San Rafael Notices

The Marin County Journal
1868: 11 April

FANCIFUL CARPET.--Spain, says Mark Twain, is the only nation the Moors feared. She thrashed them five or six years ago, about a disputed piece of property opposite Gibraltar, and captured the city of Tetouan. She compromised on an augmentation of her territory, $20,000,000 indemnity in money, and peace. And then she gave up the city. But she never gave it up until the Spanish soldiers had eaten up all the cats. On the contrary the Moors reverence cats as something sacred. So the Spanish touched them on a tender point that time. Their unfeline conduct in eating up all the Tetouan cats aroused a hatred towards them in the breasts of the Moors to which even the driving them out of Spain was tame and passionless.--Moors and Spaniards are foes forever now. France had a minister at Trangier, once who embittered the nation against him in the most innocent way. He killed a couple of batallions of cats (the city is full of them), and made a parlor carpet of their hides. He made his carpet in circles--first a circle of old gray tomcats, with their tails all pointing toward the center; then a circle of yellow ones; then a circle of all sorts of cats; and finally a centre-piece of assorted kittens. This was very beautiful, but the Moors curse his memory to this day.



The Marin County Journal
1868: 18 April

SICKENING.--The San Francisco papers are going into raptures over Mark Twain's lecture on "Pilgrim Life." This miserable scribbler, whose letters in the Alta, sickened everyone who read them, and of which the proprietors of that paper were heartily ashamed, has the audacity and impudence to attempt to lecture to an intelligent people.


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