Twain's tourists mistake sunset for sunrise
the man in Mark Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set
The episode is in chapter XXVIII of Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad (first published 1880; inspected in Project Gutenberg's illustrated electronic text, whose illustrations derive from an 1880 first edition). The narrator and Harris reach the Rigi-Kulm hotel exhausted, sleep through the morning horn, then mistake the evening signal for a summons to sunrise. They rush out in red blankets and admire the sun until its downward movement exposes their mistake. Chesterton compresses two tourists into one representative figure but preserves the joke's mechanism: enthusiasm cannot correct a mistaken historical clock. His freethinker mistakes an ending for a beginning just as Twain's travellers mistake evening for morning. Twain, chapter XXVIII, final Rigi-Kulm scene.
Sources
Revision 1 of 1 · 2026-11-07 · Suggest an edit