To all others the labyrinth had yielded up its clue.  The hunter threaded its maze; the woodman plunged confidently into its innermost depths; the peasant child gathered ferns unscared in its sunless dells.  But often the child abandoned his botany in terror, the woodman bolted for home, and the hunter’s heart went down into his boots, at the sight of a fair young spectre leading a blind phantom through the silent glades.  I saw them there in 1860, while I was gunning.  I shot them.

SEAFARING.

My envious rivals have always sought to cast discredit upon the following tale, by affirming that mere unadorned truth does not constitute a work of literary merit.  Be it so:  I care not what they call it.  A rose with any other smell would be as sweet.

In the autumn of 1868 I wanted to go from Sacramento, California, to San Francisco.  I at once went to the railway office and bought a ticket, the clerk telling me that would take me there.  But when I tried it, it wouldn’t.  Vainly I laid it on the railway and sat down upon it:  it would not move; and every few minutes an engine would come along and crowd me off the track.  I never travelled by so badly managed a line!

I then resolved to go by way of the river, and took passage on a steamboat.  The engineer of this boat had once been a candidate for the State Legislature while I was editing a newspaper.  Stung to madness by the arguments I had advanced against his election (which consisted mainly in relating how that his cousin was hanged for horse-stealing, and how that his sister had an intolerable squint which a free people could never abide), he had sworn to be revenged.  After his defeat I had confessed the charges were false, so far as he personally was concerned, but this did not seem to appease him.  He declared he would “get even on me,” and he did:  he blew up the boat.

Being thus summarily set ashore, I determined that I would be independent of common carriers destitute of common courtesy.  I purchased a wooden box, just large enough to admit one, and not transferable.  I lay down in this, double-locked it on the outside, and carrying it to the river, launched it upon the watery waste.  The box, I soon discovered, had an hereditary tendency to turn over.  I had parted my hair in the middle before embarking, but the precaution was inadequate; it secured not immunity, only impartiality, the box turning over one way as readily as the other.  I could counteract this evil only by shifting my tobacco from cheek to cheek, and in this way I got on tolerably well until my navy sprang a leak near the stern.