Extract: [The Knighted Knave of Bergen] One day it occurred to me that it had been many years since the world had been afforded the spectacle of a man adventurous enough to undertake a journey through Europe on foot. After much thought, I decided that I was a person fitted to furnish to mankind this spectacle. So I determined to do it. This was in March, 1878. I looked about me for the right sort of person to accompany me in the capacity of agent, and finally hired a Mr. Harris for this service. It was also my purpose to study art while in Europe. Mr. Harris was in sympathy with me in this. He was as much of an enthusiast in art as I was, and not less anxious to learn to paint. I desired to learn the German language; so did Harris. Toward the middle of April we sailed in the Holsatia, Captain Brandt, and had a very pleasant trip, indeed. After a brief rest at Hamburg, we made preparations for a long pedestrian trip southward in the soft spring weather, but at the last moment we changed the program, for private reasons, and took the express-train. We made a short halt at Frankfort-on-the-Main, and found it an interesting city. I would have liked to visit the birthplace of Gutenburg, but it could not be done, as no memorandum of the site of the house has been kept. So we spent an hour in the Goethe mansion instead. The city permits this house to belong to private parties, instead of gracing and dignifying herself with the honor of possessing and protecting it......
About the Author: Mark Twain, whose real name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri, United States, and died April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut, is a writer, And American humorist. After a career as a military officer, a printer and a journalist with miners in Nevada, he became known through his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and his sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). A child of the Border Mark Twain comes from a long-established family on the American continent, whose trajectory has married the pioneer front drawn by settlers. Twain's childhood environment is therefore the world of the American "Border". However, the Clemens family, like Twain himself when he reached adulthood, did not count among the adventurers and clearing people who had set out in the vanguard of the colonization movement towards the West. It slipped into the wake of this vast population movement and settled on land already worked by settlers where social life is already relatively stable. His mother, Jane Lampton, was born in Kentucky in a family that is probably one of the first generations of pioneers to cross the Appalachian Mountains; The family legend lends him a distant ancestry with the Lampton, dukes of Durham. The paternal branch of the family is native to the South of the country. His grandfather, a farmer in Virginia, migrated to Kentucky in the early 19th century to become a commissioner of revenue. Twain's father, John Marshall Clemens, studied law in the East and returned to Adair County (Kentucky) where he married Jane Lampton in 1823. He served as an attorney and ran his life After fortune. His quest takes him successively to Tennessee, Gainesboro and then to Jamestown in Fentress County, Tennessee where he invests his savings in 75,000 acres of land. The small number of cases of justice to treat pushes it to the reconversion: it becomes a merchant, opening a store of general supply, typical of the border. He tries his luck in several localities of Tennessee and then joins John Adams Quarles, his wife's brother-in-law, in Missouri on the advice of the latter. The village of Florida (Monroe County) in which the family settles is the scene of the birth of Samuel Langhorn Clemens, the fifth child of the family.