Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/88

 MARK TWAIN

long in turning four-foot pigs of thought into thirty- foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenua tion; when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk wandered all around and arrived nowhere; when conversations consisted mainly of irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy with an embarrassed look, as not being able to explain how it got there.

Cooper was certainly not a master in the con struction of dialogue. Inaccurate observation de feated him here as it defeated him in so many other enterprises of his. He even failed to notice that the man who talks corrupt English six days in the week must and will talk it on the seventh, and can t help himself. In the Deerslayer story he lets Deerslayer talk the showiest kind of book-talk sometimes, and at other times the basest of base dialects. For instance, when some one asks him if he has a sweet heart, and if so, where she abides, this is his majestic answer :

&quot; She s in the forest hanging from the boughs of the trees, in a soft rain in the dew on the open grass the clouds that float about in the blue heavens the birds that sing in the woods the sweet springs where I slake my thirst and in all the other glorious gifts that come from God s Providence!&quot;

And he preceded that, a little before, with this:

&quot;It consarns me as all things that touches a fri nd consarns afri nd.&quot;

And this is another of his remarks:

&quot;If I was Injin born, now, I might tell of this, or carry in the scalp and boast of the expl ite afore the whole tribe; or if my inimy had only been a bear &quot;[and so on].

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