This was in the eleventh century, when
our people were living in Aberdeen, county of Cork, England. Why it is
that our long line has ever since borne the maternal name (except when
one of them now and then took a playful refuge in an alias to avert
foolishness), instead of Higgins, is a mystery which none of us has ever
felt much desire to stir. It is a kind of vague, pretty romance, and we
leave it alone. All the old families do that way.

Arthour Twain was a man of considerable note--a solicitor on the highway
in William Rufus's time. At about the age of thirty he went to one of
those fine old English places of resort called Newgate, to see about
something, and never returned again. While there he died suddenly.

Augustus Twain seems to have made something of a stir about the year
1160. He was as full of fun as he could be, and used to take his old
saber and sharpen it up, and get in a convenient place on a dark night,
and stick it through people as they went by, to see them jump. He was a
born humorist. But he got to going too far with it; and the first time
he was found stripping one of these parties, the authorities removed one
end of him, and put it up on a nice high place on Temple Bar, where it
could contemplate the people and have a good time. He never liked any
situation so much or stuck to it so long.

Then for the next two hundred years the family tree shows a succession
of soldiers--noble, high-spirited fellows, who always went into battle
singing, right behind the army, and always went out a-whooping, right
ahead of it.

This is a scathing rebuke to old dead Froissart's poor witticism that
our family tree never had but one limb to it, and that that one stuck
out at right angles, and bore fruit winter and summer.

Early in the fifteenth century we have Beau Twain, called "the Scholar."
He wrote a beautiful, beautiful hand. And he could imitate anybody's
hand so closely that it was enough to make a person laugh his head off
to see it. He had infinite sport with his talent. But by and by he took
a contract to break stone for a road, and the roughness of the work
spoiled his hand. Still, he enjoyed life all the time he was in the
stone business, which, with inconsiderable intervals, was some forty-two
years. In fact, he died in harness. During all those long years he gave
such satisfaction that he never was through with one contract a week
till the government gave him another. He was a perfect pet. And he