Q. Well, I confess that I can’t understand
this. If you buried him, and you knew he was
dead
A. No! no! We only thought he was.
Q. Oh, I see! He came to life again?
A. I bet he didn’t.
Q. Well, I never heard anything like this.
Somebody was dead. Somebody was buried.
Now, where was the mystery?
A. Ah! that’s just it! That’s it
exactly. You see, we were twins —defunct—and
I—and we got mixed in the bathtub when we
were only two weeks old, and one of us was drowned.
But we didn’t know which. Some think
it was Bill. Some think it was me.
Q. Well, that is remarkable. What do you think?
A. Goodness knows! I would give whole worlds
to know. This solemn, this awful mystery has
cast a gloom over my whole life. But I will tell
you a secret now, which I never have revealed to any
creature before. One of us had a peculiar mark—a
large mole on the back of his left hand; that was
me. That child was the one that was drowned!
Q. Very well, then, I don’t see that there
is any mystery about it, after all.
A. You don’t? Well, I do. Anyway,
I don’t see how they could ever have been such
a blundering lot as to go and bury the wrong child.
But, ’sh! —don’t mention it
where the family can hear of it. Heaven knows
they have heartbreaking troubles enough without adding
this.
Q. Well, I believe I have got material enough for
the present, and I am very much obliged to you for
the pains you have taken. But I was a good deal
interested in that account of Aaron Burr’s funeral.
Would you mind telling me what particular circumstance
it was that made you think Burr was such a remarkable
man?
A. Oh! it was a mere trifle! Not one man in
fifty would have noticed it at all. When the
sermon was over, and the procession all ready to start
for the cemetery, and the body all arranged nice in
the hearse, he said he wanted to take a last look
at the scenery, and so he got up and rode with the
driver.
Then the young man reverently withdrew. He was
very pleasant company, and I was sorry to see him
go.
—[Crowded out of “A Tramp Abroad”
to make room for more vital statistics.—M.
T.]
The Parisian travels but little, he knows no language
but his own, reads no literature but his own, and
consequently he is pretty narrow and pretty self-sufficient.
However, let us not be too sweeping; there are Frenchmen
who know languages not their own: these are the
waiters. Among the rest, they know English;
that is, they know it on the European plan —which
is to say, they can speak it, but can’t understand
it. They easily make themselves understood,
but it is next to impossible to word an English sentence
in such away as to enable them to comprehend it.
They think they comprehend it; they pretend they do;
but they don’t. Here is a conversation
which I had with one of these beings; I wrote it down
at the time, in order to have it exactly correct.
