ed and eaten one in a frantic
spirit of revenge. There is, of course, no truth in this. He gives at
full length a theatrical program seventeen or eighteen hundred years
old, which he professes to have found in the ruins of the Coliseum,
among the dirt and mold and rubbish. It is a sufficient comment upon
this statement to remark that even a cast-iron program would not have
lasted so long under such circumstances. In Greece he plainly betrays
both fright and flight upon one occasion, but with frozen effrontery
puts the latter in this falsely tamed form: "We SIDLED toward the
Piraeus." "Sidled," indeed! He does not hesitate to intimate that at
Ephesus, when his mule strayed from the proper course, he got down, took
him under his arm, carried him to the road again, pointed him right,
remounted, and went to sleep contentedly till it was time to restore the
beast to the path once more. He states that a growing youth among his
ship's passengers was in the constant habit of appeasing his hunger with
soap and oakum between meals. In Palestine he tells of ants that
came eleven miles to spend the summer in the desert and brought their
provisions with them; yet he shows by his description of the country
that the feat was an impossibility. He mentions, as if it were the most
commonplace of matters, that he cut a Moslem in two in broad daylight
in Jerusalem, with Godfrey de Bouillon's sword, and would have shed
more blood IF HE HAD HAD A GRAVEYARD OF HIS OWN. These statements are
unworthy a moment's attention. Mr. Twain or any other foreigner who did
such a thing in Jerusalem would be mobbed, and would infallibly lose his
life. But why go on? Why repeat more of his audacious and exasperating
falsehoods? Let us close fittingly with this one: he affirms that "in
the mosque of St. Sophia at Constantinople I got my feet so stuck up
with a complication of gums, slime, and general impurity, that I wore
out more than two thousand pair of bootjacks getting my boots off that
night, and even then some Christian hide peeled off with them." It is
monstrous. Such statements are simply lies--there is no other name
for them. Will the reader longer marvel at the brutal ignorance that
pervades the American nation when we tell him that we are informed
upon perfectly good authority that this extravagant compilation of
falsehoods, this exhaustless mine of stupendous lies, this INNOCENTS
ABROAD, has actually been adopted by the schools and colleges of sev