The Invalid's Story Notes
The Invalid's Story by Mark Twain
a.k.a. Samuel Clemens (1835-1910) * Seems sixty and married * Really a 41 year old bachelor * two years ago he was “a man of iron, a very athlete” * Lost his health by helping take care of a box of guns on a two-hundred-mile journey by railway one night in winter * belongs in Cleveland, Ohio * reached home after dark, in a snow-storm, and heard that his dearest boyhood friend and schoolmate, John B. Hackett, had died the day before * last utterance was a desire that I would take his body to his father and mother in Wisconsin * card marked "Deacon Levi Hackett, Bethlehem, Wisconsin" * long white-pine box * fastened the card to it with tacks then put it aboard the express car then ran to the eating-room for a sandwich and some cigars * He came back and there was “a young fellow examining around it, with a card in his hands, and some tacks and a hammer” * a mistake was made and it turns out he was carrying off a box of guns which that young fellow had come to ship to a rifle company in Peoria, Illinois, and the young man had got John B. Hackett’s dead body * sat on a bale of buckets * expressman - plain man of fifty, with a simple, honest, good-natured face, and a breezy, practical heartiness in his general style * package of peculiarly mature and capable Limburger cheese on one end of my coffin-box (box of guns) * at the time he had never heard of the cheese in my life and thus was ignorant of its character * “slammed his sliding doors to, and bolted them, closed his window down tight, and then went bustling around, here and there and yonder, setting things to rights, and all the time contentedly humming "Sweet By and By," in a low tone, and flatting a good deal” * began to detect an odor on the frozen air * every minute the odor thickened more and became more gamey and hard to stand * the expressman got some wood and made fire in his stove. *
a.k.a. Samuel Clemens (1835-1910) * Seems sixty and married * Really a 41 year old bachelor * two years ago he was “a man of iron, a very athlete” * Lost his health by helping take care of a box of guns on a two-hundred-mile journey by railway one night in winter * belongs in Cleveland, Ohio * reached home after dark, in a snow-storm, and heard that his dearest boyhood friend and schoolmate, John B. Hackett, had died the day before * last utterance was a desire that I would take his body to his father and mother in Wisconsin * card marked "Deacon Levi Hackett, Bethlehem, Wisconsin" * long white-pine box * fastened the card to it with tacks then put it aboard the express car then ran to the eating-room for a sandwich and some cigars * He came back and there was “a young fellow examining around it, with a card in his hands, and some tacks and a hammer” * a mistake was made and it turns out he was carrying off a box of guns which that young fellow had come to ship to a rifle company in Peoria, Illinois, and the young man had got John B. Hackett’s dead body * sat on a bale of buckets * expressman - plain man of fifty, with a simple, honest, good-natured face, and a breezy, practical heartiness in his general style * package of peculiarly mature and capable Limburger cheese on one end of my coffin-box (box of guns) * at the time he had never heard of the cheese in my life and thus was ignorant of its character * “slammed his sliding doors to, and bolted them, closed his window down tight, and then went bustling around, here and there and yonder, setting things to rights, and all the time contentedly humming "Sweet By and By," in a low tone, and flatting a good deal” * began to detect an odor on the frozen air * every minute the odor thickened more and became more gamey and hard to stand * the expressman got some wood and made fire in his stove. *