The Invalid's Story
by Mark Twain
1- I seem sixty and married, but these effects are due to my
condition and sufferings, for I am a bachelor, and only forty-one. It
will be hard for you to believe that I, who am now but a shadow,
was a hale, hearty man two short years ago, a man of iron, a very
athlete!--yet such is the simple truth. But stranger still than this
fact is the way in which I lost my health. I lost it through helping to
take care of a box of guns on a two-hundred-mile railway journey
one winter's night. It is the actual truth, and I will tell you about it.
2- I belong in Cleveland, Ohio. One winter's night, two years
ago, I reached home just after dark, in a driving snow-storm, and
the first thing I heard when I entered the house was that my
dearest boyhood friend and schoolmate, John B. Hackett, had
died the day before, and that his last utterance had been a desire
that I would take his remains home to his poor old father and
mother in Wisconsin.
3- I was greatly shocked and grieved, but there was no time to
Which best describes the
irony in the following passage
from "The Invalid's Story"?
Section 20-"No, Cap, it don't
modify him worth a cent. Fact
is, it makes him worse, becuz it
appears to stir up his ambition.
What do you reckon we better
do, now?"
A. It is funny that they tried to cover the
smell of the box with the smell of a cigar.
B. Thompson enjoyed the smell of the
cheese, even though the narrator did not.
C. The smell of the cigar they used to mask
the smell of the "body" actually made it
worse.