Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0150/01508.txt

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$Unique_ID{bob01508}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Sketches, Old And New
A Curious Dream}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{old
now
coffin
time
dead
left
cemetery
friend
gone
shroud}
$Date{1893}
$Log{}
Title:       Sketches, Old And New
Book:        A Curious Dream
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1893

A Curious Dream

Containing A Moral

     Night before last I had a singular dream.  I seemed to be sitting on a
door-step (in no particular city perhaps), ruminating, and the time of night
appeared to be about twelve or one o'clock.  The weather was balmy and
delicious.  There was no human sound in the air, not even a footstep. There
was no sound of any kind to emphasize the dead stillness, except the
occasional hollow barking of a dog in the distance and the fainter answer of a
further dog.  Presently up the street I heard a bony clack-clacking, and
guessed it was the castanets of a serenading party.  In a minute more a tall
skeleton, hooded, and half-clad in a tattered and mouldy shroud, whose shreds
were flapping about the ribby lattice-work of its person swung by me with a
stately stride, and disappeared in the grey gloom of the starlight. It had a
broken and worm-eaten coffin on its shoulder and a bundle of something in its
hand.  I knew what the clack-clacking was then; it was this party's joints
working together, and his elbows knocking against his sides as he walked.  I
may say I was surprised.  Before I could collect my thoughts and enter upon
any speculations as to what this apparition might portend, I heard another one
coming - for I recognized his clack-clack.  He had two-thirds of a coffin on
his shoulder, and some foot- and headboards under his arm.  I mightily wanted
to peer under his hood and speak to him, but when he turned and smiled upon me
with his cavernous sockets and his projecting grin as he went by, I thought I
would not detain him.  He was hardly gone when I heard the clacking again, and
another one issued from the shadowy half-light.  This one was bending under a
heavy gravestone, and dragging a shabby coffin after him by a string.  When he
got to me he gave me a steady look for a moment or two, and then rounded to
and backed up to me, saying:

     "Ease this down for a fellow, will you?"

     I eased the gravestone down till it rested on the ground, and in doing so
noticed that it bore the name of "John Baxter Copmanhurst," with "May, 1839,"
as the date of his death.  Deceased sat wearily down by me, and wiped his os
frontis with his major maxillary - chiefly from former habit I judged, for I
could not see that he brought away any perspiration.

     "It is too bad, too bad," said he, drawing the remnant of the shroud
about him and leaning his jaw pensively on his hand.  Then he put his left
foot up on his knee and fell to scratching his ankle bone absently with a
rusty nail which he got out of his coffin.

     "What is too bad, friend?"

     "Oh, everything, everything.  I almost wish I never had died."

     "You surprise me.  Why do you say this?  Has anything gone wrong? What is
the matter?"

     "Matter!  Look at this shroud - rags.  Look at this gravestone, all
battered up.  Look at that disgraceful old coffin.  All a man's property going
to ruin and destruction before his eyes, and ask him if anything is wrong?
Fire and brimstone!"

     "Calm yourself, calm yourself," I said.  "It is too bad - it is certainly
too bad, but then I had not supposed that you would much mind such matters,
situated as you are."

     "Well, my dear sir, I do mind them.  My pride is hurt, and my comfort is
impaired - destroyed, I might say.  I will state my case - I will put it to
you in such a way that you can comprehend it, if you will let me," said the
poor skeleton, tilting the hood of his shroud back, as if he were clearing for
action, and thus unconsciously giving himself a jaunty and festive air very
much at variance with the grave character of his position in life - so to
speak - and in prominent contrast with his distressful mood.

     "Proceed," said I.

     "I reside in the shameful old graveyard a block or two above you here, in
this street - there, now, I just expected that cartilage would let go! - third
rib from the bottom, friend, hitch the end of it to my spine with a string, if
you have got such a thing about you, though a bit of silver wire is a deal
pleasanter, and more durable and becoming, if one keeps it polished - to think
of shredding out and going to pieces in this way, just on account of the
indifference and neglect of one's posterity!" - and the poor ghost grated his
teeth in a way that gave me a wrench and a shiver - for the effect is mightily
increased by the absence of muffling flesh and cuticle.  "I reside in that old
graveyard, and have for these thirty years; and I tell you things have changed
since I first laid this old tired frame there, and turned over, and stretched
out for a long sleep, with a delicious sense upon me of being done with
bother, and grief, and anxiety, and doubt, and fear, for ever and ever, and
listening with comfortable and increasing satisfaction to the sexton's work,
from the startling clatter of his first spadeful on my coffin till it dulled
away to the faint patting that shaped the roof of my new home - delicious!
My!  I wish you could try it to-night!" and out of my reverie deceased fetched
me with a rattling slap with a bony hand.

