Home | Quotations | Newspaper Articles | Special Features | Links | Search
SAN FRANCISCO LETTER dated Dec. 29
Also included:
BUSTED, AND GONE ABROAD
The term -- "Busted" -- applies to most people here. When a noted speculator breaks, you all hear of it; but when Smith and Jones and Brown go under, they make no stir; they are talked about among a small circle of gratified acquaintances, but they industriously keep up appearances, and the world at large go on thinking them as rich as ever. The lists of rich stock operators of two years ago have quietly sunk beneath the wave and financially gone to the devil. Smithers, who owned a hundred and ninety-six feet in one of the big mines, and gave such costly parties, has sent his family to Europe. Blivens, who owned so much in another big mine, and kept such fast horses, has sent his family to Germany, for their health, where they can sport a princely magnificence on fifty dollars a month. Bloggs, who was high-you-a-muck of another great mine, has sent his family home to rusticate a while with his father-in-law. All the nabobs of '63 are pretty much ruined, but they send their families foraging in foreign climes, and hide their poverty under a show of "appearances." If a man's family start anywhere on the steamer now, the public say: "There's the death rattle again -- another Croesus has gone in." These are sad, sad, times. We are all "busted," and our families are exiled in foreign lands.
A PLEASANT FARCE - text not available
PERSONAL - text not available
[reprinted in Mark Twain's San Francisco, edited by Bernard Taper, (McGraw Hill, 1963), p. 194 as reprinted in the Golden Era, JAN. 28, 1866]
