Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain [77]
I had to seek another livelihood. So I became a silver miner in Nevada; next, a newspaper reporter; next, a gold miner, in California; next, a reporter in San Francisco; next, a special correspondent in the Sandwich Islands; next, a roving correspondent in Europe and the East; next, an instructional torchbearer on the lecture platform; and, finally, I became a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of New England.
In so few words have I disposed of the twenty-one slowdrifting years that have come and gone since I last looked from the windows of a pilothouse.
Let us resume, now.
CHAPTER XXII
I Return to My Muttons
After twenty-one years’ absence, I felt a very strong desire to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left; so I resolved to go out there. I enlisted a poet for company, and a stenographer to “take him down,” and started westward about the middle of April.
As I proposed to make notes, with a view to printing, I took some thought as to methods of procedure. I reflected that if I were recognized, on the river, I should not be as free to go and come, talk, inquire, and spy around, as I should be if unknown; I remembered that it was the custom of steamboatmen in the old times to load up the confiding stranger with the most picturesque and admirable lies, and put the sophisticated friend off with dull and ineffectual facts: so I concluded, that, from a business point of view, it would be an advantage to disguise our party with fictitious names. The idea was certainly good, but it bred infinite bother; for although Smith, Jones, and Johnson are easy names to remember when there is no occasion to remember them, it is next to impossible to recollect them when they are wanted. How do criminals manage to keep a brand-new alias in mind? This is a great mystery. I was innocent; and yet was seldom able to lay my hand on my new name when it was needed; and it seemed to me that if I had had a crime on my conscience to further confuse me, I could never have kept the name by me at all.
We left per Pennsylvania Railroad, at 8 A. M. April 18th.
Evening. Speaking of dress. Grace and picturesqueness drop gradually out of it as one travels away from New York.
I find that among my notes. It makes no difference which direction you take, the fact remains the same. Whether you move north, south, east, or west, no matter: you can get up in the morning and guess how far you have come by noting what degree of grace and picturesqueness is by that time lacking in the costumes of the new passengers;—I do not mean of the women alone, but of both sexes. It may be that carriage is at the bottom of this thing; and I think it is; for there are plenty of ladies and gentlemen in the provincial cities whose garments are all made by the best tailors and dressmakers of New York; yet this had no perceptible effect upon the grand fact: the educated eye never mistakes those people for New Yorkers. No, there is a godless grace, and snap, and style about a born-and-bred New Yorker which mere clothing cannot effect.
April 19. This morning, struck into the region of full goatees—sometimes accompanied by a mustache, but only occasionally.
It was odd to come upon this thick crop of an obsolete and uncomely fashion; it was like running suddenly across a forgotten acquaintance whom you had supposed dead for a generation. The goatee extends over a wide extent of country; and is accompanied by an ironclad belief in Adam and the Biblical history of creation, which has not suffered from the assaults of the scientists.
Afternoon. At the railway stations the loafers carry both hands in their breeches pockets; it was observable, heretofore, that one hand was sometimes out of doors,—here, never. This is an important fact in geography.
If the loafers determined the character of a country, it would be still more important, of course.
Heretofore, all along, the station-loafer has been often observed to scratch one shin with the other foot; here, these remains of activity