When Huck Finn was flung out of the Concord Public Library twenty-one years ago, a number of letters of sympathy and indignation reached me—mainly from children, I am obliged to admit—and I kept some of them so that I might reread them now and then and apply them as a salve to my soreness. I have overhauled those ancient letters this morning and among them I find one from a little girl who resents that library’s treatment of Huck and then goes innocently along and gives me something more of a dig than even the library had done. She says:
I am eleven years old, and I live on a farm near Rockville, Maryland. Once this winter we had a boy to work for us named John. We lent him “Huck Finn” to read, and one night he let his clothes out of the window and left in the night. The last we heard from him he was out in Ohio; and father says if we had lent him “Tom Sawyer” to read he would not have stopped on this side of the ocean.
Bless her gentle heart, she was trying to cheer me up, and her effort is entitled to the praise which the country journalist conferred upon the Essex band after he had praised the whole Fourth of July celebration in detail, and had exhausted his stock of compliments. But he was obliged to lay something in the nature of a complimentary egg, and with a final heroic effort he brought forth this, “The Essex band done the best they could.”
I have been reading another chapter or two in Ambassador White’s autobiography, and I find the book charming, particularly where he talks about me. I find any book charming that talks about me. I am expecting this one of mine to do something in that line, and it is my purpose that it shall not lose sight of that subject long at a time. Mr. White was the first president of Cornell University, and he gives the university’s side of the Willard Fiske trouble. I stopped at that point. I didn’t read his version, for I want to give another version first, and as this version may conflict with his, I wish to set it down now before its complexion shall have a chance to undergo a change by coming in contact with his version.
This brings me back to another example of my great scheme for finding work for the unemployed. The famous Fiske-Cornell episode of a quarter of a century ago grew up in this way. About fifty years ago, when Willard Fiske was a poor and untaught and friendless boy of thirteen, he and Bayard Taylor took steerage passage in a sailing ship and crossed the ocean. They found their way to Iceland, and Willard Fiske remained there a year or two. He acquired the Norse languages and perfected himself in them. He also became an expert scholar in the literature of those languages. By and by he returned to America, and while still a very young man and hardly of age, he got a place as instructor in that kind of learning in the infant Cornell University. This seat of learning was at Ithaca, New York, and Mr. McGraw was a citizen of that little town. He had made a fortune in the electric telegraph, and it was his purpose to leave a large part of it to the university. He had a lovely young daughter, and she and young Fiske fell in love with each other. They were aware of this; the girl’s parents were aware of it; the university was aware of it; Ithaca was aware of it. All these parties expected Fiske to propose, but he didn’t do it. There was no way to account for it, and so all the parties, including the girl, went on from month to month and year to year in a condition of suppressed surprise, waiting for the mystery to solve itself. Which it still didn’t do. At last Mr. McGraw died, and the fact developed that he had left no will. Therefore the daughter was sole heir. However, she knew what her father’s intention had been, so she turned over to the university a good part of the fortune and thus made the intention good.
The years drifted along and the relations between Fiske and Miss McGraw remained the same. But there was no proposal. Fiske had a quite definite reason for not proposing. It was that he was very poor and the girl very rich, and he was not willing to seem to marry her for her money. This was good morals, good principle, good sentiment—but it was not business. Things remained just in this way for years and years, and the devotion of the couple to each other went along unimpaired by time. At last, when they were well stricken in years, and when Miss McGraw had developed pulmonary consumption, she invited Fiske and Charles Dudley Warner and his wife to make a trip up the Nile with her in the old-fashioned dahabiyeh, a trip which occupied a matter of three months. Miss McGraw had already been on the other side of the ocean several months, and she had been buying all sorts of beautiful things—pictures, sculpture, costly rugs, and so on—wherewith to adorn a little palace which she was building in Ithaca.
At last there on board the dahabiyeh a sorrowful time came—for Miss McGraw’s malady was making great progress and it was manifest that she could not live long. Then she came out frankly and said she wanted to marry Fiske so that she could leave her fortune to him. Fiske wanted to marry her, but his ideas remained unimpaired in his heart and head and he was not willing to accept the fortune. The Warners wrought with him. They used their best persuasions. He was as anxious for the marriage as was Miss McGraw, but he wouldn’t accept the fortune. At last he was persuaded to a modification of the terms. He was willing to accept the little palace and its furnishings and three hundred thousand dollars; he would accept nothing more. The marriage took place. Mrs. Fiske made a will, and in the will she left the palace and its furnishings and three hundred thousand dollars to her husband, Willard Fisk. She left the residue of the fortune to Cornell University.
By and by Fiske arrived at an understanding of the fact that he had not acted wisely. The income of three hundred thousand dollars was wholly inadequate. He could not live in the Ithaca house on any such income as that. He did not try to live in it. There it stood, with all those beautiful things in it which Miss McGraw had gathered in her travels in Europe, and Fiske lived elsewhere—lived most comfortably elsewhere—lived where three hundred thousand dollars was really a fortune, and he was entirely satisfied. He lived in Italy. He was as dear and sweet a soul as I have ever known. His was a character which won friends for him, and whoso became his friend remained so, ever afterward.
