Click to add citation to My Citations.
Becky. Came up from St Louis a sweet and pretty young thing—caused many heart-breaks. Silver pencil—$1.50—she didn’t care for it. Davis a widower, married her sister Josephine, and Becky married Davis’s son. They went to Texas. Disappeared. [The “long dog.”]
The other sisters married—Mrs. Strong went to Peoria. One of them was Mrs. Shoot—married at 13, daughter (Mrs. Hayward) born at 14. Mrs. Hayward’s daughter tried the stage at home, then at Daly’s, didn’t succeed. Finally a pushing and troublesome London newspaper correspondent.
Explanatory Notes: Expand | Collapse
Textual Commentary
Click to add citation to My Citations.
Mark Twain made these notes about the people of Hannibal, Missouri, in late July or early
August 1897, during a summer stay in Weggis, Switzerland. Hannibal, on the Mississippi River, had barely a thousand
inhabitants when Clemens’s family settled there in November 1839, a few weeks before his fourth birthday.
Click to add citation to My Citations.
99.6–7 The “long
dog.”] The anecdote apparently alluded to, one of Clemens’s favorites, has not been recovered, although
the punchline recurs in his notebooks, for example in 1879: “If all one dog, mighty long dog” (N&J2, 279; see also N&J3, 359, 644). The gist of the story is suggested 
