Roughing It, Mark Twain [dark books to read .TXT] 📗

world who is gifted with the pluck and perseverance necessary to follow up and hound such an undertaking to its completion. He has converted several obstinate Congresses to a deserved friendliness toward his important work, and has gone up and down and to and fro in Europe until he has enlisted a great moneyed interest in it there. ↩

A peculiar species of the “jadestone”⁠—to a Chinaman peculiarly precious. ↩

It has been purloined by fifty different scribblers who were too poor to invent a fancy but not ashamed to steal one. —⁠M. T. ↩

Being in calmer mood, now, I voluntarily knock off a hundred from that. —⁠M. T. ↩

True, and yet not exactly as given in the above figures, possibly. I saw Marshall, months afterward, and although he had plenty of money he did not claim to have captured an entire million. In fact I gathered that he had not then received $50,000. Beyond that figure his fortune appeared to consist of uncertain vast expectations rather than prodigious certainties. However, when the above item appeared in print I put full faith in it, and incontinently wilted and went to seed under it. ↩

Since dead. ↩

Missionary phrase. ↩

Ranks of long-handled mops made of gaudy feathers⁠—sacred to royalty. They are stuck in the ground around the tomb and left there. ↩

Tabu (pronounced tah-boo,) means prohibition (we have borrowed it,) or sacred. The tabu was sometimes permanent, sometimes temporary; and the person or thing placed under tabu was for the time being sacred to the purpose for which it was set apart. In the above case the victims selected under the tabu would be sacred to the sacrifice. ↩

It was deemed pollution to eat in the same hut a person slept in⁠—the fact that the patient was dying could not modify the rigid etiquette. ↩

This sounds suspicious, in view of the fact that all Sandwich Island historians, white and black, protest that cannibalism never existed in the islands. However, since they only proposed to “eat him raw” we “won’t count that.” But it would certainly have been cannibalism if they had cooked him. —⁠M. T. ↩

Colophon

Roughing It
was published in 1872 by
Mark Twain.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
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and is based on a transcription produced in 2004 by
David Widger
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive.

The cover page is adapted from
Camp Fire,
a painting completed in 1880 by
Winslow Homer.
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Uncopyright

May you do good and not evil.
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

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