Download Autobiography of Mark Twain. Volume II, Harriet E. Smith, by Mark Twain PDF

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Oh” he said “it is nothing. You ought to see my brother. One day he fell overboard from a ferry-boat and when he came up a woman’s voice broke high over the tumult of frightened and anxious exclamations and said, ‘You shameless thing! And ladies present! ’” About twenty-five years ago—along there somewhere—I suggested to Orion that he write an autobiography. I asked him to try to tell the straight truth in it; to refrain from exhibiting himself in creditable attitudes exclusively, and to honorably set down all the incidents of his life which he had found interesting to him, including those which were burned into his memory because he was ashamed of them.

Fiske’s will a noble addition to its endowment—two million dollars, if I remember rightly. No doubt Cornell University was satisfied. But the University’s lawyers, picking and searching around through Mrs. Fiske’s will, found a defect in it which neither Mrs. Fiske nor Charley Warner, who drew the will , suspected was there. ” It was the opinion of those lawyers that the University might claim the little palace and its rich equipment, and make the claim good in a court of law. The claim was put forward.

I had known only one Etta Booth in my lifetime, and that one rose before me in an instant, and vividly. It was almost as if she stood alongside of this fat little antiquated dame in the bloom and diffidence and sweetness of her thirteen years, her hair in plaited braids down her back and her fire-red frock stopping short at her knees. Indeed I remembered Etta very well. And immediately another vision rose before me, with that child in the centre of it and accenting its sober tint like a torch with her red frock.