Chapter 16
Dancing On Ice Floes (1849)
In the spring of 1849, I again narrowly escaped death by water, this time as it prematurely—or so it seemed to me—changed its form from a solid back to a liquid. In the early spring I was out skating on the Mississippi when of a sudden the ice began to snap and pop and break up. My friend Tom Nash and I made a mad dash for the shore, leaping from ice floe to ice floe. We had almost made it to shore when Tom slipped on one of these temporary migrating islands of ice and fell into the river. He was saved, but had spent too much time in the cold water, and ended up gradually going deaf as a result of his frigid baptism, which had first resulted in a raging case of scarlet fever.
I saw Tom again a few years back, when I visited my old boyhood environs for the last time, in 1902. Being deaf, he didn’t know he was yelling loud enough to be heard by people on both coasts when he approached me, indicated his fellow citizens with a dismissive gesture and, making a cup of his hands, “whispered” into my ear: “SAME DAMN FOOLS, SAM!”
EDITOR’S NOTES: It was apparently not unusual for residents of Hannibal to judge one another as fools. Once, when Twain returned there for a visit, he engaged a local—who had arrived since Twain’s departure—in conversation, inquiring about what had become of certain of his contemporaries. The man spoke of many residents and previous residents as having been fools. In chapter 53 of Life on the Mississippi, Twain recounts some details of the conversation:
After asking after such other folk as I could call to mind, I finally inquired about myself:
‘Oh, he succeeded well enough—another case of damned fool.’
It was with much satisfaction that I recognized the wisdom of having told this candid gentleman, in the beginning, that my name was Smith.
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