Mark Twain

Century Magazine/November, 1897

NEWS has reached this shut-in corner of the world of the death of an illustrious neighbor and friend of mine, Dr. Trumbull of Hartford. He was probably the richest man in America in the matter of knowledge—knowledge of all values, from copper up to government bonds. It seems a great pity that this vast property is now lost to the world—that it could not have been left to some college, or distributed among deserving paupers, of whom we have so many. The increment of it was so distributed, and with a free hand, as long as the billionaire lived; one may say that of Dr. Trumbull. He spent his riches in a princely way upon any that needed and applied. That was a great and fine feature of his character, and I am moved to say this word about it lest it be forgotten or overlooked. He wrote myriads of letters to information-seekers all over the world—a service of self-sacrifice which made no show, and is all the more entitled to praise and remembrance for that reason.

I asked him a question once myself about twenty years ago. I remember it yet—vividly. His answer exhibited in a striking way his two specialties—the immensity of his learning, and the generous fashion in which he lavished that and his time and labor gratis upon the ignorant needy. I was summering somewhere away from home, and one day I had a new idea—a motif for a drama. I was enchanted with the felicity of the conception—I might say intoxicated with it. It seemed to me that no idea was ever so exquisite, so beautiful, so freighted with wonderful possibilities. I believed that when I should get it fittingly dressed out in the right dramatic clothes it would not only delight the world, but astonish it. Then came a stealthy, searching, disagreeable little chill: what if the idea was not new, after all? Trumbull would know. I wrote him some cold, calm, indifferent words out of a heart that was sweltering with anxiety, mentioning my idea, and asking him in a casual way if it had ever been used in a play. His answer covered six pages, written in his fine and graceful hand—six pages of titles of plays in which the idea had been used, the date of each piracy appended, also the country and language in which the felony had been committed. The theft of my idea had been consummated two hundred and sixty-eight times. The latest instance mentioned was English, and not yet three years old; the earliest had electrified China eight hundred years before Christ. Dr. Trumbull added in a foot-note that his list was not complete, since it furnished only the modern instances; but that if I wished it, he would go back to early times. I do not remember the exact words I said about the early times in my answer, but it is not material; they indicated the absence of lust in that direction. I did not write the play.

Years ago, as I have been told, a widowed descendant of the Audubon family, in desperate need, sold a per feet copy of Audubon’s “Birds” to a commercially minded scholar in America for a hundred dollars. The book was worth a thousand in the market. The scholar complimented himself upon his shrewd stroke of business. That was not Hammond Trumbull’s style. After the war a lady in the far South wrote him that among the wreckage of her better days she had a book which someone had told her was worth a hundred dollars, and had advised her to offer it to him; she added that she was very poor, and that if he would buy it at that price, it would be a great favor to her. It was Eliot’s Indian Bible. Trumbull answered that if it was a perfect copy it had an established market value, like a gold coin, and was worth a thousand dollars; that if she would send it to him he would examine it, and if it proved to be perfect he would sell it to the British Museum and forward the money to her. It did prove to be perfect, and she got her thousand dollars without delay, and intact.

WEGGIS , SWITZERLAND.

S. L. Clemens.