Letters from the Earth

Mark Twain

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780062287267
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Religious Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"The most impressive contribution to books by Mark Twain since The Mysterious Stranger of 1916...The attitude is that of Swift, the intellectual contempt is that of Voltaire, and the imagination is that of one of the great masters of American writing."—New York Times Book Review

Virtually none of the material in Letters from the Earth was published in Twain's lifetime and the manuscript was only approved by his executors in 1962. This is vintage Twain—sharp, witty, imaginative, wildly funny. His voice is as vigorous and blistering as ever, capable of surprising truth and provoking laughter in the most unlikely places.

In this collection, he presents himself as the Father of History, reviewing and interpreting events from the garden of Eden through the Fall and the Flood, translating the papers of Adam and his descendants down through the generations. There are comments on James Fenimore Cooper, English architecture, and the civilization of the French, as well as proposals for a simplified alphabet and a parody of books on etiquette. Letters from the Earth an exuberantly eclectic collection.

The Great Dark

Before It Happened Statement by Mrs. Edwards

We were in no way prepared for this dreadful thing. We were a happy family, we had been happy from the beginning; we did not know what trouble was, we were not thinking of it nor expecting it.

My husband was thirty-five years old, and seemed ten years younger, for he was one of those fortunate people who by nature are overcharged with breezy spirits and vigorous health, and from whom cares and troubles slide off without making any impression. He was my ideal, and indeed my idol. In my eyes he was everything that a man ought to be, and in spirit and body beautiful. We were married when I was a girl of sixteen, and we now had two children, comely and dear little creatures: Jessie, eight years old, and Bessie, six.

The house had been in a pleasant turmoil all day, this 19th of March, for it was Jessie’s birthday. Henry (my husband) had romped with the children till I was afraid he would tire them out and unfit them for their party in the evening, which was to be a children’s fancy dress dance; and so I was glad when at last in the edge of the evening he took them to our bedroom to show them the grandest of all the presents, the microscope. I allowed them fifteen minutes for this show. I would put the children into their costumes, then, and have them ready to receive their great flock of little friends and the accompanying parents. Henry would then be free to jot down in shorthand (he was a past master in that art) an essay which he was to read at the social club the next night. I would show the children to him in their smart costumes when the party should be over and the goodnight kisses due.

I left the three in a state of great excitement over the microscope, and at the end of the fifteen minutes I returned for the children. They and their papa were examining the wonders of a drop of water through a powerful lens. I delivered the children to a maid and they went away. Henry said, “I will take forty winks and then go to work. But I will make a new experiment with the drop of water first. Won’t you please strengthen the drop with the merest touch of Scotch whisky and stir up the animals?”

Then he threw himself on the sofa and before I could speak he uttered a snore. That came of romping the whole day. In reaching for the whisky decanter I knocked off the one that contained brandy and it broke. The noise stopped the snore. I stooped and gathered up the broken glass hurriedly in a towel, and when I rose to put it out of the way he was gone. I dipped a broomstraw in the Scotch whisky and let a wee drop fall upon the glass slide where the water drop was, then I crossed to the glass door to tell him it was ready. But he had lit the gas and was at his table writing. It was the rule of the house not to disturb him when he was at work; so I went about my affairs in the picture gallery, which was our house’s ballroom.

Statement by Mr. Edwards

We were experimenting with the microscope. And pretty ignorantly. Among the little glass slides in the box we found one labeled “section of a fly’s eye.” In its center was faintly visible a dot. We put it under a low-power lens and it showed up like a fragment of honeycomb. We put it under a stronger lens and it became a window sash. We put it under the most powerful lens of all, then there was room in the field for only one pane of the several hundred. We were childishly delighted and astonished at the magnifying capacities of that lens, and said, “Now we can find out if there really are living animals in a drop of water, as the books say.”

