Sketches New and Old


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unsuspecting public through a burlesque without entirely and absurdly  
missing one's mark, I will here set down two experiences of my own in  
this thing. In the fall of 1862, in Nevada and California, the people  
got to running wild about extraordinary petrifactions and other natural  
marvels. One could scarcely pick up a paper without finding in it one or  
two glorified discoveries of this kind. The mania was becoming a little  
ridiculous. I was a brand-new local editor in Virginia City, and I felt  
called upon to destroy this growing evil; we all have our benignant,  
fatherly moods at one time or another, I suppose. I chose to kill the  
petrifaction mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire. But maybe it  
was altogether too delicate, for nobody ever perceived the satire part of  
it at all. I put my scheme in the shape of the discovery of a remarkably  
petrified man.  
I had had a temporary falling out with Mr.----, the new coroner and  
justice of the peace of Humboldt, and thought I might as well touch him  
up a little at the same time and make him ridiculous, and thus combine  
pleasure with business. So I told, in patient, belief-compelling detail,  
all about the finding of a petrified-man at Gravelly Ford (exactly a  
hundred and twenty miles, over a breakneck mountain trail from where  
---- lived); how all the savants of the immediate neighborhood had been to  
examine it (it was notorious that there was not a living creature within  
fifty miles of there, except a few starving Indians, some crippled  
grasshoppers, and four or five buzzards out of meat and too feeble to get  
away); how those savants all pronounced the petrified man to have been in  
a state of complete petrifaction for over ten generations; and then, with  
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