MARK TWAIN. A humorous writer of the nineteenth century. As yet, I have not had the honor of his acquaintance, but when I do meet him I shall say something jocose. I know I shall. I have it. My plan will be to inveigle him into going over a ferry to "see a man." As we pass up the slip on the other side, I shall draw out my flask, impromptu-like, with the invitation, "Mark, my dear fellow, won't you take something?" He will decline, of course, or else he isn't the humorist I take him for. I shall then consider it my duty to urge him. Fixing my eye steadily upon him, so he can understand that I am terribly in earnest, I shall proceed to apostrophize that genial victim as follows:
"Take, I give it willingly, For invisibly to thee, Spirits, Twain, have crossed with me."
Then I presume we shall go and "see a man."
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. The man who discovered America two points off the port-bow. One day, in his garden, he observed an apple falling from its tree, whereupon a conviction flashed suddenly through his mind that the earth was round. By breaking the bottom of an egg and making it stand on end at the dinner-table, he demonstrated that he could sail due west and in course of time arrive at another hemisphere. He started a line of emigrant packets from Palos, Spain, and landed at Philadelphia, where he walked up Market street with a loaf of bread under each arm. The simple-hearted natives took him out to see their new Park. On his second voyage Columbus was barbarously murdered at the Sandwich Islands, or rather he would have been but for the intervention of Pocahontas, a lovely maiden romantically fond of distressed travelers. After this little incident he went West, where his intrepidity and masterly financial talent displayed itself in the success with which he acquired land and tobacco without paying for them. As the savages had no railroad of which they could make him president, they ostracized him--sent him to the island of St. Helena. But the spirit of discovery refused to be quenched, and the next year we find him landing at Plymouth Rock in a blinding snow-storm. It was here that he shot an apple from his son's head. To this universal genius are we indebted also for the exploration of the sources of the Nile, and for an unintelligible but correspondingly valuable scientific report of a visit to the valley of the Yellowstone. He took no side in our late unhappy war; but during the Revolution he penetrated with a handful of the _garde mobile_ into the mountain-fastnesses of Minnesota, where he won that splendid series of victories which, beginning with Guilford Court-house, terminated in the glorious storming of Chapultepec. Ferdinand and Isabella rewarded him with chains. Genoa, his native city, gave him a statue, and Boston has named in his honor one of her proudest avenues. One day he rushed naked from the bath, exclaiming, "Eureka!" and the presumption is that he was right. He afterward explained himself by saying that he cared not who made the laws of a people, so long as he furnished their ballots. Columbus was cruelly put to death by order of Richard III. of England, and as he walked to the scaffold he exclaimed to the throng that stood around him, "The world moves." The drums struck up to drown his words. Smiling at this little by-play, he adjusted his crimson mantle about him and laid his head upon the block. He then drank off the cup of hemlock with philosophic composure. This great man's life (which, by the way, was not insured) teaches the beautiful moral lesson that an excess of virtue is apt to be followed by a redundancy of happiness, and that he who would secure the felicity of to-day must disdain alike the evanescent shadows of yesterday and the intangible adumbrations of the morrow.