and it ain’t going too far to say he is a pudd’nhead.
If he ain’t a pudd’nhead, I ain’t no judge, that’s all.”
Mr. Wilson stood elected. The incident was told all over the town,
and gravely discussed by everybody. Within a week he had lost his
first name; Pudd’nhead took its place. In time he came to be liked,
and well liked too; but by that time the nickname had got well stuck on,
and it stayed. That first day’s verdict made him a fool, and he was not
able to get it set aside, or even modified. The nickname soon ceased to
carry any harsh or unfriendly feeling with it, but it held its place,
and was to continue to hold its place for twenty long years.
CHAPTER 2
Driscoll Spares His Slaves
Adam was but human–this explains it all. He did not want the apple
for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.
The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have
eaten the serpent.
–Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
Pudd’nhead Wilson had a trifle of money when he arrived,
and he bought a small house on the extreme western verge of the town.
Between it and Judge Driscoll’s house there was only a grassy yard,
with a paling fence dividing the properties in the middle.
He hired a small office down in the town and hung out a tin sign
with these words on it:
D A V I D W I L S O N
ATTORNEY AND COUNSELOR-AT-LAW
SURVEYING, CONVEYANCING, ETC.
But his deadly remark had ruined his chance–at least in the law.
No clients came. He took down his sign, after a while, and put it
up on his own house with the law features knocked out of it.
It offered his services now in the humble capacities of land surveyor
and expert accountant. Now and then he got a job of surveying to do,
and now and then a merchant got him to straighten out his books.
With Scotch patience and pluck he resolved to live down his reputation
and work his way into the legal field yet. Poor fellow, he could
foresee that it was going to take him such a weary long time to do it.
He had a rich abundance of idle time, but it never hung heavy on his hands,
for he interested himself in every new thing that was born into the
universe of ideas, and studied it, and experimented upon it at his house.
One of his pet fads was palmistry. To another one he gave no name,
neither would he explain to anybody what its purpose was, but merely
said it was an amusement. In fact, he had found that his fads added to his
reputation as a pudd’nhead; there, he was growing chary of being too
communicative about them. The fad without a name was one which dealt
with people’s finger marks. He carried in his coat pocket a shallow box
with grooves in it, and in the grooves strips of glass five inches long
and three inches wide. Along the lower edge of each strip was pasted a
slip of white paper. He asked people to pass their hands through their
hair (thus collecting upon them a thin coating of the natural oil) and then
making a thumb-mark on a glass strip, following it with the mark of the ball
of each finger in succession. Under this row of faint grease prints he
would write a record on the strip of white paper–thus:
JOHN SMITH, right hand–
and add the day of the month and the year, then take Smith’s left hand
on another glass strip, and add name and date and the words “left hand.”
The strips were now returned to the grooved box, and took their place
among what Wilson called his “records.”
He often studied his records, examining and poring over them with
absorbing interest until far into the night; but what he found there–
if he found anything–he revealed to no one. Sometimes he copied on
paper the involved and delicate pattern left by the ball of the finger,
and then vastly enlarged it with a pantograph so that he could examine