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Pudd'nhead Wilson: Pudd'nhead

Tom, secure in his sense of safety because of the overwhelming evidence against the twins, ventured to taunt Pudd'nhead upon his confidence in winning his case. He entered his study, and, sitting himself at Pudd'nhead's side while he studied the prints in his collection, he picked up one of the records. "Why, here's old Roxy's label," he said, contemptuously. "Nigger paws, eh? There's a line across her thumb-print. Now how comes that?" Pudd'nhead, taking the glass from Tom's hand, held it up to the lamp. The blood sank suddenly out of his face. He gazed at the polished surface with the glassy stare of a corpse. The mystery was solved!

Tom's thumb-print standing clearly outlined before him on the glass and that on the handle of the blood-stained knife were identified. "To the minutest detail," said the foreman of the jury, as he returned a verdict of murder against the unhappy lad.

The twins were acquitted, the defrauded heir lifted up out of slavery and restored to his inheritance, and Tom, forever branded as an impostor, was "sold down the river" for the benefit of the creditors of the late Percy Northumberland Driscoll.

Which, all things considered, was not a strange fate, for as Pudd'nhead Wilson himself has said in his famous calendar, "a cauliflower, after all, is nothing but a cabbage with a college education."

STEVENSON ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON had "the most speaking of presences: a steady, penetrating fire in the wide-set eyes, a compelling power and sweetness in the smile; courteous waving gestures of the long, nervous hands, a lit cigarette generally held between his fingers." His conversation was incomparably brilliant, yet he did not dominate the talk; "rather he helped every one about him to discover unexpected powers of their own."

Henley says "he radiates talk as the sun does light and heat." Colvin compares his warm humanity to the steady flame at heart of a great driftwood fire, while his flashing humor was like the myriad colored flames. Stevenson had, moreover, the most sterling sense of duty and of justice to do what service we can, for honor and not for hire.

He was eager to risk his life at the time of the agrarian troubles in Ireland and again in Samoa; he was threatened with deportation for his activities in behalf of the natives. His loyalty is best expressed in a letter to Barrie about their beloved Scotland, "Singular that I should live here in the South Seas under conditions so new and so striking, and yet my imagination so continually inhabit that cold old huddle of gray hills." But above all he was temperamentally a poet. From childhood it was his To hear The great bell beating far and near-- The odd, unknown, enchanted gong That on the road hales men along, That from the mountain calls afar, That lures the vessel from a star, And with a still, aerial sound Makes all the earth enchanted ground.