A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

that morning, and then branched out into the glad, free,

boundless realm of the things we were not certain about.

Harris said that if the best writer in the world once got

the slovenly habit of doubling up his “haves” he could

never get rid of it while he lived. That is to say,

if a man gets the habit of saying “I should have liked

to have known more about it” instead of saying simply

and sensibly, “I should have liked to know more about it,”

that man’s disease is incurable. Harris said that his sort

of lapse is to be found in every copy of every newspaper

that has ever been printed in English, and in almost all

of our books. He said he had observed it in Kirkham’s

grammar and in Macaulay. Harris believed that milk-teeth

are commoner in men’s mouths than those “doubled-up haves.” [1]

1. I do not know that there have not been moments in the

course of the present session when I should have been

very glad to have accepted the proposal of my noble friend,

and to have exchanged parts in some of our evenings

of work.–[From a Speech of the English Chancellor

of the Exchequer, August, 1879.]

That changed the subject to dentistry. I said I believed

the average man dreaded tooth-pulling more than amputation,

and that he would yell quicker under the former operation

than he would under the latter. The philosopher Harris

said that the average man would not yell in either case

if he had an audience. Then he continued:

“When our brigade first went into camp on the Potomac,

we used to be brought up standing, occasionally, by an

ear-splitting howl of anguish. That meant that a soldier

was getting a tooth pulled in a tent. But the surgeons

soon changed that; they instituted open-air dentistry.

There never was a howl afterward–that is, from the man

who was having the tooth pulled. At the daily dental

hour there would always be about five hundred soldiers

gathered together in the neighborhood of that dental chair

waiting to see the performance–and help; and the moment

the surgeon took a grip on the candidate’s tooth and began

to lift, every one of those five hundred rascals would

clap his hand to his jaw and begin to hop around on one

leg and howl with all the lungs he had! It was enough

to raise your hair to hear that variegated and enormous

unanimous caterwaul burst out! With so big and so derisive

an audience as that, a suffer wouldn’t emit a sound though

you pulled his head off. The surgeons said that pretty

often a patient was compelled to laugh, in the midst

of his pangs, but that had never caught one crying out,

after the open-air exhibition was instituted.”

Dental surgeons suggested doctors, doctors suggested death,

death suggested skeletons–and so, by a logical process

the conversation melted out of one of these subjects

and into the next, until the topic of skeletons raised up

Nicodemus Dodge out of the deep grave in my memory where he

had lain buried and forgotten for twenty-five years.

When I was a boy in a printing-office in Missouri,

a loose-jointed, long-legged, tow-headed, jeans-clad

countrified cub of about sixteen lounged in one day,

and without removing his hands from the depths

of his trousers pockets or taking off his faded ruin

of a slouch hat, whose broken rim hung limp and ragged

about his eyes and ears like a bug-eaten cabbage leaf,

stared indifferently around, then leaned his hip

against the editor’s table, crossed his mighty brogans,

aimed at a distant fly from a crevice in his upper teeth,

laid him low, and said with composure:

“Whar’s the boss?”

“I am the boss,” said the editor, following this curious

bit of architecture wonderingly along up to its clock-face

with his eye.

“Don’t want anybody fur to learn the business, ’tain’t likely?”

“Well, I don’t know. Would you like to learn it?”

“Pap’s so po’ he cain’t run me no mo’, so I want to git

a show somers if I kin, ‘taint no diffunce what–I’m strong

and hearty, and I don’t turn my back on no kind of work,