that the intellectual coinage of Dreamland often
passes for more there than it would fetch here.
Many a time in after years my dream-sweetheart
threw off golden sayings which crumbled to ashes
under my pencil when I was setting them down in
my note-book after breakfast.

I carried her back and started over again ; and all
the long afternoon I bore her in my arms, miles upon
miles, and it never occurred to either of us that
there was anything remarkable in a youth like me
being able to carry that sweet bundle around half
a day without some sense of fatigue or need of rest.
There are many dream-worlds, but none is so rightly
and reasonably and pleasantly arranged as that one.

After dark we reached a great plantation-house,
and it was her home. I carried her in, and the
family knew me and I knew them, although we had
not met before; and the mother asked me with
ill disguised anxiety how much twelve times fourteen
was, and I said a hundred and thirty-five, and she
put it down on a piece of paper, saying it was her
habit in the process of perfecting her education not
to trust important particulars to her memory; and
her husband was offering me a chair, but noticed
that Helen was asleep, so he said it would be best
not to disturb her; and he backed me softly against
a wardrobe and said I could stand more easily now;

293



MARK TWAIN

then a negro came in, bowing humbly, with his
slouch-hat in his hand, and asked me if I would
have my measure taken. The question did not
surprise me, but it confused me and worried me, and
I said I should like to have advice about it. He
started toward the door to call advisers; then he
and the family and the lights began to grow dim,
and in a few moments the place was pitch dark;
but straightway there came a flood of moonlight and
a gust of cold wind, and I found myself crossing a
frozen lake, and my arms were empty. The wave of
grief that swept through me woke me up, and I was
sitting at my desk in the newspaper office in San
Francisco, and I noticed by the clock that I had
been asleep less than two minutes. And what was
of more consequence, I was twenty-nine years old.

That was 1864. The next year and the year after
I had momentary glimpses of my dream-sweetheart,
but nothing more. These are set down in my note
books under their proper dates, but with no talks
nor other particulars added ; which is sufficient evi
dence to me that there were none to add. In both
of these instances there was the sudden meeting and
recognition, the eager approach, then the instant
disappearance, leaving the world empty and of no
worth. I remember the two images quite well; in
fact, I remember all the images of that spirit, and
can bring them before me without help of my note
book. The habit of writing down my dreams of all
sorts while they were fresh in my mind, and then
studying them and rehearsing them and trying to
find out what the source of dreams is, and which of

294



MY PLATONIC SWEETHEART

the two or three separate persons inhabiting us is
their architect, has given me a good dream-memory
a thing which is not usual with people, for few
drill the dream-memory and, no memory can be
kept strong without that.

I spent a few months in the Hawaiian Islands in
1866, and in October of that year I delivered my
maiden lecture; it was in San Francisco. In the
following January I arrived in New York, and had
just completed my thirty-first year. In that year
I saw my platonic dream-sweetheart again. In this
dream I was again standing on the stage of the
Opera House in San Francisco, ready to lecture, and
with the audience vividly individualized before me
in the strong light. I began, spoke a few words,
and stopped, cold with fright; for I discovered that
I had no subject, no text, nothing to talk about. I
choked for a while, then got out a few words, a lame,
poor attempt at humor. The house made no
response. There was a miserable pause, then another
attempt, and another failure. There were a few
scornful laughs; otherwise the house was silent,
unsmilingly austere, deeply offended. I was con
suming with shame. In my distress I tried to work
upon its pity. I began to make servile apologies,
mixed with gross and ill-timed flatteries, and to beg
and plead for forgiveness; this was too much, and
the people broke into insulting cries, whistlings,
hootings, and cat-calls, and in the midst of this
they rose and began to struggle in a confused mass
toward the door. I stood dazed and helpless, looking
out over this spectacle, and thinking how everybody

295



MARK TWAIN

would be talking about it next day, and I could not
show myself in the streets. When the house was
become wholly empty and still, I sat down on the
only chair that was on the stage and bent my head
down on the reading-desk to shut out the look of
that place. Soon that familiar dream-voice spoke
my name, and swept all my troubles away:

"Robert!"

I answered:

"Agnes!"

