Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field

by Henry W. Fischer

TELEPATHY OR SUGGESTION

In the nineties Mark had asked me to translate his yarn on telepathy for the “Berlin Boersen Courier.” The story had caught on, and the editor kept bothering for more of that sort. Mark had promised again and again, but nothing came of it. When I asked him for the tenth or fifteenth time, he said, “Pshaw, telepathy is out of date. I saw some mental suggestion done at Professor Glossen’s in Zurich that knocked spots out of telepathy.” He asked the rest of the company to listen, and continued:

“That there be no room for deception of any kind, the professor asked me to go to any drug store in town and buy a bottle of distilled water. We scraped the label off, swathed the bottle in linen, and then buried it carefully in a box—a sort of fireless cooker arrangement. This was done before the students began to arrive. When the lecture room was good and full, the Professor addressed the boys to the effect that he was on the track of a new chemical, but that his discovery was still far from complete. The chemical, he continued, had a peculiar odor, heretofore not classified, and this morning he was anxious to study the rapidity with which that odor would diffuse itself through the air. Hence he asked the students to give the utmost attention to what he was doing. Each student was to raise his hand the moment he perceived the strange odor.

“The Professor unburied and opened the bottle, turning his head away so as not to be overcome by the odor, while I watched the proceedings by a stop-watch. The boys were all ears—nose, I mean. After fifteen seconds, most of the students in the first row were holding up a hand. In 40 seconds the odor, which did not exist, had traveled to the rear benches, and when we counted noses, seventy-five percent of the students acknowledged perception of the odor and some even went so far as to be nauseated by it.”

TRYING TO BE SERIOUS DIDN’T WORK

At Brown’s, in London, somebody spoke in glowing terms of Raymond’s portrayal of Colonel Sellers.

“You needn’t praise him for my sake,” said Mark. “I did not write the part for an actor like him at all. I wrote it for Edwin Booth. That is, I had Edwin Booth in mind when I did the play. But Raymond was the superior money-maker. He had the masses with him—and I was pressed for funds.

“As a matter of fact, my Colonel Sellers is a portrait study—a take-off on a fine old Southern gentleman, Colonel Mulberry Sellers, whom I knew in life. He had some funny traits about him, but these never counted with me. It was the pathos in his life that got me. And the pathos, relieved by a few funny things, I intended to put upon the stage. Raymond caricatured the part, and I often felt like taking it away from him.”

ASSORTED BEAUTIES

Of the Vienna women Mark Twain used to say that they were so “cussed pretty a man walking out with his wife feels relieved when he meets a plain one.”