it. When the owners were late coming for their ships, the Admiral always
burned them, so that the insurance money should not be lost. At last
this fine old tar was cut down in the fulness of his years and honors.
And to her dying day, his poor heart-broken widow believed that if he had
been cut down fifteen minutes sooner he might have been resuscitated.
Charles Henry Twain lived during the latter part of the seventeenth
century, and was a zealous and distinguished missionary. He converted
sixteen thousand South Sea islanders, and taught them that a dog-tooth
necklace and a pair of spectacles was not enough clothing to come to
divine service in. His poor flock loved him very, very dearly; and when
his funeral was over, they got up in a body (and came out of the
restaurant) with tears in their eyes, and saying, one to another, that he
was a good tender missionary, and they wished they had some more of him.
PAH-GO-TO-WAH-WAH-PUKKETEKEEWIS (Mighty-Hunter-with-a-Hog-Eye) TWAIN
adorned the middle of the eighteenth century, and aided Gen. Braddock
with all his heart to resist the oppressor Washington. It was this
ancestor who fired seventeen times at our Washington from behind a tree.
So far the beautiful romantic narrative in the moral story-books is
correct; but when that narrative goes on to say that at the seventeenth
round the awe-stricken savage said solemnly that that man was being
reserved by the Great Spirit for some mighty mission, and he dared not
lift his sacrilegious rifle against him again, the narrative seriously
impairs the integrity of history. What he did say was:
“It ain’t no (hic !) no use. ‘At man’s so drunk he can’t stan’ still
long enough for a man to hit him. I (hic !) I can’t ‘ford to fool away
any more am’nition on him!”
That was why he stopped at the seventeenth round, and it was, a good
plain matter-of-fact reason, too, and one that easily commends itself to
us by the eloquent, persuasive flavor of probability there is about it.
I always enjoyed the story-book narrative, but I felt a marring misgiving
that every Indian at Braddock’s Defeat who fired at a soldier a couple of
times (two easily grows to seventeen in a century), and missed him,
jumped to the conclusion that the Great Spirit was reserving that soldier
for some grand mission; and so I somehow feared that the only reason why
Washington’s case is remembered and the others forgotten is, that in his
the prophecy’ came true, and in that of the others it didn’t. There are
not books enough on earth to contain the record of the prophecies Indians
and other unauthorized parties have made; but one may carry in his
overcoat pockets the record of all the prophecies that have been
fulfilled.
I will remark here, in passing, that certain ancestors of mine are so
thoroughly well known in history by their aliases, that I have not felt
it to be worth while to dwell upon them, or even mention them in the
order of their birth. Among these may be mentioned RICHARD BRINSLEY
TWAIN, alias Guy Fawkes; JOHN WENTWORTH TWAIN, alias Sixteen-String Jack;
WILLIAM HOGARTH TWAIN, alias Jack Sheppard; ANANIAS TWAIN, alias Baron
Munchausen ; JOHN GEORGE TWAIN, alias Capt. Kydd; and them there are
George Francis Train, Tom Pepper, Nebuchadnezzar and Baalam’s Ass–they
all belong to our family, but to a branch of it somewhat distantly
removed from the honorable direct line–in fact, a collateral branch,
whose members chiefly differ from the ancient stock in that, in order to
acquire the notoriety we have always yearned and hungered for, they have
got into a low way of going to jail instead of getting hanged.
It is not well; when writing an autobiography, to follow your ancestry
down too close to your own time–it is safest to speak only vaguely of
your great-grandfather, and then skip from there to yourself, which I now
do.
I was born without teeth–and there Richard III had the advantage of me;
but I was born without a humpback, likewise, and there I had the
advantage of him. My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously