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Mark Twain's Speeches, Part 1

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<h2> THE UNION RIGHT OR WRONG </h2> REMINISCENCES OF NEVADA I can assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that Nevada had lively newspapers in those days. My great competitor among the reporters was Boggs, of the Union, an excellent reporter. Once in three or four months he would get a little intoxicated; but, as a general thing, he was a wary and cautious drinker, although always ready to damp himself a little with the enemy. He had the advantage of me in one thing: he could get the monthly public-school report and I could not, because the principal hated my sheet—the ‘Enterprise’. One snowy night, when the report was due, I started out, sadly wondering how I was to get it. Presently, a few steps up the almost deserted street, I stumbled on Boggs, and asked him where he was going. “After the school report.” “I’ll go along with you.” “No, Sir. I’ll excuse you.” “Have it your own way.” A saloon-keeper’s boy passed by with a steaming pitcher of hot punch, and Boggs snuffed the fragrance gratefully. He gazed fondly after the boy, and saw him start up the Enterprise stairs. I said: “I wish you could help me get that school business, but since you can’t, I must run up to the Union office and see if I can get a proof of it after it’s set up, though I don’t begin to suppose I can. Good night.” “Hold on a minute. I don’t mind getting the report and sitting around with the boys a little while you copy it, if you’re willing to drop down to the principal’s with me.” “Now you talk like a human being. Come along.” We ploughed a couple of blocks through the snow, got the report—a short document—and soon copied it in our office. Meantime, Boggs helped himself to the punch. I gave the manuscript back to him, and we started back to get an inquest. At four o’clock in the morning, when we had gone to press and were having a relaxing concert as usual (for some of the printers were good singers and others good performers on the guitar and on that atrocity the accordion), the proprietor of the Union strode in and asked if anybody had heard anything of Boggs or the school report. We stated the case, and all turned out to help hunt for the delinquent. We found him standing on a table in a saloon, with an old tin lantern in one hand and the school report in the other, haranguing a gang of “corned” miners on the iniquity of squandering the public money on education “when hundreds and hundreds of honest, hard-working men were literally starving for whiskey.” He had been assisting in a regal spree with those parties for hours. We dragged him away, and put him into bed. Of course there was no school report in the Union, and Boggs held me accountable, though I was innocent of any intention or desire to compass its absence from that paper, and was as sorry as any one that the misfortune had occurred. But we were perfectly friendly. The day the next school report was due the proprietor of the Tennessee Mine furnished us a buggy, and asked us to go down and write something about the property—a very common request, and one always gladly acceded to when people furnished buggies, for we were as fond of pleasure excursions as other people. The “mine” was a hole in the ground ninety feet deep, and no way of getting down into it but by holding on to a rope and being lowered with a windlass. The workmen had just gone off somewhere to dinner. I was not strong enough to lower Boggs’s bulk, so I took an unlighted candle in my teeth, made a loop for my foot in the end of the rope, implored Boggs not to go to sleep or let the windlass get the start of him, and then swung out over the shaft. I reached the bottom muddy and bruised about the elbows, but safe. I lit the candle, made an examination of the rock, selected some specimens, and shouted to Boggs to hoist away. No answer. Presently a head appeared in the circle of daylight away aloft, and a voice came down: “Are you all set?” “All set-hoist away!” “Are you comfortable?” “Perfectly.” “Could you wait a little?” “Oh, certainly-no particular hurry.” “Well-good-bye.” “Why, where are you going?” “After the school report!” And he did. I stayed down there an hour, and surprised the workmen when they hauled up and found a man on the rope instead of a bucket of rock. I walked home, too—five miles-up-hill. We had no school report next morning—but the Union had. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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