“‘Here goes,’ said the President, reached his right hand back, and pulled off his stovepipe in the old Illinois circuit style.”
“You see,” concluded Mark, “it was no use trying to make a courtier of Lincoln. The same here.”
MARK AT THE STOCK EXCHANGE, VIENNA
A day or two after I sent Clemens my translation of Field Marshal Count Moltke’s Letters, he called at my hotel in the forenoon and proposed that we walk to the stock exchange. The stock exchange, as usual, was swarming with gentlemen of the Jewish persuasion, and Mark asked me to pay particular attention to them.
“They are the smartest of the lot here,” he insisted, “and so is a Jewish peddler smarter than a Christian house-owner—I mean the average. I say it again; the Jews are the greatest people let loose.
“According to Moltke’s essay in the Letters you sent me, the Jews ate up Poland. Very well, the storks eat up frogs. Do we blame the storks?”
MARK AND THE PRUSSIAN LIEUTENANT
Mark liked to be taken around to real German places, and one day I escorted him to a Weinstube Unter den Linden, which had quite a reputation for liquid and other refreshments. The room we entered was full of lunchers; we sat down at a small side table that afforded a good look around. About fifteen feet ahead of us was a pier glass on the wall between two windows, and in front of it a table where an old man with his frau were eating the national dish with sausage trimmings. The old folks were enjoying themselves heartily, and, as Mark put it, “they ate so you can hear them a mile off, like Chicago millionaires.”
Presently, a young lieutenant strode in, sword trailing, spurs jingling.
“Look at that,” said Mark. “All the stupidity and maliciousness of his ancestors, male and female, for two hundred years back, is mirrored in his face.”