We sailed and hunted and fished and danced all day, and I treated my cough all night.

But my disease continued to grow worse. A sheet-bath was recommended. I had never refused a remedy yet, and it seemed poor policy [2] to start then.

It was done at midnight, and the weather was very frosty. My breast and back were bared, and a sheet (there appeared to be a thousand yards of it) soaked in ice-water was put all around me.

When the chilly rag touches one’s warm flesh, it makes him feel sudden violence and gasp for breath just as men do in the death agony. It stopped the beating of my heart. I thought my time had come.

Never take a sheet-bath – never.

When the sheet-bath failed to cure my cough, a lady friend recommended the application of a mustard plaster to my breast.

I believe that would have cured me, if it had not been for young Wilson. [3]

When I went to bed, I put my mustard plaster – which was an eighteen-inch square – where I could reach it when I was ready for it.

But young Wilson got hungry at night, and ate it up.

I never saw anybody have such an appetite; I am confident that he would have eaten me if I had been healthy.

After a week at Lake Bigler, I went to Steamboat Springs, and besides the steam baths, I took a lot of the worst medicines ever created. They would have cured me, but I had to go back to Virginia, where, in spite of the variety of new remedies I took every day, I managed to aggravate my disease.

I finally went to San Francisco, and the first day I got here one lady told me to drink a quart of whisky every twenty-four hours, and a friend recommended precisely the same.

Each advised me to take a quart – that makes half a gallon. I plan to do it or perish in the attempt.

Now, with the kindest motives in the world, I offer for the consideration of patients the course of treatment I have lately gone through. Let them try it – if it doesn’t cure them, it can’t more than kill them.

The conversation went smoothly and pleasantly from weather to crops, from crops to literature, from literature to scandal, from scandal to religion; then took a random jump, and landed on the subject of burglar alarms. And now for the first time Mr. McWilliams showed feeling. Whenever I notice this sign on this man’s face, I understand it, and keep silence, and give him opportunity to unload his heart.

“I do not spend one single cent on burglar alarms, Mr. Twain – not a single cent – and I will tell you why. When we were finishing our house, we found we had a little cash left over. And Mrs. McWilliams said, let’s have a burglar alarm. I agreed. Very well: the man came up from New York and put in the alarm, and charged three hundred and twenty-five dollars for it, and said we could sleep without uneasiness now. So we did for a while – say a month. Then one night we smelled smoke, and I was told to get up and see what the matter was. I lit a candle, and went to the stairs, and met a burglar coming out of a room with a basket of tinware, which he had mistaken for solid silver in the dark.

“He was smoking a pipe. I said, ‘My friend, we do not allow smoking in this room.’ He said he was a stranger, and could not be expected to know the rules of the house. He said he had been in many houses just as good as this one, and it had never been a problem before. He added that usually such rules had never been considered to apply to burglars, anyway.

“I said: ‘Smoke along, then, if it is the custom, though I think that giving a burglar the privilege which is denied to a bishop is a sign of the looseness of the times. But what business do you have in this house, why have you entered it without ringing the burglar alarm?’

“He looked confused and ashamed, and said, with embarrassment: ‘I beg a thousand pardons. I did not know you had a burglar alarm, or I would have rung it. I beg you not to mention where my parents may hear of it, for they are old and feeble, and such a breach of the conventionalities of our Christian civilization might disappoint them and affect their health. May I trouble you for a match?’

“I said: ‘Here you are. But to return to business: how did you get in here?’

“’Through a window on the second floor.’

“It was even so. I redeemed the tinware at pawnbroker’s rates, bade the burglar good-night, closed the window after him, and retired to headquarters to report. Next morning we sent for the burglar-alarm man, and he came up and explained that the reason the alarm did not ‘go off’ was that no part of the house but the first floor was attached to the alarm. This was simply idiotic; one might as well have no armor on at all but for on his legs. The expert now put the whole second story on the alarm, charged three hundred dollars for it, and went his way. By and by, one night, I found a burglar in the third story, about to go down a ladder with a lot of miscellaneous property. My first impulse was to crack his head with a billiard cue; but I refrained, and proceeded to compromise. I redeemed the property at the familiar rates, after charging ten per cent for use of my ladder. Next day we sent down for the expert once more, and had the third story attached to the alarm, for three hundred dollars.