| [Here are eight other brief passages from the letters MT wrote for the Alta California that he omitted or drastically altered when revising his work for a national audience, which he conceived as more genteel than the westerners among whom his career had begun. The arabic number after each passage refers to the Alta letter it is from; the roman numeral, to the chapter in Innocents Abroad based on that letter.] |
From the palace to the gloomy prison is but a step--one might spit across the narrow canal that intervenes. [9, XXII] As concerns the latter [priests], it is said that God will take care of them--but of course that is only a matter of opinion. [10, XXV] Look at the grand Duomo of Florence . . . Like all other men, I fell down and worshipped it, but I had it in me to burn it down if I had a chance. [10, XXV] They crowd you--infest you--swarm about you, and sweat and stink, and lie, and look sneaking, and mean, and obsequious--the concentrated essence of the soulless, dust-licking scum of the earth the lower classes of the whole nation are! [13, X] [Jael "drove a hideous tent-pin down through" Sisera's "brain."] It was very funny. The gentle children of Israel, the race beloved, were full of amusing eccentricities. [35, XLVI] Thus, one by one, the splendid attractions of Palestine are passing away--gradually, but surely, the paint and the gilding are peeling from its cheap theatrical scenery and exposing the unsightly boards beneath. [41, LI] One of our pilgrims went up and saw the sun rise on Olivet. I did not hear of any other that did it. One is always jaded, here, always languid and weary. His brain is so worn and racked with the day's accumulations of knowledge when he comes home at night, that it is like an overloaded stomach, and he feels as it it would be an unspeakable relief to take a mental emetic and throw up everything he ever learned in his life. [48, LV] [The "picturesque form" of Lot's wife] no longer looms above the desert of the Dead Sea to remind the tourist of the doom that fell upon the lost cities, while at the same time it called painful attention to that unhappy trait of curiosity that takes up so much spare room in all her sex. The lowing herds wound slowly o'er the lea, sometime or other, and took her along with them, no doubt. [49, LV] |