Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain

unsuspecting public through a burlesque without entirely and absurdly

missing one’s mark, I will here set down two experiences of my own in

this thing. In the fall of 1862, in Nevada and California, the people

got to running wild about extraordinary petrifactions and other natural

marvels. One could scarcely pick up a paper without finding in it one or

two glorified discoveries of this kind. The mania was becoming a little

ridiculous. I was a brand-new local editor in Virginia City, and I felt

called upon to destroy this growing evil; we all have our benignant,

fatherly moods at one time or another, I suppose. I chose to kill the

petrifaction mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire. But maybe it

was altogether too delicate, for nobody ever perceived the satire part of

it at all. I put my scheme in the shape of the discovery of a remarkably

petrified man.

I had had a temporary falling out with Mr.—-, the new coroner and

justice of the peace of Humboldt, and thought I might as well touch him

up a little at the same time and make him ridiculous, and thus combine

pleasure with business. So I told, in patient, belief-compelling detail,

all about the finding of a petrified-man at Gravelly Ford (exactly a

hundred and twenty miles, over a breakneck mountain trail from where —-

lived); how all the savants of the immediate neighborhood had been to

examine it (it was notorious that there was not a living creature within

fifty miles of there, except a few starving Indians; some crippled

grasshoppers, and four or five buzzards out of meat and too feeble to get

away); how those savants all pronounced the petrified man to have been in

a state of complete petrifaction for over ten generations; and then, with

a seriousness that I ought to have been ashamed to assume, I stated that

as soon as Mr.—- heard the news he summoned a jury, mounted his mule,

and posted off, with noble reverence for official duty, on that awful

five days’ journey, through alkali, sage brush, peril of body, and

imminent starvation, to hold an inquest on this man that had been dead

and turned to everlasting stone for more than three hundred years!

And then, my hand being “in,” so to speak, I went on, with the same

unflinching gravity, to state that the jury returned a verdict that

deceased came to his death from protracted exposure. This only moved me

to higher flights of imagination, and I said that the jury, with that

charity so characteristic of pioneers, then dug a grave, and were about

to give the petrified man Christian burial, when they found that for ages

a limestone sediment had been trickling down the face of the stone

against which he was sitting, and this stuff had run under him and

cemented him fast to the “bed-rock”; that the jury (they were all silver-

miners) canvassed the difficulty a moment, and then got out their powder

and fuse, and proceeded to drill a hole under him, in order to blast him

from his position, when Mr.—-, “with that delicacy so characteristic of

him, forbade them, observing that it would be little less than sacrilege

to do such a thing.”

From beginning to end the “Petrified Man” squib was a string of roaring

absurdities, albeit they were told with an unfair pretense of truth that

even imposed upon me to some extent, and I was in some danger of

believing in my own fraud. But I really had no desire to deceive

anybody, and no expectation of doing it. I depended on the way the

petrified man was sitting to explain to the public that he was a swindle.

Yet I purposely mixed that up with other things, hoping to make it

obscure–and I did. I would describe the position of one foot, and then

say his right thumb was against the side of his nose; then talk about his

other foot, and presently come back and say the fingers of his right hand

were spread apart; then talk about the back of his head a little, and

return and say the left thumb was hooked into the right little finger;

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *