I am not a private secretary to a senator any more I now. I held the berth two months in security and in great cheerfulness of spirit, but my bread began to return from over the waters ...

Poor, sad-eyed stranger! There was that about his humble mien, his tired look, his decayed-gentility clothes, that almost reached the mustard, seed of charity that still remained, remot...

THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT CARNIVAL OF CRIME IN CONNECTICUT I was feeling blithe, almost jocund. I put a match to my cigar, and just then the morning’s mail was handed in. The ...

All infants appear to have an impertinent and disagreeable fashion nowadays of saying “smart” things on most occasions that offer, and especially on occasions when they ought not to be ...

“MORAL STATISTICIAN.”—I don’t want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it. I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man’s hea...

There was a fellow traveling around in that country," said Mr. Nickerson, “with a moral-religious show—a sort of scriptural panorama—and he hired a wooden-headed old slab to play the pi...

There was a good deal of pleasant gossip about old Captain 'Hurricane’ Jones, of the Pacific Ocean—peace to his ashes! Two or three of us present had known him; I, particularly well, fo...

I was a very smart child at the age of thirteen—an unusually smart child, I thought at the time. It was then that I did my first newspaper scribbling, and most unexpectedly to me it sti...

In the appendix to Croker’s Boswell’s Johnson one finds this anecdote: CATO’S SOLILOQUY.—One day Mrs. Gastrel set a little girl to repeat to him [Dr. Samuel Johnson] Cato’s Soliloquy, w...

Lakeside was a pleasant little town of five or six thousand inhabitants, and a rather pretty one, too, as towns go in the Far West. It had church accommodations for thirty-five thousand...

In San Francisco, the other day, “A well-dressed boy, on his way to Sunday-school, was arrested and thrown into the city prison for stoning Chinamen.” What a commentary is this upon hum...

It has me deeply touched, my gentlemen, here so hospitably received to be. From colleagues out of my own profession, in this from my own home so far distant land. My heart is full of gr...

'It is the first time since the dawn-days of Creation that a Voice has gone crashing through space with such placid and complacent confidence and command.' This last summer, when I was ...

Now, to show how really hard it is to foist a moral or a truth upon an unsuspecting public through a burlesque without entirely and absurdly missing one’s mark, I will here set down two...

NOTE.—No experience is set down in the following letters which had to be invented. Fancy is not needed to give variety to the history of a Chinaman’s sojourn in America. Plain fact is a...