Two or three persons having at different times intimated that if I would write an
autobiography they would read it when they got leisure, I yield at last to this frenzied
public demand and herewith tender my history.
Ours is a noble house, and stretches a long way back into antiquity. The earliest ancestor
the Twains have any record of was a friend of the family by the name of Higgins. This
was in the eleventh century, when our people were living in Aberdeen, county of Cork,
England. Why it is that our long line has ever since borne the maternal name (except
when one of them now and then took a playful refuge in an alias to avert foolishness),
instead of Higgins, is a mystery which none of us has ever felt much desire to stir. It is a
kind of vague, pretty romance, and we leave it alone. All the old families do that way.
Arthour Twain was a man of considerable note--a solicitor on the highway in William
Rufus's time. At about the age of thirty he went to one of those fine old English places of
resort called Newgate, to see about something, and never returned again. While there he
died suddenly.
Augustus Twain seems to have made something of a stir about the year 1160. He was as
full of fun as he could be, and used to take his old saber and sharpen it up, and get in a
convenient place on a dark night, and stick it through people as they went by, to see them
jump. He was a born humorist. But he got to going too far with it; and the first time he
was found stripping one of these parties, the authorities removed one end of him, and put
it up on a nice high place on Temple Bar, where it could contemplate the people and have
a good time. He never liked any situation so much or stuck to it so long.
Then for the next two hundred years the family tree shows a succession of soldiers--
noble, high-spirited fellows, who always went into battle singing, right behind the army,
and always went out a-whooping, right ahead of it.
This is a scathing rebuke to old dead Froissart's poor witticism that our family tree never
had but one limb to it, and that that one stuck out at right angles, and bore fruit winter and
summer.
Early in the fifteenth century we have Beau Twain, called "the Scholar." He wrote a
beautiful, beautiful hand. And he could imitate anybody's hand so closely that it was
enough to make a person laugh his head off to see it. He had infinite sport with his talent.
But by and by he took a contract to break stone for a road, and the roughness of the work
spoiled his hand. Still, he enjoyed life all the time he was in the stone business, which,
with inconsiderable intervals, was some forty-two years. In fact, he died in harness.
During all those long years he gave such satisfaction that he never was through with one
contract a week till the government gave him another. He was a perfect pet. And he was
always a favorite with his fellow-artists, and was a conspicuous member of their