The next moment we two were lounging up the
blossomy gorge called the lao Valley, in the Hawaiian
Islands. I recognized, without any explanations,
that Robert was not my name, but only a pet name,
a common noun, and meant "dear"; and both of
us knew that Agnes was not a name, but only a pet
name, a common noun, whose spirit was affectionate,
but not conveyable with exactness in any but the
dream-language. It was about the equivalent of
"dear, "but the dream-vocabulary shaves meanings
finer and closer than do the world's daytime diction
aries. We did not know why those words should
have those meanings; we had used words which
had no existence in any known language, and had
expected them to be understood, and they were
understood. In my note-books there are several
letters from this dream-sweetheart, in some unknown
tongue presumably dream-tongue with transla
tions added. I should like to be master of that
tongue, then I could talk in shorthand. Here is
one of those letters the whole of it :

"Raxohatal."

296



MY PLATONIC SWEETHEART

Translation. "When you receive this it will
remind you that I long to see your face and touch
your hand, for the comfort of it and the peace."

It is swifter than waking thought; for thought is
not thought at all, but only a vague and formless
fog until it is articulated into words.

We wandered far up the fairy gorge, gathering the
beautiful flowers of the ginger-plant and talking
affectionate things, and tying and retying each other's
ribbons and cravats, which didn't need it ; and finally
sat down in the shade of a tree and climbed the vine-
hung precipices with our eyes, up and up and up
toward the sky to where the drifting scarfs of white
mist clove them across and left the green summits
floating pale and remote, like spectral islands wander
ing in the deeps of space; and then we descended to
earth and talked again.

1 ' How still it is and soft, and balmy, and reposeful !
I could never tire of it. You like it, don't you, Robert ?"

"Yes, and I like the whole region all the islands.
Maui. It is a darling island. I have been here
before. Have you?"

"Once, but it wasn't an island then."

"What was it?"

"It was asufa."

I understood. It was the dream- word for "part
of a continent."

"What were the people like?"

"They hadn't come yet. There weren't any/'

"Do you know, Agnes that is Haleakala, the
dead volcano, over there across the valley; was it
here in your friend's time?"

297



MARK TWAIN

"Yes, but it was burning."

"Do you travel much?"

"I think so. Not here much, but in the stars a
good deal."

"Is it pretty there?"

She- used a couple of dream-words for "You will go
with me some time and you will see." Non-commit
tal, as one perceives now, but I did not notice it then.

A man-of-war-bird lit on her shoulder; I put out
my hand and caught it. Its feathers began to fall
out, and it turned into a kitten; then the kitten's
body began to contract itself to a ball and put out
hairy, long legs, and soon it was a tarantula; I was
going to keep it, but it turned into a star-fish, and I
threw it away. Agnes said it was not worth while
to try to keep things; there was no stability about
them. I suggested rocks; but she said a rock was
like the rest; it wouldn't stay. She picked up a
stone, and it turned into a bat and flew away. These
curious matters interested me, but that was all;
they did not stir my wonder.

While we were sitting there in the lao gorge
talking, a Kanaka came along who was wrinkled
and bent and white-headed, and he stopped and
talked to us in the native tongue, and we under
stood him without trouble and answered him in his
own speech. He said he was a hundred and thirty
years old, and he remembered Captain Cook well,
and was present when he was murdered; saw it
with his own eyes, and also helped. Then he showed
us his gun, which was of strange make, and he said it
was his own invention and was to shoot arrows with,

298



MY PLATONIC SWEETHEART

though one loaded it with powder and it had a
percussioa lock. He said it would carry a hundred
miles. It seemed a reasonable statement; I had
no fault to find with it, and it did not in any way
surprise me. He loaded it and fired an arrow aloft,
and it darted into the sky and vanished. Then he
went his way, saying that the arrow would fall near
us in half an hour, and would go many yards into
the earth, not minding the rocks.

I took the time, and we waited, reclining upon
the mossy slant at the base of a tree, and gazing
into the sky. By and by there was a hissing sound,
followed by a dull impact, and Agnes uttered a groan.
She said, in a series of fainting gasps :

"Take me to your arms it passed through me
hold me to your heart I am afraid to die closer
closer. It is growing dark I cannot see you.
Don't leave me where are you? You are not gone?
You will not leave me? I would not leave you."

