The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

last she had spread the cloth and loaded it with hot corn bread, fried

chickens, bacon, buttermilk, coffee, and all manner of country luxuries,

Col. Sellers modified his harangue and for a moment throttled it down to

the orthodox pitch for a blessing, and then instantly burst forth again

as from a parenthesis and clattered on with might and main till every

stomach in the party was laden with all it could carry. And when the

new-comers ascended the ladder to their comfortable feather beds on the

second floor–to wit the garret–Mrs. Hawkins was obliged to say:

“Hang the fellow, I do believe he has gone wilder than ever, but still a

body can’t help liking him if they would–and what is more, they don’t

ever want to try when they see his eyes and hear him talk.”

Within a week or two the Hawkinses were comfortably domiciled in a new

log house, and were beginning to feel at home. The children were put to

school; at least it was what passed for a school in those days: a place

where tender young humanity devoted itself for eight or ten hours a day

to learning incomprehensible rubbish by heart out of books and reciting

it by rote, like parrots; so that a finished education consisted simply

of a permanent headache and the ability to read without stopping to spell

the words or take breath. Hawkins bought out the village store for a

song and proceeded to reap the profits, which amounted to but little more

than another song.

The wonderful speculation hinted at by Col. Sellers in his letter turned

out to be the raising of mules for the Southern market; and really it

promised very well. The young stock cost but a trifle, the rearing but

another trifle, and so Hawkins was easily persuaded to embark his slender

means in the enterprise and turn over the keep and care of the animals to

Sellers and Uncle Dan’l.

All went well: Business prospered little by little. Hawkins even built a

new house, made it two full stories high and put a lightning rod on it.

People came two or three miles to look at it. But they knew that the rod

attracted the lightning, and so they gave the place a wide berth in a

storm, for they were familiar with marksmanship and doubted if the

lightning could hit that small stick at a distance of a mile and a half

oftener than once in a hundred and fifty times. Hawkins fitted out his

house with “store” furniture from St. Louis, and the fame of its

magnificence went abroad in the land. Even the parlor carpet was from

St. Louis–though the other rooms were clothed in the “rag” carpeting of

the country. Hawkins put up the first “paling” fence that had ever

adorned the village; and he did not stop there, but whitewashed it.

His oil-cloth window-curtains had noble pictures on them of castles such

as had never been seen anywhere in the world but on window-curtains.

Hawkins enjoyed the admiration these prodigies compelled, but he always

smiled to think how poor and, cheap they were, compared to what the

Hawkins mansion would display in a future day after the Tennessee Land

should have borne its minted fruit. Even Washington observed, once, that

when the Tennessee Land was sold he would have a “store” carpet in his

and Clay’s room like the one in the parlor. This pleased Hawkins, but it

troubled his wife. It did not seem wise, to her, to put one’s entire

earthly trust in the Tennessee Land and never think of doing any work.

Hawkins took a weekly Philadelphia newspaper and a semi-weekly St. Louis

journal–almost the only papers that came to the village, though Godey’s

Lady’s Book found a good market there and was regarded as the perfection

of polite literature by some of the ablest critics in the place. Perhaps

it is only fair to explain that we are writing of a by gone age–some

twenty or thirty years ago. In the two newspapers referred to lay the

secret of Hawkins’s growing prosperity. They kept him informed of the

condition of the crops south and east, and thus he knew which articles