Mark Twain was one of America’s most prolific humorists. Best known for such classics as Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mr. Twain was also famous for his insightful tales about the experiences faced by peoples they lived their daily lives.

By this time the “annunciator” had grown to formidable dimensions. It had forty-seven tags on it, marked with the names of the various rooms and chimneys, and it occupied the space of an ordinary wardrobe. The gong was the size of a washbowl, and was placed above the head of our bed. There was a wire from the house to the coachman’s quarters in the stable, and a noble gong along side his pillow.

We should have been comfortable now but for one defect. Every morning a five the cook opened the kitchen door, in the way of business, and rip went that gong! The first time this happened I thought the last day was come sure. I didn’t think it in bed – no but out of it- for the first effect of that frightful gong was to hurl you across the house and slam you against the wall, and then curl you up and squirm you like a spider on a stove lid, till somebody shuts the kitchen door. In solid fact, there is no clamour that is even remotely comparable to the dire clamour which that gong makes. Well, this catastrophe happened every morning regularly at five o’clock, and lost us three hours sleep; for, mind you, when the thing wakes you, it doesn’t merely wake you in spots; it wakes you all over, conscience and all, and you are good for eighteen hours of wide-awakeness subsequently – eighteen hours of the very most inconceivable wide-awakness that you ever experienced in your life. A stranger died on our hands one time, and we vacated and left him in our room overnight. Did that stranger wait for general judgement? No sir; he got up at five the next morning in the most prompt and unostentatious way. I knew he would; I knew it might well. He collected his life insurance, and lived happy ever after, for there was plenty of proof as to the perfect squareness of his death.

Well we were gradually fading toward a better land, on account of the daily loss of sleep; so we finally had the expert up again, and he ran a wire to the outside of the door, and placed a switch there, whereby Thomas, the butler, always made one little mistake – he switched the alarm off at night when he went to bed, and switched it on again at daybreak in the morning, just in time for the cook to open the kitchen door, and enable that gong to slam us across the house, sometimes breaking a window with one or the other of us. At the end of the week we recognized that this switch business was a delusion and a snare. We also discovered that a band of burglars had been lodging in the house the whole time –not exactly to steal, for there wasn’t much left now, but to hide from the police, for they were hot pressed, and they shrewdly judged that the detectives would never think of a tribe of burglars taking sanctuary in a house notoriously protected by the most imposing and elaborate burglar alarm in America.

Sent down for the expert again, and this time he struck a most dazzling idea – he fixed the thing so that opening the kitchen door would take off the alarm. It was a noble idea, and he charged accordingly. But you already foresee the result. I switched on the alarm every night at bedtime, no longer trusting Thomas’s frail memory; and as soon as the lights were out the burglars walked in at the kitchen door, this taking the alarm off without waiting for the cook to do it in the morning. You see how aggravatingly we were situated. For months we couldn’t have any company. Not a spare bed in the house; all occupied by burglars.

Finally, I got up a cure of my own. The expert answered the call, and ran another ground wire to the stable, and established a switch there, so that the coachman could put on and take off the alarm. That worked first rate, and a season of peace ensued, during which we go to inviting company once more and enjoying life.

But by and by the irrepressible alarm invented a new kink.

To be continued…

Mark Twain was one of America’s most prolific humorists. Best known for such classics as Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mr. Twain was also famous for his insightful tales about the experiences faced by peoples they lived their daily lives.

The conversation drifted smoothly and pleasantly along from weather to crops, from crops to literature, from literature to scandal, from scandal to religion; then took a random jump and landed on the subject of burglar alarms. And now for the first time Mr. McWilliams showed feeling. Whenever I perceive this sign in a man’s dial, I comprehend it, and lapse into silence, and give him the opportunity to unload his heart.

Said he, with bit ill-controlled emotion: I do not go one single cent on burglar alarms, Mr. Twain – not a single cent – and I will tell you why. When we were finishing our house, we found we had a little cash left over, on account of the plumber not knowing it. I was for enlightening the heathen with it, for I was always unaccountably down on the heathen somehow, but Mrs. McWilliams said no; let’s have a burglar alarm. I agreed to this compromise. I will explain that whenever I want a thing, and Mrs. McWilliams wants another thing, and we decide upon the thing that Mrs. McWilliams wants – as we always do – she calls that a compromise.

Very well: The man came up from New York and put in the alarm, and charged three hundred and forty-five dollars for it, and said we could sleep without uneasiness now. So we did for a while – say a month. Then one night we smelled smoke, and I was advised to get up and see what the matter was. I lit a candle, and started toward the stairs, and met a burglar coming out of a room with a basket of tin ware, which he had mistaken for solid silver in the dark. He was smoking a pipe. I said, “My friend, we do not allow smoking in this room.” He said he was a stranger, and could not be expected to know the rules of the house; and he had been in many houses just as good as this one, and it had never been objected to before. He added that as far as his experience went, such rules had never been considered to apply to burglars anyway.

I said, “Smoke along then, if it is the custom, though I think that the conceding of a privilege to a burglar that is denied to a bishop is a conspicuous sign of the looseness of the times. But waiving all that, what business have you to be entering this house in the furtive and clandestine way, without ringing the burglar alarm?”

He looked confused and ashamed, and said, “I beg a thousand pardons. I did not know you had a burglar alarm; else I would have rung it. I beg you will not mention it where my parents might hear of it, for they are old and feeble, and such a seemingly wanton breach of hallowed conventionalities of our Christian civilization may all too rudely sunder the frail bridge that hangs darkly between the pale and evanescent present and the solemn deeps of eternities. May I trouble you for a match?”

I said, “Your sentiments do you honour, but if you will allow me to say it, metaphor is not your best hold. Spare your thigh; this kind of match lights only on a box, and seldom there in fact, if my experience may be trusted. But to return to business; How did you get in here?”

“Through a second story window.”

It was even so. I redeemed the tin ware at pawnbroker’s rates, less cost of advertising bade the burglar good night, closed the window after him, and retired to headquarters to report. Next morning we sent for the burglar alarm man, and he came up and explained that the reason the alarm did not “go off” was that no part of the house but the first floor was attached to the alarm. This was simply idiotic; one might as well have no armour on at all in battle as to have it only on his legs!

The expert now put the whole second story on the alarm, charged three hundred dollars for it, and went on his way. By and by, one night, I found a burglar in the third story, about to start down a ladder with a lot of miscellaneous property. My first impulse was to crack his head with a billiard cue; but my second was to refrain from this attention, because he was between me and the cue rack. The second impulse was plainly the soundest, so I refrained, and proceeded to compromise. I redeemed the property at former rates, after deducting ten percent for the use of the ladder, it being my ladder, and the next day we sent down for the expert once more, and had the third story attached to the alarm, for three hundred dollars.

To be continued…