Twain re Pipes

[Scottmi]

I have been saving this just for today. Enjoy!

We all know Mark Twain was a famous pipe smoker. Here I offer an excerpt from the little known initial draft of the Mark Twain classic (originally titled "The Celebrated Smoking Pipe of Calaveras County") which has been carefully transcribed from the original scrawls collected from the back labels of his favored Killikinick mixture:

The feller took the pipe again, and took another long, particular look, and give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate, "Well, I don't see no p'ints about that pipe that's any better'n any other pipe."

"May be you don't," Smiley says. "May be you understand pipes, and may be you don't understand 'em; may be you've had experience, and may be you an't only a amature, as it were. Anyways, I've got my opinion, and I'll risk forty dollars that it can outsmoke any pipe in Calaveras county."

Twain is the best.

 

[kcghost]

If nothing else he was clever.

 

[Grangerous]

T’was a WhiteSpot Corn Cob.

 

[mso489]

Samuel Clemons made his living from his wit, his droll humor, that gave people many happy evenings reading and many amusing evenings hearing him at the podium.

However, he stays with us as a literary voice because of his penetrating insights into human nature and his ability to wrap intensely dark aspects of humanity in enough humor to make people tolerate them and remember them.

Anyone who has read Huckleberry Finn with any understanding will not soon forget that.

At his mansion in Hartford, Conn., there is a music box on a stairway landing with the quote: "I'd like opera if it wasn't for all that damned singing."