There is no character, howsoever
good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule,
howsoever poor and witless. Observe the
ass, for instance: his character is about perfect,
he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals,
yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead
of feeling complimented when we are called an
ass, we are left in doubt. —Pudd’nhead
Wilson’s Calendar
A person who is ignorant of legal matters is always
liable to make mistakes when he tries to photograph
a court scene with his pen; and so I was not willing
to let the law chapters in this book go to press without
first subjecting them to rigid and exhausting revision
and correction by a trained barrister—if
that is what they are called. These chapters are
right, now, in every detail, for they were rewritten
under the immediate eye of William Hicks, who studied
law part of a while in southwest Missouri thirty-five
years ago and then came over here to Florence for
his health and is still helping for exercise and board
in Macaroni Vermicelli’s horse-feed shed, which
is up the back alley as you turn around the corner
out of the Piazza del Duomo just beyond the house where
that stone that Dante used to sit on six hundred years
ago is let into the wall when he let on to be watching
them build Giotto’s campanile and yet always
got tired looking as Beatrice passed along on her way
to get a chunk of chestnut cake to defend herself
with in case of a Ghibelline outbreak before she got
to school, at the same old stand where they sell the
same old cake to this day and it is just as light and
good as it was then, too, and this is not flattery,
far from it. He was a little rusty on his law,
but he rubbed up for this book, and those two or three
legal chapters are right and straight, now. He
told me so himself.
Given under my hand this second day of January, 1893,
at the Villa Viviani, village of Settignano, three
miles back of Florence, on the hills—the
same certainly affording the most charming view to
be found on this planet, and with it the most dreamlike
and enchanting sunsets to be found in any planet or
even in any solar system—and given, too,
in the swell room of the house, with the busts of
Cerretani senators and other grandees of this line
looking approvingly down upon me, as they used to
look down upon Dante, and mutely asking me to adopt
them into my family, which I do with pleasure, for
my remotest ancestors are but spring chickens compared
with these robed and stately antiques, and it will
be a great and satisfying lift for me, that six hundred
years will.
Mark Twain.
CHAPTER 1 — Pudd’nhead Wins His Name
Tell the truth or
trump—but get the trick. —Pudd’nhead
Wilson’s Calendar
The scene of this chronicle is the town of Dawson’s
Landing, on the Missouri side of the Mississippi,
half a day’s journey, per steamboat, below St.
Louis.
Copyrights
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
