I was a brand-new local editor in Virginia City, and I felt
called upon to destroy this growing evil; we all have our benignant,
fatherly moods at one time or another, I suppose. I chose to kill the
petrifaction mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire. But maybe it
was altogether too delicate, for nobody ever perceived the satire part of
it at all. I put my scheme in the shape of the discovery of a remarkably
petrified man.
I had had a temporary falling out with Mr.----, the new coroner and
justice of the peace of Humboldt, and thought I might as well touch him
up a little at the same time and make him ridiculous, and thus combine
pleasure with business. So I told, in patient, belief-compelling detail,
all about the finding of a petrified-man at Gravelly Ford (exactly a
hundred and twenty miles, over a breakneck mountain trail from where
---- lived); how all the savants of the immediate neighborhood had been to
examine it (it was notorious that there was not a living creature within
fifty miles of there, except a few starving Indians; some crippled
grasshoppers, and four or five buzzards out of meat and too feeble to get
away); how those savants all pronounced the petrified man to have been in
a state of complete petrifaction for over ten generations; and then, with
a seriousness that I ought to have been ashamed to assume, I stated that
as soon as Mr.
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