We brought some stale water from a puddle in the carriage house where some rotten hay lay soaking, sucked up a dropperful and allowed a tear of it to fall on a glass slide. Then we worked the screws and brought the lens down until it almost touched the water; then shut an eye and peered eagerly down through the barrel. A disappointment—nothing showed. Then we worked the screws again and made the lens touch the water. Another disappointment—nothing visible. Once more we worked the screws and projected the lens hard against the glass slide itself. Then we saw the animals! Not frequently, but now and then. For a time there would be a great empty blank; then a monster would enter one horizon of this great white sea made so splendidly luminous by the reflector and go plowing across and disappear beyond the opposite horizon. Others would come and go at intervals and disappear. The lens was pressing against the glass slide; therefore how could those bulky creatures crowd through between and not get stuck? Yet they swam with perfect freedom; it was plain that they had all the room and all the water that they needed. Then how unimaginably little they must be! Moreover, that wide circular sea which they were traversing was only a small part of our drop of stale water; it was not as big as the head of a pin; whereas the entire drop, flattened out on the glass, was as big around as a child’s finger ring. If we could have gotten the whole drop under the lens we could have seen those gruesome fishes swim leagues and leagues before they dwindled out of sight at the further shore!

I threw myself on the sofa profoundly impressed by what I had seen, and oppressed with thinkings. An ocean in a drop of water—and unknown, uncharted, unexplored by man! By man, who gives all his time to the Africas and the poles, with this unsearched marvelous world right at his elbow. Then the Superintendent of Dreams appeared at my side, and we talked it over. He was willing to provide a ship and crew, but said, “It will be like any other voyage of the sort—not altogether a holiday excursion.”

“That is all right; it is not an objection.”

“You and your crew will be much diminished, as to size, but you need not trouble about that, as you will not be aware of it. Your ship itself, stuck upon the point of a needle, would not be discoverable except through a microscope of very high power.”

“I do not mind these things. Get a crew of whalers. It will be well to have men who will know what to do in case we have trouble with those creatures.’ ”

“Better still if you avoid them.”

“I shall avoid them if I can, for they have done me no harm, and I would not wantonly hurt any creature, but I shan’t run from them. They have an ugly look, but I thank God I am not afraid of the ugliest that ever plowed a drop of water.”

“You think so now, with your five feet eight, but it will be a different matter when the mote that floats in a sunbeam is Mont Blanc compared to you.”

“It is no matter; you have seen me face dangers before—”

“Finish with your orders—the night is slipping away.”

“Very well, then. Provide me a naturalist to tell me the names of the creatures we see; and let the ship be a comfortable one and perfectly appointed and provisioned, for I take my family with me.”

Half a minute later (as it seemed to me), a hoarse voice broke on my ear:

“Topsails all—let go the lee brace—sheet home the stuns’le boom—hearty, now, and all together!”

I turned out, washed the sleep out of my eyes with a dash of cold water, and stepped out of my cabin, leaving Alice quietly sleeping in her berth. It was a blustering night and dark, and the air was thick with a driving mist out of which the tall masts and bellying clouds of sail towered spectrally, faintly flecked here and there aloft by the smothered signal lanterns. The ship was heaving and wallowing in the heavy seas, and it was hard to keep one’s footing on the moist deck. Everything was dimmed to obliteration, almost; the only thing sharply defined was the foamy mane of white water, sprinkled with phosphorescent sparks, which broke away from the lee bow. Men were within twenty steps of me, but I could not make out their figures; I only knew they were there by their voices. I heard the quartermaster report to the second mate, “Eight bells, sir.”

“Very well—make it so.”

Then I heard the muffled sound of the distant bell, followed by a far-off cry: “Eight bells and a cloudy morning—anchor watch turn out!”

I saw the glow of a match photograph a pipe and part of a face against the solid bank of darkness, and groped my way thither and found the second mate.

“What of the weather, mate?”

“I don’t see that it’s any better, sir, than it was the first day out, ten days ago; if anything it’s worse—thicker and blacker, I mean. You remember the spitting snow flurries we had that night?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we’ve had them again tonight. And hail and sleet besides, b’George! And here it comes again.”

We stepped into the sheltering lee of the galley, and stood there listening to the lashing of the hail along the deck and the singing of the wind in the cordage.

