Gold Hill Daily News

MARK TWAIN ON HIS ANCESTORS.

Sheldon & Co., of New York, have just issued in book form the First Romance and Autobiography of Mark Twain. The work is having an immense sale, and we take pleasure in giving the following extract from it:

I will remark here, in passing, that certain ancestors of mine are so thoroughly well known in history by their aliases, that I have not felt it to be worth while to mention them in the order of their birth. Among these may be mentioned Richard Brinsley Twaln, alias Guy Fawkes; John Wentworth Twain, alias Sixteen String Jack; William Hogarth Twain, alias Jack Sheppard; Ananias Twain, alias Baron Munchausen; John George Twain, alias Captain Kidd; and then there are George Francis Train, Tom Pepper, Nebuchadnezzar and Balaam's Ass—they all belong to our family, but to a branch of it somewhat distantly removed from the honorable direct line—in fact a collateral branch, whose members chiefly differ from the ancient stock in that, in order to acquire the notoriety we have always yearned and hungered for, they have got into a low way of going to jail instead of getting hanged." It is not well, when writing an autobiography, to follow your ancestry down too close to your own time—it is safest to speak only vaguely of your great-grandfather, and then skip from him to yourself, which I now do. I was born without teeth—and there Richard III had the advantage of me; but I was born without "a humpback likewise, and there I had the advantage of him. My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuous. But now a thought occurs to me. My own history would really seem so tame, contrasted with that of my ancestors, that it is simply wisdom to leave it unwritten until I am hanged. If some other biographies I have read had stopped with the ancestry until a like event had occurred, it would have been a felicitous thing for the reading public. How does it strike you?