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Twain, Mark, 1835-1910

"The 30,000 Dollar Bequest and Other Stories"


If she could quiet down and keep still a couple minutes at a time,
it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that case I think I could
enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming
to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature
--lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful; and once
when she was standing marble-white and sun-drenched on a boulder,
with her young head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes,
watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized that she
was beautiful.
MONDAY NOON.--If there is anything on the planet that she is not
interested in it is not in my list. There are animals that I am
indifferent to, but it is not so with her. She has no discrimination,
she takes to all of them, she thinks they are all treasures,
every new one is welcome.
When the mighty brontosaurus came striding into camp, she regarded
it as an acquisition, I considered it a calamity; that is a good
sample of the lack of harmony that prevails in our views of things.
She wanted to domesticate it, I wanted to make it a present of the
homestead and move out. She believed it could be tamed by kind
treatment and would be a good pet; I said a pet twenty-one feet
high and eighty-four feet long would be no proper thing to have
about the place, because, even with the best intentions and without
meaning any harm, it could sit down on the house and mash it,
for any one could see by the look of its eye that it was absent-minded.


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