Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Part 7Twain, Mark
General
Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Part 7
Twain, Mark
Equator -- Description and travel; Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 -- Travel; Voyages around the world
"The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of America.
"The Stamp Act was to make everybody stamp all materials so they should
be null and void.
"Washington died in Spain almost broken-hearted. His remains were taken
to the cathedral in Havana.
"Gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas."
In Brooklyn, as in India, they examine a pupil, and when they find out he
doesn't know anything, they put him into literature, or geometry, or
astronomy, or government, or something like that, so that he can properly
display the assification of the whole system--
"ON LITERATURE.
"'Bracebridge Hall' was written by Henry Irving.
"Edgar A. Poe was a very curdling writer.
"Beowulf wrote the Scriptures.
"Ben Johnson survived Shakespeare in some respects.
"In the 'Canterbury Tale' it gives account of King Alfred on his way to
the shrine of Thomas Bucket.
"Chaucer was the father of English pottery.
"Chaucer was succeeded by H. Wads. Longfellow."
We will finish with a couple of samples of "literature," one from
America, the other from India. The first is a Brooklyn public-school
boy's attempt to turn a few verses of the "Lady of the Lake" into prose.
You will have to concede that he did it:
"The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an instrument made
of steel alone with strong ardor not diminishing, for, being tired from
the time passed with hard labor overworked with anger and ignorant with
weariness, while every breath for labor lie drew with cries full of
sorrow, the young deer made imperfect who worked hard filtered in sight."
The following paragraph is from a little book which is famous in India
--the biography of a distinguished Hindoo judge, Onoocool Chunder
Mookerjee; it was written by his nephew, and is unintentionally funny-in
fact, exceedingly so. I offer here the closing scene. If you would like
to sample the rest of the book, it can be had by applying to the
publishers, Messrs. Thacker, Spink & Co., Calcutta
"And having said these words he hermetically sealed his lips not to
open them again. All the well-known doctors of Calcutta that could
be procured for a man of his position and wealth were brought,
--Doctors Payne, Fayrer, and Nilmadhub Mookerjee and others; they did
what they could do, with their puissance and knack of medical
knowledge, but it proved after all as if to milk the ram! His wife
and children had not the mournful consolation to hear his last
words; he remained sotto voce for a few hours, and then was taken
from us at 6.12 P.m. according to the caprice of God which passeth
understanding."
CHAPTER LXII.
There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined ones.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
We sailed from Calcutta toward the end of March; stopped a day at Madras;
two or three days in Ceylon; then sailed westward on a long flight for
Mauritius. From my diary:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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