Mr. Taylor Had Frequently Met Mark Twain, But Never To His Knowledge,
Bret Harte.
In common with other men who had known the Great American
Humorist, Mr. Taylor smiled at the bare mention of his name.
Twain's
breezy, hail-fellow-well-met manner, combined with his dry humor,
insured him a welcome at all the camps; he was a man who would "pass the
time of day" and take a friendly drink with any man upon the road.
Twain, he told me, and a man with whom he was traveling on one occasion,
lost their mules. They tracked them to a creek and concluding the mules
had crossed it, Twain said to his companion: "What's the use of both of
us getting wet? I'll carry you!" The other complying, Twain reached in
safety the deepest part of the creek and, purposely or not, dropped him.
A man, to play such pranks as this, must be sure of his standing in a
primitive community.
Mr. Taylor is known to everyone in Nevada County as "Ben." His genial
manner and kindly nature are apparent at a glance. But while Ben Taylor
was on friendly terms with Mark Twain, he was never so intimate with him
as with Bayard Taylor, whom, it seems, he much resembled. This
accidental likeness, combined with the similarity of names, caused many
more or less amusing but embarrassing complications, since they were
frequently taken for each other and received each other's
correspondence.
I asked Ben Taylor - he rightly dislikes "Mister," perhaps the ugliest
and most inappropriate word in the English language - if the shootings
and hangings which figure so prominently in the stories of the romancers
were not exaggerations.
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