The Gilded Age - Mark Twain [223]
5. dove-cote: small structure on a pole that houses domesticated pigeons.
CHAPTER 15
1. Women’s Medical College: founded in 1850, the first medical school for women.
2. prompter’s: a square-dance caller.
CHAPTER 16
1. Odd Fellows: fraternal order established in the United States in 1813.
2. wide-awake: a type of soft felt hat.
3. rose: rosewater; used as flavoring in certain ethnic desserts as well as perfume in various barbershop products.
4. juba: traditional African-American dance.
5. field-book: surveyor’s notebook.
CHAPTER 17
1. sighting iron: surveyor’s tripod.
2. setting poles: poles used to propel a boat by placing one end in the water, setting it on the river bottom, and then pushing against it to move the craft along the surface of the water.
3. Roederer: well-known, expensive brand of French champagne.
CHAPTER 18
1. Beatrice Cenci: infamously tragic sixteenth-century woman immortalized in poetry and lore. She had her father murdered and was later found guilty of the crime and publicly executed.
CHAPTER 20
1. Masons, of Odd Fellows . . . the Good Templars, the Sons of Temperance, the Cadets of Temperance, the Daughters of Rebecca: all nineteenth-century fraternal organizations. The Masons (or freemasons) were established in North America in 1738; Odd Fellows—see ch. 16, note 1; the Good Templars were organized in 1851 as a temperance society; the Sons of Temperance formed in 1841; the Cadets of Temperance were founded as an organization in 1848 and pledged to abstain from tobacco use; and the Daughters of Rebecca formed in 1851 as a secret society for women.
CHAPTER 23
1. “Plow, the Loom and the Anvil”: respected agricultural magazine founded in 1848.
2. “Practical Magazine”: British manufacturing publication established in 1873.
CHAPTER 24
1. great public cribs: slang term for a brothel; also vernacular for a livestock feeding trough.
2. P. S.: Permanent (or Private) Secretary.
CHAPTER 25
1. drug in the market: a commodity unwanted because its supply exceeds demand (i.e., a drag on the market).
CHAPTER 27
1. Fisher’s Hornpipe: popular mid-nineteenth-century tune.
2. aneroid: type of barometer.
CHAPTER 28
1. card: as in drawing card; or, an attraction to draw a large audience.
2. burst up: go bankrupt.
CHAPTER 29
1. chin music: foolish, idle, or disrespectful chatter.
2. “Ilium Fuit”: “Troy is no more”; allusion to Virgil’s Aeneid, book 2, line 325.
3. “Aeneas”: protagonist of Aeneid.
4. Anchises: father of Aeneas.
5. witch-hazel professor: a person who, according to folklore, could locate water or precious minerals in the ground by using a forked branch from a witch-hazel shrub.
CHAPTER 31
1. made the riffle: made a fortune.
2. “world’s people”: individuals outside the Quaker faith.
3. the Barber: reference to Figaro, the lead character from Rossini’s opera Barber of Seville (1816).
4. “Oh, Summer Night”: opening lines to Ernesto’s serenade in act 3 of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (1843).
5. “Batti Batti”: from Zerlina’s aria in act 1 of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787).
6. Black Swan: reference to Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield (1808–76), internationally popular American singer who was born a slave.
CHAPTER 32
1. the dapper young Senator from Iowa: reference to William Boyd Allison (1829–1908), who served in the senate from 1872 to 1908 and was accused of accepting bribes while in office.
2. steel pen-coated: wearing a tuxedo.
3. card: an attraction (see ch. 28, note 1).
4. knave of spades: jack of spades, the lowest of the face cards.
CHAPTER 33
1. Newport: most likely a reference to Newport, Rhode Island, which is approximately 400 miles from Washington, D.C. It is possible that the speaker is alluding to Newport News, Virginia, a fashionable resort on the James River. However, at just over 180 miles from the capital, the distance to the Virginia resort seems not altogether much more considerable than the approximately 140 miles between Washington, D.C., and the New Jersey resorts described in the next passage as “nearer