it at a single sitting, he will deserve to be nauseated, and he will have nobody to blame but himself if he is.  There is no more sin in publishing an entire volume of nonsense than there is in keeping a candy-store with no hardware in it.  It lies wholly with the customer whether he will injure himself by means of either, or will derive from them the benefits which they will afford him if he uses their possibilities judiciously. 
                                   Respectfully submitted,
          
                                             the author.

MarkTwain’s speeches

THE STORY OF A SPEECH

An address delivered in 1877, and a review of it twenty-nine years later.  The original speech was delivered at a dinner given by the publishers of The Atlantic Monthly in honor of the seventieth anniversary o f the birth of John Greenleaf Whittier, at the Hotel Brunswick, Boston, December 17, 1877.

This is an occasion peculiarly meet for the digging up of pleasant reminiscences concerning literary folk; therefore I will drop lightly into history myself.  Standing here on the shore of the Atlantic and contemplating certain of its largest literary billows, I am reminded of a thing which happened to me thirteen years ago, when I had just succeeded in stirring up a little Nevadian literary puddle myself, whose spume-flakes were beginning to blow thinly Californiaward.  I started an inspection tramp through the southern mines of California.  I was callow and conceited, and I resolved to try the virtue of my ‘nom de guerre’.

I very soon had an opportunity.  I knocked at a miner’s lonely log cabin in the foot-hills of the Sierras just at nightfall.  It was snowing at the time.  A jaded, melancholy man of fifty, barefooted, opened the door to me.  When he heard my ‘nom de guerre’ he looked more dejected than before.  He let me in—­pretty reluctantly, I thought—­and after the customary bacon and beans, black coffee and hot whiskey, I took a pipe.  This sorrowful man had not said three words up to this time.  Now he spoke up and said, in the voice of one who is secretly suffering, “You’re the fourth—­I’m going to move.”  “The fourth what?” said I.  “The fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours—­I’m going to move.”  “You don’t tell me!” said I; “who were the others?” “Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson, and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes—­consound the lot!”

You can, easily believe I was interested.  I supplicated—­three hot whiskeys did the rest—­and finally the melancholy miner began.  Said he: