200 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 



I wished to be fair and liberal — there's nothing mean about me. Good-by, friend, 

 I must be going. I may have a good way to go to-night — don't know. I only 

 know one thing for certain, and that is, that I am on the emigrant trail, now, and 

 I'll never sleep in that crazy old cemetery again. I will travel till I find respecta- 

 ble quarters, if I have to hoof it to New Jersey. All the boys are going. It was 

 decided in public conclave, last night, to emigrate, and by the time the sun rises 

 there won't be a bone left in our old habitations. Such cemeteries may suit my 

 surviving friends, but they do not suit the remains that have the honor to make 

 these remarks. My opinion is the general opinion. If you doubt it, go and see 

 how the departing ghosts upset things before they started. They were almost 

 riotous in their demonstrations of distaste. Hello, here are some of the Bledsoes, 

 and if you will give me a lift with this tombstone I guess I will join company and 

 jog along with them — mighty respectable old family, the Bledsoes, and used to 

 always come out in six-horse hearses, and all that sort of thing fifty years ago when 

 I walked these streets in daylight. Good-by, friend." 



And with his gravestone on his shoulder he joined the grisly procession, dragging 

 his damaged coffin after him, for notwithstanding he pressed it upon me so earnestly, 

 I utterly refused his hospitality. I suppose that for as much as two hours these 

 sad outcasts went clacking by, laden with their dismal effects, and all that time I 

 sat pitying them. One or two of the youngest and least dilapidated among them 

 inquired about midnight trains on the railways, but the rest seemed unacquainted 

 with that mode of travel, and merely asked about common public roads to various 

 towns and cities, some of which are not on the map now, and vanished from it and 

 from the earth as much as thirty years ago, and some few of them never ^fl(/ existed 

 anywhere but on maps, and private ones in real estate agencies at that. And they 

 asked about the condition of the cemeteries in these towns and cities, and about 

 the reputation the citizens bore as to reverence for the dead. 



This whole matter interested me deeply, and likewise compelled my sympathy 

 for these homeless ones. And it all seeming real, and I not knowing it was a 

 dream, I mentioned to one shrouded wanderer an idea that had entered my head 

 to publish an account of this curious and very sorrowful exodus, but said also that 

 I could not describe it truthfully, and just as it occurred, without seeming to trifle 



