The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1910-04-22
SKETCH OF MARK TWAIN FOREMOST YANKEE HUM0RIST
 LIFE AND ACHIEVEMENTS

Mark Twain's. death removes from
 the international field of letters the I creator of American literary humor,
 and one of its most distinguished i 1iterateurs.
 l With his passing the people of the World-the militant and persuasive | doers of things aIike-have lost a | gentle, sympathizing friend and fear l less champion. For almost 75. years
 he lived. and for two-seores he mum | bered his admirers by figures that
 rival the census of the enlightened world.
 He drew his personal friends from every condition of life and held them steadfastly by his engaging. whole
 some personality and earnest under standing.
 Snatched from the obscurity of his I gentle birth by fckle fortune and reared in the university of the world 1 to become the master of wholesome humor, Mark Twain retained to the
 last his delicate distinctions of light l and shade, giving to the world its l dearest smiles and drawing from it it's most willing, sympathetic tears.
 For withal his humor the public eye
 has seen no happy life punctuated with deeper sorrows. He had known
 are whose spirit of sound humor would have survived so many on- i slaughts of a whimsical and cruel | fate.
 It was the same man who gave this | message to an anxious world: -sRu-
 nnors of my death are largely ex- | scribed his health as mot ruggedly well but not i'll enough to excite an undertaken" and who. on return from Bermuda, two days prior to the sud den death of his favor1te daughter Jean, the day before last Christmas,
 confirmed the belief of the newspa- per reporters who met him at the gangplank, with this sdiscouraging statement:
 My active work in this life and for the world is done. I shall write
 no more books nor attempt new. work"
 The accompanying smile was one hollow and furrowed. and his gait was shuffling and uncertain, as if tired almost unto death.
 untimeIy dea tn, his daughter Jean
 made public this statement at the instance of her father:
 "I hear the newspapers say am dying. The charge is notT true. would do no such thing at my time of life am behaving as well as can. Merry Christmas to everybody
 How merry was his Christmas is known throughout sympathizings universe. The hand of fate, always the kindeSt, gentleSt of men.
 The hour hand had travelled but once around the clock before the da ughter-his confdant, companion and amanueasis-was found dead in her bath at their country home, 'sStormf1eld. 7 Bedding, Conn. Her last c-o~ c1SAOA1 mammoth Christmas tree.
 The shock which transformed the Christmas symbols into bier-the most completed the wreck made pos sible by the ravages of time
 Recalling the statement of the previous evening which mocked the rumorsg of his death. the author ven tured, pitifuliy, that tttne punishment is more than the act zmerited, and settled back. into a silent, stoic con flict with his latest grief That his health declined gradually from this cause no one doubts. and Mark Twain
 In 1885 while there were less than a million white 1nha bitants in the great empire west Of the Mississippi, Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born. It was Nov. 30, and the scene of his nativity was a humble cabin at F1ori- da, Mo. which Sat that time marked the extreme fringe of frontier settle | ment His parents were John Mar shall Clemens of Virginia and his good wife, who was Jane Lambton of Kentucky.
 The father was a linea1 descendant l of Gregory Clement, one of the three1 judges who condemned to death | the general amnesty following tI1e.re-s storation, lost his head in conse- quence.
 Daniel Boone on the t'dark and bloody ground"--the scene of sher birth 29 l. years after the building of the first
 
 of that commonwealth. Even in the state famous a hothouse of fem mine beauty Jane Lambton became.l known as one of the most beautiful and brilliant belIes of her time in the state.
 Clements parents, victims of the wanderlust, left their small property in Lexington for new <home at Jamestown on the Cumberland river in Tennessee. Next they travelled to Missouri. passing St. Louis, then city of 10,O 900 souls, for what seemed to them a land of brighter promise. They settled at Florida, a hamlet, described by the author in later years as ''the settlement that just divides the desert from the sown.''
 It was there that the future Mark Twain was born, and here it wasI also that he first encountered thatl Fate, which at the age of three years foretold the anomalies of his career.
 His father, an absent-1ninded soul wary of the scant opportunities af- forded by his dings-migrat- ed from Florida without thought of ed and cooed in the delightful oceupa- ton of mud-pie baking in the sun bathed garden, oblivious to the disap- pearance of the household cavalcade across the sky line. Two or three hours later relative found the com pIacent youngSter, overlook the par ents on the wagon road to Hannibal and reminded them in no uncertain terms of the consequences of such no knows put Th1S 1n- l cident was the turning point in little SamuePs life-the influence that set in motion that remorseless pendulum of Fate?
 The father served for some years as magistrate in Hannibal was elect ed county judge, but died in 1S47 with put assuming office His death marked the end of tie youths systematic ed- h 1eation which had previously been in- owing to his uncertain health. |
 A brothers print shop became his nigh school At . intervals shortly after he was 12 years old, hes edited l { he little newspaper to the amaze ( nent of the subscribers and the. dis ! eouafiture of the elder brother whose publisher bore the z )runt of hostile complaints against he personal journalism of the ju- I 7eniIe.