me. From having been of slaveholding stock, and a Confederate soldier,
he had become a most positive Republican, a rampant abolitionist--had
there been anything left to abolish. His sympathy had been always with
the oppressed, and he had now become their defender. His work on the
paper revealed this more and more. He wrote fewer sketches and more
editorials, and the editorials were likely to be either savage assaults
upon some human abuse, or fierce espousals of the weak. They were
fearless, scathing, terrific. Of some farmers of Cohocton, who had taken
the law into their own hands to punish a couple whom they believed to be
a detriment to the community, he wrote:

"The men who did that deed are capable of doing any low, sneaking,
cowardly villainy that could be invented in perdition. They are the very
bastards of the devil."

He appended a full list of their names, and added:

"If the farmers of Cohocton are of this complexion, what on earth must a
Cohocton rough be like?"

But all this happened a long time ago, and we need not detail those
various old interests and labors here. It is enough to say that Mark
Twain on the Express was what he had been from the beginning, and would
be to the end--the zealous champion of justice and liberty; violent and
sometimes wrong in his viewpoint, but never less than fearless and
sincere. Invariably he was for the oppressed. He had a natural instinct
for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the under dog.

Among the best of his editorial contributions is a tribute to Anson
Burlingame, who died February 23, 1870, at St. Petersburg, on his trip
around the world as special ambassador for the Chinese Empire. In this
editorial Clemens endeavored to pay something of his debt to the noble
statesman. He reviewed Burlingame's astonishing career--the career which
had closed at forty-seven, and read like a fairy-tale-and he dwelt
lovingly on his hero's nobility of character. At the close he said:

"He was a good man, and a very, very great man. America, lost a son, and
all the world a servant, when he died."

Among those early contributions to the Express is a series called "Around
the World," an attempt at collaboration with Prof. D. R. Ford, who did
the actual traveling, while Mark Twain, writing in the first person, gave
the letters his literary stamp. At least some of the contributions were
written in this way, such as "Adventures in Hayti," "The Pacific," and
"Japan." These le