Let us, therefore, photograph a passing glimpse of book and author,
and trust the rest to the reader. Let the cultivated English student
of human nature picture to himself this Mark Twain as a person capable
of doing the following-described things--and not only doing them,
but with incredible innocence PRINTING THEM calmly and tranquilly
in a book. For instance:
He states that he entered a hair-dresser's in Paris to get shaved,
and the first "rake" the barber gave him with his razor it LOOSENED
HIS "HIDE" and LIFTED HIM OUT OF THE CHAIR.
This is unquestionably exaggerated. In Florence he was so annoyed
by beggars that he pretends to have seized and eaten one in a
frantic spirit of revenge. There is, of course, no truth in this.
He gives at full length a theatrical program seventeen or eighteen
hundred years old, which he professes to have found in the ruins
of the Coliseum, among the dirt and mold and rubbish. It is a
sufficient comment upon this statement to remark that even a cast-iron
program would not have lasted so long under such circumstances.
In Greece he plainly betrays both fright and flight upon one occasion,
but with frozen effrontery puts the latter in this falsely tamed form:
"We SIDLED toward the Piraeus." "Sidled," indeed! He does not hesitate
to intimate that at Ephesus, when his mule strayed from the proper course,
he got down, took him under his arm, carried him to the road again,
pointed him right, remounted, and went to sleep contentedly till
it was time to restore the beast to the path once more.
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