[AMTv1] Service with a smile
Dec. 1st, 2010 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHi,
So I'm working my way through The Autobiography of Mark Twain Vol. 1 (now AMTv1) and since it's going to take me awhile to get through it, I feel like posting some snippets that I found really amusing as I go along. Right now, I'm reading through a bunch of stuff that Twain wrote that were early stabs at his memoirs but which never found their way into the final product.
In this unfinished piece called "A Group of Servants", Twain is writing from Vienna and drawing character sketches of his household servants (Because you needed a staff of people to do your work for you in the late 1800's before machines came along. Electricity -- it works, bitches!). Herewith are two excepts:
"We have been housekeeping a fortnight now -- long enough to have learned how to pronounce the servants' names, but not to spell them. We shan't ever learn to spell them; they were invented in Hungary and Poland, and on paper they look the alphabet on a drunk."
"The other maid, Wuthering Heights (which is not her name), is about forty and looks considerably younger. She is quick, smart, active, energetic, breezy, good-natured, has a high-keyed voice and a loud one, talks thirteen to the dozen, talks all the time, talks in her sleep, will talk when she is dead, is here, there, and everywhere all at the same time, and is consumingly interested in every devilish thing that is gong on. Particularly if it is not her affair. And she is not merely passively interested, but takes a hand; and not only takes a hand, but the principal one; in fact will play the whole game, fight the whole battle herself, if you don't find some way to turn her flank. But as she does it in the family's interest, not her own, I find myself diffident about finding fault. Not so the family. It gravels the family. I like that."
later
Tom
So I'm working my way through The Autobiography of Mark Twain Vol. 1 (now AMTv1) and since it's going to take me awhile to get through it, I feel like posting some snippets that I found really amusing as I go along. Right now, I'm reading through a bunch of stuff that Twain wrote that were early stabs at his memoirs but which never found their way into the final product.
In this unfinished piece called "A Group of Servants", Twain is writing from Vienna and drawing character sketches of his household servants (Because you needed a staff of people to do your work for you in the late 1800's before machines came along. Electricity -- it works, bitches!). Herewith are two excepts:
"We have been housekeeping a fortnight now -- long enough to have learned how to pronounce the servants' names, but not to spell them. We shan't ever learn to spell them; they were invented in Hungary and Poland, and on paper they look the alphabet on a drunk."
"The other maid, Wuthering Heights (which is not her name), is about forty and looks considerably younger. She is quick, smart, active, energetic, breezy, good-natured, has a high-keyed voice and a loud one, talks thirteen to the dozen, talks all the time, talks in her sleep, will talk when she is dead, is here, there, and everywhere all at the same time, and is consumingly interested in every devilish thing that is gong on. Particularly if it is not her affair. And she is not merely passively interested, but takes a hand; and not only takes a hand, but the principal one; in fact will play the whole game, fight the whole battle herself, if you don't find some way to turn her flank. But as she does it in the family's interest, not her own, I find myself diffident about finding fault. Not so the family. It gravels the family. I like that."
later
Tom
