y for three weeks I introduced a new gymnastic--one that he had never
seen before--and so at last a compliment was wrung from him, a thing
which I had been risking my life for days to achieve. He gathered me up
and said mournfully: "Mr. Clemens, you can fall off a bicycle in more
different ways than any person I ever saw before."

[Sidenote: (1849.)]

A boy's life is not all comedy; much of the tragic enters into it. The
drunken tramp--mentioned in "Tom Sawyer" or "Huck Finn"--who was burned
up in the village jail, lay upon my conscience a hundred nights
afterward and filled them with hideous dreams--dreams in which I saw his
appealing face as I had seen it in the pathetic reality, pressed against
the window-bars, with the red hell glowing behind him--a face which
seemed to say to me, "If you had not give me the matches, this would not
have happened; you are responsible for my death." I was _not_
responsible for it, for I had meant him no harm, but only good, when I
let him have the matches; but no matter, mine was a trained Presbyterian
conscience, and knew but the one duty--to hunt and harry its slave upon
all pretexts and on all occasions; particularly when there was no sense
or reason in it. The tramp--who was to blame--suffered ten minutes; I,
who was not to blame, suffered three months.

The shooting down of poor old Smarr in the main street[10] at noonday
supplied me with some more dreams; and in them I always saw again the
grotesque closing picture--the great family Bible spread open on the
profane old man's breast by some thoughtful idiot, and rising and
sinking to the labored breathings, and adding the torture of its leaden
weight to the dying struggles. We are curiously made. In all the throng
of gaping and sympathetic onlookers there was not one with common sense
enough to perceive that an anvil would have been in better taste there
than the Bible, less open to sarcastic criticism, and swifter in its
atrocious work. In my nightmares I gasped and struggled for breath under
the crush of that vast book for many a night.

All within the space of a couple of years we had two or three other
tragedies, and I had the ill-luck to be too near by on each occasion.
There was the slave man who was struck down with a chunk of slag for
some small offence; I saw him die. And the young California emigrant who
was stabbed with a bowie knife by a drunken comrade: I saw the red life
gush from his breast. And the case of the