t. But health permits are not granted after seven in the evening,
partly because a ship cannot be inspected and overhauled with exhaustive,
thoroughness except in daylight, and partly because health-officers are
liable to catch cold if they expose themselves to the night air. Still,
you can buy a permit after hours for five dollars extra, and the officer
will do the inspecting next week. Our ship and passengers lay under
expense and in humiliating captivity all night, under the very nose of
the little official reptile who is supposed to protect New York from
pestilence by his vigilant "inspections." This imposing rigor gave
everybody a solemn and awful idea of the beneficent watchfulness of our
government, and there were some who wondered if anything finer could be
found in other countries.

In the morning we were all a-tiptoe to witness the intricate ceremony
of inspecting the ship. But it was a disappointing thing. The
health-officer's tug ranged alongside for a moment, our purser handed the
lawful three-dollar permit fee to the health-officer's bootblack, who
passed us a folded paper in a forked stick, and away we went. The entire
"inspection" did not occupy thirteen seconds.

The health-officer's place is worth a hundred thousand dollars a year to
him. His system of inspection is perfect, and therefore cannot be
improved on; but it seems to me that his system of collecting his fees
might be amended. For a great ship to lie idle all night is a most
costly loss of time; for her passengers to have to do the same thing
works to them the same damage, with the addition of an amount of
exasperation and bitterness of soul that the spectacle of that
health-officer's ashes on a shovel could hardly sweeten. Now why would
it not be better and simpler to let the ships pass in unmolested, and the
fees and permits be exchanged once a year by post.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Rambling Notes of an Idle
Excursion, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

THE STOLEN WHITE ELEPHANT

by Mark Twain

[Left out of A Tramp Abroad, because it was feared that some of the
particulars had been exaggerated, and that others were not true. Before
these suspicions had been proven groundless, the book had gone to press.
--M. T.]

The following curious history was related to me by a chance railway
acquaintance. He was a gentleman more than seventy years of age, and his
thoroughly good and gentle face an