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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: What was it to me that his grammar was bad, his construction worse,
and his profanity so void of art that it was an element of weakness
rather than strength in his conversation? He was a wronged man,
a man who had seen trouble, and that was enough for me.
As he mellowed into his plaintive history his tears dripped
upon the lantern in his lap, and I cried, too, from sympathy.
He said he was the son of an English nobleman--either an earl
or an alderman, he could not remember which, but believed was both;
his father, the nobleman, loved him, but his mother hated him
from the cradle; and so while he was still a little boy he was sent
to 'one of them old, ancient colleges'--he couldn't remember which;
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