I think I shall quote and comment.
On the Canada side you drive along the chasm between long ranks of photographers standing guard behind their cameras, ready to make an ostentatious frontispiece of you and your decaying ambulance, and your solemn crate with a hide on it, which you are expected to regard in the light of a horse, and a diminished and unimportant background of sublime Niagara; and a great many people have the incredible effrontery or the native depravity to aid and abet this sort of crime.Photographers: Annoying people and making good on tourist traps since [at least] 1871. (I can say that because I am one.)
Any day, in the hands of these photographers, you may see stately pictures of papa and mamma, Johnny and Bub and Sis, or a couple of country cousins, all smiling vacantly, and all disposed in studied and uncomfortable attitudes in their carriage, and all looming up in their awe-inspiring imbecility before the snubbed and diminished presentment of that majestic presence whose ministering spirits are the rainbows, whose voice is the thunder, whose awful front is veiled in clouds, who was monarch here dead and forgotten ages before this hackful of small reptiles was deemed temporarily necessary to fill a crack in the world's unnoted myriads, and will still be monarch here ages and decades of ages after they shall have gathered themselves to their blood relations, the other worms, and been mingled with the unremembering dust.Did you realize that's one sentence? Good heavens. I think the marvelous thing about Twain is his ability to mock photographic posing, romantic prose, and human beings in general all in the same, paragraph-long sentence. And make it work. Talent, ladies and gentlemen. Talent.
We now began to creep along flimsy bridges of a single plank, our persons shielded from destruction by a crazy wooden railing, to which I clung with both hands-- not because I was afraid, but because I wanted to.Oh, really? Hm. Why don't I believe you?
I never was so scared before and survived it.Quite.
"Is the Wawhoo-Wang-Wang of the Whack-a-Whack happy? Does the great Speckled Thunder sigh for the warpath, or is his heart contented with dreaming of the dusky maiden, the Pride of the Forest? Does the mighty Sachem yearn to drink the blood of his enemies, or is he satisfied to make bead reticules for the pappooses of the paleface? Speak, sublime relic of bygone grandeur-- venerable ruin, speak!'Oh help. I can hardly breathe. I love this guy.
I went away from there.I don't blame him. I would do the same.
Poker and seven-up, and a vain modern expense for soap, unknown to your glorious ancestors, have depleted your purses.Honestly now, what can you say?
Remember Uncas!-- and Red Jacket!-- and Hole in the Day!-- and Whoopdedoodledo!Hm, not sure I remember the last chap.
However, thus far he thinks only sixteen of my wounds are fatal.Good news! ...Maybe...not...?
Suffice it to say I love Mark Twain. He somehow combines wise and witty and sarcastic and arrogant and entertaining and ridiculous. And he does a remarkable job of it.
Now good night, my illustrious guttersnipes. Watch out for Irish Indians.
