Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar Remark of Dr. Baldwin's, concerning upstarts: We don't care to eat toadstools that think they are truffles.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
Mrs. York Driscoll enjoyed two years of bliss with that prize, Tom--bliss that was troubled a little at times, it is true, but bliss nevertheless; then she died, and her husband and his childless sister, Mrs. Pratt, continued this bliss-business at the old stand. Tom was petted and indulged and spoiled to his entire content--or nearly that. This went on till he was nineteen, then he was sent to Yale. He went handsomely equipped with "conditions," but otherwise he was not an object of distinction there.
He remained at Yale two years, and then threw up the struggle.
He came home with his manners a good deal improved; he had lost his surliness and brusqueness, and was rather pleasantly soft and smooth, now; he was furtively, and sometimes openly, ironical of speech, and given to gently touching people on the raw, but he did it with a good-natured semiconscious air that carried it off safely, and kept him from getting into trouble. He was as indolent as ever and showed no very strenuous desire to hunt up an occupation. People argued from this that he preferred to be supported by his uncle until his uncle's shoes should become vacant. He brought back one or two new habits with him, one of which he rather openly practiced--tippling--but concealed another, which was gambling. It would not do to gamble where his uncle could hear of it; he knew that quite well.
Tom's Eastern polish was not popular among the young people.
They could have endured it, perhaps, if Tom had stopped there; but he wore gloves, and that they couldn't stand, and wouldn't; so he was mainly without society. He brought home with him a suit of clothes of such exquisite style and cut in fashion--Eastern fashion, city fashion--that it filled everybody with anguish and was regarded as a peculiarly wanton affront. He enjoyed the feeling which he was exciting, and paraded the town serene and happy all day; but the young fellows set a tailor to work that night, and when Tom started out on his parade next morning, he found the old deformed Negro bell ringer straddling along in his wake tricked out in a flamboyant curtain-calico exaggeration of his finery, and imitating his fancy Eastern graces as well as he could.
Tom surrendered, and after that clothed himself in the local fashion.
But the dull country town was tiresome to him, since his acquaintanceship with livelier regions, and it grew daily more and more so. He began to make little trips to St. Louis for refreshment.
There he found companionship to suit him, and pleasures to his taste, along with more freedom, in some particulars, than he could have at home.
So, during the next two years, his visits to the city grew in frequency and his tarryings there grew steadily longer in duration.
He was getting into deep waters. He was taking chances, privately, which might get him into trouble some day--in fact, _did_.
Judge Driscoll had retired from the bench and from all business activities in 1850, and had now been comfortably idle three years.
He was president of the Freethinkers' Society, and Pudd'nhead Wilson was the other member. The society's weekly discussions were now the old lawyer's main interest in life. Pudd'nhead was still toiling in obscurity at the bottom of the ladder, under the blight of that unlucky remark which he had let fall twenty-three years before about the dog.
Judge Driscoll was his friend, and claimed that he had a mind above the average, but that was regarded as one of the judge's whims, and it failed to modify the public opinion. Or rather, that was one of the reason why it failed, but there was another and better one.
If the judge had stopped with bare assertion, it would have had a good deal of effect; but he made the mistake of trying to prove his position.
For some years Wilson had been privately at work on a whimsical almanac, for his amusement--a calendar, with a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in ironical form, appended to each date; and the judge thought that these quips and fancies of Wilson's were neatly turned and cute; so he carried a handful of them around one day, and read them to some of the chief citizens. But irony was not for those people; their mental vision was not focused for it. They read those playful trifles in the solidest terms, and decided without hesitancy that if there had ever been any doubt that Dave Wilson was a pudd'nhead-- which there hadn't--this revelation removed that doubt for good and all.