     "Yes, sir, thirty years ago I laid me down there, and was happy.  For it
was out in the country; then - out in the breezy, flowery, grand old woods,
and the lazy winds gossiped with the leaves, and the squirrels capered over us
and around us, and the creeping things visited us, and the birds filled the
tranquil solitude with music.  Ah, it was worth ten years of a man's life to
be dead then!  Everything was pleasant.  I was in a good neighborhood, for all
the dead people that lived near me belonged to the best families in the city.
Our posterity appeared to think the world of us.  They kept our graves in the
very best condition; the fences were always in faultless repair, head-boards
were kept painted or white-washed, and were replaced with new ones as soon as
they began to look rusty or decayed; monuments were kept upright, railings
intact and bright, the rosebushes and shrubbery trimmed, trained, and free
from blemish, the walks clean and smooth and gravelled.  But that day is gone
by.  Our descendants have forgotten us.  My grandson lives in a stately house
built with money made by these old hands of mine, and I sleep in a neglected
grave with invading vermin that gnaw my shroud to build them nests withal!  I
and friends that lie with me founded and secured the prosperity of this fine
city, and the stately bantling of our loves leaves us to rotin a dilapidated
cemetery which neighbors curse and strangers scoff at.  See the difference
between the old time and this - for instance: Our graves are all caved in,
now; our head-boards have rotted away and tumbled down; our railings reel this
way and that, with one foot in the air, after a fashion of unseemly levity;
our monuments lean wearily, and our gravestones bow their heads discouraged;
there be no adornments any more - no roses, nor shrubs, nor gravelled walks,
nor anything that is a comfort to the eye; and even the paintless old board
fence that did make a show of holding us sacred from companionship with beasts
and the defilement of heedless feet, has tottered till it overhangs the
street, and only advertises the presence of our dismal resting-place and
invites yet more derision to it.  And now we cannot hide our poverty and
tatters in the friendly woods, for the city has stretched its withering arms
abroad and taken us in, and all that remains of the cheer of our old home is
the cluster of lugubrious forest trees that stand, bored and weary of a city
life, with their feet in our coffins, looking into the hazy distance and
wishing they were there.  I tell you it is disgraceful!

     "You begin to comprehend - you begin to see how it is.  While our
descendants are living sumptuously on our money, right around us in the city,
we have to fight hard to keep skull and bones together.  Bless you, there
isn't a grave in our cemetery that doesn't leak - not one.  Every time it
rains in the night we have to climb out and roost in the trees - and sometimes
we are wakened suddenly by the chilly water trickling down the back of our
necks.  Then I tell you there is a general heaving up of old graves and
kicking over of old monuments, and scampering of old skeletons for the trees!
Bless me, if you had gone along there some such nights after twelve you might
have seen as many as fifteen of us roosting on one limb, with our joints
rattling drearily and the wind wheezing through our ribs!  Many a time we have
perched there for three or four dreary hours, and then come down, stiff and
chilled through and drowsy, and borrowed each other's skulls to bale out our
graves with - if you will glance up in my mouth, now as I tilt my head back,
you can see that my headpiece is halffull of old dry sediment - how top-heavy
and stupid it makes me sometimes!  Yes, sir, many a time if you had happened
to come along just before the dawn you'd have caught us baling out the graves
and hanging our shrouds on the fence to dry.  Why, I had an elegant shroud
stolen from there one morning - think a party by the name of Smith took it,
that resides in a plebeian graveyard over yonder - I think so because the
first time I ever saw him he hadn't anything on but a check-shirt, and the
last time I saw him, which was at a social gathering in the new cemetery, he
was the best dressed corpse in the company - and it is a significant fact that
he left when he saw me; and presently an old woman from here missed her coffin
- she generally took it with her when she went anywhere, because she was
liable to take cold and bring on the spasmodic rheumatism that originally
killed her if she exposed herself to the night air much. She was named
Hotchkiss - Anna Matilda Hotchkiss - you might know her?  She has two upper
front teeth, is tall, but a good deal inclined to stoop, one rib on the left
side gone, has one shred of rusty hair hanging from the left side of her head,
and one little tuft just above and a little forward of her right ear, has her
under jaw wired on one side where it had worked loose, small bone of left
forearm gone - lost in a fight - has a kind of swagger in her gait and a
'gallus' way of going with her arms akimbo and her nostrils in the air - has
been pretty free and easy, and is all damaged and battered up till she looks
like a queen's-ware crate in ruins - maybe you have met her?"

     "God forbid!" I involuntarily ejaculated, for somehow I was not looking
for that form of question, and it caught me a little off my guard. But I
hastened to make amends for my rudeness, and say, "I simply meant I had not
had the honor - for I would not deliberately speak discourteously of a friend
of yours.  You were saying that you were robbed - and it was a shame, too -
but it appears by what is left of the shroud you have on that it was a costly
one in its day.  How did - "

     A most ghastly expression began to develop among the decayed features and
shrivelled integuments of my guest's face, and I was beginning to grow uneasy
and distressed, when he told me he was only working up a deep, sly smile, with
a wink in it, to suggest that about the time he acquired his present garment a
ghost in a neighboring cemetery missed one.  This reassured me, but I begged
him to confine himself to speech thenceforth because his facial expression was
uncertain.  Even with the most elaborate care it was liable to miss fire.
Smiling should especially be avoided. What he might honestly consider a
shinning success was likely to strike me in a very different light.  I said I
liked to see a skeleton cheerful, even decorously playful, but I did not think
smiling was a skeleton's best hold.

