d, in both sexes, in every
age, rank, situation, and condition of life.

The Acorn speech was greatly relied upon for damage to the Tammany
ranks, and hundreds of thousands of copies of it were printed and
circulated.--[The "Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany" speech had
originally been written as an article for the North American Review.]

Clemens was really heart and soul in the campaign. He even joined a
procession that marched up Broadway, and he made a speech to a great
assemblage at Broadway and Leonard Street, when, as he said, he had been
sick abed two days and, according to the doctor, should be in bed then.

But I would not stay at home for a nursery disease, and that's what
I've got. Now, don't let this leak out all over town, but I've been
doing some indiscreet eating--that's all. It wasn't drinking. If
it had been I shouldn't have said anything about it.

I ate a banana. I bought it just to clinch the Italian vote for
fusion, but I got hold of a Tammany banana by mistake. Just one
little nub of it on the end was nice and white. That was the
Shepard end. The other nine-tenths were rotten. Now that little
white end won't make the rest of the banana good. The nine-tenths
will make that little nub rotten, too.

We must get rid of the whole banana, and our Acorn Society is going
to do its share, for it is pledged to nothing but the support of
good government all over the United States. We will elect the
President next time.

It won't be I, for I have ruined my chances by joining the Acorns,
and there can be no office-holders among us.

There was a movement which Clemens early nipped in the bud--to name a
political party after him.

"I should be far from willing to have a political party named after me,"
he wrote, "and I would not be willing to belong to a party which allowed
its members to have political aspirations or push friends forward for
political preferment."

In other words, he was a knight-errant; his sole purpose for being in
politics at all--something he always detested--was to do what he could
for the betterment of his people.

He had his reward, for when Election Day came, and the returns were in,
the Fusion ticket had triumphed and Tammany had fallen. Clemens received
his share of the credit. One paper celebrated him in verse:

Who killed Croker?
I, said Mark Twain,
I killed C