Mark Twain, a Biography — Volume I, Part 1: 1835-1866 eBook

Albert Bigelow Paine
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 325 pages of information about Mark Twain, a Biography — Volume I, Part 1.

Mark Twain, a Biography — Volume I, Part 1: 1835-1866 eBook

Albert Bigelow Paine
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 325 pages of information about Mark Twain, a Biography — Volume I, Part 1.

“I don’t doubt a word they say.  In Scotland, it often happens that when people have been killed, or are troubled, they send their spirits abroad and they are seen as much like themselves as a reflection in a looking-glass.  That was a ghost of some wrecked steamboat.”

But John Quarles, who was present, laughed: 

“If ever anybody was in trouble, the men on that steamboat were,” he said.  “They were the Democratic candidates at the last election.  They killed Salt River improvements, and Salt River has killed them.  Their ghosts went up the river on a ghostly steamboat.”

It is possible that this comment, which was widely repeated and traveled far, was the origin of the term “Going up Salt River,” as applied to defeated political candidates.—­[The dictionaries give this phrase as probably traceable to a small, difficult stream in Kentucky; but it seems more reasonable to believe that it originated in Quarles’s witty comment.]

No other attempt was ever made to establish navigation on Salt River.  Rumors of railroads already running in the East put an end to any such thought.  Railroads could run anywhere and were probably cheaper and easier to maintain than the difficult navigation requiring locks and dams.  Salt River lost its prestige as a possible water highway and became mere scenery.  Railroads have ruined greater rivers than the Little Salt, and greater villages than Florida, though neither Florida nor Salt River has been touched by a railroad to this day.  Perhaps such close detail of early history may be thought unnecessary in a work of this kind, but all these things were definite influences in the career of the little lad whom the world would one day know as Mark Twain.

VI

A NEW HOME

The death of little Margaret was the final misfortune that came to the Clemens family in Florida.  Doubtless it hastened their departure.  There was a superstition in those days that to refer to health as good luck, rather than to ascribe it to the kindness of Providence, was to bring about a judgment.  Jane Clemens one day spoke to a neighbor of their good luck in thus far having lost no member of their family.  That same day, when the sisters, Pamela and Margaret, returned from school, Margaret laid her books on the table, looked in the glass at her flushed cheeks, pulled out the trundle-bed, and lay down.

She was never in her right mind again.  The doctor was sent for and diagnosed the case “bilious fever.”  One evening, about nine o’clock, Orion was sitting on the edge of the trundle-bed by the patient, when the door opened and Little Sam, then about four years old, walked in from his bedroom, fast asleep.  He came to the side of the trundle-bed and pulled at the bedding near Margaret’s shoulder for some time before he woke.  Next day the little girl was “picking at the coverlet,” and it was known that she could not live.  About a

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Mark Twain, a Biography — Volume I, Part 1: 1835-1866 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.