Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one…

Every chapter of Pudd’nhead Wilson opens with maxims from “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar”, the sayings of David Wilson, a clever lawyer whom the townspeople of Dawson’s Landing wrote off as a fool on his first day among them. This one heads chapter IV, “The Ways of the Changelings”, together with a second maxim on “special providences”: in the story of the children, the bears and the prophet, the bears got more satisfaction out of the episode than the prophet did, “because they got the children”. The chapter itself describes the spoilt childhood of the boy called Tom, whom the reader knows to be the slave woman Roxy’s own son, switched in the cradle with the heir.

Twain wrote the novel in Europe in the early 1890s, and it appeared in 1894.

The joke about teething belongs to the tradition of Poor Richard turned upside down: a calendar of maxims that mocks the very idea of edifying maxims.

Pudd’nhead Wilson, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar, chapter IV, 1894

Checked word for word in the work itself.

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