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Introduction
While walking in the woods near Heidelberg, Mark Twain was subjected to a barrage of derisory comment by three ravens. Not that he pretended to understand their language, but he got the gist of it well enough. That set him thinking about talking animals, and remembering what grizzled Californian miner Jim Baker had once told him about the ravens’ cousin, the bluejay.
“AND another thing [said Baker]:* I’ve noticed a good deal, and there’s no bird, or cow, or anything that uses as good grammar as a bluejay. You may say a cat uses good grammar.* Well, a cat does — but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you’ll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it’s the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it’s the sickening grammar they use. Now I’ve never heard a jay use bad grammar but very seldom; and when they do, they are as ashamed as a human; they shut right down and leave.
“You may call a jay a bird. Well, so he is, in a measure — because he’s got feathers on him, and don’t belong to no church, perhaps; but otherwise he is just as much a human as you be. And I’ll tell you for why.
* Jim (sometimes Dick) Baker was a blend of two real-life men, Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker. They were Californian gold miners who, long after the rush (1848–1855) was ended in their town, for many years shared a log cabin at Jackass Gulch near Jackson, California, about forty miles southeast of Sacramento. Gillis had a genius for improvising tall tales, several of which reappear in Twain’s stories, and most of which had Dick for the hero. He would stand in front of the fire, hands behind his back, and yarn and yarn; while Dick, Twain recalled, ‘gray-headed and good-natured, would sit smoking his pipe and listen with a gentle serenity to these monstrous fabrications and never utter a protest’. Twain spent three happy and hilarious months there with them. To do justice to Twain’s picture of ‘Jim Baker’, the reader needs to imagine this passage being read out by Gabby Hayes, or Walter Brennan.
* Mark Twain, real name Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), was cat-mad, keeping a series of them — some nineteen in all, to which he gave exotic and indeed startling names — and working them into his writing in many places. In Roughing It (1872) he even managed to work in a story about Dick Baker’s cat, Tom Quartz. Like most cat owners, Twain appreciated the cat’s independence, “a trait” he said “which she alone of all created creatures, including man, possesses”.
Précis
In ‘A Tramp Abroad’, Mark Twain recalled how a Californian miner had once waxed lyrical over the articulate chatter of bluejays. Their talk, he confided seriously, was of a purer kind than other animals’, even the cat’s; for in moments of stress feline grammar broke down completely, whereas the jay took an almost human pride in clear self-expression. (58 / 60 words)
In ‘A Tramp Abroad’, Mark Twain recalled how a Californian miner had once waxed lyrical over the articulate chatter of bluejays. Their talk, he confided seriously, was of a purer kind than other animals’, even the cat’s; for in moments of stress feline grammar broke down completely, whereas the jay took an almost human pride in clear self-expression.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: if, just, may, not, or, otherwise, ought, until.
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