accommodating, pleasant but fearfully green.”  This young person would become the “Interrogation Point,” in due time, and have his picture on page 71 (old edition), while opposite him, on page 70, would appear the “oracle,” identified as one Doctor Andrews, who (the note-book says) had the habit of “smelling in guide-books for knowledge and then trying to play it for old information that has been festering in his brain.”  Sometimes there are abstract notes such as: 

How lucky Adam was.  He knew when he said a good thing that no one had ever said it before.

Of the “character” notes, the most important and elaborated is that which presents the “Poet Lariat.”  This is the entry, somewhat epitomized: 

Bloodgood H. Cutter

He is fifty years old, and small of his age.  He dresses in homespun, and is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer, with a strange proclivity for writing rhymes.  He writes them on all possible subjects, and gets them printed on slips of paper, with his portrait at the head.  These he will give to any man who comes along, whether he has anything against him or not . . . .

Dan said: 

    “It must be a great happiness to you to sit down at the close of day
    and put its events all down in rhymes and poetry, like Byron and
    Shakespeare and those fellows.”

    “Oh yes, it is—­it is—­Why, many’s the time I’ve had to get up in
    the night when it comes on me: 

       Whether we’re on the sea or the land
       We’ve all got to go at the word of command—­

    “Hey! how’s that?”

A curious character was Cutter—­a Long Island farmer with the obsession of rhyme.  In his old age, in an interview, he said: 

“Mark was generally writing and he was glum.  He would write what we were doing, and I would write poetry, and Mark would say: 

“‘For Heaven’s sake, Cutter, keep your poems to yourself.’

“Yes, Mark was pretty glum, and he was generally writing.”

Poor old Poet Lariat—­dead now with so many others of that happy crew.  We may believe that Mark learned to be “glum” when he saw the Lariat approaching with his sheaf of rhymes.  We may believe, too, that he was “generally writing.”  He contributed fifty-three letters to the Alta during that five months and six to the Tribune.  They would average about two columns nonpareil each, which is to say four thousand words, or something like two hundred and fifty thousand words in all.  To turn out an average of fifteen hundred words a day, with continuous sight-seeing besides, one must be generally writing during any odd intervals; those who are wont to regard Mark Twain as lazy may consider these statistics.  That he detested manual labor is true enough, but at the work for which he was fitted and intended it may be set down here upon authority (and despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that to his last year he was the most industrious of men.