Then her spirit passed; she was clay in my arms.

The scene changed in an instant and I was awake
and crossing Bond Street in New York with a friend,
and it was snowing hard. We had been talking, and
there had been no observable gaps in the conversa
tion. I doubt if I had made any more than two
steps while I was asleep. I am satisfied that even
the most elaborate and incident-crowded dream is
seldom more than a few seconds in length. It
would not cost me very much of a strain to believe
in Mohammed's seventy-year dream, which began
when he knocked his glass over, and ended in time
for him to catch it before the water was spilled.

299



MARK TWAIN

Within a quarter of an hour I was in my quarters,
undressed, ready for bed, and was jotting down my
dream in my note-book. A striking thing happened
now. I finished my notes, and was just going to
turn out the gas when I was caught with a most
strenuous gape, for it was very late and I was very
drowsy. I fell asleep and dreamed again. What
now follows occurred while I was asleep; and when
I woke again the gape had completed itself, but not
long before, I think, for I was still on my feet. I was
in Athens a city which I had not then seen, but I
recognized the Parthenon from the pictures, although
it had a fresh look and was in perfect repair. I
passed by it and climbed a grassy hill toward a
palatial sort of mansion which was built of red
terra-cotta and had a spacious portico, whose roof
was supported by a rank of fluted columns with
Corinthian capitals. It was noonday, but I met no
one. I passed into the house and entered the first
room. It was very large and light, its walls were of
polished and richly tinted and veined onyx, and its
floor was a pictured pattern in soft colors laid in
tiles. I noted the details of the furniture and the
ornaments a thing which I should not have been
likely to do when awake and they took sharp hold
and remained in my memory; they are not really
dim yet, and this was more than thirty years ago.

There was a person present Agnes. I was not
surprised to see her, but only glad. She was in the
simple Greek costume, and her hair and eyes were
different as to color from those she had had when
she died in the Hawaiian Islands half an hour before,

300



MY PLATONIC SWEETHEART

but to me she was exactly her own beautiful little
self as I had always known her, and she was still
fifteen, and I was seventeen once more. She was
sitting on an ivory settee, crocheting something or
other, and had her crewels in a shallow willow work-
basket in her lap. I sat down by her and we began
to chat in the usual way. I remembered her death,
but the pain and the grief and the bitterness which
had been so sharp and so desolating to me at the
moment that it happened had wholly passed from
me now, and had left not a scar. I was grateful to
have her back, but there was no realizable sense
that she had ever been gone, and so it did not occur
to me to speak about it, and she made no reference
to it herself. It may be that she had often died
before, and knew that there was nothing lasting
about it, and consequently nothing important
enough in it to make conversation out of.

When I think of that house and its belongings, I
recognize what a master in taste and drawing and
color and arrangement is the dream-artist who resides
in us. In my waking hours, when the inferior artist
in me is in command, I cannot draw even the simplest
picture with a pencil, nor do anything with a brush
and colors; I cannot bring before my mind's eye the
detail image of any building known to me except
my own house at home; of St. Paul's, St. Peter's,
the Eiffel Tower, the Taj, the Capitol at Washington,
I can reproduce only portions, partial glimpses; the
same with Niagara Falls, the Matterhorn, and other
familiar things in nature; I cannot bring before my
mind's eye the face or figure of any human being

301



MARK TWAIN

known to me; I have seen my family at breakfast
within the past two hours; I cannot bring their
images before me, I do not know how they look;
before me, as I write, I see a little grove of young
trees in the garden; high above them projects the
slender lance of a young pine, beyond it is a glimpse
of the upper half of a dull-white chimney covered
by an A-shaped little roof shingled with brown-red
tiles, and half a mile away is a hill-top densely
wooded, and the red is cloven by a curved, wide
vacancy, which is smooth and grass-clad; I cannot
shut my eyes and reproduce that picture as a whole
at all, nor any single detail of it except the grassy
curve, and that but vaguely and fleetingly.

