Puddnhead Wins His Name.

Tell the truth or trump--but get the trick.--Pudd'nhead Wilson's
Calendar.

The scene of this chronicle is the town of Dawson's Landing, on the
Missouri side of the Mississippi, half a day's journey, per steamboat,
below St. Louis.

In 1830 it was a snug little collection of modest one- and two-story
frame dwellings whose whitewashed exteriors were almost concealed from
sight by climbing tangles of rose-vines, honeysuckles, and
morning-glories. Each of these pretty homes had a garden in front fenced
with white palings and opulently stocked with hollyhocks, marigolds,
touch-me-nots, prince's-feathers and other old-fashioned flowers; while
on the window-sills of the houses stood wooden boxes containing
moss-rose plants and terra-cotta pots in which grew a breed of geranium
whose spread of intensely red blossoms accented the prevailing pink tint
of the rose-clad house-front like an explosion of flame. When there was
room on the ledge outside of the pots and boxes for a cat, the cat was
there--in sunny weather--stretched at full length, asleep and blissful,
with her furry belly to the sun and a paw curved over her nose. Then
that house was complete, and its contentment and peace were made
manifest to the world by this symbol, whose testimony is infallible. A
home without a cat--and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered
cat--may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

All along the streets, on both sides, at the outer edge of the brick
sidewalks, stood locust-trees with trunks protected by wooden boxing,
and these furnished shade for summer and a sweet fragrance in spring
when the clusters of buds came forth. The main street, one block back
from the river, and running parallel with it, was the sole business
street. It was six blocks long, and in each block two or three brick
stores three stories high towered above interjected bunches of little
frame shops. Swinging signs creaked in the wind, the street's whole
length. The candy-striped pole which indicates nobility proud and
ancient along the palace-bordered canals of Venice, indicated merely the
humble barber shop along the main street of Dawson's Landing. On a chief
corner stood a lofty unpainted pole wreathed from top to bottom with tin
pots and pans and cups, the chief tinmonger's noisy notice to the world
(when the wind blew) that his shop was on hand for business at that
corner.

The hamlet's front was washed by the clear waters of the great river;
its body stretched itself rearward up a gentle incline; its most
rearward border fringed itself out and scattered its houses about the
base-line of the hills; the hills rose high, inclosing the town in a
half-moon curve, clothed with forests from foot to summit.

Steamboats passed up and down every hour or so. Those belonging to the
little Cairo line and the little Memphis line always stopped; the big
Orleans liners stopped for hails only, or to land passengers or freight;
and this was the case also with the great flotilla of "transients."
These latter came out of a dozen rivers--the Illinois, the Missouri, the
Upper Mississippi, the Ohio, the Monongahela, the Tennessee, the Red
River, the White River, and so on; and were bound every whither and
stocked with every imaginable comfort or necessity which the
Mississippi's communities could want, from the frosty Falls of St.

Anthony down through nine climates to torrid New Orleans.

Dawson's Landing was a slaveholding town, with a rich slave-worked grain
and pork country back of it. The town was sleepy and comfortable and
contented. It was fifty years old, and was growing slowly--very slowly,
in fact, but still it was growing.

The chief citizen was York Leicester Driscoll, about forty years old,
judge of the county court. He was very proud of his old Virginian
ancestry, and in his hospitalities and his rather formal and stately
manners he kept up its traditions. He was fine and just and generous. To
be a gentleman--a gentleman without stain or blemish--was his only
religion, and to it he was always faithful. He was respected, esteemed
and beloved by all the community. He was well off, and was gradually
adding to his store. He and his wife were very nearly happy, but not
quite, for they had no children. The longing for the treasure of a child
had grown stronger and stronger as the years slipped away, but the
blessing never came--and was never to come.

With this pair lived the Judge's widowed sister, Mrs. Rachel Pratt, and
she also was childless--childless, and sorrowful for that reason, and
not to be comforted. The women were good and commonplace people, and did
their duty and had their reward in clear consciences and the community's
approbation. They were Presbyterians, the Judge was a free-thinker.

