Ambitions!

"Keep away from small people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."

Mark Twain was an American novelist, writer, humorist, lecturer, journalist, publisher, and gold and silver miner. He was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri and died on April 21, 1910. His family moved to Hannibal on the Mississippi river and from this town he inspired the fictional town of St. Petersburg in his work The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Mark Twain wrought as an apprentice printer on the age of 11 and began to write humorous articles and newspaper sketches while he was sixteen. At the age of 18 he left to New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Cincinnati to work as a printer and then he returned to Missouri and worked as a riverboat pilot until the American Civil War in 1861.

Most of Mark Twain's works found on: Works by Mark Twain, The Works of Mark Twain, and Complete Literary Works of Mark Twain. His two books: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, are still remarkable works of his time.

Sketch from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

CHAPTER XXVII.

I CREPT to their doors and listened; they was snor-ing. So I tiptoed along, and got down stairs all right. There warn't a sound anywheres. I peeped through a crack of the dining-room door, and see the men that was watching the corpse all sound asleep on their chairs. The door was open into the parlor, where the corpse was laying, and there was a candle in both rooms. I passed along, and the parlor door was open; but I see there warn't nobody in there but the re-
mainders of Peter; so I shoved on by; but the front door was locked, and the key wasn't there. Just then I heard somebody coming down the stairs, back behind me. I run in the parlor and took a swift look around, and the only place I see to hide the bag was in the coffin. The lid was shoved along about a foot, show-ing the dead man's face down in there, with a wet cloth over it, and his shroud on. I tucked the money-bag in under the lid, just down beyond where his
hands was crossed, which made me creep, they was so cold, and then I run back across the room and in behind the door.

The person coming was Mary Jane. She went to the coffin, very soft, and kneeled down and looked in; then she put up her handkerchief, and I see she begun to cry, though I couldn't hear her, and her back was to me. I slid out, and as I passed the dining-room I thought I'd make sure them watchers hadn't seen me; so I looked through the crack, and everything was all
right. They hadn't stirred.

I slipped up to bed, feeling ruther blue, on accounts of the thing playing out that way after I had took so much trouble and run so much resk about it. Says I, if it could stay where it is, all right; because when we get down the river a hundred mile or two I could write back to Mary Jane, and she could dig him up again and get it; but that ain't the thing that's going to happen; the thing that's going to happen is, the money 'll be found when they come to screw on the lid. Then the king 'll get it again, and it 'll be a long day before he gives anybody another chance to smouch it from him. Of course I WANTED to slide down and get it out of there, but I dasn't try it. Every minute it was getting earlier now, and pretty soon some of them watchers would begin to stir, and I might get catched -- catched with six thousand dollars in my hands that nobody hadn't hired me to take care of. I don't wish to be mixed up in no such business as that, I says to myself.