By-and-by, when he almost reached the station where
he was to get off, he got up, crossed over, and he
said: “Now I am going to say something to
you which I hope you will regard as a compliment.”
And then he went on to say: “I have never
seen Mark Twain, but I have seen a portrait of him,
and any friend of mine will tell you that when I have
once seen a portrait of a man I place it in my eye
and store it away in my memory, and I can tell you
now that you look enough like Mark Twain to be his
brother. Now,” he said, “I hope you
take this as a compliment. Yes, you are a very
good imitation; but when I come to look closer, you
are probably not that man.”
I said: “I will be frank with you.
In my desire to look like that excellent character
I have dressed for the character; I have been playing
a part.”
He said: “That is all right, that is all
right; you look very well on the outside, but when
it comes to the inside you are not in it with the
original”
So when I come to a place like this with nothing valuable
to say I always play a part. But I will say
before I sit down that when it comes to saying anything
here I will express myself in this way: I am heartily
in sympathy with you in your efforts to help those
who were sufferers in this calamity, and in your desire
to heap those who were rendered homeless, and in saying
this I wish to impress on you the fact that I am not
playing a part.
After
the address at the Robert Fulton Fund meeting, June
19,
1906,
Mr. Clemens talked to the assembled reporters about
the
San
Francisco earthquake.
I haven’t been there since 1868, and that great
city of San Francisco has grown up since my day.
When I was there she had one hundred and eighteen
thousand people, and of this number eighteen thousand
were Chinese. I was a reporter on the Virginia
City Enterprise in Nevada in 1862, and stayed there,
I think, about two years, when I went to San Francisco
and got a job as a reporter on The Call. I was
there three or four years.
I remember one day I was walking down Third Street
in San Francisco. It was a sleepy, dull Sunday
afternoon, and no one was stirring. Suddenly
as I looked up the street about three hundred yards
the whole side of a house fell out. The street
was full of bricks and mortar. At the same time
I was knocked against the side of a house, and stood
there stunned for a moment.
I thought it was an earthquake. Nobody else
had heard anything about it and no one said earthquake
to me afterward, but I saw it and I wrote it.
Nobody else wrote it, and the house I saw go into the
street was the only house in the city that felt it.
I’ve always wondered if it wasn’t a little
performance gotten up for my especial entertainment
by the nether regions.
