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Zusatztext "Old pieces of humor are like antique toys: Some of them still work and some don't! but they all have a certain fascination. Especially if we know that they worked for Mark Twain. And when you find one that does still work after! say! a century and a half! if you are like me you say things like 'Look at that workmanship' to cover your wonderment at sharing inner-child glee with someone who was in the grave when your grandmother was born. To my surprise! I feel that way about a good many pieces in this book." --from the Introduction by Roy Blount! Jr. "Mark Twain is the Lincoln of our literature."--William Dean Howells Informationen zum Autor Mark Twain (1835-1910) was born Samuel Clemens in Missouri. As a boy, he worked as a printer and a Mississippi River pilot. A leading literary influence in his own time and ever since, he is the author of many classics, including Roughing It, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Klappentext Beginning with the piece that made Mark Twain famous--"The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"--and ending with his fanciful "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper," this treasure trove of an anthology, an abridgment of the 1888 original, collects twenty of Twain's own pieces, in addition to tall tales, fables, and satires by forty-three of Twain's contemporaries, including Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ambrose Bierce, William Dean Howells, Joel Chandler Harris, Artemus Ward, and Bret Harte. THE WORST MAN AND THE STUPIDEST MAN IN TURKEY--SAMUEL S. COX Samuel Sullivan Cox was born at Zanesville, O., September 30, 1824, and grew up in his native State. He entered journalistic life after graduating from Brown University, and has achieved distinction in politics as well as literature; his public services, in Congress and diplomacy, are as well-known as his books. Several years ago the dragoman of our American Legation at Constantinople was asked to act as arbitrator in a dispute between a foreigner and an old Turkish doctor in law and theology. After several meetings with them, the dragoman concluded that the doctor was an ill-natured and unmanageable person. The latter had served for some years as cadi of the Civil Court at Smyrna. The dragoman related a story for his instruction. The story as to its place was in old Stamboul. As to its time, it does not matter much. Its moral is for every place and for all time. But it took place at the end of the sixteenth century, when the Turkish power was well established and growing. In other words, it was during the reign of Amurath III., the sixth emperor of the Ottomans, and grandson of Suleiman the Magnificent. This Sultan was not, as the sequel of the story shows, the worst of the Ottoman emperors. He was a tall, manly man, rather fat and quite pale, with a thin long beard. His face was not of a fierce aspect, like other Sultans. He was no rioter or reveler. He punished drunkards, and as for himself he indulged only in wormwood wine. His people knew that he loved justice, and although, according to an old chronicle, he caused his brothers to be strangled, "at which so tragicall a sight that he let some teares fall, as not delighting in such barbarous crueltie, but that the state and manner of his gouernment so required," still, he was, as the time was, a good prince. But to the dragoman's story. Its moral had its uses, as the sequel reveals. This is the story, as it was told in one of the leisure hours at the Legation last summer: "There was a man, Mustapha by name, who lived near the Golden Gate. He was well off, and when about to die, he called his son to him and said: "'My dear boy, I am dying. Before I go, I want to give you my last will. Here are one hundred pounds. You will give it to the worst man you can find. Here ...
