(1908 or 1909)
The Old Walters who recalls the “village scoundrel,” Hoover, may possibly have been William Thompson Walters (1820–1894), a railroad executive, an art collector, and a breeder of fine horses whom Clemens had known in the 1880s.1 The handwriting on the manuscript and the paper, the same used in four chapters of “Little Bessie,” suggest that “About Asa Hoover” was not written until 1908 or 1909; however, Clemens could have been recalling an earlier visit with Walters. The date, September 6, with which the manuscript begins could mark the time either of composition or of Walters' visit. John Tolliver is not mentioned in “Villagers of 1840–3,” in which Mark Twain listed people he had known in Hannibal, Missouri, during his early years.2 Asa Hoover cannot now be identified, and the name may be a fictitious one. The title has been supplied here by the editor.
September 6.Ⓐemendation Old WaltersⒶalteration in the MS came. We talked of old times in the West. I drifted into the history of John Tolliver, of our village on the MississippiⒶemendation, whom I had often seen when I was a boy. Then Walters told about the village scoundrel of his own juvenileⒶemendation days. His name was Asa Hoover, and this is in substance what Walters said about him:
He was the only rich man in the town. Just how rich he was, nobody knew; it was only known that there seemed to be no bottom to his purse. Everybody looked up to him, bowed down to him, flattered him, and everybody stood in mortal fear of him, and would go any length to keep from getting his ill will, for he was malignant and vengeful, and spent much of his time imagining slights and injuries and inventing oversized punishments for them.
The people were so afraid of him that they always shut their eyes to his cruelties and injustices when they could; and when they couldn't they said the victims were in the wrong and deserved what they got. On the other hand, whenever anyⒶalteration in the MS villager came forward and helped a neighbor out of trouble everybody said Hoover was privately at the back of the act, so they loudly and gratefully praised him for it; and so also did the very villager who had done the good deed. As a result, you have this curious condition of things: whenever a villager did a generous thing, Hoover got the credit for it, and whenever Hoover in- [begin page 154] flicted a cruelty upon a villager the blame was always put upon the villager, and everybody was agreed that he had earned what he got, and richly deserved it.
Hoover had a large family, and everybody said that he loved all his children equally. If any oneⒶalteration in the MS noticed that his conduct toward them did not bear out this statement, the person noticing it kept discreetly still about it. One of the children, aged four years, fell in the fire, and when its small brothers and sisters begged him to save it he made no reply, and looked on unmoved. Then two of the older children saved it at risk of their lives. Both were badly burned, and one of them lost the use of a hand. HooverⒶalteration in the MS got the credit of saving the child, because the savers of it did their brave work by his mute permission, which was the same as doing it himself.
The manuscript is copy-text. There are no textual notes, and no ambiguous compound is hyphenated at the end of a line in the manuscript.