     "Yes, friend," said the poor skeleton, "the facts are just as I have
given them to you.  Two of these old graveyards - the one that I resided in
and one further along - have been deliberately neglected by our descendants of
to-day until there is no occupying them any longer.  Aside from the
osteological discomfort of it - and that is no light matter this rainy weather
- the present state of things is ruinous to property.  We have got to move or
be content to see our effects wasted away and utterly destroyed. Now, you will
hardly believe it, but it is true, nevertheless, that there isn't a single
coffin in good repair among all my acquaintance - now that is an absolute
fact.  I do not refer to low people who come in a pine box mounted on an
express wagon, but I am talking about your high-toned, silver mounted
burial-case, your monumental sort, that travel under black plumes at the head
of a procession and have choice of cemetery lots - I mean folks like the
Jarvises, and the Bledsoes and Burlings, and such.  They are all about ruined.
The most substantial people in our set, they were.  And now look at them -
utterly used up and poverty-stricken.  One of the Bledsoes actually traded his
monument to a late bar-keeper for some fresh shavings to put under his head.
I tell you it speaks volumes, for there is nothing a corpse takes so much
pride in as his monument.  He loves to read the inscription.  He comes after a
while to believe what it says himself, and then you may see him sitting on the
fence night after night enjoying it. Epitaphs are cheap, and they do a poor
chap a world of good after he is dead, especially if he had hard luck while he
was alive.  I wish they were used more.  Now, I don't complain, but
confidentially I do think it was a little shabby in my descendants to give me
nothing but this old slab of a gravestone - and all the more that there isn't
a compliment on it.  It used to have

               'Gone To His Just Reward'

on it, and I was proud when I first saw it, but by-and-by I noticed that
whenever an old friend of mine came along he would hook his chin on the
railing and pull a long face and read along down till he came to that and then
he would chuckle to himself and walk off, looking satisfied and comfortable.
So I scratched it off to get rid of those fools.  But a dead man always takes
a deal of pride in his monument.  Yonder goes half-a-dozen of the Jarvises,
now, with the family monument along.  And Smithers and some hired spectres
went by with him a while ago.  Hello, Higgins, good- bye, old friend!  That's
Meredith Higgins - died in '44 - belongs to our set in the cemetery - fine old
family - great-grandmother was an Injun - I am on the most familiar terms with
him - he didn't hear me was the reason he didn't answer me.  And I am sorry,
too, because I would have liked to introduce you.  You would admire him.  He
is the most disjointed, sway- backed, and generally distorted old skeleton you
ever saw, but he is full of fun.  When he laughs it sounds like rasping two
stones together, and he always starts it off with a cheery screech like raking
a nail across a window-pane.  Hey, Jones!  That is old Columbus Jones - shroud
cost four hundred dollars - entire trousseau, including monument, twenty-seven
hundred.  This was in the Spring of '26.  It was enormous style for those
days.  Dead people came all the way from the Alleghanies to see his things -
the party that occupied the grave next to mine remembers it well. Now do you
see that individual going along with a piece of a head-board under his arm,
one leg-bone below his knee gone, and not a thing in the world one?  That is
Barstow Dalhousie, and next to Columbus Jones he was the most sumptuously
outfitted person that ever entered our cemetery.  We are all leaving.  We
cannot tolerate the treatment we are receiving at the hands of our
descendants.  They open new cemeteries, but they leave us to our ignominy.
They mend the streets, but they never mend anything that is about us or
belongs to us.  Look at that coffin of mine - yet I tell you in its day it was
a piece of furniture that would have attracted attention in any drawing-room
in this city.  You may have it if you want it - I can't afford to repair it.
Put a new bottom in her, and part of a new top, and a bit of fresh lining
along the left side, and you'll find her about as comfortable as any
receptacle of her species you ever tried.  No thanks - no, don't mention it -
you have been civil to me, and I would give you all the property I have got
before I would seem ungrateful.  Now this winding- sheet is a kind of a sweet
thing in its way, if you would like to -.  No? Well, just as you say, but 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 respectable 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 had 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 with a grave subject and exhibit an irreverence for
the dead that would shock and distress their surviving friends.  But this
bland and stately remnant of a former citizen leaned him far over my gate and
whispered in my ear, and said: -

     "Do not let that disturb you.  The community that can stand such
graveyards as those we are emigrating from can stand anything a body can say
about the neglected and forsaken dead that lie in them."

     At that very moment a cock crowed, and the weird procession vanished and
left not a shred or a bone behind.  I awoke, and found myself lying with my
head out of the bed and "sagging" downwards considerably - a position
favorable to dreaming dreams with morals in them, maybe, but not poetry.

     Note: - The reader is assured that if the cemeteries in his town are kept
in good order, this Dream is not levelled at his town at all, but is levelled
particularly and venomously at the next town,