马克·吐温短篇小说《竞选州长》_美文

马克·吐温短篇小说《竞选州长》

Could anything be more deliberately malicious than that? For I never was in Montana in my life.

世间还能有比这更居心险恶的事情吗？我是一辈子没有到过蒙大拿的。

[After this, this journal customarily spoke of me as, "Twain, the Montana Thief."]

（从此以后，这个报纸就照例把我叫做“蒙大拿的小偷吐温”。）

I got to picking up papers apprehensively--much as one would lift a desired blanket which he had some idea might have a rattlesnake under it. One day this met my eye:

于是我渐渐对报纸有了戒心，一拿起来就觉得提心吊胆——很像一个人想睡觉的时候去揭开床毯，可是脑子里却担心那底下会有一条响尾蛇似的。有一天，我又看到这么一段：

THE LIE NAILED.--By the sworn affidavits of Michael O'Flanagan, Esq., of the Five Points, and Mr. Snub Rafferty and Mr. Catty Mulligan, of Water Street, it is established that Mr. Mark Twain's vile statement that the lamented grandfather of our noble standard- bearer, Blank J. Blank, was hanged for highway robbery, is a brutal and gratuitous LIE, without a shadow of foundation in fact. It is disheartening to virtuous men to see such shameful means resorted to to achieve political success as the attacking of the dead in their graves, and defiling their honored names with slander. When we think of the anguish this miserable falsehood must cause the innocent relatives and friends of the deceased, we are almost driven to incite an outraged and insulted public to summary and unlawful vengeance upon the traducer. But no! let us leave him to the agony of a lacerated conscience (though if passion should get the better of the public, and in its blind fury they should do the traducer bodily injury, it is but too obvious that no jury could convict and no court punish the perpetrators of the deed).