The Autobiography of Mark Twain Mark Twain (best beach reads .TXT) 📖

and he had paid a part and was building it on installments out of his wages. And Jones said: “I am going to put you and Dennis in privately on the big Bonanza. I am on the inside, I will watch it, and we will put this money up on a margin. Therefore when I say it is time to sell, it will be very necessary to sell.” So he put up 20-percent margins for those two boys⁠—and that is the time when this great spurt must have happened which sent that stock up to the stars in one flight⁠—because, as the history was told to me by Joe Goodman, when that thing happened Jones said to Goodman and Dennis:

“Now then, sell. You can come out $600,000 ahead, each of you, and that is enough. Sell.”

“No,” Joe objected, “it will go higher.”

Jones said: “I am on the inside; you are not. Sell.”

Joe’s wife implored him to sell. He wouldn’t do it. Dennis’s family implored him to sell. Dennis wouldn’t sell. And so it went on during two weeks. Each time the stock made a flight Jones tried to get the boys to sell. They wouldn’t do it. They said, “It is going higher.” When he said, “Sell at $900,000,” they said, “No. It will go to million.”

Then the stock began to go down very rapidly. After a little, Joe sold, and he got out with $600,000 cash, Dennis waited for the million, but he never got a cent. His holding was sold for the “mud”⁠—so that he came out without anything and had to begin again setting type.

That is the story as it was told to me many years ago⁠—I imagine by Joe Goodman; I don’t remember now. Dennis, by and by, died poor⁠—never got a start again.

Joe Goodman immediately went into the broker business. Six hundred thousand dollars was just good capital. He wasn’t in a position to retire yet. And he sent me the $300, and said that now he had started in the broking business and that he was making an abundance of money. I didn’t hear any more then for a long time; then I learned that he had not been content with mere broking, but had speculated on his own account and lost everything he had. And when that happened, John Mackay, who was always a good friend of the unfortunate, lent him $4,000 to buy a grape ranch with, in Fresno County, and Joe went up there. He didn’t know anything about the grape culture, but he and his wife learned it in a very little while. He learned it a little better than anybody else, and got a good living out of it until 1886 or ’87; then he sold it for several times what he paid for it originally.

He was here a year ago and I saw him. He lives in the garden of California⁠—in Alameda. Before this Eastern visit he had been putting in twelve years of his time in the most unpromising and difficult and stubborn study that anybody has undertaken since Champollion’s time; for he undertook to find out what those sculptures mean that they find down there in the forests of Central America. And he did find out and published a great book, the result of his twelve years of study. In this book he furnishes the meanings of those hieroglyphs, and his position as a successful expert in that complex study is recognized by the scientists in that line in London and Berlin and elsewhere. But he is no better known than he was before⁠—he is known only to those people. His book was published in about 1901.

This account in the New York Times says that in consequence of that strike in the great Bonanza a tempest of speculation ensued, and that the group of mines right around that center reached a value in the stock market of close upon $400,000,000; and six months after that, that value had been reduced by three-quarters; and by 1880, five years later, the stock of the Consolidated Virginia was under $2 a share, and the stock in the California was only $1.75⁠—for the Bonanza was now confessedly exhausted.

New York, January 10, 1906

I have to make several speeches within the next two or three months, and I have been obliged to make a few speeches during the last two months⁠—and all of a sudden it is borne in upon me that people who go out that way to make speeches at gatherings of one kind or another, and at social banquets particularly, put themselves to an unnecessary amount of trouble, often, in the way of preparation. As a rule, your speech at a social banquet is not an important part of your equipment for that occasion, for the reason that as a rule the banquet is merely given to celebrate some event of merely momentary interest, or to do honor to some guest of distinction⁠—and so there is nothing of large consequence⁠—nothing, I mean, that one should feel bound to concentrate himself upon in talking upon such an occasion, whereas the really important matter, perhaps, is that the speaker make himself reasonably interesting while he is on his feet, and avoid wearying and exasperating the people who are not privileged to make speeches, and also not privileged to get out of the way when other people begin. So, common charity for those people should require that the speaker make some kind of preparation, instead of going to the place absolutely empty.

The person who makes frequent speeches can’t afford much time for their preparation, and he probably goes to that place empty (just as I am in the habit of doing), purposing to gather texts from other unprepared people who are going to speak before he speaks. Now it is perfectly true that if you can get yourself located along about number three, and from that lower down on the program, it can be depended on with certainty that