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Mark Twain was at the Patent Office yesterday for the purpose of taking out a patent. When we heard this information our first impression was that it was a huge joke on his part, and we asked, "What is it?"
There is no fun or fiction, however, about the thing. The genial humorist has actually hit on a new invention, and of course is anxious to make some money out of it and to be protected in his constitutional rights. His claim is briefly that he has invented a new pair of suspenders, of marvelous and hitherto undiscovered advantages, combining elegance, comfort and convenience.
He says that Horace Greeley first put the idea into his head and got him to thinking on the abstruse subject of suspenders. When he first saw the veteran editor, the extraordinary set of his trowsers, half in and half out of his boots, attracted his attention, and he at once set to work to see if he could not devise some plan for making them hang more gracefully. He thinks that he has succeeded, and that if Mr. Greeley will only use "Twain's patent suspenders" his pantaloons will in future become the envy and admiration of the New York World, and that Mr. Greeley will have no occasion, during the long life that is before him, to ask the World editors to discuss his arguments and let his pantaloons alone.
If Mark Twain has really succeeded in this he has put Mr. Greeley
under great and lasting obligations. His pantaloons bother him terribly, so
much so that he has been tempted more than once to throw them off altogether,
and would have done it long ago if the discreet Samuel Sinclair, the publisher
of the Tribune, had not protested against it in his usual mild way. Mr.
Greeley's pantaloons have materially interfered with his canvass for the Presidency;
but now that the great difficulty is removed, we may expect to see him enter
into the campaign with vim and earnestness, and to have him properly suspended
outside, if not inside, the White House.
