“Anyhow,” said Mark, “I felt in my heart of hearts that I was worth more dead than alive to this person—rotten grammar, I know, but don’t let that muss up your tempers, gents—and while the idea of suicide was repugnant (I was making big money then, that is, I expected to rake in $100.00 or more next week) still I cudgeled my brain for ways and means to improve his business. It’s easy enough to promote a grocer’s or butcher’s trade; all you have to do is to get rid of your sour stomach at some Appetite Cure Factory, and pitch in anew with dill pickles and strong coffee and frankfurters and sweetbreads and deep-dish pies. But an undertaker’s! Really, I had no desire to pose for Madame Toussaud’s dead-uns. At the same time, no doggone friend of mine would die, giving me the chance to bury him at my expense. Running away from that fried-fish smell, I always felt like Henry the Eighth, when one of his half-dozen queens wouldn’t be introduced to the axe-man. Indeed, if that starving undertaker had been my own best enemy, I couldn’t have felt more sorry for him. But lo!—the silver lining to the cloud! One evening, as I approached the carcassery, my startled ears were assailed by that quaint ditty:
For we are the drunkenest lot
Of the drunken Irish crew—
and, leaping forward like oiled lightning, I saw the undertaker at work in the rear of the shop.
“‘Bless me, if the ban isn’t broke,’ I thought, ‘and with this dent in the armor, Fate will waltz up plenty more diseased ones. It’s always thus.’
“Suiting my action to the classic monologue—‘thus’ is a beautiful word, isn’t it?—I peered through the side window, expecting the janitor of tenements-of-clay to be at work on a nine-foot coffin or thereabout—”
All the merriment fled from Mark Twain’s face and manner when he added: “Damme, if that God-forsaken corpse-slinger was not planing a baby coffin!
“That night I took three Scotch, and” (looking around) “I don’t care if Livy knows.”
“I thought you were going to tell a funny one,” said one of us, after a while. Clemens had got rid of his emotion by that time. “Correct,” he drawled, “It happened a few days later, when I was working the fried-fish side of the lane. The street was quite deserted on account of the lateness of the hour and owing to the burial of herrings and crab-meat in innumerable stomachs, big and little. As I put on extra steam to reach the gin-mill before closing time, this pretty legend wafted across the moonbeams:
“‘I say, my little female doggie’ (as a matter of fact, the shorter and uglier word was used, but it isn’t good form, though one may mention ‘bull pups’ at Mrs. Van Astorbilt’s tea) ‘I say, my little female doggie, tell Mother if she has another litter by that crossing sweeper of hers, to take care to drown ’em before they grow up as big as you.’