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Our Mark Twains and Bill Nyes are flat indeed, when compared to that straight-faced clown, the American legislator, who would give an unchangable value to either the shoes we wear or the money we use. This whole question of currency has as little to do with the prevailing misery as the missing button off your vest would have to do with your being frozen to death.
Two or three persons having at different times intimated that if I would write an autobiography they would read it, when they got leisure, I yield at last to this frenzied public demand, and herewith tender my history: Ours is a noble old house, and stretches a long way back into antiquity. The earliest ancestor the Twains have any record of was a friend of the family by the name of Higgins.
Take an instance. Let a leadsman cry, 'Half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain! until it become as monotonous as the ticking of a clock; let conversation be going on all the time, and the pilot be doing his share of the talking, and no longer consciously listening to the leadsman; and in the midst of this endless string of half twains let a single 'quarter twain! be interjected, without emphasis, and then the half twain cry go on again, just as before: two or three weeks later that pilot can describe with precision the boat's position in the river when that quarter twain was uttered, and give you such a lot of head-marks, stern-marks, and side-marks to guide you, that you ought to be able to take the boat there and put her in that same spot again yourself!
The earliest ancestor the Twains have any record of was a friend of the family by the name of Higgins. This was in the eleventh century, when our people were living in Aberdeen, county of Cork, England. It is a kind of vague, pretty romance, and we leave it alone. All the old families do that way. Arthour Twain was a man of considerable note a solicitor on the highway in William Rufus's time.
If he didn't wag it off, he certainly absorbed its waggishness as a distinguishing characteristic of the "coming man" the future Artemas Wards and Mark Twains of the race. This ancestral origin will also account for the otherwise unaccountable proclivity of all human juveniles to play at the game of leap-frog! Besides, it would have relieved Mr.
Take an instance. Let a leadsman cry, 'Half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain! until it become as monotonous as the ticking of a clock; let conversation be going on all the time, and the pilot be doing his share of the talking, and no longer consciously listening to the leadsman; and in the midst of this endless string of half twains let a single 'quarter twain! be interjected, without emphasis, and then the half twain cry go on again, just as before: two or three weeks later that pilot can describe with precision the boat's position in the river when that quarter twain was uttered, and give you such a lot of head-marks, stern-marks, and side- marks to guide you, that you ought to be able to take the boat there and put her in that same spot again yourself!
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