by Mark Twain, 1893
I got this book from a little free library and finally read the first story, Pudd’nhead Wilson. I loved it so much! It’s a treasure of a story. Pudd’nhead Wilson is actually a very smart, very kind, very wise man, who moves to Dawson City and wants to be a lawyer there, but he crosses a dog owner first thing, a little yapper who would not stop yapping the entire time they tried to have a conversation. He said something like, If I owned half that dog, I’d kill my half, or something like that. He stays even though no one would ever come to his office because of that one comment. He has hobbies and one of them is to take the town-folks’ fingerprints.
This comes in handy when a thief, supposedly a woman, kills the beloved Judge with an Indian knife that was stolen from two twin brothers from Italy. Pudd’nhead Wilson is defending he innocent twins and it doesn’t look good. But the actual thief and murderer, Tom Driscoll, can’t keep his mouth shut and the night before the last day of the trial, goes to harangue Pudd’nhead and gives him exactly what he needed to figure it out. Sure enough, the fingerprints on the knife match Tom Driscoll’s and all is found out. The guilty party is convicted and the innocents are absolved of all guilt, in front of the whole town. It’s a wonderful, intriguing, amazing tale, and I absolutely love Mark Twain!
Each chapter starts with a pithy quote from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s calendar. I love this one: If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Another: Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear–not absence of fear…
My Favorite: October 12. –The Discovery.–It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.