Dec

3

Roughing It

December 3, 2024 |

for the past week ive been reading Roughing It and Following the Equator. It is amazing how much Mark Twain knew and how amusing it is. I particularly liked his analysis of the German Language, the Mormon migration and the booms and busts in the silver mines.

[Below, a market story from Roughing It. - Ed.]

A youth of nineteen, who was a telegraph operator in Virginia on a salary of a hundred dollars a month, and who, when he could not make out German names in the list of San Francisco steamer arrivals, used to ingeniously select and supply substitutes for them out of an old Berlin city directory, made himself rich by watching the mining telegrams that passed through his hands and buying and selling stocks accordingly, through a friend in San Francisco. Once when a private dispatch was sent from Virginia announcing a rich strike in a prominent mine and advising that the matter be kept secret till a large amount of the stock could be secured, he bought forty "feet" of the stock at twenty dollars a foot, and afterward sold half of it at eight hundred dollars a foot and the rest at double that figure. Within three months he was worth $150,000, and had resigned his telegraphic position.

[ And Twain analyzes The Awful German Language, from A Tramp Abroad. ]

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