steals anything, they call it kleptomania, and send him to the lunatic asylum. If a person of high standing squanders his fortune in dissipation and closes his career with strychnine or a bullet, Temporary Aberration is what was the trouble with him. And finally, as before noted, the list is capped with a new and curious madness in the shape of wholesale adultery.

Is not this insanity plea becoming rather common? Is it not so common that the reader confidently expects to see it offered in every criminal case that comes before the courts? And is it not so cheap, and so common, and often so trivial, that the reader smiles in derision when the newspaper mentions it? And is it not curious to note how very often it wins acquittal for the prisoner? Lately it does not seem possible for a man to so conduct himself, before killing another man, as not to be manifestly insane. If he talks about the stars he is insane. If he appears nervous and uneasy an hour before the killing, he is insane. If he weeps over a great grief, his friends shake their heads and fear that he is not right. If, an hour after the murder, he seems ill at ease, preoccupied and excited, he is unquestionably insane.

Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity. There is where the true evil lies.

And the penalty attached should be imprisonment, not hanging. Then, it might be worth the trouble and expense of trying the Gen. Coleses, and the Gen. Sickleses and the McFarlands, because juries might lock them up for brief terms, in deference to the majesty of the law; but it is not likely that any of us will ever live to see the murderer of a seducer hanged. Perhaps, if the truth were confessed, few of us wish to live that long.

Since I seemed to have wandered into the McFarland case without especially intending to do it (for my original idea was merely to call attention to how many really crazy people are hanged in these days, and how many that never were crazy a moment in their lives are acquitted of crime on the plea of insanity), I will venture to suggest—simply as an opinion, and not as an assertion—that the main reason why we shall never succeed in hanging this mean, small villain, McFarland, is, that his real crime did not consist in killing Richardson, but in so conducting himself long before that, as to estrange his wife's affections from himself and drive her to the love and protection of another man. If they would quash this present suit and try him on that, we would get the unreluctant fangs of justice on him sure, if what one good man says against McFarland is worth as much as what another good man says in his favor. We might all consent that he was a criminal in his treatment of his wife at that time, but somehow we hesitate to condemn him to the scaffold for this act of his whereby he inflicted a penalty for a wrong which, down in our secret hearts, we feel is beyond the ability of all law to punish amply and satisfactorily.

No, when a man abuses his wife as McFarland seems to have abused his, any jury would punish him severely, and do it with a relish. But when a man kills the seducer of his wife, a jury cannot be found that will condemn him to suffer for murder. Therefore, it is fair to consider that McFarland's real crime is not in court in New York, now, but is left out of the indictment.

If I seem to have wandered from my subject and thrown in some surplusage, what do I care? With these evidences of a wandering mind present to the reader, am I to be debarred from offering the customary plea of Insanity?

April 16, 1870

RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR (1870)

A FEW MONTHS AGO I WAS NOMINATED FOR GOVERNOR OF THE great state of New York, to run against Stewart L. Woodford and John T. Hoffman, on an independent ticket. I somehow felt that I had one prominent advantage over these gentlemen, and that was, good character. It was easy to see by the newspapers, that if ever they had known what it was to bear a good name, that time had gone by. It was plain that in these latter years they had become familiar with all manner of shameful crimes. But at the very moment that I was exalting my advantage and joying in it in secret, there was a muddy undercurrent of discomfort riling the deeps of my happiness—and that was, the having to hear my name bandied about in familiar connection with those of such people. I grew more and more disturbed. Finally I wrote my grandmother about it. Her answer came quick and sharp. She said:

You have never done one single thing in all your life to be ashamed of—not one. Look at the newspapers—look at them and comprehend what sort of characters Woodford and Hoffman are, and then see if you are willing to lower yourself to their level and enter a public canvass with them.

It was my