The mate said, “I’ve been at sea thirty years, man and boy, but for a level ten-day stretch of unholy weather this bangs anything I ever struck, north of the Horn—if we are north of it. For I’m blest if I know where we are—do you?”

It was an embarrassing question. I had been asked it very confidentially by my captain, long ago, and had been able to state that I didn’t know; and had been discreet enough not to go into any particulars; but this was the first time that any officer of the ship had approached me with the matter. I said, “Well, no, I’m not a sailor, but I am surprised to hear you say you don’t know where we are.”

He was caught. It was his turn to be embarrassed. First he began to hedge, and vaguely let on that perhaps he did know, after all; but he made a lame fist of it, and presently gave it up and concluded to be frank and take me into his confidence.

“I’m going to be honest with you, sir—and don’t give me away.” He put his mouth close to my ear and sheltered it against the howling wind with his hand to keep from having to shout, and said impressively, “Not only I don’t know where we are, sir, but by God the captain himself don’t know!”

I had met the captain’s confession by pretending to be frightened and distressed at having engaged a man who was ignorant of his business; and then he had changed his note and told me he had only meant that he had lost his bearings in the thick weather—a thing which would rectify itself as soon as he could get a glimpse of the sun. But I was willing to let the mate tell me all he would, so long as I was not to “give it away.”

“No, sir, he don’t know where he is; lets on to, but he don’t. I mean, he lets on to the crew, and his daughters, and young Phillips the purser, and of course to you and your family, but here lately he don’t let on any more to the chief mate and me. And worried? I tell you he’s worried plumb to his vitals.”

“I must say I don’t much like the look of this, Mr. Turner.”

“Well, don’t let on, sir; keep it to yourself—maybe it’ll come out all right; hope it will. But you look at the facts—just look at the facts. We sail north—see? North-and-by-east-half-east, to be exact. Noon the fourth day out, heading for Sable Island—ought to see it, weather rather thin for this voyage. Don’t see it. Think the dead reckoning ain’t right, maybe. We bang straight along, all the afternoon. No Sable Island. Damned if we didn’t run straight over it! It warn’t there. What do you think of that?”

“Dear me, it is awful—awful—if true.”

“If true. Well, it is true. True as anything that ever was, I take my oath on it. And then Greenland. We three banked our hopes on Greenland. Night before last we couldn’t sleep for uneasiness; just anxiety, you know, to see if Greenland was going to be there. By the dead reckoning she was due to be in sight along anywhere from five to seven in the morning, if clear enough. But we stayed on deck all night. Of course two of us had no business there, and had to scuttle out of the way whenever a man came along, or they would have been suspicious. But five o’clock came, seven o’clock, eight o’clock, ten o’clock, and at last twelve—and then the captain groaned and gave in! He knew well enough that if there had been any Greenland left we’d have knocked a corner off of it long before that.”

“This is appalling!”

“You may hunt out a bigger word than that and it won’t cover it, sir. And Lord, to see the captain, gray as ashes, sweating and worrying over his chart all day yesterday and all day today, and spreading his compasses here and spreading them there, and getting suspicious of his chronometer, and damning the dead reckoning—just suffering death and taxes, you know, and me and the chief mate helping and suffering, and that purser and the captain’s oldest girl spooning and cackling around, just in heaven! I’m a poor man, sir, but if I could buy out half of each of ’em’s ignorance and put it together and make it a whole, blamed if I wouldn’t put up my last nickel to do it, you hear me. Now—”

A wild gust of wind drowned the rest of his remark and smothered us in a fierce flurry of snow and sleet. He darted away and disappeared in the gloom, but first I heard his voice hoarsely shouting, “Turn out, all hands, shorten sail!”

There was a rush of feet along the deck, and then the gale brought the dimmed sound of far-off commands:

“Mizzen foretop halyards there—all clew garnets heave and away—now then, with a will—sheet home!”

And then the plaintive notes that told that the men were handling the kites:

If you get there, before I do—

Hi—ho-o-o, roll a man down;

If you get there before I do,

Oh, give a man tim...