But my dream-artist can draw anything, and do
it perfectly; he can paint with all the colors and all
the shades, and do it with delicacy and truth; he
can place before me vivid images of palaces, cities,
hamlets, hovels, mountains, valleys, lakes, skies,
glowing in sunlight or moonlight, or veiled in driving
gusts of snow or rain, and he can set before me people
who are intensely alive, and who feel, and express
their feelings in their faces, and who also talk and
laugh, sing and swear. And when I wake I can shut
my eyes and bring back those people, and the
scenery and the buildings; and not only in general
view, but often in nice detail. While Agnes and I
sat talking in that grand Athens house, several
stately Greeks entered from another part of it, dis
puting warmly about something or other, and passed
us by with courteous recognition; and among them
was Socrates. I recognized him by his nose. A

302



MY PLATONIC SWEETHEART

moment later the house and Agnes and Athens van
ished away, and I was in my quarters in New York
again and reaching for my note-book.

In our dreams I know it ! we do make the jour
neys we seem to make; we do see the things we seem
to see; the people, the horses, the cats, the dogs, the
birds, the whales, are real, not chimeras; they are
living spirits, not shadows; and they are immortal
and indestructible. They go whither they will ; they
visit all resorts, all points of interest, even the twin
kling suns that wander in the wastes of space. That
is where those strange mountains are which slide from
under our feet while we walk, and where those vast
caverns are whose bewildering avenues close behind
us and in front when we are lost, and shut us in. We
know this because there are no such things here, and
they must be there, because there is no other place.

This tale is long enough, and I will close it now.
In the forty-four years that I have known my Dream
land sweetheart, I have seen her once in two years
on an average. Mainly these were glimpses, but she
was always immediately recognizable, notwithstand
ing she was so given to repair herself and getting up
doubtful improvements in her hair and eyes. She
was always fifteen, and looked it and acted it; and
I was always seventeen, and never felt a day older.
To me she is a real person, not a fiction, and her
sweet and innocent society has been one of the
prettiest and pleasantest experiences of my life. I
know that to you her talk will not seem of the first
intellectual order; but you should hear her in Dream
land then you would see!

303



MARK TWAIN

I saw her a week ago, just for a moment. Fifteen, as
usual, and I seventeen, instead of going on sixty- three,
as I was when I went to sleep. We were in India,
and Bombay was in sight ; also Windsor Castle, its
towers and battlements veiled in a delicate haze, and
from it the. Thames flowed, curving and winding
between its swarded banks, to our feet. I said :

"There is no question about it, England is the
most beautiful of all the countries."

Her- face lighted with approval, and she said, with
that sweet and earnest irrelevance of hers:

"It is, because it is so marginal."

Then she disappeared. It was just as well; she
could probably have added nothing to that rounded
and perfect statement without damaging its sym
metry.

This glimpse of her carries me back to Maui, and
that time when I saw her gasp out her young life.
That was a terrible thing to me at the time. It was
preternaturally vivid; and the pain and the grief
and the misery of it to me transcended many suffer
ings that I have known in waking life. For every
thing in a dream is more deep and strong and sharp
and real than is ever its pale imitation in the unreal
life which is ours when we go about awake and
clothed with our artificial selves in this vague and
dull-tinted artificial world. WTien we die we shall
slough off this cheap intellect, perhaps, and go
abroad into Dreamland clothed in our real selves,
and aggrandized and enriched by the command over
the mysterious mental magician who is here not our
slave, but only our guest.

304



HUNTING THE
DECEITFUL TURKEY



HUNTING THE DECEITFUL
TURKEY*



WHEN I was a boy my uncle and his big boys
hunted with the rifle, the youngest boy Fred
and I with a shotgun a small single-barrelled shot
gun which was properly suited to our size and
strength; it was not much heavier than a broom.
We carried it turn about, half an hour at a time. I
was not able to hit anything with it, but I liked to
try. Fred and I hunted feathered small game, the
others hunted deer, squirrels, wild turkeys, and such
things. My uncle and the big boys were good shots.
They killed hawks and wild geese and such like on the
wing; and they didn't wound or kill squirrels, they
stunned them. When the dogs treed a squirrel, the
squirrel would scamper aloft and run out on a limb
and flatten himself along it, hoping to make himself
invisible in that way and not quite succeeding.
You could see his wee little ears sticking up. You
couldn't see his nose, but you knew where it was.
Then the hunter, despising a "rest" for his rifle,
stood up and took offhand aim at the limb and sent
a bullet into it immediately under the squirrel's
nose, and down tumbled the animal, unwounded but
unconscious; the dogs gave him a shake and he was
dead. Sometimes when the distance was great and

* Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers.

