University of Virginia Library

1. A BURLESQUE
AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

TWO or three persons having at different
times intimated that if I would
write an autobiography they would read
it when they got leisure, I yield at last to this
frenzied public demand, and herewith tender
my history:

Ours is a noble old house, and stretches a
long way back into antiquity. The earliest ancestor
the Twains have any record of was a
friend of the family by the name of Higgins.
This was in the eleventh century, when our
people were living in Aberdeen, county of
Cork, England. Why it is that our long line
has ever since borne the maternal name (except
when one of them now and then took a playful
refuge in an alias to avert foolishness), instead
of Higgins, is a mystery which none of us has

ever felt much desire to stir. It is a kind of
vague, pretty romance, and we leave it alone.
All the old families do that way.

Arthour Twain was a man of considerable
note—a solicitor on the highway in William
Rufus' time. At about the age of thirty he
went to one of those fine old English places of
resort called Newgate, to see about something,
and never returned again. While there he died
suddenly.

Augustus Twain seems to have made something
of a stir about the year 1160. He was
as full of fun as he could be, and used to take
his old sabre and sharpen it up, and get in a
convenient place on a dark night, and stick it
through people as they went by, to see them
jump. He was a born humorist. But he got
to going too far with it; and the first time he
was found stripping one of these parties, the
authorities removed one end of him, and put it
up on a nice high place on Temple Bar, where
it could contemplate the people and have a
good time. He never liked any situation so
much or stuck to it so long.

Then for the next two hundred years the

[ILLUSTRATION]

The House That Jack Built.

[Description: 501EAF. Page 005. Image of a story title-page. In the center of the image is a human with an enlarged donkey head, dressed in suit and glasses, holding onto the front of a train car. In the background are men working on building a house.]

[ILLUSTRATION]

Our Family Tree

[Description: 501EAF. Page 006. Image of a scroll, curling at both ends. In the center is a gallows, with an owl perched on top and a man hanging from a noose. The caption at the bottom reads "our family tree".]

family tree shows a succession of soldiers—
noble, high-spirited fellows, who always went
into battle singing, right behind the army, and
always went out a-whooping, right ahead of it.

This is a scathing rebuke to old dead Froissart's
poor witticism that our family tree never
had but one limb to it, and that that one stuck
out at right angles, and bore fruit winter and
summer.

Early in the fifteenth century we have Beau
Twain, called “the Scholar.” He wrote a beautiful,
beautiful hand. And he could imitate anybody's
hand so closely that it was enough to make
a person laugh his head off to see it. He had infinite

sport with his talent. But by and by he
took a contract to break stone for a road, and the
roughness of the work spoiled his hand. Still,
he enjoyed life all the time he was in the stone
business, which, with inconsiderable intervals,
was some forty-two years. In fact, he died in
harness. During all those long years he gave
such satisfaction that he never was through
with one contract a week till government gave
him another. He was a perfect pet. And he
was always a favorite with his fellow-artists,
and was a conspicuous member of their benevolent
secret society, called the Chain Gang.
He always wore his hair short, had a preference
for striped clothes, and died lamented by
the government. He was a sore loss to his
country. For he was so regular.

Some years later we have the illustrious John
Morgan Twain. He came over to this country
with Columbus in 1492, as a passenger. He
appears to have been of a crusty, uncomfortable
disposition. He complained of the food all
the way over, and was always threatening to go
ashore unless there was a change. He wanted
fresh shad. Hardly a day passed over his head

that he did not go idling about the ship with
his nose in the air, sneering about the commander,
and saying he did not believe Columbus
knew where he was going to or had ever
been there before. The memorable cry of
“Land ho!” thrilled every heart in the ship
but his. He gazed a while through a piece of
smoked glass at the penciled line lying on the
distant water, and then said: “Land be hanged,
—it's a raft!”

When this questionable passenger came on
board the ship, he brought nothing with him
but an old newspaper containing a handkerchief
marked “B. G.,” one cotton sock marked
“L. W. C.” one woollen one marked “D. F.”
and a night-shirt marked “O. M. R.” And yet
during the voyage he worried more about his
“trunk,” and gave himself more airs about it,
than all the rest of the passengers put together.
If the ship was “down by the head,” and would
not steer, he would go and move his “trunk”
further aft, and then watch the effect. If the
ship was “by the stern,” he would suggest to
Columbus to detail some men to “shift that
baggage.” In storms he had to be gagged, be

[ILLUSTRATION]

This is the House that Jack built.

[Description: 501EAF. Page 009. Image of large train depot, with ERIE on the front. There are three cavernous openings, out of which a train is leaving with smoke plumes pouring out of its stack.]

cause his wailings about his “trunk” made it
impossible for the men to hear the orders.
The man does not appear to have been openly
charged with any gravely unbecoming thing,
but it is noted in the ship's log as a “curious
circumstance” that albeit he brought his baggage
on board the ship in a newspaper, he took
it ashore in four trunks, a queensware crate, and
a couple of champagne baskets. But when he
came back insinuating in an insolent, swaggering
way, that some of his things were missing,
and was going to search the other passengers'
baggage, it was too much, and they threw him
overboard. They watched long and wonderingly
for him to come up, but not even a bubble
rose on the quietly ebbing tide. But while
every one was most absorbed in gazing over the
side, and the interest was momentarily increasing,
it was observed with consternation that the
vessel was adrift and the anchor cable hanging
limp from the bow. Then in the ship's dimmed
and ancient log we find this quaint note:

Yet this ancestor had good and noble instincts,
and it is with pride that we call to
mind the fact that he was the first white person
who ever interested himself in the work of
elevating and civilizing our Indians. He built
a commodious jail and put up a gallows, and to
his dying day he claimed with satisfaction that
he had had a more restraining and elevating
influence on the Indians than any other reformer
that ever labored among them. At this
point the chronicle becomes less frank and
chatty, and closes abruptly by saying that the
old voyager went to see his gallows perform
on the first white man ever hanged in America,
and while there received injuries which terminated
in his death.

