Project Gutenberg's Roughing It, Part 6., by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

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Title: Roughing It, Part 6.

Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Release Date: July 2, 2004 [EBook #8587]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUGHING IT, PART 6. ***

Produced by David Widger

ROUGHING IT

by Mark Twain

1880

Part 6.

CHAPTER LI.

Vice flourished luxuriantly during the hey-day of our "flush times." The
saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the
gambling dens, the brothels and the jails--unfailing signs of high
prosperity in a mining region--in any region for that matter. Is it not
so? A crowded police court docket is the surest of all signs that trade
is brisk and money plenty. Still, there is one other sign; it comes
last, but when it does come it establishes beyond cavil that the "flush
times" are at the flood. This is the birth of the "literary" paper.
The Weekly Occidental, "devoted to literature," made its appearance in
Virginia. All the literary people were engaged to write for it. Mr. F.
was to edit it. He was a felicitous skirmisher with a pen, and a man who
could say happy things in a crisp, neat way. Once, while editor of the
Union, he had disposed of a labored, incoherent, two-column attack made
upon him by a contemporary, with a single line, which, at first glance,
seemed to contain a solemn and tremendous compliment--viz.: "THE LOGIC OF
OUR ADVERSARY RESEMBLES THE PEACE OF GOD,"--and left it to the reader's
memory and after-thought to invest the remark with another and "more
different" meaning by supplying for himself and at his own leisure the
rest of the Scripture--"in that it passeth understanding." He once said
of a little, half-starved, wayside community that had no subsistence
except what they could get by preying upon chance passengers who stopped
over with them a day when traveling by the overland stage, that in their
Church service they had altered the Lord's Prayer to read: "Give us this
day our daily strang