A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

made a very shining success out of their attempts on the

simpleton from “old Shelby.” Experimenters grew scarce

and chary. Now the young doctor came to the rescue.

There was delight and applause when he proposed to scare

Nicodemus to death, and explained how he was going to do it.

He had a noble new skeleton–the skeleton of the late

and only local celebrity, Jimmy Finn, the village

drunkard–a grisly piece of property which he had bought

of Jimmy Finn himself, at auction, for fifty dollars,

under great competition, when Jimmy lay very sick in

the tan-yard a fortnight before his death. The fifty

dollars had gone promptly for whiskey and had considerably

hurried up the change of ownership in the skeleton.

The doctor would put Jimmy Finn’s skeleton in Nicodemus’s

bed!

This was done–about half past ten in the evening.

About Nicodemus’s usual bedtime–midnight–the village

jokers came creeping stealthily through the jimpson

weeds and sunflowers toward the lonely frame den.

They reached the window and peeped in. There sat the

long-legged pauper, on his bed, in a very short shirt,

and nothing more; he was dangling his legs contentedly

back and forth, and wheezing the music of “Camptown Races”

out of a paper-overlaid comb which he was pressing

against his mouth; by him lay a new jewsharp, a new top,

and solid india-rubber ball, a handful of painted marbles,

five pounds of “store” candy, and a well-gnawed slab of

gingerbread as big and as thick as a volume of sheet-music.

He had sold the skeleton to a traveling quack for three

dollars and was enjoying the result!

Just as we had finished talking about skeletons and were

drifting into the subject of fossils, Harris and I heard

a shout, and glanced up the steep hillside. We saw men

and women standing away up there looking frightened,

and there was a bulky object tumbling and floundering

down the steep slope toward us. We got out of the way,

and when the object landed in the road it proved to be a boy.

He had tripped and fallen, and there was nothing for him

to do but trust to luck and take what might come.

When one starts to roll down a place like that, there is

no stopping till the bottom is reached. Think of people

FARMING on a slant which is so steep that the best you can

say of it–if you want to be fastidiously accurate–is,

that it is a little steeper than a ladder and not quite

so steep as a mansard roof. But that is what they do.

Some of the little farms on the hillside opposite Heidelberg

were stood up “edgeways.” The boy was wonderfully jolted up,

and his head was bleeding, from cuts which it had got from

small stones on the way.

Harris and I gathered him up and set him on a stone,

and by that time the men and women had scampered down

and brought his cap.

Men, women, and children flocked out from neighboring

cottages and joined the crowd; the pale boy was petted,

and stared at, and commiserated, and water was

brought for him to drink and bathe his bruises in.

And such another clatter of tongues! All who had seen

the catastrophe were describing it at once, and each

trying to talk louder than his neighbor; and one youth

of a superior genius ran a little way up the hill,

called attention, tripped, fell, rolled down among us,

and thus triumphantly showed exactly how the thing had been done.

Harris and I were included in all the descriptions;

how we were coming along; how Hans Gross shouted;

how we looked up startled; how we saw Peter coming like

a cannon-shot; how judiciously we got out of the way,

and let him come; and with what presence of mind we

picked him up and brushed him off and set him on a rock

when the performance was over. We were as much heroes

as anybody else, except Peter, and were so recognized;

we were taken with Peter and the populace to Peter’s

mother’s cottage, and there we ate bread and cheese,

and drank milk and beer with everybody, and had a most