The great grandson of the “Reformer” flourished
in sixteen hundred and something, and
was known in our annals as “the old Admiral,”
though in history he had other titles. He was
long in command of fleets of swift vessels, well
armed and manned, and did great service in
hurrying up merchantmen. Vessels which he
followed and kept his eagle eye on, always made
good fair time across the ocean. But if a ship

still loitered in spite of all he could do, his indignation
would grow till he could contain himself
no longer—and then he would take that
ship home where he lived and keep it there
carefully, expecting the owners to come for it,
but they never did. And he would try to get
the idleness and sloth out of the sailors of that
ship by compelling them to take invigorating
exercise and a bath. He called it “walking a
plank.” All the pupils liked it. At any rate,
they never found any fault with it after trying
it. When the owners were late coming for their
ships, the Admiral always burned them, so that
the insurance money should not be lost. At
last this fine old tar was cut down in the fulness
of his years and honors. And to her dying
day, his poor heart-broken widow believed that
if he had been cut down fifteen minutes sooner
he might have been resuscitated.

Charles Henry Twain lived during the latter
part of the seventeenth century, and was a zealous
and distinguished missionary. He converted
sixteen thousand South Sea islanders, and taught
them that a dog-tooth necklace and a pair of
spectacles was not enough clothing to come to

[ILLUSTRATION]

This is the Malt that lay in the
House that Jack built.

[Description: 501EAF. Page 013. Image of sacks of money. Each sack is humanized with smiling faces.]

divine service in. His poor flock loved him
very, very dearly; and when his funeral was
over, they got up in a body (and came out of
the restaurant) with tears in their eyes, and
saying, one to another, that he was a good
tender missionary, and they wished they had
some more of him.

Pah-go-to-wah-wah-pukketekeewis (Mighty-Hunter-with-a-Hog-Eye)
Twain adorned the
middle of the eighteenth century, and aided
Gen. Braddock with all his heart to resist the
oppressor Washington. It was this ancestor
who fired seventeen times at our Washington
from behind a tree. So far the beautiful romantic
narrative in the moral story-books is correct;
but when that narrative goes on to say
that at the seventeenth round the awe-stricken
savage said solemnly that that man was being
reserved by the Great Spirit for some mighty
mission, and he dared not lift his sacrilegious
rifle against him again, the narrative seriously
impairs the integrity of history. What he did
say was:

“It ain't no (hic!) no use. 'At man's so drunk
he can't stan' still long enough for a man to hit

[ILLUSTRATION]

This is the Rat that ate the Malt that lay in the
House that Jack built.

[Description: 501EAF. Page 015. Image of a giant rat with a moustached man's head. The rat is dressed in the garb of an officer, complete with sword, and is feeding off the sacks of money. In the background are two buildings, one labeled harem and one opera.]

him. I (hic!) I can't 'ford to fool away any
more am'nition on him!”

That was why he stopped at the seventeenth
round, and it was a good plain matter-of-fact
reason, too, and one that easily commends itself
to us by the eloquent, persuasive flavor of probability
there is about it.

I always enjoyed the story-book narrative, but
I felt a marring misgiving that every Indian at
Braddock's Defeat who fired at a soldier a
couple of times (two easily grows to seventeen
in a century), and missed him, jumped to the
conclusion that the Great Spirit was reserving
that soldier for some grand mission; and so I
somehow feared that the only reason why
Washington's case is remembered and the
others forgotten is, that in his the prophecy
came true, and in that of the others it didn't.
There are not books enough on earth to contain
the record of the prophecies Indians and
other unauthorized parties have made; but one
may carry in his overcoat pockets the record
of all the prophecies that have been fulfilled.

I will remark here, in passing, that certain
ancestors of mine are so thoroughly well known

in history by their aliases, that I have not felt
it to be worth while to dwell upon them, or
even mention them in the order of their birth.
Among these may be mentioned Richard
Brinsley Twain, alias Guy Fawkes; John
Wentworth Twain, alias Sixteen-String Jack;
William Hogarth Twain, alias Jack Sheppard;
Ananias Twain, alias Baron Munchausen; John
George Twain, alias Capt. Kydd; and then
there are George Francis Train, Tom Pepper,
Nebuchadnezzar and Baalam's Ass—they all
belong to our family, but to a branch of it
somewhat distantly removed from the honorable
direct line—in fact, a collateral branch, whose
members chiefly differ from the ancient stock
in that, in order to acquire the notoriety we
have always yearned and hungered for, they
have got into a low way of going to jail instead
of getting hanged.

It is not well, when writing an autobiography,
to follow your ancestry down too close to your
own time—it is safest to speak only vaguely of
your great-grandfather, and then skip from there
to yourself, which I now do.

I was born without teeth—and there Richard

III had the advantage of me; but I was born
without a humpback, likewise, and there I had
the advantage of him. My parents were neither
very poor nor conspicuously honest.

But now a thought occurs to me. My own
history would really seem so tame contrasted
with that of my ancestors, that it is simply wisdom
to leave it unwritten until I am hanged.
If some other biographies I have read had
stopped with the ancestry until a like event
occurred, it would have been a felicitous thing
for the reading public. How does it strike
you?