WHAT IS MAN? AND OTHER ESSAYS OF MARK TWAIN

one as far as I could send it, and the child that first shouted

the reign it fell in got the apple.

The children were encouraged to stop locating things as

being “over by the arbor,” or “in the oak parlor,” or “up at the

stone steps,” and say instead that the things were in Stephen, or

in the Commonwealth, or in George III. They got the habit

without trouble. To have the long road mapped out with such

exactness was a great boon for me, for I had the habit of leaving

books and other articles lying around everywhere, and had not

previously been able to definitely name the place, and so had

often been obliged to go to fetch them myself, to save time and

failure; but now I could name the reign I left them in, and send

the children.

Next I thought I would measure off the French reigns, and

peg them alongside the English ones, so that we could always have

contemporaneous French history under our eyes as we went our

English rounds. We pegged them down to the Hundred Years’ War,

then threw the idea aside, I do not now remember why. After that

we made the English pegs fence in European and American history

as well as English, and that answered very well. English and

alien poets, statesmen, artists, heroes, battles, plagues,

cataclysms, revolutions–we shoveled them all into the English

fences according to their dates. Do you understand? We gave

Washington’s birth to George II.’s pegs and his death to George

III.’s; George II. got the Lisbon earthquake and George III. the

Declaration of Independence. Goethe, Shakespeare, Napoleon,

Savonarola, Joan of Arc, the French Revolution, the Edict of

Nantes, Clive, Wellington, Waterloo, Plassey, Patay, Cowpens,

Saratoga, the Battle of the Boyne, the invention of the

logarithms, the microscope, the steam-engine, the telegraph–

anything and everything all over the world–we dumped it all

in among the English pegs according to it date and regardless

of its nationality.

If the road-pegging scheme had not succeeded I should have

lodged the kings in the children’s heads by means of pictures–

that is, I should have tried. It might have failed, for the

pictures could only be effective WHEN MADE BY THE PUPIL; not the

master, for it is the work put upon the drawing that makes the

drawing stay in the memory, and my children were too little to make

drawings at that time. And, besides, they had no talent for art,

which is strange, for in other ways they are like me.

But I will develop the picture plan now, hoping that you will

be able to use it. It will come good for indoors when the

weather is bad and one cannot go outside and peg a road. Let us

imagine that the kings are a procession, and that they have come

out of the Ark and down Ararat for exercise and are now starting

back again up the zigzag road. This will bring several of them

into view at once, and each zigzag will represent the length of

a king’s reign.

And so on. You will have plenty of space, for by my project

you will use the parlor wall. You do not mark on the wall; that

would cause trouble. You only attach bits of paper to it with

pins or thumb-tacks. These will leave no mark.

Take your pen now, and twenty-one pieces of white paper,

each two inches square, and we will do the twenty-one years of

the Conqueror’s reign. On each square draw a picture of a whale

and write the dates and term of service. We choose the whale for

several reasons: its name and William’s begin with the same

letter; it is the biggest fish that swims, and William is the

most conspicuous figure in English history in the way of a

landmark; finally, a whale is about the easiest thing to draw.

By the time you have drawn twenty-one wales and written “William

I.–1066-1087–twenty-one years” twenty-one times, those details

will be your property; you cannot dislodge them from your memory

with anything but dynamite. I will make a sample for you to copy:

(Fig. 3).

I have got his chin up too high, but that is no matter; he

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