244 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 



Stocks and invest in sound and safe San Francisco stocks, such as the Spring 

 Valley Water Company, etc. But right at this unfortunate juncture, behold 

 the Spring Valley cooked a dividend too ! And so, under the insidious mask 

 of an invented " bloody massacre," I stole upon the public unawares with my 

 scathing satire upon the dividend-cooking system. In about half a column of 

 imaginary human carnage I told how a citizen had murdered his wife and nine 

 children, and then committed suicide. And I said slyly, at the bottom, that the 

 sudden madness of which the this melancholy massacre was the result, had been 

 brought about by his having allowed himself to be persuaded by the 

 California papers to sell his sound and lucrative Nevada silver stocks, and buy 

 into Spring Valley just in time to get cooked along with- that company's fancy 

 dividend, and sink every cent he had in the world. 



Ah, it was a deep, deep satire, and most ingeniously contrived. But I made 

 the horrible details so carefully and conscientiously interesting that the public 

 devoured them greedily, and wholly overlooked the following distinctly-stated 

 facts, to wit : — The murderer was perfectly well known to every creature in the 

 land as a bachelor, and consequently he could not murder his wife and nine 

 children ; he murdered them " in his splendid dressed-stone mansion just in the 

 edge of the great pine forest between Empire City and Dutch Nick's," when 

 even the very pickled oysters that came on our tables knew that there was not 

 a " dressed-stone mansion " in all Nevada Territory ; also that, so far from there 

 being a " great pine forest between Empire City and Dutch Nick's," there 

 wasn't a solitary tree within fifteen miles of either place; and, finally, it was 

 patent and notorious that Empire City and Dutch Nick's were one and the 

 same place, and contained only six houses anyhow, and consequently there 

 could be no forest between them ; and on top of all these absurdities I stated 

 that this diabolical murderer, after inflicting a wound upon himself that the 

 reader ought to have seen would kill an elephant in the twinkling of an eye, 

 jumped on his horse and rode four miles, waving his wife's reeking scalp in the 

 air, and thus performing entered Carson City with tremendous ^clat, and dropped 

 dead in front of the chief saloon, the envy and admiration of all beholders. 

 Well, in all my life I never saw anything like the sensation that little satire 



