Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain
page 113 of 344 (32%)
page 113 of 344 (32%)
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Stock hogs, ............................ 1,050
Drove hogs, ............................ 1,204 Wheat, ................................. 350 Hides, ................................. 4,000 Corn on the Alabama River, ............. 3,500 Total, .............18,104 That sum, in his report, Mr. Floyd calls the "full value of the property destroyed by the troops." He allows that sum to the starving Fishers, TOGETHER WITH INTEREST FROM 1813. From this new sum total the amounts already paid to the Fishers were deducted, and then the cheerful remainder (a fraction under forty thousand dollars) was handed to then and again they retired to Florida in a condition of temporary tranquillity. Their ancestor's farm had now yielded them altogether nearly sixty-seven thousand dollars in cash. 6. Does the reader suppose that that was the end of it? Does he suppose those diffident Fishers we: satisfied? Let the evidence show. The Fishers were quiet just two years. Then they came swarming up out of the fertile swamps of Florida with their same old documents, and besieged Congress once more. Congress capitulated on the 1st of June, 1860, and instructed Mr. Floyd to overhaul those papers again, and pay that bill. A Treasury clerk was ordered to go through those papers and report to Mr. Floyd what amount was still due the emaciated Fishers. This clerk (I can produce him whenever he is wanted) discovered what was apparently a glaring and recent forgery in the paper; whereby a witness's testimony as to the price of corn in Florida in 1813 was made to name double the amount which that witness had originally specified as the price! The |
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