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Westport Times, Volume VI, Issue 1033, 27 December 1872, Page 2

Concerning- A Dictionary.—This sketch, by Mark Twain, is from the mouth of one Coon, "a nice, baldheaded man at the hotel in Angel's Camp," in the Big |Tree , region of Calaveras County, California. It was to a request for the loan of a book, to "enliven a rainy day, that Coon replied: " Well I've got a mighty responsible old Webster's Unabridged, what there is of it, but they started her sloshing around before- I got chance to read it myself; and she Went to Murphy's and from there she went to Jackson Gulcb, and now she's gone to San Andreas, and I don't expect I'll ever see the book again. But what makes me mad is that for all they're so bandy about keeping it sashaying around from shanty to sbanty and from camp to camp, none of 'em got a good word for her* ]Now Coddington had her a week, and she was too many for him ; he couldn't spell the words ; he tackled them, regular busters, towards the middlo, you know, and they tbrowed him. Next Dyer, he tried her a time, but he pronounced 'em all kind o' ways. Dye can hunt quail and play seven up as well as any man, understand ; but he can't pronounce worth a cent; he used to worry along well enough till he'd flush one of them rattlers with a clatter of syllables as long as a string of sluice boxes, and then he'd lose his grip and tbrow up his head. A.nd so, finally, Dick Stocker harnessed her up there at his cabin, and sweat over hof and wrestled with her as much as three weeks, night and day, till he got as far as E, and then passed her over to Lige Pickerfell, and said sho was tho all firedest driest reading that ever he struck."