MARK TWAIN
writers I ever read. The book merits its enormous success
simply as literature-"
My books arc water; those of the great geniuses are
wine. Everybody drinks water.
What is biography? Unadorned romance. What is ro-
mance? Adorned biography. Adorn it less and it will be
better than it is.
Special Providence! That phrase nauseates me—with
its implied importance of mankind and triviality of God.
In my opinion these myriads of globes are merely the
blood corpuscles ebbing and flowing through the arteries
of God and we but animalcule that infest them, disease
them, pollute them; and God does not know we are there
and would not care if He did.
Nine-tenths of the pages of his notebooks now
are filled with comments, estimates, and the like
concerning the machine, but occasionally he has
a diversion like this:
August 31, 1886. Revealed to Livy my project of buy-
ing the remains of Christopher Columbus and placing
them in the base of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening
the World in New York Harbor. No—rotunda of the
Capitol at Washington,
In Wales the parson came to collect tithes. The farm-
er's wife said—"Parson, I have eleven children—will you
take one of them? You take the tenth pig, will you have
the tenth child?"
And is "tithes" a tenth of all a man's crop alive and
otherwise? However, call it a tenth of the animal crop of
live stock only, and think what a frightful tax it is on a
poor man. It does leave a gap as if one of his family had
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