307



MARK TWAIN

the wind not accurately allowed for, the bullet
would hit the squirrel's head; the dogs could do as
they pleased with that one the hunter's pride was
hurt, and he wouldn't allow it to go into the game-
bag.

In the first faint gray of the dawn the stately wild
turkeys would be stalking around in great flocks,
and ready to be sociable and answer invitations to
come and converse with other excursionists of their
kind. The hunter concealed himself and imitated the
turkey-call by sucking the air through the legbone of
a turkey which had previously answered a call like
that and lived only just long enough to regret it.
There is nothing that furnishes a perfect turkey-call
except that bone. Another of Nature's treacheries,
you see. She is full of them; half the time she
doesn't know which she likes best to betray her
child or protect it. In the case of the turkey she is
badly mixed : she gives it a bone to be used in getting
it into trouble, and she also furnishes it with a trick
for getting itself out of the trouble again. When a
mamma-turkey answers an invitation and finds she
has made a mistake in accepting it, she does as the
mamma-partridge does remembers a previous en
gagement and goes limping and scrambling away,
pretending to be very lame; and at the same time
she is saying to her not-visible children, "Lie low,
keep still, don't expose yourselves; I shall be back
as soon as I have beguiled this shabby swindler out
of the country."

When a person is ignorant and confiding, this
immoral device can have tiresome results. I followed

308



HUNTING THE DECEITFUL TURKEY

an ostensibly lame turkey over a considerable part
of the United States one morning, because I believed
in her and could not think she would deceive a mere
boy, and one who was trusting her and considering
her honest. I had the single-barrelled shotgun, but
my idea was to catch her alive. I often got within
rushing distance of her, and then made my rush;
but always, just as I made my final plunge and put
my hand down where her back had been, it wasn't
there; it was only two or three inches from there
and I brushed the tail-feathers as I landed on my
stomach a very close call, but still not quite close
enough; that is, not close enough for success, but
just close enough to convince me that I could do
it next time. She always waited for me, a little
piece away, and let on to be resting and greatly
fatigued ; which was a lie, but I believed it, for I still
thought her honest long after I ought to have begun
to doubt her, suspecting that this was no way for a
high-minded bird to be acting. I followed, and fol
lowed, and followed, making my periodical rushes,
and getting up and brushing the dust off, and resum
ing the voyage with patient confidence ; indeed, with
a confidence which grew, for I could see by the change
of climate and vegetation that we were getting up
into the high latitudes, and as she always looked a
little tireder and a little more discouraged after each
rush, I judged that I was safe to win, in the end, the
competition being purely a matter of staying power
and the advantage lying with me from the start
because she was lame.

Along in the afternoon I began to feel fatigued

309



MARK TWAIN

myself. Neither of us had had any rest since we
first started on the excursion, which was upwards of
ten hours before, though latterly we had paused
awhile after rushes, I letting on to be thinking
about something else; but neither of us sincere, and
both of us waiting for the other to call game but in
no real hurry about it, for indeed those little
evanescent snatches of rest were very grateful to
the feelings of us both; it would naturally be so,
skirmishing along like that ever since dawn and not
a bite in the meantime; at least for me, though
sometimes as she lay on her side fanning herself with
a wing and praying for strength to get out of this
difficulty a grasshopper happened along whose time
had come, and that was well for her, and fortunate,
but I had nothing nothing the whole day.

More than once, after I was very tired, I gave up
taking her alive, and was going to shoot her, but I
never did it, although it was my right, for I did not
believe I could hit her; and besides, she always
stopped and posed, when I raised the gun, and this
made me suspicious that she knew about me and my
marksmanship, and so I did not care to expose myself
to remarks.

I did not get her, at all. When she got tired of the
game at last, she rose from almost under my hand
and flew aloft with the rush and whir of a shell and
lit on the highest limb of a great tree and sat down