long or too expressive to be hurled in rapid succession
to emphasize the utter want of character of the man assailed.... There
were typesetters there who could hurl anathemas at bad copy which would
have frightened a Bengal tiger. The news editor could damn a mutilated
dispatch in twenty-four languages."

In San Francisco in the sizzling sixties we catch a glimpse of Mark
Twain and his buddy, Steve Gillis, pausing in doorways to sing "The
Doleful Ballad of the Neglected Lover," an old piece of uncollected
erotica. One morning, when a dog began to howl, Steve awoke "to find
his room-mate standing in the door that opened out into a back garden,
holding a big revolver, his hand shaking with cold and excitement,"
relates Paine in his Biography.

"'Come here, Steve,' he said. 'I'm so chilled through I can't get a bead
on him.'

"'Sam,' said Steve, 'don't shoot him. Just swear at him. You can easily
kill him at any range with your profanity.'

"Steve Gillis declares that Mark Twain let go such a scorching, singeing
blast that the brute's owner sold him the next day for a Mexican
hairless dog."

Nor did Mark's "geysers of profanity" cease spouting after these gay and
youthful days in San Francisco. With Clemens it may truly be said that
profanity was an art--a pyrotechnic art that entertained nations.

"It was my duty to keep buttons on his shirts," recalled Katy Leary,
life-long housekeeper and friend in the Clemens menage, "and he'd
swear something terrible if I didn't. If he found a shirt in his drawer
without a button on, he'd take every single shirt out of that drawer and
throw them right out of the window, rain or shine--out of the
bathroom window they'd go. I used to look out every morning to see
the snowflakes--anything white. Out they'd fly.... Oh! he'd swear at
anything when he was on a rampage. He'd swear at his razor if it didn't
cut right, and Mrs. Clemens used to send me around to the bathroom door
sometimes to knock and ask him what was the matter. Well, I'd go and
knock; I'd say, 'Mrs. Clemens wants to know what's the matter.' And then
he'd say to me (kind of low) in a whisper like, 'Did she hear me Katy?'
'Yes,' I'd say, 'every word.' Oh, well, he was ashamed then, he was
afraid of getting scolded for swearing like that, because Mrs. Clemens
hated swearing." But his swearing never seemed really bad to Katy Leary,
"It was sort of funny, and a part of him, somehow," she said. "Sort of
amusing it was--and