The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Mark Twain [good summer reads .TXT] 📗

were aware of this; the girl’s parents were aware of it; the university was aware of it; Ithaca was aware of it. All these parties expected Fiske to propose, but he didn’t do it. There was no way to account for it, and so all the parties, including the girl, went on from month to month and year to year in a condition of suppressed surprise, waiting for the mystery to solve itself. Which it still didn’t do. At last Mr. McGraw died, and the fact developed that he had left no will. Therefore the daughter was sole heir. However, she knew what her father’s intention had been, so she turned over to the university a good part of the fortune and thus made the intention good.

The years drifted along and the relations between Fiske and Miss McGraw remained the same. But there was no proposal. Fiske had a quite definite reason for not proposing. It was that he was very poor and the girl very rich, and he was not willing to seem to marry her for her money. This was good morals, good principle, good sentiment⁠—but it was not business. Things remained just in this way for years and years, and the devotion of the couple to each other went along unimpaired by time. At last, when they were well stricken in years, and when Miss McGraw had developed pulmonary consumption, she invited Fiske and Charles Dudley Warner and his wife to make a trip up the Nile with her in the old-fashioned dahabiyeh, a trip which occupied a matter of three months. Miss McGraw had already been on the other side of the ocean several months, and she had been buying all sorts of beautiful things⁠—pictures, sculpture, costly rugs, and so on⁠—wherewith to adorn a little palace which she was building in Ithaca.

At last there on board the dahabiyeh a sorrowful time came⁠—for Miss McGraw’s malady was making great progress and it was manifest that she could not live long. Then she came out frankly and said she wanted to marry Fiske so that she could leave her fortune to him. Fiske wanted to marry her, but his ideas remained unimpaired in his heart and head and he was not willing to accept the fortune. The Warners wrought with him. They used their best persuasions. He was as anxious for the marriage as was Miss McGraw, but he wouldn’t accept the fortune. At last he was persuaded to a modification of the terms. He was willing to accept the little palace and its furnishings and three hundred thousand dollars; he would accept nothing more. The marriage took place. Mrs. Fiske made a will, and in the will she left the palace and its furnishings and three hundred thousand dollars to her husband, Willard Fisk. She left the residue of the fortune to Cornell University.

By and by Fiske arrived at an understanding of the fact that he had not acted wisely. The income of three hundred thousand dollars was wholly inadequate. He could not live in the Ithaca house on any such income as that. He did not try to live in it. There it stood, with all those beautiful things in it which Miss McGraw had gathered in her travels in Europe, and Fiske lived elsewhere⁠—lived most comfortably elsewhere⁠—lived where three hundred thousand dollars was really a fortune, and he was entirely satisfied. He lived in Italy. He was as dear and sweet a soul as I have ever known. His was a character which won friends for him, and whoso became his friend remained so, ever afterward.

Now followed this curious circumstance. Cornell had received by Mrs. 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 something about “residue.” 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. Fiske and Warner were outraged by this insolence, this greed. Both knew that it was the desire of the dying wife that her husband should live in that house and have the sacred companionship of those things which had been selected by her own hands for its adornment. Both knew that but for Fiske’s stubborn resistance he would have had not only the house, but a great sum of money besides, and now that the university proposed to take the house away from Fiske⁠—well, it was time for the worm to turn. The worm turned. Fiske was the worm. Fiske resisted the university’s claim and the university brought suit.

Now then, I must go back to a point antedating the bringing of this suit three or four years. One day in Hartford a young fellow called and wanted to see me. I think he said he was from Canada. He said he had a strong desire, an irresistible desire, to become a lawyer, and he thought that if he could get some work to do that would support him, he could meantime use his off hours, if he had any, in studying Blackstone. He thought he could be a journalist. He thought he could at least become a good reporter, and his idea was to get me to use my influence with the Hartford newspaper people to the end that he might get the sort of chance he was after.

I said: “Certainly, I will get you a berth in any newspaper in the town. Choose your own paper.”

He was very grateful. These clients of mine always are, until they learn the conditions. I furnished him the conditions in the same old way. He considered a moment and then said:

“How simple that is; how sure it is; how certain it is; how actually infallible it is, human nature