Authors, American -- 19th century -- Biography; Humorists, American -- 19th century -- Biography; Twain, Mark, 1835-1910
I had a dream last night, and of course it was born of association, like
nearly everything else that drifts into a person's head, asleep or
awake. On board ship, on the passage down, Twichell was talking about
the swiftly developing possibilities of aerial navigation, and he quoted
those striking verses of Tennyson's which forecast a future when
air-borne vessels of war shall meet and fight above the clouds and
redden the earth below with a rain of blood. This picture of carnage and
blood and death reminded me of something which I had read a fortnight
ago--statistics of railway accidents compiled by the United States
Government, wherein the appalling fact was set forth that on our 200,000
miles of railway we annually kill 10,000 persons outright and injure
80,000. The war-ships in the air suggested the railway horrors, and
three nights afterward the railway horrors suggested my dream. The work
of association was going on in my head, unconsciously, all that time. It
was an admirable dream, what there was of it.
In it I saw a funeral procession; I saw it from a mountain peak; I saw
it crawling along and curving here and there, serpentlike, through a
level vast plain. I seemed to see a hundred miles of the procession, but
neither the beginning of it nor the end of it was within the limits of
my vision. The procession was in ten divisions, each division marked by
a sombre flag, and the whole represented ten years of our railway
activities in the accident line; each division was composed of 80,000
cripples, and was bearing its own year's 10,000 mutilated corpses to the
grave: in the aggregate 800,000 cripples and 100,000 dead, drenched in
blood!
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
FOOTNOTE:
[17] It isn't yet. Title of it, "Captain Stormfield's Visit to
Heaven."--S. L. C.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XXII.
BY MARK TWAIN.
[Sidenote: (1890.)]
[_Dictated, October 10, 1906._] Susy has named a number of the friends
who were assembled at Onteora at the time of our visit, but there were
others--among them Laurence Hutton, Charles Dudley Warner, and Carroll
Beckwith, and their wives. It was a bright and jolly company. Some of
those choice spirits are still with us; the others have passed from this
life: Mrs. Clemens, Susy, Mr. Warner, Mary Mapes Dodge, Laurence Hutton,
Dean Sage--peace to their ashes! Susy is in error in thinking Mrs. Dodge
was not there at that time; we were her guests.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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