Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 83, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 April 1910 — MARK TWAIN’S WATERMELON. [ARTICLE]

MARK TWAIN’S WATERMELON.

Story of One of tl»e Hnmortit’i ‘‘Mon- • keynhlnen” in Hannibal. “Going to Bermuda, is he? Well, 1 can tell him a plan that’ll beat that Let him come over here and climb up and down the old hills, chop holes to fish in Bear Creek and smoke some Old Fisherman cigars and he’ll forget he ain’t feeling peart." Thus spoke Joe Tisdale Sunday morning when told that his old friend and playmate Sam Clemens had gone to the southern islands for the benefit of his health, a Cannibal (Mo. )-= correspondent of the New York Sun says. Mr. Tisdale had been out walking since 7, without gloves, enjoying the keen wintry air, he safd. It was then 11, and everybody but Mt. Tisdale seemed to be wearing a heavy outer coat and thick gloves. He is a small man, a trifle bent, but active and vigorous as a school boy. There is only a few years’ difference between his age and Mr. Clemens’. “Are you the man who used to make those long three for a nickel stogies for Sam?” Mr. Tisdale was asked. “I made cigars, sir, not stogies,” replied the old’ gentleman with some indignation. “Began down there where Tom Foster kept drug store alongside the printing office. That was long be® fore the war—the big war, you know. I guess itawas in 1852. Sam came in there Sow and then and bought smokers; used to’ say they were the best he could get. He was a bit particular about what he smoked, even when a youngster." < ‘What did the people think of Sam in those days?”

“They thought he was a darn fool.” f The response was made with such promptness that no one could doubt the old clgarmaker’s sincerity. “He was a joke, Sam was. I remember one time he got a big watermelon, the Lord knows how, but anyway be took it upstairs and laid it on bis stool near the window. I was coming around the corner and as I looked Up I noticed Bam spying up and down 0 Presently John Meredith comes Along And urhen. be free directly under the window Sam drops that big melon ' right square on John’s head. Gee, but it smashed him. 1 think John’s first Idas was that seme building had fallen. “John saw me grinning and came in my direction like howns going to take it out of me, but when he looked around the street end saw everybody weofclaughlng i gueee he thought it too big a Job to lick us all. Of course Sam wasn’t nowheJS jn plgbt, hut John found who did It and he never spoke to Bam from that day till they met years after at Pike’s Peak. ? ‘fin .talking about it Bam said be Studied a long while which would be the most fun, to eat the melon or drop n an somebody’s bead, and be flipped a nickel to find out which be ought to fie. The bead won.

“About twenty years after. Sam had left us he came back. I met him and told him when he wanted an old-time smoke to come around to my shop. I got up a box of the Old Fisherman, and when he and John Garth came in I made Sam a present of the box. “There were forty-six big cigars in It,- John Garth told me before he and Sam went to bed that night they smoked the entire contents of the box except two, which they saved for morning. I don’t guess there are many fellbws who could smoke like Sam. “That’s the way he did about everything he went at. It was no trouble if there was fun at the end of it. We never supposed he was training for a funny writer, though. If he’d have stayed in Hannibal and wrote all them pieces that’s made him a great man the people wouldn't have paid any attention to him. They’d Just say, ‘Oh, that’s some more of Sam’s XooL-nom.. sense,’ and let it go at that He sure showed good sense by getting out of Hannibal If he wanted to turn his monkey-shines into dollars.”