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Show MARK TWAIN'S SENSITIVE EAR . Biographer Records Fact That Certain Sounds Would Drive Humorist to Border of Distraction. Murk Twain passed middle life without nmUi meaning more to him than a pretty tune or a prodigious performance, a rather remarkable fact when one considers what an artist the man was in his own field. If Mark Twain had been stone deaf the fact might have been less remarkable, but we have nlrendy noted that he could play the piano sufficiently well by ear to provide his own accompaniments for the negro spirituals, and it is of further record that he was a man so singularly sensitive to certain sounds that they sometimes drove him to the borders of hysteria. Mr, Paine has ! touched slightly on this peculiarity, but It was actually a more serious consideration con-sideration in estimating the humorist's humor-ist's life than the authorized biography biog-raphy would lead one to believe. He relates the Incident of the clocks In the home of Thomas Nasr, the cartoonist, car-toonist, when Twain and George W, Cable, In the course of a reading tour, lodged for the night with the Nast family. But that was not the only time thnt the ticking of a clock so tortured Twain's nerves that he took high-handed means to silence It From "Mark Twuln and Music," by Ralph Holmes, In the Century. |
