Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain

published some years ago. It was simply a conglomeration of incoherent

drivel from beginning to end; and so was his lengthy speech on the

scaffold afterward. For a whole year he was haunted with a desire to

disfigure a certain young woman, so that no one would marry her. He did

not love her himself, and did not want to marry her, but he did not want

anybody else to do it. He would not go anywhere with her, and yet was

opposed to anybody else’s escorting her. Upon one occasion he declined

to go to a wedding with her, and when she got other company, lay in wait

for the couple by the road, intending to make them go back or kill the

escort. After spending sleepless nights over his ruling desire for a

full year, he at last attempted its execution–that is, attempted to

disfigure the young woman. It was a success. It was permanent. In

trying to shoot her cheek (as she sat at the supper-table with her

parents and brothers and sisters) in such a manner as to mar its

comeliness, one of his bullets wandered a little out of the course, and

she dropped dead. To the very last moment of his life he bewailed the

ill luck that made her move her face just at the critical moment. And so

he died, apparently about half persuaded that somehow it was chiefly her

own fault that she got killed. This idiot was hanged. The plea, of

insanity was not offered.

Insanity certainly is on the increase in the world, and crime is dying

out. There are no longer any murders–none worth mentioning, at any

rate. Formerly, if you killed a man, it was possible that you were

insane–but now, if you, having friends and money, kill a mate, it is

evidence that you are a lunatic. In these days, too, if a person of good

family and high social standing steals anything, they call it

kleptomania, and send him to the lunatic asylum. If a person of high

standing squanders his fortune in dissipation, and closes his career with

strychnine or a bullet, “Temporary Aberration” is what was the trouble

with him.

Is not this insanity plea becoming rather common? Is it not so common

that the reader confidently expects to see it offered in every criminal

case that comes before the courts? And is it not so cheap, and so

common, and often so trivial, that the reader smiles in derision when the

newspaper mentions it?

And is it not curious to note how very often it wins acquittal for the

prisoner? Of late years it does not seem possible for a man to so

conduct himself, before killing another man, as not to be manifestly

insane. If he talks about the stars, he is insane. If he appears

nervous and uneasy an hour before the killing, he is insane. If he weeps

over a great grief, his friends shake their heads, and fear that he is

“not right.” If, an hour after the murder, he seems ill at ease,

preoccupied, and excited, he is, unquestionably insane.

Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against

insanity. There is where the true evil lies.

A CURIOUS DREAM

CONTAINING A MORAL

Night before last I had a singular dream. I seemed to be sitting on a

doorstep (in no particular city perhaps) ruminating, and the time of

night appeared to be about twelve or one o’clock. The weather was balmy

and delicious. There was no human sound in the air, not even a footstep.

There was no sound of any kind to emphasize the dead stillness, except

the occasional hollow barking of a dog in the distance and the fainter

answer of a further dog. Presently up the street I heard a bony

clack-clacking, and guessed it was the castanets of a serenading party.

In a minute more a tall skeleton, hooded, and half clad in a tattered and

moldy shroud, whose shreds were flapping about the ribby latticework of

its person, swung by me with a stately stride and disappeared in the gray

gloom of the starlight. It had a broken and worm-eaten coffin on its

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