Yours very respectfully.
Mark Twain.
P.S.—For the best Obituary—one
suitable for me to read in public, and calculated
to inspire regret—I desire to offer a Prize,
consisting of a Portrait of me done entirely by myself
in pen and ink without previous instructions.
The ink warranted to be the kind used by the very
best artists.
Some one has revealed to the Tribune that I once
suggested to Rev. Thomas K. Beecher, of Elmira, New
York, that we get up a monument to Adam, and that
Mr. Beecher favored the project. There is more
to it than that. The matter started as a joke,
but it came somewhat near to materializing.
It is long ago—thirty years. Mr.
Darwin’s descent of man has been
in print five or six years, and the storm of indignation
raised by it was still raging in pulpits and periodicals.
In tracing the genesis of the human race back to
its sources, Mr. Darwin had left Adam out altogether.
We had monkeys, and “missing links,”
and plenty of other kinds of ancestors, but no Adam.
Jesting with Mr. Beecher and other friends in Elmira,
I said there seemed to be a likelihood that the world
would discard Adam and accept the monkey, and that
in the course of time Adam’s very name would
be forgotten in the earth; therefore this calamity
ought to be averted; a monument would accomplish this,
and Elmira ought not to waste this honorable opportunity
to do Adam a favor and herself a credit.
Then the unexpected happened. Two bankers came
forward and took hold of the matter—not
for fun, not for sentiment, but because they saw in
the monument certain commercial advantages for the
town. The project had seemed gently humorous
before—it was more than that now, with
this stern business gravity injected into it.
The bankers discussed the monument with me. We
met several times. They proposed an indestructible
memorial, to cost twenty-five thousand dollars.
The insane oddity of a monument set up in a village
to preserve a name that would outlast the hills and
the rocks without any such help, would advertise Elmira
to the ends of the earth —and draw custom.
It would be the only monument on the planet to Adam,
and in the matter of interest and impressiveness could
never have a rival until somebody should set up a monument
to the Milky Way.
People would come from every corner of the globe and
stop off to look at it, no tour of the world would
be complete that left out Adam’s monument.
Elmira would be a Mecca; there would be pilgrim ships
at pilgrim rates, pilgrim specials on the continent’s
railways; libraries would be written about the monument,
every tourist would kodak it, models of it would be
for sale everywhere in the earth, its form would become
as familiar as the figure of Napoleon.
One of the bankers subscribed five thousand dollars,
and I think the other one subscribed half as much,
but I do not remember with certainty now whether that
was the figure or not. We got designs made —some
of them came from Paris.
