240 



MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 



our benignant fatherly moods at one time or another, I suppose. I chose to kill the 

 petrifaction mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire. But maybe it was alto- 

 gether too delicate, for nobody ever perceived the satire part of it at all. I put my 

 scheme in the shape of the discovery of a remarkably petrified man. 



I had had a temporary falling out with Mr. , the new coroner and justice 



of the peace of Humboldt, and thought I might as well touch him up a little at the 

 same time and make him ridiculous, and thus combine pleasure with business. So 



belief- compelling 



I told, in patient 

 detail, all about 

 petrified man at 

 (exactly a hundred 

 over a breakneck 



from where 



savants of the im- 

 hood had been to 

 notorious that 

 living creature 

 of there, except a 

 dians, some crip- 

 and four or five 

 meat and too fee- 

 how those savants 

 petrified m a n t o 



the finding of a 

 Gravelly Ford 

 and twenty miles, 

 mountain trail, 

 lived) ; how all the 

 mediate neighbor- 

 examine it (it was 

 there was not a 

 within fifty miles 

 few starving In- 

 pled grasshoppers, 

 buzzards out of 

 ble to get away) ; 

 all pronounced the 

 have been in a state 

 of complete petrifaction for over ten generations; and then, with a seriousness that- 



I ought to have been ashamed to assume, I stated that as soon as Mr. heard 



the news he summoned a jury, mounted his mule, and posted off, with noble rever- 

 ence for official duty, on that awful five days' journey, through alkali, sage-brush, 

 peril of body, and imminent starvation, to hold an inquest on this man that had 

 been dead and turned to everlasting stone for more than three hundred years ! 

 And then, my hand being "in," so to speak, I went on, with the same unflinching 

 gravity, to state that the jury returned a verdict that deceased came to his death 

 from protracted exposure. This only moved me to higher flights of imagination, 



