The Mysterious Stranger, and Other Stories

losing interest in our tiny world and might at any time abandon his visits entirely. When one day he finally came to me I was overjoyed, but only for a little while. He had come to say good-by,

away, and will not

d it has been pleasant-pleasant for both; but I mus

t in another? We shall m

berly, he made the strange

g with it a vague, dim, but blessed and hopeful feeling

er suspected

I? But if it ca

is t

d it before it could issue in words, and I said, "But-but-we

sion-it had

he great hope that was strug

is only a vis

had had that very thought a

the moon, the wilderness of stars-a dream, all a dream; they

I

e; I am but a dream-your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then

ess solitudes without friend or comrade forever-for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextin

could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell-mouths mercy and invented hell-mouths Golden Rul

puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks-in a word, that th

o heaven, no hell. It is all a dream-a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a t

led; for I knew, and realized,

FA

ure placed it so that he could see it in the mirror. He said, "This double

, and so polite and high-bred, and could tell them so much which they didn't know before, and were not certain about afterward. They were much excited a

lly flat, marvelously flat, enchantingly

, and they said they would give the

hat makes it

ooks of it,"

d uncertainty, and they were more e

is a m

cture, and it is so dainty and charming and ethereal and inspiring in its unimagina

anything as beautiful as this before, and probably wasn't now. He said that when it took a whol

perceptible. Then the animals assailed the ass for spoiling what could possibly have been a pleasure to them, on a mere suspicion that the picture was not beautiful, without any evidence that such was the case. The ass was not troubled; he was c

he stood between the picture and the mirror. The result was that the

There wasn't a sign of a flat thing visible. It was a hand

ephant

od and clear? Were

i, King of Beasts. I was so clos

s truthful before-as far as we could make out. Let another wi

t. When he came

have lied; there was nothi

ch was now anxious to make the test himself and get at t

e found nothing in

d nothing in i

d nothing in

nd nothing in i

d a camel, and

e abused his whole subjectry for liars, and was in an unappeasable fury with the moral and mental blindness of th

, BY

ll stand between it and the mirror of your imaginati

HE DECEIT

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"

here 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

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 follo

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

h 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,

nd and flew aloft with the rush and whir of a shell and lit on the highest limb of a great tree and

y, though I had never liked them before. Not more than two or three times since have I tasted anything that was so delicious as those tomatoes. I surfeited myself with them, and did not taste another one until I was in middle life. I can eat them now, but I do not

MSES AND THE

on; then took a random jump, and landed on the subject of burglar alarms. And now for the first time Mr. McWilliams showed feeling. Whenever I perceive th

ts another thing, and we decide upon the thing that Mrs. McWilliams wants-as we always do-she calls that a compromise. Very well: the man came up from New York and put in the alarm, and charged three hundred and twenty-five dollars for it, and said we could sleep without uneasiness now. So we did for awhile-say a month. Then one night we smelled smoke, and I was advised to get up and see what the matter was. I lit a candle, and started toward the stairs, and met a burglar

which is denied to a bishop is a conspicuous sign of the looseness of the times. But waiving all that, what busi

ention it where my parents may hear of it, for they are old and feeble, and such a seemingly wanton breach of the hallowed conventionalities of our Christian civilization might

t your best hold. Spare your thigh; this kind light only on the box, and seldom there, in

second-sto

tic; one might as well have no armor on at all in battle as to have it only on his legs. The expert now put the whole second story on the alarm, charged three hundred dollars for it, and went his way. By and by, one night, I found a burglar in the third story, about to start down a ladder with a lot of miscellaneous property. My first impulse was to crack his head with a billiard cue; but my second w

us rooms and chimneys, and it occupied the space of an ordinary wardrobe. The gong was the size of a wash-bowl, and was placed above

uts the kitchen door. In solid fact, there is no clamor that is even remotely comparable to the dire clamor which that gong makes. Well, this catastrophe happened every morning regularly at five o'clock, and lost us three hours sleep; for, mind you, when that thing wakes you, it doesn't merely wake you in spots; it wakes you all over, conscience and all, and you are good for eighteen hours of wide-awakeness subsequently-eighteen hours of the very most inconc

again at daybreak in the morning, just in time for the cook to open the kitchen door, and enable that gong to slam us across the house, sometimes breaking a window with one or the other of us. At the end of a week we recognized that this switch business was a delusion and a snare. We also discovered that a band of burglars had been lod

u already foresee the result. I switched on the alarm every night at bed-time, no longer trusting on Thomas's frail memory; and as soon as the lights were out the burglars walked in at the kitchen door, thus tak

e, and established a switch there, so that the coachman could put on and take off the alarm. That worked fi

that his gong had flung him out, too, and that he would be along with his gun as soon as he could jump into his clothes. When I judged that the time was ripe, I crept to the room next the nursery, glanced through the window, and saw the dim outline of the coachman in the yard below, standing at present-arms and waiting for a chance. Then I hopped into the nursery and fired, and in the same instant the coachman fired at th

'False alarm.' Said it was easily fixed. So he overhauled the n

dicated, and the coachman always sallied forth with his battery to support me. But there was never anything to shoot at-windows all tight and secure. We always sent

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use by the alarm, calmly inspected the annunciator, took note of the room indicated; and then calmly disconnected that room from the alarm, and went back to bed as if nothing had happened. Moreove

alarm! yes, sir, every hide and hair of it: ripped it out, tooth and nail; springs, bells, gongs, battery, and all; they took a hundred an

at seemed a good scheme. They promised to have the whole thing finished in ten days. They began work, and we left for the summer. They worked a couple of days; then they left for the summer. After which the burglars moved in, and began their summer vacation. When we returned in the fall, the house was as empty as a beer closet in premises where

clock in the morning. I turned the hands around twelve hours, according to instructions, and this took off the alarm; but there was another hitch at night, and I had to set her ahead twelve hours once more to get her to put the alarm on again. That sort of nonsense went on a week or two, then the expert came up and put in a new clock

a d--d cent could I ever get THEM to contribute-I just said to Mrs. McWilliams that I had had enough of that kind of pie; so with her full consent I took the whole thing out and traded it off for a dog, and shot the dog. I don't know what you think about it, Mr. Twain; but I think those things are made so