Now followed this curious circumstance. Cornell had received by Mrs. Fiske’s will a noble addition to its endowment—two million dollars, if I remember rightly. No doubt Cornell University was satisfied. But the university’s lawyers, picking and searching around through Mrs. Fiske’s will, found a defect in it which neither Mrs. Fiske nor Charley Warner, who drew the will, suspected was there. It was something about “residue.” It was the opinion of those lawyers that the university might claim the little palace and its rich equipment, and make the claim good in a court of law.
The claim was put forward. Fiske and Warner were outraged by this insolence, this greed. Both knew that it was the desire of the dying wife that her husband should live in that house and have the sacred companionship of those things which had been selected by her own hands for its adornment. Both knew that but for Fiske’s stubborn resistance he would have had not only the house, but a great sum of money besides, and now that the university proposed to take the house away from Fiske—well, it was time for the worm to turn. The worm turned. Fiske was the worm. Fiske resisted the university’s claim and the university brought suit.
Now then, I must go back to a point antedating the bringing of this suit three or four years. One day in Hartford a young fellow called and wanted to see me. I think he said he was from Canada. He said he had a strong desire, an irresistible desire, to become a lawyer, and he thought that if he could get some work to do that would support him, he could meantime use his off hours, if he had any, in studying Blackstone. He thought he could be a journalist. He thought he could at least become a good reporter, and his idea was to get me to use my influence with the Hartford newspaper people to the end that he might get the sort of chance he was after.
I said: “Certainly, I will get you a berth in any newspaper in the town. Choose your own paper.”
He was very grateful. These clients of mine always are, until they learn the conditions. I furnished him the conditions in the same old way. He considered a moment and then said:
“How simple that is; how sure it is; how certain it is; how actually infallible it is, human nature being constructed as it is—how is it that that has not been thought of before?” Then he added, as he went out of the door, “I choose the Courant, and I will have the job before night.”
About three months afterward he came out to report progress. He had moved along so briskly, from sweeper-out, up through the several grades, that he was now on the editorial staff, and was very happy, particularly as staff work allowed him a good deal of off time for the study of the law, and the law was where his high ambition lay.
I come back now to that Fiske lawsuit. We had gone to Elmira one summer to spend the summer, as usual, at Quarry Farm, and we were visiting Mrs. Clemens’s family down in the town for a while. A young man called and said he would like to see me. I went to the library and saw him there. It was the young man of whom I have been talking, but as I had not seen him for three or four years I did not at first recall him. He said that while he was on the Courant he saved all the money he could, and studied the law diligently in his off hours—that now, recently, he had given up journalism and was going to make a break into the law; that he had canvassed the field and had decided that he would become office assistant to David B. Hill of Elmira, New York—that is to say, he had decided to do this, evidently without requiring Mr. Hill to state whether he wanted it so or not. Hill was a very distinguished lawyer and a big politician, a man of vast importance and influence—and he is still that today, in his old age. The application was made and Hill said promptly that he didn’t need anybody’s assistance. But young Bacon said he didn’t want any pay, he only wanted a chance to work; he could support himself. He would do anything that could be of any assistance to Mr. Hill, even to sweeping out the office; that he wanted to work, and he wanted to be near a man like Hill because he was determined to become a lawyer. Well, as he was not expensive and showed a determination that pleased Hill, Hill gave him office room. Very well, the usual thing happened, the thing that always happens. Little by little Bacon got to beguiling out of Hill things to do, and presently Hill was furnishing him the things to do without any beguilement.
“Now then,” Bacon said, “Mr. Clemens, I’ve got a chance—I’ve got a chance.” Professor Willard Fiske brought his case to Mr. Hill. Mr. Hill examined it carefully and declined to take it. He said Fiske had no case, and therefore he did not wish to take it merely to lose it. Fiske insisted, and presently Hill said: “Well, here’s this young fellow here in my office. If he wants to take your case, all right; I will advise him and help him to the best of my ability without charge”; and he asked if Fiske was willing to put the case into Bacon’s hands. Fiske did it.
Then young Bacon had this happy idea. There being nothing for Fiske in the apparent conditions, he went to the university charter to see what he might find there. He found a very pleasant thing there; to use a phrase of the day, he struck oil in that charter. He brought the charter to Mr. Hill and showed him this large fact: that Cornell University was not privileged to accept or to acquire any property if, at the time, it already possessed property worth three millions of dollars. Cornell University possessed property worth more than that at the time that Mrs. Fiske made her will, and it still possessed that amount.
Hill said, “Well, Bacon, the case is yours—that is to say, well, Bacon, the case is Fiske’s. It is the university, now, that has no show.”
Bacon won the case. It was his first case. He charged Fiske a hundred thousand dollars for his services. Fiske handed him the check, and his thanks therewith.
I didn’t see Bacon again for some years—I don’t know how many—and then he told me that that first lawsuit of his was also his last one; that that first fee of his was the only one he had ever received; that he had hardly pocketed his check until he ran across a most charming young widow possessed of a great fortune and he took them both in. I think I will say nothing more about my great scheme for providing jobs for the unemployed. I think I have proven that it is a good and effective scheme.