Pembroke Howard, lawyer and bachelor, aged about forty, was another old
Virginian grandee with proved descent from the First Families. He was a
fine, brave, majestic creature, a gentleman according to the nicest
requirements of the Virginia rule, a devoted Presbyterian, an authority
on the "code," and a man always courteously ready to stand up before you
in the field if any act or word of his had seemed doubtful or suspicious
to you, and explain it with any weapon you might prefer from brad-awls
to artillery. He was very popular with the people, and was the Judge's
dearest friend.

Then there was Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex, another F. F. V. of
formidable caliber--however, with him we have no concern.

Percy Northumberland Driscoll, brother to the Judge, and younger than he
by five years, was a married man, and had had children around his
hearthstone; but they were attacked in detail by measles, croup and
scarlet fever, and this had given the doctor a chance with his effective
antediluvian methods; so the cradles were empty. He was a prosperous
man, with a good head for speculations, and his fortune was growing. On
the 1st of February, 1830, two boy babes were born in his house: one to
him, the other to one of his slave girls, Roxana by name. Roxana was
twenty years old. She was up and around the same day, with her hands
full, for she was tending both babies.

Mrs. Percy Driscoll died within the week. Roxy remained in charge of the
children. She had her own way, for Mr. Driscoll soon absorbed himself in
his speculations and left her to her own devices.

In that same month of February, Dawson's Landing gained a new citizen.

This was Mr. David Wilson, a young fellow of Scotch parentage. He had
wandered to this remote region from his birthplace in the interior of
the State of New York, to seek his fortune. He was twenty-five years
old, college-bred, and had finished a post-college course in an Eastern
law school a couple of years before.

He was a homely, freckled, sandy-haired young fellow, with an
intelligent blue eye that had frankness and comradeship in it and a
covert twinkle of a pleasant sort. But for an unfortunate remark of his,
he would no doubt have entered at once upon a successful career at
Dawson's Landing. But he made his fatal remark the first day he spent in
the village, and it "gaged" him. He had just made the acquaintance of a
group of citizens when an invisible dog began to yelp and snarl and howl
and make himself very comprehensively disagreeable, whereupon young
Wilson said, much as one who is thinking aloud--

"I wish I owned half of that dog."

"Why?" somebody asked.

"Because I would kill my half."

The group searched his face with curiosity, with anxiety even, but found
no light there, no expression that they could read. They fell away from
him as from something uncanny, and went into privacy to discuss him. One
said:

"'Pears to be a fool."

"'Pears?" said another. "Is, I reckon you better say."

"Said he wished he owned half of the dog, the idiot," said a third.

"What did he reckon would become of the other half if he killed his
half? Do you reckon he thought it would live?"

"Why, he must have thought it, unless he is the downrightest fool in the
world; because if he hadn't thought it, he would have wanted to own the
whole dog, knowing that if he killed his half and the other half died,
he would be responsible for that half just the same as if he had killed
that half instead of his own. Don't it look that way to you, gents?"

"Yes, it does. If he owned one half of the general dog, it would be so;
if he owned one end of the dog and another person owned the other end,
it would be so, just the same; particularly in the first case, because
if you kill one half of a general dog, there ain't any man that can tell
whose half it was, but if he owned one end of the dog, maybe he could
kill his end of it and--"

"No, he couldn't either; he couldn't and not be responsible if the other
end died, which it would. In my opinion that man ain't in his right
mind."

"In my opinion he hain't got any mind."

No. 3 said: "Well, he's a lummox, anyway."

"That's what he is," said No. 4, "he's a labrick--just a Simon-pure
labrick, if ever there was one."

"Yes, sir, he's a dam fool, that's the way I put him up," said No. 5.

"Anybody can think different that wants to, but those are my
sentiments."

"I'm with you, gentlemen," said No. 6. "Perfect jackass--yes, and it
ain't going too far to say he is a pudd'nhead. If he ain't a pudd'nhead,
I ain't no judge, that's all."

Mr. Wilson stood elected. The incident was told all over the town, and
gravely discussed by everybody. Within a week he had lost his first
name; Pudd'nhead took its place. In time he came to be liked, and well
liked too; but by that time the nickname had got well stuck on, and it
stayed. That first day's verdict made him a fool, and he was not able to
get it set aside, or even modified. The nickname soon ceased to carry
any harsh or unfriendly feeling with it, but it held its place, and was
to continue to hold its place for twenty long years.