This passage does have some of the characteristics you mentioned, and is from "Life on the Mississippi". Has it been mentioned?
http://www.bartleby.com/library/prose/5348.html
Sent from my iPad
> On Aug 27, 2016, at 12:05 PM, Wesley Britton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> To my surprise, absolutely none of the candidates proposed so far are the
> passage I'm hunting. They don't have the Ariel view that narrows down,
> narrows down even tighter, and finally focuses on one man.
>
> I'm beginning to wonder if my memory has sprung a huge leak. But I vividly
> remember such a passage used in an old textbook called the Bedford Reader.
> Back when we taught freshman English using modes, the excerpt was an example
> in the "Description" section. I vividly remember Dr. Hughes discussing the
> Twain passage as it was a perfect lesson plan for beginning teachers who had
> no lesson plans in our files yet.
>
> I obviously can't swear the excerpt came from LOM, judging from my
> inability to find it there. I doubt it is in Huck as the description
> wouldn't really fit his voice. While the first chapter of Pudd'nhead Wilson
> is wonderfully descriptive, the narrator moves from street to street, but
> not using the pattern I'm talking about.
>
> Sigh. I never thought in a million years this hunt would be for such an
> elusive description. Or confound this august company.
>
>
> Dr. Wesley Britton
> Author, Beta-Earth Chronicles
> www.drwesleybritton.com
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Twain Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Salwen
> Sent: Friday, August 26, 2016 11:05 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Life on the Mississippi passage
>
> I've got another candidate -- one that wouldn't be known to the general
> public, but might be familiar to Wesley and other members of this weirdly
> specialized group.
>
> I'm thinking of the opening pages of "Which Was it?" -- that strange, angry,
> unfinished guilt-laden novel Twain was blazing through in Maine in the
> summer of 1902, just before the sudden onset of Livy's final illness.
> The following descriptions occur over the course of some three book pages,
> interspersed with expository matter that introduces Twain's cast of
> characters:
> ____________________
>
> Indiantown was a village of twelve or fifteen hundred inhabitants. It was
> away out of the world, and sleepy and peaceful, and had no newspaper, and
> was comfortable and content. Its climate was a pleasant one; sometimes there
> was a winter, but this did not happen every year. It was a corn-growing
> country, and from the village-edges the great fields stretched mile upon
> mile to the north and to the south up the valley and down it, each with its
> family house in a big yard; the cluster of slave cabins a hundred yards
> behind it; around and beyond the cabins, the orchards and gardens and melon
> patches. Indiantown's Christianity was of the usual Southern breeds --
> Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist -- and each sect had a church which was
> commodious but not architectural. There was a court house; also, a jail; for
> this was the county seat. [ . . . ]
>
> Indian River ran by the town. It was not a great stream, but it was clear
> and clean and bright, and its banks were beautiful in summer with
> overhanging willows and with curving meadow-vacancies cushioned with grass
> and sprinkled as with fire-coals when the prairie-pink was in bloom. The
> stage road ran along the river, and one of these meadow-stretches occurred
> at the northern edge of the village. In the middle of it was the mill, on
> the bank; close to it, on the south side, was the dwelling of the salaried
> mill-hand -- that German, Jake Bleeker; close to the mill on its northern
> side was the house of its owner, the venerable Andrew Independence Harrison,
> with garden and orchard behind it. [ . . . ]
>
> The Fairfax house, which was a spacious old-fashioned mansion, stood fifty
> or sixty yards back from the river road, and was nearly hidden from sight
> among shade-trees. Behind it its fields stretched a mile to the hills, and
> in their midst was the hamlet of white-washed log cabins called the
> "nigger-quarter." The mansion was a short mile northward from the mill;
> between was the country blacksmith shop, on the river bank. It stood under
> the vast spread of an ancient live-oak, and was the intelligence-centre of
> the northward-lying farming region. It did the horse-shoeing and
> wagon-mending for fifteen or twenty farms, and under the tree in summer and
> in the shop in winter was usually to be found a company of waiting gossips.
>
>
> To return to the Fairfax house. On entering, one passed a couple of rooms on
> the right hand side of the hall; then came a third, on the same side, -- the
> Squire's work-room -- and it is with this one that we have to do, now that
> we are ready to begin. There is a grand wood fire flaming there in a
> spacious fireplace, for it is cold weather and a blustering day. The date is
> Saturday, November the third.
>
> Two men sat in that room.
> ____________________
>
> . . . and so on. Probably not what you had in mind, now that I think of it
> (no sleeping man on a porch, for one thing) but it is interesting to see
> Twain playing again with that same cinematic dollying-in approach.
>
> *_________________________________*
>
> *Peter Salwen /* salwen.com
> 114 W 86, NYC 10024 | 917-620-5371
>
>
> *_________________________________*
>
> *Peter Salwen /* salwen.com
> *114 W 86, NYC 10024 | 917-620-5371*
>
>
>> On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 6:07 PM, Wesley Britton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks, Richard. However, this isn't the passage I'm hunting. It
>> doesn't have the bird's eye view that narrows in focus to a town to a
>> street to a house.
>>
>> I'm starting to think my memory has gone bad and the description comes
> from
>> a different book completely. Huck, maybe?
>>
>> Tells you how long it's been since I read these books--
>>
>>
>> Dr. Wesley Britton
>> Author, Beta-Earth Chronicles
>> www.drwesleybritton.com
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Mark Twain Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
>> [log in to unmask]
>> Sent: Friday, August 26, 2016 2:33 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Life on the Mississippi passage
>>
>> Duh. Wrong link. Here, please attempt this one...
>>
>> http://www.richardhenzel.com/Steamboat_A-Comin.mp3
>>
>> sorry for the confusion.
>>
>> Richard
>
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