Getting into Tuttletown at a rather late hour one night on my way home from Sonora, I found a party of half a dozen young men who had been serenading their lady friends in the neighborhood. I suggested that they go with me to Jackass Hill and end the night’s program with a serenade to Mark Twain. They readily fell in with my suggestion and we climbed the hill together, and, after our chief musician had tuned up his “old banjo,” lined up under Mark’s window, and opened up with “Oh, Darkies, hab you seen Ole Massa?”

We had finished this song and “Happy Land O’Canaan” and were well under way with “I’se Gwine to de Shuckin,” when that window went up with a bang, and an angry, rasping voice snarled out, “What do you lot of yapping coyotes mean by disturbing the peace and quiet of the respectable people on the hill with that infernal yowling you’re doing out there? Get away from this window, you drunken loafers, and go off to that shuckin you’re howling about, and go right now.”

This rude reception, it is needless to say, put an abrupt ending to our serenade and my companions left the hill on the double quick. On entering the cabin I found Mark sitting on the side of the bed, cramming his pipe with “Bull Durham” tobacco. “Hello, Sam,” said I, “going to have a smoke?”

At my salutation he looked at me with an ugly scowl and greeted me with, “Billy, how did you come to get drunk tonight, and bring that gang of low down rowdies on the hill, to make the night hideous with their horrible racket? Up to this time I have regarded you as a well-behaved, behaved, decent young fellow with instincts somewhat approaching those of a gentleman but I have been wakened from that dream tonight to find you nothing but a common, wine guzzling hoodlum.” (William R. Gillis, 38–39)