Roughing It

by Mark Twain

I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith & Wesson’s seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homoeopathic pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult.

I had many an exciting day, subsequently, lying on it reading the statutes and the dictionary, and wondering how the characters would turn out.

first time we had ever seen a man’s front yard on top of his house.

Slade lacked?—this

He lacked empathy

We had this spectacle; a familiar one to many, but to us a novelty.

Take my word for it, ten or eleven wives is all you need—never go over it.”

It seems a pity he did not finish, for after all his dreary former chapters of commonplace, he stopped just as he was in danger of becoming interesting.

I know a man who went there to die. But he made a failure of it.

What Mr. Ballou customarily meant, when he used a long word, was a secret between himself and his Maker.

The coffee we made of this water was the meanest compound man has yet invented.

I have scarcely exaggerated a detail of this curious and absurd adventure. It occurred almost exactly as I have stated it.

All things have their uses and their part and proper place in Nature’s economy: the ducks eat the flies—the flies eat the worms—the Indians eat all three—the wild cats eat the Indians—the white folks eat the wild cats—and thus all things are lovely.

I had been a bookseller’s clerk for awhile, but the customers bothered me so much I could not read with any comfort, and so the proprietor gave me a furlough and forgot to put a limit to it.

Necessity is the mother of “taking chances.”

I thought they were going to last always, but somehow I never was much of a prophet.

He said a man never imagined what surprising things there were in the world till he had traveled.

every effort I make to save the country “misses fire.”

Prov’dence don’t fire no blank ca’tridges, boys.

I wanted to see San Francisco. I wanted to go somewhere. I wanted—I did not know what I wanted. I had the “ fever” and wanted a change, principally, no doubt.

No land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful. The tropics are not, for all the sentiment that is wasted on them. They seem beautiful at first, but sameness impairs the charm by and by.

One never sees summer-clothing or mosquitoes in San Francisco—but they can be found in Sacramento. Not always and unvaryingly, but about one hundred and forty-three months out of twelve years, perhaps.

“Well, if it ain’t a child!” And then he snatched a little leather sack out of his pocket and said to the servant: “There’s a hundred and fifty dollars in dust, there, and I’ll give it to you to let me kiss the child!” That anecdote is true.

Whenever he was out of luck and a little down-hearted, he would fall to mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where women and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets, for they must love something).

He was a raving, deafening, devastating typhoon, laying waste the cowering seas but with an unvexed refuge in the centre where all comers were safe and at rest.

I saw cats—Tom-cats, Mary Ann cats, long-tailed cats, bob-tailed cats, blind cats, one-eyed cats, wall-eyed cats, cross-eyed cats, gray cats, black cats, white cats, yellow cats, striped cats, spotted cats, tame cats, wild cats, singed cats, individual cats, groups of cats, platoons of cats, companies of cats, regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats, millions of cats, and all of them sleek, fat, lazy and sound asleep.

These poor ignorant heathen seem to have had a sort of groping idea of what came of woman eating fruit in the garden of Eden, and they did not choose to take any more chances.

The floor room unoccupied was not extensive. One might swing a cat in it, perhaps, but not a long cat.

At noon I observed a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing in the sea, and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen.

The smell of sulphur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner.