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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. 1, Part 2, 1866-1875, by Albert Bigelow Paine
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. 1, Part 2, 1866-1875
+
+Author: Albert Bigelow Paine
+
+Release Date: December, 2001 [EBook #2983]
+[Most recently updated: June 1, 2020]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+      MARK TWAIN A BIOGRAPHY
+
+      THE PERSONAL AND LITERARY LIFE OF SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS
+
+      BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE
+
+
+      CONTENTS
+
+           VOLUME I, Part 2: 1866-1875
+
+           LIV.
+          THE LECTURER
+
+           LV.
+          HIGHWAY ROBBERY
+
+           LVI.
+          BACK TO THE STATES
+
+           LVII.
+          OLD FRIENDS AND NEW PLANS
+
+           LVIII.
+          A NEW BOOK AND A LECTURE
+
+           LIX.
+          THE FIRST BOOK
+
+           LX.
+          THE INNOCENTS AT SEA
+
+           LXI.
+          THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
+
+           LXII.
+          THE RETURN OF THE PILGRIMS
+
+           LXIII.
+          IN WASHINGTON—A PUBLISHING PROPOSITION
+
+           LXIV.
+          OLIVIA LANGDON
+
+           LXV.
+          A CONTRACT WITH ELISHA BLISS, JR.
+
+           LXVI.
+          BACK TO SAN FRANCISCO
+
+           LXVII.
+          A VISIT TO ELMIRA
+
+           LXVIII.
+          THE REV. “JOE” TWICHELL.
+
+           LXIX.
+          A LECTURE TOUR
+
+           LXX.
+          INNOCENTS AT HOME—AND “THE INNOCENTS ABROAD”
+
+           LXXI.
+          THE GREAT BOOK OF TRAVEL.
+
+           LXXII.
+          THE PURCHASE OF A PAPER.
+
+           LXXIII.
+          THE FIRST MEETING WITH HOWELLS
+
+           LXXIV.
+          THE WEDDING-DAY
+
+           LXXV.
+          AS TO DESTINY
+
+           LXXVI.
+          ON THE BUFFALO “EXPRESS”
+
+           LXXVII.
+          THE “GALAXY”
+
+           LXXVIII.
+          THE PRIMROSE PATH
+
+           LXXIX.
+          THE OLD HUMAN STORY
+
+           LXXX.
+          LITERARY PROJECTS
+
+           LXXXI.
+          SOME FURTHER LITERARY MATTERS
+
+           LXXXII.
+          THE WRITING OF “ROUGHING IT”
+
+           LXXXIII.
+          LECTURING DAYS
+
+           LXXXIV.
+          "ROUGHING IT”.
+
+           LXXXV.
+          A BIRTH, A DEATH, AND A VOYAGE
+
+           LXXXVI.
+          ENGLAND
+
+           LXXXVII.
+          THE BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+
+           LXXXVIII.
+          "THE GILDED AGE”
+
+           LXXXIX.
+          PLANNING A NEW HOME
+
+           XC.
+          A LONG ENGLISH HOLIDAY
+
+           XCI.
+          A LONDON LECTURE
+
+           XCII.
+          FURTHER LONDON LECTURE TRIUMPHS
+
+           XCIII.
+          THE REAL COLONEL SELLERS-GOLDEN DAYS
+
+           XCIV.
+          BEGINNING “TOM SAWYER”
+
+           XCV.
+          AN “ATLANTIC” STORY AND A PLAY
+
+           XCVI.
+          THE NEW HOME
+
+           XCVII.
+          THE WALK TO BOSTON
+
+           XCVIII.
+          "OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI”
+
+           XCIX.
+          A TYPEWRITER, AND A JOKE ON ALDRICH
+
+           C.
+          RAYMOND, MENTAL TELEGRAPHY, ETC.
+
+           CI.
+          CONCLUDING “TOM SAWYER”—MARK TWAIN's “EDITORS”
+
+           CII.
+          "SKETCHES NEW AND OLD”
+
+           CIII.
+          "ATLANTIC” DAYS
+
+           CIV.
+          MARK TWAIN AND HIS WIFE
+
+
+
+
+      VOLUME I, Part 2: 1866-1875
+
+      LIV. THE LECTURER
+
+
+      It was not easy to take up the daily struggle again, but it was
+      necessary.—[Clemens once declared he had been so blue at this
+      period that one morning he put a loaded pistol to his head, but
+      found he lacked courage to pull the trigger.]—Out of the ruck of
+      possibilities (his brain always thronged with plans) he
+      constructed three or four resolves. The chief of these was the
+      trip around the world; but that lay months ahead, and in the mean
+      time ways and means must be provided. Another intention was to
+      finish the Hornet article, and forward it to Harper's Magazine—a
+      purpose carried immediately into effect. To his delight the
+      article found acceptance, and he looked forward to the day of its
+      publication as the beginning of a real career. He intended to
+      follow it up with a series on the islands, which in due time
+      might result in a book and an income. He had gone so far as to
+      experiment with a dedication for the book—an inscription to his
+      mother, modified later for use in 'The Innocents Abroad'. A third
+      plan of action was to take advantage of the popularity of the
+      Hawaiian letters, and deliver a lecture on the same subject. But
+      this was a fearsome prospect—he trembled when he thought of it.
+      As Governor of the Third House he had been extravagantly received
+      and applauded, but in that case the position of public
+      entertainer had been thrust upon him. To come forward now,
+      offering himself in the same capacity, was a different matter. He
+      believed he could entertain, but he lacked the courage to declare
+      himself; besides, it meant a risk of his slender capital. He
+      confided his situation to Col. John McComb, of the Alta
+      California, and was startled by McComb's vigorous endorsement.
+
+      “Do it, by all means!” urged McComb. “It will be a grand
+      success—I know it! Take the largest house in town, and charge a
+      dollar a ticket.”
+
+      Frightened but resolute, he went to the leading theater manager
+      the same Tom Maguire of his verses—and was offered the new
+      opera-house at half rates. The next day this advertisement
+      appeared:
+
+                MAGUIRE'S ACADEMY OF MUSIC PINE STREET, NEAR MONTGOMERY
+                  THE SANDWICH ISLANDS
+                      MARK TWAIN
+        (HONOLULU CORRESPONDENT OF THE SACRAMENTO UNION) WILL DELIVER A
+        LECTURE ON THE SANDWICH ISLANDS
+                AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC ON TUESDAY EVENING, OCT. 2d
+                (1866)
+  In which passing mention will be made of Harris, Bishop Staley, the
+  American missionaries, etc., and the absurd customs and
+  characteristics of the natives duly discussed and described. The
+  great volcano of Kilauea will also receive proper attention.
+                  A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA is in town, but has not been
+                  engaged ALSO A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS will be
+                  on exhibition in the next block MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS
+ were in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been
+ abandoned A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION may be expected; in fact, the
+ public are privileged to expect whatever they please.
+           Dress Circle, $1.00  Family Circle, 50c Doors open at 7
+           o'clock  The Trouble to begin at 8 o'clock
+
+      The story of that first lecture, as told in Roughing It, is a
+      faithful one, and need only be summarized here.
+
+      Expecting to find the house empty, he found it packed from the
+      footlights to the walls. Sidling out from the wings—wobbly-kneed
+      and dry of tongue—he was greeted by a murmur, a roar, a very
+      crash of applause that frightened away his remaining vestiges of
+      courage. Then, came reaction—these were his friends, and he began
+      to talk to them. Fear melted away, and as tide after tide of
+      applause rose and billowed and came breaking at his feet, he knew
+      something of the exaltation of Monte Cristo when he declared “The
+      world is mine!”
+
+      It was a vast satisfaction to have succeeded. It was particularly
+      gratifying at this time, for he dreaded going back into newspaper
+      harness. Also; it softened later the disappointment resulting
+      from another venture; for when the December Harper appeared, with
+      his article, the printer and proof-reader had somehow converted
+      Mark Twain into “Mark Swain,” and his literary dream perished.
+
+      As to the literary value of his lecture, it was much higher than
+      had, been any portion of his letters, if we may judge from its
+      few remaining fragments. One of these—a part of the description
+      of the great volcano Haleakala, on the island of Maui—is a fair
+      example of his eloquence.
+
+      It is somewhat more florid than his later description of the same
+      scene in Roughing It, which it otherwise resembles; and we may
+      imagine that its poetry, with the added charm of its delivery,
+      held breathless his hearers, many of whom believed that no purer
+      eloquence had ever been uttered or written.
+
+      It is worth remembering, too, that in this lecture, delivered so
+      long ago, he advocated the idea of American ownership of these
+      islands, dwelling at considerable length on his reasons for this
+      ideal. —[For fragmentary extracts from this first lecture of Mark
+      Twain and news comment, see Appendix D, end of last
+      volume.]—There was a gross return from his venture of more than
+      $1,200, but with his usual business insight, which was never
+      foresight, he had made an arrangement by which, after paying
+      bills and dividing with his manager, he had only about one-third
+      of, this sum left. Still, even this was prosperity and triumph.
+      He had acquired a new and lucrative profession at a bound. The
+      papers lauded him as the “most piquant and humorous writer and
+      lecturer on the Coast since the days of the lamented John
+      Phoenix.” He felt that he was on the highroad at last.
+
+      Denis McCarthy, late of the Enterprise, was in San Francisco, and
+      was willing to become his manager. Denis was capable and honest,
+      and Clemens was fond of him. They planned a tour of the near-by
+      towns, beginning with Sacramento, extending it later even to the
+      mining camps, such as Red Dog and Grass Valley; also across into
+      Nevada, with engagements at Carson City, Virginia, and Gold Hill.
+      It was an exultant and hilarious excursion—that first lecture
+      tour made by Denis McCarthy and Mark Twain. Success traveled with
+      them everywhere, whether the lecturer looked across the
+      footlights of some pretentious “opera-house” or between the two
+      tallow candles of some camp “academy.” Whatever the building, it
+      was packed, and the returns were maximum.
+
+      Those who remember him as a lecturer in that long-ago time say
+      that his delivery was more quaint, his drawl more exaggerated,
+      even than in later life; that his appearance and movements on the
+      stage were natural, rather than graceful; that his manuscript,
+      which he carried under his arm, looked like a ruffled hen. It
+      was, in fact, originally written on sheets of manila paper, in
+      large characters, so that it could be read easily by dim light,
+      and it was doubtless often disordered.
+
+      There was plenty of amusing experience on this tour. At one
+      place, when the lecture was over, an old man came to him and
+      said:
+
+      “Be them your natural tones of eloquence?”
+
+      At Grass Valley there was a rival show, consisting of a lady
+      tight-rope walker and her husband. It was a small place, and the
+      tight-rope attraction seemed likely to fail. The lady's husband
+      had formerly been a compositor on the Enterprise, so that he felt
+      there was a bond of brotherhood between him and Mark Twain.
+
+      “Look here,” he said. “Let's combine our shows. I'll let my wife
+      do the tight-rope act outside and draw a crowd, and you go inside
+      and lecture.”
+
+      The arrangement was not made.
+
+      Following custom, the lecturer at first thought it necessary to
+      be introduced, and at each place McCarthy had to skirmish around
+      and find the proper person. At Red Dog, on the Stanislaus, the
+      man selected failed to appear, and Denis had to provide another
+      on short notice. He went down into the audience and captured an
+      old fellow, who ducked and dodged but could not escape. Denis led
+      him to the stage, a good deal frightened.
+
+      “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “this is the celebrated Mark
+      Twain from the celebrated city of San Francisco, with his
+      celebrated lecture about the celebrated Sandwich Islands.”
+
+      That was as far as he could go; but it was far enough. Mark Twain
+      never had a better introduction. The audience was in a shouting
+      humor from the start.
+
+      Clemens himself used to tell of an introduction at another camp,
+      where his sponsor said:
+
+      “Ladies and gentlemen, I know only two things about this man: the
+      first is that he's never been in jail, and the second is I don't
+      know why.”
+
+      But this is probably apocryphal; there is too much “Mark Twain”
+      in it.
+
+      When he reached Virginia, Goodman said to him:
+
+      “Sam, you do not need anybody to introduce you. There's a piano
+      on the stage in the theater. Have it brought out in sight, and
+      when the curtain rises you be seated at the piano, playing and
+      singing that song of yours, 'I Had an Old Horse Whose Name Was
+      Methusalem,' and don't seem to notice that the curtain is up at
+      first; then be surprised when you suddenly find out that it is
+      up, and begin talking, without any further preliminaries.”
+
+      This proved good advice, and the lecture, thus opened, started
+      off with general hilarity and applause.
+
+
+
+
+      LV. HIGHWAY ROBBERY
+
+
+      His Nevada, lectures were bound to be immensely successful. The
+      people regarded him as their property over there, and at Carson
+      and Virginia the houses overflowed. At Virginia especially his
+      friends urged and begged him to repeat the entertainment, but he
+      resolutely declined.
+
+      “I have only one lecture yet,” he said. “I cannot bring myself to
+      give it twice in the same town.”
+
+      But that irresponsible imp, Steve Gillis, who was again in
+      Virginia, conceived a plan which would make it not only necessary
+      for him to lecture again, but would supply him with a subject.
+      Steve's plan was very simple: it was to relieve the lecturer of
+      his funds by a friendly highway robbery, and let an account of
+      the adventure furnish the new lecture.
+
+      In 'Roughing It' Mark Twain has given a version of this mock
+      robbery which is correct enough as far as it goes; but important
+      details are lacking. Only a few years ago (it was April, 1907),
+      in his cabin on jackass Hill, with Joseph Goodman and the writer
+      of this history present, Steve Gillis made his “death-bed”
+      confession as is here set down:
+
+      “Mark's lecture was given in Piper's Opera House, October 30,
+      1866. The Virginia City people had heard many famous lectures
+      before, but they were mere sideshows compared with Mark's. It
+      could have been run to crowded houses for a week. We begged him
+      to give the common people a chance; but he refused to repeat
+      himself. He was going down to Carson, and was coming back to talk
+      in Gold Hill about a week later, and his agent, Denis McCarthy,
+      and I laid a plan to have him robbed on the Divide between Gold
+      Hill and Virginia, after the Gold Hill lecture was over and he
+      and Denis would be coming home with the money. The Divide was a
+      good lonely place, and was famous for its hold-ups. We got City
+      Marshal George Birdsall into it with us, and took in Leslie
+      Blackburn, Pat Holland, Jimmy Eddington, and one or two more of
+      Sam's old friends. We all loved him, and would have fought for
+      him in a moment. That's the kind of friends Mark had in Nevada.
+      If he had any enemies I never heard of them.
+
+      “We didn't take in Dan de Quille, or Joe here, because Sam was
+      Joe's guest, and we were afraid he would tell him. We didn't take
+      in Dan because we wanted him to write it up as a genuine robbery
+      and make a big sensation. That would pack the opera-house at two
+      dollars a seat to hear Mark tell the story.
+
+      “Well, everything went off pretty well. About the time Mark was
+      finishing his lecture in Gold Hill the robbers all went up on the
+      Divide to wait, but Mark's audience gave him a kind of reception
+      after his lecture, and we nearly froze to death up there before
+      he came along. By and by I went back to see what was the matter.
+      Sam and Denis were coming, and carrying a carpet-sack about half
+      full of silver between them. I shadowed them and blew a
+      policeman's whistle as a signal to the boys when the lecturers
+      were within about a hundred yards of the place. I heard Sam say
+      to Denis:
+
+      “'I'm glad they've got a policeman on the Divide. They never had
+      one in my day.'
+
+      “Just about that time the boys, all with black masks on and
+      silver dollars at the sides of their tongues to disguise their
+      voices, stepped out and stuck six-shooters at Sam and Denis and
+      told them to put up their hands. The robbers called each other
+      'Beauregard' and 'Stonewall Jackson.' Of course Denis's hands
+      went up, and Mark's, too, though Mark wasn't a bit scared or
+      excited. He talked to the robbers in his regular fashion. He
+      said:
+
+      “'Don't flourish those pistols so promiscuously. They might go
+      off by accident.'
+
+      “They told him to hand over his watch and money; but when he
+      started to take his hands down they made him put them up again.
+      Then he asked how they expected him to give them his valuables
+      with his hands up in the sky. He said his treasures didn't lie in
+      heaven. He told them not to take his watch, which was the one
+      Sandy Baldwin and Theodore Winters had given him as Governor of
+      the Third House, but we took it all the same.
+
+      “Whenever he started to put his hands down we made him put them
+      up again. Once he said:
+
+      “'Don't you fellows be so rough. I was tenderly reared.'
+
+      “Then we told him and Denis to keep their hands up for fifteen
+      minutes after we were gone—this was to give us time to get back
+      to Virginia and be settled when they came along. As we were going
+      away Mark called:
+
+      “'Say, you forgot something.'
+
+      “'What is it?'
+
+      “Why, the carpet-bag.'
+
+      “He was cool all the time. Senator Bill Stewart, in his
+      Autobiography, tells a great story of how scared Mark was, and
+      how he ran; but Stewart was three thousand miles from Virginia by
+      that time, and later got mad at Mark because he made a joke about
+      him in 'Roughing It'.
+
+      “Denis wanted to take his hands down pretty soon after we were
+      gone, but Mark said:
+
+      “'No, Denis, I'm used to obeying orders when they are given in
+      that convincing way; we'll just keep our hands up another fifteen
+      minutes or so for good measure.'
+
+      “We were waiting in a big saloon on C Street when Mark and Denis
+      came along. We knew they would come in, and we expected Mark
+      would be excited; but he was as unruffled as a mountain lake. He
+      told us they had been robbed, and asked me if I had any money. I
+      gave him a hundred dollars of his own money, and he ordered
+      refreshments for everybody. Then we adjourned to the Enterprise
+      office, where he offered a reward, and Dan de Quille wrote up the
+      story and telegraphed it to the other newspapers. Then somebody
+      suggested that Mark would have to give another lecture now, and
+      that the robbery would make a great subject. He entered right
+      into the thing, and next day we engaged Piper's Opera House, and
+      people were offering five dollars apiece for front seats. It
+      would have been the biggest thing that ever came to Virginia if
+      it had come off. But we made a mistake, then, by taking Sandy
+      Baldwin into the joke. We took in Joe here, too, and gave him the
+      watch and money to keep, which made it hard for Joe afterward.
+      But it was Sandy Baldwin that ruined us. He had Mark out to
+      dinner the night before the show was to come off, and after he
+      got well warmed up with champagne he thought it would be a smart
+      thing to let Mark into what was really going on.
+
+      “Mark didn't see it our way. He was mad clear through.”
+
+      At this point Joseph Goodman took up the story. He said:
+
+      “Those devils put Sam's money, watch, keys, pencils, and all his
+      things into my hands. I felt particularly mean at being made
+      accessory to the crime, especially as Sam was my guest, and I had
+      grave doubts as to how he would take it when he found out the
+      robbery was not genuine.
+
+      “I felt terribly guilty when he said:
+
+      “'Joe, those d—n thieves took my keys, and I can't get into my
+      trunk. Do you suppose you could get me a key that would fit my
+      trunk?'
+
+      “I said I thought I could during the day, and after Sam had gone
+      I took his own key, put it in the fire and burnt it to make it
+      look black. Then I took a file and scratched it here and there,
+      to make it look as if I had been fitting it to the lock, feeling
+      guilty all the time, like a man who is trying to hide a murder.
+      Sam did not ask for his key that day, and that evening he was
+      invited to judge Baldwin's to dinner. I thought he looked pretty
+      silent and solemn when he came home; but he only said:
+
+      “'Joe, let's play cards; I don't feel sleepy.'
+
+      “Steve here, and two or three of the other boys who had been
+      active in the robbery, were present, and they did not like Sam's
+      manner, so they excused themselves and left him alone with me. We
+      played a good while; then he said:
+
+      “'Joe, these cards are greasy. I have got some new ones in my
+      trunk. Did you get that key to-day?'
+
+      “I fished out that burnt, scratched-up key with fear and
+      trembling. But he didn't seem to notice it at all, and presently
+      returned with the cards. Then we played, and played, and
+      played—till one o'clock—two o'clock—Sam hardly saying a word, and
+      I wondering what was going to happen. By and by he laid down his
+      cards and looked at me, and said:
+
+      “'Joe, Sandy Baldwin told me all about that robbery to-night.
+      Now, Joe, I have found out that the law doesn't recognize a joke,
+      and I am going to send every one of those fellows to the
+      penitentiary.'
+
+      “He said it with such solemn gravity, and such vindictiveness,
+      that I believed he was in dead earnest.
+
+      “I know that I put in two hours of the hardest work I ever did,
+      trying to talk him out of that resolution. I used all the
+      arguments about the boys being his oldest friends; how they all
+      loved him, and how the joke had been entirely for his own good; I
+      pleaded with him, begged him to reconsider; I went and got his
+      money and his watch and laid them on the table; but for a time it
+      seemed hopeless. And I could imagine those fellows going behind
+      the bars, and the sensation it would make in California; and just
+      as I was about to give it up he said:
+
+      “'Well, Joe, I'll let it pass—this time; I'll forgive them again;
+      I've had to do it so many times; but if I should see Denis
+      McCarthy and Steve Gillis mounting the scaffold to-morrow, and I
+      could save them by turning over my hand, I wouldn't do it!'
+
+      “He canceled the lecture engagement, however, next morning, and
+      the day after left on the Pioneer Stage, by the way of Donner
+      Lake, for California. The boys came rather sheepishly to see him
+      off; but he would make no show of relenting. When they introduced
+      themselves as Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, etc., he merely
+      said:
+
+      “'Yes, and you'll all be behind the bars some day. There's been a
+      good deal of robbery around here lately, and it's pretty clear
+      now who did it.' They handed him a package containing the masks
+      which the robbers had worn. He received it in gloomy silence; but
+      as the stage drove away he put his head out of the window, and
+      after some pretty vigorous admonition resumed his old smile, and
+      called out: 'Good-by, friends; good-by, thieves; I bear you no
+      malice.' So the heaviest joke was on his tormentors after all.”
+
+      This is the story of the famous Mark Twain robbery direct from
+      headquarters. It has been garbled in so many ways that it seems
+      worth setting down in full. Denis McCarthy, who joined him
+      presently in San Francisco, received a little more punishment
+      there.
+
+      “What kind of a trip did you boys have?” a friend asked of them.
+
+      Clemens, just recovering from a cold which the exposure on the
+      Divide had given him, smiled grimly:
+
+      “Oh, pretty good, only Denis here mistook it for a spree.”
+
+      He lectured again in San Francisco, this time telling the story
+      of his Overland trip in 1861, and he did the daring thing of
+      repeating three times the worn-out story of Horace Greeley's ride
+      with Hank Monk, as given later in 'Roughing It'. People were
+      deadly tired of that story out there, and when he told it the
+      first time, with great seriousness, they thought he must be
+      failing mentally. They did not laugh—they only felt sorry. He
+      waited a little, as if expecting a laugh, and presently led
+      around to it and told it again. The audience was astonished still
+      more, and pitied him thoroughly. He seemed to be waiting
+      pathetically in the dead silence for their applause, then went on
+      with his lecture; but presently, with labored effort, struggled
+      around to the old story again, and told it for the third time.
+      The audience suddenly saw the joke then, and became vociferous
+      and hysterical in their applause; but it was a narrow escape. He
+      would have been hysterical himself if the relief had not came
+      when it did. —[A side-light on the Horace Greeley story and on
+      Mr. Greeley's eccentricities is furnished by Mr. Goodman:
+
+      When I was going East in 1869 I happened to see Hank Monk just
+      before I started. “Mr. Goodman,” he said, “you tell Horace
+      Greeley that I want to come East, and ask him to send me a pass.”
+      “All right, Hank,” I said, “I will.” It happened that when I got
+      to New York City one of the first men I met was Greeley. “Mr.
+      Greeley,” said, “I have a message for you from Hank Monk.”
+      Greeley bristled and glared at me. “That—rascal?” he said, “He
+      has done me more injury than any other man in America.”]
+
+
+
+
+      LVI. BACK TO THE STATES
+
+
+      In the mean time Clemens had completed his plan for sailing, and
+      had arranged with General McComb, of the Alta California, for
+      letters during his proposed trip around the world. However, he
+      meant to visit his people first, and his old home. He could go
+      back with means now, and with the prestige of success.
+
+      “I sail to-morrow per Opposition—telegraphed you to-day,” he
+      wrote on December 14th, and a day later his note-book entry says:
+
+    Sailed from San Francisco in Opposition (line) steamer America,
+    Capt. Wakeman, at noon, 15th Dec., 1866. Pleasant sunny day, hills
+    brightly clad with green grass and shrubbery.
+
+      So he was really going home at last! He had been gone five and a
+      half years—eventful, adventurous years that had made him over
+      completely, at least so far as ambitions and equipment were
+      concerned. He had came away, in his early manhood, a printer and
+      a pilot, unknown outside of his class. He was returning a man of
+      thirty-one, with a fund of hard experience, three added
+      professions—mining, journalism, and lecturing—also with a new
+      name, already famous on the sunset slopes of its adoption, and
+      beginning to be heard over the hills and far away. In some
+      degree, at least, he resembled the prince of a fairy tale who,
+      starting out humble and unnoticed, wins his way through a hundred
+      adventures and returns with gifts and honors.
+
+      The homeward voyage was a notable one. It began with a tempest a
+      little way out of San Francisco—a storm terrible but brief, that
+      brought the passengers from their berths to the deck, and for a
+      time set them praying. Then there was Captain Ned Wakeman, a big,
+      burly, fearless sailor, who had visited the edges of all
+      continents and archipelagos; who had been born at sea, and never
+      had a day's schooling in his life, but knew the Bible by heart;
+      who was full of human nature and profanity, and believed he was
+      the only man on the globe who knew the secret of the Bible
+      miracles. He became a distinct personality in Mark Twain's
+      work—the memory of him was an unfailing delight. Captain “Ned
+      Blakely,” in 'Roughing It', who with his own hands hanged Bill
+      Noakes, after reading him promiscuous chapters from the Bible,
+      was Captain Wakeman. Captain “Stormfield,” who had the marvelous
+      visit to heaven, was likewise Captain Wakeman; and he appears in
+      the “Idle Excursion” and elsewhere.
+
+      Another event of the voyage was crossing the Nicaragua
+      Isthmus—the trip across the lake and down the San Juan River—a
+      brand-new experience, between shores of splendid tropic tangle,
+      gleaming with vivid life. The luxuriance got into his note-book.
+
+      Dark grottos, fairy festoons, tunnels, temples, columns, pillars,
+      towers, pilasters, terraces, pyramids, mounds, domes, walls, in
+      endless confusion of vine-work—no shape known to architecture
+      unimitated—and all so webbed together that short distances within
+      are only gained by glimpses. Monkeys here and there; birds
+      warbling; gorgeous plumaged birds on the wing; Paradise itself,
+      the imperial realm of beauty-nothing to wish for to make it
+      perfect.
+
+      But it was beyond the isthmus that the voyage loomed into
+      proportions somber and terrible. The vessel they took there, the
+      San Francisco, sailed from Greytown January 1, 1867, the
+      beginning of a memorable year in Mark Twain's life. Next day two
+      cases of Asiatic cholera were reported in the steerage. There had
+      been a rumor of it in Nicaragua, but no one expected it on the
+      ship.
+
+      The nature of the disease was not hinted at until evening, when
+      one of the men died. Soon after midnight, the other followed. A
+      minister making the voyage home, Rev. J. G. Fackler, read the
+      burial service. The gaiety of the passengers, who had become well
+      acquainted during the Pacific voyage, was subdued. When the word
+      “cholera” went among them, faces grew grave and frightened. On
+      the morning of January 4th Reverend Fackler's services were again
+      required. The dead man was put overboard within half an hour
+      after he had ceased to breathe.
+
+      Gloom settled upon the ship. All steam was made to put into Key
+      West. Then some of the machinery gave way and the ship lay
+      rolling, helplessly becalmed in the fierce heat of the Gulf,
+      while repairs were being made. The work was done at a
+      disadvantage, and the parts did not hold. Time and again they
+      were obliged to lie to, in the deadly tropic heat, listening to
+      the hopeless hammering, wondering who would be the next to be
+      sewed up hastily in a blanket and slipped over the ship's side.
+      On the 5th seven new cases of illness were reported. One of the
+      crew, a man called “Shape,” was said to be dying. A few hours
+      later he was dead. By this time the Reverend Fackler himself had
+      been taken.
+
+      “So they are burying poor 'Shape' without benefit of clergy,”
+      says the note-book.
+
+      General consternation now began to prevail. Then it was learned
+      that the ship's doctor had run out of medicines. The passengers
+      became demoralized. They believed their vessel was to become a
+      charnel ship. Strict sanitary orders were issued, and a hospital
+      was improvised.
+
+    Verily the ship is becoming a floating hospital herself—not an hour
+    passes but brings its fresh sensation, its new disaster, its
+    melancholy tidings. When I think of poor “Shape” and the preacher,
+    both so well when I saw them yesterday evening, I realize that I
+    myself may be dead to-morrow.
+    Since the last two hours all laughter, all levity, has ceased on
+    the ship—a settled gloom is upon the faces of the passengers.
+
+      By noon it was evident that the minister could not survive. He
+      died at two o'clock next morning; the fifth victim in less than
+      five days. The machinery continued to break and the vessel to
+      drag. The ship's doctor confessed to Clemens that he was
+      helpless. There were eight patients in the hospital.
+
+      But on January 6th they managed to make Key West, and for some
+      reason were not quarantined. Twenty-one passengers immediately
+      deserted the ship and were heard of no more.
+
+      “I am glad they are gone. D—n them,” says the notebook.
+      Apparently he had never considered leaving, and a number of
+      others remained. The doctor restocked his medicine-locker, and
+      the next day they put to sea again. Certainly they were a daring
+      lot of voyagers. On the 8th another of the patients died. Then
+      the cooler weather seemed to check the contagion, and it was not
+      until the night of the 11th, when the New York harbor lights were
+      in view, that the final death occurred. There were no new cases
+      by this time, and the other patients were convalescent. A
+      certificate was made out that the last man had died of “dropsy.”
+      There would seem to have been no serious difficulty in docking
+      the vessel and landing the passengers. The matter would probably
+      be handled differently to-day.
+
+
+
+
+      LVII. OLD FRIENDS AND NEW PLANS
+
+
+      It had been more than thirteen years since his first arrival in
+      New York. Then he had been a youth, green, untraveled, eager to
+      get away from home. Now a veteran, he was as eager to return.
+
+      He stopped only long enough in New York to see Charles Henry
+      Webb, late of California, who had put together a number of the
+      Mark Twain sketches, including “The Jumping Frog,” for book
+      publication. Clemens himself decided to take the book to
+      Carleton, thinking that, having missed the fame of the “Frog”
+      once, he might welcome a chance to stand sponsor for it now. But
+      Carleton was wary; the “Frog” had won favor, and even fame, in
+      its fugitive, vagrant way, but a book was another matter. Books
+      were undertaken very seriously and with plenty of consideration
+      in those days. Twenty-one years later, in Switzerland, Carleton
+      said to Mark Twain:
+
+      “My chief claim to immortality is the distinction of having
+      declined your first book.”
+
+      Clemens was ready enough to give up the book when Carleton
+      declined it, but Webb said he would publish it himself, and he
+      set about it forthwith. The author waited no longer now, but
+      started for St. Louis, and was soon with his mother and sister,
+      whom he had not seen since that eventful first year of the war.
+      They thought he looked old, which was true enough, but they found
+      him unchanged in his manner: buoyant, full of banter and gravely
+      quaint remarks—he was always the same. Jane Clemens had grown
+      older, too. She was nearly sixty-four, but as keen and vigorous
+      as ever-proud (even if somewhat critical) of this handsome,
+      brilliant man of new name and fame who had been her mischievous,
+      wayward boy. She petted him, joked with him, scolded him, and
+      inquired searchingly into his morals and habits. In turn he
+      petted, comforted, and teased her. She decided that he was the
+      same Sam, and always would be—a true prophecy.
+
+      He went up to Hannibal to see old friends. Many were married;
+      some had moved away; some were dead—the old story. He delivered
+      his lecture there, and was the center of interest and
+      admiration—his welcome might have satisfied even Tom Sawyer. From
+      Hannibal he journeyed to Keokuk, where he lectured again to a
+      crowd of old friends and new, then returned to St. Louis for a
+      more extended visit.
+
+      It was while he was in St. Louis that he first saw the
+      announcement of the Quaker City Holy Land Excursion, and was
+      promptly fascinated by what was then a brand-new idea in ocean
+      travel—a splendid picnic—a choice and refined party that would
+      sail away for a long summer's journeying to the most romantic of
+      all lands and seas, the shores of the Mediterranean. No such
+      argosy had ever set out before in pursuit of the golden fleece of
+      happiness.
+
+      His projected trip around the world lost its charm in the light
+      of this idyllic dream. Henry Ward Beecher was advertised as one
+      of the party; General Sherman as another; also ministers,
+      high-class journalists—the best minds of the nation. Anson
+      Burlingame had told him to associate with persons of refinement
+      and intellect. He lost no time in writing to the Alta, proposing
+      that they send him in this select company.
+
+      Noah Brooks, who was then on the Alta, states—[In an article
+      published in the Century Magazine.]—that the management was
+      staggered by the proposition, but that Col. John McComb insisted
+      that the investment in Mark Twain would be sound. A letter was
+      accordingly sent, stating that a check for his passage would be
+      forwarded in due season, and that meantime he could contribute
+      letters from New York City. The rate for all letters was to be
+      twenty dollars each. The arrangement was a godsend, in the
+      fullest sense of the word, to Mark Twain.
+
+      It was now April, and he was eager to get back to New York to
+      arrange his passage. The Quaker City would not sail for two
+      months yet (two eventful months), but the advertisement said that
+      passages must be secured by the 5th, and he was there on that
+      day. Almost the first man he met was the chief of the New York
+      Alta bureau with a check for twelve hundred and fifty dollars
+      (the amount of his ticket) and a telegram saying, “Ship Mark
+      Twain in the Holy Land Excursion and pay his passage.”
+
+    —[The following letter, which bears no date, was probably handed to
+    him later in the New York Alta office as a sort of credential:
+    ALTA CALIFORNIA OFFICE, 42 JOHN STREET, NEW YORK.
+    Sam'l Clemens, Esq., New York.
+    DEAR SIR,—I have the honor to inform you that Fred'k. MacCrellish &
+    Co., Proprietors of Alta California, San Francisco, Cal., desire to
+    engage your services as Special Correspondent on the pleasure
+    excursion now about to proceed from this City to the Holy Land. In
+    obedience to their instructions I have secured a passage for you on
+    the vessel about to convey the excursion party referred to, and
+    made such arrangements as I hope will secure your comfort and
+    convenience. Your only instructions are that you will continue to
+    write at such times and from such places as you deem proper, and in
+    the same style that heretofore secured you the favor of the readers
+    of the Alta California. I have the honor to remain, with high
+    respect and esteem,
+    Your ob'dt. Servant,
+    JOHN J. MURPHY.]
+
+      The Alta, it appears, had already applied for his berth; but, not
+      having been vouched for by Mr. Beecher or some other eminent
+      divine, Clemens was fearful he might not be accepted. Quite
+      casually he was enlightened on this point. While waiting for
+      attention in the shipping-office, with the Alta agent, he heard a
+      newspaper man inquire what notables were going. A clerk, with
+      evident pride, rattled off the names:
+
+      “Lieutenant-General Sherman, Henry Ward Beecher, and Mask Twain;
+      also probably General Banks.”
+
+      So he was billed as an attraction. It was his first surreptitious
+      taste of fame on the Atlantic coast, and not without its delight.
+      The story often told of his being introduced by Ned House, of the
+      Tribune, as a minister, though often repeated by Mark Twain
+      himself, was in the nature of a joke, and mainly apocryphal.
+      Clemens was a good deal in House's company at the time, for he
+      had made an arrangement to contribute occasional letters to the
+      Tribune, and House no doubt introduced him jokingly as one of the
+      Quaker City ministers.
+
+
+
+
+      LVIII. A NEW BOOK AND A LECTURE
+
+
+      Webb, meantime, had pushed the Frog book along. The proofs had
+      been read and the volume was about ready for issue. Clemens wrote
+      to his mother April 15th:
+
+    My book will probably be in the bookseller's hands in about two
+    weeks. After that I shall lecture. Since I have been gone, the boys
+    have gotten up a “call” on me signed by two hundred Californians.
+
+      The lecture plan was the idea of Frank Fuller, who as acting
+      Governor of Utah had known Mark Twain on the Comstock, and
+      prophesied favorably of his future career. Clemens had hunted up
+      Fuller on landing in New York in January, and Fuller had
+      encouraged the lecture then; but Clemens was doubtful.
+
+      “I have no reputation with the general public here,” he said. “We
+      couldn't get a baker's dozen to hear me.”
+
+      But Fuller was a sanguine person, with an energy and enthusiasm
+      that were infectious. He insisted that the idea was sound. It
+      would solidify Mark Twain's reputation on the Atlantic coast, he
+      declared, insisting that the largest house in New York, Cooper
+      Union, should be taken. Clemens had partially consented, and
+      Fuller had arranged with all the Pacific slope people who had
+      come East, headed by ex-Governor James W. Nye (by this time
+      Senator at Washington), to sign a call for the “Inimitable Mark
+      Twain” to appear before a New York audience. Fuller made Nye
+      agree to be there and introduce the lecturer, and he was
+      burningly busy and happy in the prospect.
+
+      But Mark Twain was not happy. He looked at that spacious hall and
+      imagined the little crowd of faithful Californian stragglers that
+      might gather in to hear him, and the ridicule of the papers next
+      day. He begged Fuller to take a smaller hall, the smallest he
+      could get. But only the biggest hall in New York would satisfy
+      Fuller. He would have taken a larger one if he could have found
+      it. The lecture was announced for May 6th. Its subject was
+      “Kanakadom, or the Sandwich Islands”—tickets fifty cents. Fuller
+      timed it to follow a few days after Webb's book should appear, so
+      that one event might help the other.
+
+      Mark Twain's first book, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of
+      Calaveyas County, and Other Sketches', was scheduled for May 1st,
+      and did, in fact, appear on that date; but to the author it was
+      no longer an important event. Jim Smiley's frog as
+      standard-bearer of his literary procession was not an interesting
+      object, so far as he was concerned—not with that vast, empty hall
+      in the background and the insane undertaking of trying to fill
+      it. The San Francisco venture had been as nothing compared with
+      this. Fuller was working night and day with abounding joy, while
+      the subject of his labor felt as if he were on the brink of a
+      fearful precipice, preparing to try a pair of wings without first
+      learning to fly. At one instant he was cold with fright, the next
+      glowing with an infection of Fuller's faith. He devised a hundred
+      schemes for the sale of seats. Once he came rushing to Fuller,
+      saying:
+
+      “Send a lot of tickets down to the Chickering Piano Company. I
+      have promised to put on my programme, 'The piano used at this
+      entertainment is manufactured by Chickering.”'
+
+      “But you don't want a piano, Mark,” said Fuller, “do you?”
+
+      “No, of course not; but they will distribute the tickets for the
+      sake of the advertisement, whether we have the piano or not.”
+
+      Fuller got out a lot of handbills and hung bunches of them in the
+      stages, omnibuses, and horse-cars. Clemens at first haunted these
+      vehicles to see if anybody noticed the bills. The little dangling
+      bunches seemed untouched. Finally two men came in; one of them
+      pulled off a bill and glanced at it. His friend asked:
+
+      “Who's Mark Twain?”
+
+      “God knows; I don't!”
+
+      The lecturer could not ride any more. He was desperate.
+
+      “Fuller,” he groaned, “there isn't a sign—a ripple of interest.”
+
+      Fuller assured him that everything was working all right “working
+      underneath,” Fuller said—but the lecturer was hopeless. He
+      reported his impressions to the folks at home:
+
+    Everything looks shady, at least, if not dark; I have a good agent;
+    but now, after we have hired the Cooper Institute, and gone to an
+    expense in one way or another of $500, it comes out that I have got
+    to play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, Ristori, and also
+    the double troop of Japanese jugglers, the latter opening at the
+    great Academy of Music—and with all this against me I have taken
+    the largest house in New York and cannot back water.
+
+      He might have added that there were other rival entertainments:
+      “The Flying Scud” was at Wallack's, the “Black Crook” was at
+      Niblo's, John Brougham at the Olympic; and there were at least a
+      dozen lesser attractions. New York was not the inexhaustible city
+      in those days; these things could gather in the public to the
+      last man. When the day drew near, and only a few tickets had been
+      sold, Clemens was desperate.
+
+      “Fuller,” he said, “there'll be nobody in the Cooper Union that
+      night but you and me. I am on the verge of suicide. I would
+      commit suicide if I had the pluck and the outfit. You must paper
+      the house, Fuller. You must send out a flood of complementaries.”
+
+      “Very well,” said Fuller; “what we want this time is reputation
+      anyway—money is secondary. I'll put you before the choicest, most
+      intelligent audience that ever was gathered in New York City. I
+      will bring in the school-instructors—the finest body of men and
+      women in the world.”
+
+      Fuller immediately sent out a deluge of complimentary tickets,
+      inviting the school-teachers of New York and Brooklyn, and all
+      the adjacent country, to come free and hear Mark Twain's great
+      lecture on Kanakadom. This was within forty-eight hours of the
+      time he was to appear.
+
+      Senator Nye was to have joined Clemens and Fuller at the
+      Westminster, where Clemens was stopping, and they waited for him
+      there with a carriage, fuming and swearing, until it was evident
+      that he was not coming. At last Clemens said:
+
+      “Fuller, you've got to introduce me.”
+
+      “No,” suggested Fuller; “I've got a better scheme than that. You
+      get up and begin by bemeaning Nye for not being there. That will
+      be better anyway.”
+
+      Clemens said:
+
+      “Well, Fuller, I can do that. I feel that way. I'll try to think
+      up something fresh and happy to say about that horse-thief.”
+
+      They drove to Cooper Union with trepidation. Suppose, after all,
+      the school-teachers had declined to come? They went half an hour
+      before the lecture was to begin. Forty years later Mark Twain
+      said:
+
+      “I couldn't keep away. I wanted to see that vast Mammoth cave and
+      die. But when we got near the building I saw that all the streets
+      were blocked with people, and that traffic had stopped. I
+      couldn't believe that these people were trying to get into Cooper
+      Institute; but they were, and when I got to the stage at last the
+      house was jammed full-packed; there wasn't room enough left for a
+      child.
+
+      “I was happy and I was excited beyond expression. I poured the
+      Sandwich Islands out on those people, and they laughed and
+      shouted to my entire content. For an hour and fifteen minutes I
+      was in paradise.”
+
+      And Fuller to-day, alive and young, when so many others of that
+      ancient time and event have vanished, has added:
+
+      “When Mark appeared the Californians gave a regular yell of
+      welcome. When that was over he walked to the edge of the
+      platform, looked carefully down in the pit, round the edges as if
+      he were hunting for something. Then he said: 'There was to have
+      been a piano here, and a senator to introduce me. I don't seem to
+      discover them anywhere. The piano was a good one, but we will
+      have to get along with such music as I can make with your help.
+      As for the senator—Then Mark let himself go and did as he
+      promised about Senator Nye. He said things that made men from the
+      Pacific coast, who had known Nye, scream with delight. After that
+      came his lecture. The first sentence captured the audience. From
+      that moment to the end it was either in a roar of laughter or
+      half breathless by his beautiful descriptive passages. People
+      were positively ill for days, laughing at that lecture.”
+
+      So it was a success: everybody was glad to have been there; the
+      papers were kind, congratulations numerous. —[Kind but not
+      extravagant; those were burning political times, and the doings
+      of mere literary people did not excite the press to the extent of
+      headlines. A jam around Cooper Union to-day, followed by such an
+      artistic triumph, would be a news event. On the other hand,
+      Schuyler Colfax, then Speaker of the House, was reported to the
+      extent of a column, nonpareil. His lecture was of no literary
+      importance, and no echo of it now remains. But those were
+      political, not artistic, days.
+
+      Of Mark Twain's lecture the Times notice said:
+
+      “Nearly every one present came prepared for considerable
+      provocation for enjoyable laughter, and from the appearance of
+      their mirthful faces leaving the hall at the conclusion of the
+      lecture but few were disappointed, and it is not too much to say
+      that seldom has so large an audience been so uniformly pleased as
+      the one that listened to Mark Twain's quaint remarks last
+      evening. The large hall of the Union was filled to its utmost
+      capacity by fully two thousand persons, which fact spoke well for
+      the reputation of the lecturer and his future success. Mark
+      Twain's style is a quaint one both in manner and method, and
+      through his discourse he managed to keep on the right side of the
+      audience, and frequently convulsed it with hearty laughter....
+      During a description of the topography of the Sandwich Islands
+      the lecturer surprised his hearers by a graphic and eloquent
+      description of the eruption of the great volcano, which occurred
+      in 1840, and his language was loudly applauded.
+
+      “Judging from the success achieved by the lecturer last evening,
+      he should repeat his experiment at an early date.”]
+
+                   COOPER INSTITUTE By Invitation of s large number of
+                   prominent Californians and Citizens of New York,
+                      MARK TWAIN
+                    WILL DELIVER A SERIO-HUMEROUS LECTURE CONERNING
+                      KANAKDOM OR THE SANDWICH ISLANDS,
+                   COOPER INSTITUTE, On Monday Evening, May 6,1867.
+                  TICKETS FIFTY GENTS. For Sale at Chickering and Sons,
+                  852 Broadway, and at the Principal Hotel
+    Doors open at 7 o'clock.  The Wisdom will begin to flow at 8.
+
+      Mark Twain always felt grateful to the school-teachers for that
+      night. Many years later, when they wanted him to read to them in
+      Steinway Hall, he gladly gave his services without charge.
+
+      Nor was the lecture a complete financial failure. In spite of the
+      flood of complementaries, there was a cash return of some three
+      hundred dollars from the sale of tickets—a substantial aid in
+      defraying the expenses which Fuller assumed and insisted on
+      making good on his own account. That was Fuller's regal way; his
+      return lay in the joy of the game, and in the winning of the
+      larger stake for a friend.
+
+      “Mark,” he said, “it is all right. The fortune didn't come, but
+      it will. The fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book
+      just out you are going to be the most talked-of man in the
+      country. Your letters for the Alta and the Tribune will get the
+      widest reception of any letters of travel ever written.”
+
+
+
+
+      LIX. THE FIRST BOOK
+
+
+      With the shadow of the Cooper Institute so happily dispelled, The
+      Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and his following of
+      Other Sketches, became a matter of more interest. The book was a
+      neat blue-and-gold volume printed by John A. Gray & Green, the
+      old firm for which the boy, Sam Clemens, had set type thirteen
+      years before. The title-page bore Webb's name as publisher, with
+      the American News Company as selling agents. It further stated
+      that the book was edited by “John Paul,” that is to say by Webb
+      himself. The dedication was in keeping with the general
+      irresponsible character of the venture. It was as follows:
+
+                         TO JOHN SMITH WHOM I HAVE KNOWN IN DIVERS AND
+                         SUNDRY PLACES ABOUT THE WORLD, AND WHOSE MANY
+                         AND MANIFOLD VIRTUES DID ALWAYS COMMAND MY
+                         ESTEEM, I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
+
+      It is said that the man to whom a volume is dedicated always buys
+      a copy. If this prove true in the present instance, a princely
+      affluence is about to burst upon THE AUTHOR.
+
+      The “advertisement” stated that the author had “scaled the
+      heights of popularity at a single jump, and won for himself the
+      sobriquet of the 'Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope';
+      furthermore, that he was known to fame as the 'Moralist of the
+      Main,'” and that as such he would be likely to go down to
+      posterity, adding that it was in his secondary character, as
+      humorist, rather than in his primal one of moralist, that the
+      volume aimed to present him.—[The advertisement complete, with
+      extracts from the book, may be found under Appendix E, at the end
+      of last volume.]
+
+      Every little while, during the forty years or more that have
+      elapsed since then, some one has come forward announcing Mark
+      Twain to be as much a philosopher as a humorist, as if this were
+      a new discovery. But it was a discovery chiefly to the person
+      making the announcement. Every one who ever knew Mark Twain at
+      any period of his life made the same discovery. Every one who
+      ever took the trouble to familiarize himself with his work made
+      it. Those who did not make it have known his work only by hearsay
+      and quotation, or they have read it very casually, or have been
+      very dull. It would be much more of a discovery to find a book in
+      which he has not been serious—a philosopher, a moralist, and a
+      poet. Even in the Jumping Frog sketches, selected particularly
+      for their inconsequence, the under-vein of reflection and purpose
+      is not lacking. The answer to Moral Statistician—[In “Answers to
+      Correspondents,” included now in Sketches New and Old. An extract
+      from it, and from “A Strange Dream,” will be found in Appendix
+      E.]—is fairly alive with human wisdom and righteous wrath. The
+      “Strange Dream,” though ending in a joke, is aglow with poetry.
+      Webb's “advertisement” was playfully written, but it was
+      earnestly intended, and he writes Mark Twain down a moralist—not
+      as a discovery, but as a matter of course. The discoveries came
+      along later, when the author's fame as a humorist had dazzled the
+      nations.
+
+      It is as well to say it here as anywhere, perhaps, that one
+      reason why Mark Twain found it difficult to be accepted seriously
+      was the fact that his personality was in itself so essentially
+      humorous. His physiognomy, his manner of speech, this movement,
+      his mental attitude toward events—all these were distinctly
+      diverting. When we add to this that his medium of expression was
+      nearly always full of the quaint phrasing and those surprising
+      appositions which we recognize as amusing, it is not so
+      astonishing that his deeper, wiser, more serious purpose should
+      be overlooked. On the whole these unabated discoverers serve a
+      purpose, if only to make the rest of their species look somewhat
+      deeper than the comic phrase.
+
+      The little blue-and-gold volume which presented the Frog story
+      and twenty-six other sketches in covers is chiefly important
+      to-day as being Mark Twain's first book. The selections in it
+      were made for a public that had been too busy with a great war to
+      learn discrimination, and most of them have properly found
+      oblivion. Fewer than a dozen of them were included in his
+      collected Sketches issued eight years later, and some even of
+      those might have been spared; also some that were added, for that
+      matter; but detailed literary criticism is not the province of
+      this work. The reader may investigate and judge for himself.
+
+      Clemens was pleased with the appearance of his book. To Bret
+      Harte he wrote:
+
+      The book is out and it is handsome. It is full of damnable errors
+      of grammar and deadly inconsistencies of spelling in the Frog
+      sketch, because I was away and did not read proofs; but be a
+      friend and say nothing about these things. When my hurry is over,
+      I will send you a copy to pisen the children with.
+
+      That he had no exaggerated opinion of the book's contents or
+      prospects we may gather from his letter home:
+
+      As for the Frog book, I don't believe it will ever pay anything
+      worth a cent. I published it simply to advertise myself, and not
+      with the hope of making anything out of it.
+
+      He had grown more lenient in his opinion of the merits of the
+      Frog story itself since it had made friends in high places,
+      especially since James Russell Lowell had pronounced it “the
+      finest piece of humorous writing yet produced in America”; but
+      compared with his lecture triumph, and his prospective journey to
+      foreign seas, his book venture, at best, claimed no more than a
+      casual regard. A Sandwich Island book (he had collected his Union
+      letters with the idea of a volume) he gave up altogether after
+      one unsuccessful offer of it to Dick & Fitzgerald.
+
+      Frank Fuller's statement, that the fame had arrived, had in it
+      some measure of truth. Lecture propositions came from various
+      directions. Thomas Nast, then in the early day of his great
+      popularity, proposed a joint tour, in which Clemens would
+      lecture, while he, Nast, illustrated the remarks with lightning
+      caricatures. But the time was too short; the Quaker City would
+      sail on the 8th of June, and in the mean time the Alta
+      correspondent was far behind with his New York letters. On May
+      29th he wrote:
+
+      I am 18 Alta letters behind, and I must catch up or bust. I have
+      refused all invitations to lecture. Don't know how my book is
+      coming on.
+
+      He worked like a slave for a week or so, almost night and day, to
+      clean up matters before his departure. Then came days of idleness
+      and reaction-days of waiting, during which his natural
+      restlessness and the old-time regret for things done and undone,
+      beset him.
+
+    My passage is paid, and if the ship sails I sail on her; but I make
+    no calculations, have bought no cigars, no sea-going clothing—have
+    made no preparations whatever—shall not pack my trunk till the
+    morning we sail.
+    All I do know or feel is that I am wild with impatience to move
+    —move—move! Curse the endless delays! They always kill me—they make
+    me neglect every duty, and then I have a conscience that tears me
+    like a wild beast. I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month. I
+    do more mean things the moment I get a chance to fold my hands and
+    sit down than ever I get forgiveness for.
+    Yes, we are to meet at Mr. Beach's next Thursday night, and I
+    suppose we shall have to be gotten up regardless of expense, in
+    swallow-tails, white kids and everything 'en regle'.
+    I am resigned to Rev. Mr. Hutchinson's or anybody else's
+    supervision. I don't mind it. I am fixed. I have got a splendid,
+    immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless roommate who is as
+    good and true and right-minded a man as ever lived—a man whose
+    blameless conduct and example will always be an eloquent sermon to
+    all who shall come within their influence. But send on the
+    professional preachers—there are none I like better to converse
+    with; if they're not narrowminded and bigoted they make good
+    companions.
+
+      The “splendid immoral room-mate” was Dan Slote—“Dan,” of The
+      Innocents, a lovable character—all as set down. Samuel Clemens
+      wrote one more letter to his mother and sister—a
+      conscience-stricken, pessimistic letter of good-by written the
+      night before sailing. Referring to the Alta letters he says:
+
+    I think they are the stupidest letters ever written from New York.
+    Corresponding has been a perfect drag ever since I got to the
+    States. If it continues abroad, I don't know what the Tribune and
+    Alta folk will think.
+
+      He remembers Orion, who had been officially eliminated when
+      Nevada had received statehood.
+
+    I often wonder if his law business is going satisfactorily. I wish
+    I had gone to Washington in the winter instead of going West. I
+    could have gouged an office out of Bill Stewart for him, and that
+    would have atoned for the loss of my home visit. But I am so
+    worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish
+    anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is
+    stored full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all,
+    and an accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and
+    restless moving from place to place. If I could only say I had done
+    one thing for any of you that entitled me to your good opinions (I
+    say nothing of your love, for I am sure of that, no matter how
+    unworthy of it I may make myself—from Orion down, you have always
+    given me that; all the days of my life, when God Almighty knows I
+    have seldom deserved it), I believe I could go home and stay there
+    —and I know I would care little for the world's praise or blame.
+    There is no satisfaction in the world's praise anyhow, and it has
+    no worth to me save in the way of business. I tried to gather up
+    its compliments to send you, but the work was distasteful and I
+    dropped it.
+    You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that
+    is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt. I can get away
+    from that at sea, and be tranquil and satisfied; and so, with my
+    parting love and benediction for Orion and all of you, I say
+    good-by and God bless you all-and welcome the wind that wafts a
+    weary soul to the sunny lands of the Mediterranean!
+                     Yrs. forever, SAM
+
+
+
+
+      LX. THE INNOCENTS AT SEA
+
+
+       HOLY LAND PLEASURE EXCURSION
+       Steamer: Quaker City.
+       Captain C. C. Duncan.
+       Left New York at 2 P.m., June 8, 1867.
+       Rough weather—anchored within the harbor to lay all night.
+
+      That first note recorded an event momentous in Mark Twain's
+      career—an event of supreme importance; if we concede that any
+      link in a chain regardless of size is of more importance than any
+      other link. Undoubtedly it remains the most conspicuous event, as
+      the world views it now, in retrospect.
+
+      The note further heads a new chapter of history in sea-voyaging.
+      No such thing as the sailing of an ocean steamship with a
+      pleasure-party on a long transatlantic cruise had ever occurred
+      before. A similar project had been undertaken the previous year,
+      but owing to a cholera scare in the East it had been abandoned.
+      Now the dream had become a fact—a stupendous fact when we
+      consider it. Such an important beginning as that now would in all
+      likelihood furnish the chief news story of the day.
+
+      But they had different ideas of news in those days. There were no
+      headlines announcing the departure of the Quaker City—only the
+      barest mention of the ship's sailing, though a prominent position
+      was given to an account of a senatorial excursion-party which set
+      out that same morning over the Union Pacific Railway, then under
+      construction. Every name in that political party was set dawn,
+      and not one of them except General Hancock will ever be heard of
+      again. The New York Times, however, had some one on its editorial
+      staff who thought it worth while to comment a little on the
+      history-making Quaker City excursion. The writer was pleasantly
+      complimentary to officers and passengers. He referred to Moses S.
+      Beach, of the Sun, who was taking with him type and press,
+      whereby he would “skilfully utilize the brains of the company for
+      their mutual edification.” Mr. Beecher and General Sherman would
+      find talent enough aboard to make the hours go pleasantly
+      (evidently the writer had not interested himself sufficiently to
+      know that these gentlemen were not along), and the paragraph
+      closed by prophesying other such excursions, and wishing the
+      travelers “good speed, a happy voyage, and a safe return.”
+
+      That was handsome, especially for those days; only now, some fine
+      day, when an airship shall start with a band of happy argonauts
+      to land beyond the sunrise for the first time in history, we
+      shall feature it and emblazon it with pictures in the Sunday
+      papers, and weeklies, and in the magazines.—[The Quaker City idea
+      was so unheard-of that in some of the foreign ports visited, the
+      officials could not believe that the vessel was simply a
+      pleasure-craft, and were suspicious of some dark, ulterior
+      purpose.]
+
+      That Henry Ward Beecher and General Sherman had concluded not to
+      go was a heavy disappointment at first; but it proved only a
+      temporary disaster. The inevitable amalgamation of all ship
+      companies took place. The sixty-seven travelers fell into
+      congenial groups, or they mingled and devised amusements, and
+      gossiped and became a big family, as happy and as free from
+      contention as families of that size are likely to be.
+
+      The Quaker City was a good enough ship and sizable for her time.
+      She was registered eighteen hundred tons—about one-tenth the size
+      of Mediterranean excursion-steamers today—and when conditions
+      were favorable she could make ten knots an hour under steam—or,
+      at least, she could do it with the help of her auxiliary sails.
+      Altogether she was a cozy, satisfactory ship, and they were a
+      fortunate company who had her all to themselves and went out on
+      her on that long-ago ocean gipsying. She has grown since then,
+      even to the proportions of the Mayflower. It was necessary for
+      her to grow to hold all of those who in later times claimed to
+      have sailed in her on that voyage with Mark Twain.—[The Quaker
+      City passenger list will be found under Appendix F, at the end of
+      last volume.]
+
+      They were not all ministers and deacons aboard the Quaker City.
+      Clemens found other congenial spirits be sides his room-mate Dan
+      Slote—among them the ship's surgeon, Dr. A. Reeve Jackson (the
+      guide-destroying “Doctor” of The Innocents); Jack Van Nostrand,
+      of New Jersey (“Jack”); Julius Moulton, of St. Louis (“Moult”),
+      and other care-free fellows, the smoking-room crowd which is
+      likely to make comradeship its chief watchword. There were
+      companionable people in the cabin crowd also—fine, intelligent
+      men and women, especially one of the latter, a middle-aged,
+      intellectual, motherly soul—Mrs. A. W. Fairbanks, of Cleveland,
+      Ohio. Mrs. Fairbanks—herself a newspaper correspondent for her
+      husband's paper, the Cleveland Herald had a large influence on
+      the character and general tone of those Quaker City letters which
+      established Mark Twain's larger fame. She was an able writer
+      herself; her judgment was thoughtful, refined,
+      unbiased—altogether of a superior sort. She understood Samuel
+      Clemens, counseled him, encouraged him to read his letters aloud
+      to her, became in reality “Mother Fairbanks,” as they termed her,
+      to him and to others of that ship who needed her kindly offices.
+
+      In one of his home letters, later, he said of her:
+
+    She was the most refined, intelligent, cultivated lady in the ship,
+    and altogether the kindest and best. She sewed my buttons on, kept
+    my clothing in presentable trim, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I
+    behaved), lectured me awfully on the quarter-deck on moonlit
+    promenading evenings, and cured me of several bad habits. I am
+    under lasting obligations to her. She looks young because she is so
+    good, but she has a grown son and daughter at home.
+
+      In one of the early letters which Mrs. Fairbanks wrote to her
+      paper she is scarcely less complimentary to him, even if in a
+      different way.
+
+    We have D.D.'s and M.D.'s—we have men of wisdom and men of wit.
+    There is one table from which is sure to come a peal of laughter,
+    and all eyes are turned toward Mark Twain, whose face is, perfectly
+    mirth-provoking. Sitting lazily at the table, scarcely genteel in
+    his appearance, there is something, I know not what, that interests
+    and attracts. I saw to-day at dinner venerable divines and sage-
+    looking men convulsed with laughter at his drolleries and quaint,
+    odd manners.
+
+      It requires only a few days on shipboard for acquaintances to
+      form, and presently a little afternoon group was gathering to
+      hear Mark Twain read his letters. Mrs. Fairbanks was there, of
+      course, also Mr. and Mrs. S. L. Severance, likewise of Cleveland,
+      and Moses S. Beach, of the Sun, with his daughter Emma, a girl of
+      seventeen. Dan Slote was likely to be there, too, and Jack, and
+      the Doctor, and Charles J. Langdon, of Elmira, New York, a boy of
+      eighteen, who had conceived a deep admiration for the brilliant
+      writer. They were fortunate ones who first gathered to hear those
+      daring, wonderful letters.
+
+      But the benefit was a mutual one. He furnished a priceless
+      entertainment, and he derived something equally priceless in
+      return—the test of immediate audience and the boon of criticism.
+      Mrs. Fairbanks especially was frankly sincere. Mr. Severance
+      wrote afterward:
+
+    One afternoon I saw him tearing up a bunch of the soft, white
+    paper- copy paper, I guess the newspapers call it-on which he had
+    written something, and throwing the fragments into the
+    Mediterranean. I inquired of him why he cast away the fruits of his
+    labors in that manner.
+
+      “Well,” he drawled, “Mrs. Fairbanks thinks it oughtn't to be
+      printed, and, like as not, she is right.”
+
+      And Emma Beach (Mrs. Abbott Thayer) remembers hearing him say:
+
+      “Well, Mrs. Fairbanks has just destroyed another four hours' work
+      for me.”
+
+      Sometimes he played chess with Emma Beach, who thought him a
+      great hero because, once when a crowd of men were tormenting a
+      young lad, a passenger, Mark Twain took the boy's part and made
+      them desist.
+
+      “I am sure I was right, too,” she declares; “heroism came natural
+      to him.”
+
+      Mr. Severance recalls another incident which, as he says, was
+      trivial enough, but not easy to forget:
+
+      We were having a little celebration over the birthday anniversary
+      of Mrs. Duncan, wife of our captain. Mark Twain got up and made a
+      little speech, in which he said Mrs. Duncan was really older than
+      Methuselah because she knew a lot of things that Methuselah never
+      heard of. Then he mentioned a number of more or less modern
+      inventions, and wound up by saying, “What did Methuselah know
+      about a barbed-wire fence?”
+
+      Except Following the Equator, The Innocents Abroad comes nearer
+      to being history than any other of Mark Twain's travel-books. The
+      notes for it were made on the spot, and there was plenty of fact,
+      plenty of fresh, new experience, plenty of incident to set down.
+      His idea of descriptive travel in those days was to tell the
+      story as it happened; also, perhaps, he had not then acquired the
+      courage of his inventions. We may believe that the adventures
+      with Jack, Dan, and the Doctor are elaborated here and there; but
+      even those happened substantially as recorded. There is little to
+      add, then, to the story of that halcyon trip, and not much to
+      elucidate.
+
+      The old note-books give a light here and there that is
+      interesting. It is curious to be looking through them now, trying
+      to realize that these penciled memoranda were the fresh, first
+      impressions that would presently grow into the world's most
+      delightful book of travel; that they were set down in the very
+      midst of that care-free little company that frolicked through
+      Italy, climbed wearily the arid Syrian hills. They are all dead
+      now; but to us they are as alive and young to-day as when they
+      followed the footprints of the Son of Man through Palestine, and
+      stood at last before the Sphinx, impressed and awed by its “five
+      thousand slow-revolving years.”
+
+      Some of the items consist of no more than a few terse, suggestive
+      words—serious, humorous, sometimes profane. Others are
+      statistical, descriptive, elaborated. Also there are
+      drawings—“not copied,” he marks them, with a pride not always
+      justified by the result. The earlier notes are mainly comments on
+      the “pilgrims,” the freak pilgrims: “the Frenchy-looking woman
+      who owns a dog and keeps up an interminable biography of him to
+      the passengers”; the “long-legged, simple, wide-mouthed,
+      horse-laughing young fellow who once made a sea voyage to
+      Fortress Monroe, and quotes eternally from his experiences”;
+      also, there is reference to another young man, “good,
+      accommodating, pleasant but fearfully green.” This young person
+      would become the “Interrogation Point,” in due time, and have his
+      picture on page 71 (old edition), while opposite him, on page 70,
+      would appear the “oracle," identified as one Doctor Andrews, who
+      (the note-book says) had the habit of “smelling in guide-books
+      for knowledge and then trying to play it for old information that
+      has been festering in his brain.” Sometimes there are abstract
+      notes such as:
+
+      How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing that no one
+      had ever said it before.
+
+      Of the “character” notes, the most important and elaborated is
+      that which presents the “Poet Lariat.” This is the entry,
+      somewhat epitomized:
+
+                  BLOODGOOD H. CUTTER
+    He is fifty years old, and small of his age. He dresses in
+    homespun, and is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer,
+    with a strange proclivity for writing rhymes. He writes them on all
+    possible subjects, and gets them printed on slips of paper, with
+    his portrait at the head. These he will give to any man who comes
+    along, whether he has anything against him or not....
+    Dan said:
+    “It must be a great happiness to you to sit down at the close of
+    day and put its events all down in rhymes and poetry, like Byron
+    and Shakespeare and those fellows.”
+    “Oh yes, it is—it is—Why, many's the time I've had to get up in the
+    night when it comes on me:
+       Whether we're on the sea or the land We've all got to go at the
+       word of command—
+    “Hey! how's that?”
+
+      A curious character was Cutter—a Long Island farmer with the
+      obsession of rhyme. In his old age, in an interview, he said:
+
+      “Mark was generally writing and he was glum. He would write what
+      we were doing, and I would write poetry, and Mark would say:
+
+      “'For Heaven's sake, Cutter, keep your poems to yourself.'
+
+      “Yes, Mark was pretty glum, and he was generally writing.”
+
+      Poor old Poet Lariat—dead now with so many others of that happy
+      crew. We may believe that Mark learned to be “glum” when he saw
+      the Lariat approaching with his sheaf of rhymes. We may believe,
+      too, that he was “generally writing.” He contributed fifty-three
+      letters to the Alta during that five months and six to the
+      Tribune. They would average about two columns nonpareil each,
+      which is to say four thousand words, or something like two
+      hundred and fifty thousand words in all. To turn out an average
+      of fifteen hundred words a day, with continuous sight-seeing
+      besides, one must be generally writing during any odd intervals;
+      those who are wont to regard Mark Twain as lazy may consider
+      these statistics. That he detested manual labor is true enough,
+      but at the work for which he was fitted and intended it may be
+      set down here upon authority (and despite his own frequent
+      assertions to the contrary) that to his last year he was the most
+      industrious of men.
+
+
+
+
+      LXI. THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
+
+
+      It was Dan, Jack, and the Doctor who with Mark Twain wandered
+      down through Italy and left moral footprints that remain to this
+      day. The Italian guides are wary about showing pieces of the True
+      Cross, fragments of the Crown of Thorns, and the bones of saints
+      since then. They show them, it is true, but with a smile; the
+      name of Mark Twain is a touch-stone to test their statements. Not
+      a guide in Italy but has heard the tale of that iconoclastic
+      crew, and of the book which turned their marvels into myths,
+      their relics into bywords.
+
+      It was Doctor Jackson, Colonel Denny, Doctor Birch, and Samuel
+      Clemens who evaded the quarantine and made the perilous night
+      trip to Athens and looked upon the Parthenon and the sleeping
+      city by moonlight. It is all set down in the notes, and the
+      account varies little from that given in the book; only he does
+      not tell us that Captain Duncan and the quartermaster, Pratt,
+      connived at the escapade, or how the latter watched the shore in
+      anxious suspense until he heard the whistle which was their
+      signal to be taken aboard. It would have meant six months'
+      imprisonment if they had been captured, for there was no
+      discretion in the Greek law.
+
+      It was T. D. Crocker, A. N. Sanford, Col. Peter Kinney, and
+      William Gibson who were delegated to draft the address to the
+      Emperor of Russia at Yalta, with Samuel L. Clemens as chairman of
+      that committee. The chairman wrote the address, the opening
+      sentence of which he grew so weary of hearing:
+
+    We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply
+    for recreation, and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial
+    state.
+
+      The address is all set down in the notes, and there also exists
+      the first rough draft, with the emendations in his own hand. He
+      deplores the time it required:
+
+    That job is over. Writing addresses to emperors is not my strong
+    suit. However, if it is not as good as it might be it doesn't
+    signify—the other committeemen ought to have helped me write it;
+    they had nothing to do, and I had my hands full. But for bothering
+    with this I would have caught up entirely with my New York Tribune
+    correspondence and nearly up with the San Francisco.
+
+      They wanted him also to read the address to the Emperor, but he
+      pointed out that the American consul was the proper person for
+      that office. He tells how the address was presented:
+
+      August 26th. The Imperial carriages were in waiting at eleven,
+      and at twelve we were at the palace....
+
+      The Consul for Odessa read the address and the Czar said
+      frequently, “Good—very good; indeed”—and at the close, “I am
+      very, very grateful.”
+
+      It was not improper for him to set down all this, and much more,
+      in his own note-book—not then for publication. It was in fact a
+      very proper record—for today.
+
+      One incident of the imperial audience Mark Twain omitted from his
+      book, perhaps because the humor of it had not yet become
+      sufficiently evident. “The humorous perception of a thing is a
+      pretty slow growth sometimes,” he once remarked. It was about
+      seventeen years before he could laugh enjoyably at a slight
+      mistake he made at the Emperor's reception. He set down a
+      memorandum of it, then, for fear it might be lost:
+
+    There were a number of great dignitaries of the Empire there, and
+    although, as a general thing, they were dressed in citizen's
+    clothing, I observed that the most of them wore a very small piece
+    of ribbon in the lapels of their coats. That little touch of color
+    struck my fancy, and it seemed to me a good idea to add it to my
+    own attractions; not imagining that it had any special
+    significance. So I stepped aside, hunted up a bit of red ribbon,
+    and ornamented my lapel with it. Presently, Count Festetics, the
+    Grand Master of ceremonies, and the only man there who was
+    gorgeously arrayed, in full official costume, began to show me a
+    great many attentions. He was particularly polite, and pleasant,
+    and anxious to be of service to me. Presently, he asked me what
+    order of nobility I belonged to? I said, “I didn't belong to any.”
+    Then he asked me what order of knighthood I belonged to? I said,
+    “None.” Then he asked me what the red ribbon in my buttonhole stood
+    for? I saw, at once, what an ass I had been making of myself, and
+    was accordingly confused and embarrassed. I said the first thing
+    that came into my mind, and that was that the ribbon was merely the
+    symbol of a club of journalists to which I belonged, and I was not
+    pursued with any more of Count Festetic's attentions.
+    Later, I got on very familiar terms with an old gentleman, whom I
+    took to be the head gardener, and walked him all about the gardens,
+    slipping my arm into his without invitation, yet without demur on
+    his part, and by and by was confused again when I found that he was
+    not a gardener at all, but the Lord High Admiral of Russia! I
+    almost made up my mind that I would never call on an Emperor again.
+
+      Like all Mediterranean excursionists, those first pilgrims were
+      insatiable collectors of curios, costumes, and all manner of
+      outlandish things. Dan Slote had the stateroom hung and piled
+      with such gleanings. At Constantinople his room-mate writes:
+
+    I thought Dan had got the state-room pretty full of rubbish at
+    last, but awhile ago his dragoman arrived with a brand-new ghastly
+    tombstone of the Oriental pattern, with his name handsomely carved
+    and gilted on it in Turkish characters. That fellow will buy a
+    Circassian slave next.
+
+      It was Church, Denny, Jack, Davis, Dan, Moult, and Mark Twain who
+      made the “long trip” through Syria from Beirut to Jerusalem with
+      their elaborate camping outfit and decrepit nags “Jericho,”
+      “Baalbec,” and the rest. It was better camping than that Humboldt
+      journey of six years before, though the horses were not so
+      dissimilar, and altogether it was a hard, nerve-racking
+      experience, climbing the arid hills of Palestine in that torrid
+      summer heat. Nobody makes that trip in summer-time now. Tourists
+      hurry out of Syria before the first of April, and they do not go
+      back before November. One brief quotation from Mark Twain's book
+      gives us an idea of what that early party of pilgrims had to
+      undergo:
+
+    We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple of
+    hours, and then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig-
+    trees to give me a chance to rest. It was the hottest day we had
+    seen yet—the sun-flames shot down like the shafts of fire that
+    stream out before a blow-pipe; the rays seemed to fall in a deluge
+    on the head and pass downward like rain from a roof. I imagined I
+    could distinguish between the floods of rays. I thought I could
+    tell when each flood struck my head, when it reached my shoulders,
+    and when the next one came. It was terrible.
+
+      He had been ill with cholera at Damascus, a light attack; but any
+      attack of that dread disease is serious enough. He tells of this
+      in the book, but he does not mention, either in the book or in
+      his notes, the attack which Dan Slote had some days later. It
+      remained for William F. Church, of the party, to relate that
+      incident, for it was the kind of thing that Mark Twain was not
+      likely to record, or even to remember. Doctor Church was a deacon
+      with orthodox views and did not approve of Mark Twain; he thought
+      him sinful, irreverent, profane.
+
+      “He was the worst man I ever knew,” Church said; then he added,
+      “And the best.”
+
+      What happened was this: At the end of a terrible day of heat,
+      when the party had camped on the edge of a squalid Syrian
+      village, Dan was taken suddenly ill. It was cholera, beyond
+      doubt. Dan could not go on—he might never go on. The chances were
+      that way. It was a serious matter all around. To wait with Dan
+      meant to upset their travel schedule—it might mean to miss the
+      ship. Consultation was held and a resolution passed (the pilgrims
+      were always passing resolutions) to provide for Dan as well as
+      possible, and leave him behind. Clemens, who had remained with
+      Dan, suddenly appeared and said:
+
+      “Gentlemen, I understand that you are going to leave Dan Slote
+      here alone. I'll be d—-d if I do!”
+
+      And he didn't. He stayed there and brought Dan into Jerusalem, a
+      few days late, but convalescent.
+
+      Perhaps most of them were not always reverent during that Holy
+      Land trip. It was a trying journey, and after fierce days of
+      desert hills the reaction might not always spare even the holiest
+      memories. Jack was particularly sinful. When they learned the
+      price for a boat on Galilee, and the deacons who had traveled
+      nearly half around the world to sail on that sacred water were
+      confounded by the charge, Jack said:
+
+      “Well, Denny, do you wonder now that Christ walked?”
+
+      It was the irreverent Jack who one morning (they had camped the
+      night before by the ruins of Jericho) refused to get up to see
+      the sun rise across the Jordan. Deacon Church went to his tent.
+
+      “Jack, my boy, get up. Here is the place where the Israelites
+      crossed over into the Promised Land, and beyond are the mountains
+      of Moab, where Moses lies buried.”
+
+      “Moses who!” said Jack.
+
+      “Oh, Jack, my boy, Moses, the great lawgiver—who led the
+      Israelites out of Egypt-forty years through the wilderness—to the
+      Promised Land.”
+
+      “Forty years!” said Jack. “How far was it?”
+
+      “It was three hundred miles, Jack; a great wilderness, and he
+      brought them through in safety.”
+
+      Jack regarded him with scorn. “Huh, Moses—three hundred miles
+      forty years—why, Ben Holiday would have brought them through in
+      thirty-six hours!”—[Ben Holiday, owner of the Overland stages,
+      and a man of great executive ability. This incident, a true one,
+      is more elaborately told in Roughing It, but it seems pertinent
+      here.]
+
+      Jack probably learned more about the Bible during that trip-its
+      history and its heroes-than during all his former years. Nor was
+      Jack the only one of that group thus benefited. The sacred
+      landmarks of Palestine inspire a burning interest in the
+      Scriptures, and Mark Twain probably did not now regret those
+      early Sunday-school lessons; certainly he did not fail to review
+      them exhaustively on that journey. His note-books fairly overflow
+      with Bible references; the Syrian chapters in The Innocents
+      Abroad are permeated with the poetry and legendary beauty of the
+      Bible story. The little Bible he carried on that trip, bought in
+      Constantinople, was well worn by the time they reached the ship
+      again at Jaffa. He must have read it with a large and persistent
+      interest; also with a double benefit. For, besides the knowledge
+      acquired, he was harvesting a profit—probably unsuspected at the
+      time—-viz., the influence of the most direct and beautiful
+      English—the English of the King James version—which could not
+      fail to affect his own literary method at that impressionable
+      age. We have already noted his earlier admiration for that noble
+      and simple poem, “The Burial of Moses,” which in the Palestine
+      note-book is copied in full. All the tendency of his expression
+      lay that way, and the intense consideration of stately Bible
+      phrase and imagery could hardly fail to influence his mental
+      processes. The very distinct difference of style, as shown in The
+      Innocents Abroad and in his earlier writings, we may believe was
+      in no small measure due to his study of the King James version
+      during those weeks in Palestine.
+
+      He bought another Bible at Jerusalem; but it was not for himself.
+      It was a little souvenir volume bound in olive and balsam wood,
+      and on the fly-leaf is inscribed:
+
+    Mrs. Jane Clemens from her son. Jerusalem, Sept. 24, 1867.
+
+      There is one more circumstance of that long cruise-recorded
+      neither in the book nor the notes—an incident brief, but of more
+      importance in the life of Samuel Clemens than any heretofore set
+      down. It occurred in the beautiful Bay of Smyrna, on the fifth or
+      sixth of September, while the vessel lay there for the Ephesus
+      trip.
+
+      Reference has been made to young Charles Langdon, of Elmira (the
+      “Charley” once mentioned in the Innocents), as an admirer of Mark
+      Twain. There was a good deal of difference in their ages, and
+      they were seldom of the same party; but sometimes the boy invited
+      the journalist to his cabin and, boy-like, exhibited his
+      treasures. He had two sisters at home; and of Olivia, the
+      youngest, he had brought a dainty miniature done on ivory in
+      delicate tints—a sweet-pictured countenance, fine and spiritual.
+      On that fateful day in the day of Smyrna, Samuel Clemens,
+      visiting in young Langdon's cabin, was shown this portrait. He
+      looked at it with long admiration, and spoke of it reverently,
+      for the delicate face seemed to him to be something more than a
+      mere human likeness. Each time he came, after that, he asked to
+      see the picture, and once even begged to be allowed to take it
+      away with him. The boy would not agree to this, and the elder man
+      looked long and steadily at the miniature, resolving in his mind
+      that some day he would meet the owner of that lovely face—a
+      purpose for once in accord with that which the fates had arranged
+      for him, in the day when all things were arranged, the day of the
+      first beginning.
+
+
+
+
+      LXII. THE RETURN OF THE PILGRIMS
+
+
+      The last note-book entry bears date of October 11th:
+
+    At sea, somewhere in the neighborhood of Malta. Very stormy.
+    Terrible death to be talked to death. The storm has blown two small
+    land birds and a hawk to sea and they came on board. Sea full of
+    flying-fish.
+
+      That is all. There is no record of the week's travel in Spain,
+      which a little group of four made under the picturesque Gibraltar
+      guide, Benunes, still living and quite as picturesque at last
+      accounts. This side-trip is covered in a single brief paragraph
+      in the Innocents, and the only account we have of it is in a home
+      letter, from Cadiz, of October 24th:
+
+    We left Gibraltar at noon and rode to Algeciras (4 hours), thus
+    dodging the quarantine—took dinner, and then rode horseback all
+    night in a swinging trot, and at daylight took a caleche (a-wheeled
+    vehicle), and rode 5 hours—then took cars and traveled till twelve
+    at night. That landed us at Seville, and we were over the hard part
+    of our trip and somewhat tired. Since then we have taken things
+    comparatively easy, drifting around from one town to another and
+    attracting a good deal of attention—for I guess strangers do not
+    wander through Andalusia and the other southern provinces of Spain
+    often. The country is precisely what it was when Don Quixote and
+    Sancho Panza were possible characters.
+    But I see now what the glory of Spain must have been when it was
+    under Moorish domination. No, I will not say that—but then when one
+    is carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of the
+    Alhambra and the supernatural beauty of the Alcazar, he is apt to
+    overflow with admiration for the splendid intellects that created
+    them.
+
+      We may wish that he had left us a chapter of that idyllic
+      journey, but it will never be written now. A night or two before
+      the vessel reached New York there was the usual good-by assembly,
+      and for this occasion, at Mrs. Severance's request, Mark Twain
+      wrote some verses. They were not especially notable, for meter
+      and rhyme did not come easy to him, but one prophetic stanza is
+      worth remembering. In the opening lines the passengers are
+      referred to as a fleet of vessels, then follows:
+
+       Lo! other ships of that parted fleet Shall suffer this fate or
+       that: One shall be wrecked, another shall sink, Or ground on
+       treacherous flat. Some shall be famed in many lands As good
+       ships, fast and fair, And some shall strangely disappear, Men
+       know not when or where.
+
+      The Quaker City returned to America on November 19, 1867, and
+      Mark Twain found himself, if not famous, at least in very wide
+      repute. The fifty-three letters to the Alta and the half-dozen to
+      the New York Tribune had carried his celebrity into every corner
+      of the States and Territories. Vivid, fearless, full of fresh
+      color, humor, poetry, they came as a revelation to a public weary
+      of the driveling, tiresome travel-letters of that period. They
+      preached a new gospel in travel-literature: the gospel of seeing
+      with an overflowing honesty; a gospel of sincerity in according
+      praises to whatever seemed genuine, and ridicule to the things
+      considered sham. It was the gospel that Mark Twain would continue
+      to preach during his whole career. It became his chief literary
+      message to the world-a world waiting for that message.
+
+      Moreover, the letters were literature. He had received, from
+      whatever source, a large and very positive literary impulse, a
+      loftier conception and expression. It was at Tangier that he
+      first struck the grander chord, the throbbing cadence of human
+      story.
+
+      Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered
+      America; old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the
+      Middle Ages to arm for the first Crusade; old when Charlemagne
+      and his paladins beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with
+      giants and genii in the fabled days of the olden time; old when
+      Christ and his disciples walked the earth; stood where it stands
+      to-day when the lips of Memnon were vocal and men bought and sold
+      in the streets of ancient Thebes.
+
+      This is pure poetry. He had never touched so high a strain
+      before, but he reached it often after that, and always with an
+      ever-increasing mastery and confidence. In Venice, in Rome, in
+      Athens, through the Holy Land, his retrospection becomes a
+      stately epic symphony, a processional crescendo that swings ever
+      higher until it reaches that sublime strain, the ageless
+      contemplation of the Sphinx. We cannot forego a paragraph or two
+      of that word-picture:
+
+    After years of waiting it was before me at last. The great face was
+    so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not
+    of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as
+    never anything human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If
+    ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking toward
+    the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing—nothing but
+    distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond everything of
+    the present, and far into the past.... It was thinking of the wars
+    of the departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and
+    destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose
+    progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the
+    joy and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five
+    thousand slow-revolving years....
+    The Sphinx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its
+    magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its
+    story. And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this
+    eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of
+    all ages, which reveals to one something of what we shall feel when
+    we shall stand at last in the awful presence of God.
+
+      Then that closing word of Egypt. He elaborated it for the book,
+      and did not improve it. Let us preserve here its original form.
+
+    We are glad to have seen Egypt. We are glad to have seen that old
+    land which taught Greece her letters—and through Greece, Rome—and
+    through Rome, the world—that venerable cradle of culture and
+    refinement which could have humanized and civilized the Children of
+    Israel, but allowed them to depart out of her borders savages—those
+    Children whom we still revere, still love, and whose sad
+    shortcomings we still excuse—not because they were savages, but
+    because they were the chosen savages of God.
+
+      The Holy Land letters alone would have brought him fame. They
+      presented the most graphic and sympathetic picture of Syrian
+      travel ever written—one that will never become antiquated or
+      obsolete so long as human nature remains unchanged. From
+      beginning to end the tale is rarely, reverently told. Its closing
+      paragraph has not been surpassed in the voluminous literature of
+      that solemn land:
+
+    Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of
+    a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.
+    Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers that solemn
+    sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing
+    exists—over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs
+    motionless and dead—about whose borders nothing grows but weeds and
+    scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises
+    refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch.
+    Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of
+    Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing one finds
+    only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho
+    the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle
+    left it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany,
+    in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now
+    to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour's
+    presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their
+    flocks by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, goodwill
+    to men, is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any
+    feature that is pleasant to the eye. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the
+    stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and
+    is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer
+    there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the
+    wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel is
+    gone, and the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on
+    that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the
+    Holy Cross. The noted Sea of Galilee, where Roman fleets once rode
+    at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed in their ships,
+    was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and its
+    borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a shapeless ruin;
+    Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have
+    vanished from the earth, and the “desert places” round about them
+    where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's voice and ate
+    the miraculous bread sleep in the hush of a solitude that is
+    inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.
+    Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise?
+    Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?
+
+      It would be easy to quote pages here—a pictorial sequence from
+      Gibraltar to Athens, from Athens to Egypt, a radiant panoramic
+      march. In time he would write technically better. He would avoid
+      solecism, he would become a greater master of vocabulary and
+      phrase, but in all the years ahead he would never match the
+      lambent bloom and spontaneity of those fresh, first impressions
+      of Mediterranean lands and seas. No need to mention the humor,
+      the burlesque, the fearless, unrestrained ridicule of old masters
+      and of sacred relics, so called. These we have kept familiar with
+      much repetition. Only, the humor had grown more subtle, more
+      restrained; the burlesque had become impersonal and harmless, the
+      ridicule so frank and good-natured, that even the old masters
+      themselves might have enjoyed it, while the most devoted
+      churchman, unless blinded by bigotry, would find in it
+      satisfaction, rather than sacrilege.
+
+      The final letter was written for the New York Herald after the
+      arrival, and was altogether unlike those that preceded it. Gaily
+      satirical and personal—inclusively so—it might better have been
+      left unwritten, for it would seem to have given needless offense
+      to a number of goodly people, whose chief sin was the sedateness
+      of years. However, it is all past now, and those who were old
+      then, and perhaps queer and pious and stingy, do not mind any
+      more, and those who were young and frivolous have all grown old
+      too, and most of them have set out on the still farther voyage.
+      Somewhere, it may be, they gather, now; and then, and lightly,
+      tenderly recall their old-time journeying.
+
+
+
+
+      LXIII. IN WASHINGTON—A PUBLISHING PROPOSITION
+
+
+      Clemens remained but one day in New York. Senator Stewart had
+      written, about the time of the departure of the Quaker City,
+      offering him the position of private secretary—a position which
+      was to give him leisure for literary work, with a supporting
+      salary as well. Stewart no doubt thought it would be considerably
+      to his advantage to have the brilliant writer and lecturer
+      attached to his political establishment, and Clemens likewise saw
+      possibilities in the arrangement. From Naples, in August, he had
+      written accepting Stewart's offer; he lost no time now in
+      discussing the matter in person.—[In a letter home, August 9th,
+      he referred to the arrangement: “I wrote to Bill Stewart to-day
+      accepting his private secretaryship in Washington, next winter.”]
+
+      There seems to have been little difficulty in concluding the
+      arrangement. When Clemens had been in Washington a week we find
+      him writing:
+
+    DEAR FOLKS, Tired and sleepy—been in Congress all day and making
+    newspaper acquaintances. Stewart is to look up a clerkship in the
+    Patent Office for Orion. Things necessarily move slowly where there
+    is so much business and such armies of office-seekers to be
+    attended to. I guess it will be all right. I intend it shall be all
+    right.
+    I have 18 invitations to lecture, at $100 each, in various parts of
+    the Union—have declined them all. I am for business now.
+    Belong on the Tribune Staff, and shall write occasionally. Am
+    offered the same berth to-day on the Herald by letter. Shall write
+    Mr. Bennett and accept, as soon as I hear from Tribune that it will
+    not interfere. Am pretty well known now—intend to be better known.
+    Am hobnobbing with these old Generals and Senators and other
+    humbugs for no good purpose. Don't have any more trouble making
+    friends than I did in California. All serene. Good-by. Shall
+    continue on the Alta. Yours affectionately, SAM.
+    P.S.—I room with Bill Stewart and board at Willard's Hotel.
+
+      But the secretary arrangement was a brief matter. It is
+      impossible to conceive of Mark Twain as anybody's secretary,
+      especially as the secretary of Senator Stewart. —[In Senator
+      Stewart's memoirs he refers unpleasantly to Mark Twain, and after
+      relating several incidents that bear only strained relations to
+      the truth, states that when the writer returned from the Holy
+      Land he (Stewart) offered him a secretaryship as a sort of
+      charity. He adds that Mark Twain's behavior on his premises was
+      such that a threat of a thrashing was necessary. The reason for
+      such statements becomes apparent, however, when he adds that in
+      'Roughing It' the author accuses him of cheating, prints a
+      picture of him with a hatch over his eye, and claims to have
+      given him a sound thrashing, none of which statements, save only
+      the one concerning the picture (an apparently unforgivable
+      offense to his dignity), is true, as the reader may easily
+      ascertain for himself.]
+
+      Within a few weeks he was writing humorous accounts of “My Late
+      Senatorial Secretaryship,” “Facts Concerning the Recent
+      Resignation,” etc., all good-natured burlesque, but inspired, we
+      may believe, by the change: These articles appeared in the New
+      York Tribune, the New York Citizen, and the Galaxy Magazine.
+
+      There appears to have been no ill-feeling at this time between
+      Clemens and Stewart. If so, it is not discoverable in any of the
+      former's personal or newspaper correspondence. In fact, in his
+      article relating to his “late senatorial secretaryship” he puts
+      the joke, so far as it is a joke, on Senator James W. Nye,
+      probably as an additional punishment for Nye's failure to appear
+      on the night of his lecture. He established headquarters with a
+      brilliant newspaper correspondent named Riley. “One of the best
+      men in Washington—or elsewhere,” he tells us in a brief sketch of
+      that person.—[See Riley, newspaper correspondent. Sketches New
+      and Old.]—He had known Riley in San Francisco; the two were
+      congenial, and settled down to their several undertakings.
+
+      Clemens was chiefly concerned over two things: he wished to make
+      money and he wished to secure a government appointment for Orion.
+      He had used up the most of his lecture accumulations, and was
+      moderately in debt. His work was in demand at good rates, for
+      those days, and with working opportunity he could presently
+      dispose of his financial problem. The Tribune was anxious for
+      letters; the Enterprise and Alta were waiting for them; the
+      Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the magazines—all had solicited
+      contributions; the lecture bureaus pursued him. Personally his
+      outlook was bright.
+
+      The appointment for Orion was a different matter. The powers were
+      not especially interested in a brother; there were too many
+      brothers and assorted relatives on the official waiting-list
+      already. Clemens was offered appointments for himself—a
+      consulship, a post-mastership; even that of San Francisco. From
+      the Cabinet down, the Washington political contingent had read
+      his travel-letters, and was ready to recognize officially the
+      author of them in his own person and personality.
+
+      Also, socially: Mark Twain found himself all at once in the midst
+      of receptions, dinners, and speech-making; all very exciting for
+      a time at least, but not profitable, not conducive to work. At a
+      dinner of the Washington Correspondents Club his response to the
+      toast, “Women,” was pronounced by Schuyler Colfax to be “the best
+      after dinner speech ever made.” Certainly it was a refreshing
+      departure from the prosy or clumsy-witted efforts common to that
+      period. He was coming altogether into his own.—[This is the first
+      of Mark Twain's after-dinner speeches to be preserved. The reader
+      will find it complete, as reported next day, in Appendix G, at
+      the end of last volume.]
+
+      He was not immediately interested in the matter of book
+      publication. The Jumping Frog book was popular, and in England
+      had been issued by Routledge; but the royalty returns were modest
+      enough and slow in arrival. His desire was for prompter results.
+      His interest in book publication had never been an eager one, and
+      related mainly to the advertising it would furnish, which he did
+      not now need; or to the money return, in which he had no great
+      faith. Yet at this very moment a letter for him was lying in the
+      Tribune office in New York which would bring the book idea into
+      first prominence and spell the beginning of his fortune.
+
+      Among those who had read and found delight in the Tribune letters
+      was Elisha Bliss, Jr., of the American Publishing Company, of
+      Hartford. Bliss was a shrewd and energetic man, with a keen
+      appreciation for humor and the American fondness for that
+      literary quality. He had recently undertaken the management of a
+      Hartford concern, and had somewhat alarmed its conservative
+      directorate by publishing books that furnished entertainment to
+      the reader as well as moral instruction. Only his success in
+      paying dividends justified this heresy and averted his downfall.
+      Two days after the arrival of the Quaker City Bliss wrote the
+      letter above mentioned. It ran as follows:
+
+                  OFFICE OF THE AMERICAN PUBLISHING CO. HARTFORD,
+                  CONN., November 21, 1867.
+
+      SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, ESQ., Tribune Office, New York.
+
+      DEAR SIR,—We take the liberty to address you this, in place of a
+      letter which we had recently written and were about to forward to
+      you, not knowing your arrival home was expected so soon. We are
+      desirous of obtaining from you a work of some kind, perhaps
+      compiled from your letters from the past, etc., with such
+      interesting additions as may be proper. We are the publishers of
+      A. D. Richardson's works, and flatter ourselves that we can give
+      an author a favorable term and do as full justice to his
+      productions as any other house in the country. We are perhaps the
+      oldest subscription house in the country, and have never failed
+      to give a book an immense circulation. We sold about 100,000
+      copies of Richardson's F. D. and E. ('Field, Dungeon and
+      Escape'), and are now printing 41,000 of 'Beyond the
+      Mississippi', and large orders ahead. If you have any thought of
+      writing a book, or could be induced to do so, we should be
+      pleased to see you, and will do so. Will you do us the favor of
+      reply at once, at your earliest convenience.
+
+                         Very truly etc.,
+                            E. BLISS, JR., Secretary.
+
+      After ten days' delay this letter was forwarded to the Tribune
+      bureau in Washington, where Clemens received it. He replied
+      promptly.
+
+                     WASHINGTON, December 2, 1867.
+
+      E. BLISS, JR., ESQ., Secretary American Publishing Co.
+
+      DEAR SIR,—I only received your favor of November 21st last night,
+      at the rooms of the Tribune Bureau here. It was forwarded from
+      the Tribune office, New York where it had lain eight or ten days.
+      This will be a sufficient apology for the seeming discourtesy of
+      my silence.
+
+      I wrote fifty-two letters for the San Francisco Alta California
+      during the Quaker City excursion, about half of which number have
+      been printed thus far. The Alta has few exchanges in the East,
+      and I suppose scarcely any of these letters have been copied on
+      this side of the Rocky Mountains. I could weed them of their
+      chief faults of construction and inelegancies of expression, and
+      make a volume that would be more acceptable in many respects than
+      any I could now write. When those letters were written my
+      impressions were fresh, but now they have lost that freshness;
+      they were warm then, they are cold now. I could strike out
+      certain letters, and write new ones wherewith to supply their
+      places. If you think such a book would suit your purpose, please
+      drop me a line, specifying the size and general style of the
+      volume—when the matter ought to be ready; whether it should have
+      pictures in it or not; and particularly what your terms with me
+      would be, and what amount of money I might possibly make out of
+      it. The latter clause has a degree of importance for me which is
+      almost beyond my own comprehension. But you understand that, of
+      course.
+
+      I have other propositions for a book, but have doubted the
+      propriety of interfering with good newspaper engagements, except
+      my way as an author could be demonstrated to be plain before me.
+      But I know Richardson, and learned from him some months ago
+      something of an idea of the subscription plan of publishing. If
+      that is your plan invariably it looks safe.
+
+I am on the New York Tribune staff here as an “occasional,” among other
+things, and a note from you addressed to              Very truly, etc.,
+SAM. L. CLEMENS, New York Tribune Bureau, Washington will find me,
+without fail.
+
+      The exchange of those two letters marked the beginning of one of
+      the most notable publishing connections in American literary
+      history.
+
+      Consummation, however, was somewhat delayed. Bliss was ill when
+      the reply came, and could not write again in detail until nearly
+      a month later. In this letter he recited the profits made by
+      Richardson and others through subscription publication, and named
+      the royalties paid. Richardson had received four per cent. of the
+      sale price, a small enough rate for these later days; but the
+      cost of manufacture was larger then, and the sale and delivery of
+      books through agents has ever been an expensive process. Even
+      Horace Greeley had received but a fraction more on his Great
+      American Conflict. Bliss especially suggested and emphasized a
+      “humorous work—that is to say, a work humorously inclined.” He
+      added that they had two arrangements for paying authors: outright
+      purchase, and royalty. He invited a meeting in New York to
+      arrange terms.
+
+
+
+
+      LXIV. OLIVIA LANGDON
+
+
+      Clemens did in fact go to New York that same evening, to spend
+      Christmas with Dan Slote, and missed Bliss's second letter. It
+      was no matter. Fate had his affairs properly in hand, and had
+      prepared an event of still larger moment than the publication
+      even of Innocents Abroad. There was a pleasant reunion at Dan
+      Slote's. He wrote home about it:
+
+    Charley Langdon, Jack Van Nostrand, Dan and I (all Quaker City
+    night-hawks) had a blow-out at Dan's house and a lively talk over
+    old times. I just laughed till my sides ached at some of our
+    reminiscences. It was the unholiest gang that ever cavorted through
+    Palestine, but those are the best boys in the world.
+
+      This, however, was not the event; it was only preliminary to it.
+      We are coming to that now. At the old St. Nicholas Hotel, which
+      stood on the west of Broadway between Spring and Broome streets,
+      there were stopping at this time Jervis Langdon, a wealty
+      coal-dealer and mine-owner of Elmira, his son Charles and his
+      daughter Olivia, whose pictured face Samuel Clemens had first
+      seen in the Bay of Smyrna one September day. Young Langdon had
+      been especially anxious to bring his distinguished Quaker City
+      friend and his own people together, and two days before Christmas
+      Samuel Clemens was invited to dine at the hotel. He went very
+      willingly. The lovely face of that miniature had been often a
+      part of his waking dreams. For the first time now he looked upon
+      its reality. Long afterward he said:
+
+      “It is forty years ago. From that day to this she has never been
+      out of my mind.”
+
+      Charles Dickens was in New York then, and gave a reading that
+      night in Steinway Hall. The Langdons went, and Samuel Clemens
+      accompanied them. He remembered afterward that Dickens wore a
+      black velvet coat with a fiery red flower in his buttonhole, and
+      that he read the storm scene from Copperfield—the death of James
+      Steerforth. But he remembered still more clearly the face and
+      dress of that slender girlish figure at his side.
+
+      Olivia Langdon was twenty-two years old at this time, delicate as
+      the miniature he had seen, fragile to look upon, though no longer
+      with the shattered health of her girlhood. At sixteen, through a
+      fall upon the ice, she had become a complete invalid, confined to
+      her bed for two years, unable to sit, even when supported, unable
+      to lie in any position except upon her back. Great physicians and
+      surgeons, one after another, had done their best for her but she
+      had failed steadily until every hope had died. Then, when nothing
+      else was left to try, a certain Doctor Newton, of spectacular
+      celebrity, who cured by “laying on of hands,” was brought to
+      Elmira to see her. Doctor Newton came into the darkened room and
+      said:
+
+      “Open the windows—we must have light!”
+
+      They protested that she could not bear the light, but the windows
+      were opened. Doctor Newton came to the bedside of the helpless
+      girl, delivered a short, fervent prayer, put his arm under her
+      shoulders, and bade her sit up. She had not moved for two years,
+      and the family were alarmed, but she obeyed, and he assisted her
+      into a chair. Sensation came back to her limbs. With his
+      assistance she even made a feeble attempt to walk. He left then,
+      saying that she would gradually improve, and in time be well,
+      though probably never very strong. On the same day he healed a
+      boy, crippled and drawn with fever.
+
+      It turned out as he had said. Olivia Langdon improved steadily,
+      and now at twenty-two, though not robust—she was never that—she
+      was comparatively well. Gentle, winning, lovable, she was the
+      family idol, and Samuel Clemens joined in their worship from the
+      moment of that first meeting.
+
+      Olivia Langdon, on her part, was at first dazed and fascinated,
+      rather than attracted, by this astonishing creature, so unlike
+      any one she had ever known. Her life had been circumscribed, her
+      experiences of a simple sort. She had never seen anything
+      resembling him before. Indeed, nobody had. Somewhat carelessly,
+      even if correctly, attired; eagerly, rather than observantly,
+      attentive; brilliant and startling, rather than cultured, of
+      speech—a blazing human solitaire, unfashioned, unset, tossed by
+      the drift of fortune at her feet. He disturbed rather than
+      gratified her. She sensed his heresy toward the conventions and
+      forms which had been her gospel; his bantering, indifferent
+      attitude toward life—to her always so serious and sacred; she
+      suspected that he even might have unorthodox views on matters of
+      religion. When he had gone she somehow had the feeling that a
+      great fiery meteor of unknown portent had swept across her sky.
+
+      To her brother, who was eager for her approval of his celebrity,
+      Miss Langdon conceded admiration. As for her father, he did not
+      qualify his opinion. With hearty sense of humor, and a keen
+      perception of verity and capability in men, Jervis Langdon
+      accepted Samuel Clemens from the start, and remained his stanch
+      admirer and friend. Clemens left that night with an invitation to
+      visit Elmira by and by, and with the full intention of
+      going—soon. Fate, however, had another plan. He did not see
+      Elmira for the better part of a year.
+
+      He saw Miss Langdon again within the week. On New-Year's Day he
+      set forth to pay calls, after the fashion of the time—more lavish
+      then than now. Miss Langdon was receiving with Miss Alice Hooker,
+      a niece of Henry Ward Beecher, at the home of a Mrs. Berry; he
+      decided to go there first. With young Langdon he arrived at
+      eleven o'clock in the morning, and they did not leave until
+      midnight. If his first impression upon Olivia Langdon had been
+      meteoric, it would seem that he must now have become to her as a
+      streaming comet that swept from zenith to horizon. One thing is
+      certain: she had become to him the single, unvarying beacon of
+      his future years. He visited Henry Ward Beecher on that trip and
+      dined with him by invitation. Harriet Beecher Stowe was present,
+      and others of that eminent family. Likewise his old Quaker City
+      comrades, Moses S. and Emma Beach. It was a brilliant gathering,
+      a conclave of intellectual gods—a triumph to be there for one who
+      had been a printer-boy on the banks of the Mississippi, and only
+      a little while before a miner with pick and shovel. It was
+      gratifying to be so honored; it would be pleasant to write home;
+      but the occasion lacked something too—everything, in fact—for
+      when he ran his eye around the board the face of the minature was
+      not there.
+
+      Still there were compensations; inadequate, of course, but
+      pleasant enough to remember. It was Sunday evening and the party
+      adjourned to Plymouth Church. After services Mr. Beecher invited
+      him to return home with him for a quiet talk. Evidently they had
+      a good time, for in the letter telling of these things Samuel
+      Clemens said: “Henry Ward Beecher is a brick.”
+
+
+
+
+      LXV. A CONTRACT WITH ELISHA BLISS, JR.
+
+
+      He returned to Washington without seeing Miss Langdon again,
+      though he would seem to have had permission to write—friendly
+      letters. A little later (it was on the evening of January 9th) he
+      lectured in Washington—on very brief notice indeed. The
+      arrangement for his appearance had been made by a friend during
+      his absence—“a friend,” Clemens declared afterward, “not entirely
+      sober at the time.” To his mother he wrote:
+
+      I scared up a doorkeeper and was ready at the proper time, and by
+      pure good luck a tolerably good house assembled and I was saved.
+      I hardly knew what I was going to talk about, but it went off in
+      splendid style.
+
+      The title of the lecture delivered was “The Frozen Truth”—“more
+      truth in the title than in the lecture,” according to his own
+      statement. What it dealt with is not remembered now. It had to do
+      with the Quaker City trip, perhaps, and it seems to have brought
+      a financial return which was welcome enough. Subsequently he
+      delivered it elsewhere; though just how far the tour extended
+      cannot be learned from the letters, and he had but little memory
+      of it in later years.
+
+      There was some further correspondence with Bliss, then about the
+      21st of January (1868) Clemens made a trip to Hartford to settle
+      the matter. Bliss had been particularly anxious to meet him,
+      personally and was a trifle disappointed with his appearance.
+      Mark Twain's traveling costume was neither new nor neat, and he
+      was smoking steadily a pipe of power. His general make-up was
+      hardly impressive.
+
+      Bliss's disturbance was momentary. Once he began to talk the rest
+      did not matter. He was the author of those letters, and Bliss
+      decided that personally he was even greater than they. The
+      publisher, confined to his home with illness, offered him the
+      hospitality of his household. Also, he made him two propositions:
+      he would pay him ten thousand dollars cash for his copyright, or
+      he would pay five per cent. royalty, which was a fourth more than
+      Richardson had received. He advised the latter arrangement.
+
+      Clemens had already taken advice and had discussed the project a
+      good deal with Richardson. The ten thousand dollars was a heavy
+      temptation, but he withstood it and closed on the royalty
+      basis—“the best business judgment I ever displayed,” he was wont
+      to declare. A letter written to his mother and sister near the
+      end of this Hartford stay is worth quoting pretty fully here, for
+      the information and “character” it contains. It bears date of
+      January 24th.
+
+    This is a good week for me. I stopped in the Herald office, as I
+    came through New York, to see the boys on the staff, and young
+    James Gordon Bennett asked me to write twice a week, impersonally,
+    for the Herald, and said if I would I might have full swing, and
+    about anybody and everything I wanted to. I said I must have the
+    very fullest possible swing, and he said, “All right.” I said,
+    “It's a contract—” and that settled that matter.
+    I'll make it a point to write one letter a week anyhow. But the
+    best thing that has happened is here. This great American
+    Publishing Company kept on trying to bargain with me for a book
+    till I thought I would cut the matter short by coming up for a
+    talk. I met Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, and with his usual
+    whole-souled way of dropping his own work to give other people a
+    lift when he gets a chance, he said: “Now, here, you are one of the
+    talented men of the age—nobody is going to deny that—but in matters
+    of business I don't suppose you know more than enough to come in
+    when it rains. I'll tell you what to do and how to do it.” And he
+    did.
+    And I listened well, and then came up here and made a splendid
+    contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large pages, with
+    illustrations, the manuscript to be placed in the publisher's hands
+    by the middle of July.—[The contract was not a formal one. There
+    was an exchange of letters agreeing to the terms, but no joint
+    document was drawn until October 16 (1868).]—My percentage is to be
+    a fourth more than they have ever paid any author except Greeley.
+    Beecher will be surprised, I guess, when he hears this.
+    These publishers get off the most tremendous editions of their
+    books you can imagine. I shall write to the Enterprise and Alta
+    every week, as usual, I guess, and to the Herald twice a week,
+    occasionally to the Tribune and the magazines (I have a stupid
+    article in the Galaxy, just issued), but I am not going to write to
+    this and that and the other paper any more.
+    I have had a tiptop time here for a few days (guest of Mr. Jno.
+    Hooker's family—Beecher's relatives—in a general way of Mr. Bliss
+    also, who is head of the publishing firm). Puritans are mighty
+    straight-laced, and they won't let me smoke in the parlor, but the
+    Almighty don't make any better people.
+    I have to make a speech at the annual Herald dinner on the 6th of
+    May.
+
+      So the book, which would establish his claim to a peerage in the
+      literary land, was arranged for, and it remained only to prepare
+      the manuscript, a task which he regarded as not difficult. He had
+      only to collate the Alta and Tribune letters, edit them, and
+      write such new matter as would be required for completeness.
+
+      Returning to Washington, he plunged into work with his usual
+      terrific energy, preparing the copy—in the mean time writing
+      newspaper correspondence and sketches that would bring immediate
+      return. In addition to his regular contributions, he entered into
+      a syndicate arrangement with John Swinton (brother of William
+      Swinton, the historian) to supply letters to a list of
+      newspapers.
+
+      “I have written seven long newspaper letters and a short magazine
+      article in less than two days,” he wrote home, and by the end of
+      January he had also prepared several chapters of his book.
+
+      The San Francisco post-mastership was suggested to him again, but
+      he put the temptation behind him. He refers to this more than
+      once in his home letters, and it is clear that he wavered.
+
+    Judge Field said if I wanted the place he could pledge me the
+    President's appointment, and Senator Corners said he would
+    guarantee me the Senate's confirmation. It was a great temptation,
+    but it would render it impossible to fill my book contract, and I
+    had to drop the idea....
+    And besides I did not want the office.
+
+      He made this final decision when he heard that the chief editor
+      of the Alta wanted the place, and he now threw his influence in
+      that quarter. “I would not take ten thousand dollars out of a
+      friend's pocket,” he said.
+
+      But then suddenly came the news from Goodman that the Alta
+      publishers had copyrighted his Quaker City letters and proposed
+      getting them out in a book, to reimburse themselves still further
+      on their investment. This was sharper than a serpent's tooth.
+      Clemens got confirmation of the report by telegraph. By the same
+      medium he protested, but to no purpose. Then he wrote a letter
+      and sat down to wait. He reported his troubles to Orion:
+
+    I have made a superb contract for a book, and have prepared the
+    first ten chapters of the sixty or eighty, but I will bet it never
+    sees the light. Don't you let the folks at home hear that. That
+    thieving Alta copyrighted the letters, and now shows no disposition
+    to let me use them. I have done all I can by telegraph, and now
+    await the final result by mail. I only charged them for 50 letters
+    what (even in) greenbacks would amount to less than two thousand
+    dollars, intending to write a good deal for high-priced Eastern
+    papers, and now they want to publish my letters in book form
+    themselves to get back that pitiful sum.
+
+      Orion was by this time back from Nevada, setting type in St.
+      Louis. He was full of schemes, as usual, and his brother counsels
+      him freely. Then he says:
+
+    We chase phantoms half the days of our lives. It is well if we
+    learn wisdom even then, and save the other half.
+    I am in for it. I must go on chasing them, until I marry, then I am
+    done with literature and all other bosh—that is, literature
+    wherewith to please the general public.
+    I shall write to please myself then.
+
+      He closes by saying that he rather expects to go with Anson
+      Burlingame on the Chinese embassy. Clearly he was pretty hopeless
+      as to his book prospects.
+
+      His first meeting with General Grant occurred just at this time.
+      In one of his home letters he mentions, rather airily, that he
+      will drop in someday on the General for an interview; and at
+      last, through Mrs. Grant, an appointment was made for a Sunday
+      evening when the General would be at home. He was elated with the
+      prospect of an interview; but when he looked into the
+      imperturbable, square, smileless face of the soldier he found
+      himself, for the first time in his life, without anything
+      particular to say. Grant nodded slightly and waited. His caller
+      wished something would happen. It did. His inspiration returned.
+
+      “General,” he said, “I seem to be a little embarrassed. Are you?”
+
+      That broke the ice. There were no further difficulties.—[Mark
+      Twain has variously related this incident. It is given here in
+      accordance with the letters of the period.]
+
+
+
+
+      LXVI. BACK TO SAN FRANCISCO
+
+
+      Reply came from the Alta, but it was not promising. It spoke
+      rather vaguely of prior arrangements and future possibilities.
+      Clemens gathered that under certain conditions he might share in
+      the profits of the venture. There was but one thing to do; he
+      knew those people—some of them—Colonel McComb and a Mr.
+      McCrellish intimately. He must confer with them in person.
+
+      He was weary of Washington, anyway. The whole pitiful machinery
+      of politics disgusted him. In his notebook he wrote:
+
+    Whiskey is taken into the committee rooms in demijohns and carried
+    out in demagogues.
+
+      And in a letter:
+
+    This is a place to get a poor opinion of everybody in. There are
+    some pitiful intellects in this Congress! There isn't one man in
+    Washington in civil office who has the brains of Anson Burlingame,
+    and I suppose if China had not seized and saved his great talents
+    to the world this government would have discarded him when his time
+    was up.—[Anson Burlingame had by this time become China's special
+    ambassador to the nations.]
+
+      Furthermore, he was down on the climate of Washington. He decided
+      to go to San Francisco and see “those Alta thieves face to face.”
+      Then, if a book resulted, he could prepare it there among
+      friends. Also, he could lecture.
+
+      He had been anxious to visit his people before sailing, but
+      matters were too urgent to permit delay. He obtained from Bliss
+      an advance of royalty and took passage, by way of Aspinwall, on
+      the sidewheel steamer Henry Chauncey, a fine vessel for those
+      days. The name of Mark Twain was already known on the isthmus,
+      and when it was learned he had arrived on the Chauncey a
+      delegation welcomed him on the wharf, and provided him with
+      refreshments and entertainment. Mr. Tracy Robinson, a poet, long
+      a resident of that southern land, was one of the group. Beyond
+      the isthmus Clemens fell in again with his old captain, Ned
+      Wakeman, who during the trip told him the amazing dream that in
+      due time would become Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. He
+      made the first draft of this story soon after his arrival in San
+      Francisco, as a sort of travesty of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's
+      Gates Ajar, then very popular. Clemens, then and later, had a
+      high opinion of Capt. Ned Wakeman's dream, but his story of it
+      would pass through several stages before finally reaching the
+      light of publication.—[Mr. John P. Vollmer, now of Lewiston,
+      Idaho, a companion of that voyage, writes of a card game which
+      took place beyond the isthmus. The notorious crippled gambler,
+      “Smithy,” figured in it, and it would seem to have furnished the
+      inspiration for the exciting story in Chapter XXXVI of the
+      Mississippi book.]
+
+      In San Francisco matters turned out as he had hoped. Colonel
+      McComb was his stanch friend; McCrellish and Woodward, the
+      proprietors, presently conceded that they had already received
+      good value for the money paid. The author agreed to make proper
+      acknowledgments to the Alta in his preface, and the matter was
+      settled with friendliness all around.
+
+      The way was now clear, the book assured. First, however, he must
+      provide himself with funds. He delivered a lecture, with the
+      Quaker City excursion as his subject. On the 5th of May he wrote
+      to Bliss:
+
+      I lectured here on the trip the other night; over $1,600 in gold
+      in the house; every seat taken and paid for before night.
+
+      He reports that he is steadily at work, and expects to start East
+      with the completed manuscript about the middle of June.
+
+      But this was a miscalculation. Clemens found that the letters
+      needed more preparation than he had thought. His literary vision
+      and equipment had vastly altered since the beginning of that
+      correspondence. Some of the chapters he rewrote; others he
+      eliminated entirely. It required two months of fairly steady work
+      to put the big manuscript together.
+
+      Some of the new chapters he gave to Bret Harte for the Overland
+      Monthly, then recently established. Harte himself was becoming a
+      celebrity about this time. His “Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The
+      Outcasts of Poker Flat,” published in early numbers of the
+      Overland, were making a great stir in the East, arousing there a
+      good deal more enthusiasm than in the magazine office or the city
+      of their publication. That these two friends, each supreme in his
+      own field, should have entered into their heritage so nearly at
+      the same moment, is one of the many seemingly curious
+      coincidences of literary history.
+
+      Clemens now concluded to cover his lecture circuit of two years
+      before. He was assured that it would be throwing away a precious
+      opportunity not to give his new lecture to his old friends. The
+      result justified that opinion. At Virginia, at Carson, and
+      elsewhere he was received like a returned conqueror. He might
+      have been accorded a Roman triumph had there been time and
+      paraphernalia. Even the robbers had reformed, and entire safety
+      was guaranteed him on the Divide between Virginia and Gold Hill.
+      At Carson he called on Mrs. Curry, as in the old days, and among
+      other things told her how snow from the Lebanon Mountains is
+      brought to Damascus on the backs of camels.
+
+      “Sam,” she said, “that's just one of your yarns, and if you tell
+      it in your lecture to-night I'll get right up and say so.”
+
+      But he did tell it, for it was a fact; and though Mrs. Curry did
+      not rise to deny it she shook her finger at him in a way he knew.
+
+      He returned to San Francisco and gave one more lecture, the last
+      he would ever give in California. His preparatory advertising for
+      that occasion was wholly unique, characteristic of him to the
+      last degree. It assumed the form of a handbill of protest,
+      supposed to have been issued by the foremost citizens of San
+      Francisco, urging him to return to the States without inflicting
+      himself further upon them. As signatures he made free with the
+      names of prominent individuals, followed by those of
+      organizations, institutions, “Various Benevolent Societies,
+      Citizens on Foot and Horseback, and fifteen hundred in the
+      Steerage.”
+
+      Following this (on the same bill) was his reply, “To the fifteen
+      hundred and others,” in which he insisted on another hearing:
+
+    I will torment the people if I want to.... It only costs the people
+    $1 apiece, and if they can't stand it what do they stay here
+    for?... My last lecture was not as fine as I thought it was, but I
+    have submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they
+    have pronounced it good. Now, therefore, why should I withhold it?
+
+      He promised positively to sail on the 6th of July if they would
+      let him talk just this once. Continuing, the handbill presented a
+      second protest, signed by the various clubs and business firms;
+      also others bearing variously the signatures of the newspapers,
+      and the clergy, ending with the brief word:
+
+    You had better go.  Yours,  CHIEF OF POLICE.
+
+      All of which drollery concluded with his announcement of place
+      and date of his lecture, with still further gaiety at the end.
+      Nothing short of a seismic cataclysm—an earthquake, in fact—could
+      deter a San Francisco audience after that. Mark Twain's farewell
+      address, given at the Mercantile Library July 2 (1868), doubtless
+      remains today the leading literary event in San Francisco's
+      history.—[Copy of the lecture announcement, complete, will be
+      found in Appendix H, at the end of last volume.]
+
+      He sailed July 6th by the Pacific mail steamer Montana to
+      Acapulco, caught the Henry Chauncey at Aspinwall, reached New
+      York on the 28th, and a day or two later had delivered his
+      manuscript at Hartford.
+
+      But a further difficulty had arisen. Bliss was having troubles
+      himself, this time, with his directors. Many reports of Mark
+      Twain's new book had been traveling the rounds of the press, some
+      of which declared it was to be irreverent, even blasphemous, in
+      tone. The title selected, The New Pilgrim's Progress, was in
+      itself a sacrilege. Hartford was a conservative place; the
+      American Publishing Company directors were of orthodox
+      persuasion. They urged Bliss to relieve the company of this
+      impending disaster of heresy. When the author arrived one or more
+      of them labored with him in person, without avail. As for Bliss,
+      he was stanch; he believed in the book thoroughly, from every
+      standpoint. He declared if the company refused to print it he
+      would resign the management and publish the book himself. This
+      was an alarming suggestion to the stockholders. Bliss had
+      returned dividends—a boon altogether too rare in the company's
+      former history. The objectors retired and were heard of no more.
+      The manuscript was placed in the hands of Fay and Cox,
+      illustrators, with an order for about two hundred and fifty
+      pictures.
+
+      Fay and Cox turned it over to True Williams, one of the
+      well-known illustrators of that day. Williams was a man of great
+      talent—of fine imagination and sweetness of spirit—but it was
+      necessary to lock him in a room when industry was required, with
+      nothing more exciting than cold water as a beverage. Clemens
+      himself aided in the illustrating by obtaining of Moses S. Beach
+      photographs from the large collection he had brought home.
+
+
+
+
+      LXVII. A VISIT TO ELMIRA
+
+
+      Meantime he had skilfully obtained a renewal of the invitation to
+      spend a week in the Langdon home.
+
+      He meant to go by a fast train, but, with his natural gift for
+      misunderstanding time-tables, of course took a slow one,
+      telegraphing his approach from different stations along the road.
+      Young Langdon concluded to go down the line as far as Waverly to
+      meet him. When the New York train reached there the young man
+      found his guest in the smoking-car, travel-stained and
+      distressingly clad. Mark Twain was always scrupulously neat and
+      correct of dress in later years, but in that earlier day neatness
+      and style had not become habitual and did not give him comfort.
+      Langdon greeted him warmly but with doubt. Finally he summoned
+      courage to say, hesitatingly—“You've got some other clothes,
+      haven't you?”
+
+      The arriving guest was not in the least disturbed.
+
+      “Oh yes,” he said with enthusiasm, “I've got a fine brand-new
+      outfit in this bag, all but a hat. It will be late when we get
+      in, and I won't see any one to-night. You won't know me in the
+      morning. We'll go out early and get a hat.”
+
+      This was a large relief to the younger man, and the rest of the
+      journey was happy enough. True to promise, the guest appeared at
+      daylight correctly, even elegantly clad, and an early trip to the
+      shops secured the hat. A gay and happy week followed—a week
+      during which Samuel Clemens realized more fully than ever that in
+      his heart there was room for only one woman in all the world:
+      Olivia Langdon—“Livy,” as they all called her—and as the day of
+      departure drew near it may be that the gentle girl had made some
+      discoveries, too.
+
+      No word had passed between them. Samuel Clemens had the
+      old-fashioned Southern respect for courtship conventions, and for
+      what, in that day at least, was regarded as honor. On the morning
+      of the final day he said to young Langdon:
+
+      “Charley, my week is up, and I must go home.”
+
+      The young man expressed a regret which was genuine enough, though
+      not wholly unqualified. His older sister, Mrs. Crane, leaving
+      just then for a trip to the White Mountains, had said:
+
+      “Charley, I am sure Mr. Clemens is after our Livy. You mustn't
+      let him carry her off before our return.”
+
+      The idea was a disturbing one. The young man did not urge his
+      guest to prolong his-visit. He said:
+
+      “We'll have to stand it, I guess, but you mustn't leave before
+      to-night.”
+
+      “I ought to go by the first train,” Clemens said, gloomily. “I am
+      in love.”
+
+      “In what!”
+
+      “In love-with your sister, and I ought to get away from here.”
+
+      The young man was now very genuinely alarmed. To him Mark Twain
+      was a highly gifted, fearless, robust man—a man's man—and as such
+      altogether admirable—lovable. But Olivia—Livy—she was to him
+      little short of a saint. No man was good enough for her,
+      certainly not this adventurous soldier of letters from the West.
+      Delightful he was beyond doubt, adorable as a companion, but not
+      a companion for Livy.
+
+      “Look here, Clemens,” he said, when he could get his voice.
+      “There's a train in half an hour. I'll help you catch it. Don't
+      wait till to-night. Go now.”
+
+      Clemens shook his head.
+
+      “No, Charley,” he said, in his gentle drawl, “I want to enjoy
+      your hospitality a little longer. I promise to be circumspect,
+      and I'll go to-night.”
+
+      That night, after dinner, when it was time to take the New York
+      train, a light two-seated wagon was at the gate. The coachman was
+      in front, and young Langdon and his guest took the back seat. For
+      some reason the seat had not been locked in its place, and when,
+      after the good-bys, the coachman touched the horse it made a
+      quick spring forward, and the back seat, with both passengers,
+      described a half-circle and came down with force on the cobbled
+      street. Neither passenger was seriously hurt; Clemens not at
+      all—only dazed a little for a moment. Then came an inspiration;
+      here was a chance to prolong his visit. Evidently it was not
+      intended that he should take that train. When the Langdon
+      household gathered around with restoratives he did not recover
+      too quickly. He allowed them to support or carry him into the
+      house and place him in an arm-chair and apply remedies. The young
+      daughter of the house especially showed anxiety and attention.
+      This was pure happiness. He was perjuring himself, of course, but
+      they say Jove laughs at such things.
+
+      He recovered in a day or two, but the wide hospitality of the
+      handsome Langdon home was not only offered now; it was enforced.
+      He was still there two weeks later, after which he made a trip to
+      Cleveland to confide in Mrs. Fairbanks how he intended to win
+      Livy Langdon for his wife.
+
+
+
+
+      LXVIII. THE REV. “JOE” TWICHELL.
+
+
+      He returned to Hartford to look after the progress of his book.
+      Some of it was being put into type, and with his mechanical
+      knowledge of such things he was naturally interested in the
+      process.
+
+      He made his headquarters with the Blisses, then living at 821
+      Asylum Avenue, and read proof in a little upper room, where the
+      lamp was likely to be burning most of the time, where the
+      atmosphere was nearly always blue with smoke, and the window-sill
+      full of cigar butts. Mrs. Bliss took him into the quiet social
+      life of the neighborhood—to small church receptions, society
+      gatherings and the like—all of which he seemed to enjoy. Most of
+      the dwellers in that neighborhood were members of the Asylum Hill
+      Congregational Church, then recently completed; all but the
+      spire. It was a cultured circle, well-off in the world's goods,
+      its male members, for the most part, concerned in various
+      commercial ventures.
+
+      The church stood almost across the way from the Bliss home, and
+      Mark Twain, with his picturesque phrasing, referred to it as the
+      “stub-tailed church,” on account of its abbreviated spire; also,
+      later, with a knowledge of its prosperous membership, as the
+      “Church of the Holy Speculators.” He was at an evening reception
+      in the home of one of its members when he noticed a photograph of
+      the unfinished building framed and hanging on the wall.
+
+      “Why, yes,” he commented, in his slow fashion, “this is the
+      'Church of the Holy Speculators.'”
+
+      “Sh,” cautioned Mrs. Bliss. “Its pastor is just behind you. He
+      knows your work and wants to meet you.” Turning, she said: “Mr.
+      Twichell, this is Mr. Clemens. Most people know him as Mark
+      Twain.”
+
+      And so, in this casual fashion, he met the man who was presently
+      to become his closest personal friend and counselor, and would
+      remain so for more than forty years.
+
+      Joseph Hopkins Twichell was a man about his own age, athletic and
+      handsome, a student and a devout Christian, yet a man familiar
+      with the world, fond of sports, with an exuberant sense of humor
+      and a wide understanding of the frailties of humankind. He had
+      been “port waist oar” at Yale, and had left college to serve with
+      General “Dan” Sickles as a chaplain who had followed his duties
+      not only in the camp, but on the field.
+
+      Mention has already been made of Mark Twain's natural leaning
+      toward ministers of the gospel, and the explanation of it is
+      easier to realize than to convey. He was hopelessly
+      unorthodox—rankly rebellious as to creeds. Anything resembling
+      cant or the curtailment of mental liberty roused only his
+      resentment and irony. Yet something in his heart always warmed
+      toward any laborer in the vineyard, and if we could put the
+      explanation into a single sentence, perhaps we might say it was
+      because he could meet them on that wide, common ground sympathy
+      with mankind. Mark Twain's creed, then and always, may be put
+      into three words, “liberty, justice, humanity.” It may be put
+      into one word, “humanity.”
+
+      Ministers always loved Mark Twain. They did not always approve of
+      him, but they adored him: The Rev. Mr. Rising, of the Comstock,
+      was an early example of his ministerial friendships, and we have
+      seen that Henry Ward Beecher cultivated his company. In a San
+      Francisco letter of two years before, Mark Twain wrote his
+      mother, thinking it would please her:
+
+      I am as thick as thieves with the Reverend Stebbins. I am laying
+      for the Reverend Scudder and the Reverend Doctor Stone. I am
+      running on preachers now altogether, and I find them gay.
+
+      So it may be that his first impulse toward Joseph Twichell was
+      due to the fact that he was a young member of that army whose
+      mission is to comfort and uplift mankind. But it was only a
+      little time till the impulse had grown into a friendship that
+      went beyond any profession or doctrine, a friendship that ripened
+      into a permanent admiration and love for “Joe” Twichell himself,
+      as one of the noblest specimens of his race.
+
+      He was invited to the Twichell home, where he met the young wife
+      and got a glimpse of the happiness of that sweet and peaceful
+      household. He had a neglected, lonely look, and he loved to
+      gather with them at their fireside. He expressed his envy of
+      their happiness, and Mrs. Twichell asked him why, since his
+      affairs were growing prosperous, he did not establish a household
+      of his own. Long afterward Mr. Twichell wrote:
+
+    Mark made no answer for a little, but, with his eyes bent on the
+    floor, appeared to be deeply pondering. Then he looked up, and said
+    slowly, in a voice tremulous with earnestness (with what sympathy
+    he was heard may be imagined): “I am taking thought of it. I am in
+    love beyond all telling with the dearest and best girl in the whole
+    world. I don't suppose she will marry me. I can't think it
+    possible. She ought not to. But if she doesn't I shall be sure that
+    the best thing I ever did was to fall in love with her, and proud
+    to have it known that I tried to win her!”
+
+      It was only a brief time until the Twichell fireside was home to
+      him. He came and went, and presently it was “Mark” and “Joe,” as
+      by and by it would be “Livy” and “Harmony,” and in a few years
+      “Uncle Joe” and “Uncle Mark,” “Aunt Livy” and “Aunt Harmony,” and
+      so would remain until the end.
+
+
+
+
+      LXIX. A LECTURE TOUR
+
+
+      James Redpath, proprietor of the Boston Lyceum Bureau, was the
+      leading lecture agent of those days, and controlled all, or
+      nearly all, of the platform celebrities. Mark Twain's success at
+      the Cooper Union the year before had interested Redpath. He had
+      offered engagements then and later, but Clemens had not been free
+      for the regular circuit. Now there was no longer a reason for
+      postponement of a contract. Redpath was eager for the new
+      celebrity, and Clemens closed with him for the season of 1868-9.
+      With his new lecture, “The Vandal Abroad,” he was presently
+      earning a hundred dollars and more a night, and making most of
+      the nights count.
+
+      This was affluence indeed. He had become suddenly a person of
+      substance-an associate of men of consequence, with a commensurate
+      income. He could help his mother lavishly now, and he did.
+
+      His new lecture was immensely popular. It was a resume of the
+      'Quaker City' letters—a foretaste of the book which would
+      presently follow. Wherever he went, he was hailed with eager
+      greetings. He caught such drifting exclamations as, “There he is!
+      There goes Mark Twain!” People came out on the street to see him
+      pass. That marvelous miracle which we variously call “notoriety,”
+      “popularity,” “fame,” had come to him. In his notebook he wrote,
+      “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only, earthly
+      certainty oblivion.”
+
+      The newspapers were filled with enthusiasm both as to his matter
+      and method. His delivery was described as a “long, monotonous
+      drawl, with the fun invariably coming in at the end of a
+      sentence—after a pause.” His appearance at this time is thus set
+      down:
+
+    Mark Twain is a man of medium height, about five feet ten, sparsely
+    built, with dark reddish-brown hair and mustache. His features are
+    fair, his eyes keen and twinkling. He dresses in scrupulous evening
+    attire. In lecturing he hangs about the desk, leaning on it or
+    flirting around the corners of it, then marching and
+    countermarching in the rear of it. He seldom casts a glance at his
+    manuscript.
+
+      No doubt this fairly presents Mark Twain, the lecturer of that
+      day. It was a new figure on the platform, a man with a new
+      method. As to his manuscript, the item might have said that he
+      never consulted it at all. He learned his lecture; what he
+      consulted was merely a series of hieroglyphics, a set of crude
+      pictures drawn by himself, suggestive of the subject-matter
+      underneath new head. Certain columns represented the Parthenon;
+      the Sphinx meant Egypt, and so on. His manuscript lay there in
+      case of accident, but the accident did not happen.
+
+      A number of his engagements were in the central part of New York,
+      at points not far distant from Elmira. He had a standing
+      invitation to visit the Langdon home, and he made it convenient
+      to avail himself of that happiness.
+
+      His was not an unruffled courtship. When at last he reached the
+      point of proposing for the daughter of the house, neither the
+      daughter nor the household offered any noticeable encouragement
+      to his suit. Many absurd anecdotes have been told of his first
+      interview with Mr. Langdon on the subject, but they are
+      altogether without foundation. It was a proper and dignified
+      discussion of a very serious matter. Mr. Langdon expressed deep
+      regard for him and friendship but he was not inclined to add him
+      to the family; the young lady herself, in a general way, accorded
+      with these views. The applicant for favor left sadly enough, but
+      he could not remain discouraged or sad. He lectured at Cleveland
+      with vast success, and the news of it traveled quickly to Elmira.
+      He was referred to by Cleveland papers as a “lion” and “the
+      coming man of the age.” Two days later, in Pittsburgh (November
+      19th), he “played” against Fanny Kemble, the favorite actress of
+      that time, with the result that Miss Kemble had an audience of
+      two hundred against nearly ten times the number who gathered to
+      hear Mark Twain. The news of this went to Elmira, too. It was in
+      the papers there next morning; surely this was a conquering
+      hero—a gay Lochinvar from out of the West—and the daughter of the
+      house must be guarded closely, that he did not bear her away. It
+      was on the second morning following the Pittsburgh triumph, when
+      the Langdon family were gathered at breakfast, that a bushy
+      auburn head poked fearfully in at the door, and a low, humble
+      voice said:
+
+      “The calf has returned; may the prodigal have some breakfast?”
+
+      No one could be reserved or reprovingly distant, or any of those
+      unfriendly things with a person like that; certainly not Jervis
+      Langdon, who delighted in the humor and the tricks and turns and
+      oddities of this eccentric visitor. Giving his daughter to him
+      was another matter, but even that thought was less disturbing
+      than it had been at the start. In truth, the Langdon household
+      had somehow grown to feel that he belonged to them. The elder
+      sister's husband, Theodore Crane, endorsed him fully. He had long
+      before read some of the Mark Twain sketches that had traveled
+      eastward in advance of their author, and had recognized, even in
+      the crudest of them, a classic charm. As for Olivia Langdon's
+      mother and sister, their happiness lay in hers. Where her heart
+      went theirs went also, and it would appear that her heart, in
+      spite of herself, had found its rightful keeper. Only young
+      Langdon was irreconciled, and eventually set out for a voyage
+      around the world to escape the situation.
+
+      There was only a provisional engagement at first. Jervis Langdon
+      suggested, and Samuel Clemens agreed with him, that it was proper
+      to know something of his past, as well as of his present, before
+      the official parental sanction should be given. When Mr. Langdon
+      inquired as to the names of persons of standing to whom he might
+      write for credentials, Clemens pretty confidently gave him the
+      name of the Reverend Stebbins and others of San Francisco, adding
+      that he might write also to Joe Goodman if he wanted to, but that
+      he had lied for Goodman a hundred times and Goodman would lie for
+      him if necessary, so his testimony would be of no value. The
+      letters to the clergy were written, and Mr. Langdon also wrote
+      one on his own account.
+
+      It was a long mail-trip to the Coast and back in those days. It
+      might be two months before replies would come from those
+      ministers. The lecturer set out again on his travels, and was
+      radiantly and happily busy. He went as far west as Illinois, had
+      crowded houses in Chicago, visited friends and kindred in
+      Hannibal, St. Louis, and Keokuk, carrying the great news, and
+      lecturing in old familiar haunts.
+
+
+
+
+      LXX. INNOCENTS AT HOME—AND “THE INNOCENTS ABROAD”
+
+
+      He was in Jacksonville, Illinois, at the end of January (1869),
+      and in a letter to Bliss states that he will be in Elmira two
+      days later, and asks that proofs of the book be sent there. He
+      arrived at the Langdon home, anxious to hear the reports that
+      would make him, as the novels might say, “the happiest or the
+      most miserable of men.” Jervis Langdon had a rather solemn look
+      when they were alone together. Clemens asked:
+
+      “You've heard from those gentlemen out there?”
+
+      “Yes, and from another gentleman I wrote concerning you.”
+
+      “They don't appear to have been very enthusiastic, from your
+      manner.”
+
+      “Well, yes, some of them were.”
+
+      “I suppose I may ask what particular form their emotion took?”
+
+      “Oh yes, yes; they agree unanimously that you are a brilliant,
+      able man, a man with a future, and that you would make about the
+      worst husband on record.”
+
+      The applicant for favor had a forlorn look.
+
+      “There's nothing very evasive about that,” he said:
+
+      There was a period of reflective silence. It was probably no more
+      than a few seconds, but it seemed longer.
+
+      “Haven't you any other friend that you could suggest?” Langdon
+      said.
+
+      “Apparently none whose testimony would be valuable.”
+
+      Jervis Langdon held out his hand. “You have at least one,” he
+      said. “I believe in you. I know you better than they do.”
+
+      And so came the crown of happiness. The engagement of Samuel
+      Langhorne Clemens and Olivia Lewis Langdon was ratified next day,
+      February 4, 1869.
+
+      But if the friends of Mark Twain viewed the idea of the marriage
+      with scant favor, the friends of Miss Langdon regarded it with
+      genuine alarm. Elmira was a conservative place—a place of
+      pedigree and family tradition; that a stranger, a former printer,
+      pilot, miner, wandering journalist and lecturer, was to carry off
+      the daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families, was a
+      thing not to be lightly permitted. The fact that he had achieved
+      a national fame did not count against other considerations. The
+      social protest amounted almost to insurrection, but it was not
+      availing. The Langdon family had their doubts too, though of a
+      different sort. Their doubts lay in the fear that one, reared as
+      their daughter had been, might be unable to hold a place as the
+      wife of this intellectual giant, whom they felt that the world
+      was preparing to honor. That this delicate, sheltered girl could
+      have the strength of mind and body for her position seemed hard
+      to believe. Their faith overbore such questionings, and the
+      future years proved how fully it was justified.
+
+      To his mother Samuel Clemens wrote:
+
+    She is only a little body, but she hasn't her peer in Christendom.
+    I gave her only a plain gold engagement ring, when fashion
+    imperatively demands a two-hundred-dollar diamond one, and told her
+    it was typical of her future life-namely, that she would have to
+    flourish on substance, rather than luxuries (but you see I know the
+    girl—she don't care anything about luxuries).... She spends no
+    money but her astral year's allowance, and spends nearly every cent
+    of that on other people. She will be a good, sensible little wife,
+    without any airs about her. I don't make intercession for her
+    beforehand, and ask you to love her, for there isn't any use in
+    that—you couldn't help it if you were to try. I warn you that
+    whoever comes within the fatal influence of her beautiful nature is
+    her willing slave forevermore.
+
+      To Mrs. Crane, absent in March, her father wrote:
+
+    DEAR SUE,—I received your letter yesterday with a great deal of
+    pleasure, but the letter has gone in pursuit of one S. L. Clemens,
+    who has been giving us a great deal of trouble lately. We cannot
+    have a joy in our family without a feeling, on the part of the
+    little incorrigible in our family, that this wanderer must share
+    it, so, as soon as read, into her pocket and off upstairs goes your
+    letter, and in the next two minutes into the mail, so it is
+    impossible for me now to refer to it, or by reading it over gain an
+    inspiration in writing you...
+
+      Clemens closed his lecture tour in March, acid went immediately
+      to Elmira. He had lectured between fifty and sixty times, with a
+      return of something more than $8,000, not a bad aggregate for a
+      first season on the circuit. He had planned to make a spring tour
+      to California, but the attraction at Elmira was of a sort that
+      discouraged distant travel. Furthermore, he disliked the
+      platform, then and always. It was always a temptation to him
+      because of its quick and abundant return, but it was none the
+      less distasteful. In a letter of that spring he wrote:
+
+    I most cordially hate the lecture field. And after all, I shudder
+    to think I may never get out of it. In all conversation with Gough,
+    and Anna Dickinson, Nasby, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips,
+    and the other old stagers, I could not observe that they ever
+    expected or hoped to get out of the business. I don't want to get
+    wedded to it as they are.
+
+      He declined further engagements on the excuse that he must attend
+      to getting out his book. The revised proofs were coming now, and
+      he and gentle Livy Langdon read them together. He realized
+      presently that with her sensitive nature she had also a keen
+      literary perception. What he lacked in delicacy—and his lack was
+      likely to be large enough in that direction—she detected, and
+      together they pruned it away. She became his editor during those
+      happy courtship days—a position which she held to her death. The
+      world owed a large debt of gratitude to Mark Twain's wife, who
+      from the very beginning—and always, so far as in her strength she
+      was able—inspired him to give only his worthiest to the world,
+      whether in written or spoken word, in counsel or in deed. Those
+      early days of their close companionship, spiritual and mental,
+      were full of revelation to Samuel Clemens, a revelation that
+      continued from day to day, and from year to year, even to the
+      very end.
+
+      The letter to Bliss and the proofs were full of suggested changes
+      that would refine and beautify the text. In one of them he
+      settles the question of title, which he says is to be:
+
+                  THE INNOCENTS ABROAD or THE NEW PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
+
+      and we may be sure that it was Olivia Langdon's voice that gave
+      the deciding vote for the newly adopted chief title, which would
+      take any suggestion of irreverence out of the remaining words.
+
+      The book was to have been issued in the spring, but during his
+      wanderings proofs had been delayed, and there was now
+      considerable anxiety about it, as the agencies had become
+      impatient for the canvass. At the end of April Clemens wrote:
+      “Your printers are doing well. I will hurry the proofs”; but it
+      was not until the early part of June that the last chapters were
+      revised and returned. Then the big book, at last completed, went
+      to press on an edition of twenty thousand, a large number for any
+      new book, even to-day.
+
+      In later years, through some confusion of circumstance, Mark
+      Twain was led to believe that the publication of The Innocents
+      Abroad was long and unnecessarily delayed. But this was
+      manifestly a mistake. The book went to press in June. It was a
+      big book and a large edition. The first copy was delivered July
+      20 (1869), and four hundred and seventeen bound volumes were
+      shipped that month. Even with the quicker mechanical processes of
+      to-day a month or more is allowed for a large book between the
+      final return of proofs and the date of publication. So it is only
+      another instance of his remembering, as he once quaintly put it,
+      “the thing that didn't happen.”—[In an article in the North
+      American Review (September 21, 1906) Mr. Clemens stated that he
+      found it necessary to telegraph notice that he would bring suit
+      if the book was not immediately issued. In none of the letters
+      covering this period is there any suggestion of delay on the part
+      of the publishers, and the date of the final return of proofs,
+      together with the date of publication, preclude the possibility
+      of such a circumstance. At some period of his life he doubtless
+      sent, or contemplated sending, such a message, and this fact,
+      through some curious psychology, became confused in his mind with
+      the first edition of The Innocents Abroad.]
+
+
+
+
+      LXXI. THE GREAT BOOK OF TRAVEL.
+
+
+      'The Innocents Abroad' was a success from the start. The
+      machinery for its sale and delivery was in full swing by August
+      1, and five thousand one hundred and seventy copies were disposed
+      of that month—a number that had increased to more than thirty-one
+      thousand by the first of the year. It was a book of travel; its
+      lowest price was three and a half dollars. No such record had
+      been made by a book of that description; none has equaled it
+      since.—[One must recall that this was the record only up to 1910.
+      D.W.]
+
+      If Mark Twain was not already famous, he was unquestionably
+      famous now. As the author of The New Pilgrim's Progress he was
+      swept into the domain of letters as one riding at the head of a
+      cavalcade—doors and windows wide with welcome and jubilant with
+      applause. Newspapers chorused their enthusiasm; the public voiced
+      universal approval; only a few of the more cultured critics
+      seemed hesitant and doubtful.
+
+      They applauded—most of them—but with reservation. Doctor Holland
+      regarded Mark Twain as a mere fun maker of ephemeral popularity,
+      and was not altogether pleasant in his dictum. Doctor Holmes, in
+      a letter to the author, speaks of the “frequently quaint and
+      amusing conceits,” but does not find it in his heart to refer to
+      the book as literature. It was naturally difficult for the East
+      to concede a serious value to one who approached his subject with
+      such militant aboriginality, and occasionally wrote “those kind.”
+      William Dean Howells reviewed the book in the Atlantic, which was
+      of itself a distinction, whether the review was favorable or
+      otherwise. It was favorable on the whole, favorable to the humor
+      of the book, its “delicious impudence,” the charm of its
+      good-natured irony. The review closed:
+
+    It is no business of ours to fix his rank among the humorists
+    California has given us, but we think he is, in an entirely
+    different way from all the others, quite worthy of the company of
+    the best.
+
+      This is praise, but not of an intemperate sort, nor very
+      inclusive. The descriptive, the poetic, the more pretentious
+      phases of the book did not receive attention. Mr. Howells was
+      perhaps the first critic of eminence to recognize in Mark Twain
+      not only the humorist, but the supreme genius-the “Lincoln of our
+      literature.” This was later. The public—the silent public—with
+      what Howells calls “the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted
+      multitude,” reached a similar verdict forthwith. And on
+      sufficient evidence: let the average unprejudiced person of
+      to-day take up the old volume and read a few chapters anywhere
+      and decide whether it is the work of a mere humorist, or also of
+      a philosopher, a poet, and a seer. The writer well remembers a
+      little group of “the simple-hearted multitude” who during the
+      winter of '69 and '70 gathered each evening to hear the Innocents
+      read aloud, and their unanimous verdict that it was the “best
+      book of modern times.”
+
+      It was the most daring book of its day. Passages of it were
+      calculated to take the breath of the orthodox reader; only,
+      somehow, it made him smile, too. It was all so good-natured, so
+      openly sincere. Without doubt it preached heresy—the heresy of
+      viewing revered landmarks and relics joyously, rather than
+      lugubriously; reverentially, when they inspired reverence;
+      satirically, when they invited ridicule, and with kindliness
+      always.
+
+      The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain's greatest book of travel. The
+      critical and the pure in speech may object to this verdict.
+      Brander Matthews regards it second to A Tramp Abroad, the natural
+      viewpoint of the literary technician. The 'Tramp' contains better
+      usage without doubt, but it lacks the “color” which gives the
+      Innocents its perennial charm. In the Innocents there is a glow,
+      a fragrance, a romance of touch, a subtle something which is
+      idyllic, something which is not quite of reality, in the tale of
+      that little company that so long ago sailed away to the harbors
+      of their illusions beyond the sea, and, wandered together through
+      old palaces and galleries, and among the tombs of the saints, and
+      down through ancient lands. There is an atmosphere about it all,
+      a dream-like quality that lies somewhere in the telling, maybe,
+      or in the tale; at all events it is there, and the world has felt
+      it ever since. Perhaps it could be defined in a single word,
+      perhaps that word would be “youth.” That the artist, poor True
+      Williams, felt its inspiration is certain. We may believe that
+      Williams was not a great draftsman, but no artist ever caught
+      more perfectly the light and spirit of the author's text. Crude
+      some of the pictures are, no doubt, but they convey the very
+      essence of the story; they belong to it, they are a part of it,
+      and they ought never to perish. 'A Tramp Abroad' is a rare book,
+      but it cannot rank with its great predecessor in human charm. The
+      public, which in the long run makes mistakes, has rendered that
+      verdict. The Innocents by far outsells the Tramp, and, for that
+      matter, any other book of travel.
+
+
+
+
+      LXXII.THE PURCHASE OF A PAPER.
+
+
+      It is curious to reflect that Mark Twain still did not regard
+      himself as a literary man. He had no literary plans for the
+      future; he scarcely looked forward to the publication of another
+      book. He considered himself a journalist; his ambition lay in the
+      direction of retirement in some prosperous newspaper enterprise,
+      with the comforts and companionship of a home. During his travels
+      he had already been casting about for a congenial and substantial
+      association in newspaperdom, and had at one time considered the
+      purchase of an interest in the Cleveland Herald. But Buffalo was
+      nearer Elmira, and when an opportunity offered, by which he could
+      acquire a third interest in the Buffalo Express for $25,000, the
+      purchase was decided upon. His lack of funds prompted a new plan
+      for a lecture tour to the Pacific coast, this time with D. R.
+      Locke (Nasby), then immensely popular, in his lecture “Cussed Be
+      Canaan.”
+
+      Clemens had met Nasby on the circuit, and was very fond of him.
+      The two had visited Boston together, and while there had called
+      on Doctor Holmes; this by the way. Nasby was fond of Clemens too,
+      but doubtful about the trip-doubtful about his lecture:
+
+    Your proposition takes my breath away. If I had my new lecture
+    completed I wouldn't hesitate a moment, but really isn't “Cussed Be
+    Canaan” too old? You know that lemon, our African brother, juicy as
+    he was in his day, has been squeezed dry. Why howl about his wrongs
+    after said wrongs have been redressed? Why screech about the
+    “damnable spirit of Cahst” when the victim thereof sits at the
+    first table, and his oppressor mildly takes, in hash, what he
+    leaves? You see, friend Twain, the Fifteenth Amendment busted
+    “Cussed Be Canaan.” I howled feelingly on the subject while it was
+    a living issue, for I felt all that I said and a great deal more;
+    but now that we have won our fight why dance frantically on the
+    dead corpse of our enemy? The Reliable Contraband is contraband no
+    more, but a citizen of the United States, and I speak of him no
+    more.
+    Give me a week to think of your proposition. If I can jerk a
+    lecture in time I will go with you. The Lord knows I would like to.
+    —[Nasby's lecture, “Cussed Be Canaan,” opened, “We are all
+    descended from grandfathers!” He had a powerful voice, and always
+    just on the stroke of eight he rose and vigorously delivered this
+    sentence. Once, after lecturing an entire season—two hundred and
+    twenty-five nights—he went home to rest. That evening he sat,
+    musingly drowsing by the fire, when the clock struck eight. Without
+    a moment's thought Nasby sprang to his feet and thundered out, “We
+    are all descended from grandfathers!”]
+
+      Nasby did not go, and Clemens's enthusiasm cooled at the prospect
+      of setting out alone on that long tour. Furthermore, Jervis
+      Langdon promptly insisted on advancing the money required to
+      complete the purchase of the Express, and the trade was
+      closed.—[Mr. Langdon is just as good for $25,000 for me, and has
+      already advanced half of it in cash. I wrote and asked whether I
+      had better send him my note, or a due bill, or how he would
+      prefer to have the indebtedness made of record, and he answered
+      every other topic in the letter pleasantly, but never replied to
+      that at all. Still, I shall give my note into a hands of his
+      business agent here, and pay him the interest as it falls due.—S.
+      L. C. to his mother.]
+
+      The Buffalo Express was at this time in the hands of three
+      men—Col. George F. Selkirk, J. L. Lamed, and Thomas A. Kennett.
+      Colonel Selkirk was business manager, Lamed was political editor.
+      With the purchase of Kennett's share Clemens became a sort of
+      general and contributing editor, with a more or less “roving
+      commission”—his hours and duties not very clearly defined. It was
+      believed by his associates, and by Clemens himself, that his
+      known connection with the paper would give it prestige and
+      circulation, as Nasby's connection had popularized the Toledo
+      Blade. The new editor entered upon his duties August 14 (1869).
+      The members of the Buffalo press gave him a dinner that evening,
+      and after the manner of newspaper men the world over, were
+      handsomely cordial to the “new enemy in their midst.”
+
+      There is an anecdote which relates that next morning, when Mark
+      Twain arrived in the Express office (it was then at 14 Swan
+      Street), there happened to be no one present who knew him. A
+      young man rose very bruskly and asked if there was any one he
+      would like to see. It is reported that he replied, with gentle
+      deliberation:
+
+      “Well, yes, I should like to see some young man offer the new
+      editor a chair.”
+
+      It is so like Mark Twain that we are inclined to accept it,
+      though it seems of doubtful circumstance. In any case it deserves
+      to be true. His “Salutatory” (August 18th) is sufficiently
+      genuine:
+
+    Being a stranger, it would be immodest for me to suddenly and
+    violently assume the associate editorship of the Buffalo Express
+    without a single word of comfort or encouragement to the
+    unoffending patrons of the paper, who are about to be exposed to
+    constant attacks of my wisdom and learning. But the word shall be
+    as brief as possible. I only want to assure parties having a
+    friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not
+    going to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time.
+    I am not going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way
+    attempt to make trouble.... I shall not make use of slang and
+    vulgarity upon any occasion or under any circumstances, and shall
+    never use profanity except when discussing house rent and taxes.
+    Indeed, upon a second thought, I shall not use it even then, for it
+    is unchristian, inelegant, and degrading; though, to speak truly, I
+    do not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth
+    a cent without it. I shall not often meddle with politics, because
+    we have a political Editor who is already excellent and only needs
+    to serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect. I shall
+    not write any poetry unless I conceive a spite against the
+    subscribers.
+    Such is my platform. I do not see any use in it, but custom is law
+    and must be obeyed.
+
+      John Harrison Mills, who was connected with the Express in those
+      days, has written:
+
+    I cannot remember that there was any delay in getting down to his
+    work. I think within five minutes the new editor had assumed the
+    easy look of one entirely at home, pencil in hand and a clutch of
+    paper before him, with an air of preoccupation, as of one intent on
+    a task delayed. It was impossible to be conscious of the man
+    sitting there, and not feel his identity with all that he had
+    enjoyed, and the reminiscence of it he that seemed to radiate; for
+    the personality was so absolutely in accord with all the record of
+    himself and his work. I cannot say he seemed to be that vague thing
+    they call a type in race or blood, though the word, if used in his
+    case for temperament, would decidedly mean what they used to call
+    the “sanguine.”
+    I thought that, pictorially, the noble costume of the Albanian
+    would have well become him. Or he might have been a Goth, and worn
+    the horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors; or stood at the
+    prow of one of the swift craft of the Vikings. His eyes, which have
+    been variously described, were, it seemed to me, of an
+    indescribable depth of the bluish moss-agate, with a capacity of
+    pupil dilation that in certain lights had the effect of a deep
+    black....
+
+      Mr. Mills adds that in dress he was now “well groomed,” and that
+      consequently they were obliged to revise their notions as to the
+      careless negligee which gossip had reported.—[From unpublished
+      Reminiscences kindly lent to the author by Mr. Mills]
+
+
+
+
+      LXXIII. THE FIRST MEETING WITH HOWELLS
+
+
+      Clemens' first period of editorial work was a brief one, though
+      he made frequent contributions to the paper: sketches, squibs,
+      travel-notes, and experiences, usually humorous in character. His
+      wedding-day had been set for early in the year, and it was
+      necessary to accumulate a bank account for that occasion. Before
+      October he was out on the lecture circuit, billed now for the
+      first time for New England, nervous and apprehensive in
+      consequence, though with good hope. To Pamela he wrote (November
+      9th):
+
+      To-morrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston
+      audience—4,000 critics—and on the success of this matter depends
+      my future success in New England. But I am not distressed. Nasby
+      is in the same boat. Tonight decides the fate of his brand-new
+      lecture. He has just left my room—been reading his lecture to
+      me—was greatly depressed. I have convinced him that he has little
+      to fear.
+
+      Whatever alarm Mark Twain may have felt was not warranted. His
+      success with the New England public was immediate and complete.
+      He made his headquarters in Boston, at Redpath's office, where
+      there was pretty sure to be a congenial company, of which he was
+      presently the center.
+
+      It was during one of these Boston sojourns that he first met
+      William Dean Howells, his future friend and literary counselor.
+      Howells was assistant editor of the Atlantic at this time; James
+      T. Fields, its editor. Clemens had been gratified by the Atlantic
+      review, and had called to express his thanks for it. He sat
+      talking to Fields, when Howells entered the editorial rooms, and
+      on being presented to the author of the review, delivered his
+      appreciation in the form of a story, sufficiently appropriate,
+      but not qualified for the larger types.—[He said: “When I read
+      that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was so glad her
+      baby had come white.”]
+
+      His manner, his humor, his quaint colloquial forms all delighted
+      Howells—more, in fact, than the opulent sealskin overcoat which
+      he affected at this period—a garment astonishing rather than
+      esthetic, as Mark Twain's clothes in those days of his first
+      regeneration were likely to be startling enough, we may believe;
+      in the conservative atmosphere of the Atlantic rooms. And
+      Howells—gentle, genial, sincere—filled with the early happiness
+      of his calling, won the heart of Mark Twain and never lost it,
+      and, what is still more notable, won his absolute and unvarying
+      confidence in all literary affairs. It was always Mark Twain's
+      habit to rely on somebody, and in matters pertaining to
+      literature and to literary people in general he laid his burden
+      on William Dean Howells from that day. Only a few weeks after
+      that first visit we find him telegraphing to Howells, asking him
+      to look after a Californian poet, then ill and friendless in
+      Brooklyn. Clemens states that he does not know the poet, but will
+      contribute fifty dollars if Howells will petition the steamboat
+      company for a pass; and no doubt Howells complied, and spent a
+      good deal more than fifty dollars' worth of time to get the poet
+      relieved and started; it would be like him.
+
+
+
+
+      LXXIV. THE WEDDING-DAY
+
+
+      The wedding was planned, at first, either for Christmas or
+      New-Year's Day; but as the lecture engagements continued into
+      January it was decided to wait until these were filled. February
+      2d, a date near the anniversary of the engagement, was agreed
+      upon, also a quiet wedding with no “tour.” The young people would
+      go immediately to Buffalo, and take up a modest residence, in a
+      boardinghouse as comfortable, even as luxurious, as the husband's
+      financial situation justified. At least that was Samuel Clemens's
+      understanding of the matter. He felt that he was heavily in
+      debt—that his first duty was to relieve himself of that
+      obligation.
+
+      There were other plans in Elmira, but in the daily and happy
+      letters he received there was no inkling of any new purpose.
+
+      He wrote to J. D. F. Slee, of Buffalo, who was associated in
+      business with Mr. Langdon, and asked him to find a suitable
+      boarding-place, one that would be sufficiently refined for the
+      woman who was to be his wife, and sufficiently reasonable to
+      insure prosperity. In due time Slee replied that, while boarding
+      was a “miserable business anyhow,” he had been particularly
+      fortunate in securing a place on one of the most pleasant
+      streets—“the family a small one and choice spirits, with no
+      predilection for taking boarders, and consenting to the present
+      arrangement only because of the anticipated pleasure of your
+      company.” The price, Slee added, would be reasonable. As a matter
+      of fact a house on Delaware Avenue—still the fine residence
+      street of Buffalo—had been bought and furnished throughout as a
+      present to the bride and groom. It stands to-day practically
+      unchanged—brick and mansard without, Eastlake within, a type then
+      much in vogue—spacious and handsome for that period. It was
+      completely appointed. Diagrams of the rooms had been sent to
+      Elmira and Miss Langdon herself had selected the furnishings.
+      Everything was put in readiness, including linen, cutlery, and
+      utensils. Even the servants had been engaged and the pantry and
+      cellar had been stocked.
+
+      It must have been hard for Olivia Langdon to keep this wonderful
+      surprise out of those daily letters. A surprise like that is
+      always watching a chance to slip out unawares, especially when
+      one is eagerly impatient to reveal it.
+
+      However, the traveler remained completely in the dark. He may
+      have wondered vaguely at the lack of enthusiasm in the boarding
+      idea, and could he have been certain that the sales of the book
+      would continue, or that his newspaper venture would yield an
+      abundant harvest, he might have planned his domestic beginning on
+      a more elaborate scale. If only the Tennessee land would yield
+      the long-expected fortune now! But these were all incalculable
+      things. All that he could be sure of was the coming of his great
+      happiness, in whatever environment, and of the dragging weeks
+      between.
+
+      At last the night of the final lecture came, and he was off for
+      Elmira with the smallest possible delay. Once there, the
+      intervening days did not matter. He could join in the busy
+      preparations; he could write exuberantly to his friends. To Laura
+      Hawkins, long since Laura Frazer he sent a playful line; to Jim
+      Gillis, still digging and washing on the slopes of the old
+      Tuolumne hills, he wrote a letter which eminently belongs here:
+
+                     Elmira, N. Y., January 26, 1870.
+    DEAR Jim,—I remember that old night just as well! And somewhere
+    among my relics I have your remembrance stored away. It makes my
+    heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days. Still it
+    shouldn't, for right in the depths of their poverty and their
+    pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune.
+    You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal
+    sojourn in the rain and mud of Angel's Camp—I mean that day we sat
+    around the tavern stove and heard that chap tell about the frog and
+    how they filled him with shot. And you remember how we quoted from
+    the yarn and laughed over it out there on the hillside while you
+    and dear old Stoker panned and washed. I jotted the story down in
+    my note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or
+    fifteen dollars for it—I was just that blind. But then we were so
+    hard up. I published that story, and it became widely known in
+    America, India, China, England, and the reputation it made for me
+    has paid me thousands and thousands of dollars since. Four or five
+    months ago I bought into the Express (I have ordered it sent to you
+    as long as you live, and if the bookkeeper sends you any bills you
+    let me hear of it). I went heavily in debt—never could have dared
+    to do that, Jim, if we hadn't heard the jumping Frog story that
+    day.
+    And wouldn't I love to take old Stoker by the hand, and wouldn't I
+    love to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of
+    Rinalds in the “Burning Shame!” Where is Dick and what is he doing?
+    Give him my fervent love and warm old remembrances.
+    A week from to-day I shall be married-to a girl even better and
+    lovelier than the peerless “Chapparal Quails.” You can't come so
+    far, Jim, but still I cordially invite you to come anyhow, and I
+    invite Dick too. And if you two boys were to land here on that
+    pleasant occasion we would make you right royally welcome. Truly
+    your friend, SAML. L. CLEMENS.
+    P.S.—-California plums are good. Jim, particularly when they are
+    stewed.
+
+      It had been only five years before—that day in Angel's Camp—but
+      how long ago and how far away it seemed to him now! So much had
+      happened since then, so much of which that was the beginning—so
+      little compared with the marvel of the years ahead, whose
+      threshold he was now about to cross, and not alone.
+
+      A day or two before the wedding he was asked to lecture on the
+      night of February 2d. He replied that he was sorry to disappoint
+      the applicant, but that he could not lecture on the night of
+      February 2d, for the reason that he was going to marry a young
+      lady on that evening, and that he would rather marry that young
+      lady than deliver all the lectures in the world.
+
+      And so came the wedding-day. It began pleasantly; the postman
+      brought a royalty check that morning of $4,000, the accumulation
+      of three months' sales, and the Rev. Joseph Twichell and Harmony,
+      his wife, came from Hartford—Twichell to join with the Rev.
+      Thomas K. Beecher in solemnizing the marriage. Pamela Moffett, a
+      widow now, with her daughter Annie, grown to a young lady, had
+      come all the way from St. Louis, and Mrs. Fairbanks from
+      Cleveland.
+
+      Yet the guests were not numerous, not more than a hundred at
+      most, so it was a quiet wedding there in the Langdon parlors,
+      those dim, stately rooms that in the future would hold so much of
+      his history—so much of the story of life and death that made its
+      beginning there.
+
+      The wedding-service was about seven o'clock, for Mr. Beecher had
+      a meeting at the church soon after that hour. Afterward followed
+      the wedding-supper and dancing, and the bride's father danced
+      with the bride. To the interested crowd awaiting him at the
+      church Mr. Beecher reported that the bride was very beautiful,
+      and had on the longest white gloves he had ever seen; he declared
+      they reached to her shoulders.—[Perhaps for a younger generation
+      it should be said that Thomas K. Beecher was a brother of Henry
+      Ward Beecher. He lived and died in Elmira, the almost worshiped
+      pastor of the Park Congregational Church. He was a noble,
+      unorthodox teacher. Samuel Clemens at the time of his marriage
+      already strongly admired him, and had espoused his cause in an
+      article signed “S'cat!” in the Elmira Advertiser, when he
+      (Beecher) had been assailed by the more orthodox Elmira clergy.
+      For the “S'cat” article see Appendix I, at the end of last
+      volume.]
+
+      It was the next afternoon when they set out for Buffalo,
+      accompanied by the bride's parents, the groom's relatives, the
+      Beechers, and perhaps one or two others of that happy company. It
+      was nine o'clock at night when they arrived, and found Mr. Slee
+      waiting at the station with sleighs to convey the party to the
+      “boarding-house” he had selected. They drove and drove, and the
+      sleigh containing the bride and groom got behind and apparently
+      was bound nowhere in particular, which disturbed the groom a good
+      deal, for he thought it proper that they should arrive first, to
+      receive their guests. He commented on Slee's poor judgment in
+      selecting a house that was so hard to find, and when at length
+      they turned into fashionable Delaware Avenue, and stopped before
+      one of the most attractive places in the neighborhood, he was
+      beset with fear concerning the richness of the locality.
+
+      They were on the steps when the doors opened, and a perfect
+      fairyland of lights and decoration was revealed within. The
+      friends who had gone ahead came out with greetings, to lead in
+      the bride and groom. Servants hurried forward to take bags and
+      wraps. They were ushered inside; they were led through beautiful
+      rooms, all newly appointed and garnished. The bridegroom was
+      dazed, unable to understand the meaning of things, the apparent
+      ownership and completeness of possession.
+
+      At last the young wife put her hand upon his arm:
+
+      “Don't you understand, Youth,” she said; that was always her name
+      for him. “Don't you understand? It is ours, all ours—everything—a
+      gift from father!”
+
+      But even then he could not grasp it; not at first, not until Mr.
+      Langdon brought a little box and, opening it, handed them the
+      deeds.
+
+      Nobody quite remembers what was the first remark that Samuel
+      Clemens made then; but either then or a little later he said:
+
+      “Mr. Langdon, whenever you are in Buffalo, if it's twice a year,
+      come right here. Bring your bag and stay overnight if you want
+      to. It sha'n't cost you a cent!”
+
+      They went in to supper then, and by and by the guests were gone
+      and the young wedded pair were alone.
+
+      Patrick McAleer, the young coachman, who would grow old in their
+      employ, and Ellen, the cook, came in for their morning orders,
+      and were full of Irish delight at the inexperience and novelty of
+      it all. Then they were gone, and only the lovers in their new
+      house and their new happiness remained.
+
+      And so it was they entered the enchanted land.
+
+
+
+
+      LXXV. AS TO DESTINY
+
+
+      If any reader has followed these chapters thus far, he may have
+      wondered, even if vaguely, at the seeming fatality of events.
+      Mark Twain had but to review his own life for justification of
+      his doctrine of inevitability—an unbroken and immutable sequence
+      of cause and effect from the beginning. Once he said:
+
+      “When the first living atom found itself afloat on the great
+      Laurentian sea the first act of that first atom led to the second
+      act of that first atom, and so on down through the succeeding
+      ages of all life, until, if the steps could be traced, it would
+      be shown that the first act of that first atom has led inevitably
+      to the act of my standing here in my dressing-gown at this
+      instant talking to you.”
+
+      It seemed the clearest presentment ever offered in the matter of
+      predestined circumstance—predestined from the instant when that
+      primal atom felt the vital thrill. Mark Twain's early life,
+      however imperfectly recorded, exemplifies this postulate. If
+      through the years still ahead of us the course of destiny seems
+      less clearly defined, it is only because thronging events make
+      the threads less easy to trace. The web becomes richer, the
+      pattern more intricate and confusing, but the line of fate
+      neither breaks nor falters, to the end.
+
+
+
+
+      LXXVI. ON THE BUFFALO “EXPRESS”
+
+
+      With the beginning of life in Buffalo, Mark Twain had become
+      already a world character—a man of large consequence and events.
+      He had no proper realization of this, no real sense of the size
+      of his conquest; he still regarded himself merely as a lecturer
+      and journalist, temporarily popular, but with no warrant to a
+      permanent seat in the world's literary congress. He thought his
+      success something of an accident. The fact that he was prepared
+      to settle down as an editorial contributor to a newspaper in what
+      was then only a big village is the best evidence of a modest
+      estimate of his talents.
+
+      He “worked like a horse,” is the verdict of those who were
+      closely associated with him on the Express. His hours were not
+      regular, but they were long. Often he was at his desk at eight in
+      the morning, and remained there until ten or eleven at night.
+
+      His working costume was suited to comfort rather than show. With
+      coat, vest, collar, and tie usually removed (sometimes even his
+      shoes), he lounged in his chair, in any attitude that afforded
+      the larger ease, pulling over the exchanges; scribbling
+      paragraphs, editorials, humorous skits, and what not, as the
+      notion came upon him. J. L. Lamed, his co-worker (he sat on the
+      opposite side of the same table), remembers that Mark Twain
+      enjoyed his work as he went along—the humor of it—and that he
+      frequently laughed as some whimsicality or new absurdity came
+      into his mind.
+
+      “I doubt,” writes Lamed, “if he ever enjoyed anything more than
+      the jackknife engraving that he did on a piece of board of a
+      military map of the siege of Paris, which was printed in the
+      Express from his original plate, with accompanying explanations
+      and comments. His half-day of whittling and laughter that went
+      with it are something that I find pleasant to remember. Indeed,
+      my whole experience of association with him is a happy memory,
+      which I am fortunate in having.... What one saw of him was always
+      the actual Mark Twain, acting out of his own nature simply,
+      frankly, without pretense, and almost without reserve. It was
+      that simplicity and naturalness in the man which carried his
+      greatest charm.”
+
+      Lamed, like many others, likens Mark Twain to Lincoln in various
+      of his characteristics. The two worked harmoniously together:
+      Lamed attending to the political direction of the journal,
+      Clemens to the literary, and what might be termed the sentimental
+      side. There was no friction in the division of labor, never
+      anything but good feeling between them. Clemens had a poor
+      opinion of his own comprehension of politics, and perhaps as
+      little regard for Lamed's conception of humor. Once when the
+      latter attempted something in the way of pleasantry his associate
+      said:
+
+      “Better leave the humor on this paper to me, Lamed”; and once
+      when Lamed was away attending the Republican State Convention at
+      Saratoga, and some editorial comment seemed necessary, Clemens
+      thought it best to sign the utterance, and to make humor of his
+      shortcomings.
+
+    I do not know much about politics, and am not sitting up nights to
+    learn....
+    I am satisfied that these nominations are all right and sound, and
+    that they are the only ones that can bring peace to our distracted
+    country (the only political phrase I am perfectly familiar with and
+    competent to hurl at the public with fearless confidence—the other
+    editor is full of them), but being merely satisfied is not enough.
+    I always like to know before I shout. But I go for Mr. Curtis with
+    all my strength! Being certain of him, I hereby shout all I know
+    how. But the others may be a split ticket, or a scratched ticket,
+    or whatever you call it.
+    I will let it alone for the present. It will keep. The other young
+    man will be back to-morrow, and he will shout for it, split or no
+    split, rest assured of that. He will prance into this political
+    ring with his tomahawk and his war-whoop, and then you will hear a
+    crash and see the scalps fly. He has none of my diffidence. He
+    knows all about these nominees, and if he don't he will let on to
+    in such a natural way as to deceive the most critical. He knows
+    everything—he knows more than Webster's Unabridged and the American
+    Encyclopedia—but whether he knows anything about a subject or not
+    he is perfectly willing to discuss it. When he gets back he will
+    tell you all about these candidates as serenely as if he had been
+    acquainted with them a hundred years, though, speaking
+    confidentially, I doubt if he ever heard of any of them till
+    to-day. I am right well satisfied it is a good, sound, sensible
+    ticket, and a ticket to win; but wait till he comes.
+    In the mean time I go for George William Curtis and take the
+    chances. MARK TWAIN.
+
+      He had become what Mr. Howells calls entirely “desouthernized” by
+      this time. From having been of slaveholding stock, and a
+      Confederate soldier, he had become a most positive Republican, a
+      rampant abolitionist—had there been anything left to abolish. His
+      sympathy had been always with the oppressed, and he had now
+      become their defender. His work on the paper revealed this more
+      and more. He wrote fewer sketches and more editorials, and the
+      editorials were likely to be either savage assaults upon some
+      human abuse, or fierce espousals of the weak. They were fearless,
+      scathing, terrific. Of some farmers of Cohocton, who had taken
+      the law into their own hands to punish a couple whom they
+      believed to be a detriment to the community, he wrote:
+
+      “The men who did that deed are capable of doing any low,
+      sneaking, cowardly villainy that could be invented in perdition.
+      They are the very bastards of the devil.”
+
+      He appended a full list of their names, and added:
+
+      “If the farmers of Cohocton are of this complexion, what on earth
+      must a Cohocton rough be like?”
+
+      But all this happened a long time ago, and we need not detail
+      those various old interests and labors here. It is enough to say
+      that Mark Twain on the Express was what he had been from the
+      beginning, and would be to the end—the zealous champion of
+      justice and liberty; violent and sometimes wrong in his
+      viewpoint, but never less than fearless and sincere. Invariably
+      he was for the oppressed. He had a natural instinct for the
+      right, but, right or wrong, he was for the under dog.
+
+      Among the best of his editorial contributions is a tribute to
+      Anson Burlingame, who died February 23, 1870, at St. Petersburg,
+      on his trip around the world as special ambassador for the
+      Chinese Empire. In this editorial Clemens endeavored to pay
+      something of his debt to the noble statesman. He reviewed
+      Burlingame's astonishing career—the career which had closed at
+      forty-seven, and read like a fairy-tale-and he dwelt lovingly on
+      his hero's nobility of character. At the close he said:
+
+      “He was a good man, and a very, very great man. America, lost a
+      son, and all the world a servant, when he died.”
+
+      Among those early contributions to the Express is a series called
+      “Around the World,” an attempt at collaboration with Prof. D. R.
+      Ford, who did the actual traveling, while Mark Twain, writing in
+      the first person, gave the letters his literary stamp. At least
+      some of the contributions were written in this way, such as
+      “Adventures in Hayti,” “The Pacific,” and “Japan.” These letters
+      exist to-day only in the old files of the Express, and indeed
+      this is the case with most of Clemens's work for that paper. It
+      was mainly ephemeral or timely work, and its larger value has
+      disappeared. Here and there is a sentence worth remembering. Of
+      two practical jokers who sent in a marriage notice of persons not
+      even contemplating matrimony, he said: “This deceit has been
+      practised maliciously by a couple of men whose small souls will
+      escape through their pores some day if they do not varnish their
+      hides.”
+
+      Some of the sketches have been preserved. “Journalism in
+      Tennessee,” one of the best of his wilder burlesques, is as
+      enjoyable to-day as when written. “A Curious Dream” made a
+      lasting impression on his Buffalo readers, and you are pretty
+      certain to hear of it when you mention Mark Twain in that city
+      to-day. It vividly called attention to the neglect of the old
+      North Street graveyard. The gruesome vision of the ancestors
+      deserting with their coffins on their backs was even more
+      humiliating than amusing, and inspired a movement for reform. It
+      has been effective elsewhere since then, and may still be read
+      with profit—or satisfaction—for in a note at the end the reader
+      is assured that if the cemeteries of his town are kept in good
+      order the dream is not leveled at his town at all, but
+      “particularly and venomously at the next town.”
+
+
+
+
+      LXXVII. THE “GALAXY”
+
+
+      Mark Twain's work on the Express represented only a portion of
+      his literary activities during his Buffalo residence. The Galaxy,
+      an ambitious New York magazine of that day—[published by Sheldon
+      & Co. at 498 and 500 Broadway]—proposed to him that he conduct
+      for them a humorous department. They would pay $2,400 a year for
+      the work, and allow him a free hand. There was some discussion as
+      to book rights, but the arrangement was concluded, and his first
+      instalment, under the general title of “Memoranda,” appeared in
+      the May number, 1870. In his Introductory he outlined what the
+      reader might expect, such as “exhaustive statistical tables,”
+      “Patent Office reports,” and “complete instructions about
+      farming, even from the grafting of the seed to the harrowing of
+      the matured crops.” He declared that he would throw a pathos into
+      the subject of agriculture that would surprise and delight the
+      world. He added that the “Memoranda” was not necessarily a
+      humorous department.
+
+    I would not conduct an exclusively and professedly humorous
+    department for any one. I would always prefer to have the privilege
+    of printing a serious and sensible remark, in case one occurred to
+    me, without the reader's feeling obliged to consider himself
+    outraged.... Puns cannot be allowed a place in this department....
+    No circumstance, however dismal, will ever be considered a
+    sufficient excuse for the admission of that last and saddest
+    evidence of intellectual poverty, the pun.
+
+      The Galaxy was really a fine magazine, with the best contributors
+      obtainable; among them Justin McCarthy, S. M. B. Piatt, Richard
+      Grant White, and many others well known in that day, with names
+      that still flicker here and there in its literary twilight. The
+      new department appealed to Clemens, and very soon he was writing
+      most of his sketches for it. They were better literature, as a
+      rule, than those published in his own paper.
+
+      The first number of the “Memoranda” was fairly representative of
+      those that followed it. “The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef
+      Contract,” a manuscript which he had undertaken three years
+      before and mislaid, was its initial contribution. Besides the
+      “Beef Contract,” there was a tribute to George Wakeman, a
+      well-known journalist of those days; a stricture on the Rev. T.
+      DeWitt Talmage, who had delivered from the pulpit an argument
+      against workingmen occupying pews in fashionable churches; a
+      presentment of the Chinese situation in San Francisco, depicting
+      the cruel treatment of the Celestial immigrant; a burlesque of
+      the Sunday-school “good little boy” story,—[“The Story of the
+      Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper” and the “Beef Contract” are
+      included in Sketches New and Old; also the Chinese sketch, under
+      the title, “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy.”]—and several
+      shorter skits—and anecdotes, ten pages in all; a rather generous
+      contract.
+
+      Mark Twain's comment on Talmage was prompted by an article in
+      which Talmage had assumed the premise that if workingmen attended
+      the churches it would drive the better class of worshipers away.
+      Among other things he said:
+
+    I have a good Christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in
+    church, and a workingman should enter the door at the other end,
+    would smell him instantly. My friend is not to blame for the
+    sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer
+    for being keener on the scent than a stupid watch-dog. The fact is,
+    if you had all the churches free, by reason of the mixing of the
+    common people with the uncommon, you would keep one-half of
+    Christendom sick at their stomach. If you are going to kill the
+    church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to do with this
+    work of evangelization.
+
+      Commenting on this Mark Twain said—well, he said a good deal more
+      than we have room for here, but a portion of his closing
+      paragraphs is worth preserving. He compares the Reverend Mr.
+      Talmage with the early disciples of Christ—Paul and Peter and the
+      others; or, rather, he contrasts him with them.
+
+    They healed the very beggars, and held intercourse with people of a
+    villainous odor every day. If the subject of these remarks had been
+    chosen among the original Twelve Apostles he would not have
+    associated with the rest, because he could not have stood the fishy
+    smell of some of his comrades who came from around the Sea of
+    Galilee. He would have resigned his commission with some such
+    remark as he makes in the extract quoted above: “Master, if thou
+    art going to kill the church thus with bad smells I will have
+    nothing to do with this work of evangelization.” He is a disciple,
+    and makes that remark to the Master; the only difference is that he
+    makes it in the nineteenth instead of the first century.
+
+      Talmage was immensely popular at this time, and Mark Twain's open
+      attack on him must have shocked a good many Galaxy readers, as
+      perhaps his article on the Chinese cruelties offended the
+      citizens of San Francisco. It did not matter. He was not likely
+      to worry over the friends he would lose because of any stand
+      taken for human justice. Lamed said of him: “He was very far from
+      being one who tried in any way to make himself popular.”
+      Certainly he never made any such attempt at the expense of his
+      convictions.
+
+      The first Galaxy instalment was a sort of platform of principles
+      for the campaign that was to follow. Not that each month's
+      contribution contained personal criticism, or a defense of the
+      Chinese (of whom he was always the champion as long as he lived),
+      but a good many of them did. In the October number he began a
+      series of letters under the general title of “Goldsmith's Friend
+      Abroad Again,” supposed to have been written by a Chinese
+      immigrant in San Francisco, detailing his experience there. In a
+      note the author says: “No experience is set down in the following
+      letters which had to be invented. Fancy is not needed to give
+      variety to the history of the Chinaman's sojourn in America.
+      Plain fact is amply sufficient.” The letters show how the
+      supposed Chinese writer of them had set out for America,
+      believing it to be a land whose government was based on the
+      principle that all men are created equal, and treated
+      accordingly; how, upon arriving in San Francisco, he was kicked
+      and bruised and beaten, and set upon by dogs, flung into jail,
+      tried and condemned without witnesses, his own race not being
+      allowed to testify against Americans—Irish-Americans—in the San
+      Francisco court. They are scathing, powerful letters, and one
+      cannot read them, even in this day of improved conditions,
+      without feeling the hot waves of resentment and indignation which
+      Mark Twain must have felt when he penned them.
+
+      Reverend Mr. Talmage was not the only divine to receive attention
+      in the “Memoranda.” The Reverend Mr. Sabine, of New York, who had
+      declined to hold a church burial service for the old actor,
+      George Holland, came in for the most caustic as well as the most
+      artistic stricture of the entire series. It deserves preservation
+      to-day, not only for its literary value, but because no finer
+      defense of the drama, no more searching sermon on
+      self-righteousness, has ever been put into concrete form.—[“The
+      Indignity Put Upon the Remains of Gorge Holland by the Rev. Mr.
+      Sabine”; Galaxy for February, 1871. The reader will find it
+      complete under Appendix J, at the end of last volume.]
+
+      The “Little Church Around the Corner” on Twenty-ninth Street
+      received that happy title from this incident.
+
+      “There is a little church around the corner that will, perhaps,
+      permit the service,” Mr. Sabine had said to Holland's friends.
+
+      The little church did permit the service, and there was conferred
+      upon it the new name, which it still bears. It has sheltered a
+      long line of actor folk and their friends since then, earning
+      thereby reverence, gratitude, and immortal memory.—[Church of the
+      Transfiguration. Memorial services were held there for Joseph
+      Jefferson; and a memorial window, by John La Farge, has been
+      placed there in memory of Edwin Booth.]
+
+      Of the Galaxy contributions a number are preserved in Sketches
+      New and Old. “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper” is one of the
+      best of these—an excellent example of Mark Twain's more
+      extravagant style of humor. It is perennially delightful; in
+      France it has been dramatized, and is still played.
+
+      A successful Galaxy feature, also preserved in the Sketches, was
+      the “Burlesque Map of Paris,” reprinted from the Express. The
+      Franco-Prussian War was in progress, and this travesty was
+      particularly timely. It creates only a smile of amusement to-day,
+      but it was all fresh and delightful then. Schuyler Colfax, by
+      this time Vice-President, wrote to him: “I have had the heartiest
+      possible laugh over it, and so have all my family. You are a
+      wicked, conscienceless wag, who ought to be punished severely.”
+
+      The “Official Commendations,” which accompany the map, are its
+      chief charm. They are from Grant, Bismarck, Brigham Young, and
+      others, the best one coming from one J. Smith, who says:
+
+    My wife was for years afflicted with freckles, and though
+    everything was done for her relief that could be done, all was in
+    vain. But, sir, since her first glance at your map they have
+    entirely left her. She has nothing but convulsions now.
+
+      It is said that the “Map of Paris” found its way to Berlin, where
+      the American students in the beer-halls used to pretend to
+      quarrel over it until they attracted the attention of the German
+      soldiers that might be present. Then they would wander away and
+      leave it on the table and watch results. The soldiers would
+      pounce upon it and lose their tempers over it; then finally abuse
+      it and revile its author, to the satisfaction of everybody.
+
+      The larger number of “Memoranda” sketches have properly found
+      oblivion to-day. They were all, or nearly all, collected by a
+      Canadian pirate, C. A. Backas, in a volume bearing the title of
+      Memoranda,—[Also by a harpy named John Camden Hotten (of London),
+      of whom we shall hear again. Hotten had already pirated The
+      Innocents, and had it on the market before Routledge could bring
+      out the authorized edition. Routledge later published the
+      “Memoranda” under the title of Sketches, including the contents
+      of the Jumping Frog book.]—a book long ago suppressed. Only about
+      twenty of the Galaxy contributions found place in Sketches New
+      and Old, five years later, and some of these might have been
+      spared as literature. “To Raise Poultry,” “John Chinaman in New
+      York,” and “History Repeats Itself” are valuable only as examples
+      of his work at that period. The reader may consult them for
+      himself.
+
+
+
+
+      LXXVIII. THE PRIMROSE PATH
+
+
+      But we are losing sight of more important things. From the very
+      beginning Mark Twain's home meant always more to him than his
+      work. The life at 472 Delaware Avenue had begun with as fair a
+      promise as any matrimonial journey ever undertaken: There seemed
+      nothing lacking: a beautiful home, sufficient income, bright
+      prospects—these things, with health and love; constitute married
+      happiness. Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister, Mrs. Crane, at the
+      end of February: “Sue, we are two as happy people as you ever
+      saw. Our days seem to be made up of only bright sunlight, with no
+      shadow in them.” In the same letter the husband added: “Livy
+      pines and pines every day for you, and I pine and pine every day
+      for you, and when we both of us are pining at once you would
+      think it was a whole pine forest let loose.”
+
+      To Redpath, who was urging lecture engagements for the coming
+      season, he wrote:
+
+    DEAR RED,—I am not going to lecture any more forever. I have got
+    things ciphered down to a fraction now. I know just about what it
+    will cost to live, and I can make the money without lecturing.
+    Therefore, old man, count me out.
+
+      And still later, in May:
+
+    I guess I am out of the field permanently. Have got a lovely wife,
+    a lovely house, bewitchingly furnished, a lovely carriage, and a
+    coachman whose style and dignity are simply awe-in-spiring, nothing
+    less; and I am making more money than necessary, by considerable,
+    and therefore why crucify myself nightly on the platform? The
+    subscriber will have to be excused for the present season at least.
+
+      So they were very happy during those early months, acquiring
+      pleasantly the education which any matrimonial experience is sure
+      to furnish, accustoming themselves to the uses of housekeeping,
+      to life in partnership, with all the discoveries and mental and
+      spiritual adaptations that belong to the close association of
+      marriage. They were far, very far, apart on many subjects. He was
+      unpolished, untrained, impulsive, sometimes violent. Twichell
+      remembers that in the earlier days of their acquaintance he wore
+      a slouch hat pulled down in front, and smoked a cigar that
+      sometimes tilted up and touched the brim of it. The atmosphere
+      and customs of frontier life, the Westernisms of that day, still
+      clung to him. Mrs. Clemens, on the other hand, was conservative,
+      dainty, cultured, spiritual. He adored her as little less than a
+      saint, and she became, indeed, his saving grace. She had all the
+      personal refinement which he lacked, and she undertook the work
+      of polishing and purifying her life companion. She had no wish to
+      destroy his personality, to make him over, but only to preserve
+      his best, and she set about it in the right way—gently, and with
+      a tender gratitude in each achievement.
+
+      She did not entirely approve of certain lines of his reading; or,
+      rather, she did not understand them in those days. That he should
+      be fond of history and the sciences was natural enough, but when
+      the Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself, appeared, and he
+      sat up nights to absorb it, and woke early and lighted the lamp
+      to follow the career of the great showman, she was at a loss to
+      comprehend this particular literary passion, and indeed was
+      rather jealous of it. She did not realize then his vast interest
+      in the study of human nature, or that such a book contained what
+      Mr. Howells calls “the root of the human matter,” the inner
+      revelation of the human being at first hand.
+
+      Concerning his religious observances her task in the beginning
+      was easy enough. Clemens had not at that time formulated any
+      particular doctrines of his own. His natural kindness of heart,
+      and especially his love for his wife, inclined him toward the
+      teachings and customs of her Christian faith—unorthodox but
+      sincere, as Christianity in the Langdon family was likely to be.
+      It took very little persuasion on his wife's part to establish
+      family prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the morning
+      reading of a Bible chapter. Joe Goodman, who made a trip East,
+      and visited them during the early days of their married life, was
+      dumfounded to see Mark Twain ask a blessing and join in family
+      worship. Just how long these forms continued cannot be known
+      to-day; the time of their abandonment has perished from the
+      recollection of any one now living.
+
+      It would seem to have been the Bible-reading that wrought the
+      change. The prayer and the blessing were to him sincere and
+      gracious; but as the readings continued he realized that he had
+      never before considered the Bible from a doctrinal point of view,
+      as a guide to spiritual salvation. To his logical reasoning mind,
+      a large portion of it seemed absurd: a mass of fables and
+      traditions, mere mythology. From such material humanity had built
+      its mightiest edifice of hope, the doctrines of its faith. After
+      a little while he could stand it no longer.
+
+      “Livy,” he said one day, “you may keep this up if you want to,
+      but I must ask you to excuse me from it. It is making me a
+      hypocrite. I don't believe in this Bible. It contradicts my
+      reason. I can't sit here and listen to it, letting you believe
+      that I regard it, as you do, in the light of gospel, the word of
+      God.”
+
+      He was moved to write an article on the human idea of God,
+      ancient and modern. It contained these paragraphs:
+
+    The difference in importance, between the God of the Bible and the
+    God of the present day, cannot be described, it can only be vaguely
+    and inadequately figured to the mind.... If you make figures to
+    represent the earth and moon, and allow a space of one inch between
+    them, to represent the four hundred thousand miles of distance
+    which lies between the two bodies, the map will have to be eleven
+    miles long in order to bring in the nearest fixed star. —[His
+    figures were far too small. A map drawn on the scale of 400,000
+    miles to the inch would need to be 1,100 miles long to take in both
+    the earth and the nearest fixed star. On such a map the earth would
+    be one-fiftieth of an inch in diameter—the size of a small grain of
+    sand.]—So one cannot put the modern heavens on a map, nor the
+    modern God; but the Bible God and the Bible heavens can be set down
+    on a slate and yet not be discommoded....
+    The difference between that universe and the modern one revealed by
+    science is as the difference between a dust-flecked ray in a barn
+    and the sublime arch of the Milky Way in the skies. Its God was
+    strictly proportioned to its dimensions. His sole solicitude was
+    about a handful of truculent nomads. He worried and fretted over
+    them in a peculiarly and distractingly human way. One day he coaxed
+    and petted them beyond their due, the next he harried and lashed
+    them beyond their deserts. He sulked, he cursed, he raged, he
+    grieved, according to his mood and the circumstances, but all to no
+    purpose; his efforts were all vain, he could not govern them. When
+    the fury was on him he was blind to all reason—he not only
+    slaughtered the offender, but even his harmless little children and
+    dumb cattle....
+    To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive,
+    fierce and ever fickle and changeful master; to trust the true God
+    is to trust a Being who has uttered no promises, but whose
+    beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of his
+    colossal universe is proof that he is at least steadfast to his
+    purposes; whose unwritten laws, so far as they affect man, being
+    equal and impartial, show that he is just and fair; these things,
+    taken together, suggest that if he shall ordain us to live
+    hereafter, he will still be steadfast, just, and fair toward us. We
+    shall not need to require anything more.
+
+      It seems mild enough, obvious, even orthodox, now—so far have we
+      traveled in forty years. But such a declaration then would have
+      shocked a great number of sincerely devout persons. His wife
+      prevailed upon him not to print it. She respected his
+      honesty—even his reasoning, but his doubts were a long grief to
+      her, nevertheless. In time she saw more clearly with his vision,
+      but this was long after, when she had lived more with the world,
+      had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the
+      proportions of created things.
+
+      They did not mingle much or long with the social life of Buffalo.
+      They received and returned calls, attended an occasional
+      reception; but neither of them found such things especially
+      attractive in those days, so they remained more and more in their
+      own environment. There is an anecdote which seems to belong here.
+
+      One Sunday morning Clemens noticed smoke pouring from the upper
+      window of the house across the street. The owner and his wife,
+      comparatively newcomers, were seated upon the veranda, evidently
+      not aware of impending danger. The Clemens household thus far had
+      delayed calling on them, but Clemens himself now stepped briskly
+      across the street. Bowing with leisurely politeness, he said:
+
+      “My name is Clemens; we ought to have called on you before, and I
+      beg your pardon for intruding now in this informal way, but your
+      house is on fire.”
+
+      Almost the only intimate friends they had in Buffalo were in the
+      family of David Gray, the poet-editor of the Courier. Gray was a
+      gentle, lovable man. “The gentlest spirit and the loveliest that
+      ever went clothed in clay, since Sir Galahad laid him to rest,”
+      Mark Twain once said of him. Both Gray and Clemens were friends
+      of John Hay, and their families soon became intimate. Perhaps, in
+      time, the Clemens household would have found other as good
+      friends in the Buffalo circles; but heavy clouds that had lain
+      unseen just beyond the horizon during those earlier months of
+      marriage rose suddenly into view, and the social life, whatever
+      it might have become, was no longer a consideration.
+
+
+
+
+      LXXIX. THE OLD HUMAN STORY
+
+
+      Jervis Langdon was never able to accept his son-in-law's
+      invitation to the new home. His health began to fail that spring,
+      and at the end of March, with his physician and Mrs. Langdon, he
+      made a trip to the South. In a letter written at Richmond he
+      said, “I have thrown off all care,” and named a list of the four
+      great interests in which he was involved. Under “number 5,” he
+      included “everything,” adding, “so you see how good I am to
+      follow the counsel of my children.” He closed: “Samuel, I love
+      your wife and she loves me. I think it is only fair that you
+      should know it, but you need not flare up. I loved her before you
+      did, and she loved me before she did you, and has not ceased
+      since. I see no way but for you to make the most of it.” He was
+      already a very ill man, and this cheerful letter was among the
+      last he ever wrote.
+
+      He was absent six weeks and seemed to improve, but suffered an
+      attack early in May; in June his condition became critical.
+      Clemens and his wife were summoned to Elmira, and joined in the
+      nursing, day and night. Clemens surprised every one by his
+      ability as a nurse. His delicacy and thoughtfulness were
+      unfailing; his original ways of doing things always amused and
+      interested the patient. In later years Mark Twain once said:
+
+    “How much of the nursing did I do? My main watch was from midnight
+    to four in the morning, nearly four hours. My other watch was a
+    midday watch, and I think it was nearly three hours. The two
+    sisters divided the remaining seventeen hours of the twenty-four
+    hours between them, and each of them tried generously and
+    persistently to swindle the other out of a part of her watch. I
+    went to bed early every night, and tried to get sleep enough by
+    midnight to fit me for my work, but it was always a failure. I went
+    on watch sleepy and remained miserable, sleepy, and wretched,
+    straight along through the four hours. I can still see myself
+    sitting by that bed in the melancholy stillness of the sweltering
+    night, mechanically waving a palm-leaf fan over the drawn, white
+    face of the patient. I can still recall my noddings, my fleeting
+    unconsciousness, when the fan would come to a standstill in my
+    hand, and I woke up with a start and a hideous shock. During all
+    that dreary time I began to watch for the dawn long before it came.
+    When the first faint gray showed through the window-blinds I felt
+    as no doubt a castaway feels when the dim threads of the looked-for
+    ship appear against the sky. I was well and strong, but I was a
+    man, afflicted with a man's infirmity—lack of endurance.”
+
+      He always dealt with himself in this unsparing way; but those who
+      were about him then have left a different story.
+
+      It was all without avail. Mr. Langdon rallied, and early in July
+      there was hope for his recovery. He failed again, and on the
+      afternoon of the 6th of August he died. To Mrs. Clemens, delicate
+      and greatly worn with the anxiety and strain of watching, the
+      blow was a crushing one. It was the beginning of a series of
+      disasters which would mark the entire remaining period of their
+      Buffalo residence.
+
+      There had been a partial plan for spending the summer in England,
+      and a more definite one for joining the Twichells in the
+      Adirondacks. Both of these projects were now abandoned. Mrs.
+      Clemens concluded that she would be better at home than anywhere
+      else, and invited an old school friend, a Miss Emma Nye, to visit
+      her.
+
+      But the shadow of death had not been lifted from the Clemens
+      household. Miss Nye presently fell ill with typhoid fever. There
+      followed another long period of anxiety and nursing, ending with
+      the death of the visitor in the new home, September 29th. The
+      young wife was now in very delicate health; genuinely ill, in
+      fact. The happy home had become a place of sorrow-of troubled
+      nights and days. Another friend came to cheer them, and on this
+      friend's departure Mrs. Clemens drove to the railway station. It
+      was a hurried trip over rough streets to catch the train. She was
+      prostrated on her return, and a little later, November 7, 1870,
+      her first child, Langdon, was prematurely born. A dangerous
+      illness followed, and complete recovery was long delayed. But on
+      the 12th the crisis seemed passed, and the new father wrote a
+      playful letter to the Twichells, as coming from the late arrival:
+
+    DEAR UNCLE AND AUNT,—I came into the world on the 7th inst., and
+    consequently am about five days old now. I have had wretched health
+    ever since I made my appearance... I am not corpulent, nor am I
+    robust in any way. At birth I only weighed four and one-half pounds
+    with my clothes on—and the clothes were the chief feature of the
+    weight, too, I am obliged to confess, but I am doing finely, all
+    things considered.... My little mother is very bright and cheery,
+    and I guess she is pretty happy, but I don't know what about. She
+    laughs a great deal, notwithstanding she is sick abed.
+    P. S.—Father says I had better write because you will be more
+    interested in me, just now, than in the rest of the family.
+
+      A week later Clemens, as himself, wrote:
+
+    Livy is up and the prince keeps her busy and anxious these latter
+    days and nights, but I am a bachelor up-stairs and don't have to
+    jump up and get the soothing sirup, though I would as soon do it as
+    not, I assure you. (Livy will be certain to read this letter.)
+    Tell Harmony that I do hold the baby, and do it pretty handily too,
+    though with occasional apprehensions that his loose head will fall
+    off. I don't have to quiet him; he hardly ever utters a cry. He is
+    always thinking about something. He is a patient, good little baby.
+
+      Further along he refers to one of his reforms:
+
+    Smoke? I always smoke from three till five on Sunday afternoons,
+    and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week, day and night. But
+    when Livy is well I smoke only those two hours on Sunday. I'm boss
+    of the habit now, and shall never let it boss me any more.
+    Originally I quit solely on Livy's account (not that I believed
+    there was the faintest reason in the matter, but just as I would
+    deprive myself of sugar in my coffee if she wished it, or quit
+    wearing socks if she thought them immoral), and I stick to it yet
+    on Livy's account, and shall always continue to do so without a
+    pang. But somehow it seems a pity that you quit, for Mrs. T. didn't
+    mind it, if I remember rightly. Ah, it is turning one's back upon a
+    kindly Providence to spurn away from us the good creature he sent
+    to make the breath of life a luxury as well as a necessity,
+    enjoyable as well as useful. To go quit smoking, when there ain't
+    any sufficient excuse for it!—why, my old boy, when they used to
+    tell me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little
+    knew the devotee they were wasting their puerile words upon; they
+    little knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that
+    had no smoking in it! But I won't persuade you, Twichell—I won't
+    until I see you again—but then we'll smoke for a week together, and
+    then shut off again.
+
+
+
+
+      LXXX. LITERARY PROJECTS
+
+
+      The success of the Innocents naturally made a thrifty publisher
+      like Bliss anxious for a second experiment. He had begun early in
+      the year to talk about another book, but nothing had come of it
+      beyond a project or two, more or less hazy and unpursued. Clemens
+      at one time developed a plan for a Noah's Ark book, which was to
+      detail the cruise of the Ark in diaries kept by various members
+      of it-Shem, Ham, and the others. He really wrote some of it at
+      the time, and it was an idea he never entirely lost track of. All
+      along among his manuscripts appear fragments from those ancient
+      voyagers. One of the earlier entries will show the style and
+      purpose of the undertaking. It is from Shem's record:
+
+    Friday: Papa's birthday. He is 600 years old. We celebrated it in a
+    big, black tent. Principal men of the tribe present. Afterward they
+    were shown over the ark, which was looking desolate and empty and
+    dreary on account of a misunderstanding with the workmen about
+    wages. Methuselah was as free with his criticisms as usual, and as
+    voluble and familiar, which I and my brothers do not like; for we
+    are past our one hundredth year and married. He still calls me
+    Shemmy, just as he did when I was a child of sixty. I am still but
+    a youth, it is true, but youth has its feelings, and I do not like
+    this....
+    Saturday: Keeping the Sabbath.
+    Sunday: Papa has yielded the advance and everybody is hard at work.
+    The shipyard is so crowded that the men hinder each other;
+    everybody hurrying or being hurried; the rush and confusion and
+    shouting and wrangling are astonishing to our family, who have
+    always been used to a quiet, country life.
+
+      It was from this germ that in a later day grew the diaries of
+      Adam and Eve, though nothing very satisfactory ever came of this
+      preliminary attempt. The author had faith in it, however. To
+      Bliss he wrote:
+
+    I mean to take plenty of time and pains with the Noah's Ark book;
+    maybe it will be several years before it is all written, but it
+    will be a perfect lightning striker when it is done.
+    You can have the first say (that is plain enough) on that or any
+    other book I may prepare for the press, as long as you deal in a
+    fair, open, and honorable way with me. I do not think you will ever
+    find me doing otherwise with you. I can get a book ready for you
+    any time you want it; but you can't want one before this time next
+    year, so I have plenty of time.
+
+      Bliss was only temporarily appeased. He realized that to get a
+      book ready by the time he wanted it-a book of sufficient size and
+      importance to maintain the pace set by the Innocents meant rather
+      more immediate action than his author seemed to contemplate.
+      Futhermore, he knew that other publishers were besieging the
+      author of the Innocents; a disquieting thought. In early July,
+      when Mr. Langdon's condition had temporarily improved, Bliss had
+      come to Elmira and proposed a book which should relate the
+      author's travels and experiences in the Far West. It was an
+      inviting subject, and Clemens, by this time more attracted by the
+      idea of authorship and its rewards, readily enough agreed to
+      undertake the volume. He had been offered half profits, and
+      suggested that the new contract be arranged upon these terms.
+      Bliss, figuring on a sale of 100,000 copies, proposed seven and
+      one-half per cent. royalty as an equivalent, and the contract was
+      so arranged. In after-years, when the cost of manufacture and
+      paper had become greatly reduced, Clemens, with but a confused
+      notion of business details, believed he had been misled by Bliss
+      in this contract, and was bitter and resentful accordingly. The
+      figures remain, however, to show that Bliss dealt fairly. Seven
+      and one-half per cent. of a subscription book did represent half
+      profits up to 100,000 copies when the contract was drawn; but it
+      required ten years to sell that quantity, and in that time
+      conditions had changed. Bliss could hardly foresee that these
+      things would be so, and as he was dead when the book touched the
+      100,000 mark he could not explain or readjust matters, whatever
+      might have been his inclination.
+
+      Clemens was pleased enough with the contract when it was made. To
+      Orion he wrote July 15 (1870):
+
+    Per contract I must have another six-hundred-page book ready for my
+    publisher January 1st, and I only began it to-day. The subject of
+    it is a secret, because I may possibly change it. But as it stands
+    I propose to do up Nevada and California, beginning with the trip
+    across the country in the stage. Have you a memorandum of the route
+    we took, or the names of any of the stations we stopped at? Do you
+    remember any of the scenes, names, incidents, or adventures of the
+    coach trip?—for I remember next to nothing about the matter. Jot
+    down a foolscap page of items for me. I wish I could have two days'
+    talk with you.
+    I suppose I am to get the biggest copyright this time ever paid on
+    a subscription book in this country.
+
+      The work so promptly begun made little progress. Hard days of
+      illness and sorrow followed, and it was not until September that
+      it was really under way. His natural enthusiasm over any new
+      undertaking possessed him. On the 4th he wrote Bliss:
+
+      During the past week I have written the first four chapters of
+      the book, and I tell you 'The Innocents Abroad' will have to get
+      up early to beat it. It will be a book that will jump straight
+      into continental celebrity the first month it is issued.
+
+      He prophesied a sale of 90,000 copies during the first twelve
+      months and declared, “I see the capabilities of the subject.”
+
+      But further disasters, even then impending, made continued effort
+      impossible; the prospect of the new book for a time became
+      gloomy, the idea of it less inspiring. Other plans presented
+      themselves, and at one time he thought of letting the Galaxy
+      publishers get out a volume of his sketches. In October he wrote
+      Bliss that he was “driveling along tolerably fair on the book,
+      getting off from twelve to twenty pages of manuscript a day.”
+      Bliss naturally discouraged the Galaxy idea, and realizing that
+      the new book might be long delayed, agreed to get out a volume of
+      miscellany sufficiently large and important for subscription
+      sales. He was doubtful of the wisdom of this plan, and when
+      Clemens suddenly proposed a brand-new scheme his publisher very
+      readily agreed to hold back the publication of Sketches
+      indefinitely.
+
+      The new book was to be adventures in the diamond mines of South
+      Africa, then newly opened and of wide public interest. Clemens
+      did not propose to visit the mines himself, but to let another
+      man do the traveling, make the notes, and write or tell him the
+      story, after which Clemens would enlarge and elaborate it in his
+      own fashion. His adaptation of the letters of Professor Ford, a
+      year earlier, had convinced him that his plan would work out
+      successfully on a larger scale; he fixed upon his old friend, J.
+      H. Riley, of Washington—[“Riley-Newspaper Correspondent.” See
+      Sketches.]—(earlier of San Francisco), as the proper person to do
+      the traveling. At the end of November he wrote Bliss:
+
+    I have put my greedy hands upon the best man in America for my
+    purpose, and shall start him to the diamond field in South Africa
+    within a fortnight at my expense... that the book will have a
+    perfectly beautiful sale.
+
+      He suggested that Bliss advance Riley's expense money, the amount
+      to be deducted from the first royalty returns; also he proposed
+      an increased royalty, probably in view of the startling splendor
+      of the new idea. Bliss was duly impressed, and the agreement was
+      finally made on a basis of eight and one-half per cent., with an
+      advance of royalty sufficient to see Riley to South Africa and
+      return.
+
+      Clemens had not yet heard from Riley definitely when he wrote his
+      glowing letter to Bliss. He took it for granted that Riley,
+      always an adventurous sort, would go. When Riley wrote him that
+      he felt morally bound to the Alta, of which he was then
+      Washington correspondent, also in certain other directions till
+      the end of the session, Clemens wrote him at great length,
+      detailing his scheme in full and urging him to write instantly to
+      the Alta and others, asking a release on the ground of being
+      offered a rare opportunity to improve his fortunes.
+
+      You know right well that I would not have you depart a hair from
+      any obligation for any money. The boundless confidence that I
+      have in you is born of a conviction of your integrity in small as
+      well as in great things. I know plenty of men whose integrity I
+      would trust to here, but not off yonder in Africa.
+
+      His proposal, in brief, to Riley was that the latter should make
+      the trip to Africa without expense to himself, collect memoranda,
+      and such diamond mines as might be found lying about handy. Upon
+      his return he was to take up temporary residence in the Clemens
+      household until the book was finished, after which large benefits
+      were to accrue to everybody concerned. In the end Riley obtained
+      a release from his obligations and was off for the diamond mines
+      and fortune.
+
+      Poor fellow! He was faithful in his mission, and it is said that
+      he really located a mining claim that would have made him and his
+      independent for all time to come; but returning home with his
+      precious memoranda and the news of good fortune, he accidentally
+      wounded himself with a fork while eating; blood-poisoning set in
+      (they called it cancer then), and he was only able to get home to
+      die. His memoranda were never used, his mining claim was never
+      identified. Certainly, death was closely associated with Mark
+      Twain's fortunes during those earlier days of his married life.
+
+      On the whole the Buffalo residence was mainly a gloomy one; its
+      ventures were attended by ill-fortune. For some reason Mark
+      Twain's connection with the Express, while it had given the paper
+      a wide reputation, had not largely increased its subscription.
+      Perhaps his work on it was too varied and erratic. Nasby, who had
+      popularized the Toledo Blade, kept steadily to one line. His
+      farmer public knew always just what to expect when their weekly
+      edition arrived.
+
+      Clemens and his wife dreamed of a new habitation, and new faces
+      and surroundings. They agreed to offer their home and his
+      interests in the Express for sale. They began to talk of
+      Hartford, where Twichell lived, and where Orion Clemens and his
+      wife had recently located.
+
+      Mark Twain's new fortunes had wrought changes in the affairs of
+      his relatives. Already, before his marriage, he had prospected
+      towns here and there with a view to finding an Eastern residence
+      for his mother and sister, and he had kept Orion's welfare always
+      in mind. When Pamela and her daughter came to his wedding he told
+      them of a little city by the name of Fredonia (New York), not far
+      from Buffalo, where he thought they might find a pleasant home.
+
+      “I went in there by night and out by night,” he said, “so I saw
+      none of it, but I had an intelligent, attractive audience.
+      Prospect Fredonia and let me know what it is like. Try to select
+      a place where a good many funerals pass. Ma likes funerals. If
+      you can pick a good funeral corner she will be happy.”
+
+      It was in her later life that Jane Clemens had developed this
+      particular passion. She would consult the morning paper for any
+      notice of obsequies and attend those that were easy of access.
+      Watching the processions go by gave her a peculiar joy. Mrs.
+      Moffett and her daughter did go to Fredonia immediately following
+      the wedding. They found it residentially attractive, and rented a
+      house before returning to St. Louis, a promptness that somewhat
+      alarmed the old lady, who did not altogether fancy the idea of
+      being suddenly set down in a strange house, in a strange land,
+      even though it would be within hailing distance of Sam and his
+      new wife. Perhaps the Fredonia funerals were sufficiently
+      numerous and attractive, for she soon became attached to the
+      place, and entered into the spirit of the life there, joining its
+      temperance crusades, and the like, with zest and enjoyment.
+
+      Onion remained in St. Louis, but when Bliss established a paper
+      called The Publisher, and wanted an editor, he was chosen for the
+      place, originally offered to his brother; the latter, writing to
+      Onion, said:
+
+      If you take the place with an air of perfect confidence in
+      yourself, never once letting anything show in your bearing but a
+      quiet, modest, entire, and perfect confidence in your ability to
+      do pretty much anything in the world, Bliss will think you are
+      the very man he needs; but don't show any shadow of timidity or
+      unsoldierly diffidence, for that sort of thing is fatal to
+      advancement.
+
+      I warn you thus because you are naturally given to knocking your
+      pot over in this way, when a little judicious conduct would make
+      it boil.
+
+
+
+
+      LXXXI. SOME FURTHER LITERARY MATTERS
+
+
+      Meantime The Innocents Abroad had continued to prosper. Its
+      author ranked mainly as a humorist, but of such colossal
+      proportions that his contemporaries had seemed to dwindle; the
+      mighty note of the “Frog of Calaveras” had dwarfed a score of
+      smaller peepers. At the end of a year from its date of
+      publication the book had sold up to 67,000 and was continuing at
+      the rate of several thousand monthly.
+
+      “You are running it in staving, tiptop, first-class style,”
+      Clemens wrote to Bliss. “On the average ten people a day come and
+      hunt me up to tell me I am a benefactor! I guess that is a part
+      of the program we didn't expect, in the first place.”
+
+      Apparently the book appealed to readers of every grade. One
+      hundred and fifteen copies were in constant circulation at the
+      Mercantile Library, in New York, while in the most remote cabins
+      of America it was read and quoted. Jack Van Nostrand, making a
+      long horseback tour of Colorado, wrote:
+
+      I stopped a week ago in a ranch but a hundred miles from nowhere.
+      The occupant had just two books: the Bible and The Innocents
+      Abroad—the former in good repair.
+
+      Across the ocean the book had found no less favor, and was being
+      translated into many and strange tongues. By what seems now some
+      veritable magic its author's fame had become literally universal.
+      The consul at Hongkong, discussing English literature with a
+      Chinese acquaintance, a mandarin, mentioned The Pilgrim's
+      Progress.
+
+      “Yes, indeed, I have read it!” the mandarin said, eagerly. “We
+      are enjoying it in China, and shall have it soon in our own
+      language. It is by Mark Twain.”
+
+      In England the book had an amazing vogue from the beginning, and
+      English readers were endeavoring to outdo the Americans in
+      appreciation. Indeed, as a rule, English readers of culture,
+      critical readers, rose to an understanding of Mark Twain's
+      literary value with greater promptness than did the same class of
+      readers at home. There were exceptions, of course. There were
+      English critics who did not take Mark Twain seriously, there were
+      American critics who did. Among the latter was a certain William
+      Ward, an editor of a paper down in Macon, Georgia—The Beacon.
+      Ward did not hold a place with the great magazine arbiters of
+      literary rank. He was only an obscure country editor, but he
+      wrote like a prophet. His article—too long to quote in
+      full—concerned American humorists in general, from Washington
+      Irving, through John Phoenix, Philander Doesticks, Sut
+      Lovingwood, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings and Petroleum V. Nasby,
+      down to Mark Twain. With the exception of the first and last
+      named he says of them:
+
+    They have all had, or will have, their day. Some of them are
+    resting beneath the sod, and others still live whose work will
+    scarcely survive them. Since Irving no humorist in prose has held
+    the foundation of a permanent fame except it be Mark Twain, and
+    this, as in the case of Irving, is because he is a pure writer.
+    Aside from any subtle mirth that lurks through his composition, the
+    grace and finish of his more didactic and descriptive sentences
+    indicate more than mediocrity.
+
+      The writer then refers to Mark Twain's description of the Sphinx,
+      comparing it with Bulwer's, which he thinks may have influenced
+      it. He was mistaken in this, for Clemens had not read
+      Bulwer—never could read him at any length.
+
+      Of the English opinions, that of The Saturday Review was perhaps
+      most doubtful. It came along late in 1870, and would hardly be
+      worth recalling if it were not for a resulting, or collateral,
+      interest. Clemens saw notice of this review before he saw the
+      review itself. A paragraph in the Boston Advertiser spoke of The
+      Saturday Review as treating the absurdities of the Innocents from
+      a serious standpoint. The paragraph closed:
+
+    We can imagine the delight of the humorist in reading this tribute
+    to his power; and indeed it is so amusing in itself that he can
+    hardly do better than reproduce the article in full in his next
+    monthly “Memoranda.”
+
+      The old temptation to hoax his readers prompted Mark Twain to
+      “reproduce” in the Galaxy, not the Review article, which he had
+      not yet seen, but an imaginary Review article, an article in
+      which the imaginary reviewer would be utterly devoid of any sense
+      of humor and treat the most absurd incidents of The New Pilgrim's
+      Progress as if set down by the author in solemn and serious
+      earnest. The pretended review began:
+
+    Lord Macaulay died too soon. We never felt this so deeply as when
+    we finished the last chapter of the above-named extravagant work.
+    Macaulay died too soon; for none but he could mete out complete and
+    comprehensive justice to the insolence, the impudence, the
+    presumption, the mendacity, and, above all, the majestic ignorance
+    of this author.
+
+      The review goes on to cite cases of the author's gross deception.
+      It says:
+
+    Let the cultivated English student of human nature picture to
+    himself this Mark Twain as a person capable of doing the following
+    described things; and not only doing them, but, with incredible
+    innocence, printing them tranquilly and calmly in a book. For
+    instance:
+    He states that he entered a hair-dresser's in Paris to get a shave,
+    and the first “rake” the barber gave him with his razor it loosened
+    his “hide,” and lifted him out of the chair.
+    This is unquestionably extravagant. In Florence he was so annoyed
+    by beggars that he pretends to have seized and eaten one in a
+    frantic spirit of revenge. There is, of course, no truth in this.
+    He gives at full length the theatrical program, seventeen or
+    eighteen hundred years old, which he professes to have found in the
+    ruins of the Colosseum, among the dirt-and mold and rubbish. It is
+    a sufficient comment upon this subject to remark that even a cast-
+    iron program would not have lasted so long under the circumstances.
+
+      There were two and one-half pages of this really delightful
+      burlesque which the author had written with huge-enjoyment,
+      partly as a joke on the Review, partly to trick American editors,
+      who he believed would accept it as a fresh and startling proof of
+      the traditional English lack of humor.
+
+      But, as in the early sage-brush hoaxes, he rather overdid the
+      thing. Readers and editors readily enough accepted it as genuine,
+      so far as having come from The Saturday Review; but most of them,
+      regarded it as a delicious bit of humor which Mark Twain himself
+      had taken seriously, and was therefore the one sold. This was
+      certainly startling, and by no means gratifying. In the next
+      issue he undertook that saddest of all performances with tongue
+      or pen: he explained his joke, and insisted on the truth of the
+      explanation. Then he said:
+
+    If any man doubts my word now I will kill him. No, I will not kill
+    him; I will win his money. I will bet him twenty to one, and let
+    any New York publisher hold the stakes, that the statements I have
+    above made as to the authorship of the article in question are
+    entirely true.
+
+      But the Cincinnati Enquirer persisted in continuing the joke—in
+      “rubbing it in,” as we say now. The Enquirer declared that Mark
+      Twain had been intensely mortified at having been so badly taken
+      in; that his explanation in the Galaxy was “ingenious, but
+      unfortunately not true.” The Enquirer maintained that The
+      Saturday Review of October 8, 1870, did contain the article
+      exactly as printed in the “Memoranda,” and advised Mark Twain to
+      admit that he was sold, and say no more about it.
+
+      This was enraging. Mark Twain had his own ideas as to how far a
+      joke might be carried without violence, and this was a good way
+      beyond the limits. He denounced the Enquirer's statement as a
+      “pitiful, deliberate falsehood,” in his anger falling into the
+      old-time phrasing of newspaper editorial abuse. He offered to bet
+      them a thousand dollars in cash that they could not prove their
+      assertions, and asked pointedly, in conclusion: “Will they
+      swallow that falsehood ignominiously, or will they send an agent
+      to the Galaxy office? I think the Cincinnati Enquirer must be
+      edited by children.” He promised that if they did not accept his
+      financial proposition he would expose them in the next issue.
+
+      The incident closed there. He was prevented, by illness in his
+      household, from contributing to the next issue, and the second
+      issue following was his final “Memoranda” installment. So the
+      matter perished and was forgotten. It was his last editorial
+      hoax. Perhaps he concluded that hoaxes in any form were dangerous
+      playthings; they were too likely to go off at the wrong end.
+
+      It was with the April number (1871) that he concluded his
+      relations with the Galaxy. In a brief valedictory he gave his
+      reasons:
+
+    I have now written for the Galaxy a year. For the last eight
+    months, with hardly an interval, I have had for my fellows and
+    comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the sick! During
+    these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle
+    and malignantly threatened two others. All this I have experienced,
+    yet all the time have been under contract to furnish “humorous”
+    matter, once a month, for this magazine. I am speaking the exact
+    truth in the above details. Please to put yourself in my place and
+    contemplate the grisly grotesqueness of the situation. I think that
+    some of the “humor” I have written during this period could have
+    been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the
+    solemnity of the occasion.
+    The “Memoranda” will cease permanently with this issue of the
+    magazine. To be a pirate on a low salary, and with no share in the
+    profits of the business, used to be my idea of an uncomfortable
+    occupation, but I have other views now. To be a monthly humorist in
+    a cheerless time is drearier.
+
+      Without doubt he felt a glad relief in being rid of this
+      recurrent, imperative demand. He wrote to Orion that he had told
+      the Galaxy people he would not write another article, long or
+      short, for less than $500, and preferred not to do it at all.
+
+      The Galaxy department and the work on the Express were Mark
+      Twain's farewell to journalism; for the “Memoranda” was
+      essentially journalistic, almost as much so, and as liberally, as
+      his old-time Enterprise position. Apparently he wrote with
+      absolute freedom, unhampered by editorial policy or restriction.
+      The result was not always pleasant, and it was not always
+      refined. We may be certain that it was because of Mrs. Clemens's
+      heavy burdens that year, and her consequent inability to exert a
+      beneficent censorship, that more than one—more than a dozen—of
+      the “Memoranda” contributions were permitted to see the light of
+      print.
+
+      As a whole, the literary result of Mark Twain's Buffalo period
+      does not reach the high standard of The Innocents Abroad. It was
+      a retrogression—in some measure a return to his earlier form. It
+      had been done under pressure, under heavy stress of mind, as he
+      said. Also there was another reason; neither the subject treated
+      nor the environment of labor had afforded that lofty inspiration
+      which glorified every step of the Quaker City journey. Buffalo
+      was a progressive city—a beautiful city, as American cities
+      go—but it was hardly an inspiring city for literature, and a
+      dull, dingy newspaper office was far, very far, from the pleasant
+      decks of the Quaker City, the camp-fires of Syria, the blue sky
+      and sea of the Mediterranean.
+
+
+
+
+      LXXXII. THE WRITING OF “ROUGHING IT”
+
+
+      The third book published by Mark Twa in was not the Western book
+      he was preparing for Bliss. It was a small volume, issued by
+      Sheldon & Co., entitled Mark Twain's Autobiography (Burlesque)
+      and First Romance. The Romance was the “Awful, Terrible Medieval
+      Romance” which had appeared in the Express at the beginning of
+      1870. The burlesque autobiography had not previously appeared.
+      The two made a thin little book, which, in addition to its
+      literary features, had running through it a series of full-page,
+      irrelevant pictures—-cartoons of the Erie Railroad Ring,
+      presented as illustrations of a slightly modified version of “The
+      House That Jack Built.” The “House” was the Erie headquarters,
+      the purpose being to illustrate the swindling methods of the
+      Ring. The faces of Jay Gould, James Fisk, Jr., John T. Hoffman,
+      and others of the combination, are chiefly conspicuous. The
+      publication was not important, from any standpoint. Literary
+      burlesque is rarely important, and it was far from Mark Twain's
+      best form of expression. A year or two later he realized the
+      mistake of this book, bought in the plates and destroyed them.
+
+      Meantime the new Western book was at a standstill. To Orion, in
+      March, he wrote:
+
+    I am still nursing Livy night and day. I am nearly worn out. We
+    shall go to Elmira ten days hence (if Livy can travel on a mattress
+    then), and stay there until I finish the California book, say three
+    months. But I can't begin work right away when I get there; must
+    have a week's rest, for I have been through thirty days' terrific
+    siege.
+
+      He promised to forward some of the manuscript soon.
+
+    Hold on four or five days and I will see if I can get a few
+    chapters fixed to send to Bliss....
+    I have offered this house and the Express for sale, and when we go
+    to Elmira we leave here for good. I shall not select a new home
+    till the book is finished, but we have little doubt that Hartford
+    will be the place.
+
+      He disposed of his interest in the Express in April, at a
+      sacrifice of $10,000 on the purchase price. Mrs. Clemens and the
+      baby were able to travel, and without further delay he took them
+      to Elmira, to Quarry Farm.
+
+      Quarry Farm, the home of Mrs. Clemens's sister, Mrs. Theodore
+      Crane, is a beautiful hilltop, with a wide green slope,
+      overlooking the hazy city and the Chemung River, beyond which are
+      the distant hills. It was bought quite incidentally by Mr. and
+      Mrs. Langdon, who, driving by one evening, stopped to water the
+      horses and decided that it would make a happy summer retreat,
+      where the families could combine their housekeeping arrangements
+      during vacation days. When the place had first been purchased,
+      they had debated on a name for it. They had tried several, among
+      them “Go-as-you-please Hall,” “Crane's Nest,” and had finally
+      agreed upon “Rest and Be Thankful.” But this was only its
+      official name. There was an abandoned quarry up the hill, a
+      little way from the house, and the title suggested by Thomas K.
+      Beecher came more naturally to the tongue. The place became
+      Quarry Farm, and so remains.
+
+      Clemens and his wife had fully made up their minds to live in
+      Hartford. They had both conceived an affection for the place,
+      Clemens mainly because of Twichell, while both of them yearned
+      for the congenial literary and social atmosphere, and the welcome
+      which they felt awaited them. Hartford was precisely what Buffalo
+      in that day was not—a home for the literary man. It held a
+      distinguished group of writers, most of whom the Clemenses
+      already knew. Furthermore, with Bliss as publisher of the Mark
+      Twain books, it held their chief business interests.
+
+      Their plans for going were not very definite as to time. Clemens
+      found that his work went better at the farm, and that Mrs.
+      Clemens and the delicate baby daily improved. They decided to
+      remain at Quarry Farm for the summer, their first summer in that
+      beautiful place which would mean so much to them in the years to
+      come.
+
+      It was really Joe Goodman, as much as anything, that stirred a
+      fresh enthusiasm in the new book. Goodman arrived just when the
+      author's spirits were at low ebb.
+
+      “Joe,” he said, “I guess I'm done for. I don't appear to be able
+      to get along at all with my work, and what I do write does not
+      seem valuable. I'm afraid I'll never be able to reach the
+      standard of 'The Innocents Abroad' again. Here is what I have
+      written, Joe. Read it, and see if that is your opinion.”
+
+      Goodman took the manuscript and seated himself in a chair, while
+      Clemens went over to a table and pretended to work. Goodman read
+      page after page, critically, and was presently absorbed in it.
+      Clemens watched him furtively, till he could stand it no longer.
+      Then he threw down his pen, exclaiming:
+
+      “I knew it! I knew it! I am writing nothing but rot. You have sat
+      there all this time reading without a smile, and pitying the ass
+      I am making of myself. But I am not wholly to blame. I am not
+      strong enough to fight against fate. I have been trying to write
+      a funny book, with dead people and sickness everywhere. Mr.
+      Langdon died first, then a young lady in our house, and now Mrs.
+      Clemens and the baby have been at the point of death all winter!
+      Oh, Joe, I wish to God I could die myself!”
+
+      “Mark,” said Joe, “I was reading critically, not for amusement,
+      and so far as I have read, and can judge, this is one of the best
+      things you have ever written. I have found it perfectly
+      absorbing. You are doing a great book!”
+
+      Clemens knew that Goodman never spoke except from conviction, and
+      the verdict was to him like a message of life handed down by an
+      archangel. He was a changed man instantly. He was all enthusiasm,
+      full of his subject, eager to go on. He proposed to pay Goodman a
+      salary to stay there and keep him company and furnish him with
+      inspiration—the Pacific coast atmosphere and vernacular, which he
+      feared had slipped away from him. Goodman declined the salary,
+      but extended his visit as long as his plans would permit, and the
+      two had a happy time together, recalling old Comstock days. Every
+      morning, for a month or more, they used to tramp over the farm.
+      They fell into the habit of visiting the old quarry and pawing
+      over the fragments in search of fossil specimens. Both of them
+      had a poetic interest in geology, its infinite remotenesses and
+      its testimonies. Without scientific knowledge, they took a deep
+      pleasure in accumulating a collection, which they arranged on
+      boards torn from an old fence, until they had enough specimens to
+      fill a small museum. They imagined they could distinguish certain
+      geological relations and families, and would talk about
+      trilobites, the Old Red Sandstone period, and the azoic age, or
+      follow random speculation to far-lying conclusions, developing
+      vague humors of phrase and fancy, having altogether a joyful good
+      time.
+
+      Another interest that developed during Goodman's stay was in one
+      Ruloff, who was under death sentence for a particularly atrocious
+      murder. The papers were full of Ruloff's prodigious learning. It
+      was said that he had in preparation a work showing the unity of
+      all languages. Goodman and Clemens agreed that Ruloff's death
+      would be a great loss to mankind, even though he was clearly a
+      villain and deserved his sentence. They decided that justice
+      would be served just as well if some stupid person were hung in
+      his place, and following out this fancy Clemens one morning put
+      aside his regular work and wrote an article to the Tribune,
+      offering to supply a substitute for Ruloff. He signed it simply
+      “Samuel Langhorne,” and it was published as a serious
+      communication, without comment, so far as the Tribune was
+      concerned. Other papers, however, took it up and it was widely
+      copied and commented upon. Apparently no one ever identified,
+      Mark Twain with the authorship of the letter, which, by the way,
+      does not appear to have prolonged Ruloff's earthly
+      usefulness.—[The reader will find the Ruloff letter in full under
+      Appendix K, at the end of last volume.]
+
+      Life at the farm may have furnished agricultural inspiration, for
+      Clemens wrote something about Horace Greeley's farming, also a
+      skit concerning Henry Ward Beecher's efforts in that direction.
+      Of Mr. Beecher's farming he said:
+
+      “His strawberries would be a comfortable success if robins would
+      eat turnips.”
+
+      The article amused Beecher, and perhaps Greeley was amused too,
+      for he wrote:
+
+    MARK,—You are mistaken as to my criticisms on your farming. I never
+    publicly made any, while you have undertaken to tell the exact cost
+    per pint of my potatoes and cabbages, truly enough the inspiration
+    of genius. If you will really betake yourself to farming, or even
+    to telling what you know about it, rather than what you don't know
+    about mine, I will not only refrain from disparaging criticism, but
+    will give you my blessing.
+                     Yours,  HORACE GREELEY.
+
+      The letter is in Mr. Greeley's characteristic scrawl, and no
+      doubt furnished inspiration for the turnip story in 'Roughing
+      It', also the model for the pretended facsimile of Greeley's
+      writing.
+
+      Altogether that was a busy, enterprising summer at Quarry Farm.
+      By the middle of May, Clemens wrote to Bliss that he had twelve
+      hundred manuscript pages of the new book already written, and
+      that he was turning out the remainder at the rate of from thirty
+      to sixty-five per day. He was in high spirits by this time. The
+      family health had improved, and prospects were bright.
+
+      I have enough manuscript on hand now to make (allowing for
+      engravings) about four hundred pages of the book, consequently am
+      two-thirds done. I intended to run up to Hartford about the
+      middle of the week and take it along, but I find myself so
+      thoroughly interested in my work now (a thing I have not
+      experienced for months) that I can't bear to lose a single moment
+      of the inspiration. So I will stay here and peg away as long as
+      it lasts. My present idea is to write as much more as I have
+      already written, and then collect from the mass the very best
+      chapters and discard the rest. When I get it done I want to see
+      the man who will begin to read it and not finish it. Nothing
+      grieves me now; nothing troubles me, nothing bothers me or gets
+      my attention. I don't think of anything but the book, and don't
+      have an hour's unhappiness about anything, and don't care two
+      cents whether school keeps or not. The book will be done soon
+      now. It will be a starchy book; the dedication will be worth the
+      price of the volume. Thus:
+
+                   TO THE LATE CAIN THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
+    not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little
+    respect; not on account of sympathy for him, for his bloody deed
+    places him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking, but out
+    of a mere humane commiseration for him, in that it was his
+    misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent
+    insanity plea.
+
+      Probably Mrs. Clemens diverted this picturesque dedication in
+      favor of the Higbie inscription, or perhaps the author never
+      really intended the literary tribute to Cain. The impulse that
+      inspired it, however, was characteristic.
+
+      In a postscript to this letter he adds:
+
+    My stock is looking up. I am getting the bulliest offers for books
+    and almanacs; am flooded with lecture invitations, and one
+    periodical offers me $6,000 cash for twelve articles of any length,
+    and on any subject, treated humorously or otherwise.
+
+      He set in to make hay while the sun was shining. In addition to
+      the California book, which was now fast nearing completion, he
+      discussed a scheme with Goodman for a six-hundred-page work which
+      they were to do jointly; he planned and wrote one or two scenes
+      from a Western play, to be built from episodes in the new book
+      (one of them was the “Arkansas” incident, related in Chapter
+      XXXI); he perfected one of his several inventions—an
+      automatically adjusting vest-strap; he wrote a number of
+      sketches, made an occasional business trip to New York and
+      Hartford; prospected the latter place for a new home. The shadow
+      which had hung over the sojourn in Buffalo seemed to have lifted.
+
+      He had promised Bliss some contributions for his new paper, and
+      in June he sent three sketches. In an accompanying letter he
+      says:
+
+    Here are three articles which you may have if you will pay $125 for
+    the lot. If you don't want them I'll sell them to the Galaxy, but
+    not for a cent less than three times the money.... If you take them
+    pay one-tenth of the $125 in weekly instalments to Orion till he
+    has received it all.
+
+      He reconsidered his resolution not to lecture again, and closed
+      with Redpath for the coming season. He found himself in a
+      lecture-writing fever. He wrote three of them in succession: one
+      on Artemus Ward, another on “Reminiscences of Some Pleasant
+      Characters I Have Met,” and a third one based on chapters from
+      the new book. Of the “Reminiscence” lecture he wrote Redpath:
+
+      “It covers my whole acquaintance; kings, lunatics, idiots, and
+      all.” Immediately afterward he wrote that he had prepared still
+      another lecture, “title to be announced later.”
+
+      “During July I'll decide which one I like best,” he said. He
+      instructed Redpath not to make engagements for him to lecture in
+      churches. “I never made a success of a lecture in a church yet.
+      People are afraid to laugh in a church.”
+
+      Redpath was having difficulties in arranging a circuit to suit
+      him. Clemens had prejudices against certain towns and localities,
+      prejudices that were likely to change overnight. In August he
+      wrote:
+
+    DEAR RED,—I am different from other women; my mind changes oftener.
+    People who have no mind can easily be stead fast and firm, but when
+    a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy
+    sea of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the
+    cargo. See? Therefore, if you will notice, one week I am likely to
+    give rigid instructions to confine me to New England; the next week
+    send me to Arizona; the next week withdraw my name; the next week
+    give you full, untrammeled swing; and the week following modify it.
+    You must try to keep the run of my mind, Redpath that is your
+    business, being the agent, and it always was too many for me....
+    Now about the West this week, I am willing that you shall retain
+    all the Western engagements. But what I shall want next week is
+    still with God. Yours,  MARK.
+
+      He was in Hartford when this letter was written, arranging for
+      residence there and the removal of his belongings. He finally
+      leased the fine Hooker house on Ford Street, in that pleasant
+      seclusion known as Nook Farm—the literary part of Hartford, which
+      included the residence of Charles Dudley Warner and Harriet
+      Beecher Stowe. He arranged for possession of the premises October
+      1st. So the new home was settled upon; then learning that Nasby
+      was to be in Boston, he ran over to that city for a few days of
+      recreation after his season's labors.
+
+      Preparations for removal to Hartford were not delayed. The
+      Buffalo property was disposed of, the furnishings were packed and
+      shipped away. The house which as bride and groom they had entered
+      so happily was left empty and deserted, never to be entered by
+      them again. In the year and a half of their occupancy it had seen
+      well-nigh all the human round, all that goes to make up the
+      happiness and the sorrow of life.
+
+
+
+
+      LXXXIII. LECTURING DAYS
+
+
+      Life in Hartford, in the autumn of 1871, began in the letter,
+      rather than in the spirit. The newcomers were received with a
+      wide, neighborly welcome, but the disorder of establishment and
+      the almost immediate departure of the head of the household on a
+      protracted lecturing tour were disquieting things; the atmosphere
+      of the Clemens home during those early Hartford days gave only a
+      faint promise of its future loveliness.
+
+      As in a far later period, Mark Twain had resorted to lecturing to
+      pay off debt. He still owed a portion of his share in the
+      Express; also he had been obliged to obtain an advance from the
+      lecture bureau. He dreaded, as always, the tedium of travel, the
+      clatter of hotel life, the monotony of entertainment, while, more
+      than most men, he loved the tender luxury of home. It was only
+      that he could not afford to lose the profit offered on the
+      platform.
+
+      His season opened at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, October 16th, and
+      his schedule carried him hither and thither, to and fro, over
+      distances that lie between Boston and Chicago. There were
+      opportunities to run into Hartford now and then, when he was not
+      too far away, and in November he lectured there on Artemus Ward.
+
+      He changed his entertainment at least twice that season. He began
+      with the “Reminiscences,” the lecture which he said would treat
+      of all those whom he had met, “idiots, lunatics, and kings,” but
+      he did not like it, or it did not go well. He wrote Redpath of
+      the Artemus Ward address:
+
+      “It suits me, and I'll never deliver the nasty, nauseous
+      'Reminiscences' any more.”
+
+      But the Ward lecture was good for little more than a month, for
+      on December 8th he wrote again:
+
+    Notify all hands that from this time I shall talk nothing but
+    selections from my forthcoming book, 'Roughing It'. Tried it twice
+    last night; suits me tiptop.
+
+      And somewhat later:
+
+    Had a splendid time with a splendid audience in Indianapolis last
+    night; a perfectly jammed house, just as I have all the time out
+    here.... I don't care now to have any appointments canceled. I'll
+    even “fetch” those Dutch Pennsylvanians with this lecture.
+    Have paid up $4,000 indebtedness. You are the last on my list.
+    Shall begin to pay you in a few days, and then I shall be a free
+    man again.
+
+      Undoubtedly he reveled in the triumphs of a platform tour, though
+      at no time did he regard it as a pleasure excursion. During those
+      early weeks the proofs of his new book, chasing him from place to
+      place, did not add to his comfort. Still, with large, substantial
+      rewards in hand and in prospect, one could endure much.
+
+      In the neighborhood of Boston there were other compensations. He
+      could spend a good part of his days at the Lyceum headquarters,
+      in School Street, where there was always congenial
+      fellowship—Nasby, Josh Billings, and the rest of the peripatetic
+      group that about the end of the year collected there. Their
+      lectures were never tried immediately in Boston, but in the
+      outlying towns; tried and perfected—or discarded. When the
+      provincial audiences were finally satisfied, then the final. test
+      in the Boston Music Hall was made, and if this proved successful
+      the rest of the season was safe. Redpath's lecturers put up at
+      Young's Hotel, and spent their days at the bureau, smoking and
+      spinning yarns, or talking shop. Early in the evening they
+      scattered to the outlying towns, Lowell, Lexington, Concord, New
+      Bedford. There is no such a condition to-day: lecturers are few,
+      lecture bureaus obscure; there are no great reputations made on
+      the platform.
+
+      Neither is there any such distinct group of humorists as the one
+      just mentioned. Humor has become universal since then. Few
+      writers of this age would confess to taking their work so
+      seriously as to be at all times unsmiling in it; only about as
+      many, in fact, as in that day would confess to taking their work
+      so lightly that they could regard life's sterner phases and
+      philosophies with a smile.
+
+      Josh Billings was one of the gentlest and loveliest of our
+      pioneers of laughter. The present generation is not overfamiliar
+      even with his name, but both the name and sayings of that quaint
+      soul were on everybody's lips at the time of which we are
+      writing. His true name was Henry W. Shaw, and he was a genuine,
+      smiling philosopher, who might have built up a more permanent and
+      serious reputation had he not been induced to disfigure his
+      maxims with ridiculous spelling in order to popularize them and
+      make them bring a living price. It did not matter much with
+      Nasby's work. An assumed illiteracy belonged with the side of
+      life which he presented; but it is pathetic now to consider some
+      of the really masterly sayings of Josh Billings presented in that
+      uncouth form which was regarded as a part of humor a generation
+      ago. Even the aphorisms that were essentially humorous lose value
+      in that degraded spelling.
+
+      “When a man starts down hill everything is greased for the
+      occasion,” could hardly be improved upon by distorted
+      orthography, and here are a few more gems which have survived
+      that deadly blight.
+
+      “Some folks mistake vivacity for wit; whereas the difference
+      between vivacity and wit is the same as the difference between
+      the lightning-bug and the lightning.”
+
+      “Don't take the bull by the horns-take him by the tail; then you
+      can let go when you want to.”
+
+      “The difficulty is not that we know so much, but that we know so
+      much that isn't so.”
+
+      Josh Billings, Nasby, and Mark Twain were close friends. They had
+      themselves photographed in a group, and there was always some
+      pleasantry going on among them. Josh Billings once wrote on
+      “Lekturing,” and under the head of “Rule Seven,” which treated of
+      unwisdom of inviting a lecturer to a private house, he said:
+
+    Think of asking Mark Twain home with yu, for instance. Yure good
+    wife has put her house in apple-pie order for the ockashun;
+    everything is just in the right place. Yu don't smoke in yure
+    house, never. Yu don't put yure feet on the center-table, yu don't
+    skatter the nuzepapers all over the room, in utter confushion:
+    order and ekonemy governs yure premises. But if yu expeckt Mark
+    Twain to be happy, or even kumfortable yu hav got to buy a box of
+    cigars worth at least seventeen dollars and yu hav got to move all
+    the tender things out ov yure parlor. Yu hav got to skatter all the
+    latest papers around the room careless, you hav got to hav a
+    pitcher ov icewater handy, for Mark is a dry humorist. Yu hav got
+    to ketch and tie all yure yung ones, hed and foot, for Mark luvs
+    babys only in theory; yu hav got to send yure favorite kat over to
+    the nabors and hide yure poodle. These are things that hav to be
+    done, or Mark will pak hiz valise with hiz extry shirt collar and
+    hiz lektur on the Sandwich Islands, and travel around yure streets,
+    smoking and reading the sighns over the store doorways untill
+    lektur time begins.
+
+      As we-are not likely to touch upon Mark Twain's lecturing, save
+      only lightly, hereafter, it may be as well to say something of
+      his method at this period. At all places visited by lecturers
+      there was a committee, and it was the place of the chairman to
+      introduce the lecturer, a privilege which he valued, because it
+      gave him a momentary association with distinction and fame.
+      Clemens was a great disappointment to these officials. He had
+      learned long ago that he could introduce himself more effectively
+      than any one else. His usual formula was to present himself as
+      the chairman of the committee, introducing the lecturer of the
+      evening; then, with what was in effect a complete change of
+      personality, to begin his lecture. It was always startling and
+      amusing, always a success; but the papers finally printed this
+      formula, which took the freshness out of it, so that he had to
+      invent others. Sometimes he got up with the frank statement that
+      he was introducing himself because he had never met any one who
+      could pay a proper tribute to his talents; but the newspapers
+      printed that too, and he often rose and began with no
+      introduction at all.
+
+      Whatever his method of beginning, Mark Twain's procedure probably
+      was the purest exemplification of the platform entertainer's art
+      which this country has ever seen. It was the art that makes you
+      forget the artisanship, the art that made each hearer forget that
+      he was not being personally entertained by a new and marvelous
+      friend, who had traveled a long way for his particular benefit.
+      One listener has written that he sat “simmering with laughter”
+      through what he supposed was the continuation of the
+      introduction, waiting for the traditional lecture to begin, when
+      presently the lecturer, with a bow, disappeared, and it was over.
+      The listener looked at his watch; he had been there more than an
+      hour. He thought it could be no more than ten minutes, at most.
+      Many have tried to set down something of the effect his art
+      produced on them, but one may not clearly convey the story of a
+      vanished presence and a silent voice.
+
+      There were other pleasant associations in Boston. Howells was
+      there, and Aldrich; also Bret Harte, who had finished his
+      triumphal progress across the continent to join the Atlantic
+      group. Clemens appears not to have met Aldrich before, though
+      their acquaintance had begun a year earlier, when Aldrich, as
+      editor of Every Saturday, had commented on a poem entitled, “The
+      Three Aces,” which had appeared in the Buffalo Express. Aldrich
+      had assumed the poem to be the work of Mark Twain, and had
+      characterized it as “a feeble imitation of Bret Harte's 'Heathen
+      Chinee.'” Clemens, in a letter, had mildly protested as to the
+      charge of authorship, and Aldrich had promptly printed the letter
+      with apologetic explanation. A playful exchange of personal
+      letters followed, and the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
+
+      One of the letters has a special interest here. Clemens had
+      followed his protest with an apology for it, asking that no
+      further notice be taken of the matter. Aldrich replied that it
+      was too late to prevent “doing him justice,” as his explanation
+      was already on the press, but that if Clemens insisted he would
+      withdraw it in the next issue. Clemens then wrote that he did not
+      want it withdrawn, and explained that he hated to be accused of
+      plagiarizing Bret Harte, to whom he was deeply indebted for
+      literary schooling in the California days. Continuing he said:
+
+    Do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot
+    through Harte's brain? It was this. When they were trying to decide
+    upon a vignette cover for the Overland a grizzly bear (of the arms
+    of the State of California) was chosen. Nahl Bros. carved him and
+    the page was printed with him in it.
+    As a bear he was a success. He was a good bear, but then, it was
+    objected, he was an objectless bear—a bear that meant nothing,
+    signified nothing, simply stood there, snarling over his shoulder
+    at nothing, and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and
+    ill-natured intruder upon the fair page. All hands said that none
+    were satisfied; they hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated
+    as much to have him there when there was no point to him. But
+    presently Harte took a pencil and drew two simple lines under his
+    feet, and behold he was a magnificent success!—the ancient symbol
+    of California savagery, snarling at the approaching type of high
+    and progressive civilization, the first Overland locomotive! I just
+    think that was nothing less than an inspiration.—[The “bear” was
+    that which has always appeared on the Overland cover; the “two
+    lines” formed a railway track under his feet. Clemens's original
+    letter contained crude sketches illustrating these things.]
+
+      Among the Boston group was another Californian, Ralph Keeler, an
+      eccentric, gifted, and altogether charming fellow, whom Clemens
+      had known on the Pacific slope. Keeler had been adopted by the
+      Boston writers, and was grateful and happy accordingly. He was
+      poor of purse, but inexhaustibly rich in the happier gifts of
+      fortune. He was unfailingly buoyant, light-hearted, and hopeful.
+      On an infinitesimal capital he had made a tour of many lands, and
+      had written of it for the Atlantic. In that charmed circle he was
+      as overflowingly happy as if he had been admitted to the company
+      of the gods. Keeler was affectionately regarded by all who knew
+      him, and he offered a sort of worship in return. He often
+      accompanied Mark Twain on his lecture engagements to the various
+      outlying towns, and Clemens brought him back to his hotel for
+      breakfast, where they had good, enjoyable talks together. Once
+      Keeler came eagerly to the hotel and made his way up to Clemens's
+      room.
+
+      “Come with me,” he said. “Quick!”
+
+      “What is it? What's happened?”
+
+      “Don't wait to talk. Come with me.”
+
+      They tramped briskly through the streets till they reached the
+      public library, entered, Keeler leading the way, not stopping
+      till he faced a row of shelves filled with books. He pointed at
+      one of them, his face radiant with joy.
+
+      “Look,” he said. “Do you see it?”
+
+      Clemens looked carefully now and identified one of the books as a
+      still-born novel which Keeler had published.
+
+      “This is a library,” said Keeler, eagerly, “and they've got it!”
+
+      His whole being was aglow with the wonder of it. He had been
+      investigating; the library records showed that in the two years
+      the book had been there it had been taken out and read three
+      times! It never occurred to Clemens even to smile. Knowing Mark
+      Twain, one would guess that his eyes were likely to be filled
+      with tears.
+
+      In his book about Mark Twain, Howells tells of a luncheon which
+      Keeler gave to his more famous associates—Aldrich, Fields, Harte,
+      Clemens, and Howells himself—a merry informal occasion. Says
+      Howells:
+
+    Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and
+    aimless and joyful talk—play, beginning and ending nowhere, of
+    eager laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat-
+    lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional
+    concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it
+    gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full of
+    good-fellowship, Bret Harte's leering dramatization of Clemens's
+    mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates. “Why,
+    fellows,” he spluttered, “this is the dream of Mark's life,” and I
+    remember the glance from under Clemens's feathery eyebrows which
+    betrayed his enjoyment of the fun.
+
+      Very likely Keeler gave that luncheon in celebration of his
+      book's triumph; it would be like him.
+
+      Keeler's end was a mystery. The New York Tribune commissioned him
+      to go to Cuba to report the facts of some Spanish outrages. He
+      sailed from New York in the steamer, and was last seen alive the
+      night before the vessel reached Havana. He had made no secret of
+      his mission, but had discussed it in his frank, innocent way.
+      There were some Spanish military men on the ship.
+
+      Clemens, commenting on the matter, once said:
+
+      “It may be that he was not flung into the sea, still the belief
+      was general that that was what had happened.”
+
+      In his book Howells refers to the doubt with which Mark Twain was
+      then received by the polite culture of Boston; which, on the
+      other hand, accepted Bret Harte as one of its own, forgiving even
+      social shortcomings.
+
+      The reason is not difficult to understand. Harte had made his
+      appeal with legitimate fiction of the kind which, however fresh
+      in flavor and environment, was of a sort to be measured and
+      classified. Harte spoke a language they could understand; his
+      humor, his pathos, his point of view were all recognizable. It
+      was an art already standardized by a master. It is no reflection
+      on the genius of Bret Harte to liken his splendid achievements to
+      those of Charles Dickens. Much of Harte's work is in no way
+      inferior to that of his great English prototype. Dickens never
+      wrote a better short story than “The Outcasts of Poker Flats.” He
+      never wrote as good a short story as “The Luck of Roaring Camp.”
+      Boston critics promptly realized these things and gave Harte his
+      correct rating. That they failed to do this with Mark Twain, lay
+      chiefly in the fact that he spoke to them in new and startling
+      tongues. His gospels were likely to be heresies; his literary
+      eccentricities were all unclassified. Of the ultrafastidious set
+      Howells tells us that Charles Eliot Norton and Prof. Francis J.
+      Child were about the only ones who accorded him unqualified
+      approval. The others smiled and enjoyed him, but with that
+      condescension which the courtier is likely to accord to motley
+      and the cap and bells. Only the great, simple-hearted, unbiased
+      multitude, the public, which had no standards but the direct
+      appeal from one human heart to another, could recognize
+      immediately his mightier heritage, could exalt and place him on
+      the throne.
+
+
+
+
+      LXXXIV. “ROUGHING IT”.
+
+
+      Telegram to Redpath:
+
+    How in the name of God does a man find his way from here to
+    Amherst, and when must he start? Give me full particulars, and send
+    a man with me. If I had another engagement I would rot before I
+    would fill it.                S. L. CLEMENS.
+
+      This was at the end of February, and he believed that he was
+      standing on the platform for the last time. He loathed the
+      drudgery of the work, and he considered there was no further
+      need. He was no longer in debt, and his income he accounted
+      ample. His new book, 'Roughing It',—[It was Bliss who had given
+      the new book the title of Roughing It. Innocents at Home had been
+      its provision title, certainly a misleading one, though it has
+      been retained in England for the second volume; for what reason
+      it would be difficult to explain.]—had had a large advance sale,
+      and its earnings promised to rival those of the 'Innocents'. He
+      resolved in the future to confine himself to the trade and
+      profits of authorship.
+
+      The new book had advantages in its favor. Issued early in the
+      year, it was offered at the best canvassing season; particularly
+      so, as the author's lectures had prepared the public for its
+      reception. Furthermore, it dealt with the most picturesque phases
+      of American life, scenes and episodes vastly interesting at that
+      time, and peculiarly adapted to Mark Twain's literary expression.
+      In a different way 'Roughing It' is quite as remarkable as 'The
+      Innocents Abroad.' If it has less charm, it has greater interest,
+      and it is by no means without charm. There is something
+      delicious, for instance, in this bit of pure enjoyment of the
+      first day's overland travel:
+
+    It was now just dawn, and as we stretched our cramped legs full
+    length on the mail-sacks, and gazed out through the windows across
+    the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist to where
+    there was an expectant look in the Eastern horizon, our perfect
+    enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy. The
+    stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping the
+    curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle
+    swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses' hoofs,
+    the cracking of the driver's whip, and his “Hi-yi! g'lang!” were
+    music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared to give
+    us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after us
+    with interest and envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the
+    pipe of peace, and compared all this luxury with the years of
+    tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was
+    only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had
+    found it.
+
+      Also, there is that lofty presentation of South Pass, and a
+      picture of the alkali desert, so parching, so withering in its
+      choking realism, that it makes the throat ache and the tongue dry
+      to read it. Just a bit of the desert in passing:
+
+    The sun beats down with a dead, blistering, relentless malignity;
+    the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but
+    scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface—it is absorbed
+    before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air
+    stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the
+    brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature visible in any
+    direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its
+    monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound, not a sigh,
+    not a whisper, not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of
+    bird; not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that
+    dead air.
+
+      As for the humor of the book, it has been chiefly famous for
+      that. “Buck Fanshaw's Funeral” has become a classic, and the
+      purchase of the “Mexican Plug.” But it is to no purpose to review
+      the book here in detail. We have already reviewed the life and
+      environment out of which it grew.
+
+      Without doubt the story would have contained more of the poetic
+      and contemplative, in which he was always at his best, if the
+      subject itself, as in the Innocents, had lent itself oftener to
+      this form of writing. It was the lack of that halo perhaps which
+      caused the new book never quite to rank with its great forerunner
+      in public favor. There could hardly be any other reason. It
+      presented a fresher theme; it abounded in humor; technically, it
+      was better written; seemingly it had all the elements of
+      popularity and of permanence. It did, in fact, possess these
+      qualities, but its sales, except during the earlier months of its
+      canvass, never quite equaled those of The Innocents Abroad.
+
+      'Roughing It' was accepted by the public for just what it was and
+      is, a great picture of the Overland Pioneer days—a marvelous
+      picture of frontier aspects at a time when the frontier itself,
+      even with its hardships and its tragedies, was little more than a
+      vast primal joke; when all frontiersmen were obliged to be
+      laughing philosophers in order to survive the stress of its
+      warfares.
+
+      A word here about this Western humor: It is a distinct product.
+      It grew out of a distinct condition—the battle with the frontier.
+      The fight was so desperate, to take it seriously was to
+      surrender. Women laughed that they might not weep; men, when they
+      could no longer swear. “Western humor” was the result. It is the
+      freshest, wildest humor in the world, but there is tragedy behind
+      it.
+
+      'Roughing It' presented the picture of those early conditions
+      with the startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which,
+      in effect, it was. It was not accurate history, even of the
+      author's own adventures. It was true in its aspects, rather than
+      in its details. The greater artist disregards the truth of detail
+      to render more strikingly a phase or a condition, to produce an
+      atmosphere, to reconstruct a vanished time. This was what Mark
+      Twain did in 'Roughing It'. He told the story of overland travel
+      and the frontier, for his own and future generations, in what is
+      essentially a picaresque novel, a work of unperishing fiction,
+      founded on fact.
+
+      The sales of 'Roughing It' during the first three months
+      aggregated nearly forty thousand copies, and the author was
+      lavishly elate accordingly. To Orion (who had already closed his
+      career with Bliss, by exercise of those hereditary eccentricities
+      through which he so often came to grief) he gave $1,000 out of
+      the first royalty check, in acknowledgment of the memorandum book
+      and other data which Orion had supplied. Clemens believed the new
+      book would sell one hundred thousand copies within the year; but
+      the sale diminished presently, and at the end of the first year
+      it was considerably behind the Innocents for the same period. As
+      already stated, it required ten years for Roughing It to reach
+      the one-hundred-thousand mark, which the Innocents reached in
+      three.
+
+
+
+
+      LXXXV. A BIRTH, A DEATH, AND A VOYAGE
+
+
+      The year 1872 was an eventful one in Mark Twain's life. At
+      Elmira, on March 19th, his second child, a little girl, whom they
+      named Susan Olivia, was born. On June 2d, in the new home in
+      Hartford, to which they had recently moved, his first child, a
+      little boy, Langdon, died. He had never been strong, his wavering
+      life had often been uncertain, always more of the spirit than the
+      body, and in Elmira he contracted a heavy cold, or perhaps it was
+      diphtheria from the beginning. In later years, whenever Clemens
+      spoke of the little fellow, he never failed to accuse himself of
+      having been the cause of the child's death. It was Mrs. Clemens's
+      custom to drive out each morning with Langdon, and once when she
+      was unable to go Clemens himself went instead.
+
+      “I should not have been permitted to do it,” he said,
+      remembering. “I was not qualified for any such responsibility as
+      that. Some one should have gone who had at least the rudiments of
+      a mind. Necessarily I would lose myself dreaming. After a while
+      the coachman looked around and noticed that the carriage-robes
+      had dropped away from the little fellow, and that he was exposed
+      to the chilly air. He called my attention to it, but it was too
+      late. Tonsilitis or something of the sort set in, and he did not
+      get any better, so we took him to Hartford. There it was
+      pronounced diphtheria, and of course he died.”
+
+      So, with or without reason, he added the blame of another tragedy
+      to the heavy burden of remorse which he would go on piling up
+      while he lived.
+
+      The blow was a terrible one to Mrs. Clemens; even the comfort of
+      the little new baby on her arm could not ease the ache in her
+      breast. It seemed to her that death was pursuing her. In one of
+      her letters she says:
+
+      “I feel so often as if my path is to be lined with graves,” and
+      she expresses the wish that she may drop out of life herself
+      before her sister and her husband—a wish which the years would
+      grant.
+
+      They did not return to Elmira, for it was thought that the air of
+      the shore would be better for the little girl; so they spent the
+      summer at Saybrook, Connecticut, at Fenwick Hall, leaving Orion
+      and his wife in charge of the house at Hartford.
+
+      Beyond a few sketches, Clemens did very little literary work that
+      summer, but he planned a trip to Europe, and he invented what is
+      still known and sold as the “Mark Twain Scrap-Book.”
+
+      He wrote to Orion of his proposed trip to England, and dilated
+      upon his scrap-book with considerable enthusiasm. The idea had
+      grown out of the inconvenience of finding a paste-jar, and the
+      general mussiness of scrap-book keeping. His new plan was a
+      self-pasting scrap-book with the gum laid on in narrow strips,
+      requiring only to be dampened with a sponge or other moist
+      substance to be ready for the clipping. He states that he intends
+      to put the invention into the hands of Slote, Woodman & Co., of
+      whom Dan Slote, his old Quaker City room-mate, was the senior
+      partner, and have it manufactured for the trade.
+
+      About this time began Mark Twain's long and active interest in
+      copyright. Previously he had not much considered the subject; he
+      had taken it for granted there was no step that he could take,
+      while international piracy was a recognized institution. On both
+      sides of the water books were appropriated, often without profit,
+      sometimes even without credit, to the author. To tell the truth,
+      Clemens had at first regarded it rather in the nature of a
+      compliment that his books should be thought worth pirating in
+      England, but as time passed he realized that he was paying
+      heavily for this recognition. Furthermore, he decided that he was
+      forfeiting a right; rather that he was being deprived of it:
+      something which it was in his nature to resent.
+
+      When 'Roughing It' had been ready for issue he agreed with Bliss
+      that they should try the experiment of copyrighting it in
+      England, and see how far the law would protect them against the
+      voracious little publisher, who thus far had not only snapped up
+      everything bearing Mark Twain's signature, but had included in a
+      volume of Mark Twain sketches certain examples of very weak humor
+      with which Mark Twain had been previously unfamiliar.
+
+      Whatever the English pirate's opinion of the copyright protection
+      of 'Roughing It' may have been, he did not attempt to violate it.
+      This was gratifying. Clemens came to regard England as a friendly
+      power. He decided to visit it and spy out the land. He would make
+      the acquaintance of its people and institutions and write a book,
+      which would do these things justice.
+
+      He gave out no word of his real purpose. He merely said that he
+      was going over to see his English publishers, and perhaps to
+      arrange for a few lectures. He provided himself with some
+      stylographic note-books, by which he could produce two copies of
+      his daily memoranda—one for himself and one to mail to Mrs.
+      Clemens—and sailed on the Scotia August 21, 1872.
+
+      Arriving in Liverpool he took train for London, and presently the
+      wonderful charm of that old, finished country broke upon him. His
+      “first hour in England was an hour of delight,” he records; “of
+      rapture and ecstasy. These are the best words I can find, but
+      they are not adequate; they are not strong enough to convey the
+      feeling which this first vision of rural England brought me.”
+      Then he noticed that the gentleman opposite in his compartment
+      paid no attention to the scenery, but was absorbed in a
+      green-covered volume. He was so absorbed in it that, by and by,
+      Clemens's curiosity was aroused. He shifted his position a little
+      and his eye caught the title. It was the first volume of the
+      English edition of The Innocents Abroad. This was gratifying for
+      a moment; then he remembered that the man had never laughed,
+      never even smiled during the hour of his steady reading. Clemens
+      recalled what he had heard of the English lack of humor. He
+      wondered if this was a fair example of it, and if the man could
+      be really taking seriously every word he was reading. Clemens
+      could not look at the scenery any more for watching his
+      fellow-passenger, waiting with a fascinated interest for the
+      paragraph that would break up that iron-clad solemnity. It did
+      not come. During all the rest of the trip to London the
+      atmosphere of the compartment remained heavy with gloom.
+
+      He drove to the Langham Hotel, always popular with Americans,
+      established himself, and went to look up his publishers. He found
+      the Routledges about to sit down to luncheon in a private room,
+      up-stairs, in their publishing house. He joined them, and not a
+      soul stirred from that table again until evening. The Routledges
+      had never heard Mark Twain talk before, never heard any one talk
+      who in the least resembled him. Various refreshments were served
+      during the afternoon, came and went, while this marvelous
+      creature talked on and they listened, reveling, and wondering if
+      America had any more of that sort at home. By and by dinner was
+      served; then after a long time, when there was no further excuse
+      for keeping him there, they took him to the Savage Club, where
+      there were yet other refreshments and a gathering of the clans to
+      welcome this new arrival as a being from some remote and
+      unfamiliar star.
+
+      Tom Hood, the younger, was there, and Harry Lee, and Stanley the
+      explorer, who had but just returned from finding Livingstone, and
+      Henry Irving, and many another whose name remains, though the
+      owners of those names are all dead now, and their laughter and
+      their good-fellowship are only a part of that intangible fabric
+      which we call the past.'—[Clemens had first known Stanley as a
+      newspaper man. “I first met him when he reported a lecture of
+      mine in St. Louis,” he said once in a conversation where the name
+      of Stanley was mentioned.]
+
+
+
+
+      LXXXVI. ENGLAND
+
+
+      From that night Mark Twain's stay in England could not properly
+      be called a gloomy one.
+
+      Routledge, Hood, Lee, and, in fact, all literary London, set
+      themselves the task of giving him a good time. Whatever place of
+      interest they could think of he was taken there; whatever there
+      was to see he saw it. Dinners, receptions, and assemblies were
+      not complete without him. The White Friars' Club and others gave
+      banquets in his honor. He was the sensation of the day. When he
+      rose to speak on these occasions he was greeted with wild cheers.
+      Whatever he said they eagerly applauded—too eagerly sometimes, in
+      the fear that they might be regarded as insensible to American
+      humor. Other speakers delighted in chaffing him in order to
+      provoke his retorts. When a speaker humorously referred to his
+      American habit of carrying a cotton umbrella, his reply that he
+      followed this custom because a cotton umbrella was the only kind
+      of an umbrella that an Englishman wouldn't steal, was all over
+      England next day, and regarded as one of the finest examples of
+      wit since the days of Swift.
+
+      The suddenness and completeness of his acceptance by the great
+      ones of London rather overwhelmed and frightened him made him
+      timid. Joaquin Miller writes:
+
+    He was shy as a girl, although time was already coyly flirting
+    white flowers at his temples, and could hardly be coaxed to meet
+    the learned and great who wanted to take him by the hand.
+
+      Many came to call on him at his hotel, among them Charles Reade
+      and Canon Kingsley. Kingsley came twice without finding him; then
+      wrote, asking for an appointment. Reade invited his assistance on
+      a novel. Indeed, it was in England that Mark Twain was first made
+      to feel that he had come into his rightful heritage. Whatever may
+      have been the doubts concerning him in America, there was no
+      question in England. Howells says:
+
+    In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. Lord mayors,
+    lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he
+    was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the
+    favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation.
+
+      After that first visit of Mark Twain's, when Americans in
+      England, referring to their great statesmen, authors, and the
+      like, naturally mentioned the names of Seward, Webster, Lowell,
+      or Holmes, the English comment was likely to be: “Never mind
+      those. We can turn out academic Sewards by the dozen, and
+      cultured humorists like Lowell and Holmes by the score. Tell us
+      of Lincoln, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain. We cannot match these;
+      they interest us.” And it was true. History could not match them,
+      for they were unique.
+
+      Clemens would have been more than human if in time he had not
+      realized the fuller meaning of this triumph, and exulted in it a
+      little to the folks at home. There never lived a more modest,
+      less pretentious, less aggressive man than Mark Twain, but there
+      never lived a man who took a more childlike delight in genuine
+      appreciation; and, being childlike, it was only human that he
+      should wish those nearest to him to share his happiness. After
+      one memorable affair he wrote:
+
+    I have been received in a sort of tremendous way to-night by the
+    brains of London, assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of
+    London; mine being (between you and me) a name which was received
+    with a thundering outburst of spontaneous applause when the long
+    list of guests was called.
+
+      I might have perished on the spot but for the friendly support
+      and assistance of my excellent friend, Sir John Bennett.
+
+      This letter does not tell all of the incident or the real reason
+      why he might have perished on the spot. During the long roll-call
+      of guests he had lost interest a little, and was conversing in
+      whispers with his “excellent friend,” Sir John Bennett, stopping
+      to applaud now and then when the applause of the others indicated
+      that some distinguished name had been pronounced. All at once the
+      applause broke out with great vehemence. This must be some very
+      distinguished person indeed. He joined in it with great
+      enthusiasm. When it was over he whispered to Sir John:
+
+      “Whose name was that we were just applauding?”
+
+      “Mark Twain's.”
+
+      Whereupon the support was needed.
+
+      Poor little pirate Hotten did not have a happy time during this
+      visit. He had reveled in the prospect at first, for he
+      anticipated a large increase to be derived from his purloined
+      property; but suddenly, one morning, he was aghast to find in the
+      Spectator a signed letter from Mark Twain, in which he was
+      repudiated, referred to as “John Camden Hottentot,” an unsavory
+      person generally. Hotten also sent a letter to the Spectator, in
+      which he attempted to justify himself, but it was a feeble
+      performance. Clemens prepared two other communications, each
+      worse than the other and both more destructive than the first
+      one. But these were only to relieve his mind. He did not print
+      them. In one of them he pursued the fancy of John Camden
+      Hottentot, whom he offers as a specimen to the Zoological
+      Gardens.
+
+      It is not a bird. It is not a man. It is not a fish. It does not
+      seem to be in all respects a reptile. It has the body and
+      features of a man, but scarcely any of the instincts that belong
+      to such a structure.... I am sure that this singular little
+      creature is the missing link between the man and the hyena.
+
+      Hotten had preyed upon explorer Stanley and libeled him in a
+      so-called. biography to a degree that had really aroused some
+      feeling against Stanley in England. Only for the moment—the Queen
+      invited Stanley to luncheon, and newspaper criticism ceased.
+      Hotten was in general disrepute, therefore, so it was not worth
+      while throwing a second brick at him.
+
+      In fact, now that Clemens had expended his venom, on paper,
+      Hotten seemed to him rather an amusing figure than otherwise. An
+      incident grew out of it all, however, that was not amusing. E. P.
+      Hingston, whom the reader may remember as having been with
+      Artemus Ward in Virginia City, and one of that happy group that
+      wined and dined the year away, had been engaged by Hotten to
+      write the introductory to his edition of The Innocents Abroad. It
+      was a well-written, highly complimentary appreciation. Hingston
+      did not dream that he was committing an offense, nor did Clemens
+      himself regard it as such in the beginning.
+
+      But Mark Twain's views had undergone a radical change, and with
+      characteristic dismissal of previous conditions he had forgotten
+      that he had ever had any other views than those he now held.
+      Hingston was in London, and one evening, at a gathering,
+      approached Clemens with outstretched hand. But Clemens failed to
+      see Hingston's hand or to recognize him. In after-years his
+      conscience hurt him terribly for this. He remembered it only with
+      remorse and shame. Once, in his old age, he spoke of it with deep
+      sorrow.
+
+
+
+
+      LXXXVII. THE BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+
+
+      The book on England, which he had prepared for so carefully, was
+      never written. Hundreds of the stylographic pages were filled,
+      and the duplicates sent home for the entertainment of Olivia
+      Clemens, but the notes were not completed, and the actual writing
+      was never begun. There was too much sociability in London for one
+      thing, and then he found that he could not write entertainingly
+      of England without introducing too many personalities, and
+      running the risk of offending those who had taken him into their
+      hearts and homes. In a word, he would have to write too seriously
+      or not at all.
+
+      He began his memoranda industriously enough, and the volume might
+      have been as charming and as valuable as any he has left behind.
+      The reader will hardly fail to find a few of the entries
+      interesting. They are offered here as examples of his daily
+      observation during those early weeks of his stay, and to show
+      somewhat of his purpose:
+
+                    AN EXPATRIATE
+    There was once an American thief who fled his country and took
+    refuge in England. He dressed himself after the fashion of the
+    Londoners, and taught his tongue the peculiarities of the London
+    pronunciation and did his best in all ways to pass himself for a
+    native. But he did two fatal things: he stopped at the Langham
+    Hotel, and the first trip he took was to visit Stratford-on-Avon
+    and the grave of Shakespeare. These things betrayed his
+    nationality.
+                  STANLEY AND THE QUEEN
+    See the power a monarch wields! When I arrived here, two weeks ago,
+    the papers and geographers were in a fair way to eat poor Stanley
+    up without salt or sauce. The Queen says, “Come four hundred miles
+    up into Scotland and sit at my luncheon-table fifteen minutes”;
+    which, being translated, means, “Gentlemen, I believe in this man
+    and take him under my protection”; and not another yelp is heard.
+                  AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM
+    What a place it is!
+    Mention some very rare curiosity of a peculiar nature—a something
+    which you have read about somewhere but never seen—they show you a
+    dozen! They show you all the possible varieties of that thing! They
+    show you curiously wrought jeweled necklaces of beaten gold, worn
+    by the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Etruscans, Greeks,
+    Britons—every people of the forgotten ages, indeed. They show you
+    the ornaments of all the tribes and peoples that live or ever did
+    live. Then they show you a cast taken from Cromwell's face in
+    death; then the venerable vase that once contained the ashes of
+    Xerxes.
+    I am wonderfully thankful for the British Museum. Nobody comes
+    bothering around me—nobody elbows me—all the room and all the light
+    I want, under this huge dome—no disturbing noises—and people
+    standing ready to bring me a copy of pretty much any book that ever
+    was printed under the sun—and if I choose to go wandering about the
+    long corridors and galleries of the great building the secrets of
+    all the earth and all the ages axe laid open to me. I am not
+    capable of expressing my gratitude for the British Museum—it seems
+    as if I do not know any but little words and weak ones.
+                WESTMINSTER ABBEY BY NIGHT
+    It was past eleven o'clock and I was just going to bed. But this
+    friend of mine was as reliable as he was eccentric, and so there
+    was not a doubt in my mind that his “expedition” had merit in it. I
+    put on my coat and boots again, and we drove away.
+    “Where is it? Where are we going?”
+    “Don't worry. You'll see.”
+    He was not inclined to talk. So I thought this must be a weighty
+    matter. My curiosity grew with the minutes, but I kept it manfully
+    under the surface. I watched the lamps, the signs, the numbers as
+    we thundered down the long street. I am always lost in London, day
+    or night. It was very chilly, almost bleak. People leaned against
+    the gusty blasts as if it were the dead of winter. The crowds grew
+    thinner and thinner, and the noises waxed faint and seemed far
+    away. The sky was overcast and threatening. We drove on, and still
+    on, till I wondered if we were ever going to stop. At last we
+    passed by a spacious bridge and a vast building, and presently
+    entered a gateway, passed through a sort of tunnel, and stopped in
+    a court surrounded by the black outlines of a great edifice. Then
+    we alighted, walked a dozen steps or so, and waited. In a little
+    while footsteps were heard, a man emerged from the darkness, and we
+    dropped into his wake without saying anything. He led us under an
+    archway of masonry, and from that into a roomy tunnel, through a
+    tall iron gate, which he locked behind us. We followed him down
+    this tunnel, guided more by his footsteps on the stone flagging
+    than by anything we could very distinctly see. At the end of it we
+    came to another iron gate, and our conductor stopped there and lit
+    a bull's-eye lantern. Then he unlocked the gate; and I wished he
+    had oiled it first, it grated so dismally. The gate swung open and
+    we stood on the threshold of what seemed a limitless domed and
+    pillared cavern, carved out of the solid darkness. The conductor
+    and my friend took off their hats reverently, and I did likewise.
+    For the moment that we stood thus there was not a sound, and the
+    stillness seemed to add to the solemnity of the gloom. I looked my
+    inquiry!
+    “It is the tomb of the great dead of England-Westminster Abbey.”...
+    We were among the tombs; on every hand dull shapes of men, sitting,
+    standing, or stooping, inspected us curiously out of the darkness
+    —reached out their hands toward us—some appealing, some beckoning,
+    some warning us away. Effigies they were—statues over the graves;
+    but they looked human and natural in the murky shadows. Now a
+    little half-grown black and white cat squeezed herself through the
+    bars of the iron gate and came purring lovingly about us, unawed by
+    the time or the place, unimpressed by the marble pomp that
+    sepulchers a line of mighty dead that ends with a great author of
+    yesterday and began with a sceptered monarch away back in the dawn
+    of history, more than twelve hundred years ago....
+    Mr. Wright flashed his lantern first upon this object and then upon
+    that, and kept up a running commentary that showed there was
+    nothing about the venerable Abbey that was trivial in his eyes or
+    void of interest. He is a man in authority, being superintendent,
+    and his daily business keeps him familiar with every nook and
+    corner of the great pile. Casting a luminous ray now here, now
+    yonder, he would say:
+    “Observe the height of the Abbey—one hundred and three feet to the
+    base of the roof; I measured it myself the other day. Notice the
+    base of this column—old, very old—hundreds and hundreds of years
+    —and how well they knew how to build in those old days! Notice it
+    —every stone is laid horizontally; that is to say, just as nature
+    laid it originally in the quarry not set up edgewise; in our day
+    some people set them on edge, and then wonder why they split and
+    flake. Architects cannot teach nature anything. Let me remove this
+    matting—it is put here to preserve the pavement; now there is a bit
+    of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these
+    scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before
+    time and sacrilegious idlers marred it. Now there, in the border,
+    was an inscription, once see, follow the circle-you can trace it by
+    the ornaments that have been pulled out—here is an A and there is
+    an O, and yonder another A—all beautiful Old English capitals;
+    there is no telling what the inscription was—no record left now.
+    Now move along in this direction, if you please. Yonder is where
+    old King Sebert the Saxon lies his monument is the oldest one in
+    the Abbey; Sebert died in 616,—[Clemens probably misunderstood the
+    name. It was Ethelbert who died in 616. The name Sebert does not
+    appear in any Saxon annals accessible to the author.]—and that's as
+    much, as twelve hundred and fifty years ago think of it! Twelve
+    hundred and fifty years! Now yonder is the last one—Charles
+    Dickens—there on the floor, with the brass letters on the slab—and
+    to this day the people come and put flowers on it.... There is
+    Garrick's monument; and Addison's, and Thackeray's bust—and
+    Macaulay lies there. And close to Dickens and Garrick lie Sheridan
+    and Dr. Johnson—and here is old Parr....
+    “That stone there covers Campbell the poet. Here are names you know
+    pretty well—Milton, and Gray who wrote the Elegy, and Butler who
+    wrote Hudibras; and Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson—there are three
+    tablets to him scattered about the Abbey, and all got 'O, Rare Ben
+    Jonson' cut on them. You were standing on one of them just now he
+    is buried standing up. There used to be a tradition here that
+    explains it. The story goes that he did not dare ask to be buried
+    in the Abbey, so he asked King James if he would make him a present
+    of eighteen inches of English ground, and the King said 'yes,' and
+    asked him where he would have it, and he said in Westminster Abbey.
+    Well, the King wouldn't go back on his word, and so there he is,
+    sure enough-stood up on end.”
+
+      The reader may regret that there are not more of these entries,
+      and that the book itself was never written. Just when he gave up
+      the project is not recorded. He was urged to lecture in London,
+      but declined. To Mrs. Clemens, in September, he wrote:
+
+      Everybody says lecture, lecture, lecture, but I have not the
+      least idea of doing it; certainly not at present. Mr. Dolby, who
+      took Dickens to America, is coming to talk business tomorrow,
+      though I have sent him word once before that I can't be hired to
+      talk here; because I have no time to spare. There is too much
+      sociability; I do not get along fast enough with work.
+
+      In October he declared that he was very homesick, and proposed
+      that Mrs. Clemens and Susie join him at once in London, unless
+      she would prefer to have him come home for the winter and all of
+      them return to London in the spring. So it is likely that the
+      book was not then abandoned. He felt that his visit was by no
+      means ended; that it was, in fact, only just begun, but he wanted
+      the ones he loved most to share it with him. To his mother and
+      sister, in November, he wrote:
+
+      I came here to take notes for a book, but I haven't done much but
+      attend dinners and make speeches. I have had a jolly good time,
+      and I do hate to go away from these English folks; they make a
+      stranger feel entirely at home, and they laugh so easily that it
+      is a comfort to make after-dinner speeches here. I have made
+      hundreds of friends; and last night, in the crush at the opening
+      of the new Guild Hall Library and Museum, I was surprised to meet
+      a familiar face every other step.
+
+      All his impressions of England had been happy ones. He could
+      deliver a gentle satire now and then at certain British
+      institutions—certain London localities and features—as in his
+      speech at the Savage Club,—[September 28, 1872. This is probably
+      the most characteristic speech made by Mark Twain during his
+      first London visit; the reader will find it in full in Appendix
+      L, at the end of last volume.]—but taking the snug island as a
+      whole, its people, its institutions, its fair, rural aspects, he
+      had found in it only delight. To Mrs. Crane he wrote:
+
+    If you and Theodore will come over in the spring with Livy and me,
+    and spend the summer, you shall see a country that is so beautiful
+    that you will be obliged to believe in fairy-land. There is nothing
+    like it elsewhere on the globe. You should have a season ticket and
+    travel up and down every day between London and Oxford and worship
+    nature.
+    And Theodore can browse with me among dusty old dens that look now
+    as they looked five hundred years ago; and puzzle over books in the
+    British Museum that were made before Christ was born; and in the
+    customs of their public dinners, and the ceremonies of every
+    official act, and the dresses of a thousand dignitaries, trace the
+    speech and manners of all the centuries that have dragged their
+    lagging decades over England since the Heptarchy fell asunder. I
+    would a good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you
+    over.
+
+      He sailed November 12th, on the Batavia, loaded with Christmas
+      presents for everybody; jewelry, furs, laces; also a practical
+      steam-engine for his namesake, Sam Moffett. Half-way across the
+      Atlantic the Batavia ran into a hurricane and was badly damaged
+      by heavy seas, and driven far out of her course. It was a lucky
+      event on the whole, for she fell in with a water-logged lumber
+      bark, a complete wreck, with nine surviving sailors clinging to
+      her rigging. In the midst of the wild gale a lifeboat was
+      launched and the perishing men were rescued. Clemens prepared a
+      graphic report of the matter for the Royal Humane Society, asking
+      that medals be conferred upon the brave rescuers, a document that
+      was signed by his fellow-passengers and obtained for the men
+      complete recognition and wide celebrity. Closing, the writer
+      said:
+
+    As might have been anticipated, if I have been of any service
+    toward rescuing these nine shipwrecked human beings by standing
+    around the deck in a furious storm, without an umbrella, keeping an
+    eye on things and seeing that they were done right, and yelling
+    whenever a cheer seemed to be the important thing, I am glad and I
+    am satisfied. I ask no reward. I would do it again under the same
+    circumstances. But what I do plead for, earnestly and sincerely, is
+    that the Royal Humane Society will remember our captain and our
+    life-boat crew, and in so remembering them increase the high honor
+    and esteem in which the society is held all over the civilized
+    world.
+
+      The Batavia reached New York November 26, 1872. Mark Twain had
+      been absent three months, during which he had been brought to at
+      least a partial realization of what his work meant to him and to
+      mankind.
+
+      An election had taken place during his absence—an election which
+      gratified him deeply, for it had resulted in the second
+      presidency of General Grant and in the defeat of Horace Greeley,
+      whom he admired perhaps, but not as presidential material. To
+      Thomas Nast, who had aided very effectually in Mr. Greeley's
+      overwhelming defeat, Clemens wrote:
+
+      Nast, you more than any other man have won a prodigious victory
+      for Grant—I mean, rather, for civilization and progress. Those
+      pictures were simply marvelous, and if any man in the land has a
+      right to hold his head up and be honestly proud of his share in
+      this year's vast events that man is unquestionably yourself. We
+      all do sincerely honor you, and are proud of you.
+
+      Horace Greeley's peculiar abilities and eccentricities won
+      celebrity for him, rather than voters. Mark Twain once said of
+      him:
+
+      “He was a great man, an honest man, and served his, country well
+      and was an honor to it. Also, he was a good-natured man, but
+      abrupt with strangers if they annoyed him when he was busy. He
+      was profane, but that is nothing; the best of us is that. I did
+      not know him well, but only just casually, and by accident. I
+      never met him but once. I called on him in the Tribune office,
+      but I was not intending to. I was looking for Whitelaw Reid, and
+      got into the wrong den. He was alone at his desk, writing, and we
+      conversed—not long, but just a little. I asked him if he was
+      well, and he said, 'What the hell do you want?' Well, I couldn't
+      remember what I wanted, so I said I would call again. But I
+      didn't.”
+
+      Clemens did not always tell the incident just in this way.
+      Sometimes it was John Hay he was looking for instead of Reid, and
+      the conversation with Greeley varied; but perhaps there was a
+      germ of history under it somewhere, and at any rate it could have
+      happened well enough, and not have been out of character with
+      either of the men.
+
+
+
+
+      LXXXVIII. “THE GILDED AGE”
+
+
+      Mark Twain did not go on the lecture circuit that winter. Redpath
+      had besought him as usual, and even in midsummer had written:
+
+      “Will you? Won't you? We have seven thousand to eight thousand
+      dollars in engagements recorded for you,” and he named a list of
+      towns ranging geographically from Boston to St. Paul.
+
+      But Clemens had no intention then of ever lecturing any more, and
+      again in November, from London, he announced (to Redpath):
+
+      “When I yell again for less than $500 I'll be pretty hungry, but
+      I haven't any intention of yelling at any price.”
+
+      Redpath pursued him, and in January proposed $400 for a single
+      night in Philadelphia, but without result. He did lecture two
+      nights in Steinway Hall for the Mercantile Library Association,
+      on the basis of half profits, netting $1,300 for the two nights
+      as his share; and he lectured one night in Hartford, at a profit
+      Of $1,500, for charity. Father Hawley, of Hartford, had announced
+      that his missionary work was suffering for lack of funds. Some of
+      his people were actually without food, he said, their children
+      crying with hunger. No one ever responded to an appeal like that
+      quicker than Samuel Clemens. He offered to deliver a lecture
+      free, and to bear an equal proportion of whatever expenses were
+      incurred by the committee of eight who agreed to join in
+      forwarding the project. He gave the Sandwich Island lecture, and
+      at the close of it a large card was handed him with the figures
+      of the receipts printed upon it. It was held up to view, and the
+      house broke into a storm of cheers.
+
+      He did very little writing during the early weeks following his
+      return. Early in the year (January 3 and 6, 1873) he contributed
+      two Sandwich Island letters to the Tribune, in which, in his own
+      peculiar fashion, he urged annexation.
+
+      “We must annex those people,” he declared, and proceeded to
+      specify the blessings we could give them, such as “leather-headed
+      juries, the insanity law, and the Tweed Ring.”
+
+    We can confer Woodhull and Clafin on them, and George Francis
+    Train. We can give them lecturers! I will go myself.
+    We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner
+    on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy
+    civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need!
+    “Shall we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?”
+
+      His success in England became an incentive to certain American
+      institutions to recognize his gifts at home. Early in the year he
+      was dined as the guest of the Lotos Club of New York, and a week
+      or two later elected to its membership. This was but a beginning.
+      Some new membership or honor was offered every little while, and
+      so many banquets that he finally invented a set form for
+      declining them. He was not yet recognized as the foremost
+      American man of letters, but undoubtedly he had become the most
+      popular; and Edwin Whipple, writing at this time, or but little
+      later, said:
+
+      “Mark Twain is regarded chiefly as a humorist, but the exercise
+      of his real talents would rank him with the ablest of our authors
+      in the past fifty years.” So he was beginning to be “discovered”
+      in high places.
+
+      It was during this winter that the Clemens household enjoyed its
+      first real home life in Hartford, its first real home life
+      anywhere since those earliest days of marriage. The Hooker
+      mansion was a comfortable place. The little family had
+      comparatively good health. Their old friends were stanch and
+      lavishly warm-hearted, and they had added many new ones. Their
+      fireside was a delightful nucleus around which gathered those
+      they cared for most, the Twichells, the Warner families, the
+      Trumbulls—all certain of a welcome there. George Warner, only a
+      little while ago, remembering, said:
+
+      “The Clemens house was the only one I have ever known where there
+      was never any preoccupation in the evenings, and where visitors
+      were always welcome. Clemens was the best kind of a host; his
+      evenings after dinner were an unending flow of stories.”
+
+      Friends living near by usually came and went at will, often
+      without the ceremony of knocking or formal leave-taking. They
+      were more like one great family in that neighborhood, with a
+      community of interests, a unity of ideals. The Warner families
+      and the Clemenses were particularly intimate, and out of their
+      association grew Mark Twain's next important literary
+      undertaking, his collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner in 'The
+      Gilded Age'.
+
+      A number of more or less absurd stories have been printed about
+      the origin of this book. It was a very simple matter, a perfectly
+      natural development.
+
+      At the dinner-table one night, with the Warners present,
+      criticisms of recent novels were offered, with the usual freedom
+      and severity of dinner-table talk. The husbands were inclined to
+      treat rather lightly the novels in which their wives were finding
+      entertainment. The wives naturally retorted that the proper thing
+      for the husbands to do was to furnish the American people with
+      better ones. This was regarded in the nature of a challenge, and
+      as such was accepted—mutually accepted: that is to say, in
+      partnership. On the spur of the moment Clemens and Warner agreed
+      that they would do a novel together, that they would begin it
+      immediately. This is the whole story of the book's origin; so
+      far, at least, as the collaboration is concerned. Clemens, in
+      fact, had the beginning of a story in his mind, but had been
+      unwilling to undertake an extended work of fiction alone. He
+      welcomed only too eagerly, therefore, the proposition of joint
+      authorship. His purpose was to write a tale around that lovable
+      character of his youth, his mother's cousin, James Lampton—to let
+      that gentle visionary stand as the central figure against a
+      proper background. The idea appealed to Warner, and there was no
+      delay in the beginning. Clemens immediately set to work and
+      completed 399 pages of the manuscript, the first eleven chapters
+      of the book, before the early flush of enthusiasm waned.
+
+      Warner came over then, and Clemens read it aloud to him. Warner
+      had some plans for the story, and took it up at this point, and
+      continued it through the next twelve chapters; and so they worked
+      alternately, “in the superstition,” as Mark Twain long afterward
+      declared, “that we were writing one coherent yarn, when I
+      suppose, as a matter of fact, we were writing two incoherent
+      ones.”—[The reader may be interested in the division of labor.
+      Clemens wrote chapters I to XI; also chapters XXIV, XXV, XXVII,
+      XXVIII, XXX, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XLII, XLIII,
+      XLV, LI, LII, LIII, LVII, LIX, LX, LXI, LXII, and portions of
+      chapters XXXV, XLIX, LVI. Warner wrote chapters XII to XXIII;
+      also chapters XXVI, XXIX, XXXI, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL, XLI, XLIV,
+      XLVI, XLVII, XLVIII, L, LIV, LV, LVIII, LXIII, and portions of
+      chapters XXXV, XLIX, and LVI. The work was therefore very evenly
+      divided.
+
+      There was another co-worker on The Gilded Age before the book was
+      finally completed. This was J. Hammond Trumbull, who prepared the
+      variegated, marvelous cryptographic chapter headings: Trumbull
+      was the most learned man that ever lived in Hartford. He was
+      familiar with all literary and scientific data, and according to
+      Clemens could swear in twenty-seven languages. It was thought to
+      be a choice idea to get Trumbull to supply a lingual medley of
+      quotations to precede the chapters in the new book, the purpose
+      being to excite interest and possibly to amuse the reader—a
+      purpose which to some extent appears to have miscarried.]
+
+      The book was begun in February and finished in April, so the work
+      did not lag. The result, if not highly artistic, made
+      astonishingly good reading. Warner had the touch of romance,
+      Clemens, the gift of creating, or at least of portraying, human
+      realities. Most of his characters reflected intimate
+      personalities of his early life. Besides the apotheosis of James
+      Lampton into the immortal Sellers, Orion became Washington
+      Hawkins, Squire Clemens the judge, while Mark Twain's own
+      personality, in a greater or lesser degree, is reflected in most
+      of his creations. As for the Tennessee land, so long a
+      will-o'the-wisp and a bugbear, it became tangible property at
+      last. Only a year or two before Clemens had written to Orion:
+
+    Oh, here! I don't want to be consulted at all about Tennessee. I
+    don't want it even mentioned to me. When I make a suggestion it is
+    for you to act upon it or throw it aside, but I beseech you never
+    to ask my advice, opinion, or consent about that hated property.
+
+      But it came in good play now. It is the important theme of the
+      story.
+
+      Mark Twain was well qualified to construct his share of the tale.
+      He knew his characters, their lives, and their atmospheres
+      perfectly. Senator Dilworthy (otherwise Senator Pomeroy, of
+      Kansas, then notorious for attempted vote-buying) was familiar
+      enough. That winter in Washington had acquainted Clemens with the
+      life there, its political intrigues, and the disrepute of
+      Congress. Warner was equally well qualified for his share of the
+      undertaking, and the chief criticism that one may offer is the
+      one stated by Clemens himself—that the divisions of the tale
+      remain divisions rather than unity.
+
+      As for the story itself—the romance and tragedy of it—the
+      character of Laura in the hands of either author is one not easy
+      to forget. Whether this means that the work is well done, or only
+      strikingly done, the reader himself must judge. Morally, the
+      character is not justified. Laura was a victim of circumstance
+      from the beginning. There could be no poetic justice in her doom.
+      To drag her out of a steamer wreck, only to make her the victim
+      of a scoundrel, later an adventuress, and finally a murderess,
+      all may be good art, but of a very bad kind. Laura is a sort of
+      American Becky Sharp; but there is retributive justice in Becky's
+      fate, whereas Laura's doom is warranted only by the author's
+      whim. As for her end, whatever the virtuous public of that day
+      might have done, a present-day audience would not have pelted her
+      from the stage, destroyed her future, taken away her life.
+
+      The authors regarded their work highly when it was finished, but
+      that is nothing. Any author regards his work highly at the moment
+      of its completion. In later years neither of them thought very
+      well of their production; but that also is nothing. The author
+      seldom cares very deeply for his offspring once it is turned over
+      to the public charge. The fact that the story is still popular,
+      still delights thousands of readers, when a myriad of novels that
+      have been written since it was completed have lived their little
+      day and died so utterly that even their names have passed out of
+      memory, is the best verdict as to its worth.
+
+
+
+
+      LXXXIX. PLANNING A NEW HOME
+
+
+      Clemens and his wife bought a lot for the new home that winter, a
+      fine, sightly piece of land on Farmington Avenue—table-land,
+      sloping down to a pretty stream that wound through the willows
+      and among the trees. They were as delighted as children with
+      their new purchase and the prospect of building. To her sister
+      Mrs. Clemens wrote:
+
+    Mr. Clemens seems to glory in his sense of possession; he goes
+    daily into the lot, has had several falls trying to lay off the
+    land by sliding around on his feet....
+    For three days the ice has covered the trees, and they have been
+    glorious. We could do nothing but watch the beauty outside; if you
+    looked at the trees as the sun struck them, with your back toward
+    the sun, they were covered with jewels. If you looked toward the
+    sun it was all crystal whiteness, a perfect fairy-land. Then the
+    nights were moonlight, and that was a great beauty, the moon giving
+    us the same prismatic effect.
+
+      This was the storm of which Mark Twain wrote his matchless
+      description, given first in his speech on New England weather,
+      and later preserved in 'Following the Equator', in more extended
+      form. In that book he likens an ice-storm to his impressions
+      derived from reading descriptions of the Taj Mahal, that
+      wonderful tomb of a fair East Indian queen. It is a marvelous bit
+      of word-painting—his description of that majestic vision: “When
+      every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops,
+      and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of
+      Persia's diamond plume.” It will pay any one to look up that
+      description and read it all, though it has been said, by the
+      fortunate one or two who heard him first give it utterance as an
+      impromptu outburst, that in the subsequent process of writing the
+      bloom of its original magnificence was lost.
+
+      The plans for the new house were drawn forthwith by that gentle
+      architect Edward Potter, whose art to-day may be considered open
+      to criticism, but not because of any lack of originality.
+      Hartford houses of that period were mainly of the goods-box form
+      of architecture, perfectly square, typifying the commercial
+      pursuits of many of their owners. Potter agreed to get away from
+      this idea, and a radical and even frenzied departure was the
+      result. Certainly his plans presented beautiful pictures, and all
+      who saw them were filled with wonder and delight. Architecture
+      has lavished itself in many florescent forms since then, but we
+      may imagine that Potter's “English violet” order of design, as he
+      himself designated it, startled, dazzled, and captivated in a
+      day, when most houses were mere habitations, built with a view to
+      economy and the largest possible amount of room.
+
+      Workmen were put on the ground without delay, to prepare for the
+      builders, and work was rapidly pushed along. Then in May the
+      whole matter was left in the hands of the architect and the
+      carpenters (with Lawyer Charles E. Perkins to stand between
+      Potter and the violent builder, who roared at Potter and
+      frightened him when he wanted changes), while the Clemens
+      household, with Clara Spaulding, a girlhood friend of Mrs.
+      Clemens, sailed away to England for a half-year holiday.
+
+
+
+
+      XC. A LONG ENGLISH HOLIDAY
+
+
+      They sailed on the Batavia, and with them went a young man named
+      Thompson, a theological student whom Clemens had consented to
+      take as an amanuensis. There is a pathetic incident connected
+      with this young man, and it may as well be set down here. Clemens
+      found, a few weeks after his arrival in England, that so great
+      was the tax upon his time that he could make no use of Thompson's
+      services. He gave Thompson fifty dollars, and upon the
+      possibility of the young man's desiring to return to America,
+      advanced him another fifty dollars, saying that he could return
+      it some day, and never thought of it again. But the young man
+      remembered it, and one day, thirty-six years later, after a life
+      of hardship and struggle, such as the life of a country minister
+      is apt to be, he wrote and inclosed a money-order, a payment on
+      his debt. That letter and its inclosure brought only sorrow to
+      Mark Twain. He felt that it laid upon him the accumulated burden
+      of the weary thirty-six years' struggle with ill-fortune. He
+      returned the money, of course, and in a biographical note
+      commented:
+
+    How pale painted heroisms of romance look beside it! Thompson's
+    heroism, which is real, which is colossal, which is sublime, and
+    which is costly beyond all estimate, is achieved in profound
+    obscurity, and its hero walks in rags to the end of his days. I had
+    forgotten Thompson completely, but he flashes before me as vividly
+    as lightning. I can see him now. It was on the deck of the Batavia,
+    in the dock. The ship was casting off, with that hubbub and
+    confusion and rushing of sailors, and shouting of orders and
+    shrieking of boatswain whistles, which marked the departure
+    preparations in those days—an impressive contrast with the solemn
+    silence which marks the departure preparations of the giant ships
+    of the present day. Mrs. Clemens, Clara Spaulding, little Susy, and
+    the nurse-maid were all properly garbed for the occasion. We all
+    had on our storm-rig, heavy clothes of somber hue, but new and
+    designed and constructed for the purpose, strictly in accordance
+    with sea-going etiquette; anything wearable on land being
+    distinctly and odiously out of the question.
+    Very well. On that deck, and gliding placidly among those honorable
+    and properly upholstered groups, appeared Thompson, young, grave,
+    long, slim, with an aged fuzzy plug hat towering high on the upper
+    end of him and followed by a gray duster, which flowed down,
+    without break or wrinkle, to his ankles. He came straight to us,
+    and shook hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we
+    knew him. A nigger in heaven could not have created a profounder
+    astonishment.
+    However, Thompson didn't know that anything was happening. He had
+    no prejudices about clothes. I can still see him as he looked when
+    we passed Sandy Hook and the winds of the big ocean smote us.
+    Erect, lofty, and grand he stood facing the blast, holding his plug
+    on with both hands and his generous duster blowing out behind,
+    level with his neck. There were scoffers observing, but he didn't
+    know it; he wasn't disturbed.
+    In my mind, I see him once afterward, clothed as before, taking me
+    down in shorthand. The Shah of Persia had come to England and Dr.
+    Hosmer, of the Herald, had sent me to Ostend, to view his Majesty's
+    progress across the Channel and write an account of it. I can't
+    recall Thompson after that, and I wish his memory had been as poor
+    as mine.
+
+      They had been a month in London, when the final incident referred
+      to took place—the arrival of the Shah of Persia—and were
+      comfortably quartered at the Langham Hotel. To Twichell Clemens
+      wrote:
+
+    We have a luxuriously ample suite of apartments on the third floor,
+    our bedroom looking straight up Portland Place, our parlor having a
+    noble array of great windows looking out upon both streets
+    (Portland Place and the crook that joins it onto Regent Street).
+    Nine p.m. full twilight, rich sunset tints lingering in the west.
+    I am not going to write anything; rather tell it when I get back. I
+    love you and Harmony, and that is all the fresh news I've got
+    anyway. And I mean to keep that fresh all the time.
+
+      Mrs. Clemens, in a letter to her sister, declared: “It is
+      perfectly discouraging to try to write you. There is so much to
+      write about that it makes me feel as if it was no use to begin.”
+
+      It was a period of continuous honor and entertainment. If Mark
+      Twain had been a lion on his first visit, he was little less than
+      royalty now. His rooms at the Langham were like a court. Miss
+      Spaulding (now Mrs. John B. Stanchfield) remembers that Robert
+      Browning, Turgenieff, Sir John Millais, Lord Houghton, and Sir
+      Charles Dilke (then at the height of his fame) were among those
+      that called to pay their respects. In a recent letter she says:
+
+    I remember a delightful luncheon that Charles Kingsley gave for Mr.
+    Clemens; also an evening when Lord Dunraven brought Mr. Home, the
+    medium, Lord Dunraven telling many of the remarkable things he had
+    seen Mr. Home do. I remember I wanted so much to see him float out
+    of a seven or eight story window, and enter another, which Lord
+    Dunraven said he had seen him do many times. But Mr. Home had been
+    very ill, and said his power had left him. My great regret was that
+    we did not see Carlyle, who was too sad and ill for visits.
+
+      Among others they met Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in
+      Wonderland, and found him so shy that it was almost impossible to
+      get him to say a word on any subject.
+
+      “The shyest full-grown man, except Uncle Remus, I ever met,”
+      Clemens once wrote. “Dr. MacDonald and several other lively
+      talkers were present, and the talk went briskly on for a couple
+      of hours, but Carroll sat still all the while, except now and
+      then when he answered a question.”
+
+      At a dinner given by George Smalley they met Herbert Spencer, and
+      at a luncheon-party at Lord Houghton's, Sir Arthur Helps, then a
+      world-wide celebrity.
+
+    Lord Elcho, a large, vigorous man, sat at some distance down the
+    table. He was talking earnestly about the town of Godalming. It was
+    a deep, flowing, and inarticulate rumble, but I caught the
+    Godalming pretty nearly every time it broke free of the rumbling,
+    and as all the strength was on the first end of the word, it
+    startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing. In the
+    middle of the luncheon Lady Houghton rose, remarked to the guests
+    on her right and on her left, in a matter-of-fact way, “Excuse me,
+    I have an engagement,” and without further ceremony, she went off
+    to meet it. This would have been doubtful etiquette in America.
+    Lord Houghton told a number of delightful stories. He told them in
+    French, and I lost nothing of them but the nubs.
+
+      Little Susy and her father thrived on London life, but after a
+      time it wore on Mrs. Clemens. She delighted in the English
+      cordiality and culture, but the demands were heavy, the social
+      forms sometimes trying. Life in London was interesting, and in
+      its way charming, but she did not enter into it with quite her
+      husband's enthusiasm and heartiness. In the end they canceled all
+      London engagements and quietly set out for Scotland. On the way
+      they rested a few days in York, a venerable place such as Mark
+      Twain always loved to describe. In a letter to Mrs. Langdon he
+      wrote:
+
+    For the present we shall remain in this queer old walled town, with
+    its crooked, narrow lanes, that tell us of their old day that knew
+    no wheeled vehicles; its plaster-and-timber dwellings, with upper
+    stories far overhanging the street, and thus marking their date,
+    say three hundred years ago; the stately city walls, the
+    castellated gates, the ivy-grown, foliage-sheltered, most noble and
+    picturesque ruin of St. Mary's Abbey, suggesting their date, say
+    five hundred years ago, in the heart of Crusading times and the
+    glory of English chivalry and romance; the vast Cathedral of York,
+    with its worn carvings and quaintly pictured windows, preaching of
+    still remoter days; the outlandish names of streets and courts and
+    byways that stand as a record and a memorial, all these centuries,
+    of Danish dominion here in still earlier times; the hint here and
+    there of King Arthur and his knights and their bloody fights with
+    Saxon oppressors round about this old city more than thirteen
+    hundred years gone by; and, last of all, the melancholy old stone
+    coffins and sculptured inscriptions, a venerable arch and a hoary
+    tower of stone that still remain and are kissed by the sun and
+    caressed by the shadows every day, just as the sun and the shadows
+    have kissed and, caressed them every lagging day since the Roman
+    Emperor's soldiers placed them here in the times when Jesus the Son
+    of Mary walked the streets of Nazareth a youth, with no more name
+    or fame than the Yorkshire boy who is loitering down this street
+    this moment.
+
+      They reached Edinburgh at the end of July and secluded themselves
+      in Veitch's family hotel in George Street, intending to see no
+      one. But this plan was not a success; the social stress of London
+      had been too much for Mrs. Clemens, and she collapsed immediately
+      after their arrival. Clemens was unacquainted in Edinburgh, but
+      remembered that Dr. John Brown, who had written Rab and His
+      Friend, lived there. He learned his address, and that he was
+      still a practising physician. He walked around to 23 Rutland
+      Street, and made himself known. Dr. Brown came forthwith, and
+      Mrs. Clemens speedily recovered under his able and inspiring
+      treatment.
+
+      The association did not end there. For nearly a month Dr. Brown
+      was their daily companion, either at the hotel, or in his own
+      home, or on protracted drives when he made his round of visits,
+      taking these new friends along. Dr. John was beloved by everybody
+      in Edinburgh, everybody in Scotland, for that matter, and his
+      story of Rab had won him a following throughout Christendom. He
+      was an unpretentious sovereign. Clemens once wrote of him:
+
+    His was a sweet and winning face, as beautiful a face as I have
+    ever known. Reposeful, gentle, benignant; the face of a saint at
+    peace with all the world and placidly beaming upon it the sunshine
+    of love that filled his heart.
+
+      He was the friend of all dogs, and of all people. It has been
+      told of him that once, when driving, he thrust his head suddenly
+      out of the carriage window, then resumed his place with a
+      disappointed look.
+
+      “Who was it?” asked his companion. “Some one you know?”
+
+      “No,” he said. “A dog I don't know.”
+
+      He became the boon companion and playmate of little Susy, then
+      not quite a year and a half old. He called her Megalopis, a Greek
+      term, suggested by her eyes; those deep, burning eyes that seemed
+      always so full of life's sadder philosophies, and impending
+      tragedy. In a collection of Dr. Brown's letters he refers to this
+      period. In one place he says:
+
+    Had the author of The Innocents Abroad not come to Edinburgh at
+    that time we in all human probability might never have met, and
+    what a deprivation that would have been to me during the last
+    quarter of a century!
+
+      And in another place:
+
+    I am attending the wife of Mark Twain. His real name is Clemens.
+    She is a quite lovely little woman, modest and clever, and she has
+    a girlie eighteen months old, her ludicrous miniature—and such
+    eyes!
+
+      Those playmates, the good doctor and Megalopis, romped together
+      through the hotel rooms with that complete abandon which few
+      grown persons can assume in their play with children, and not all
+      children can assume in their play with grown-ups. They played
+      “bear,” and the “bear” (which was a very little one, so little
+      that when it stood up behind the sofa you could just get a
+      glimpse of yellow hair) would lie in wait for her victim, and
+      spring out and surprise him and throw him into frenzies of fear.
+
+      Almost every day they made his professional rounds with him. He
+      always carried a basket of grapes for his patients. His guests
+      brought along books to read while they waited. When he stopped
+      for a call he would say:
+
+      “Entertain yourselves while I go in and reduce the population.”
+
+      There was much sight-seeing to do in Edinburgh, and they could
+      not quite escape social affairs. There were teas and luncheons
+      and dinners with the Dunfermlines and the Abercrombies, and the
+      MacDonalds, and with others of those brave clans that no longer
+      slew one another among the grim northern crags and glens, but
+      were as sociable and entertaining lords and ladies as ever the
+      southland could produce. They were very gentle folk indeed, and
+      Mrs. Clemens, in future years, found her heart going back oftener
+      to Edinburgh than to any other haven of those first wanderings.
+      August 24th she wrote to her sister:
+
+    We leave Edinburgh to-morrow with sincere regret; we have had such
+    a delightful stay here—we do so regret leaving Dr. Brown and his
+    sister, thinking that we shall probably never see them again [as
+    indeed they never did].
+
+      They spent a day or two at Glasgow and sailed for Ireland, where
+      they put in a fortnight, and early in September were back in
+      England again, at Chester, that queer old city where; from a
+      tower on the wall, Charles I. read the story of his doom.
+      Reginald Cholmondeley had invited them to visit his country seat,
+      beautiful Condover Hall, near Shrewsbury, and in that lovely
+      retreat they spent some happy, restful days. Then they were in
+      the whirl of London once more, but escaped for a fortnight to
+      Paris, sight-seeing and making purchases for the new home.
+
+      Mrs. Clemens was quite ready to return to America, by this time.
+
+    I am blue and cross and homesick [she wrote]. I suppose what makes
+    me feel the latter is because we are contemplating to stay in
+    London another month. There has not one sheet of Mr. Clemens's
+    proof come yet, and if he goes home before the book is published
+    here he will lose his copyright. And then his friends feel that it
+    will be better for him to lecture in London before his book is
+    published, not only that it will give him a larger but a more
+    enviable reputation. I would not hesitate one moment if it were
+    simply for the money that his copyright will bring him, but if his
+    reputation will be better for his staying and lecturing, of course
+    he ought to stay.... The truth is, I can't bear the thought of
+    postponing going home.
+
+      It is rather gratifying to find Olivia Clemens human, like that,
+      now and then. Otherwise, on general testimony, one might well be
+      tempted to regard her as altogether of another race and kind.
+
+
+
+
+      XCI. A LONDON LECTURE
+
+
+      Clemens concluded to hasten the homeward journey, but to lecture
+      a few nights in London before starting. He would then accompany
+      his little family home, and return at once to continue the
+      lecture series and protect his copyright. This plan was carried
+      out. In a communication to the Standard, October 7th, he said:
+
+    SIR,—In view of the prevailing frenzy concerning the Sandwich
+    Islands, and the inflamed desire of the public to acquire
+    information concerning them, I have thought it well to tarry yet
+    another week in England and deliver a lecture upon this absorbing
+    subject. And lest it should be thought unbecoming in me, a
+    stranger, to come to the public rescue at such a time, instead of
+    leaving to abler hands a matter of so much moment, I desire to
+    explain that I do it with the best motives and the most honorable
+    intentions. I do it because I am convinced that no one can allay
+    this unwholesome excitement as effectually as I can, and to allay
+    it, and allay it as quickly as possible, is surely one thing that
+    is absolutely necessary at this juncture. I feel and know that I am
+    equal to this task, for I can allay any kind of an excitement by
+    lecturing upon it. I have saved many communities in this way. I
+    have always been able to paralyze the public interest in any topic
+    that I chose to take hold of and elucidate with all my strength.
+    Hoping that this explanation will show that if I am seeming to
+    intrude I am at least doing it from a high impulse, I am, sir, your
+    obedient servant, MARK TWAIN.
+
+      A day later the following announcement appeared:
+
+                  QUEEN'S CONCERT ROOMS, HANOVER SQUARE.
+            MR. GEORGE DOLBY begs to announce that
+                    MR. MARK TWAIN
+                    WILL DELIVER A LECTURE OF A HUMOROUS CHARACTER,
+                     AS ABOVE, ON MONDAY EVENING NEXT, OCTOBER 13th,
+                     1873, AND REPEAT IT IN THE SAME PLACE, ON TUESDAY
+                     EVENING, OCTOBER 14th, WEDNESDAY “      “  15th,
+                     THURSDAY “      “  16th, FRIDAY  “      “  17th,
+                   At Eight o'Clock, AND SATURDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER
+                   18th, At Three o'Clock.
+                      SUBJECT: “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich
+                      Islands.”
+    As Mr. TWAIN has spent several months in these Islands, and is well
+    acquainted with his subject, the Lecture may be expected to furnish
+    matter of interest.
+           STALLS, 5s.     UNRESERVED SEATS, 3s.
+
+      The prospect of a lecture from Mark Twain interested the London
+      public. Those who had not seen him were willing to pay even for
+      that privilege. The papers were encouraging; Punch sounded a
+      characteristic note:
+
+              WELCOME TO A LECTURER
+  “'Tis time we Twain did show ourselves.” 'Twas said By Caesar, when
+  one Mark had lost his head: By Mark, whose head's quite bright, 'tis
+  said again: Therefore, “go with me, friends, to bless this Twain.”
+                                —Punch.
+
+      Dolby had managed the Dickens lectures, and he proved his sound
+      business judgment and experience by taking the largest available
+      hall in London for Mark Twain.
+
+      On the evening of October 13th, in the spacious Queen's Concert
+      Rooms, Hanover Square, Mark Twain delivered his first public
+      address in England. The subject was “Our Fellow Savages of the
+      Sandwich Islands,” the old lecture with which he had made his
+      first great successes. He was not introduced. He appeared on the
+      platform in evening dress, assuming the character of a manager
+      announcing a disappointment.
+
+      Mr. Clemens, he said, had fully expected to be present. He paused
+      and loud murmurs arose from the audience. He lifted his hand and
+      they subsided. Then he added, “I am happy to say that Mark Twain
+      is present, and will now give his lecture.” Whereupon the
+      audience roared its approval.
+
+      It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that his triumph that
+      week was a regal one. For five successive nights and a Saturday
+      matinee the culture and fashion of London thronged to hear him
+      discourse of their “fellow savages.” It was a lecture event
+      wholly without precedent. The lectures of Artemus Ward,—[“Artemus
+      the delicious,” as Charles Reade called him, came to London in
+      June, 1866, and gave his “piece” in Egyptian Hall. The refined,
+      delicate, intellectual countenance, the sweet, gave, mouth, from
+      which one might have expected philosophical lectures retained
+      their seriousness while listeners were convulsed with laughter.
+      There was something magical about it. Every sentence was a
+      surprise. He played on his audience as Liszt did on a piano most
+      easily when most effectively. Who can ever forget his attempt to
+      stop his Italian pianist—“a count in his own country, but not
+      much account in this”—who went on playing loudly while he was
+      trying to tell us an “affecting incident” that occurred near a
+      small clump of trees shown on his panorama of the Far West. The
+      music stormed on-we could see only lips and arms pathetically
+      moving till the piano suddenly ceased, and we heard-it was all we
+      heard “and, she fainted in Reginald's arms.” His tricks have been
+      at tempted in many theaters, but Artemus Ward was inimitable. And
+      all the time the man was dying. (Moneure D. Conway,
+      Autobiography.)]—who had quickly become a favorite in London, had
+      prepared the public for American platform humor, while the daily
+      doings of this new American product, as reported by the press,
+      had aroused interest, or curiosity, to a high pitch. On no
+      occasion in his own country had he won such a complete triumph.
+      The papers for a week devoted columns of space to appreciation
+      and editorial comment. The Daily News of October 17th published a
+      column-and-a-half editorial on American humor, with Mark Twain's
+      public appearance as the general text. The Times referred to the
+      continued popularity of the lectures:
+
+    They can't be said to have more than whetted the public appetite,
+    if we are to take the fact which has been imparted to us, that the
+    holding capacity of the Hanover Square Rooms has been inadequate to
+    the demand made upon it every night by Twain's lecturing, as a
+    criterion. The last lecture of this too brief course was delivered
+    yesterday before an audience which crammed to discomfort every part
+    of the principal apartment of the Hanover Square Rooms....
+
+      At the close of yesterday's lecture Mark Twain was so loudly
+      applauded that he returned to the stage, and, as soon as the
+      audience gave him a chance of being heard, he said, with much
+      apparent emotion:
+
+    “Ladies and Gentlemen,—I won't keep you one single moment in this
+    suffocating atmosphere. I simply wish to say that this is the last
+    lecture I shall have the honor to deliver in London until I return
+    from America, four weeks from now. I only wish to say (here Mr.
+    Clemens faltered as if too much affected to proceed) I am very
+    grateful. I do not wish to appear pathetic, but it is something
+    magnificent for a stranger to come to the metropolis of the world
+    and be received so handsomely as I have been. I simply thank you.”
+
+      The Saturday Review devoted a page, and Once a Week, under the
+      head of “Cracking jokes,” gave three pages, to praise of the
+      literary and lecture methods of the new American humorist. With
+      the promise of speedy return, he left London, gave the lecture
+      once in Liverpool, and with his party (October 21st) set sail for
+      home.
+
+      In mid-Atlantic he remembered Dr. Brown, and wrote him:
+
+    We have plowed a long way over the sea, and there's twenty-two
+    hundred miles of restless water between us now, besides the railway
+    stretch. And yet you are so present with us, so close to us, that a
+    span and a whisper would bridge the distance.
+
+      So it would seem that of all the many memories of that eventful
+      half-year, that of Dr. Brown was the most present, the most
+      tender.
+
+
+
+
+      XCII. FURTHER LONDON LECTURE TRIUMPHS
+
+
+      Orion Clemens records that he met “Sam and Livy” on their arrival
+      from England, November 2d, and that the president of the
+      Mercantile Library Association sent up his card “four times,” in
+      the hope of getting a chance to propose a lecture engagement—an
+      incident which impressed Orion deeply in its evidence of his
+      brother's towering importance. Orion himself was by this time
+      engaged in various projects. He was inventing a flying-machine,
+      for one thing, writing a Jules Verne story, reading proof on a
+      New York daily, and contemplating the lecture field. This great
+      blaze of international appreciation which had come to the little
+      boy who used to set type for him in Hannibal, and wash up the
+      forms and cry over the dirty proof, made him gasp.
+
+      They went to see Booth in Hamlet [he says], and Booth sent for
+      Sam to come behind the scenes, and when Sam proposed to add a
+      part to Hamlet, the part of a bystander who makes humorous modern
+      comment on the situations in the play, Booth laughed
+      immoderately.
+
+      Proposing a sacrilege like that to Booth! To what heights had
+      this printer-pilot, miner-brother not attained!—[This idea of
+      introducing a new character in Hamlet was really attempted later
+      by Mark Twain, with the connivance of Joe Goodman [of all men],
+      sad to relate. So far as is known it is the one stain on
+      Goodman's literary record.]
+
+      Clemens returned immediately to England—the following Saturday,
+      in fact—and was back in London lecturing again after barely a
+      month's absence. He gave the “Roughing It” address, this time
+      under the title of “Roughing It on the Silver Frontier,” and if
+      his audiences were any less enthusiastic, or his houses less
+      crowded than before, the newspapers of that day have left no
+      record of it. It was the height of the season now, and being free
+      to do so, he threw himself into the whirl of it, and for two
+      months, beyond doubt, was the most talked-of figure in London.
+      The Athenaeum Club made him a visiting member (an honor
+      considered next to knighthood); Punch quoted him; societies
+      banqueted him; his apartments, as before; were besieged by
+      callers. Afternoons one was likely to find him in “Poets' Corner”
+      of the Langham smoking-room, with a group of London and American
+      authors—Reade, Collins, Miller, and the others—frankly rioting in
+      his bold fancies. Charles Warren Stoddard was in London at the
+      time, and acted as his secretary. Stoddard was a gentle poet, a
+      delightful fellow, and Clemens was very fond of him. His only
+      complaint of Stoddard was that he did not laugh enough at his
+      humorous yarns. Clemens once said:
+
+      “Dolby and I used to come in after the lecture, or perhaps after
+      being out to some dinner, and we liked to sit down and talk it
+      over and tell yarns, and we expected Stoddard to laugh at them,
+      but Stoddard would lie there on the couch and snore. Otherwise,
+      as a secretary, he was perfect.”
+
+      The great Tichborne trial was in progress then, and the spectacle
+      of an illiterate impostor trying to establish his claim as the
+      rightful heir to a great estate was highly diverting to Mark
+      Twain.—[In a letter of this period he speaks of having attended
+      one of the Claimant's “Evenings.”]—He wanted to preserve the
+      evidence as future literary material, and Stoddard day after day
+      patiently collected the news reports and neatly pasted them into
+      scrap-books, where they still rest, a complete record of that now
+      forgotten farce. The Tichborne trial recalled to Mark Twain the
+      claimant in the Lampton family, who from time to time wrote him
+      long letters, urging him to join in the effort to establish his
+      rights to the earldom of Durham. This American claimant was a
+      distant cousin, who had “somehow gotten hold of, or had
+      fabricated a full set of documents.”
+
+      Colonel Henry Watterson, just quoted (also a Lampton connection),
+      adds:
+
+    During the Tichborne trial Mark and I were in London, and one day
+    he said to me: “I have investigated this Durham business down at
+    the Herald's office. There is nothing to it. The Lamptons passed
+    out of the earldom of Durham a hundred years ago. There were never
+    any estates; the title lapsed; the present earldom is a new
+    creation, not in the same family at all. But I'll tell you what: if
+    you'll put up $500, I'll put up $500 more; we'll bring our chap
+    over here and set him in as claimant, and, my word for it,
+    Kenealy's fat boy won't be a marker to him.”
+
+      It was a characteristic Mark Twain project, one of the sort he
+      never earned out in reality, but loved to follow in fancy, and
+      with the pen sometimes. The “Rightful Earl of Durham” continued
+      to send letters for a long time after that (some of them still
+      exist), but he did not establish his claim. No one but Mark Twain
+      ever really got anything out of it. Like the Tennessee land, it
+      furnished material by and by for a book. Colonel Watterson goes
+      on to say that Clemens was only joking about having looked up the
+      matter in the peerage; that he hadn't really looked it up at all,
+      and that the earldom lies still in the Lampton family.
+
+      Another of Clemens's friends in London at this time was Prentice
+      Mulford, of California. In later years Mulford acquired a wide
+      reputation for his optimistic and practical psychologies. Through
+      them he lifted himself out of the slough of despond, and he
+      sought to extend a helping hand to others. His “White Cross
+      Library” had a wide reading and a wide influence; perhaps has to
+      this day. But in 1873 Mulford had not found the tangibility of
+      thought, the secret of strength; he was only finding it, maybe,
+      in his frank acknowledgment of shortcoming:
+
+    Now, Mark, I am down-very much down at present; you are up-where
+    you deserve to be. I can't ask this on the score of any past
+    favors, for there have been none. I have not always spoken of you
+    in terms of extravagant praise; have sometimes criticized you,
+    which was due, I suppose, in part to an envious spirit. I am simply
+    human. Some people in the same profession say they entertain no
+    jealousy of those more successful. I can't. They are divine; I am
+    not.
+
+      It was only that he wished Clemens to speak a word for him to
+      Routledge, to get him a hearing for his work. He adds:
+
+    I shall be up myself some day, although my line is far apart from
+    yours. Whether you can do anything that I ask of you or not, I
+    shall be happy then, as I would be now, to do you any just and
+    right service.... Perhaps I have mistaken my vocation. Certainly,
+    if I was back with my rocker on the Tuolumne, I'd make it rattle
+    livelier than ever I did before. I have occasionally thought of
+    London Bridge, but the Thames is now so d—-d cold and dirty, and
+    besides I can swim, and any attempt at drowning would, through the
+    mere instinct of self-preservation, only result in my swimming
+    ashore and ruining my best clothes; wherefore I should be worse off
+    than ever.
+
+      Of course Mark Twain granted the favor Mulford asked, and a great
+      deal more, no doubt, for that was his way. Mulford came up, as he
+      had prophesied, but the sea in due time claimed him, though not
+      in the way he had contemplated. Years after he was one day found
+      drifting off the shores of Long Island in an open boat, dead.
+
+      Clemens made a number of notable dinner speeches during this
+      second London lecture period. His response to the toast of the
+      “Ladies,” delivered at the annual dinner of the Scottish
+      Corporation of London, was the sensational event of the evening.
+
+      He was obliged to decline an invitation to the Lord Mayor's
+      dinner, whereupon his Lordship wrote to urge him to be present at
+      least at the finale, when the welcome would be “none the less
+      hearty,” and bespoke his attendance for any future dinners.
+
+      Clemens lectured steadily at the Hanover Square Rooms during the
+      two months of his stay in London, and it was only toward the end
+      of this astonishing engagement that the audience began to show
+      any sign of diminishing. Early in January he wrote to Twichell:
+
+      I am not going to the provinces because I cannot get halls that
+      are large enough. I always felt cramped in the Hanover Square
+      Rooms, but I find that everybody here speaks with awe and respect
+      of that prodigious hall and wonders that I could fill it so long.
+
+      I am hoping to be back in twenty days, but I have so much to go
+      home to and enjoy with a jubilant joy that it hardly seems
+      possible that it can come to pass in so uncertain a world as
+      this.
+
+      In the same letter he speaks of attending an exhibition of
+      Landseer's paintings at the Royal Academy:
+
+    Ah, they are wonderfully beautiful! There are such rich moonlights
+    and dusks in the “Challenge” and the “Combat,” and in that long
+    flight of birds across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or
+    sunrise, for no man can ever tell t'other from which in a picture,
+    except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the
+    water), and there is such a grave analytical profundity in the face
+    of the connoisseurs; and such pathos in the picture of a fawn
+    suckling its dead mother on a snowy waste, with only the blood in
+    the footprints to hint that she is not asleep. And the way that he
+    makes animals' flesh and blood, insomuch that if the room were
+    darkened ever so little, and a motionless living animal placed
+    beside the painted one, no man could tell which was which.
+
+      I interrupted myself here, to drop a line to Shirley Brooks and
+      suggest a cartoon for Punch. It was this: in one of the Academy
+      saloons (in a suite where these pictures are) a fine bust of
+      Landseer stands on a pedestal in the center of the room. I
+      suggested that some of Landseer's best known animals be
+      represented as having come down out of their frames in the
+      moonlight and grouped themselves about the bust in mourning
+      attitudes.
+
+      He sailed January 13 (1874.), on the Paythia, and two weeks later
+      was at home, where all was going well. The Gilded Age had been
+      issued a day or two before Christmas, and was already in its
+      third edition. By the end of January 26,000 copies had been sold,
+      a sale that had increased to 40,000 a month later. The new house
+      was progressing, though it was by no means finished. Mrs. Clemens
+      was in good health. Little Susy was full of such American
+      activities as to earn the name of “The Modoc.” The promise of the
+      year was bright.
+
+
+
+
+      XCIII. THE REAL COLONEL SELLERS-GOLDEN DAYS
+
+
+      There are bound to be vexations, flies in the ointment, as we
+      say. It was Warner who conferred the name of Eschol Sellers on
+      the chief figure of the collaborated novel. Warner had known it
+      as the name of an obscure person, or perhaps he had only heard of
+      it. At all events, it seemed a good one for the character and had
+      been adopted. But behold, the book had been issued but a little
+      while when there rose “out of the vasty deeps” a genuine Eschol
+      Sellers, who was a very respectable person. He was a stout,
+      prosperous-looking man, gray and about fifty-five years old. He
+      came into the American Publishing Company offices and asked
+      permission to look at the book. Mr. Bliss was out at the moment,
+      but presently arrived. The visitor rose and introduced himself.
+
+      “My name is Eschol Sellers,” he said. “You have used it in one of
+      your publications. It has brought upon me a lot of ridicule. My
+      people wish me to sue you for $10,000 damages.”
+
+      He had documents to prove his identity, and there was only one
+      thing to be done; he must be satisfied. Bliss agreed to recall as
+      many of the offending volumes as possible and change the name on
+      the plates. He contacted the authors, and the name Beriah was
+      substituted for the offending Eschol. It turned out that the real
+      Sellers family was a large one, and that the given name Eschol
+      was not uncommon in its several branches. This particular Eschol
+      Sellers, curiously enough, was an inventor and a promoter, though
+      of a much more substantial sort than his fiction namesake. He was
+      also a painter of considerable merit, a writer and an
+      antiquarian. He was said to have been a grandson of the famous
+      painter, Rembrandt Peale.
+
+      Clemens vowed that he would not lecture in America that winter.
+      The irrepressible Redpath besieged him as usual, and at the end
+      of January Clemens telegraphed him, as he thought, finally.
+      Following it with a letter of explanation, he added:
+
+      “I said to her, 'There isn't money enough in America to hire me
+      to leave you for one day.'”
+
+      But Redpath was a persistent devil. He used arguments and held
+      out inducements which even Mrs. Clemens thought should not be
+      resisted, and Clemens yielded from time to time, and gave a
+      lecture here and there during February. Finally, on the 3d of
+      March (1879.) he telegraphed his tormentor:
+
+      “Why don't you congratulate me? I never expect to stand on a
+      lecture platform again after Thursday night.”
+
+      Howells tells delightfully of a visit which he and Aldrich paid
+      to Hartford just at this period. Aldrich went to visit Clemens
+      and Howells to visit Charles Dudley Warner, Clemens coming as far
+      as Springfield to welcome them.
+
+    In the good-fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such
+    days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round. There was
+    constant running in and out of friendly houses where the lively
+    hosts and guests called one another by their Christian names or
+    nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at
+    doors. Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he
+    satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another
+    sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which
+    enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance.
+
+      Howells tells how Clemens dilated on the advantages of
+      subscription sale over the usual methods of publication, and
+      urged the two Boston authors to prepare something which
+      canvassers could handle.
+
+      “Why, any other means of bringing out a book is privately
+      printing it,” he declared, and added that his subscription books
+      in Bliss's hands sold right along, “just like the Bible.”
+
+      On the way back to Boston Howells and Aldrich planned a
+      subscription book which would sell straight along, like the
+      Bible. It was to be called “Twelve Memorable Murders.” They had
+      dreamed two or three fortunes by the time they had reached
+      Boston, but the project ended there.
+
+      “We never killed a single soul,” Howells said once to the writer
+      of this memoir.
+
+      Clemens was always urging Howells to visit him after that. He
+      offered all sorts of inducements.
+
+    You will find us the most reasonable people in the world. We had
+    thought of precipitating upon you, George Warner and his wife one
+    day, Twichell and his jewel of a wife another day, and Charles
+    Perkins and wife another. Only those—simply members of our family
+    they are. But I'll close the door against them all, which will
+    “fix” all of the lot except Twichell, who will no more hesitate to
+    climb in the back window than nothing.
+    And you shall go to bed when you please, get up when you please,
+    talk when you please, read when you please.
+
+      A little later he was urging Howells or Aldrich, or both of them;
+      to come to Hartford to live.
+
+    Mr. Hall, who lives in the house next to Mrs. Stowe's (just where
+    we drive in to go to our new house), will sell for $16,000 or
+    $17,000. You can do your work just as well here as in Cambridge,
+    can't you? Come! Will one of you boys buy that house? Now, say yes.
+
+      Certainly those were golden, blessed days, and perhaps, as
+      Howells says, the sun does not shine on their like any more—not
+      in Hartford, at least, for the old group that made them no longer
+      assembles there. Hartford about this time became a sort of shrine
+      for all literary visitors, and for other notables as well,
+      whether of America or from overseas. It was the half-way place
+      between Boston and New York, and pilgrims going in either
+      direction rested there. It is said that travelers arriving in
+      America, were apt to remember two things they wished to see:
+      Niagara Falls and Mark Twain. But the Falls had no such recent
+      advertising advantage as that spectacular success in London.
+      Visitors were apt to begin in Hartford.
+
+      Howells went with considerable frequency after that, or rather
+      with regularity, twice a year, or oftener, and his coming was
+      always hailed with great rejoicing. They visited and ate around
+      at one place and another among that pleasant circle of friends.
+      But they were happiest afterward together, Clemens smoking
+      continually, “soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch,”
+      says Howells, “while we both talked, and talked, and tasked of
+      everything in the heavens and on the earth, and the waters under
+      the earth. After two days of this talk I would come away hollow,
+      realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust-shells
+      which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of
+      summer.” Sometimes Clemens told the story of his early life, “the
+      inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights story, which I could
+      never tire of even when it began to be told over again.”
+
+
+
+
+      XCIV. BEGINNING “TOM SAWYER”
+
+
+      The Clemens household went to Quarry Farm in April, leaving the
+      new house once more in the hands of the architect and builders.
+      It was costing a vast sum of money, and there was a financial
+      stress upon land. Mrs. Clemens, always prudent, became a little
+      uneasy at times, though without warrant in those days, for her
+      business statement showed that her holdings were only a little
+      less than a quarter of a million in her own right, while her
+      husband's books and lectures had been highly remunerative, and
+      would be more so. They were justified in living in ample, even
+      luxurious comfort, and how free from financial worries they could
+      have lived for the rest of their days!
+
+      Clemens, realizing his happiness, wrote Dr. Brown:
+
+      Indeed I am thankful for the wifey and the child, and if there is
+      one individual creature on all this footstool who is more
+      thoroughly and uniformly and, unceasingly happy than I am I defy
+      the world to produce him and prove him. In my opinion he don't
+      exist. I was a mighty rough, coarse, unpromising subject when
+      Livy took charge of me, four years ago, and I may still be to the
+      rest of the world, but not to her. She has made a very creditable
+      job of me.
+
+      Truly fortune not only smiled, but laughed. Every mail brought
+      great bundles of letters that sang his praises. Robert Watt, who
+      had translated his books into Danish, wrote of their wide
+      popularity among his people. Madame Blanc (Th. Bentzon), who as
+      early as 1872 had translated The Jumping Frog into French, and
+      published it, with extended comment on the author and his work,
+      in the 'Revue des deux mondes', was said to be preparing a review
+      of 'The Gilded Age'. All the world seemed ready to do him honor.
+
+      Of course, one must always pay the price, usually a vexatious
+      one. Bores stopped him on the street to repeat ancient and
+      witless stories. Invented anecdotes, some of them exasperating
+      ones, went the rounds of the press. Impostors in distant
+      localities personated him, or claimed to be near relatives, and
+      obtained favors, sometimes money, in his name. Trivial letters,
+      seeking benefactions of every kind, took the savor from his daily
+      mail. Letters from literary aspirants were so numerous that he
+      prepared a “form” letter of reply:
+
+      DEAR SIR OR MADAM,—Experience has not taught me very much, still
+      it has taught me that it is not wise to criticize a piece of
+      literature, except to an enemy of the person who wrote it; then
+      if you praise it that enemy admires—you for your honest
+      manliness, and if you dispraise it he admires you for your sound
+      judgment.
+
+                     Yours truly,  S. L. C.
+
+      Even Orion, now in Keokuk on a chicken farm, pursued him with
+      manuscripts and proposals of schemes. Clemens had bought this
+      farm for Orion, who had counted on large and quick returns, but
+      was planning new enterprises before the first eggs were hatched.
+      Orion Clemens was as delightful a character as was ever created
+      in fiction, but he must have been a trial now and then to Mark
+      Twain. We may gather something of this from a letter written by
+      the latter to his mother and sister at this period:
+
+    I can't “encourage” Orion. Nobody can do that conscientiously, for
+    the reason that before one's letter has time to reach him he is off
+    on some new wild-goose chase. Would you encourage in literature a
+    man who the older he grows the worse he writes?
+    I cannot encourage him to try the ministry, because he would change
+    his religion so fast that he would have to keep a traveling agent
+    under wages to go ahead of him to engage pulpits and board for him.
+    I cannot conscientiously encourage him to do anything but potter
+    around his little farm and put in his odd hours contriving new and
+    impossible projects at the rate of 365 a year which is his
+    customary average. He says he did well in Hannibal! Now there is a
+    man who ought to be entirely satisfied with the grandeurs,
+    emoluments, and activities of a hen farm.
+    If you ask me to pity Orion I can do that. I can do it every day
+    and all day long. But one can't “encourage” quicksilver; because
+    the instant you put your finger on it, it isn't there. No, I am
+    saying too much. He does stick to his literary and legal
+    aspirations, and he naturally would elect the very two things which
+    he is wholly and preposterously unfitted for. If I ever become
+    able, I mean to put Orion on a regular pension without revealing
+    the fact that it is a pension.
+    He did presently allow the pension, a liberal one, which continued
+    until neither Orion Clemens nor his wife had further earthly need
+    of it.
+
+      Mark Twain for some time had contemplated one of the books that
+      will longest preserve his memory, 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'.
+      The success of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for
+      other autobiographical material, and he remembered those days
+      along the river-front in Hannibal—his skylarking with Tom
+      Blankenship, the Bowen boys, John Briggs, and the rest. He had
+      recognized these things as material—inviting material it was—and
+      now in the cool luxury of Quarry Farm he set himself to spin the
+      fabric of youth.
+
+      He found summer-time always his best period for literary effort,
+      and on a hillside just by the old quarry, Mrs. Crane had built
+      for him that spring a study—a little room of windows, somewhat
+      suggestive of a pilot-house—overlooking the long sweep of grass
+      and the dreamlike city below. Vines were planted that in the
+      course of time would cover and embower it; there was a tiny
+      fireplace for chilly days. To Twichell, of his new retreat,
+      Clemens wrote:
+
+      It is the loveliest study you ever saw. It is octagonal, with a
+      peaked roof, each face filled with a spacious window, and it sits
+      perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that
+      commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of
+      distant blue hills. It is a cozy nest and just room in it for a
+      sofa, table, and three or four chairs, and when the storms sweep
+      down the remote valley and the lightning flashes behind the hills
+      beyond, and the rain beats upon the roof over my head, imagine
+      the luxury of it.
+
+      He worked steadily there that summer. He would go up mornings,
+      after breakfast, remaining until nearly dinner-time, say until
+      five o'clock or after, for it was not his habit to eat luncheon.
+      Other members of the family did not venture near the place, and
+      if he was urgently wanted they blew a horn. Each evening he
+      brought down his day's performance to read to the assembled
+      family. He felt the need of audience and approval. Usually he
+      earned the latter, but not always. Once, when for a day he put
+      aside other matters to record a young undertaker's love-affair,
+      and brought down the result in the evening, fairly bubbling with
+      the joy of it, he met with a surprise. The tale was a ghastly
+      burlesque, its humor of the most disheartening, unsavory sort. No
+      one spoke during the reading, nobody laughed: The air was thick
+      with disapproval. His voice lagged and faltered toward the end.
+      When he finished there was heavy silence. Mrs. Clemens was the
+      only one who could speak:
+
+      “Youth, let's walk a little,” she said.
+
+      The “Undertaker's Love Story” is still among the manuscripts of
+      that period, but it is unlikely that it will ever see the light
+      of print.—[This tale bears no relation to “The Undertaker's
+      Story” in Sketches New and Old.]
+
+      The Tom Sawyer tale progressed steadily and satisfactorily.
+      Clemens wrote Dr. Brown:
+
+    I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average,
+    for some time now, on a book (a story), and consequently have been
+    so wrapped up in it, and dead to everything else, that I have
+    fallen mighty short in letter-writing....
+    On hot days I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down
+    with brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in
+    the same thin linen we make shirts of.
+
+      He incloses some photographs in this letter.
+
+    The group [he says] represents the vine-clad carriageway in front
+    of the farm-house. On the left is Megalopis sitting in the lap of
+    her German nurse-maid. I am sitting behind them. Mrs. Crane is in
+    the center. Mr. Crane next to her. Then Mrs. Clemens and the new
+    baby. Her Irish nurse stands at her back. Then comes the table
+    waitress, a young negro girl, born free. Next to her is Auntie Cord
+    (a fragment of whose history I have just sent to a magazine). She
+    is the cook; was in slavery more than forty years; and the self-
+    satisfied wench, the last of the group, is the little baby's
+    American nurse-maid. In the middle distance my mother-in-law's
+    coachman (up on errand) has taken a position unsolicited to help
+    out the picture. No, that is not true. He was waiting there a
+    minute or two before the photographer came. In the extreme
+    background, under the archway, you glimpse my study.
+
+      The “new baby,” “Bay,” as they came to call her, was another
+      little daughter, born in June, a happy, healthy addition to the
+      household. In a letter written to Twichell we get a sweet summer
+      picture of this period, particularly of little sunny-haired,
+      two-year-old Susy.
+
+    There is nothing selfish about the Modoc. She is fascinated with
+    the new baby. The Modoc rips and tears around outdoors most of the
+    time, and consequently is as hard as a pineknot and as brown as an
+    Indian. She is bosom friend to all the chickens, ducks, turkeys,
+    and guinea-hens on the place. Yesterday, as she marched along the
+    winding path that leads up the hill through the red-clover beds to
+    the summer-house, there was a long procession of these fowls
+    stringing contentedly after her, led by a stately rooster, who can
+    look over the Modoc's head. The devotion of these vassals has been
+    purchased with daily largess of Indian meal, and so the Modoc,
+    attended by her body-guard, moves in state wherever she goes.
+
+      There were days, mainly Sundays, when he did not work at all;
+      peaceful days of lying fallow, dreaming in shady places, drowsily
+      watching little Susy, or reading with Mrs. Clemens. Howells's
+      “Foregone Conclusion” was running in the Atlantic that year, and
+      they delighted in it. Clemens wrote the author:
+
+    I should think that this must be the daintiest, truest, most
+    admirable workmanship that was ever put on a story. The creatures
+    of God do not act out their natures more unerringly than yours do.
+    If your genuine stories can die I wonder by what right old Walter
+    Scott's artificialities shall continue to live.
+
+      At other times he found comfort in the society of Theodore Crane.
+      These two were always fond of each other, and often read together
+      the books in which they were mutually interested. They had
+      portable-hammock arrangements, which they placed side by side on
+      the lawn, and read and discussed through summer afternoons. The
+      'Mutineers of the Bounty' was one of the books they liked best,
+      and there was a story of an Iceland farmer, a human document,
+      that had an unfading interest. Also there were certain articles
+      in old numbers of the Atlantic that they read and reread. 'Pepys'
+      Diary', 'Two Years Before the Mast', and a book on the Andes were
+      reliable favorites. Mark Twain read not so many books, but read a
+      few books often. Those named were among the literature he asked
+      for each year of his return to Quarry Farm. Without them, the
+      farm and the summer would not be the same.
+
+      Then there was 'Lecky's History of European Morals'; there were
+      periods when they read Lecky avidly and discussed it in original
+      and unorthodox ways. Mark Twain found an echo of his own
+      philosophies in Lecky. He made frequent marginal notes along the
+      pages of the world's moral history—notes not always quotable in
+      the family circle. Mainly, however, they were short, crisp
+      interjections of assent or disapproval. In one place Lecky refers
+      to those who have undertaken to prove that all our morality is a
+      product of experience, holding that a desire to obtain happiness
+      and to avoid pain is the only possible motive to action; the
+      reason, and the only reason, why we should perform virtuous
+      actions being “that on the whole such a course will bring us the
+      greatest amount of happiness.” Clemens has indorsed these
+      philosophies by writing on the margin, “Sound and true.” It was
+      the philosophy which he himself would always hold (though,
+      apparently, never live by), and in the end would embody a volume
+      of his own.—[What Is Man? Privately printed in 1906.]—In another
+      place Lecky, himself speaking, says:
+
+    Fortunately we are all dependent for many of our pleasures on
+    others. Co-operation and organization are essential to our
+    happiness, and these are impossible without some restraint being
+    placed upon our appetites. Laws are made to secure this restraint,
+    and being sustained by rewards, and punishments they make it the
+    interest of the individual to regard that of the community.
+
+      “Correct!” comments Clemens. “He has proceeded from unreasoned
+      selfishness to reasoned selfishness. All our acts, reasoned and
+      unreasoned, are selfish.” It was a conclusion he logically never
+      departed from; not the happiest one, it would seem, at first
+      glance, but one easier to deny than to disprove.
+
+      On the back of an old envelope Mark Twain set down his literary
+      declaration of this period.
+
+      “I like history, biography, travels, curious facts and strange
+      happenings, and science. And I detest novels, poetry, and
+      theology.”
+
+      But of course the novels of Howells would be excepted; Lecky was
+      not theology, but the history of it; his taste for poetry would
+      develop later, though it would never become a fixed quantity, as
+      was his devotion to history and science. His interest in these
+      amounted to a passion.
+
+
+
+
+      XCV. AN “ATLANTIC” STORY AND A PLAY
+
+
+      The reference to “Auntie Cord” in the letter to Dr. Brown brings
+      us to Mark Twain's first contribution to the Atlantic Monthly.
+      Howells in his Recollections of his Atlantic editorship, after
+      referring to certain Western contributors, says:
+
+    Later came Mark Twain, originally of Missouri, but then
+    provisionally of Hartford, and now ultimately of the solar system,
+    not to say the universe. He came first with “A True Story,” one of
+    those noble pieces of humanity with which the South has atoned
+    chiefly, if not solely, through him for all its despite to the
+    negro.
+
+      Clemens had long aspired to appear in the Atlantic, but such was
+      his own rating of his literature that he hardly hoped to qualify
+      for its pages. Twichell remembers his “mingled astonishment and
+      triumph” when he was invited to send something to the magazine.
+
+      He was obliged to “send something” once or twice before the
+      acceptance of “A True Story,” the narrative of Auntie Cord, and
+      even this acceptance brought with it the return of a fable which
+      had accompanied it, with the explanation that a fable like that
+      would disqualify the magazine for every denominational reader,
+      though Howells hastened to express his own joy in it, having been
+      particularly touched by the author's reference to Sisyphus and
+      Atlas as ancestors of the tumble-bug. The “True Story,” he said,
+      with its “realest king of black talk,” won him, and a few days
+      later he wrote again: “This little story delights me more and
+      more. I wish you had about forty of 'em.”
+
+      And so, modestly enough, as became him, for the story was of the
+      simplest, most unpretentious sort, Mark Twain entered into the
+      school of the elect.
+
+      In his letter to Howells, accompanying the MS., the author said:
+
+    I inclose also “A True Story,” which has no humor in it. You can
+    pay as lightly as you choose for that if you want it, for it is
+    rather out of my line. I have not altered the old colored woman's
+    story, except to begin it at the beginning, instead of the middle,
+    as she did—and traveled both ways.
+
+      Howells in his Recollections tells of the business anxiety in the
+      Atlantic office in the effort to estimate the story's pecuniary
+      value. Clemens and Harte had raised literary rates enormously;
+      the latter was reputed to have received as much as five cents a
+      word from affluent newspapers! But the Atlantic was poor, and
+      when sixty dollars was finally decided upon for the three pages
+      (about two and a half cents a word) the rate was regarded as
+      handsome—without precedent in Atlantic history. Howells adds that
+      as much as forty times this amount was sometimes offered to Mark
+      Twain in later years. Even in '74 he had received a much higher
+      rate than that offered by the Atlantic,—but no acceptance, then,
+      or later, ever made him happier, or seemed more richly rewarded.
+
+      “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” was
+      precisely what it claimed to be.—[Atlantic Monthly for November,
+      1874; also included in Sketches New and Old.]—Auntie Cord, the
+      Auntie Rachel of that tale, cook at Quarry Farm, was a Virginia
+      negress who had been twice sold as a slave, and was proud of the
+      fact; particularly proud that she had brought $1,000 on the
+      block. All her children had been sold away from her, but it was a
+      long time ago, and now at sixty she was fat and seemingly without
+      care. She had told her story to Mrs. Crane, who had more than
+      once tried to persuade her to tell it to Clemens; but Auntie Cord
+      was reluctant. One evening, however, when the family sat on the
+      front veranda in the moonlight, looking down on the picture city,
+      as was their habit, Auntie Cord came around to say good night,
+      and Clemens engaged her in conversation. He led up to her story,
+      and almost before she knew it she was seated at his feet telling
+      the strange tale in almost the exact words in which it was set
+      down by him next morning. It gave Mark Twain a chance to exercise
+      two of his chief gifts—transcription and portrayal. He was always
+      greater at these things than at invention. Auntie Cord's story is
+      a little masterpiece.
+
+      He wished to do more with Auntie Cord and her associates of the
+      farm, for they were extraordinarily interesting. Two other
+      negroes on the place, John Lewis and his wife (we shall hear
+      notably of Lewis later), were not always on terms of amity with
+      Auntie Cord. They disagreed on religion, and there were frequent
+      battles in the kitchen. These depressed the mistress of the
+      house, but they gave only joy to Mark Twain. His Southern raising
+      had given him an understanding of their humors, their native
+      emotions which made these riots a spiritual gratification. He
+      would slip around among the shrubbery and listen to the noise and
+      strife of battle, and hug himself with delight. Sometimes they
+      resorted to missiles—stones, tinware—even dressed poultry which
+      Auntie Cord was preparing for the oven. Lewis was very black,
+      Auntie Cord was a bright mulatto, Lewis's' wife several shades
+      lighter. Wherever the discussion began it promptly shaded off
+      toward the color-line and insult. Auntie Cord was a Methodist;
+      Lewis was a Dunkard. Auntie Cord was ignorant and dogmatic; Lewis
+      could read and was intelligent. Theology invariably led to
+      personality, and eventually to epithets, crockery, geology, and
+      victuals. How the greatest joker of the age did enjoy that summer
+      warfare!
+
+      The fun was not all one-sided. An incident of that summer
+      probably furnished more enjoyment for the colored members of the
+      household than it did for Mark Twain. Lewis had some fowls, and
+      among them was a particularly pestiferous guinea-hen that used to
+      get up at three in the morning and go around making the kind of a
+      noise that a guinea-hen must like and is willing to get up early
+      to hear. Mark Twain did not care for it. He stood it as long as
+      he could one morning, then crept softly from the house to stop
+      it.
+
+      It was a clear, bright night; locating the guinea-hen, he slipped
+      up stealthily with a stout stick. The bird was pouring out its
+      heart, tearing the moonlight to tatters. Stealing up close,
+      Clemens made a vicious swing with his bludgeon, but just then the
+      guinea stepped forward a little, and he missed. The stroke and
+      his explosion frightened the fowl, and it started to run.
+      Clemens, with his mind now on the single purpose of revenge,
+      started after it. Around the trees, along the paths, up and down
+      the lawn, through gates and across the garden, out over the
+      fields, they raced, “pursuer and pursued.” The guinea nor longer
+      sang, and Clemens was presently too exhausted to swear. Hour
+      after hour the silent, deadly hunt continued, both stopping to
+      rest at intervals; then up again and away. It was like something
+      in a dream. It was nearly breakfast-time when he dragged himself
+      into the house at last, and the guinea was resting and panting
+      under a currant-bush. Later in the day Clemens gave orders to
+      Lewis to “kill and eat that guinea-hen,” which Lewis did. Clemens
+      himself had then never eaten a guinea, but some years later, in
+      Paris, when the delicious breast of one of those fowls was served
+      him, he remembered and said:
+
+      “And to think, after chasing that creature all night, John Lewis
+      got to eat him instead of me.”
+
+      The interest in Tom and Huck, or the inspiration for their
+      adventures, gave out at last, or was superseded by a more
+      immediate demand. As early as May, Goodman, in San Francisco, had
+      seen a play announced there, presenting the character of Colonel
+      Sellers, dramatized by Gilbert S. Densmore and played by John T.
+      Raymond. Goodman immediately wrote Clemens; also a letter came
+      from Warner, in Hartford, who had noticed in San Francisco papers
+      announcements of the play. Of course Clemens would take action
+      immediately; he telegraphed, enjoining the performance. Then
+      began a correspondence with the dramatist and actor. This in time
+      resulted in an amicable arrangement, by which the dramatist
+      agreed to dispose of his version to Clemens. Clemens did not wait
+      for it to arrive, but began immediately a version of his own.
+      Just how much or how little of Densmore's work found its way into
+      the completed play, as presented by Raymond later, cannot be
+      known now. Howells conveys the impression that Clemens had no
+      hand in its authorship beyond the character of Sellers as taken
+      from the book. But in a letter still extant, which Clemens wrote
+      to Howells at the time, he says:
+
+    I worked a month on my play, and launched it in New York last
+    Wednesday. I believe it will go. The newspapers have been
+    complimentary. It is simply a setting for one character, Colonel
+    Sellers. As a play I guess it will not bear critical assault in
+    force.
+
+      The Warners are as charming as ever. They go shortly to the devil
+      for a year—that is, to Egypt.
+
+      Raymond, in a letter which he wrote to the Sun, November 3, 1874,
+      declared that “not one line” of Densmore's dramatization was
+      used, “except that which was taken bodily from The Gilded Age.”
+      During the newspaper discussion of the matter, Clemens himself
+      prepared a letter for the Hartford Post. This letter was
+      suppressed, but it still exists. In it he says:
+
+    I entirely rewrote the play three separate and distinct times. I
+    had expected to use little of his [Densmore's] language and but
+    little of his plot. I do not think there are now twenty sentences
+    of Mr. Densmore's in the play, but I used so much of his plot that
+    I wrote and told him that I should pay him about as much more as I
+    had already paid him in case the play proved a success. I shall
+    keep my word.
+
+      This letter, written while the matter was fresh in his mind, is
+      undoubtedly in accordance with the facts. That Densmore was fully
+      satisfied may be gathered from an acknowledgment, in which he
+      says: “Your letter reached me on the ad, with check. In this
+      place permit me to thank you for the very handsome manner in
+      which you have acted in this matter.”
+
+      Warner, meantime, realizing that the play was constructed almost
+      entirely of the Mark Twain chapters of the book, agreed that his
+      collaborator should undertake the work and financial
+      responsibilities of the dramatic venture and reap such rewards as
+      might result. Various stories have been told of this matter, most
+      of them untrue. There was no bitterness between the friends, no
+      semblance of an estrangement of any sort. Warner very generously
+      and promptly admitted that he was not concerned with the play,
+      its authorship, or its profits, whatever the latter might amount
+      to. Moreover, Warner was going to Egypt very soon, and his labors
+      and responsibilities were doubly sufficient as they stood.
+
+      Clemens's estimate of the play as a dramatic composition was
+      correct enough, but the public liked it, and it was a financial
+      success from the start. He employed a representative to travel
+      with Raymond, to assist in the management and in the division of
+      spoil. The agent had instructions to mail a card every day,
+      stating the amount of his share in the profits. Howells once
+      arrived in Hartford just when this postal tide of fortune was at
+      its flood:
+
+      One hundred and fifty dollars—two hundred dollars—three hundred
+      dollars were the gay figures which they bore, and which he
+      flaunted in the air, before he sat down at the table, or rose
+      from it to brandish, and then, flinging his napkin in the chair,
+      walked up and down to exult in.
+
+      Once, in later years, referring to the matter, Howells said “He
+      was never a man who cared anything about money except as a dream,
+      and he wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this
+      dream.” Which was a true word. Mark Twain with money was like a
+      child with a heap of bright pebbles, ready to pile up more and
+      still more, then presently to throw them all away and begin
+      gathering anew.
+
+
+
+
+      XCVI. THE NEW HOME
+
+
+      The Clemenses returned to Hartford to find their new house
+      “ready,” though still full of workmen, decorators, plumbers, and
+      such other minions of labor as make life miserable to those with
+      ambitions for new or improved habitations. The carpenters were
+      still on the lower floor, but the family moved in and camped
+      about in rooms up-stairs that were more or less free from the
+      invader. They had stopped in New York ten days to buy carpets and
+      furnishings, and these began to arrive, with no particular place
+      to put them; but the owners were excited and happy with it all,
+      for it was the pleasant season of the year, and all the new
+      features of the house were fascinating, while the daily progress
+      of the decorators furnished a fresh surprise when they roamed
+      through the rooms at evening. Mrs. Clemens wrote home:
+
+    We are perfectly delighted with everything here and do so want you
+    all to see it.
+
+      Her husband, as he was likely to do, picked up the letter and
+      finished it:
+
+    Livy appoints me to finish this; but how can a headless man perform
+    an intelligent function? I have been bully-ragged all day by the
+    builder, by his foreman, by the architect, by the tapestry devil
+    who is to upholster the furniture, by the idiot who is putting down
+    the carpets, by the scoundrel who is setting up the billiard-table
+    (and has left the balls in New York), by the wildcat who is sodding
+    the ground and finishing the driveway (after the sun went down), by
+    a book agent, whose body is in the back yard and the coroner
+    notified. Just think of this thing going on the whole day long, and
+    I a man who loathes details with all his heart! But I haven't lost
+    my temper, and I've made Livy lie down most of the time; could
+    anybody make her lie down all the time?
+
+      Warner wrote from Egypt expressing sympathy for their unfurnished
+      state of affairs, but added, “I would rather fit out three houses
+      and fill them with furniture than to fit out one 'dahabiyeh'.”
+      Warner was at that moment undertaking his charmingly remembered
+      trip up the Nile.
+
+      The new home was not entirely done for a long time. One never
+      knows when a big house like that—or a little house, for that
+      matters done. But they were settled at last, with all their
+      beautiful things in place; and perhaps there have been richer
+      homes, possibly more artistic ones, but there has never been a
+      more charming home, within or without, than that one.
+
+      So many frequenters have tried to express the charm of that
+      household. None of them has quite succeeded, for it lay not so
+      much in its arrangement of rooms or their decorations or their
+      outlook, though these were all beautiful enough, but rather in
+      the personality, the atmosphere; and these are elusive things to
+      convey in words. We can only see and feel and recognize; we
+      cannot translate them. Even Howells, with his subtle touch, can
+      present only an aspect here and there; an essence, as it were,
+      from a happy garden, rather than the fullness of its bloom.
+
+      As Mark Twain was unlike any other man that ever lived, so his
+      house was unlike any other house ever built. People asked him why
+      he built the kitchen toward the street, and he said:
+
+      “So the servants can see the circus go by without running out
+      into the front yard.”
+
+      But this was probably an after-thought. The kitchen end of the
+      house extended toward Farmington Avenue, but it was by no means
+      unbeautiful. It was a pleasing detail of the general scheme. The
+      main entrance faced at right angles with the street and opened to
+      a spacious hall. In turn, the hall opened to a parlor, where
+      there was a grand piano, and to the dining-room and library, and
+      the library opened to a little conservatory, semicircular in
+      form, of a design invented by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Says
+      Howells:
+
+    The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed
+    up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of the
+    fountain companied by Callas and other waterloving lilies. There,
+    while we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled
+    the pretty bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the
+    delicate accents of its varied blossoms.
+
+      In the library was an old carved mantel which Clemens and his
+      wife had bought in Scotland, salvage from a dismantled castle,
+      and across the top of the fireplace a plate of brass with the
+      motto, “The ornament of a house is the friends that frequent it,”
+      surely never more appropriately inscribed.
+
+      There was the mahogany room, a large bedroom on the ground floor,
+      and upstairs were other spacious bedrooms and many baths, while
+      everywhere were Oriental rugs and draperies, and statuary and
+      paintings. There was a fireplace under a window, after the
+      English pattern, so that in winter-time one could at the same
+      moment watch the blaze and the falling snow. The library windows
+      looked out over the valley with the little stream in it, and
+      through and across the tree-tops. At the top of the house was
+      what became Clemens's favorite retreat, the billiard-room, and
+      here and there were unexpected little balconies, which one could
+      step out upon for the view.
+
+      Below was a wide, covered veranda, the “ombra,” as they called
+      it, secluded from the public eye—a favorite family
+      gathering-place on pleasant days.
+
+      But a house might easily have all these things without being more
+      than usually attractive, and a house with a great deal less might
+      have been as full of charm; only it seemed just the proper
+      setting for that particular household, and undoubtedly it
+      acquired the personality of its occupants.
+
+      Howells assures us that there never was another home like it, and
+      we may accept his statement. It was unique. It was the home of
+      one of the most unusual and unaccountable personalities in the
+      world, yet was perfectly and serenely ordered. Mark Twain was not
+      responsible for this blissful condition. He was its beacon-light;
+      it was around Mrs. Clemens that its affairs steadily revolved.
+
+      If in the four years and more of marriage Clemens had made
+      advancement in culture and capabilities, Olivia Clemens also had
+      become something more than the half-timid, inexperienced girl he
+      had first known. In a way her education had been no less notable
+      than his. She had worked and studied, and her half-year of travel
+      and entertainment abroad had given her opportunity for acquiring
+      knowledge and confidence. Her vision of life had vastly enlarged;
+      her intellect had flowered; her grasp of practicalities had
+      become firm and sure.
+
+      In spite of her delicate physical structure, her continued
+      uncertainty of health, she capably undertook the management of
+      their large new house, and supervised its economies. Any one of
+      her undertakings was sufficient for one woman, but she compassed
+      them all. No children had more careful direction than hers. No
+      husband had more devoted attendance and companionship. No
+      household was ever directed with a sweeter and gentler grace, or
+      with greater perfection of detail. When the great ones of the
+      world came to visit America's most picturesque literary figure
+      she gave welcome to them all, and filled her place at his side
+      with such sweet and capable dignity that those who came to pay
+      their duties to him often returned to pay even greater devotion
+      to his companion. Says Howells:
+
+    She was, in a way, the loveliest person I have ever seen—the
+    gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united
+    wonderful tact with wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted
+    her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried in it.
+
+      And once, in an interview with the writer of these chapters,
+      Howells declared: “She was not only a beautiful soul, but a woman
+      of singular intellectual power. I never knew any one quite like
+      her.” Then he added: “Words cannot express Mrs. Clemens—her
+      fineness, her delicate, her wonderful tact with a man who was in
+      some respects, and wished to be, the most outrageous creature
+      that ever breathed.”
+
+      Howells meant a good many things by that, no doubt: Clemens's
+      violent methods, for one thing, his sudden, savage impulses,
+      which sometimes worked injustice and hardship for others, though
+      he was first to discover the wrong and to repair it only too
+      fully. Then, too, Howells may have meant his boyish teasing
+      tendency to disturb Mrs. Clemens's exquisite sense of decorum.
+
+      Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford
+      in a pair of white cowskin slippers with the hair out, and do a
+      crippled colored uncle, to the joy of all beholders. I must not
+      say all, for I remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her
+      low, despairing cry of “Oh, Youth!”
+
+      He was continually doing such things as the “crippled colored
+      uncle,”; partly for the very joy of the performance, but partly,
+      too, to disturb her serenity, to incur her reproof, to shiver her
+      a little—“shock” would be too strong a word. And he liked to
+      fancy her in a spirit and attitude of belligerence, to present
+      that fancy to those who knew the measure of her gentle nature.
+      Writing to Mrs. Howells of a picture of herself in a group, he
+      said:
+
+    You look exactly as Mrs. Clemens does after she has said: “Indeed,
+    I do not wonder that you can frame no reply; for you know only too
+    well that your conduct admits of no excuse, palliation, or argument
+    —none!”
+
+      Clemens would pretend to a visitor that she had been violently
+      indignant over some offense of his; perhaps he would say:
+
+      “Well I contradicted her just now, and the crockery will begin to
+      fly pretty soon.”
+
+      She could never quite get used to this pleasantry, and a faint
+      glow would steal over her face. He liked to produce that glow.
+      Yet always his manner toward her was tenderness itself. He
+      regarded her as some dainty bit of porcelain, and it was said
+      that he was always following her about with a chair. Their union
+      has been regarded as ideal. That is Twichell's opinion and
+      Howells's. The latter sums up:
+
+    Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to
+    be, but from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of
+    the most perfect.
+
+
+
+
+      XCVII. THE WALK TO BOSTON
+
+
+      The new home became more beautiful to them as things found their
+      places, as the year deepened; and the wonder of autumn foliage
+      lit up their landscape. Sitting on one of the little upper
+      balconies Mrs. Clemens wrote:
+
+    The atmosphere is very hazy, and it makes the autumn tints even
+    more soft and beautiful than usual. Mr. Twichell came for Mr.
+    Clemens to go walking with him; they returned at dinner-time,
+    heavily laden with autumn leaves.
+
+      And as usual Clemens, finding the letter unfinished, took up the
+      story.
+
+    Twichell came up here with me to luncheon after services, and I
+    went back home with him and took Susy along in her little carriage.
+    We have just got home again, middle of afternoon, and Livy has gone
+    to rest and left the west balcony to me. There is a shining and
+    most marvelous miracle of cloud-effects mirrored in the brook; a
+    picture which began with perfection, and has momently surpassed it
+    ever since, until at last it is almost unendurably beautiful....
+    There is a cloud-picture in the stream now whose hues are as
+    manifold as those in an opal and as delicate as the tintings of a
+    sea-shell. But now a muskrat is swimming through it and
+    obliterating it with the turmoil of wavelets he casts abroad from
+    his shoulders.
+    The customary Sunday assemblage of strangers is gathered together
+    in the grounds discussing the house.
+
+      Twichell and Clemens took a good many walks these days; long
+      walks, for Twichell was an athlete and Clemens had not then
+      outgrown the Nevada habit of pedestrian wandering. Talcott's
+      Tower, a wooden structure about five miles from Hartford, was one
+      of their favorite objective points; and often they walked out and
+      back, talking so continuously, and so absorbed in the themes of
+      their discussions, that time and distance slipped away almost
+      unnoticed. How many things they talked of in those long walks!
+      They discussed philosophies and religions and creeds, and all the
+      range of human possibility and shortcoming, and all the phases of
+      literature and history and politics. Unorthodox discussions they
+      were, illuminating, marvelously enchanting, and vanished now
+      forever. Sometimes they took the train as far as Bloomfield, a
+      little station on the way, and walked the rest of the distance,
+      or they took the train from Bloomfield home. It seems a strange
+      association, perhaps, the fellowship of that violent dissenter
+      with that fervent soul dedicated to church and creed, but the
+      root of their friendship lay in the frankness with which each man
+      delivered his dogmas and respected those of his companion.
+
+      It was during one of their walks to the tower that they planned a
+      far more extraordinary undertaking—nothing less, in fact, than a
+      walk from Hartford to Boston. This was early in November. They
+      did not delay the matter, for the weather was getting too
+      uncertain.
+
+      Clemens wrote Redpath:
+
+      DEAR REDPATH,—Rev. J. H. Twichell and I expect to start at 8
+      o'clock Thursday morning to walk to Boston in twenty four
+      hours—or more. We shall telegraph Young's Hotel for rooms
+      Saturday night, in order to allow for a low average of
+      pedestrianism.
+
+      It was half past eight on Thursday morning, November 12, 1874,
+      that they left Twichell's house in a carriage, drove to the East
+      Hartford bridge, and there took to the road, Twichell carrying a
+      little bag and Clemens a basket of lunch.
+
+      The papers had got hold of it by this time, and were watching the
+      result. They did well enough that first day, following the old
+      Boston stage road, arriving at Westford about seven o'clock in
+      the evening, twenty-eight miles from the starting-point. There
+      was no real hotel at Westford, only a sort of tavern, but it
+      afforded the luxury of rest. “Also,” says Twichell, in a
+      memoranda of the trip, “a sublimely profane hostler whom you
+      couldn't jostle with any sort of mild remark without bringing
+      down upon yourself a perfect avalanche of oaths.”
+
+      This was a joy to Clemens, who sat behind the stove, rubbing his
+      lame knees and fairly reveling in Twichell's discomfiture in his
+      efforts to divert the hostler's blasphemy. There was also a
+      mellow inebriate there who recommended kerosene for Clemens's
+      lameness, and offered as testimony the fact that he himself had
+      frequently used it for stiffness in his joints after lying out
+      all night in cold weather, drunk: altogether it was a notable
+      evening.
+
+      Westford was about as far as they continued the journey afoot.
+      Clemens was exceedingly lame next morning, and had had a rather
+      bad night; but he swore and limped along six miles farther, to
+      North Ashford, then gave it up. They drove from North Ashford to
+      the railway, where Clemens telegraphed Redpath and Howells of
+      their approach. To Redpath:
+
+    We have made thirty-five miles in less than five days. This
+    demonstrates that the thing can be done. Shall now finish by rail.
+    Did you have any bets on us?
+
+      To Howells:
+
+    Arrive by rail at seven o'clock, the first of a series of grand
+    annual pedestrian tours from Hartford to Boston to be performed by
+    us. The next will take place next year.
+
+      Redpath read his despatch to a lecture audience, with effect.
+      Howells made immediate preparation for receiving two way-worn,
+      hungry men. He telegraphed to Young's Hotel: “You and Twichell
+      come right up to 37 Concord Avenue, Cambridge, near observatory.
+      Party waiting for you.”
+
+      They got to Howells's about nine o'clock, and the refreshments
+      were waiting. Miss Longfellow was there, Rose Hawthorne, John
+      Fiske, Larkin G. Mead, the sculptor, and others of their kind.
+      Howells tells in his book how Clemens, with Twichell, “suddenly
+      stormed in,” and immediately began to eat and drink:
+
+    I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with
+    his head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped
+    oysters without which no party in Cambridge was really a party,
+    exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the
+    most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of
+    their progress.
+
+      Clemens gave a dinner, next night, to Howells, Aldrich, Osgood,
+      and the rest. The papers were full of jokes concerning the Boston
+      expedition; some even had illustrations, and it was all amusing
+      enough at the time.
+
+      Next morning, sitting in the writing-room of Young's Hotel, he
+      wrote a curious letter to Mrs. Clemens, though intended as much
+      for Howells and Aldrich as for her. It was dated sixty-one years
+      ahead, and was a sort of Looking Backwards, though that notable
+      book had not yet been written. It presupposed a monarchy in which
+      the name of Boston has been changed to “Limerick,” and Hartford
+      to “Dublin.” In it, Twichell has become the “Archbishop of
+      Dublin,” Howells “Duke of Cambridge,” Aldrich “Marquis of
+      Ponkapog,” Clemens the “Earl of Hartford.” It was too whimsical
+      and delightful a fancy to be forgotten.—[This remarkable and
+      amusing document will be found under Appendix M, at the end of
+      last volume.]
+
+      A long time afterward, thirty-four year, he came across this
+      letter. He said:
+
+      “It seems curious now that I should have been dreaming dreams of
+      a future monarchy and never suspect that the monarchy was already
+      present and the Republic a thing of the past.”
+
+      What he meant, was the political succession that had fostered
+      those commercial trusts which, in turn, had established party
+      dominion.
+
+      To Howells, on his return, Clemens wrote his acknowledgments, and
+      added:
+
+    Mrs. Clemens gets upon the verge of swearing, and goes tearing
+    around in an unseemly fury when I enlarge upon the delightful time
+    we had in Boston, and she not there to have her share. I have tried
+    hard to reproduce Mrs. Howells to her, and have probably not made a
+    shining success of it.
+
+
+
+
+      XCVIII. “OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI”
+
+
+      Howells had been urging Clemens to do something more for the
+      Atlantic, specifically something for the January number. Clemens
+      cudgeled his brains, but finally declared he must give it up:
+
+    Mrs. Clemens has diligently persecuted me day by day with urgings
+    to go to work and do that something, but it's no use. I find I
+    can't. We are in such a state of worry and endless confusion that
+    my head won't go.
+
+      Two hours later he sent another hasty line:
+
+    I take back the remark that I can't write for the January number,
+    for Twichell and I have had a long walk in the woods, and I got to
+    telling him about old Mississippi days of steam-boating glory and
+    grandeur as I saw them (during four years) from the pilot-house. He
+    said, “What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!” I hadn't
+    thought of that before. Would you like a series of papers to run
+    through three months or six or nine—or about four months, say?
+
+      Howells welcomed this offer as an echo of his own thought. He had
+      come from a piloting family himself, and knew the interest that
+      Mark Twain could put into such a series.
+
+      Acting promptly under the new inspiration, Clemens forthwith sent
+      the first chapter of that monumental, that absolutely unique,
+      series of papers on Mississippi River life, which to-day
+      constitutes one of his chief claims to immortality.
+
+      His first number was in the nature of an experiment. Perhaps,
+      after all, the idea would not suit the Atlantic readers.
+
+      “Cut it, scarify it, reject it, handle it with entire freedom,”
+      he wrote, and awaited the result.
+
+      The “result” was that Howells expressed his delight:
+
+    The piece about the Mississippi is capital. It almost made the
+    water in our ice-pitcher muddy as I read it. I don't think I shall
+    meddle much with it, even in the way of suggestion. The sketch of
+    the low-lived little town was so good that I could have wished
+    there was more of it. I want the sketches, if you can make them,
+    every month.
+
+      Mark Twain was now really interested in this new literary
+      venture. He was fairly saturated with memories. He was writing on
+      the theme that lay nearest to his heart. Within ten days he
+      reported that he had finished three of the papers, and had begun
+      the fourth.
+
+      And yet I have spoken of nothing but piloting as a science so
+      far, and I doubt if I ever get beyond that portion of my subject.
+      And I don't care to. Any Muggins can write about old days on the
+      Mississippi of five hundred different kinds, but I am the only
+      man alive that can scribble about the piloting of that day, and
+      no man has ever tried to scribble about it yet. Its newness
+      pleases me all the time, and it is about the only new subject I
+      know of.
+
+      He became so enthusiastic presently that he wanted to take
+      Howells with him on a trip down the Mississippi, with their wives
+      for company, to go over the old ground again and obtain added
+      material enough for a book. Howells was willing enough—agreed to
+      go, in fact—but found it hard to get away. He began to temporize
+      and finally backed out. Clemens tried to inveigle Osgood into the
+      trip, but without success; also John Hay, but Hay had a new baby
+      at his house just then—“three days old, and with a voice beyond
+      price,” he said, offering it as an excuse for non-acceptance. So
+      the plan for revisiting the river and the conclusion of the book
+      were held in abeyance for nearly seven years.
+
+      Those early piloting chapters, as they appeared in the Atlantic,
+      constituted Mark Twain's best literary exhibit up to that time.
+      In some respects they are his best literature of any time. As
+      pictures of an intensely interesting phase of life, they are so
+      convincing, so real, and at the same time of such extraordinary
+      charm and interest, that if the English language should survive a
+      thousand years, or ten times as long, they would be as fresh and
+      vivid at the end of that period as the day they were penned. In
+      them the atmosphere of, the river and its environment—its
+      pictures, its thousand aspects of life—are reproduced with what
+      is no less than literary necromancy. Not only does he make you
+      smell the river you can fairly hear it breathe. On the appearance
+      of the first number John Hay wrote:
+
+      “It is perfect; no more nor less. I don't see how you do it,” and
+      added, “you know what my opinion is of time not spent with you.”
+
+      Howells wrote:
+
+    You are doing the science of piloting splendidly. Every word
+    interesting, and don't you drop the series till you've got every
+    bit of anecdote and reminiscence into it.
+
+      He let Clemens write the articles to suit himself. Once he said:
+
+    If I might put in my jaw at this point I should say, stick to
+    actual fact and character in the thing and give things in detail.
+    All that belongs to the old river life is novel, and is now mostly
+    historical. Don't write at any supposed Atlantic audience, but yarn
+    it off as if into my sympathetic ear.
+
+      Clemens replied that he had no dread of the Atlantic audience; he
+      declared it was the only audience that did not require a humorist
+      to “paint himself striped and stand on his head to amuse it.”
+
+      The “Old Times” papers ran through seven numbers of the Atlantic.
+      They were reprinted everywhere by the newspapers, who in that day
+      had little respect for magazine copyrights, and were promptly
+      pirated in book form in Canada. They added vastly to Mark Twain's
+      literary capital, though Howells informs us that the Atlantic
+      circulation did not thrive proportionately, for the reason that
+      the newspapers gave the articles to their readers from advanced
+      sheets of the magazine, even before the latter could be placed on
+      sale. It so happened that in the January Atlantic, which
+      contained the first of the Mississippi papers, there appeared
+      Robert Dale Owen's article on “Spiritualism,” which brought such
+      humility both to author and publisher because of the exposure of
+      the medium Katie King, which came along while the magazine was in
+      press. Clemens has written this marginal note on the opening page
+      of the copy at Quarry Farm:
+
+      While this number of the Atlantic was being printed the Katie
+      King manifestations were discovered to be the cheapest,
+      wretchedest shams and frauds, and were exposed in the newspapers.
+      The awful humiliation of it unseated Robert Dale Owen's reason,
+      and he died in the madhouse.
+
+
+
+
+      XCIX. A TYPEWRITER, AND A JOKE ON ALDRICH
+
+
+      It was during the trip to Boston with Twichell that Mark Twain
+      saw for the first time what was then—a brand-new invention, a
+      typewriter; or it may have been during a subsequent visit, a week
+      or two later. At all events, he had the machine and was
+      practising on it December 9, 1874, for he wrote two letters on it
+      that day, one to Howells and the other to Orion Clemens. In the
+      latter he says:
+
+    I am trying to get the hang of this new-fangled writing-machine,
+    but am not making a shining success of it. However, this is the
+    first attempt I ever have made, and yet I perceive that I shall
+    soon easily acquire a fine facility in its use. I saw the thing in
+    Boston the other day and was greatly taken with it.
+
+      He goes on to explain the new wonder, and on the whole his first
+      attempt is a very creditable performance. With his usual
+      enthusiasm over an innovation, he believes it is going to be a
+      great help to him, and proclaims its advantages.
+
+      This is the letter to Howells, with the errors preserved:
+
+    You needn't answer this; I am only practicing to get three; anothe
+    slip-up there; only practici?ng ti get the hang of the thing. I
+    notice I miss fire & get in a good many unnecessary letters &
+    punctuation marks. I am simply using you for a target to bang at.
+    Blame my cats, but this thing requires genius in order to work it
+    just right.
+
+      In an article written long after he tells how he was with Nasby
+      when he first saw the machine in Boston through a window, and how
+      they went in to see it perform. In the same article he states
+      that he was the first person in the world to apply the
+      type-machine to literature, and that he thinks the story of Tom
+      Sawyer was the first type-copied manuscript.—[Tom Sawyer was not
+      then complete, and had been laid aside. The first type-copied
+      manuscript was probably early chapters of the Mississippi story,
+      two discarded typewritten pages of which still exist.]
+
+      The new enthusiasm ran its course and died. Three months later,
+      when the Remington makers wrote him for a recommendation of the
+      machine, he replied that he had entirely stopped using it. The
+      typewriter was not perfect in those days, and the keys did not
+      always respond readily. He declared it was ruining his
+      morals—that it made him “want to swear.” He offered it to Howells
+      because, he said, Howells had no morals anyway. Howells
+      hesitated, so Clemens traded the machine to Bliss for a
+      side-saddle. But perhaps Bliss also became afraid of its
+      influence, for in due time he brought it back. Howells, again
+      tempted, hesitated, and this time was lost. What eventually
+      became of the machine is not history.
+
+      One of those, happy Atlantic dinners which Howells tells of came
+      about the end of that year. It was at the Parker House, and
+      Emerson was there; and Aldrich, and the rest of that group.
+
+      “Don't you dare to refuse the invitation,” said Howells, and
+      naturally Clemens didn't, and wrote back:
+
+    I want you to ask Mrs. Howells to let you stay all night at the
+    Parker House and tell lies and have an improving time, and take
+    breakfast with me in the morning. I will have a good room for you
+    and a fire. Can't you tell her it always makes you sick to go home
+    late at night or something like that? That sort of thing arouses
+    Mrs. Clemens's sympathies easily.
+
+      Two memories of that old dinner remain to-day. Aldrich and
+      Howells were not satisfied with the kind of neckties that Mark
+      Twain wore (the old-fashioned black “string” tie, a Western
+      survival), so they made him a present of two cravats when he set
+      out on his return for Hartford. Next day he wrote:
+
+    You and Aldrich have made one woman deeply and sincerely grateful
+    —Mrs. Clemens. For months—I may even say years—she has shown an
+    unaccountable animosity toward my necktie, even getting up in the
+    night to take it with the tongs and blackguard it, sometimes also
+    getting so far as to threaten it.
+    When I said you and Aldrich had given me two new neckties, and that
+    they were in a paper in my overcoat pocket, she was in a fever of
+    happiness until she found I was going to frame them; then all the
+    venom in her nature gathered itself together; insomuch that I,
+    being near to a door, went without, perceiving danger.
+
+      It is recorded that eventually he wore the neckties, and returned
+      no more to the earlier mode.
+
+      Another memory of that dinner is linked to a demand that Aldrich
+      made of Clemens that night, for his photograph. Clemens,
+      returning to Hartford, put up fifty-two different specimens in as
+      many envelopes, with the idea of sending one a week for a year.
+      Then he concluded that this was too slow a process, and for a
+      week sent one every morning to “His Grace of Ponkapog.”
+
+      Aldrich stood it for a few days, then protested. “The police,” he
+      said, “are in the habit of swooping down upon a publication of
+      that sort.”
+
+      On New-Year's no less than twenty pictures came at
+      once—photographs and prints of Mark Twain, his house, his family,
+      his various belongings. Aldrich sent a warning then that the
+      perpetrator of this outrage was known to the police as Mark
+      Twain, alias “The Jumping Frog,” a well-known California
+      desperado, who would be speedily arrested and brought to Ponkapog
+      to face his victim. This letter was signed “T. Bayleigh, Chief of
+      Police,” and on the outside of the envelope there was a statement
+      that it would be useless for that person to send any more
+      mail-matter, as the post-office had been blown up. The jolly
+      farce closed there. It was the sort of thing that both men
+      enjoyed.
+
+      Aldrich was writing a story at this time which contained some
+      Western mining incident and environment. He sent the manuscript
+      to Clemens for “expert” consideration and advice. Clemens wrote
+      him at great length and in careful detail. He was fond of
+      Aldrich, regarding him as one of the most brilliant of men. Once,
+      to Robert Louis Stevenson, he said:
+
+    “Aldrich has never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and
+    humorous sayings. None has equaled him, certainly none has
+    surpassed him, in the felicity of phrasing with which he clothed
+    these children of his fancy. Aldrich is always brilliant; he can't
+    help it; he is a fire-opal set round with rose diamonds; when he is
+    not speaking you know that his dainty fancies are twinkling and
+    glimmering around in him; when he speaks the diamonds flash. Yes,
+    he is always brilliant, he will always be brilliant; he will be
+    brilliant in hell-you will see.”
+
+      Stevenson, smiling a chuckly smile, said, “I hope not.”
+
+      “Well, you will, and he will dim even those ruddy fires and look
+      like a transfigured Adonis backed against a pink sunset.”—[North
+      American Review, September, 1906.]
+
+
+
+
+      C. RAYMOND, MENTAL TELEGRAPHY, ETC.
+
+
+      The Sellers play was given in Hartford, in January (1875), to as
+      many people as could crowd into the Opera House. Raymond had
+      reached the perfection of his art by that time, and the townsmen
+      of Mark Twain saw the play and the actor at their best. Kate
+      Field played the part of Laura Hawkins, and there was a Hartford
+      girl in the company; also a Hartford young man, who would one day
+      be about as well known to playgoers as any playwright or actor
+      that America has produced. His name was William Gillette, and it
+      was largely due to Mark Twain that the author of Secret Service
+      and of the dramatic “Sherlock Holmes” got a fair public start.
+      Clemens and his wife loaned Gillette the three thousand dollars
+      which tided him through his period of dramatic education. Their
+      faith in his ability was justified.
+
+      Hartford would naturally be enthusiastic on a first
+      “Sellers-Raymond” night. At the end of the fourth act there was
+      an urgent demand for the author of the play, who was supposed to
+      be present. He was not there in person, but had sent a letter,
+      which Raymond read:
+
+      MY DEAR RAYMOND,—I am aware that you are going to be welcomed to
+      our town by great audiences on both nights of your stay there,
+      and I beg to add my hearty welcome also, through this note. I
+      cannot come to the theater on either evening, Raymond, because
+      there is something so touching about your acting that I can't
+      stand it.
+
+      (I do not mention a couple of colds in my head, because I hardly
+      mind them as much as I would the erysipelas, but between you and
+      me I would prefer it if they were rights and lefts.)
+
+      And then there is another thing. I have always taken a pride in
+      earning my living in outside places and spending it in Hartford;
+      I have said that no good citizen would live on his own people,
+      but go forth and make it sultry for other communities and fetch
+      home the result; and now at this late day I find myself in the
+      crushed and bleeding position of fattening myself upon the spoils
+      of my brethren! Can I support such grief as this? (This is
+      literary emotion, you understand. Take the money at the door just
+      the same.)
+
+      Once more I welcome you to Hartford, Raymond, but as for me let
+      me stay at home and blush.
+
+                         Yours truly,  MARK.
+
+      The play was equally successful wherever it went. It made what in
+      that day was regarded as a fortune. One hundred thousand dollars
+      is hardly too large an estimate of the amount divided between
+      author and actor. Raymond was a great actor in that part, as he
+      interpreted it, though he did not interpret it fully, or always
+      in its best way. The finer side, the subtle, tender side of
+      Colonel Sellers, he was likely to overlook. Yet, with a natural
+      human self-estimate, Raymond believed he had created a much
+      greater part than Mark Twain had written. Doubtless from the
+      point of view of a number of people this was so, though the idea,
+      was naturally obnoxious to Clemens. In course of time their
+      personal relations ceased.
+
+      Clemens that winter gave another benefit for Father Hawley. In
+      reply to an invitation to appear in behalf of the poor, he wrote
+      that he had quit the lecture field, and would not return to the
+      platform unless driven there by lack of bread. But he added:
+
+      By the spirit of that remark I am debarred from delivering this
+      proposed lecture, and so I fall back upon the letter of it, and
+      emerge upon the platform for this last and final time because I
+      am confronted by a lack of bread-among Father Hawley's flock.
+
+      He made an introductory speech at an old-fashioned spelling-bee,
+      given at the Asylum Hill Church; a breezy, charming talk of which
+      the following is a sample:
+
+    I don't see any use in spelling a word right—and never did. I mean
+    I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of
+    spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook
+    all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. I have
+    a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me; there
+    is such a breezy, unfettered originality about his orthography. He
+    always spells “kow” with a large “K.” Now that is just as good as
+    to spell it with a small one. It is better. It gives the
+    imagination a broader field, a wider scope. It suggests to the mind
+    a grand, vague, impressive new kind of a cow.
+    He took part in the contest, and in spite of his early reputation,
+    was spelled down on the word “chaldron,” which he spelled
+    “cauldron,” as he had been taught, while the dictionary used as
+    authority gave that form as second choice.
+
+      Another time that winter, Clemens read before the Monday Evening
+      Club a paper on “Universal Suffrage,” which is still remembered
+      by the surviving members of that time. A paragraph or two will
+      convey its purport:
+
+    Our marvelous latter-day statesmanship has invented universal
+    suffrage. That is the finest feather in our cap. All that we
+    require of a voter is that he shall be forked, wear pantaloons
+    instead of petticoats, and bear a more or less humorous resemblance
+    to the reported image of God. He need not know anything whatever;
+    he may be wholly useless and a cumberer of the earth; he may even
+    be known to be a consummate scoundrel. No matter. While he can
+    steer clear of the penitentiary his vote is as weighty as the vote
+    of a president, a bishop, a college professor, a merchant prince.
+    We brag of our universal, unrestricted suffrage; but we are shams
+    after all, for we restrict when we come to the women.
+
+      The Monday Evening Club was an organization which included the
+      best minds of Hartford. Dr. Horace Bushnell, Prof. Calvin E.
+      Stowe, and J. Hammond Trumbull founded it back in the sixties,
+      and it included such men as Rev. Dr. Parker, Rev. Dr. Burton,
+      Charles H. Clark, of the Courant, Warner, and Twichell, with
+      others of their kind. Clemens had been elected after his first
+      sojourn in England (February, 1873), and had then read a paper on
+      the “License of the Press.” The club met alternate Mondays, from
+      October to May. There was one paper for each evening, and, after
+      the usual fashion of such clubs, the reading was followed by
+      discussion. Members of that time agree that Mark Twain's
+      association with the club had a tendency to give it a life, or at
+      least an exhilaration, which it had not previously known. His
+      papers were serious in their purpose he always preferred to be
+      serious—but they evidenced the magic gift which made whatever he
+      touched turn to literary jewelry.
+
+      Psychic theories and phenomena always attracted Mark Twain. In
+      thought-transference, especially, he had a frank interest—an
+      interest awakened and kept alive by certain phenomena—psychic
+      manifestations we call them now. In his association with Mrs.
+      Clemens it not infrequently happened that one spoke the other's
+      thought, or perhaps a long-procrastinated letter to a friend
+      would bring an answer as quickly as mailed; but these are things
+      familiar to us all. A more startling example of
+      thought-communication developed at the time of which we are
+      writing, an example which raised to a fever-point whatever
+      interest he may have had in the subject before. (He was always
+      having these vehement interests—rages we may call them, for it
+      would be inadequate to speak of them as fads, inasmuch as they
+      tended in the direction of human enlightenment, or progress, or
+      reform.)
+
+      Clemens one morning was lying in bed when, as he says, “suddenly
+      a red-hot new idea came whistling down into my camp.” The idea
+      was that the time was ripe for a book that would tell the story
+      of the Comstock-of the Nevada silver mines. It seemed to him that
+      the person best qualified for the work was his old friend William
+      Wright—Dan de Quille. He had not heard from Dan, or of him, for a
+      long time, but decided to write and urge him to take up the idea.
+      He prepared the letter, going fully into the details of his plan,
+      as was natural for him to do, then laid it aside until he could
+      see Bliss and secure his approval of the scheme from a publishing
+      standpoint. Just a week later, it was the 9th of March, a letter
+      came—a thick letter bearing a Nevada postmark, and addressed in a
+      handwriting which he presently recognized as De Quille's. To a
+      visitor who was present he said:
+
+      “Now I will do a miracle. I will tell you everything this letter
+      contains—date, signature, and all without breaking the seal.”
+
+      He stated what he believed was in the letter. Then he opened it
+      and showed that he had correctly given its contents, which were
+      the same in all essential details as those of his own letter, not
+      yet mailed.
+
+      In an article on “Mental Telegraphy” (he invented the name) he
+      relates this instance, with others, and in 'Following the
+      Equator' and elsewhere he records other such happenings. It was
+      one of the “mysteries” in which he never lost interest, though
+      his concern in it in time became a passive one.
+
+      The result of the De Quille manifestation, however, he has not
+      recorded. Clemens immediately wrote, urging Dan to come to
+      Hartford for an extended visit. De Quille came, and put in a
+      happy spring in his old comrade's luxurious home, writing 'The
+      Big Bonanza', which Bliss successfully published a year later.
+
+      Mark Twain was continually inviting old friends to share his
+      success with him. Any comrade of former days found welcome in his
+      home as often as he would come, and for as long as he would stay.
+      Clemens dropped his own affairs to advise in their undertakings;
+      and if their undertakings were literary he found them a
+      publisher. He did this for Joaquin Miller and for Bret Harte, and
+      he was always urging Goodman to make his house a home.
+
+      The Beecher-Tilton trial was the sensation of the spring of 1875,
+      and Clemens, in common with many others, was greatly worked up
+      over it. The printed testimony had left him decidedly in doubt as
+      to Beecher's innocence, though his blame would seem to have been
+      less for the possible offense than because of the great leader's
+      attitude in the matter. To Twichell he said:
+
+      “His quibbling was fatal. Innocent or guilty, he should have made
+      an unqualified statement in the beginning.”
+
+      Together they attended one of the sessions, on a day when Beecher
+      himself was on the witness-stand. The tension was very great; the
+      excitement was painful. Twichell thought that Beecher appeared
+      well under the stress of examination and was deeply sorry for
+      him; Clemens was far from convinced.
+
+      The feeling was especially strong in Hartford, where Henry Ward
+      Beecher's relatives were prominent, and animosities grew out of
+      it. They are all forgotten now; most of those who cherished
+      bitterness are dead. Any feeling that Clemens had in the matter
+      lasted but a little while. Howells tells us that when he met him
+      some months after the trial ended, and was tempted to mention it,
+      Clemens discouraged any discussion of the event. Says Howells:
+
+    He would only say the man had suffered enough; as if the man had
+    expiated his wrong, and he was not going to do anything to renew
+    his penalty. I found that very curious, very delicate. His
+    continued blame could not come to the sufferer's knowledge, but he
+    felt it his duty to forbear it.
+
+      It was one hundred years, that 19th of April, since the battles
+      of Lexington and Concord, and there was to be a great
+      celebration. The Howellses had visited Hartford in March, and the
+      Clemenses were invited to Cambridge for the celebration. Only
+      Clemens could go, which in the event proved a good thing perhaps;
+      for when Clemens and Howells set out for Concord they did not go
+      over to Boston to take the train, but decided to wait for it at
+      Cambridge. Apparently it did not occur to them that the train
+      would be jammed the moment the doors were opened at the Boston
+      station; but when it came along they saw how hopeless was their
+      chance. They had special invitations and passage from Boston, but
+      these were only mockeries now. It yeas cold and chilly, and they
+      forlornly set out in search of some sort of a conveyance. They
+      tramped around in the mud and raw wind, but vehicles were either
+      filled or engaged, and drivers and occupants were inclined to
+      jeer at them. Clemens was taken with an acute attack of
+      indigestion, which made him rather dismal and savage. Their
+      effort finally ended with his trying to run down a tally-ho which
+      was empty inside and had a party of Harvard students riding atop.
+      The students, who did not recognize their would-be fare, enjoyed
+      the race. They encouraged their pursuer, and perhaps their
+      driver, with merriment and cheers. Clemens was handicapped by
+      having to run in the slippery mud, and soon “dropped by the
+      wayside.”
+
+      “I am glad,” says Howells, “I cannot recall what he said when he
+      came back to me.”
+
+      They hung about a little longer, then dragged themselves home,
+      slipped into the house, and built up a fine, cheerful fire on the
+      hearth. They proposed to practise a deception on Mrs. Howells by
+      pretending they had been to Concord and returned. But it was no
+      use. Their statements were flimsy, and guilt was plainly written
+      on their faces. Howells recalls this incident delightfully, and
+      expresses the belief that the humor of the situation was finally
+      a greater pleasure to Clemens than the actual visit to Concord
+      would have been.
+
+      Twichell did not have any such trouble in attending the
+      celebration. He had adventures (he was always having adventures),
+      but they were of a more successful kind. Clemens heard the tale
+      of them when he returned to Hartford. He wrote it to Howells:
+
+    Joe Twichell preached morning and evening here last Sunday; took
+    midnight train for Boston; got an early breakfast and started by
+    rail at 7.30 A.M. for Concord; swelled around there until 1 P.M.,
+    seeing everything; then traveled on top of a train to Lexington;
+    saw everything there; traveled on top of a train to Boston (with
+    hundreds in company), deluged with dust, smoke, and cinders; yelled
+    and hurrahed all the way like a school-boy; lay flat down, to dodge
+    numerous bridges, and sailed into the depot howling with excitement
+    and as black as a chimneysweep; got to Young's Hotel at 7 P.M.; sat
+    down in the reading-room and immediately fell asleep; was promptly
+    awakened by a porter, who supposed he was drunk; wandered around an
+    hour and a half; then took 9 P.M. train, sat down in a smoking-car,
+    and remembered nothing more until awakened by conductor as the
+    train came into Hartford at 1.30 A.M. Thinks he had simply a
+    glorious time, and wouldn't have missed the Centennial for the
+    world. He would have run out to see us a moment at Cambridge but he
+    was too dirty. I wouldn't have wanted him there; his appalling
+    energy would have been an insufferable reproach to mild adventurers
+    like you and me.
+
+
+
+
+      CI. CONCLUDING “TOM SAWYER”—MARK TWAIN's “EDITORS”
+
+
+      Meantime the “inspiration tank,” as Clemens sometimes called it,
+      had filled up again. He had received from somewhere new afflatus
+      for the story of Tom and Huck, and was working on it steadily.
+      The family remained in Hartford, and early in July, under full
+      head of steam, he brought the story to a close. On the 5th he
+      wrote Howells:
+
+    I have finished the story and didn't take the chap beyond boyhood.
+    I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but
+    autobiographically, like Gil Blas. I perhaps made a mistake in not
+    writing it in the first person. If I went on now, and took him into
+    manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in
+    literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for
+    him. It is not a boy's book at all. It will only be read by adults.
+    It is only written for adults.
+
+      He would like to see the story in the Atlantic, he said, but
+      doubted the wisdom of serialization.
+
+      “By and by I shall take a boy of twelve and run him through life
+      (in the first person), but not Tom Sawyer, he would not make a
+      good character for it.” From which we get the first glimpse of
+      Huck's later adventures.
+
+      Of course he wanted Howells to look at the story. It was a
+      tremendous favor to ask, he said, and added, “But I know of no
+      other person whose judgment I could venture to take, fully and
+      entirely. Don't hesitate to say no, for I know how your time is
+      taxed, and I would have honest need to blush if you said yes.”
+
+      “Send on your MS.,” wrote Howells. “You've no idea what I may ask
+      you to do for me some day.”
+
+      But Clemens, conscience-stricken, “blushed and weakened,” as he
+      said. When Howells insisted, he wrote:
+
+    But I will gladly send it to you if you will do as follows:
+    dramatize it, if you perceive that you can, and take, for your
+    remuneration, half of the first $6,000 which I receive for its
+    representation on the stage. You could alter the plot entirely if
+    you chose. I could help in the work most cheerfully after you had
+    arranged the plot. I have my eye upon two young girls who can play
+    Tom and Huck.
+
+      Howells in his reply urged Clemens to do the playwriting himself.
+      He could never find time, he said, and he doubted whether he
+      could enter into the spirit of another man's story. Clemens did
+      begin a dramatization then or a little later, but it was not
+      completed. Mrs. Clemens, to whom he had read the story as it
+      proceeded, was as anxious as her husband for Howells's opinion,
+      for it was the first extended piece of fiction Mark Twain had
+      undertaken alone. He carried the manuscript over to Boston
+      himself, and whatever their doubts may have been, Howells's
+      subsequent letter set them at rest. He wrote that he had sat up
+      till one in the morning to get to the end of it, simply because
+      it was impossible to leave off.
+
+      It is altogether the best boy story I ever read. It will be an
+      immense success, but I think you ought to treat it explicitly as
+      a boy's story; grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do,
+      and if you should put it forth as a story of boys' character from
+      the grown-up point of view you give the wrong key to it.
+
+      Viewed in the light of later events, there has never been any
+      better literary opinion than that—none that has been more fully
+      justified.
+
+      Clemens was delighted. He wrote concerning a point here and
+      there, one inquiry referring to the use of a certain strong word.
+      Howells's reply left no doubt:
+
+    I'd have that swearing out in an instant. I suppose I didn't notice
+    it because the location was so familiar to my Western sense, and so
+    exactly the thing Huck would say, but it won't do for children.
+
+      It was in the last chapter, where Huck relates to Tom the sorrows
+      of reform and tells how they comb him “all to thunder.” In the
+      original, “They comb me all to hell,” says Huck; which statement,
+      one must agree, is more effective, more the thing Huck would be
+      likely to say.
+
+      Clemens's acknowledgment of the correction was characteristic:
+
+    Mrs. Clemens received the mail this morning, and the next minute
+    she lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on
+    her tongue, “Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?” Then I
+    had to miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the
+    MS. to her. Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this
+    scrape with my scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when
+    you go a little one-sided?
+
+      The Clemens family did not go to Elmira that year. The children's
+      health seemed to require the sea-shore, and in August they went
+      to Bateman's Point, Rhode Island, where Clemens most of the time
+      played tenpins in an alley that had gone to ruin. The balls would
+      not stay on the track; the pins stood at inebriate angles. It
+      reminded him of the old billiard-tables of Western mining-camps,
+      and furnished the same uncertainty of play. It was his delight,
+      after he had become accustomed to the eccentricities of the
+      alley, to invite in a stranger and watch his suffering and his
+      frantic effort to score.
+
+
+
+
+      CII. “SKETCHES NEW AND OLD”
+
+
+      The long-delayed book of Sketches, contracted for five years
+      before, was issued that autumn. “The Jumping Frog,” which he had
+      bought from Webb, was included in the volume, also the French
+      translation which Madame Blanc (Th. Bentzon) had made for the
+      Revue des deux mondes, with Mark Twain's retranslation back into
+      English, a most astonishing performance in its literal rendition
+      of the French idiom. One example will suffice here. It is where
+      the stranger says to Smiley, “I don't see no p'ints about that
+      frog that's any better'n any other frog.”
+
+      Says the French, retranslated:
+
+      “Eh bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than
+      each frog” (Je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait mieux
+      qu'aucune grenouille). (If that isn't grammar gone to seed then I
+      count myself no judge.—M. T.)
+
+      “Possible that you not it saw not,” said Smiley; “possible that
+      you you comprehend frogs; possible that you not you there
+      comprehend nothing; possible that you had of the experience, and
+      possible that you not be but an amateur. Of all manner (de toute
+      maniere) I bet forty dollars that she batter in jumping, no
+      matter which frog of the county of Calaveras.”
+
+      He included a number of sketches originally published with the
+      Frog, also a selection from the “Memoranda” and Buffalo Express
+      contributions, and he put in the story of Auntie Cord, with some
+      matter which had never hitherto appeared. True Williams
+      illustrated the book, but either it furnished him no inspiration
+      or he was allowed too much of another sort, for the pictures do
+      not compare with his earlier work.
+
+      Among the new matter in the book were-“Some Fables for Good Old
+      Boys and Girls,” in which certain wood creatures are supposed to
+      make a scientific excursion into a place at some time occupied by
+      men. It is the most pretentious feature of the book, and in its
+      way about as good as any. Like Gulliver's Travels, its object was
+      satire, but its result is also interest.
+
+      Clemens was very anxious that Howells should be first to review
+      this volume. He had a superstition that Howells's verdicts were
+      echoed by the lesser reviewers, and that a book was made or
+      damned accordingly; a belief hardly warranted, for the review has
+      seldom been written that meant to any book the difference between
+      success and failure. Howells's review of Sketches may be offered
+      as a case in point. It was highly commendatory, much more so than
+      the notice of the 'Innocents' had been, or even that of 'Roughing
+      It', also more extensive than the latter. Yet after the initial
+      sale of some twenty thousand copies, mainly on the strength of
+      the author's reputation, the book made a comparatively poor
+      showing, and soon lagged far behind its predecessors.
+
+      We cannot judge, of course, the taste of that day, but it appears
+      now an unattractive, incoherent volume. The pictures were
+      absurdly bad, the sketches were of unequal merit. Many of them
+      are amusing, some of them delightful, but most of them seem
+      ephemeral. If we except “The Jumping Frog,” and possibly “A True
+      Story” (and the latter was altogether out of place in the
+      collection), there is no reason to suppose that any of its
+      contents will escape oblivion. The greater number of the
+      sketches, as Mark Twain himself presently realized and declared,
+      would better have been allowed to die.
+
+      Howells did, however, take occasion to point out in his review,
+      or at least to suggest, the more serious side of Mark Twain. He
+      particularly called attention to “A True Story,” which the
+      reviewers, at the time of its publication in the Atlantic, had
+      treated lightly, fearing a lurking joke in it; or it may be they
+      had not read it, for reviewers are busy people. Howells spoke of
+      it as the choicest piece of work in the volume, and of its
+      “perfect fidelity to the tragic fact.” He urged the reader to
+      turn to it again, and to read it as a “simple dramatic report of
+      reality,” such as had been equaled by no other American writer.
+
+      It was in this volume of sketches that Mark Twain first spoke in
+      print concerning copyright, showing the absurd injustice of
+      discriminating against literary ownership by statute of
+      limitation. He did this in the form of an open petition to
+      Congress, asking that all property, real and personal, should be
+      put on the copyright basis, its period of ownership limited to a
+      “beneficent term of forty-two years.” Generally this was regarded
+      as a joke, as in a sense it was; but like most of Mark Twain's
+      jokes it was founded on reason and justice.
+
+      The approval with which it was received by his literary
+      associates led him to still further flights. He began a
+      determined crusade for international copyright laws. It was a
+      transcendental beginning, but it contained the germ of what, in
+      the course of time, he would be largely instrumental in bringing
+      to a ripe and magnificent conclusion. In this first effort he
+      framed a petition to enact laws by which the United States would
+      declare itself to be for right and justice, regardless of other
+      nations, and become a good example to the world by refusing to
+      pirate the books of any foreign author. He wrote to Howells,
+      urging him to get Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and
+      others to sign this petition.
+
+      I will then put a gentlemanly chap under wages, and send him
+      personally to every author of distinction in the country and
+      corral the rest of the signatures. Then I'll have the whole thing
+      lithographed (about one thousand copies), and move upon the
+      President and Congress in person, but in the subordinate capacity
+      of the party who is merely the agent of better and wiser men, or
+      men whom the country cannot venture to laugh at. I will ask the
+      President to recommend the thing in his message (and if he should
+      ask me to sit down and frame the paragraph for him I should
+      blush, but still I would frame it). And then if Europe chooses to
+      go on stealing from us we would say, with noble enthusiasm,
+      “American lawmakers do steal, but not from foreign authors—not
+      from foreign authors,”.... If we only had some God in the
+      country's laws, instead of being in such a sweat to get Him into
+      the Constitution, it would be better all around.
+
+      The petition never reached Congress. Holmes agreed to sign it
+      with a smile, and the comment that governments were not in the
+      habit of setting themselves up as high moral examples, except for
+      revenue. Longfellow also pledged himself, as did a few others;
+      but if there was any general concurrence in the effort there is
+      no memory of it now. Clemens abandoned the original idea, but
+      remained one of the most persistent and influential advocates of
+      copyright betterment, and lived to see most of his dream
+      fulfilled.—[For the petition concerning copyright term in the
+      United States, see Sketches New and Old. For the petition
+      concerning international copyright and related matters, see
+      Appendix N, at the end of last volume.]
+
+
+
+
+      CIII. “ATLANTIC” DAYS
+
+
+      It was about this period that Mark Twain began to exhibit openly
+      his more serious side; that is to say his advocacy of public
+      reforms. His paper on “Universal Suffrage” had sounded a first
+      note, and his copyright petitions were of the same spirit. In
+      later years he used to say that he had always felt it was his
+      mission to teach, to carry the banner of moral reconstruction,
+      and here at forty we find him furnishing evidences of this
+      inclination. In the Atlantic for October, 1875, there was
+      published an unsigned three-page article entitled, “The Curious
+      Republic of Gondour.” In this article was developed the idea that
+      the voting privilege should be estimated not by the individuals,
+      but by their intellectual qualifications. The republic of Gondour
+      was a Utopia, where this plan had been established:
+
+    It was an odd idea and ingenious. You must understand the
+    constitution gave every man a vote; therefore that vote was a
+    vested right, and could not be taken away. But the constitution did
+    not say that certain individuals might not be given two votes or
+    ten. So an amendatory clause was inserted in a quiet way, a clause
+    which authorized the enlargement of the suffrage in certain cases
+    to be specified by statute....
+    The victory was complete. The new law was framed and passed. Under
+    it every citizen, howsoever poor or ignorant, possessed one vote,
+    so universal suffrage still reigned; but if a man possessed a good
+    common-school education and no money he had two votes, a
+    high-school education gave him four; if he had property, likewise,
+    to the value of three thousand sacos he wielded one more vote; for
+    every fifty thousand sacos a man added to his property, he was
+    entitled to another vote; a University education entitled a man to
+    nine votes, even though he owned no property.
+
+      The author goes on to show the beneficent results of this
+      enaction; how the country was benefited and glorified by this
+      stimulus toward enlightenment and industry. No one ever suspected
+      that Mark Twain was the author of this fable. It contained almost
+      no trace of his usual literary manner. Nevertheless he wrote it,
+      and only withheld his name, as he did in a few other instances,
+      in the fear that the world might refuse to take him seriously
+      over his own signature or nom de plume.
+
+      Howells urged him to follow up the “Gondour” paper; to send some
+      more reports from that model land. But Clemens was engaged in
+      other things by that time, and was not pledged altogether to
+      national reforms.
+
+      He was writing a skit about a bit of doggerel which was then
+      making nights and days unhappy for many undeserving persons who
+      in an evil moment had fallen upon it in some stray newspaper
+      corner. A certain car line had recently adopted the “punch
+      system,” and posted in its cars, for the information of
+      passengers and conductor, this placard:
+
+      A Blue Trip Slip for an 8 Cents Fare, A Buff Trip Slip for a 6
+      Cents Fare, A Pink Trip Slip for a 3 Cents Fare, For Coupon And
+      Transfer, Punch The Tickets.
+
+      Noah Brooks and Isaac Bromley were riding down-town one evening
+      on the Fourth Avenue line, when Bromley said:
+
+      “Brooks, it's poetry. By George, it's poetry!”
+
+      Brooks followed the direction of Bromley's finger and read the
+      card of instructions. They began perfecting the poetic character
+      of the notice, giving it still more of a rhythmic twist and
+      jingle; arrived at the Tribune office, W. C. Wyckoff, scientific
+      editor, and Moses P. Handy lent intellectual and poetic
+      assistance, with this result:
+
+       Conductor, when you receive a fare,
+       Punch in the presence of the passenjare! A blue trip slip for an
+       eight-cent fare, A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare, A pink
+       trip slip for a three-cent fare. Punch in the presence of the
+       passenjare!
+    CHORUS Punch, brothers! Punch with care! Punch in the presence of
+    the passenjare!
+
+      It was printed, and street-car poetry became popular. Different
+      papers had a turn at it, and each usually preceded its own effort
+      with all other examples, as far as perpetrated. Clemens
+      discovered the lines, and on one of their walks recited them to
+      Twichell. “A Literary Nightmare” was written a few days later. In
+      it the author tells how the jingle took instant and entire
+      possession of him and went waltzing through his brain; how, when
+      he had finished his breakfast, he couldn't tell whether he had
+      eaten anything or not; and how, when he went to finish the novel
+      he was writing, and took up his pen, he could only get it to say:
+
+      Punch in the presence of the passenjare.
+
+      He found relief at last in telling it to his reverend friend,
+      that is, Twichell, upon whom he unloaded it with sad results.
+
+      It was an amusing and timely skit, and is worth reading to-day.
+      Its publication in the Atlantic had the effect of waking up
+      horse-car poetry all over the world. Howells, going to dine at
+      Ernest Longfellow's the day following its appearance, heard his
+      host and Tom Appleton urging each other to “Punch with care.” The
+      Longfellow ladies had it by heart. Boston was devastated by it.
+      At home, Howells's children recited it to him in chorus. The
+      streets were full of it; in Harvard it became an epidemic.
+
+      It was transformed into other tongues. Even Swinburne, the
+      musical, is said to have done a French version for the 'Revue des
+      deux mondes'. * A St. Louis magazine, The Western, found relief
+      in a Latin anthem with this chorus:
+
+      Pungite, fratres, pungite, Pungite cum amore, Pungite pro
+      vectore, Diligentissime pungite.
+
+              * LE CHANT DU CONDUCTEUR
+           Ayant ete paye, le conducteur Percera en pleine vue du
+           voyageur, Quand il regoit trois sous un coupon vert, Un
+           coupon jaune pour six sous c'est l'affaire, Et pour huit
+           sous c'est un coupon couleur De rose, en pleine vue du
+           voyageur.
+       CHOEUR Donc, percez soigneusement, mes freres Tout en pleine vue
+       des voyageurs, etc.
+
+
+
+
+      CIV. MARK TWAIN AND HIS WIFE
+
+
+      Clemens and his wife traveled to Boston for one of those happy
+      fore-gatherings with the Howellses, which continued, at one end
+      of the journey or another, for so many years. There was a
+      luncheon with Longfellow at Craigie House, and, on the return to
+      Hartford, Clemens reported to Howells how Mrs. Clemens had
+      thrived on the happiness of the visit. Also he confesses his
+      punishment for the usual crimes:
+
+    I “caught it” for letting Mrs. Howells bother and bother about her
+    coffee, when it was a “good deal better than we get at home.” I
+    “caught it” for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment and losing
+    her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that MS.
+    when the printers are done with it. I “caught it” once more for
+    personating that drunken Colonel James. I “caught it” for
+    mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and
+    when, after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I
+    had privately suggested to you that we hadn't any frames, and that
+    if you wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the
+    madam was simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she
+    said:
+    “How could you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his
+    sensitive nature, upon such a repulsive er—”
+    “Oh, Howells won't mind it! You don't know Howells. Howells is a
+    man who—”
+    She was gone. But George was the first person she stumbled on in
+    the hall, so she took it out of George. I am glad of that, because
+    it saved the babies.
+
+      Clemens used to admit, at a later day, that his education did not
+      advance by leaps and bounds, but gradually, very gradually; and
+      it used to give him a pathetic relief in those after-years, when
+      that sweet presence had gone out of his life, to tell the way of
+      it, to confess over-fully, perhaps, what a responsibility he had
+      been to her.
+
+      He used to tell how, for a long time, he concealed his profanity
+      from her; how one morning, when he thought the door was shut
+      between their bedroom and the bathroom, he was in there dressing
+      and shaving, accompanying these trying things with language
+      intended only for the strictest privacy; how presently, when he
+      discovered a button off the shirt he intended to put on, he
+      hurled it through the window into the yard with appropriate
+      remarks, followed it with another shirt that was in the same
+      condition, and added certain collars and neckties and bath-room
+      requisites, decorating the shrubbery outside, where the people
+      were going by to church; how in this extreme moment he heard a
+      slight cough and turned to find that the door was open! There was
+      only one door to the bath-room, and he knew he had to pass her.
+      He felt pale and sick, and sat down for a few moments to
+      consider. He decided to assume that she was asleep, and to walk
+      out and through the room, head up, as if he had nothing on his
+      conscience. He attempted it, but without success. Half-way across
+      the room he heard a voice suddenly repeat his last terrific
+      remark. He turned to see her sitting up in bed, regarding him
+      with a look as withering as she could find in her gentle soul.
+      The humor of it struck him.
+
+      “Livy,” he said, “did it sound like that?”
+
+      “Of course it did,” she said, “only worse. I wanted you to hear
+      just how it sounded.”
+
+      “Livy,” he said, “it would pain me to think that when I swear it
+      sounds like that. You got the words right, Livy, but you don't
+      know the tune.”
+
+      Yet he never willingly gave her pain, and he adored her and
+      gloried in her dominion, his life long. Howells speaks of his
+      beautiful and tender loyalty to her as the “most moving quality
+      of his most faithful soul.”
+
+      It was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their
+      wives, and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the
+      devotion, all the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and
+      beauty of character.
+
+      She guarded his work sacredly; and reviewing the manuscripts
+      which he was induced to discard, and certain edited manuscripts,
+      one gets a partial idea of what the reading world owes to Olivia
+      Clemens. Of the discarded manuscripts (he seems seldom to have
+      destroyed them) there are a multitude, and among them all
+      scarcely one that is not a proof of her sanity and high regard
+      for his literary honor. They are amusing—some of them; they are
+      interesting—some of them; they are strong and virile—some of
+      them; but they are unworthy—most of them, though a number remain
+      unfinished because theme or interest failed.
+
+      Mark Twain was likely to write not wisely but too much, piling up
+      hundreds of manuscript pages only because his brain was thronging
+      as with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of darting, flashing ideas
+      demanding release. As often as not he began writing with only a
+      nebulous idea of what he proposed to do. He would start with a
+      few characters and situations, trusting in Providence to supply
+      material as needed. So he was likely to run ashore any time. As
+      for those other attempts—stories “unavailable” for one reason or
+      another—he was just as apt to begin those as the better sort, for
+      somehow he could never tell the difference. That is one of the
+      hall-marks of genius—the thing which sharply differentiates
+      genius from talent. Genius is likely to rate a literary disaster
+      as its best work. Talent rarely makes that mistake.
+
+      Among the abandoned literary undertakings of these early years of
+      authorship there is the beginning of what was doubtless intended
+      to become a book, “The Second Advent,” a story which opens with a
+      very doubtful miraculous conception in Arkansas, and leads only
+      to grotesquery and literary disorder. There is another, “The
+      Autobiography of a Damn Fool,” a burlesque on family history,
+      hopelessly impossible; yet he began it with vast enthusiasm and,
+      until he allowed her to see the manuscript, thought it especially
+      good. “Livy wouldn't have it,” he said, “so I gave it up.” There
+      is another, “The Mysterious Chamber,” strong and fine in
+      conception, vividly and intensely interesting; the story of a
+      young lover who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an
+      old castle and cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down
+      into subterranean passages beneath the castle, and he lives in
+      this isolation for twenty years. The question of sustenance was
+      the weak point in the story. Clemens could invent no way of
+      providing it, except by means of a waste or conduit from the
+      kitchen into which scraps of meat, bread, and other items of
+      garbage were thrown. This he thought sufficient, but Mrs. Clemens
+      did not highly regard such a literary device. Clemens could think
+      of no good way to improve upon it, so this effort too was
+      consigned to the penal colony, a set of pigeonholes kept in his
+      study. To Howells and others, when they came along, he would read
+      the discarded yarns, and they were delightful enough for such a
+      purpose, as delightful as the sketches which every artist has,
+      turned face to the wall.
+
+      “Captain Stormfield” lay under the ban for many a year, though
+      never entirely abandoned. This manuscript was even recommended
+      for publication by Howells, who has since admitted that it would
+      not have done then; and indeed, in its original, primitive
+      nakedness it would hardly have done even in this day of wider
+      toleration.
+
+      It should be said here that there is not the least evidence (and
+      the manuscripts are full of evidence) that Mrs. Clemens was ever
+      super-sensitive, or narrow, or unliterary in her restraints. She
+      became his public, as it were, and no man ever had a more
+      open-minded, clear-headed public than that. For Mark Twain's
+      reputation it would have been better had she exercised her
+      editorial prerogative even more actively—if, in her love for him
+      and her jealousy of his reputation, she had been even more
+      severe. She did all that lay in her strength, from the beginning
+      to the end, and if we dwell upon this phase of their life
+      together it is because it is so large a part of Mark Twain's
+      literary story. On her birthday in the year we are now closing
+      (1875) he wrote her a letter which conveys an acknowledgment of
+      his debt.
+
+      LIVY DARLING,—Six years have gone by since I made my first great
+      success in life and won you, and thirty years have passed since
+      Providence made preparation for that happy success by sending you
+      into the world. Every day we live together adds to the security
+      of my confidence that we can never any more wish to be separated
+      than we can imagine a regret that we were ever joined. You are
+      dearer to me to-day, my child, than you were upon the last
+      anniversary of this birthday; you were dearer then than you were
+      a year before; you have grown more and more dear from the first
+      of those anniversaries, and I do not doubt that this precious
+      progression will continue on to the end.
+
+      Let us look forward to the coming anniversaries, with their age
+      and their gray hairs, without fear and without depression,
+      trusting and believing that the love we bear each other will be
+      sufficient to make them blessed.
+
+      So, with abounding affection for you and our babies I hail this
+      day that brings you the matronly grace and dignity of three
+      decades!
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. 1, Part 2, 1866-1875, by Albert Bigelow Paine
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+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
+<title>Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. 1, Part 2, 1866-1875, by Albert Bigelow Paine</title>
+
+<style type="text/css">
+
+    body { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; background:#faebd7; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    pre     { font-family: Times New Roman;font-style: italic;
+font-size: 100%; margin-left: 10%;}
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+  </head>
+  <body>
+
+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. 1, Part 2, 1866-1875, by Albert Bigelow Paine
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. 1, Part 2, 1866-1875
+
+Author: Albert Bigelow Paine
+
+Release Date: December, 2001 [EBook #2983]
+[Most recently updated: June 1, 2020]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <h1>
+      MARK TWAIN A BIOGRAPHY
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      THE PERSONAL AND LITERARY LIFE OF SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+    </p>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto" cellpadding="4" border="3">
+      <tr>
+        <td></td>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0058"> <b>VOLUME I, Part 2: 1866-1875</b> </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0059"> LIV. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE LECTURER
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0060"> LV. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          HIGHWAY ROBBERY
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0061"> LVI. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          BACK TO THE STATES
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0062"> LVII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          OLD FRIENDS AND NEW PLANS
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0063"> LVIII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          A NEW BOOK AND A LECTURE
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0064"> LIX. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE FIRST BOOK
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0065"> LX. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE INNOCENTS AT SEA
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0066"> LXI. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0067"> LXII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE RETURN OF THE PILGRIMS
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0068"> LXIII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          IN WASHINGTON&mdash;A PUBLISHING PROPOSITION
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0069"> LXIV. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          OLIVIA LANGDON
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0070"> LXV. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          A CONTRACT WITH ELISHA BLISS, JR.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0071"> LXVI. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          BACK TO SAN FRANCISCO
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0072"> LXVII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          A VISIT TO ELMIRA
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0073"> LXVIII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE REV. &ldquo;JOE&rdquo; TWICHELL.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0074"> LXIX. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          A LECTURE TOUR
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0075"> LXX. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          INNOCENTS AT HOME&mdash;AND &ldquo;THE INNOCENTS ABROAD&rdquo;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0076"> LXXI. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE GREAT BOOK OF TRAVEL.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0077"> LXXII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE PURCHASE OF A PAPER.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0078"> LXXIII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE FIRST MEETING WITH HOWELLS
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0079"> LXXIV. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE WEDDING-DAY
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0080"> LXXV. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          AS TO DESTINY
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0081"> LXXVI. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          ON THE BUFFALO &ldquo;EXPRESS&rdquo;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0082"> LXXVII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE &ldquo;GALAXY&rdquo;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0083"> LXXVIII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE PRIMROSE PATH
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0084"> LXXIX. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE OLD HUMAN STORY
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0085"> LXXX. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          LITERARY PROJECTS
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0086"> LXXXI. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          SOME FURTHER LITERARY MATTERS
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0087"> LXXXII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE WRITING OF &ldquo;ROUGHING IT&rdquo;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0088"> LXXXIII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          LECTURING DAYS
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0089"> LXXXIV. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          "ROUGHING IT&rdquo;.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0090"> LXXXV. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          A BIRTH, A DEATH, AND A VOYAGE
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0091"> LXXXVI. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          ENGLAND
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0092"> LXXXVII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0093"> LXXXVIII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          "THE GILDED AGE&rdquo;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0094"> LXXXIX. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          PLANNING A NEW HOME
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0095"> XC. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          A LONG ENGLISH HOLIDAY
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0096"> XCI. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          A LONDON LECTURE
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0097"> XCII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          FURTHER LONDON LECTURE TRIUMPHS
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0098"> XCIII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE REAL COLONEL SELLERS-GOLDEN DAYS
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0099"> XCIV. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          BEGINNING &ldquo;TOM SAWYER&rdquo;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0100"> XCV. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          AN &ldquo;ATLANTIC&rdquo; STORY AND A PLAY
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0101"> XCVI. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE NEW HOME
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0102"> XCVII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE WALK TO BOSTON
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0103"> XCVIII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          "OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI&rdquo;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0104"> XCIX. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          A TYPEWRITER, AND A JOKE ON ALDRICH
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0105"> C. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          RAYMOND, MENTAL TELEGRAPHY, ETC.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0106"> CI. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          CONCLUDING &ldquo;TOM SAWYER&rdquo;&mdash;MARK TWAIN's &ldquo;EDITORS&rdquo;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0107"> CII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          "SKETCHES NEW AND OLD&rdquo;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0108"> CIII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          "ATLANTIC&rdquo; DAYS
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0109"> CIV. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          MARK TWAIN AND HIS WIFE
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+
+    </table>
+
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0058" id="link2H_4_0058">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VOLUME I, Part 2: 1866-1875
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0059" id="link2H_4_0059">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LIV. THE LECTURER
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was not easy to take up the daily struggle again, but it was necessary.&mdash;[Clemens
+      once declared he had been so blue at this period that one morning he put a
+      loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked courage to pull the
+      trigger.]&mdash;Out of the ruck of possibilities (his brain always
+      thronged with plans) he constructed three or four resolves. The chief of
+      these was the trip around the world; but that lay months ahead, and in the
+      mean time ways and means must be provided. Another intention was to finish
+      the Hornet article, and forward it to Harper's Magazine&mdash;a purpose
+      carried immediately into effect. To his delight the article found
+      acceptance, and he looked forward to the day of its publication as the
+      beginning of a real career. He intended to follow it up with a series on
+      the islands, which in due time might result in a book and an income. He
+      had gone so far as to experiment with a dedication for the book&mdash;an
+      inscription to his mother, modified later for use in 'The Innocents
+      Abroad'. A third plan of action was to take advantage of the popularity of
+      the Hawaiian letters, and deliver a lecture on the same subject. But this
+      was a fearsome prospect&mdash;he trembled when he thought of it. As
+      Governor of the Third House he had been extravagantly received and
+      applauded, but in that case the position of public entertainer had been
+      thrust upon him. To come forward now, offering himself in the same
+      capacity, was a different matter. He believed he could entertain, but he
+      lacked the courage to declare himself; besides, it meant a risk of his
+      slender capital. He confided his situation to Col. John McComb, of the
+      Alta California, and was startled by McComb's vigorous endorsement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do it, by all means!&rdquo; urged McComb. &ldquo;It will be a grand
+      success&mdash;I know it! Take the largest house in town, and charge a
+      dollar a ticket.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Frightened but resolute, he went to the leading theater manager the same
+      Tom Maguire of his verses&mdash;and was offered the new opera-house at
+      half rates. The next day this advertisement appeared:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                MAGUIRE'S ACADEMY OF MUSIC
+               PINE STREET, NEAR MONTGOMERY
+
+                  THE SANDWICH ISLANDS
+
+                      MARK TWAIN
+
+        (HONOLULU CORRESPONDENT OF THE SACRAMENTO UNION)
+                    WILL DELIVER A
+              LECTURE ON THE SANDWICH ISLANDS
+
+                AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC
+               ON TUESDAY EVENING, OCT. 2d
+                       (1866)
+
+  In which passing mention will be made of Harris, Bishop Staley, the
+American missionaries, etc., and the absurd customs and characteristics
+of the natives duly discussed and described. The great volcano of
+Kilauea will also receive proper attention.
+
+                  A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA
+            is in town, but has not been engaged
+                       ALSO
+               A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS
+           will be on exhibition in the next block
+                  MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS
+
+ were in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been abandoned
+A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION may be expected; in fact, the public are
+privileged to expect whatever they please.
+
+           Dress Circle, $1.00  Family Circle, 50c
+    Doors open at 7 o'clock  The Trouble to begin at 8 o'clock
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The story of that first lecture, as told in Roughing It, is a faithful
+      one, and need only be summarized here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Expecting to find the house empty, he found it packed from the footlights
+      to the walls. Sidling out from the wings&mdash;wobbly-kneed and dry of
+      tongue&mdash;he was greeted by a murmur, a roar, a very crash of applause
+      that frightened away his remaining vestiges of courage. Then, came
+      reaction&mdash;these were his friends, and he began to talk to them. Fear
+      melted away, and as tide after tide of applause rose and billowed and came
+      breaking at his feet, he knew something of the exaltation of Monte Cristo
+      when he declared &ldquo;The world is mine!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a vast satisfaction to have succeeded. It was particularly
+      gratifying at this time, for he dreaded going back into newspaper harness.
+      Also; it softened later the disappointment resulting from another venture;
+      for when the December Harper appeared, with his article, the printer and
+      proof-reader had somehow converted Mark Twain into &ldquo;Mark Swain,&rdquo;
+      and his literary dream perished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to the literary value of his lecture, it was much higher than had, been
+      any portion of his letters, if we may judge from its few remaining
+      fragments. One of these&mdash;a part of the description of the great
+      volcano Haleakala, on the island of Maui&mdash;is a fair example of his
+      eloquence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is somewhat more florid than his later description of the same scene in
+      Roughing It, which it otherwise resembles; and we may imagine that its
+      poetry, with the added charm of its delivery, held breathless his hearers,
+      many of whom believed that no purer eloquence had ever been uttered or
+      written.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is worth remembering, too, that in this lecture, delivered so long ago,
+      he advocated the idea of American ownership of these islands, dwelling at
+      considerable length on his reasons for this ideal. &mdash;[For fragmentary
+      extracts from this first lecture of Mark Twain and news comment, see
+      Appendix D, end of last volume.]&mdash;There was a gross return from his
+      venture of more than $1,200, but with his usual business insight, which
+      was never foresight, he had made an arrangement by which, after paying
+      bills and dividing with his manager, he had only about one-third of, this
+      sum left. Still, even this was prosperity and triumph. He had acquired a
+      new and lucrative profession at a bound. The papers lauded him as the
+      &ldquo;most piquant and humorous writer and lecturer on the Coast since
+      the days of the lamented John Phoenix.&rdquo; He felt that he was on the
+      highroad at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Denis McCarthy, late of the Enterprise, was in San Francisco, and was
+      willing to become his manager. Denis was capable and honest, and Clemens
+      was fond of him. They planned a tour of the near-by towns, beginning with
+      Sacramento, extending it later even to the mining camps, such as Red Dog
+      and Grass Valley; also across into Nevada, with engagements at Carson
+      City, Virginia, and Gold Hill. It was an exultant and hilarious excursion&mdash;that
+      first lecture tour made by Denis McCarthy and Mark Twain. Success traveled
+      with them everywhere, whether the lecturer looked across the footlights of
+      some pretentious &ldquo;opera-house&rdquo; or between the two tallow
+      candles of some camp &ldquo;academy.&rdquo; Whatever the building, it was
+      packed, and the returns were maximum.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those who remember him as a lecturer in that long-ago time say that his
+      delivery was more quaint, his drawl more exaggerated, even than in later
+      life; that his appearance and movements on the stage were natural, rather
+      than graceful; that his manuscript, which he carried under his arm, looked
+      like a ruffled hen. It was, in fact, originally written on sheets of
+      manila paper, in large characters, so that it could be read easily by dim
+      light, and it was doubtless often disordered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was plenty of amusing experience on this tour. At one place, when
+      the lecture was over, an old man came to him and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be them your natural tones of eloquence?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Grass Valley there was a rival show, consisting of a lady tight-rope
+      walker and her husband. It was a small place, and the tight-rope
+      attraction seemed likely to fail. The lady's husband had formerly been a
+      compositor on the Enterprise, so that he felt there was a bond of
+      brotherhood between him and Mark Twain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Let's combine our shows. I'll let
+      my wife do the tight-rope act outside and draw a crowd, and you go inside
+      and lecture.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The arrangement was not made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Following custom, the lecturer at first thought it necessary to be
+      introduced, and at each place McCarthy had to skirmish around and find the
+      proper person. At Red Dog, on the Stanislaus, the man selected failed to
+      appear, and Denis had to provide another on short notice. He went down
+      into the audience and captured an old fellow, who ducked and dodged but
+      could not escape. Denis led him to the stage, a good deal frightened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ladies and gentlemen,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;this is the celebrated
+      Mark Twain from the celebrated city of San Francisco, with his celebrated
+      lecture about the celebrated Sandwich Islands.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was as far as he could go; but it was far enough. Mark Twain never
+      had a better introduction. The audience was in a shouting humor from the
+      start.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens himself used to tell of an introduction at another camp, where his
+      sponsor said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ladies and gentlemen, I know only two things about this man: the
+      first is that he's never been in jail, and the second is I don't know why.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this is probably apocryphal; there is too much &ldquo;Mark Twain&rdquo;
+      in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he reached Virginia, Goodman said to him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sam, you do not need anybody to introduce you. There's a piano on
+      the stage in the theater. Have it brought out in sight, and when the
+      curtain rises you be seated at the piano, playing and singing that song of
+      yours, 'I Had an Old Horse Whose Name Was Methusalem,' and don't seem to
+      notice that the curtain is up at first; then be surprised when you
+      suddenly find out that it is up, and begin talking, without any further
+      preliminaries.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This proved good advice, and the lecture, thus opened, started off with
+      general hilarity and applause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0060" id="link2H_4_0060">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LV. HIGHWAY ROBBERY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      His Nevada, lectures were bound to be immensely successful. The people
+      regarded him as their property over there, and at Carson and Virginia the
+      houses overflowed. At Virginia especially his friends urged and begged him
+      to repeat the entertainment, but he resolutely declined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have only one lecture yet,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I cannot bring
+      myself to give it twice in the same town.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But that irresponsible imp, Steve Gillis, who was again in Virginia,
+      conceived a plan which would make it not only necessary for him to lecture
+      again, but would supply him with a subject. Steve's plan was very simple:
+      it was to relieve the lecturer of his funds by a friendly highway robbery,
+      and let an account of the adventure furnish the new lecture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 'Roughing It' Mark Twain has given a version of this mock robbery which
+      is correct enough as far as it goes; but important details are lacking.
+      Only a few years ago (it was April, 1907), in his cabin on jackass Hill,
+      with Joseph Goodman and the writer of this history present, Steve Gillis
+      made his &ldquo;death-bed&rdquo; confession as is here set down:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mark's lecture was given in Piper's Opera House, October 30, 1866.
+      The Virginia City people had heard many famous lectures before, but they
+      were mere sideshows compared with Mark's. It could have been run to
+      crowded houses for a week. We begged him to give the common people a
+      chance; but he refused to repeat himself. He was going down to Carson, and
+      was coming back to talk in Gold Hill about a week later, and his agent,
+      Denis McCarthy, and I laid a plan to have him robbed on the Divide between
+      Gold Hill and Virginia, after the Gold Hill lecture was over and he and
+      Denis would be coming home with the money. The Divide was a good lonely
+      place, and was famous for its hold-ups. We got City Marshal George
+      Birdsall into it with us, and took in Leslie Blackburn, Pat Holland, Jimmy
+      Eddington, and one or two more of Sam's old friends. We all loved him, and
+      would have fought for him in a moment. That's the kind of friends Mark had
+      in Nevada. If he had any enemies I never heard of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We didn't take in Dan de Quille, or Joe here, because Sam was Joe's
+      guest, and we were afraid he would tell him. We didn't take in Dan because
+      we wanted him to write it up as a genuine robbery and make a big
+      sensation. That would pack the opera-house at two dollars a seat to hear
+      Mark tell the story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, everything went off pretty well. About the time Mark was
+      finishing his lecture in Gold Hill the robbers all went up on the Divide
+      to wait, but Mark's audience gave him a kind of reception after his
+      lecture, and we nearly froze to death up there before he came along. By
+      and by I went back to see what was the matter. Sam and Denis were coming,
+      and carrying a carpet-sack about half full of silver between them. I
+      shadowed them and blew a policeman's whistle as a signal to the boys when
+      the lecturers were within about a hundred yards of the place. I heard Sam
+      say to Denis:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I'm glad they've got a policeman on the Divide. They never had one
+      in my day.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just about that time the boys, all with black masks on and silver
+      dollars at the sides of their tongues to disguise their voices, stepped
+      out and stuck six-shooters at Sam and Denis and told them to put up their
+      hands. The robbers called each other 'Beauregard' and 'Stonewall Jackson.'
+      Of course Denis's hands went up, and Mark's, too, though Mark wasn't a bit
+      scared or excited. He talked to the robbers in his regular fashion. He
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Don't flourish those pistols so promiscuously. They might go off
+      by accident.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They told him to hand over his watch and money; but when he started
+      to take his hands down they made him put them up again. Then he asked how
+      they expected him to give them his valuables with his hands up in the sky.
+      He said his treasures didn't lie in heaven. He told them not to take his
+      watch, which was the one Sandy Baldwin and Theodore Winters had given him
+      as Governor of the Third House, but we took it all the same.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whenever he started to put his hands down we made him put them up
+      again. Once he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Don't you fellows be so rough. I was tenderly reared.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then we told him and Denis to keep their hands up for fifteen
+      minutes after we were gone&mdash;this was to give us time to get back to
+      Virginia and be settled when they came along. As we were going away Mark
+      called:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Say, you forgot something.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'What is it?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, the carpet-bag.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was cool all the time. Senator Bill Stewart, in his
+      Autobiography, tells a great story of how scared Mark was, and how he ran;
+      but Stewart was three thousand miles from Virginia by that time, and later
+      got mad at Mark because he made a joke about him in 'Roughing It'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Denis wanted to take his hands down pretty soon after we were gone,
+      but Mark said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'No, Denis, I'm used to obeying orders when they are given in that
+      convincing way; we'll just keep our hands up another fifteen minutes or so
+      for good measure.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were waiting in a big saloon on C Street when Mark and Denis
+      came along. We knew they would come in, and we expected Mark would be
+      excited; but he was as unruffled as a mountain lake. He told us they had
+      been robbed, and asked me if I had any money. I gave him a hundred dollars
+      of his own money, and he ordered refreshments for everybody. Then we
+      adjourned to the Enterprise office, where he offered a reward, and Dan de
+      Quille wrote up the story and telegraphed it to the other newspapers. Then
+      somebody suggested that Mark would have to give another lecture now, and
+      that the robbery would make a great subject. He entered right into the
+      thing, and next day we engaged Piper's Opera House, and people were
+      offering five dollars apiece for front seats. It would have been the
+      biggest thing that ever came to Virginia if it had come off. But we made a
+      mistake, then, by taking Sandy Baldwin into the joke. We took in Joe here,
+      too, and gave him the watch and money to keep, which made it hard for Joe
+      afterward. But it was Sandy Baldwin that ruined us. He had Mark out to
+      dinner the night before the show was to come off, and after he got well
+      warmed up with champagne he thought it would be a smart thing to let Mark
+      into what was really going on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mark didn't see it our way. He was mad clear through.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this point Joseph Goodman took up the story. He said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those devils put Sam's money, watch, keys, pencils, and all his
+      things into my hands. I felt particularly mean at being made accessory to
+      the crime, especially as Sam was my guest, and I had grave doubts as to
+      how he would take it when he found out the robbery was not genuine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I felt terribly guilty when he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Joe, those d&mdash;n thieves took my keys, and I can't get into my
+      trunk. Do you suppose you could get me a key that would fit my trunk?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said I thought I could during the day, and after Sam had gone I
+      took his own key, put it in the fire and burnt it to make it look black.
+      Then I took a file and scratched it here and there, to make it look as if
+      I had been fitting it to the lock, feeling guilty all the time, like a man
+      who is trying to hide a murder. Sam did not ask for his key that day, and
+      that evening he was invited to judge Baldwin's to dinner. I thought he
+      looked pretty silent and solemn when he came home; but he only said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Joe, let's play cards; I don't feel sleepy.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Steve here, and two or three of the other boys who had been active
+      in the robbery, were present, and they did not like Sam's manner, so they
+      excused themselves and left him alone with me. We played a good while;
+      then he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Joe, these cards are greasy. I have got some new ones in my trunk.
+      Did you get that key to-day?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I fished out that burnt, scratched-up key with fear and trembling.
+      But he didn't seem to notice it at all, and presently returned with the
+      cards. Then we played, and played, and played&mdash;till one o'clock&mdash;two
+      o'clock&mdash;Sam hardly saying a word, and I wondering what was going to
+      happen. By and by he laid down his cards and looked at me, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Joe, Sandy Baldwin told me all about that robbery to-night. Now,
+      Joe, I have found out that the law doesn't recognize a joke, and I am
+      going to send every one of those fellows to the penitentiary.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He said it with such solemn gravity, and such vindictiveness, that
+      I believed he was in dead earnest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know that I put in two hours of the hardest work I ever did,
+      trying to talk him out of that resolution. I used all the arguments about
+      the boys being his oldest friends; how they all loved him, and how the
+      joke had been entirely for his own good; I pleaded with him, begged him to
+      reconsider; I went and got his money and his watch and laid them on the
+      table; but for a time it seemed hopeless. And I could imagine those
+      fellows going behind the bars, and the sensation it would make in
+      California; and just as I was about to give it up he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Well, Joe, I'll let it pass&mdash;this time; I'll forgive them
+      again; I've had to do it so many times; but if I should see Denis McCarthy
+      and Steve Gillis mounting the scaffold to-morrow, and I could save them by
+      turning over my hand, I wouldn't do it!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He canceled the lecture engagement, however, next morning, and the
+      day after left on the Pioneer Stage, by the way of Donner Lake, for
+      California. The boys came rather sheepishly to see him off; but he would
+      make no show of relenting. When they introduced themselves as Beauregard,
+      Stonewall Jackson, etc., he merely said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Yes, and you'll all be behind the bars some day. There's been a
+      good deal of robbery around here lately, and it's pretty clear now who did
+      it.' They handed him a package containing the masks which the robbers had
+      worn. He received it in gloomy silence; but as the stage drove away he put
+      his head out of the window, and after some pretty vigorous admonition
+      resumed his old smile, and called out: 'Good-by, friends; good-by,
+      thieves; I bear you no malice.' So the heaviest joke was on his tormentors
+      after all.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is the story of the famous Mark Twain robbery direct from
+      headquarters. It has been garbled in so many ways that it seems worth
+      setting down in full. Denis McCarthy, who joined him presently in San
+      Francisco, received a little more punishment there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What kind of a trip did you boys have?&rdquo; a friend asked of
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens, just recovering from a cold which the exposure on the Divide had
+      given him, smiled grimly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, pretty good, only Denis here mistook it for a spree.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lectured again in San Francisco, this time telling the story of his
+      Overland trip in 1861, and he did the daring thing of repeating three
+      times the worn-out story of Horace Greeley's ride with Hank Monk, as given
+      later in 'Roughing It'. People were deadly tired of that story out there,
+      and when he told it the first time, with great seriousness, they thought
+      he must be failing mentally. They did not laugh&mdash;they only felt
+      sorry. He waited a little, as if expecting a laugh, and presently led
+      around to it and told it again. The audience was astonished still more,
+      and pitied him thoroughly. He seemed to be waiting pathetically in the
+      dead silence for their applause, then went on with his lecture; but
+      presently, with labored effort, struggled around to the old story again,
+      and told it for the third time. The audience suddenly saw the joke then,
+      and became vociferous and hysterical in their applause; but it was a
+      narrow escape. He would have been hysterical himself if the relief had not
+      came when it did. &mdash;[A side-light on the Horace Greeley story and on
+      Mr. Greeley's eccentricities is furnished by Mr. Goodman:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I was going East in 1869 I happened to see Hank Monk just before I
+      started. &ldquo;Mr. Goodman,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you tell Horace
+      Greeley that I want to come East, and ask him to send me a pass.&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;All right, Hank,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I will.&rdquo; It happened
+      that when I got to New York City one of the first men I met was Greeley.
+      &ldquo;Mr. Greeley,&rdquo; said, &ldquo;I have a message for you from Hank
+      Monk.&rdquo; Greeley bristled and glared at me. &ldquo;That&mdash;rascal?&rdquo;
+      he said, &ldquo;He has done me more injury than any other man in America.&rdquo;]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0061" id="link2H_4_0061">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LVI. BACK TO THE STATES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the mean time Clemens had completed his plan for sailing, and had
+      arranged with General McComb, of the Alta California, for letters during
+      his proposed trip around the world. However, he meant to visit his people
+      first, and his old home. He could go back with means now, and with the
+      prestige of success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I sail to-morrow per Opposition&mdash;telegraphed you to-day,&rdquo;
+      he wrote on December 14th, and a day later his note-book entry says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Sailed from San Francisco in Opposition (line) steamer America,
+    Capt. Wakeman, at noon, 15th Dec., 1866. Pleasant sunny day, hills
+    brightly clad with green grass and shrubbery.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      So he was really going home at last! He had been gone five and a half
+      years&mdash;eventful, adventurous years that had made him over completely,
+      at least so far as ambitions and equipment were concerned. He had came
+      away, in his early manhood, a printer and a pilot, unknown outside of his
+      class. He was returning a man of thirty-one, with a fund of hard
+      experience, three added professions&mdash;mining, journalism, and
+      lecturing&mdash;also with a new name, already famous on the sunset slopes
+      of its adoption, and beginning to be heard over the hills and far away. In
+      some degree, at least, he resembled the prince of a fairy tale who,
+      starting out humble and unnoticed, wins his way through a hundred
+      adventures and returns with gifts and honors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The homeward voyage was a notable one. It began with a tempest a little
+      way out of San Francisco&mdash;a storm terrible but brief, that brought
+      the passengers from their berths to the deck, and for a time set them
+      praying. Then there was Captain Ned Wakeman, a big, burly, fearless
+      sailor, who had visited the edges of all continents and archipelagos; who
+      had been born at sea, and never had a day's schooling in his life, but
+      knew the Bible by heart; who was full of human nature and profanity, and
+      believed he was the only man on the globe who knew the secret of the Bible
+      miracles. He became a distinct personality in Mark Twain's work&mdash;the
+      memory of him was an unfailing delight. Captain &ldquo;Ned Blakely,&rdquo;
+      in 'Roughing It', who with his own hands hanged Bill Noakes, after reading
+      him promiscuous chapters from the Bible, was Captain Wakeman. Captain
+      &ldquo;Stormfield,&rdquo; who had the marvelous visit to heaven, was
+      likewise Captain Wakeman; and he appears in the &ldquo;Idle Excursion&rdquo;
+      and elsewhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another event of the voyage was crossing the Nicaragua Isthmus&mdash;the
+      trip across the lake and down the San Juan River&mdash;a brand-new
+      experience, between shores of splendid tropic tangle, gleaming with vivid
+      life. The luxuriance got into his note-book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dark grottos, fairy festoons, tunnels, temples, columns, pillars, towers,
+      pilasters, terraces, pyramids, mounds, domes, walls, in endless confusion
+      of vine-work&mdash;no shape known to architecture unimitated&mdash;and all
+      so webbed together that short distances within are only gained by
+      glimpses. Monkeys here and there; birds warbling; gorgeous plumaged birds
+      on the wing; Paradise itself, the imperial realm of beauty-nothing to wish
+      for to make it perfect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was beyond the isthmus that the voyage loomed into proportions
+      somber and terrible. The vessel they took there, the San Francisco, sailed
+      from Greytown January 1, 1867, the beginning of a memorable year in Mark
+      Twain's life. Next day two cases of Asiatic cholera were reported in the
+      steerage. There had been a rumor of it in Nicaragua, but no one expected
+      it on the ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The nature of the disease was not hinted at until evening, when one of the
+      men died. Soon after midnight, the other followed. A minister making the
+      voyage home, Rev. J. G. Fackler, read the burial service. The gaiety of
+      the passengers, who had become well acquainted during the Pacific voyage,
+      was subdued. When the word &ldquo;cholera&rdquo; went among them, faces
+      grew grave and frightened. On the morning of January 4th Reverend
+      Fackler's services were again required. The dead man was put overboard
+      within half an hour after he had ceased to breathe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gloom settled upon the ship. All steam was made to put into Key West. Then
+      some of the machinery gave way and the ship lay rolling, helplessly
+      becalmed in the fierce heat of the Gulf, while repairs were being made.
+      The work was done at a disadvantage, and the parts did not hold. Time and
+      again they were obliged to lie to, in the deadly tropic heat, listening to
+      the hopeless hammering, wondering who would be the next to be sewed up
+      hastily in a blanket and slipped over the ship's side. On the 5th seven
+      new cases of illness were reported. One of the crew, a man called &ldquo;Shape,&rdquo;
+      was said to be dying. A few hours later he was dead. By this time the
+      Reverend Fackler himself had been taken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So they are burying poor 'Shape' without benefit of clergy,&rdquo;
+      says the note-book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      General consternation now began to prevail. Then it was learned that the
+      ship's doctor had run out of medicines. The passengers became demoralized.
+      They believed their vessel was to become a charnel ship. Strict sanitary
+      orders were issued, and a hospital was improvised.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Verily the ship is becoming a floating hospital herself&mdash;not an hour
+    passes but brings its fresh sensation, its new disaster, its
+    melancholy tidings. When I think of poor &ldquo;Shape&rdquo; and the preacher,
+    both so well when I saw them yesterday evening, I realize that I
+    myself may be dead to-morrow.
+
+    Since the last two hours all laughter, all levity, has ceased on the
+    ship&mdash;a settled gloom is upon the faces of the passengers.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      By noon it was evident that the minister could not survive. He died at two
+      o'clock next morning; the fifth victim in less than five days. The
+      machinery continued to break and the vessel to drag. The ship's doctor
+      confessed to Clemens that he was helpless. There were eight patients in
+      the hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But on January 6th they managed to make Key West, and for some reason were
+      not quarantined. Twenty-one passengers immediately deserted the ship and
+      were heard of no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad they are gone. D&mdash;n them,&rdquo; says the notebook.
+      Apparently he had never considered leaving, and a number of others
+      remained. The doctor restocked his medicine-locker, and the next day they
+      put to sea again. Certainly they were a daring lot of voyagers. On the 8th
+      another of the patients died. Then the cooler weather seemed to check the
+      contagion, and it was not until the night of the 11th, when the New York
+      harbor lights were in view, that the final death occurred. There were no
+      new cases by this time, and the other patients were convalescent. A
+      certificate was made out that the last man had died of &ldquo;dropsy.&rdquo;
+      There would seem to have been no serious difficulty in docking the vessel
+      and landing the passengers. The matter would probably be handled
+      differently to-day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0062" id="link2H_4_0062">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LVII. OLD FRIENDS AND NEW PLANS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It had been more than thirteen years since his first arrival in New York.
+      Then he had been a youth, green, untraveled, eager to get away from home.
+      Now a veteran, he was as eager to return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped only long enough in New York to see Charles Henry Webb, late of
+      California, who had put together a number of the Mark Twain sketches,
+      including &ldquo;The Jumping Frog,&rdquo; for book publication. Clemens
+      himself decided to take the book to Carleton, thinking that, having missed
+      the fame of the &ldquo;Frog&rdquo; once, he might welcome a chance to
+      stand sponsor for it now. But Carleton was wary; the &ldquo;Frog&rdquo;
+      had won favor, and even fame, in its fugitive, vagrant way, but a book was
+      another matter. Books were undertaken very seriously and with plenty of
+      consideration in those days. Twenty-one years later, in Switzerland,
+      Carleton said to Mark Twain:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My chief claim to immortality is the distinction of having declined
+      your first book.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens was ready enough to give up the book when Carleton declined it,
+      but Webb said he would publish it himself, and he set about it forthwith.
+      The author waited no longer now, but started for St. Louis, and was soon
+      with his mother and sister, whom he had not seen since that eventful first
+      year of the war. They thought he looked old, which was true enough, but
+      they found him unchanged in his manner: buoyant, full of banter and
+      gravely quaint remarks&mdash;he was always the same. Jane Clemens had
+      grown older, too. She was nearly sixty-four, but as keen and vigorous as
+      ever-proud (even if somewhat critical) of this handsome, brilliant man of
+      new name and fame who had been her mischievous, wayward boy. She petted
+      him, joked with him, scolded him, and inquired searchingly into his morals
+      and habits. In turn he petted, comforted, and teased her. She decided that
+      he was the same Sam, and always would be&mdash;a true prophecy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went up to Hannibal to see old friends. Many were married; some had
+      moved away; some were dead&mdash;the old story. He delivered his lecture
+      there, and was the center of interest and admiration&mdash;his welcome
+      might have satisfied even Tom Sawyer. From Hannibal he journeyed to
+      Keokuk, where he lectured again to a crowd of old friends and new, then
+      returned to St. Louis for a more extended visit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was while he was in St. Louis that he first saw the announcement of the
+      Quaker City Holy Land Excursion, and was promptly fascinated by what was
+      then a brand-new idea in ocean travel&mdash;a splendid picnic&mdash;a
+      choice and refined party that would sail away for a long summer's
+      journeying to the most romantic of all lands and seas, the shores of the
+      Mediterranean. No such argosy had ever set out before in pursuit of the
+      golden fleece of happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His projected trip around the world lost its charm in the light of this
+      idyllic dream. Henry Ward Beecher was advertised as one of the party;
+      General Sherman as another; also ministers, high-class journalists&mdash;the
+      best minds of the nation. Anson Burlingame had told him to associate with
+      persons of refinement and intellect. He lost no time in writing to the
+      Alta, proposing that they send him in this select company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Noah Brooks, who was then on the Alta, states&mdash;[In an article
+      published in the Century Magazine.]&mdash;that the management was
+      staggered by the proposition, but that Col. John McComb insisted that the
+      investment in Mark Twain would be sound. A letter was accordingly sent,
+      stating that a check for his passage would be forwarded in due season, and
+      that meantime he could contribute letters from New York City. The rate for
+      all letters was to be twenty dollars each. The arrangement was a godsend,
+      in the fullest sense of the word, to Mark Twain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was now April, and he was eager to get back to New York to arrange his
+      passage. The Quaker City would not sail for two months yet (two eventful
+      months), but the advertisement said that passages must be secured by the
+      5th, and he was there on that day. Almost the first man he met was the
+      chief of the New York Alta bureau with a check for twelve hundred and
+      fifty dollars (the amount of his ticket) and a telegram saying, &ldquo;Ship
+      Mark Twain in the Holy Land Excursion and pay his passage.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &mdash;[The following letter, which bears no date, was probably handed to
+    him later in the New York Alta office as a sort of credential:
+
+    ALTA CALIFORNIA OFFICE, 42 JOHN STREET, NEW YORK.
+
+    Sam'l Clemens, Esq., New York.
+
+    DEAR SIR,&mdash;I have the honor to inform you that Fred'k. MacCrellish
+    &amp; Co., Proprietors of Alta California, San Francisco, Cal., desire
+    to engage your services as Special Correspondent on the pleasure
+    excursion now about to proceed from this City to the Holy Land. In
+    obedience to their instructions I have secured a passage for you on
+    the vessel about to convey the excursion party referred to, and made
+    such arrangements as I hope will secure your comfort and
+    convenience. Your only instructions are that you will continue to
+    write at such times and from such places as you deem proper, and in
+    the same style that heretofore secured you the favor of the readers
+    of the Alta California. I have the honor to remain, with high
+    respect and esteem,
+
+    Your ob'dt. Servant,
+
+    JOHN J. MURPHY.]
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The Alta, it appears, had already applied for his berth; but, not having
+      been vouched for by Mr. Beecher or some other eminent divine, Clemens was
+      fearful he might not be accepted. Quite casually he was enlightened on
+      this point. While waiting for attention in the shipping-office, with the
+      Alta agent, he heard a newspaper man inquire what notables were going. A
+      clerk, with evident pride, rattled off the names:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lieutenant-General Sherman, Henry Ward Beecher, and Mask Twain;
+      also probably General Banks.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he was billed as an attraction. It was his first surreptitious taste of
+      fame on the Atlantic coast, and not without its delight. The story often
+      told of his being introduced by Ned House, of the Tribune, as a minister,
+      though often repeated by Mark Twain himself, was in the nature of a joke,
+      and mainly apocryphal. Clemens was a good deal in House's company at the
+      time, for he had made an arrangement to contribute occasional letters to
+      the Tribune, and House no doubt introduced him jokingly as one of the
+      Quaker City ministers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0063" id="link2H_4_0063">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LVIII. A NEW BOOK AND A LECTURE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Webb, meantime, had pushed the Frog book along. The proofs had been read
+      and the volume was about ready for issue. Clemens wrote to his mother
+      April 15th:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    My book will probably be in the bookseller's hands in about two
+    weeks. After that I shall lecture. Since I have been gone, the
+    boys have gotten up a &ldquo;call&rdquo; on me signed by two hundred
+    Californians.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The lecture plan was the idea of Frank Fuller, who as acting Governor of
+      Utah had known Mark Twain on the Comstock, and prophesied favorably of his
+      future career. Clemens had hunted up Fuller on landing in New York in
+      January, and Fuller had encouraged the lecture then; but Clemens was
+      doubtful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have no reputation with the general public here,&rdquo; he said.
+      &ldquo;We couldn't get a baker's dozen to hear me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Fuller was a sanguine person, with an energy and enthusiasm that were
+      infectious. He insisted that the idea was sound. It would solidify Mark
+      Twain's reputation on the Atlantic coast, he declared, insisting that the
+      largest house in New York, Cooper Union, should be taken. Clemens had
+      partially consented, and Fuller had arranged with all the Pacific slope
+      people who had come East, headed by ex-Governor James W. Nye (by this time
+      Senator at Washington), to sign a call for the &ldquo;Inimitable Mark
+      Twain&rdquo; to appear before a New York audience. Fuller made Nye agree
+      to be there and introduce the lecturer, and he was burningly busy and
+      happy in the prospect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Mark Twain was not happy. He looked at that spacious hall and imagined
+      the little crowd of faithful Californian stragglers that might gather in
+      to hear him, and the ridicule of the papers next day. He begged Fuller to
+      take a smaller hall, the smallest he could get. But only the biggest hall
+      in New York would satisfy Fuller. He would have taken a larger one if he
+      could have found it. The lecture was announced for May 6th. Its subject
+      was &ldquo;Kanakadom, or the Sandwich Islands&rdquo;&mdash;tickets fifty
+      cents. Fuller timed it to follow a few days after Webb's book should
+      appear, so that one event might help the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain's first book, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveyas County,
+      and Other Sketches', was scheduled for May 1st, and did, in fact, appear
+      on that date; but to the author it was no longer an important event. Jim
+      Smiley's frog as standard-bearer of his literary procession was not an
+      interesting object, so far as he was concerned&mdash;not with that vast,
+      empty hall in the background and the insane undertaking of trying to fill
+      it. The San Francisco venture had been as nothing compared with this.
+      Fuller was working night and day with abounding joy, while the subject of
+      his labor felt as if he were on the brink of a fearful precipice,
+      preparing to try a pair of wings without first learning to fly. At one
+      instant he was cold with fright, the next glowing with an infection of
+      Fuller's faith. He devised a hundred schemes for the sale of seats. Once
+      he came rushing to Fuller, saying:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Send a lot of tickets down to the Chickering Piano Company. I have
+      promised to put on my programme, 'The piano used at this entertainment is
+      manufactured by Chickering.&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you don't want a piano, Mark,&rdquo; said Fuller, &ldquo;do
+      you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, of course not; but they will distribute the tickets for the
+      sake of the advertisement, whether we have the piano or not.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fuller got out a lot of handbills and hung bunches of them in the stages,
+      omnibuses, and horse-cars. Clemens at first haunted these vehicles to see
+      if anybody noticed the bills. The little dangling bunches seemed
+      untouched. Finally two men came in; one of them pulled off a bill and
+      glanced at it. His friend asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who's Mark Twain?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God knows; I don't!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lecturer could not ride any more. He was desperate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fuller,&rdquo; he groaned, &ldquo;there isn't a sign&mdash;a ripple
+      of interest.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fuller assured him that everything was working all right &ldquo;working
+      underneath,&rdquo; Fuller said&mdash;but the lecturer was hopeless. He
+      reported his impressions to the folks at home:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Everything looks shady, at least, if not dark; I have a good agent;
+    but now, after we have hired the Cooper Institute, and gone to an
+    expense in one way or another of $500, it comes out that I have got
+    to play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, Ristori, and also the
+    double troop of Japanese jugglers, the latter opening at the great
+    Academy of Music&mdash;and with all this against me I have taken the
+    largest house in New York and cannot back water.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He might have added that there were other rival entertainments: &ldquo;The
+      Flying Scud&rdquo; was at Wallack's, the &ldquo;Black Crook&rdquo; was at
+      Niblo's, John Brougham at the Olympic; and there were at least a dozen
+      lesser attractions. New York was not the inexhaustible city in those days;
+      these things could gather in the public to the last man. When the day drew
+      near, and only a few tickets had been sold, Clemens was desperate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fuller,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;there'll be nobody in the Cooper
+      Union that night but you and me. I am on the verge of suicide. I would
+      commit suicide if I had the pluck and the outfit. You must paper the
+      house, Fuller. You must send out a flood of complementaries.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; said Fuller; &ldquo;what we want this time is
+      reputation anyway&mdash;money is secondary. I'll put you before the
+      choicest, most intelligent audience that ever was gathered in New York
+      City. I will bring in the school-instructors&mdash;the finest body of men
+      and women in the world.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fuller immediately sent out a deluge of complimentary tickets, inviting
+      the school-teachers of New York and Brooklyn, and all the adjacent
+      country, to come free and hear Mark Twain's great lecture on Kanakadom.
+      This was within forty-eight hours of the time he was to appear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Senator Nye was to have joined Clemens and Fuller at the Westminster,
+      where Clemens was stopping, and they waited for him there with a carriage,
+      fuming and swearing, until it was evident that he was not coming. At last
+      Clemens said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fuller, you've got to introduce me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; suggested Fuller; &ldquo;I've got a better scheme than
+      that. You get up and begin by bemeaning Nye for not being there. That will
+      be better anyway.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Fuller, I can do that. I feel that way. I'll try to think up
+      something fresh and happy to say about that horse-thief.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They drove to Cooper Union with trepidation. Suppose, after all, the
+      school-teachers had declined to come? They went half an hour before the
+      lecture was to begin. Forty years later Mark Twain said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I couldn't keep away. I wanted to see that vast Mammoth cave and
+      die. But when we got near the building I saw that all the streets were
+      blocked with people, and that traffic had stopped. I couldn't believe that
+      these people were trying to get into Cooper Institute; but they were, and
+      when I got to the stage at last the house was jammed full-packed; there
+      wasn't room enough left for a child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was happy and I was excited beyond expression. I poured the
+      Sandwich Islands out on those people, and they laughed and shouted to my
+      entire content. For an hour and fifteen minutes I was in paradise.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Fuller to-day, alive and young, when so many others of that ancient
+      time and event have vanished, has added:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When Mark appeared the Californians gave a regular yell of welcome.
+      When that was over he walked to the edge of the platform, looked carefully
+      down in the pit, round the edges as if he were hunting for something. Then
+      he said: 'There was to have been a piano here, and a senator to introduce
+      me. I don't seem to discover them anywhere. The piano was a good one, but
+      we will have to get along with such music as I can make with your help. As
+      for the senator&mdash;Then Mark let himself go and did as he promised
+      about Senator Nye. He said things that made men from the Pacific coast,
+      who had known Nye, scream with delight. After that came his lecture. The
+      first sentence captured the audience. From that moment to the end it was
+      either in a roar of laughter or half breathless by his beautiful
+      descriptive passages. People were positively ill for days, laughing at
+      that lecture.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So it was a success: everybody was glad to have been there; the papers
+      were kind, congratulations numerous. &mdash;[Kind but not extravagant;
+      those were burning political times, and the doings of mere literary people
+      did not excite the press to the extent of headlines. A jam around Cooper
+      Union to-day, followed by such an artistic triumph, would be a news event.
+      On the other hand, Schuyler Colfax, then Speaker of the House, was
+      reported to the extent of a column, nonpareil. His lecture was of no
+      literary importance, and no echo of it now remains. But those were
+      political, not artistic, days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of Mark Twain's lecture the Times notice said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nearly every one present came prepared for considerable provocation
+      for enjoyable laughter, and from the appearance of their mirthful faces
+      leaving the hall at the conclusion of the lecture but few were
+      disappointed, and it is not too much to say that seldom has so large an
+      audience been so uniformly pleased as the one that listened to Mark
+      Twain's quaint remarks last evening. The large hall of the Union was
+      filled to its utmost capacity by fully two thousand persons, which fact
+      spoke well for the reputation of the lecturer and his future success. Mark
+      Twain's style is a quaint one both in manner and method, and through his
+      discourse he managed to keep on the right side of the audience, and
+      frequently convulsed it with hearty laughter.... During a description of
+      the topography of the Sandwich Islands the lecturer surprised his hearers
+      by a graphic and eloquent description of the eruption of the great
+      volcano, which occurred in 1840, and his language was loudly applauded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Judging from the success achieved by the lecturer last evening, he
+      should repeat his experiment at an early date.&rdquo;]
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                   COOPER INSTITUTE
+    By Invitation of s large number of prominent Californians and
+                  Citizens of New York,
+
+                      MARK TWAIN
+
+                    WILL DELIVER A
+                  SERIO-HUMEROUS LECTURE
+                      CONERNING
+
+                      KANAKDOM
+                         OR
+                  THE SANDWICH ISLANDS,
+
+                   COOPER INSTITUTE,
+               On Monday Evening, May 6,1867.
+
+                  TICKETS FIFTY GENTS.
+ For Sale at Chickering and Sons, 852 Broadway, and at the Principal
+                       Hotel
+
+    Doors open at 7 o'clock.  The Wisdom will begin to flow at 8.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain always felt grateful to the school-teachers for that night.
+      Many years later, when they wanted him to read to them in Steinway Hall,
+      he gladly gave his services without charge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor was the lecture a complete financial failure. In spite of the flood of
+      complementaries, there was a cash return of some three hundred dollars
+      from the sale of tickets&mdash;a substantial aid in defraying the expenses
+      which Fuller assumed and insisted on making good on his own account. That
+      was Fuller's regal way; his return lay in the joy of the game, and in the
+      winning of the larger stake for a friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mark,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;it is all right. The fortune didn't
+      come, but it will. The fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book
+      just out you are going to be the most talked-of man in the country. Your
+      letters for the Alta and the Tribune will get the widest reception of any
+      letters of travel ever written.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0064" id="link2H_4_0064">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LIX. THE FIRST BOOK
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      With the shadow of the Cooper Institute so happily dispelled, The
+      Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and his following of Other
+      Sketches, became a matter of more interest. The book was a neat
+      blue-and-gold volume printed by John A. Gray &amp; Green, the old firm for
+      which the boy, Sam Clemens, had set type thirteen years before. The
+      title-page bore Webb's name as publisher, with the American News Company
+      as selling agents. It further stated that the book was edited by &ldquo;John
+      Paul,&rdquo; that is to say by Webb himself. The dedication was in keeping
+      with the general irresponsible character of the venture. It was as
+      follows:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                         TO
+                      JOHN SMITH
+            WHOM I HAVE KNOWN IN DIVERS AND SUNDRY
+             PLACES ABOUT THE WORLD, AND WHOSE
+               MANY AND MANIFOLD VIRTUES DID
+                ALWAYS COMMAND MY ESTEEM,
+                  I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It is said that the man to whom a volume is dedicated always buys a copy.
+      If this prove true in the present instance, a princely affluence is about
+      to burst upon THE AUTHOR.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;advertisement&rdquo; stated that the author had &ldquo;scaled
+      the heights of popularity at a single jump, and won for himself the
+      sobriquet of the 'Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope'; furthermore, that
+      he was known to fame as the 'Moralist of the Main,'&rdquo; and that as
+      such he would be likely to go down to posterity, adding that it was in his
+      secondary character, as humorist, rather than in his primal one of
+      moralist, that the volume aimed to present him.&mdash;[The advertisement
+      complete, with extracts from the book, may be found under Appendix E, at
+      the end of last volume.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every little while, during the forty years or more that have elapsed since
+      then, some one has come forward announcing Mark Twain to be as much a
+      philosopher as a humorist, as if this were a new discovery. But it was a
+      discovery chiefly to the person making the announcement. Every one who
+      ever knew Mark Twain at any period of his life made the same discovery.
+      Every one who ever took the trouble to familiarize himself with his work
+      made it. Those who did not make it have known his work only by hearsay and
+      quotation, or they have read it very casually, or have been very dull. It
+      would be much more of a discovery to find a book in which he has not been
+      serious&mdash;a philosopher, a moralist, and a poet. Even in the Jumping
+      Frog sketches, selected particularly for their inconsequence, the
+      under-vein of reflection and purpose is not lacking. The answer to Moral
+      Statistician&mdash;[In &ldquo;Answers to Correspondents,&rdquo; included
+      now in Sketches New and Old. An extract from it, and from &ldquo;A Strange
+      Dream,&rdquo; will be found in Appendix E.]&mdash;is fairly alive with
+      human wisdom and righteous wrath. The &ldquo;Strange Dream,&rdquo; though
+      ending in a joke, is aglow with poetry. Webb's &ldquo;advertisement&rdquo;
+      was playfully written, but it was earnestly intended, and he writes Mark
+      Twain down a moralist&mdash;not as a discovery, but as a matter of course.
+      The discoveries came along later, when the author's fame as a humorist had
+      dazzled the nations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is as well to say it here as anywhere, perhaps, that one reason why
+      Mark Twain found it difficult to be accepted seriously was the fact that
+      his personality was in itself so essentially humorous. His physiognomy,
+      his manner of speech, this movement, his mental attitude toward events&mdash;all
+      these were distinctly diverting. When we add to this that his medium of
+      expression was nearly always full of the quaint phrasing and those
+      surprising appositions which we recognize as amusing, it is not so
+      astonishing that his deeper, wiser, more serious purpose should be
+      overlooked. On the whole these unabated discoverers serve a purpose, if
+      only to make the rest of their species look somewhat deeper than the comic
+      phrase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little blue-and-gold volume which presented the Frog story and
+      twenty-six other sketches in covers is chiefly important to-day as being
+      Mark Twain's first book. The selections in it were made for a public that
+      had been too busy with a great war to learn discrimination, and most of
+      them have properly found oblivion. Fewer than a dozen of them were
+      included in his collected Sketches issued eight years later, and some even
+      of those might have been spared; also some that were added, for that
+      matter; but detailed literary criticism is not the province of this work.
+      The reader may investigate and judge for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens was pleased with the appearance of his book. To Bret Harte he
+      wrote:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The book is out and it is handsome. It is full of damnable errors of
+      grammar and deadly inconsistencies of spelling in the Frog sketch, because
+      I was away and did not read proofs; but be a friend and say nothing about
+      these things. When my hurry is over, I will send you a copy to pisen the
+      children with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That he had no exaggerated opinion of the book's contents or prospects we
+      may gather from his letter home:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the Frog book, I don't believe it will ever pay anything worth a
+      cent. I published it simply to advertise myself, and not with the hope of
+      making anything out of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had grown more lenient in his opinion of the merits of the Frog story
+      itself since it had made friends in high places, especially since James
+      Russell Lowell had pronounced it &ldquo;the finest piece of humorous
+      writing yet produced in America&rdquo;; but compared with his lecture
+      triumph, and his prospective journey to foreign seas, his book venture, at
+      best, claimed no more than a casual regard. A Sandwich Island book (he had
+      collected his Union letters with the idea of a volume) he gave up
+      altogether after one unsuccessful offer of it to Dick &amp; Fitzgerald.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank Fuller's statement, that the fame had arrived, had in it some
+      measure of truth. Lecture propositions came from various directions.
+      Thomas Nast, then in the early day of his great popularity, proposed a
+      joint tour, in which Clemens would lecture, while he, Nast, illustrated
+      the remarks with lightning caricatures. But the time was too short; the
+      Quaker City would sail on the 8th of June, and in the mean time the Alta
+      correspondent was far behind with his New York letters. On May 29th he
+      wrote:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am 18 Alta letters behind, and I must catch up or bust. I have refused
+      all invitations to lecture. Don't know how my book is coming on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He worked like a slave for a week or so, almost night and day, to clean up
+      matters before his departure. Then came days of idleness and reaction-days
+      of waiting, during which his natural restlessness and the old-time regret
+      for things done and undone, beset him.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    My passage is paid, and if the ship sails I sail on her; but I make
+    no calculations, have bought no cigars, no sea-going clothing&mdash;have
+    made no preparations whatever&mdash;shall not pack my trunk till the
+    morning we sail.
+
+    All I do know or feel is that I am wild with impatience to move
+    &mdash;move&mdash;move! Curse the endless delays! They always kill me&mdash;they
+    make me neglect every duty, and then I have a conscience that tears
+    me like a wild beast. I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month.
+    I do more mean things the moment I get a chance to fold my hands and
+    sit down than ever I get forgiveness for.
+
+    Yes, we are to meet at Mr. Beach's next Thursday night, and I
+    suppose we shall have to be gotten up regardless of expense, in
+    swallow-tails, white kids and everything 'en regle'.
+
+    I am resigned to Rev. Mr. Hutchinson's or anybody else's
+    supervision. I don't mind it. I am fixed. I have got a splendid,
+    immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless roommate who is as
+    good and true and right-minded a man as ever lived&mdash;a man whose
+    blameless conduct and example will always be an eloquent sermon to
+    all who shall come within their influence. But send on the
+    professional preachers&mdash;there are none I like better to converse
+    with; if they're not narrowminded and bigoted they make good
+    companions.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;splendid immoral room-mate&rdquo; was Dan Slote&mdash;&ldquo;Dan,&rdquo;
+      of The Innocents, a lovable character&mdash;all as set down. Samuel
+      Clemens wrote one more letter to his mother and sister&mdash;a
+      conscience-stricken, pessimistic letter of good-by written the night
+      before sailing. Referring to the Alta letters he says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I think they are the stupidest letters ever written from New York.
+    Corresponding has been a perfect drag ever since I got to the
+    States. If it continues abroad, I don't know what the Tribune and
+    Alta folk will think.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He remembers Orion, who had been officially eliminated when Nevada had
+      received statehood.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I often wonder if his law business is going satisfactorily. I wish
+    I had gone to Washington in the winter instead of going West. I
+    could have gouged an office out of Bill Stewart for him, and that
+    would have atoned for the loss of my home visit. But I am so
+    worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish
+    anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is
+    stored full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and
+    an accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and
+    restless moving from place to place. If I could only say I had done
+    one thing for any of you that entitled me to your good opinions (I
+    say nothing of your love, for I am sure of that, no matter how
+    unworthy of it I may make myself&mdash;from Orion down, you have always
+    given me that; all the days of my life, when God Almighty knows I
+    have seldom deserved it), I believe I could go home and stay there
+    &mdash;and I know I would care little for the world's praise or blame.
+    There is no satisfaction in the world's praise anyhow, and it has no
+    worth to me save in the way of business. I tried to gather up its
+    compliments to send you, but the work was distasteful and I dropped
+    it.
+
+    You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that
+    is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt. I can get away
+    from that at sea, and be tranquil and satisfied; and so, with my
+    parting love and benediction for Orion and all of you, I say good-by
+    and God bless you all-and welcome the wind that wafts a weary soul
+    to the sunny lands of the Mediterranean!
+
+                     Yrs. forever,
+                                SAM
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0065" id="link2H_4_0065">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LX. THE INNOCENTS AT SEA
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       HOLY LAND PLEASURE EXCURSION
+
+       Steamer: Quaker City.
+
+       Captain C. C. Duncan.
+
+       Left New York at 2 P.m., June 8, 1867.
+
+       Rough weather&mdash;anchored within the harbor to lay all night.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      That first note recorded an event momentous in Mark Twain's career&mdash;an
+      event of supreme importance; if we concede that any link in a chain
+      regardless of size is of more importance than any other link. Undoubtedly
+      it remains the most conspicuous event, as the world views it now, in
+      retrospect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The note further heads a new chapter of history in sea-voyaging. No such
+      thing as the sailing of an ocean steamship with a pleasure-party on a long
+      transatlantic cruise had ever occurred before. A similar project had been
+      undertaken the previous year, but owing to a cholera scare in the East it
+      had been abandoned. Now the dream had become a fact&mdash;a stupendous
+      fact when we consider it. Such an important beginning as that now would in
+      all likelihood furnish the chief news story of the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But they had different ideas of news in those days. There were no
+      headlines announcing the departure of the Quaker City&mdash;only the
+      barest mention of the ship's sailing, though a prominent position was
+      given to an account of a senatorial excursion-party which set out that
+      same morning over the Union Pacific Railway, then under construction.
+      Every name in that political party was set dawn, and not one of them
+      except General Hancock will ever be heard of again. The New York Times,
+      however, had some one on its editorial staff who thought it worth while to
+      comment a little on the history-making Quaker City excursion. The writer
+      was pleasantly complimentary to officers and passengers. He referred to
+      Moses S. Beach, of the Sun, who was taking with him type and press,
+      whereby he would &ldquo;skilfully utilize the brains of the company for
+      their mutual edification.&rdquo; Mr. Beecher and General Sherman would
+      find talent enough aboard to make the hours go pleasantly (evidently the
+      writer had not interested himself sufficiently to know that these
+      gentlemen were not along), and the paragraph closed by prophesying other
+      such excursions, and wishing the travelers &ldquo;good speed, a happy
+      voyage, and a safe return.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was handsome, especially for those days; only now, some fine day,
+      when an airship shall start with a band of happy argonauts to land beyond
+      the sunrise for the first time in history, we shall feature it and
+      emblazon it with pictures in the Sunday papers, and weeklies, and in the
+      magazines.&mdash;[The Quaker City idea was so unheard-of that in some of
+      the foreign ports visited, the officials could not believe that the vessel
+      was simply a pleasure-craft, and were suspicious of some dark, ulterior
+      purpose.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That Henry Ward Beecher and General Sherman had concluded not to go was a
+      heavy disappointment at first; but it proved only a temporary disaster.
+      The inevitable amalgamation of all ship companies took place. The
+      sixty-seven travelers fell into congenial groups, or they mingled and
+      devised amusements, and gossiped and became a big family, as happy and as
+      free from contention as families of that size are likely to be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Quaker City was a good enough ship and sizable for her time. She was
+      registered eighteen hundred tons&mdash;about one-tenth the size of
+      Mediterranean excursion-steamers today&mdash;and when conditions were
+      favorable she could make ten knots an hour under steam&mdash;or, at least,
+      she could do it with the help of her auxiliary sails. Altogether she was a
+      cozy, satisfactory ship, and they were a fortunate company who had her all
+      to themselves and went out on her on that long-ago ocean gipsying. She has
+      grown since then, even to the proportions of the Mayflower. It was
+      necessary for her to grow to hold all of those who in later times claimed
+      to have sailed in her on that voyage with Mark Twain.&mdash;[The Quaker
+      City passenger list will be found under Appendix F, at the end of last
+      volume.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were not all ministers and deacons aboard the Quaker City. Clemens
+      found other congenial spirits be sides his room-mate Dan Slote&mdash;among
+      them the ship's surgeon, Dr. A. Reeve Jackson (the guide-destroying
+      &ldquo;Doctor&rdquo; of The Innocents); Jack Van Nostrand, of New Jersey (&ldquo;Jack&rdquo;);
+      Julius Moulton, of St. Louis (&ldquo;Moult&rdquo;), and other care-free
+      fellows, the smoking-room crowd which is likely to make comradeship its
+      chief watchword. There were companionable people in the cabin crowd also&mdash;fine,
+      intelligent men and women, especially one of the latter, a middle-aged,
+      intellectual, motherly soul&mdash;Mrs. A. W. Fairbanks, of Cleveland,
+      Ohio. Mrs. Fairbanks&mdash;herself a newspaper correspondent for her
+      husband's paper, the Cleveland Herald had a large influence on the
+      character and general tone of those Quaker City letters which established
+      Mark Twain's larger fame. She was an able writer herself; her judgment was
+      thoughtful, refined, unbiased&mdash;altogether of a superior sort. She
+      understood Samuel Clemens, counseled him, encouraged him to read his
+      letters aloud to her, became in reality &ldquo;Mother Fairbanks,&rdquo; as
+      they termed her, to him and to others of that ship who needed her kindly
+      offices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one of his home letters, later, he said of her:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    She was the most refined, intelligent, cultivated lady in the ship,
+    and altogether the kindest and best. She sewed my buttons on, kept
+    my clothing in presentable trim, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I
+    behaved), lectured me awfully on the quarter-deck on moonlit
+    promenading evenings, and cured me of several bad habits. I am
+    under lasting obligations to her. She looks young because she is so
+    good, but she has a grown son and daughter at home.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      In one of the early letters which Mrs. Fairbanks wrote to her paper she is
+      scarcely less complimentary to him, even if in a different way.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    We have D.D.'s and M.D.'s&mdash;we have men of wisdom and men of wit.
+    There is one table from which is sure to come a peal of laughter,
+    and all eyes are turned toward Mark Twain, whose face is, perfectly
+    mirth-provoking. Sitting lazily at the table, scarcely genteel in
+    his appearance, there is something, I know not what, that interests
+    and attracts. I saw to-day at dinner venerable divines and sage-
+    looking men convulsed with laughter at his drolleries and quaint,
+    odd manners.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It requires only a few days on shipboard for acquaintances to form, and
+      presently a little afternoon group was gathering to hear Mark Twain read
+      his letters. Mrs. Fairbanks was there, of course, also Mr. and Mrs. S. L.
+      Severance, likewise of Cleveland, and Moses S. Beach, of the Sun, with his
+      daughter Emma, a girl of seventeen. Dan Slote was likely to be there, too,
+      and Jack, and the Doctor, and Charles J. Langdon, of Elmira, New York, a
+      boy of eighteen, who had conceived a deep admiration for the brilliant
+      writer. They were fortunate ones who first gathered to hear those daring,
+      wonderful letters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the benefit was a mutual one. He furnished a priceless entertainment,
+      and he derived something equally priceless in return&mdash;the test of
+      immediate audience and the boon of criticism. Mrs. Fairbanks especially
+      was frankly sincere. Mr. Severance wrote afterward:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    One afternoon I saw him tearing up a bunch of the soft, white paper-
+    copy paper, I guess the newspapers call it-on which he had written
+    something, and throwing the fragments into the Mediterranean. I
+    inquired of him why he cast away the fruits of his labors in that
+    manner.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he drawled, &ldquo;Mrs. Fairbanks thinks it oughtn't
+      to be printed, and, like as not, she is right.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Emma Beach (Mrs. Abbott Thayer) remembers hearing him say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Mrs. Fairbanks has just destroyed another four hours' work
+      for me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes he played chess with Emma Beach, who thought him a great hero
+      because, once when a crowd of men were tormenting a young lad, a
+      passenger, Mark Twain took the boy's part and made them desist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure I was right, too,&rdquo; she declares; &ldquo;heroism
+      came natural to him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Severance recalls another incident which, as he says, was trivial
+      enough, but not easy to forget:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were having a little celebration over the birthday anniversary of Mrs.
+      Duncan, wife of our captain. Mark Twain got up and made a little speech,
+      in which he said Mrs. Duncan was really older than Methuselah because she
+      knew a lot of things that Methuselah never heard of. Then he mentioned a
+      number of more or less modern inventions, and wound up by saying, &ldquo;What
+      did Methuselah know about a barbed-wire fence?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Except Following the Equator, The Innocents Abroad comes nearer to being
+      history than any other of Mark Twain's travel-books. The notes for it were
+      made on the spot, and there was plenty of fact, plenty of fresh, new
+      experience, plenty of incident to set down. His idea of descriptive travel
+      in those days was to tell the story as it happened; also, perhaps, he had
+      not then acquired the courage of his inventions. We may believe that the
+      adventures with Jack, Dan, and the Doctor are elaborated here and there;
+      but even those happened substantially as recorded. There is little to add,
+      then, to the story of that halcyon trip, and not much to elucidate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old note-books give a light here and there that is interesting. It is
+      curious to be looking through them now, trying to realize that these
+      penciled memoranda were the fresh, first impressions that would presently
+      grow into the world's most delightful book of travel; that they were set
+      down in the very midst of that care-free little company that frolicked
+      through Italy, climbed wearily the arid Syrian hills. They are all dead
+      now; but to us they are as alive and young to-day as when they followed
+      the footprints of the Son of Man through Palestine, and stood at last
+      before the Sphinx, impressed and awed by its &ldquo;five thousand
+      slow-revolving years.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of the items consist of no more than a few terse, suggestive words&mdash;serious,
+      humorous, sometimes profane. Others are statistical, descriptive,
+      elaborated. Also there are drawings&mdash;&ldquo;not copied,&rdquo; he
+      marks them, with a pride not always justified by the result. The earlier
+      notes are mainly comments on the &ldquo;pilgrims,&rdquo; the freak
+      pilgrims: &ldquo;the Frenchy-looking woman who owns a dog and keeps up an
+      interminable biography of him to the passengers&rdquo;; the &ldquo;long-legged,
+      simple, wide-mouthed, horse-laughing young fellow who once made a sea
+      voyage to Fortress Monroe, and quotes eternally from his experiences&rdquo;;
+      also, there is reference to another young man, &ldquo;good, accommodating,
+      pleasant but fearfully green.&rdquo; This young person would become the
+      &ldquo;Interrogation Point,&rdquo; in due time, and have his picture on
+      page 71 (old edition), while opposite him, on page 70, would appear the
+      &ldquo;oracle," identified as one Doctor Andrews, who (the note-book says)
+      had the habit of &ldquo;smelling in guide-books for knowledge and then
+      trying to play it for old information that has been festering in his
+      brain.&rdquo; Sometimes there are abstract notes such as:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing that no one had ever
+      said it before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the &ldquo;character&rdquo; notes, the most important and elaborated is
+      that which presents the &ldquo;Poet Lariat.&rdquo; This is the entry,
+      somewhat epitomized:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                  BLOODGOOD H. CUTTER
+
+    He is fifty years old, and small of his age. He dresses in
+    homespun, and is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer, with
+    a strange proclivity for writing rhymes. He writes them on all
+    possible subjects, and gets them printed on slips of paper, with his
+    portrait at the head. These he will give to any man who comes
+    along, whether he has anything against him or not....
+
+    Dan said:
+
+    &ldquo;It must be a great happiness to you to sit down at the close of day
+    and put its events all down in rhymes and poetry, like Byron and
+    Shakespeare and those fellows.&rdquo;
+
+    &ldquo;Oh yes, it is&mdash;it is&mdash;Why, many's the time I've had to get up in
+    the night when it comes on me:
+
+       Whether we're on the sea or the land
+       We've all got to go at the word of command&mdash;
+
+    &ldquo;Hey! how's that?&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      A curious character was Cutter&mdash;a Long Island farmer with the
+      obsession of rhyme. In his old age, in an interview, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mark was generally writing and he was glum. He would write what we
+      were doing, and I would write poetry, and Mark would say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'For Heaven's sake, Cutter, keep your poems to yourself.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Mark was pretty glum, and he was generally writing.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor old Poet Lariat&mdash;dead now with so many others of that happy
+      crew. We may believe that Mark learned to be &ldquo;glum&rdquo; when he
+      saw the Lariat approaching with his sheaf of rhymes. We may believe, too,
+      that he was &ldquo;generally writing.&rdquo; He contributed fifty-three
+      letters to the Alta during that five months and six to the Tribune. They
+      would average about two columns nonpareil each, which is to say four
+      thousand words, or something like two hundred and fifty thousand words in
+      all. To turn out an average of fifteen hundred words a day, with
+      continuous sight-seeing besides, one must be generally writing during any
+      odd intervals; those who are wont to regard Mark Twain as lazy may
+      consider these statistics. That he detested manual labor is true enough,
+      but at the work for which he was fitted and intended it may be set down
+      here upon authority (and despite his own frequent assertions to the
+      contrary) that to his last year he was the most industrious of men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0066" id="link2H_4_0066">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXI. THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was Dan, Jack, and the Doctor who with Mark Twain wandered down through
+      Italy and left moral footprints that remain to this day. The Italian
+      guides are wary about showing pieces of the True Cross, fragments of the
+      Crown of Thorns, and the bones of saints since then. They show them, it is
+      true, but with a smile; the name of Mark Twain is a touch-stone to test
+      their statements. Not a guide in Italy but has heard the tale of that
+      iconoclastic crew, and of the book which turned their marvels into myths,
+      their relics into bywords.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Doctor Jackson, Colonel Denny, Doctor Birch, and Samuel Clemens who
+      evaded the quarantine and made the perilous night trip to Athens and
+      looked upon the Parthenon and the sleeping city by moonlight. It is all
+      set down in the notes, and the account varies little from that given in
+      the book; only he does not tell us that Captain Duncan and the
+      quartermaster, Pratt, connived at the escapade, or how the latter watched
+      the shore in anxious suspense until he heard the whistle which was their
+      signal to be taken aboard. It would have meant six months' imprisonment if
+      they had been captured, for there was no discretion in the Greek law.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was T. D. Crocker, A. N. Sanford, Col. Peter Kinney, and William Gibson
+      who were delegated to draft the address to the Emperor of Russia at Yalta,
+      with Samuel L. Clemens as chairman of that committee. The chairman wrote
+      the address, the opening sentence of which he grew so weary of hearing:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply
+    for recreation, and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial
+    state.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The address is all set down in the notes, and there also exists the first
+      rough draft, with the emendations in his own hand. He deplores the time it
+      required:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    That job is over. Writing addresses to emperors is not my strong
+    suit. However, if it is not as good as it might be it doesn't
+    signify&mdash;the other committeemen ought to have helped me write it;
+    they had nothing to do, and I had my hands full. But for bothering
+    with this I would have caught up entirely with my New York Tribune
+    correspondence and nearly up with the San Francisco.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      They wanted him also to read the address to the Emperor, but he pointed
+      out that the American consul was the proper person for that office. He
+      tells how the address was presented:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      August 26th. The Imperial carriages were in waiting at eleven, and at
+      twelve we were at the palace....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Consul for Odessa read the address and the Czar said frequently,
+      &ldquo;Good&mdash;very good; indeed&rdquo;&mdash;and at the close, &ldquo;I
+      am very, very grateful.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not improper for him to set down all this, and much more, in his
+      own note-book&mdash;not then for publication. It was in fact a very proper
+      record&mdash;for today.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One incident of the imperial audience Mark Twain omitted from his book,
+      perhaps because the humor of it had not yet become sufficiently evident.
+      &ldquo;The humorous perception of a thing is a pretty slow growth
+      sometimes,&rdquo; he once remarked. It was about seventeen years before he
+      could laugh enjoyably at a slight mistake he made at the Emperor's
+      reception. He set down a memorandum of it, then, for fear it might be
+      lost:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    There were a number of great dignitaries of the Empire there, and
+    although, as a general thing, they were dressed in citizen's
+    clothing, I observed that the most of them wore a very small piece
+    of ribbon in the lapels of their coats. That little touch of color
+    struck my fancy, and it seemed to me a good idea to add it to my own
+    attractions; not imagining that it had any special significance. So
+    I stepped aside, hunted up a bit of red ribbon, and ornamented my
+    lapel with it. Presently, Count Festetics, the Grand Master of
+    ceremonies, and the only man there who was gorgeously arrayed, in
+    full official costume, began to show me a great many attentions. He
+    was particularly polite, and pleasant, and anxious to be of service
+    to me. Presently, he asked me what order of nobility I belonged to?
+    I said, &ldquo;I didn't belong to any.&rdquo; Then he asked me what order of
+    knighthood I belonged to? I said, &ldquo;None.&rdquo; Then he asked me what
+    the red ribbon in my buttonhole stood for? I saw, at once, what an
+    ass I had been making of myself, and was accordingly confused and
+    embarrassed. I said the first thing that came into my mind, and
+    that was that the ribbon was merely the symbol of a club of
+    journalists to which I belonged, and I was not pursued with any more
+    of Count Festetic's attentions.
+
+    Later, I got on very familiar terms with an old gentleman, whom I
+    took to be the head gardener, and walked him all about the gardens,
+    slipping my arm into his without invitation, yet without demur on
+    his part, and by and by was confused again when I found that he was
+    not a gardener at all, but the Lord High Admiral of Russia! I
+    almost made up my mind that I would never call on an Emperor again.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Like all Mediterranean excursionists, those first pilgrims were insatiable
+      collectors of curios, costumes, and all manner of outlandish things. Dan
+      Slote had the stateroom hung and piled with such gleanings. At
+      Constantinople his room-mate writes:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I thought Dan had got the state-room pretty full of rubbish at last,
+    but awhile ago his dragoman arrived with a brand-new ghastly
+    tombstone of the Oriental pattern, with his name handsomely carved
+    and gilted on it in Turkish characters. That fellow will buy a
+    Circassian slave next.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It was Church, Denny, Jack, Davis, Dan, Moult, and Mark Twain who made the
+      &ldquo;long trip&rdquo; through Syria from Beirut to Jerusalem with their
+      elaborate camping outfit and decrepit nags &ldquo;Jericho,&rdquo; &ldquo;Baalbec,&rdquo;
+      and the rest. It was better camping than that Humboldt journey of six
+      years before, though the horses were not so dissimilar, and altogether it
+      was a hard, nerve-racking experience, climbing the arid hills of Palestine
+      in that torrid summer heat. Nobody makes that trip in summer-time now.
+      Tourists hurry out of Syria before the first of April, and they do not go
+      back before November. One brief quotation from Mark Twain's book gives us
+      an idea of what that early party of pilgrims had to undergo:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple of
+    hours, and then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig-
+    trees to give me a chance to rest. It was the hottest day we had
+    seen yet&mdash;the sun-flames shot down like the shafts of fire that
+    stream out before a blow-pipe; the rays seemed to fall in a deluge
+    on the head and pass downward like rain from a roof. I imagined I
+    could distinguish between the floods of rays. I thought I could
+    tell when each flood struck my head, when it reached my shoulders,
+    and when the next one came. It was terrible.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He had been ill with cholera at Damascus, a light attack; but any attack
+      of that dread disease is serious enough. He tells of this in the book, but
+      he does not mention, either in the book or in his notes, the attack which
+      Dan Slote had some days later. It remained for William F. Church, of the
+      party, to relate that incident, for it was the kind of thing that Mark
+      Twain was not likely to record, or even to remember. Doctor Church was a
+      deacon with orthodox views and did not approve of Mark Twain; he thought
+      him sinful, irreverent, profane.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was the worst man I ever knew,&rdquo; Church said; then he
+      added, &ldquo;And the best.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What happened was this: At the end of a terrible day of heat, when the
+      party had camped on the edge of a squalid Syrian village, Dan was taken
+      suddenly ill. It was cholera, beyond doubt. Dan could not go on&mdash;he
+      might never go on. The chances were that way. It was a serious matter all
+      around. To wait with Dan meant to upset their travel schedule&mdash;it
+      might mean to miss the ship. Consultation was held and a resolution passed
+      (the pilgrims were always passing resolutions) to provide for Dan as well
+      as possible, and leave him behind. Clemens, who had remained with Dan,
+      suddenly appeared and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gentlemen, I understand that you are going to leave Dan Slote here
+      alone. I'll be d&mdash;-d if I do!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he didn't. He stayed there and brought Dan into Jerusalem, a few days
+      late, but convalescent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps most of them were not always reverent during that Holy Land trip.
+      It was a trying journey, and after fierce days of desert hills the
+      reaction might not always spare even the holiest memories. Jack was
+      particularly sinful. When they learned the price for a boat on Galilee,
+      and the deacons who had traveled nearly half around the world to sail on
+      that sacred water were confounded by the charge, Jack said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Denny, do you wonder now that Christ walked?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the irreverent Jack who one morning (they had camped the night
+      before by the ruins of Jericho) refused to get up to see the sun rise
+      across the Jordan. Deacon Church went to his tent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jack, my boy, get up. Here is the place where the Israelites
+      crossed over into the Promised Land, and beyond are the mountains of Moab,
+      where Moses lies buried.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Moses who!&rdquo; said Jack.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Jack, my boy, Moses, the great lawgiver&mdash;who led the
+      Israelites out of Egypt-forty years through the wilderness&mdash;to the
+      Promised Land.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forty years!&rdquo; said Jack. &ldquo;How far was it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was three hundred miles, Jack; a great wilderness, and he
+      brought them through in safety.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jack regarded him with scorn. &ldquo;Huh, Moses&mdash;three hundred miles
+      forty years&mdash;why, Ben Holiday would have brought them through in
+      thirty-six hours!&rdquo;&mdash;[Ben Holiday, owner of the Overland stages,
+      and a man of great executive ability. This incident, a true one, is more
+      elaborately told in Roughing It, but it seems pertinent here.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jack probably learned more about the Bible during that trip-its history
+      and its heroes-than during all his former years. Nor was Jack the only one
+      of that group thus benefited. The sacred landmarks of Palestine inspire a
+      burning interest in the Scriptures, and Mark Twain probably did not now
+      regret those early Sunday-school lessons; certainly he did not fail to
+      review them exhaustively on that journey. His note-books fairly overflow
+      with Bible references; the Syrian chapters in The Innocents Abroad are
+      permeated with the poetry and legendary beauty of the Bible story. The
+      little Bible he carried on that trip, bought in Constantinople, was well
+      worn by the time they reached the ship again at Jaffa. He must have read
+      it with a large and persistent interest; also with a double benefit. For,
+      besides the knowledge acquired, he was harvesting a profit&mdash;probably
+      unsuspected at the time&mdash;-viz., the influence of the most direct and
+      beautiful English&mdash;the English of the King James version&mdash;which
+      could not fail to affect his own literary method at that impressionable
+      age. We have already noted his earlier admiration for that noble and
+      simple poem, &ldquo;The Burial of Moses,&rdquo; which in the Palestine
+      note-book is copied in full. All the tendency of his expression lay that
+      way, and the intense consideration of stately Bible phrase and imagery
+      could hardly fail to influence his mental processes. The very distinct
+      difference of style, as shown in The Innocents Abroad and in his earlier
+      writings, we may believe was in no small measure due to his study of the
+      King James version during those weeks in Palestine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He bought another Bible at Jerusalem; but it was not for himself. It was a
+      little souvenir volume bound in olive and balsam wood, and on the fly-leaf
+      is inscribed:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Mrs. Jane Clemens from her son. Jerusalem, Sept. 24, 1867.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      There is one more circumstance of that long cruise-recorded neither in the
+      book nor the notes&mdash;an incident brief, but of more importance in the
+      life of Samuel Clemens than any heretofore set down. It occurred in the
+      beautiful Bay of Smyrna, on the fifth or sixth of September, while the
+      vessel lay there for the Ephesus trip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reference has been made to young Charles Langdon, of Elmira (the &ldquo;Charley&rdquo;
+      once mentioned in the Innocents), as an admirer of Mark Twain. There was a
+      good deal of difference in their ages, and they were seldom of the same
+      party; but sometimes the boy invited the journalist to his cabin and,
+      boy-like, exhibited his treasures. He had two sisters at home; and of
+      Olivia, the youngest, he had brought a dainty miniature done on ivory in
+      delicate tints&mdash;a sweet-pictured countenance, fine and spiritual. On
+      that fateful day in the day of Smyrna, Samuel Clemens, visiting in young
+      Langdon's cabin, was shown this portrait. He looked at it with long
+      admiration, and spoke of it reverently, for the delicate face seemed to
+      him to be something more than a mere human likeness. Each time he came,
+      after that, he asked to see the picture, and once even begged to be
+      allowed to take it away with him. The boy would not agree to this, and the
+      elder man looked long and steadily at the miniature, resolving in his mind
+      that some day he would meet the owner of that lovely face&mdash;a purpose
+      for once in accord with that which the fates had arranged for him, in the
+      day when all things were arranged, the day of the first beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0067" id="link2H_4_0067">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXII. THE RETURN OF THE PILGRIMS
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      The last note-book entry bears date of October 11th:
+    </h3>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    At sea, somewhere in the neighborhood of Malta. Very stormy.
+
+    Terrible death to be talked to death. The storm has blown two small
+    land birds and a hawk to sea and they came on board. Sea full of
+    flying-fish.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      That is all. There is no record of the week's travel in Spain, which a
+      little group of four made under the picturesque Gibraltar guide, Benunes,
+      still living and quite as picturesque at last accounts. This side-trip is
+      covered in a single brief paragraph in the Innocents, and the only account
+      we have of it is in a home letter, from Cadiz, of October 24th:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    We left Gibraltar at noon and rode to Algeciras (4 hours), thus
+    dodging the quarantine&mdash;took dinner, and then rode horseback all
+    night in a swinging trot, and at daylight took a caleche (a-wheeled
+    vehicle), and rode 5 hours&mdash;then took cars and traveled till twelve
+    at night. That landed us at Seville, and we were over the hard part
+    of our trip and somewhat tired. Since then we have taken things
+    comparatively easy, drifting around from one town to another and
+    attracting a good deal of attention&mdash;for I guess strangers do not
+    wander through Andalusia and the other southern provinces of Spain
+    often. The country is precisely what it was when Don Quixote and
+    Sancho Panza were possible characters.
+
+    But I see now what the glory of Spain must have been when it was
+    under Moorish domination. No, I will not say that&mdash;but then when
+    one is carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of the
+    Alhambra and the supernatural beauty of the Alcazar, he is apt to
+    overflow with admiration for the splendid intellects that created
+    them.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      We may wish that he had left us a chapter of that idyllic journey, but it
+      will never be written now. A night or two before the vessel reached New
+      York there was the usual good-by assembly, and for this occasion, at Mrs.
+      Severance's request, Mark Twain wrote some verses. They were not
+      especially notable, for meter and rhyme did not come easy to him, but one
+      prophetic stanza is worth remembering. In the opening lines the passengers
+      are referred to as a fleet of vessels, then follows:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       Lo! other ships of that parted fleet
+       Shall suffer this fate or that:
+       One shall be wrecked, another shall sink,
+       Or ground on treacherous flat.
+       Some shall be famed in many lands
+       As good ships, fast and fair,
+       And some shall strangely disappear,
+       Men know not when or where.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The Quaker City returned to America on November 19, 1867, and Mark Twain
+      found himself, if not famous, at least in very wide repute. The
+      fifty-three letters to the Alta and the half-dozen to the New York Tribune
+      had carried his celebrity into every corner of the States and Territories.
+      Vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry, they came as a
+      revelation to a public weary of the driveling, tiresome travel-letters of
+      that period. They preached a new gospel in travel-literature: the gospel
+      of seeing with an overflowing honesty; a gospel of sincerity in according
+      praises to whatever seemed genuine, and ridicule to the things considered
+      sham. It was the gospel that Mark Twain would continue to preach during
+      his whole career. It became his chief literary message to the world-a
+      world waiting for that message.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moreover, the letters were literature. He had received, from whatever
+      source, a large and very positive literary impulse, a loftier conception
+      and expression. It was at Tangier that he first struck the grander chord,
+      the throbbing cadence of human story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered America;
+      old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to
+      arm for the first Crusade; old when Charlemagne and his paladins
+      beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the
+      fabled days of the olden time; old when Christ and his disciples walked
+      the earth; stood where it stands to-day when the lips of Memnon were vocal
+      and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is pure poetry. He had never touched so high a strain before, but he
+      reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing mastery
+      and confidence. In Venice, in Rome, in Athens, through the Holy Land, his
+      retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional crescendo
+      that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain, the ageless
+      contemplation of the Sphinx. We cannot forego a paragraph or two of that
+      word-picture:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    After years of waiting it was before me at last. The great face was
+    so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not
+    of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as
+    never anything human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient.
+    If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking
+    toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing&mdash;nothing
+    but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond everything
+    of the present, and far into the past.... It was thinking of the
+    wars of the departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and
+    destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose
+    progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy
+    and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five
+    thousand slow-revolving years....
+
+    The Sphinx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its
+    magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its
+    story. And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this
+    eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of
+    all ages, which reveals to one something of what we shall feel when
+    we shall stand at last in the awful presence of God.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Then that closing word of Egypt. He elaborated it for the book, and did
+      not improve it. Let us preserve here its original form.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    We are glad to have seen Egypt. We are glad to have seen that old
+    land which taught Greece her letters&mdash;and through Greece, Rome&mdash;and
+    through Rome, the world&mdash;that venerable cradle of culture and
+    refinement which could have humanized and civilized the Children of
+    Israel, but allowed them to depart out of her borders savages&mdash;those
+    Children whom we still revere, still love, and whose sad
+    shortcomings we still excuse&mdash;not because they were savages, but
+    because they were the chosen savages of God.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The Holy Land letters alone would have brought him fame. They presented
+      the most graphic and sympathetic picture of Syrian travel ever written&mdash;one
+      that will never become antiquated or obsolete so long as human nature
+      remains unchanged. From beginning to end the tale is rarely, reverently
+      told. Its closing paragraph has not been surpassed in the voluminous
+      literature of that solemn land:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of
+    a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.
+    Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers that solemn
+    sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing
+    exists&mdash;over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs
+    motionless and dead&mdash;about whose borders nothing grows but weeds and
+    scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises
+    refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch.
+    Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of
+    Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing one finds
+    only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the
+    accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle left
+    it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in
+    their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to
+    remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour's
+    presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks
+    by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, goodwill to men,
+    is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature
+    that is pleasant to the eye. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the
+    stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and
+    is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer
+    there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the
+    wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel is
+    gone, and the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on
+    that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the
+    Holy Cross. The noted Sea of Galilee, where Roman fleets once rode
+    at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed in their ships,
+    was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and its
+    borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a shapeless ruin;
+    Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have
+    vanished from the earth, and the &ldquo;desert places&rdquo; round about them
+    where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's voice and ate
+    the miraculous bread sleep in the hush of a solitude that is
+    inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.
+
+    Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise?
+    Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It would be easy to quote pages here&mdash;a pictorial sequence from
+      Gibraltar to Athens, from Athens to Egypt, a radiant panoramic march. In
+      time he would write technically better. He would avoid solecism, he would
+      become a greater master of vocabulary and phrase, but in all the years
+      ahead he would never match the lambent bloom and spontaneity of those
+      fresh, first impressions of Mediterranean lands and seas. No need to
+      mention the humor, the burlesque, the fearless, unrestrained ridicule of
+      old masters and of sacred relics, so called. These we have kept familiar
+      with much repetition. Only, the humor had grown more subtle, more
+      restrained; the burlesque had become impersonal and harmless, the ridicule
+      so frank and good-natured, that even the old masters themselves might have
+      enjoyed it, while the most devoted churchman, unless blinded by bigotry,
+      would find in it satisfaction, rather than sacrilege.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The final letter was written for the New York Herald after the arrival,
+      and was altogether unlike those that preceded it. Gaily satirical and
+      personal&mdash;inclusively so&mdash;it might better have been left
+      unwritten, for it would seem to have given needless offense to a number of
+      goodly people, whose chief sin was the sedateness of years. However, it is
+      all past now, and those who were old then, and perhaps queer and pious and
+      stingy, do not mind any more, and those who were young and frivolous have
+      all grown old too, and most of them have set out on the still farther
+      voyage. Somewhere, it may be, they gather, now; and then, and lightly,
+      tenderly recall their old-time journeying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0068" id="link2H_4_0068">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXIII. IN WASHINGTON&mdash;A PUBLISHING PROPOSITION
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Clemens remained but one day in New York. Senator Stewart had written,
+      about the time of the departure of the Quaker City, offering him the
+      position of private secretary&mdash;a position which was to give him
+      leisure for literary work, with a supporting salary as well. Stewart no
+      doubt thought it would be considerably to his advantage to have the
+      brilliant writer and lecturer attached to his political establishment, and
+      Clemens likewise saw possibilities in the arrangement. From Naples, in
+      August, he had written accepting Stewart's offer; he lost no time now in
+      discussing the matter in person.&mdash;[In a letter home, August 9th, he
+      referred to the arrangement: &ldquo;I wrote to Bill Stewart to-day
+      accepting his private secretaryship in Washington, next winter.&rdquo;]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There seems to have been little difficulty in concluding the arrangement.
+      When Clemens had been in Washington a week we find him writing:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    DEAR FOLKS, Tired and sleepy&mdash;been in Congress all day and making
+    newspaper acquaintances. Stewart is to look up a clerkship in the
+    Patent Office for Orion. Things necessarily move slowly where there
+    is so much business and such armies of office-seekers to be attended
+    to. I guess it will be all right. I intend it shall be all right.
+
+    I have 18 invitations to lecture, at $100 each, in various parts
+    of the Union&mdash;have declined them all. I am for business now.
+
+    Belong on the Tribune Staff, and shall write occasionally. Am
+    offered the same berth to-day on the Herald by letter. Shall write
+    Mr. Bennett and accept, as soon as I hear from Tribune that it will
+    not interfere. Am pretty well known now&mdash;intend to be better known.
+    Am hobnobbing with these old Generals and Senators and other humbugs
+    for no good purpose. Don't have any more trouble making friends
+    than I did in California. All serene. Good-by. Shall continue on
+    the Alta.
+                     Yours affectionately,
+                                   SAM.
+
+    P.S.&mdash;I room with Bill Stewart and board at Willard's Hotel.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      But the secretary arrangement was a brief matter. It is impossible to
+      conceive of Mark Twain as anybody's secretary, especially as the secretary
+      of Senator Stewart. &mdash;[In Senator Stewart's memoirs he refers
+      unpleasantly to Mark Twain, and after relating several incidents that bear
+      only strained relations to the truth, states that when the writer returned
+      from the Holy Land he (Stewart) offered him a secretaryship as a sort of
+      charity. He adds that Mark Twain's behavior on his premises was such that
+      a threat of a thrashing was necessary. The reason for such statements
+      becomes apparent, however, when he adds that in 'Roughing It' the author
+      accuses him of cheating, prints a picture of him with a hatch over his
+      eye, and claims to have given him a sound thrashing, none of which
+      statements, save only the one concerning the picture (an apparently
+      unforgivable offense to his dignity), is true, as the reader may easily
+      ascertain for himself.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within a few weeks he was writing humorous accounts of &ldquo;My Late
+      Senatorial Secretaryship,&rdquo; &ldquo;Facts Concerning the Recent
+      Resignation,&rdquo; etc., all good-natured burlesque, but inspired, we may
+      believe, by the change: These articles appeared in the New York Tribune,
+      the New York Citizen, and the Galaxy Magazine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There appears to have been no ill-feeling at this time between Clemens and
+      Stewart. If so, it is not discoverable in any of the former's personal or
+      newspaper correspondence. In fact, in his article relating to his &ldquo;late
+      senatorial secretaryship&rdquo; he puts the joke, so far as it is a joke,
+      on Senator James W. Nye, probably as an additional punishment for Nye's
+      failure to appear on the night of his lecture. He established headquarters
+      with a brilliant newspaper correspondent named Riley. &ldquo;One of the
+      best men in Washington&mdash;or elsewhere,&rdquo; he tells us in a brief
+      sketch of that person.&mdash;[See Riley, newspaper correspondent. Sketches
+      New and Old.]&mdash;He had known Riley in San Francisco; the two were
+      congenial, and settled down to their several undertakings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens was chiefly concerned over two things: he wished to make money and
+      he wished to secure a government appointment for Orion. He had used up the
+      most of his lecture accumulations, and was moderately in debt. His work
+      was in demand at good rates, for those days, and with working opportunity
+      he could presently dispose of his financial problem. The Tribune was
+      anxious for letters; the Enterprise and Alta were waiting for them; the
+      Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the magazines&mdash;all had solicited
+      contributions; the lecture bureaus pursued him. Personally his outlook was
+      bright.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The appointment for Orion was a different matter. The powers were not
+      especially interested in a brother; there were too many brothers and
+      assorted relatives on the official waiting-list already. Clemens was
+      offered appointments for himself&mdash;a consulship, a post-mastership;
+      even that of San Francisco. From the Cabinet down, the Washington
+      political contingent had read his travel-letters, and was ready to
+      recognize officially the author of them in his own person and personality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Also, socially: Mark Twain found himself all at once in the midst of
+      receptions, dinners, and speech-making; all very exciting for a time at
+      least, but not profitable, not conducive to work. At a dinner of the
+      Washington Correspondents Club his response to the toast, &ldquo;Women,&rdquo;
+      was pronounced by Schuyler Colfax to be &ldquo;the best after dinner
+      speech ever made.&rdquo; Certainly it was a refreshing departure from the
+      prosy or clumsy-witted efforts common to that period. He was coming
+      altogether into his own.&mdash;[This is the first of Mark Twain's
+      after-dinner speeches to be preserved. The reader will find it complete,
+      as reported next day, in Appendix G, at the end of last volume.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was not immediately interested in the matter of book publication. The
+      Jumping Frog book was popular, and in England had been issued by
+      Routledge; but the royalty returns were modest enough and slow in arrival.
+      His desire was for prompter results. His interest in book publication had
+      never been an eager one, and related mainly to the advertising it would
+      furnish, which he did not now need; or to the money return, in which he
+      had no great faith. Yet at this very moment a letter for him was lying in
+      the Tribune office in New York which would bring the book idea into first
+      prominence and spell the beginning of his fortune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among those who had read and found delight in the Tribune letters was
+      Elisha Bliss, Jr., of the American Publishing Company, of Hartford. Bliss
+      was a shrewd and energetic man, with a keen appreciation for humor and the
+      American fondness for that literary quality. He had recently undertaken
+      the management of a Hartford concern, and had somewhat alarmed its
+      conservative directorate by publishing books that furnished entertainment
+      to the reader as well as moral instruction. Only his success in paying
+      dividends justified this heresy and averted his downfall. Two days after
+      the arrival of the Quaker City Bliss wrote the letter above mentioned. It
+      ran as follows:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                  OFFICE OF THE AMERICAN PUBLISHING CO.
+                  HARTFORD, CONN., November 21, 1867.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, ESQ., Tribune Office, New York.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      DEAR SIR,&mdash;We take the liberty to address you this, in place of a
+      letter which we had recently written and were about to forward to you, not
+      knowing your arrival home was expected so soon. We are desirous of
+      obtaining from you a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your letters
+      from the past, etc., with such interesting additions as may be proper. We
+      are the publishers of A. D. Richardson's works, and flatter ourselves that
+      we can give an author a favorable term and do as full justice to his
+      productions as any other house in the country. We are perhaps the oldest
+      subscription house in the country, and have never failed to give a book an
+      immense circulation. We sold about 100,000 copies of Richardson's F. D.
+      and E. ('Field, Dungeon and Escape'), and are now printing 41,000 of
+      'Beyond the Mississippi', and large orders ahead. If you have any thought
+      of writing a book, or could be induced to do so, we should be pleased to
+      see you, and will do so. Will you do us the favor of reply at once, at
+      your earliest convenience.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                         Very truly etc.,
+
+                            E. BLISS, JR.,
+                            Secretary.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      After ten days' delay this letter was forwarded to the Tribune bureau in
+      Washington, where Clemens received it. He replied promptly.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                     WASHINGTON, December 2, 1867.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      E. BLISS, JR., ESQ., Secretary American Publishing Co.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      DEAR SIR,&mdash;I only received your favor of November 21st last night, at
+      the rooms of the Tribune Bureau here. It was forwarded from the Tribune
+      office, New York where it had lain eight or ten days. This will be a
+      sufficient apology for the seeming discourtesy of my silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wrote fifty-two letters for the San Francisco Alta California during the
+      Quaker City excursion, about half of which number have been printed thus
+      far. The Alta has few exchanges in the East, and I suppose scarcely any of
+      these letters have been copied on this side of the Rocky Mountains. I
+      could weed them of their chief faults of construction and inelegancies of
+      expression, and make a volume that would be more acceptable in many
+      respects than any I could now write. When those letters were written my
+      impressions were fresh, but now they have lost that freshness; they were
+      warm then, they are cold now. I could strike out certain letters, and
+      write new ones wherewith to supply their places. If you think such a book
+      would suit your purpose, please drop me a line, specifying the size and
+      general style of the volume&mdash;when the matter ought to be ready;
+      whether it should have pictures in it or not; and particularly what your
+      terms with me would be, and what amount of money I might possibly make out
+      of it. The latter clause has a degree of importance for me which is almost
+      beyond my own comprehension. But you understand that, of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have other propositions for a book, but have doubted the propriety of
+      interfering with good newspaper engagements, except my way as an author
+      could be demonstrated to be plain before me. But I know Richardson, and
+      learned from him some months ago something of an idea of the subscription
+      plan of publishing. If that is your plan invariably it looks safe.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+I am on the New York Tribune staff here as an &ldquo;occasional,&rdquo; among other
+things, and a note from you addressed to              Very truly, etc.,
+                         SAM. L. CLEMENS,
+                         New York Tribune Bureau, Washington
+will find me, without fail.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The exchange of those two letters marked the beginning of one of the most
+      notable publishing connections in American literary history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consummation, however, was somewhat delayed. Bliss was ill when the reply
+      came, and could not write again in detail until nearly a month later. In
+      this letter he recited the profits made by Richardson and others through
+      subscription publication, and named the royalties paid. Richardson had
+      received four per cent. of the sale price, a small enough rate for these
+      later days; but the cost of manufacture was larger then, and the sale and
+      delivery of books through agents has ever been an expensive process. Even
+      Horace Greeley had received but a fraction more on his Great American
+      Conflict. Bliss especially suggested and emphasized a &ldquo;humorous work&mdash;that
+      is to say, a work humorously inclined.&rdquo; He added that they had two
+      arrangements for paying authors: outright purchase, and royalty. He
+      invited a meeting in New York to arrange terms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0069" id="link2H_4_0069">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXIV. OLIVIA LANGDON
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Clemens did in fact go to New York that same evening, to spend Christmas
+      with Dan Slote, and missed Bliss's second letter. It was no matter. Fate
+      had his affairs properly in hand, and had prepared an event of still
+      larger moment than the publication even of Innocents Abroad. There was a
+      pleasant reunion at Dan Slote's. He wrote home about it:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Charley Langdon, Jack Van Nostrand, Dan and I (all Quaker City
+    night-hawks) had a blow-out at Dan's house and a lively talk over
+    old times. I just laughed till my sides ached at some of our
+    reminiscences. It was the unholiest gang that ever cavorted through
+    Palestine, but those are the best boys in the world.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This, however, was not the event; it was only preliminary to it. We are
+      coming to that now. At the old St. Nicholas Hotel, which stood on the west
+      of Broadway between Spring and Broome streets, there were stopping at this
+      time Jervis Langdon, a wealty coal-dealer and mine-owner of Elmira, his
+      son Charles and his daughter Olivia, whose pictured face Samuel Clemens
+      had first seen in the Bay of Smyrna one September day. Young Langdon had
+      been especially anxious to bring his distinguished Quaker City friend and
+      his own people together, and two days before Christmas Samuel Clemens was
+      invited to dine at the hotel. He went very willingly. The lovely face of
+      that miniature had been often a part of his waking dreams. For the first
+      time now he looked upon its reality. Long afterward he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is forty years ago. From that day to this she has never been out
+      of my mind.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Charles Dickens was in New York then, and gave a reading that night in
+      Steinway Hall. The Langdons went, and Samuel Clemens accompanied them. He
+      remembered afterward that Dickens wore a black velvet coat with a fiery
+      red flower in his buttonhole, and that he read the storm scene from
+      Copperfield&mdash;the death of James Steerforth. But he remembered still
+      more clearly the face and dress of that slender girlish figure at his
+      side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Olivia Langdon was twenty-two years old at this time, delicate as the
+      miniature he had seen, fragile to look upon, though no longer with the
+      shattered health of her girlhood. At sixteen, through a fall upon the ice,
+      she had become a complete invalid, confined to her bed for two years,
+      unable to sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position except
+      upon her back. Great physicians and surgeons, one after another, had done
+      their best for her but she had failed steadily until every hope had died.
+      Then, when nothing else was left to try, a certain Doctor Newton, of
+      spectacular celebrity, who cured by &ldquo;laying on of hands,&rdquo; was
+      brought to Elmira to see her. Doctor Newton came into the darkened room
+      and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Open the windows&mdash;we must have light!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They protested that she could not bear the light, but the windows were
+      opened. Doctor Newton came to the bedside of the helpless girl, delivered
+      a short, fervent prayer, put his arm under her shoulders, and bade her sit
+      up. She had not moved for two years, and the family were alarmed, but she
+      obeyed, and he assisted her into a chair. Sensation came back to her
+      limbs. With his assistance she even made a feeble attempt to walk. He left
+      then, saying that she would gradually improve, and in time be well, though
+      probably never very strong. On the same day he healed a boy, crippled and
+      drawn with fever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It turned out as he had said. Olivia Langdon improved steadily, and now at
+      twenty-two, though not robust&mdash;she was never that&mdash;she was
+      comparatively well. Gentle, winning, lovable, she was the family idol, and
+      Samuel Clemens joined in their worship from the moment of that first
+      meeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Olivia Langdon, on her part, was at first dazed and fascinated, rather
+      than attracted, by this astonishing creature, so unlike any one she had
+      ever known. Her life had been circumscribed, her experiences of a simple
+      sort. She had never seen anything resembling him before. Indeed, nobody
+      had. Somewhat carelessly, even if correctly, attired; eagerly, rather than
+      observantly, attentive; brilliant and startling, rather than cultured, of
+      speech&mdash;a blazing human solitaire, unfashioned, unset, tossed by the
+      drift of fortune at her feet. He disturbed rather than gratified her. She
+      sensed his heresy toward the conventions and forms which had been her
+      gospel; his bantering, indifferent attitude toward life&mdash;to her
+      always so serious and sacred; she suspected that he even might have
+      unorthodox views on matters of religion. When he had gone she somehow had
+      the feeling that a great fiery meteor of unknown portent had swept across
+      her sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To her brother, who was eager for her approval of his celebrity, Miss
+      Langdon conceded admiration. As for her father, he did not qualify his
+      opinion. With hearty sense of humor, and a keen perception of verity and
+      capability in men, Jervis Langdon accepted Samuel Clemens from the start,
+      and remained his stanch admirer and friend. Clemens left that night with
+      an invitation to visit Elmira by and by, and with the full intention of
+      going&mdash;soon. Fate, however, had another plan. He did not see Elmira
+      for the better part of a year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw Miss Langdon again within the week. On New-Year's Day he set forth
+      to pay calls, after the fashion of the time&mdash;more lavish then than
+      now. Miss Langdon was receiving with Miss Alice Hooker, a niece of Henry
+      Ward Beecher, at the home of a Mrs. Berry; he decided to go there first.
+      With young Langdon he arrived at eleven o'clock in the morning, and they
+      did not leave until midnight. If his first impression upon Olivia Langdon
+      had been meteoric, it would seem that he must now have become to her as a
+      streaming comet that swept from zenith to horizon. One thing is certain:
+      she had become to him the single, unvarying beacon of his future years. He
+      visited Henry Ward Beecher on that trip and dined with him by invitation.
+      Harriet Beecher Stowe was present, and others of that eminent family.
+      Likewise his old Quaker City comrades, Moses S. and Emma Beach. It was a
+      brilliant gathering, a conclave of intellectual gods&mdash;a triumph to be
+      there for one who had been a printer-boy on the banks of the Mississippi,
+      and only a little while before a miner with pick and shovel. It was
+      gratifying to be so honored; it would be pleasant to write home; but the
+      occasion lacked something too&mdash;everything, in fact&mdash;for when he
+      ran his eye around the board the face of the minature was not there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still there were compensations; inadequate, of course, but pleasant enough
+      to remember. It was Sunday evening and the party adjourned to Plymouth
+      Church. After services Mr. Beecher invited him to return home with him for
+      a quiet talk. Evidently they had a good time, for in the letter telling of
+      these things Samuel Clemens said: &ldquo;Henry Ward Beecher is a brick.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0070" id="link2H_4_0070">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXV. A CONTRACT WITH ELISHA BLISS, JR.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      He returned to Washington without seeing Miss Langdon again, though he
+      would seem to have had permission to write&mdash;friendly letters. A
+      little later (it was on the evening of January 9th) he lectured in
+      Washington&mdash;on very brief notice indeed. The arrangement for his
+      appearance had been made by a friend during his absence&mdash;&ldquo;a
+      friend,&rdquo; Clemens declared afterward, &ldquo;not entirely sober at
+      the time.&rdquo; To his mother he wrote:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I scared up a doorkeeper and was ready at the proper time, and by pure
+      good luck a tolerably good house assembled and I was saved. I hardly knew
+      what I was going to talk about, but it went off in splendid style.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The title of the lecture delivered was &ldquo;The Frozen Truth&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;more
+      truth in the title than in the lecture,&rdquo; according to his own
+      statement. What it dealt with is not remembered now. It had to do with the
+      Quaker City trip, perhaps, and it seems to have brought a financial return
+      which was welcome enough. Subsequently he delivered it elsewhere; though
+      just how far the tour extended cannot be learned from the letters, and he
+      had but little memory of it in later years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was some further correspondence with Bliss, then about the 21st of
+      January (1868) Clemens made a trip to Hartford to settle the matter. Bliss
+      had been particularly anxious to meet him, personally and was a trifle
+      disappointed with his appearance. Mark Twain's traveling costume was
+      neither new nor neat, and he was smoking steadily a pipe of power. His
+      general make-up was hardly impressive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bliss's disturbance was momentary. Once he began to talk the rest did not
+      matter. He was the author of those letters, and Bliss decided that
+      personally he was even greater than they. The publisher, confined to his
+      home with illness, offered him the hospitality of his household. Also, he
+      made him two propositions: he would pay him ten thousand dollars cash for
+      his copyright, or he would pay five per cent. royalty, which was a fourth
+      more than Richardson had received. He advised the latter arrangement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens had already taken advice and had discussed the project a good deal
+      with Richardson. The ten thousand dollars was a heavy temptation, but he
+      withstood it and closed on the royalty basis&mdash;&ldquo;the best
+      business judgment I ever displayed,&rdquo; he was wont to declare. A
+      letter written to his mother and sister near the end of this Hartford stay
+      is worth quoting pretty fully here, for the information and &ldquo;character&rdquo;
+      it contains. It bears date of January 24th.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    This is a good week for me. I stopped in the Herald office, as I
+    came through New York, to see the boys on the staff, and young James
+    Gordon Bennett asked me to write twice a week, impersonally, for the
+    Herald, and said if I would I might have full swing, and about
+    anybody and everything I wanted to. I said I must have the very
+    fullest possible swing, and he said, &ldquo;All right.&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;It's a
+    contract&mdash;&rdquo; and that settled that matter.
+
+    I'll make it a point to write one letter a week anyhow. But the
+    best thing that has happened is here. This great American
+    Publishing Company kept on trying to bargain with me for a book till
+    I thought I would cut the matter short by coming up for a talk. I
+    met Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, and with his usual whole-souled
+    way of dropping his own work to give other people a lift when he
+    gets a chance, he said: &ldquo;Now, here, you are one of the talented men
+    of the age&mdash;nobody is going to deny that&mdash;but in matters of business
+    I don't suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains.
+    I'll tell you what to do and how to do it.&rdquo; And he did.
+
+    And I listened well, and then came up here and made a splendid
+    contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large pages, with
+    illustrations, the manuscript to be placed in the publisher's hands
+    by the middle of July.&mdash;[The contract was not a formal one. There
+    was an exchange of letters agreeing to the terms, but no joint
+    document was drawn until October 16 (1868).]&mdash;My percentage is to
+    be a fourth more than they have ever paid any author except Greeley.
+    Beecher will be surprised, I guess, when he hears this.
+
+    These publishers get off the most tremendous editions of their books
+    you can imagine. I shall write to the Enterprise and Alta every
+    week, as usual, I guess, and to the Herald twice a week,
+    occasionally to the Tribune and the magazines (I have a stupid
+    article in the Galaxy, just issued), but I am not going to write to
+    this and that and the other paper any more.
+
+    I have had a tiptop time here for a few days (guest of Mr. Jno.
+    Hooker's family&mdash;Beecher's relatives&mdash;in a general way of Mr. Bliss
+    also, who is head of the publishing firm). Puritans are mighty
+    straight-laced, and they won't let me smoke in the parlor, but the
+    Almighty don't make any better people.
+
+    I have to make a speech at the annual Herald dinner on the 6th of
+    May.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      So the book, which would establish his claim to a peerage in the literary
+      land, was arranged for, and it remained only to prepare the manuscript, a
+      task which he regarded as not difficult. He had only to collate the Alta
+      and Tribune letters, edit them, and write such new matter as would be
+      required for completeness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Returning to Washington, he plunged into work with his usual terrific
+      energy, preparing the copy&mdash;in the mean time writing newspaper
+      correspondence and sketches that would bring immediate return. In addition
+      to his regular contributions, he entered into a syndicate arrangement with
+      John Swinton (brother of William Swinton, the historian) to supply letters
+      to a list of newspapers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have written seven long newspaper letters and a short magazine
+      article in less than two days,&rdquo; he wrote home, and by the end of
+      January he had also prepared several chapters of his book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The San Francisco post-mastership was suggested to him again, but he put
+      the temptation behind him. He refers to this more than once in his home
+      letters, and it is clear that he wavered.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Judge Field said if I wanted the place he could pledge me the
+    President's appointment, and Senator Corners said he would guarantee
+    me the Senate's confirmation. It was a great temptation, but it
+    would render it impossible to fill my book contract, and I had to
+    drop the idea....
+
+    And besides I did not want the office.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He made this final decision when he heard that the chief editor of the
+      Alta wanted the place, and he now threw his influence in that quarter.
+      &ldquo;I would not take ten thousand dollars out of a friend's pocket,&rdquo;
+      he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then suddenly came the news from Goodman that the Alta publishers had
+      copyrighted his Quaker City letters and proposed getting them out in a
+      book, to reimburse themselves still further on their investment. This was
+      sharper than a serpent's tooth. Clemens got confirmation of the report by
+      telegraph. By the same medium he protested, but to no purpose. Then he
+      wrote a letter and sat down to wait. He reported his troubles to Orion:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I have made a superb contract for a book, and have prepared the
+    first ten chapters of the sixty or eighty, but I will bet it never
+    sees the light. Don't you let the folks at home hear that. That
+    thieving Alta copyrighted the letters, and now shows no disposition
+    to let me use them. I have done all I can by telegraph, and now
+    await the final result by mail. I only charged them for 50 letters
+    what (even in) greenbacks would amount to less than two thousand
+    dollars, intending to write a good deal for high-priced Eastern
+    papers, and now they want to publish my letters in book form
+    themselves to get back that pitiful sum.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Orion was by this time back from Nevada, setting type in St. Louis. He was
+      full of schemes, as usual, and his brother counsels him freely. Then he
+      says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    We chase phantoms half the days of our lives. It is well if we
+    learn wisdom even then, and save the other half.
+
+    I am in for it. I must go on chasing them, until I marry, then I am
+    done with literature and all other bosh&mdash;that is, literature
+    wherewith to please the general public.
+
+    I shall write to please myself then.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He closes by saying that he rather expects to go with Anson Burlingame on
+      the Chinese embassy. Clearly he was pretty hopeless as to his book
+      prospects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His first meeting with General Grant occurred just at this time. In one of
+      his home letters he mentions, rather airily, that he will drop in someday
+      on the General for an interview; and at last, through Mrs. Grant, an
+      appointment was made for a Sunday evening when the General would be at
+      home. He was elated with the prospect of an interview; but when he looked
+      into the imperturbable, square, smileless face of the soldier he found
+      himself, for the first time in his life, without anything particular to
+      say. Grant nodded slightly and waited. His caller wished something would
+      happen. It did. His inspiration returned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;General,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I seem to be a little embarrassed.
+      Are you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That broke the ice. There were no further difficulties.&mdash;[Mark Twain
+      has variously related this incident. It is given here in accordance with
+      the letters of the period.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0071" id="link2H_4_0071">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXVI. BACK TO SAN FRANCISCO
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Reply came from the Alta, but it was not promising. It spoke rather
+      vaguely of prior arrangements and future possibilities. Clemens gathered
+      that under certain conditions he might share in the profits of the
+      venture. There was but one thing to do; he knew those people&mdash;some of
+      them&mdash;Colonel McComb and a Mr. McCrellish intimately. He must confer
+      with them in person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was weary of Washington, anyway. The whole pitiful machinery of
+      politics disgusted him. In his notebook he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Whiskey is taken into the committee rooms in demijohns and carried
+    out in demagogues.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      And in a letter:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    This is a place to get a poor opinion of everybody in. There are
+    some pitiful intellects in this Congress! There isn't one man in
+    Washington in civil office who has the brains of Anson Burlingame,
+    and I suppose if China had not seized and saved his great talents to
+    the world this government would have discarded him when his time was
+    up.&mdash;[Anson Burlingame had by this time become China's special
+    ambassador to the nations.]
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Furthermore, he was down on the climate of Washington. He decided to go to
+      San Francisco and see &ldquo;those Alta thieves face to face.&rdquo; Then,
+      if a book resulted, he could prepare it there among friends. Also, he
+      could lecture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had been anxious to visit his people before sailing, but matters were
+      too urgent to permit delay. He obtained from Bliss an advance of royalty
+      and took passage, by way of Aspinwall, on the sidewheel steamer Henry
+      Chauncey, a fine vessel for those days. The name of Mark Twain was already
+      known on the isthmus, and when it was learned he had arrived on the
+      Chauncey a delegation welcomed him on the wharf, and provided him with
+      refreshments and entertainment. Mr. Tracy Robinson, a poet, long a
+      resident of that southern land, was one of the group. Beyond the isthmus
+      Clemens fell in again with his old captain, Ned Wakeman, who during the
+      trip told him the amazing dream that in due time would become Captain
+      Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. He made the first draft of this story soon
+      after his arrival in San Francisco, as a sort of travesty of Elizabeth
+      Stuart Phelps's Gates Ajar, then very popular. Clemens, then and later,
+      had a high opinion of Capt. Ned Wakeman's dream, but his story of it would
+      pass through several stages before finally reaching the light of
+      publication.&mdash;[Mr. John P. Vollmer, now of Lewiston, Idaho, a
+      companion of that voyage, writes of a card game which took place beyond
+      the isthmus. The notorious crippled gambler, &ldquo;Smithy,&rdquo; figured
+      in it, and it would seem to have furnished the inspiration for the
+      exciting story in Chapter XXXVI of the Mississippi book.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In San Francisco matters turned out as he had hoped. Colonel McComb was
+      his stanch friend; McCrellish and Woodward, the proprietors, presently
+      conceded that they had already received good value for the money paid. The
+      author agreed to make proper acknowledgments to the Alta in his preface,
+      and the matter was settled with friendliness all around.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The way was now clear, the book assured. First, however, he must provide
+      himself with funds. He delivered a lecture, with the Quaker City excursion
+      as his subject. On the 5th of May he wrote to Bliss:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I lectured here on the trip the other night; over $1,600 in gold in the
+      house; every seat taken and paid for before night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He reports that he is steadily at work, and expects to start East with the
+      completed manuscript about the middle of June.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this was a miscalculation. Clemens found that the letters needed more
+      preparation than he had thought. His literary vision and equipment had
+      vastly altered since the beginning of that correspondence. Some of the
+      chapters he rewrote; others he eliminated entirely. It required two months
+      of fairly steady work to put the big manuscript together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of the new chapters he gave to Bret Harte for the Overland Monthly,
+      then recently established. Harte himself was becoming a celebrity about
+      this time. His &ldquo;Luck of Roaring Camp&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Outcasts
+      of Poker Flat,&rdquo; published in early numbers of the Overland, were
+      making a great stir in the East, arousing there a good deal more
+      enthusiasm than in the magazine office or the city of their publication.
+      That these two friends, each supreme in his own field, should have entered
+      into their heritage so nearly at the same moment, is one of the many
+      seemingly curious coincidences of literary history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens now concluded to cover his lecture circuit of two years before. He
+      was assured that it would be throwing away a precious opportunity not to
+      give his new lecture to his old friends. The result justified that
+      opinion. At Virginia, at Carson, and elsewhere he was received like a
+      returned conqueror. He might have been accorded a Roman triumph had there
+      been time and paraphernalia. Even the robbers had reformed, and entire
+      safety was guaranteed him on the Divide between Virginia and Gold Hill. At
+      Carson he called on Mrs. Curry, as in the old days, and among other things
+      told her how snow from the Lebanon Mountains is brought to Damascus on the
+      backs of camels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sam,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that's just one of your yarns, and if
+      you tell it in your lecture to-night I'll get right up and say so.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he did tell it, for it was a fact; and though Mrs. Curry did not rise
+      to deny it she shook her finger at him in a way he knew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He returned to San Francisco and gave one more lecture, the last he would
+      ever give in California. His preparatory advertising for that occasion was
+      wholly unique, characteristic of him to the last degree. It assumed the
+      form of a handbill of protest, supposed to have been issued by the
+      foremost citizens of San Francisco, urging him to return to the States
+      without inflicting himself further upon them. As signatures he made free
+      with the names of prominent individuals, followed by those of
+      organizations, institutions, &ldquo;Various Benevolent Societies, Citizens
+      on Foot and Horseback, and fifteen hundred in the Steerage.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Following this (on the same bill) was his reply, &ldquo;To the fifteen
+      hundred and others,&rdquo; in which he insisted on another hearing:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I will torment the people if I want to.... It only costs the people
+    $1 apiece, and if they can't stand it what do they stay here for?...
+    My last lecture was not as fine as I thought it was, but I have
+    submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have
+    pronounced it good. Now, therefore, why should I withhold it?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He promised positively to sail on the 6th of July if they would let him
+      talk just this once. Continuing, the handbill presented a second protest,
+      signed by the various clubs and business firms; also others bearing
+      variously the signatures of the newspapers, and the clergy, ending with
+      the brief word:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    You had better go.  Yours,  CHIEF OF POLICE.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      All of which drollery concluded with his announcement of place and date of
+      his lecture, with still further gaiety at the end. Nothing short of a
+      seismic cataclysm&mdash;an earthquake, in fact&mdash;could deter a San
+      Francisco audience after that. Mark Twain's farewell address, given at the
+      Mercantile Library July 2 (1868), doubtless remains today the leading
+      literary event in San Francisco's history.&mdash;[Copy of the lecture
+      announcement, complete, will be found in Appendix H, at the end of last
+      volume.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sailed July 6th by the Pacific mail steamer Montana to Acapulco, caught
+      the Henry Chauncey at Aspinwall, reached New York on the 28th, and a day
+      or two later had delivered his manuscript at Hartford.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a further difficulty had arisen. Bliss was having troubles himself,
+      this time, with his directors. Many reports of Mark Twain's new book had
+      been traveling the rounds of the press, some of which declared it was to
+      be irreverent, even blasphemous, in tone. The title selected, The New
+      Pilgrim's Progress, was in itself a sacrilege. Hartford was a conservative
+      place; the American Publishing Company directors were of orthodox
+      persuasion. They urged Bliss to relieve the company of this impending
+      disaster of heresy. When the author arrived one or more of them labored
+      with him in person, without avail. As for Bliss, he was stanch; he
+      believed in the book thoroughly, from every standpoint. He declared if the
+      company refused to print it he would resign the management and publish the
+      book himself. This was an alarming suggestion to the stockholders. Bliss
+      had returned dividends&mdash;a boon altogether too rare in the company's
+      former history. The objectors retired and were heard of no more. The
+      manuscript was placed in the hands of Fay and Cox, illustrators, with an
+      order for about two hundred and fifty pictures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fay and Cox turned it over to True Williams, one of the well-known
+      illustrators of that day. Williams was a man of great talent&mdash;of fine
+      imagination and sweetness of spirit&mdash;but it was necessary to lock him
+      in a room when industry was required, with nothing more exciting than cold
+      water as a beverage. Clemens himself aided in the illustrating by
+      obtaining of Moses S. Beach photographs from the large collection he had
+      brought home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0072" id="link2H_4_0072">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXVII. A VISIT TO ELMIRA
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Meantime he had skilfully obtained a renewal of the invitation to spend a
+      week in the Langdon home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He meant to go by a fast train, but, with his natural gift for
+      misunderstanding time-tables, of course took a slow one, telegraphing his
+      approach from different stations along the road. Young Langdon concluded
+      to go down the line as far as Waverly to meet him. When the New York train
+      reached there the young man found his guest in the smoking-car,
+      travel-stained and distressingly clad. Mark Twain was always scrupulously
+      neat and correct of dress in later years, but in that earlier day neatness
+      and style had not become habitual and did not give him comfort. Langdon
+      greeted him warmly but with doubt. Finally he summoned courage to say,
+      hesitatingly&mdash;&ldquo;You've got some other clothes, haven't you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The arriving guest was not in the least disturbed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes,&rdquo; he said with enthusiasm, &ldquo;I've got a fine
+      brand-new outfit in this bag, all but a hat. It will be late when we get
+      in, and I won't see any one to-night. You won't know me in the morning.
+      We'll go out early and get a hat.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was a large relief to the younger man, and the rest of the journey
+      was happy enough. True to promise, the guest appeared at daylight
+      correctly, even elegantly clad, and an early trip to the shops secured the
+      hat. A gay and happy week followed&mdash;a week during which Samuel
+      Clemens realized more fully than ever that in his heart there was room for
+      only one woman in all the world: Olivia Langdon&mdash;&ldquo;Livy,&rdquo;
+      as they all called her&mdash;and as the day of departure drew near it may
+      be that the gentle girl had made some discoveries, too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No word had passed between them. Samuel Clemens had the old-fashioned
+      Southern respect for courtship conventions, and for what, in that day at
+      least, was regarded as honor. On the morning of the final day he said to
+      young Langdon:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Charley, my week is up, and I must go home.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man expressed a regret which was genuine enough, though not
+      wholly unqualified. His older sister, Mrs. Crane, leaving just then for a
+      trip to the White Mountains, had said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Charley, I am sure Mr. Clemens is after our Livy. You mustn't let
+      him carry her off before our return.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea was a disturbing one. The young man did not urge his guest to
+      prolong his-visit. He said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll have to stand it, I guess, but you mustn't leave before
+      to-night.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought to go by the first train,&rdquo; Clemens said, gloomily.
+      &ldquo;I am in love.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In what!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In love-with your sister, and I ought to get away from here.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man was now very genuinely alarmed. To him Mark Twain was a
+      highly gifted, fearless, robust man&mdash;a man's man&mdash;and as such
+      altogether admirable&mdash;lovable. But Olivia&mdash;Livy&mdash;she was to
+      him little short of a saint. No man was good enough for her, certainly not
+      this adventurous soldier of letters from the West. Delightful he was
+      beyond doubt, adorable as a companion, but not a companion for Livy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here, Clemens,&rdquo; he said, when he could get his voice.
+      &ldquo;There's a train in half an hour. I'll help you catch it. Don't wait
+      till to-night. Go now.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Charley,&rdquo; he said, in his gentle drawl, &ldquo;I want to
+      enjoy your hospitality a little longer. I promise to be circumspect, and
+      I'll go to-night.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night, after dinner, when it was time to take the New York train, a
+      light two-seated wagon was at the gate. The coachman was in front, and
+      young Langdon and his guest took the back seat. For some reason the seat
+      had not been locked in its place, and when, after the good-bys, the
+      coachman touched the horse it made a quick spring forward, and the back
+      seat, with both passengers, described a half-circle and came down with
+      force on the cobbled street. Neither passenger was seriously hurt; Clemens
+      not at all&mdash;only dazed a little for a moment. Then came an
+      inspiration; here was a chance to prolong his visit. Evidently it was not
+      intended that he should take that train. When the Langdon household
+      gathered around with restoratives he did not recover too quickly. He
+      allowed them to support or carry him into the house and place him in an
+      arm-chair and apply remedies. The young daughter of the house especially
+      showed anxiety and attention. This was pure happiness. He was perjuring
+      himself, of course, but they say Jove laughs at such things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He recovered in a day or two, but the wide hospitality of the handsome
+      Langdon home was not only offered now; it was enforced. He was still there
+      two weeks later, after which he made a trip to Cleveland to confide in
+      Mrs. Fairbanks how he intended to win Livy Langdon for his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0073" id="link2H_4_0073">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXVIII. THE REV. &ldquo;JOE&rdquo; TWICHELL.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      He returned to Hartford to look after the progress of his book. Some of it
+      was being put into type, and with his mechanical knowledge of such things
+      he was naturally interested in the process.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He made his headquarters with the Blisses, then living at 821 Asylum
+      Avenue, and read proof in a little upper room, where the lamp was likely
+      to be burning most of the time, where the atmosphere was nearly always
+      blue with smoke, and the window-sill full of cigar butts. Mrs. Bliss took
+      him into the quiet social life of the neighborhood&mdash;to small church
+      receptions, society gatherings and the like&mdash;all of which he seemed
+      to enjoy. Most of the dwellers in that neighborhood were members of the
+      Asylum Hill Congregational Church, then recently completed; all but the
+      spire. It was a cultured circle, well-off in the world's goods, its male
+      members, for the most part, concerned in various commercial ventures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The church stood almost across the way from the Bliss home, and Mark
+      Twain, with his picturesque phrasing, referred to it as the &ldquo;stub-tailed
+      church,&rdquo; on account of its abbreviated spire; also, later, with a
+      knowledge of its prosperous membership, as the &ldquo;Church of the Holy
+      Speculators.&rdquo; He was at an evening reception in the home of one of
+      its members when he noticed a photograph of the unfinished building framed
+      and hanging on the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, yes,&rdquo; he commented, in his slow fashion, &ldquo;this is
+      the 'Church of the Holy Speculators.'&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sh,&rdquo; cautioned Mrs. Bliss. &ldquo;Its pastor is just behind
+      you. He knows your work and wants to meet you.&rdquo; Turning, she said:
+      &ldquo;Mr. Twichell, this is Mr. Clemens. Most people know him as Mark
+      Twain.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so, in this casual fashion, he met the man who was presently to become
+      his closest personal friend and counselor, and would remain so for more
+      than forty years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Joseph Hopkins Twichell was a man about his own age, athletic and
+      handsome, a student and a devout Christian, yet a man familiar with the
+      world, fond of sports, with an exuberant sense of humor and a wide
+      understanding of the frailties of humankind. He had been &ldquo;port waist
+      oar&rdquo; at Yale, and had left college to serve with General &ldquo;Dan&rdquo;
+      Sickles as a chaplain who had followed his duties not only in the camp,
+      but on the field.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mention has already been made of Mark Twain's natural leaning toward
+      ministers of the gospel, and the explanation of it is easier to realize
+      than to convey. He was hopelessly unorthodox&mdash;rankly rebellious as to
+      creeds. Anything resembling cant or the curtailment of mental liberty
+      roused only his resentment and irony. Yet something in his heart always
+      warmed toward any laborer in the vineyard, and if we could put the
+      explanation into a single sentence, perhaps we might say it was because he
+      could meet them on that wide, common ground sympathy with mankind. Mark
+      Twain's creed, then and always, may be put into three words, &ldquo;liberty,
+      justice, humanity.&rdquo; It may be put into one word, &ldquo;humanity.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ministers always loved Mark Twain. They did not always approve of him, but
+      they adored him: The Rev. Mr. Rising, of the Comstock, was an early
+      example of his ministerial friendships, and we have seen that Henry Ward
+      Beecher cultivated his company. In a San Francisco letter of two years
+      before, Mark Twain wrote his mother, thinking it would please her:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am as thick as thieves with the Reverend Stebbins. I am laying for the
+      Reverend Scudder and the Reverend Doctor Stone. I am running on preachers
+      now altogether, and I find them gay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So it may be that his first impulse toward Joseph Twichell was due to the
+      fact that he was a young member of that army whose mission is to comfort
+      and uplift mankind. But it was only a little time till the impulse had
+      grown into a friendship that went beyond any profession or doctrine, a
+      friendship that ripened into a permanent admiration and love for &ldquo;Joe&rdquo;
+      Twichell himself, as one of the noblest specimens of his race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was invited to the Twichell home, where he met the young wife and got a
+      glimpse of the happiness of that sweet and peaceful household. He had a
+      neglected, lonely look, and he loved to gather with them at their
+      fireside. He expressed his envy of their happiness, and Mrs. Twichell
+      asked him why, since his affairs were growing prosperous, he did not
+      establish a household of his own. Long afterward Mr. Twichell wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Mark made no answer for a little, but, with his eyes bent on the
+    floor, appeared to be deeply pondering. Then he looked up, and said
+    slowly, in a voice tremulous with earnestness (with what sympathy he
+    was heard may be imagined): &ldquo;I am taking thought of it. I am in
+    love beyond all telling with the dearest and best girl in the whole
+    world. I don't suppose she will marry me. I can't think it
+    possible. She ought not to. But if she doesn't I shall be sure
+    that the best thing I ever did was to fall in love with her, and
+    proud to have it known that I tried to win her!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      It was only a brief time until the Twichell fireside was home to him. He
+      came and went, and presently it was &ldquo;Mark&rdquo; and &ldquo;Joe,&rdquo;
+      as by and by it would be &ldquo;Livy&rdquo; and &ldquo;Harmony,&rdquo; and
+      in a few years &ldquo;Uncle Joe&rdquo; and &ldquo;Uncle Mark,&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;Aunt Livy&rdquo; and &ldquo;Aunt Harmony,&rdquo; and so would
+      remain until the end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0074" id="link2H_4_0074">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXIX. A LECTURE TOUR
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      James Redpath, proprietor of the Boston Lyceum Bureau, was the leading
+      lecture agent of those days, and controlled all, or nearly all, of the
+      platform celebrities. Mark Twain's success at the Cooper Union the year
+      before had interested Redpath. He had offered engagements then and later,
+      but Clemens had not been free for the regular circuit. Now there was no
+      longer a reason for postponement of a contract. Redpath was eager for the
+      new celebrity, and Clemens closed with him for the season of 1868-9. With
+      his new lecture, &ldquo;The Vandal Abroad,&rdquo; he was presently earning
+      a hundred dollars and more a night, and making most of the nights count.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was affluence indeed. He had become suddenly a person of substance-an
+      associate of men of consequence, with a commensurate income. He could help
+      his mother lavishly now, and he did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His new lecture was immensely popular. It was a resume of the 'Quaker
+      City' letters&mdash;a foretaste of the book which would presently follow.
+      Wherever he went, he was hailed with eager greetings. He caught such
+      drifting exclamations as, &ldquo;There he is! There goes Mark Twain!&rdquo;
+      People came out on the street to see him pass. That marvelous miracle
+      which we variously call &ldquo;notoriety,&rdquo; &ldquo;popularity,&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;fame,&rdquo; had come to him. In his notebook he wrote, &ldquo;Fame
+      is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only, earthly certainty oblivion.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The newspapers were filled with enthusiasm both as to his matter and
+      method. His delivery was described as a &ldquo;long, monotonous drawl,
+      with the fun invariably coming in at the end of a sentence&mdash;after a
+      pause.&rdquo; His appearance at this time is thus set down:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Mark Twain is a man of medium height, about five feet ten, sparsely
+    built, with dark reddish-brown hair and mustache. His features are
+    fair, his eyes keen and twinkling. He dresses in scrupulous evening
+    attire. In lecturing he hangs about the desk, leaning on it or
+    flirting around the corners of it, then marching and countermarching
+    in the rear of it. He seldom casts a glance at his manuscript.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      No doubt this fairly presents Mark Twain, the lecturer of that day. It was
+      a new figure on the platform, a man with a new method. As to his
+      manuscript, the item might have said that he never consulted it at all. He
+      learned his lecture; what he consulted was merely a series of
+      hieroglyphics, a set of crude pictures drawn by himself, suggestive of the
+      subject-matter underneath new head. Certain columns represented the
+      Parthenon; the Sphinx meant Egypt, and so on. His manuscript lay there in
+      case of accident, but the accident did not happen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A number of his engagements were in the central part of New York, at
+      points not far distant from Elmira. He had a standing invitation to visit
+      the Langdon home, and he made it convenient to avail himself of that
+      happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His was not an unruffled courtship. When at last he reached the point of
+      proposing for the daughter of the house, neither the daughter nor the
+      household offered any noticeable encouragement to his suit. Many absurd
+      anecdotes have been told of his first interview with Mr. Langdon on the
+      subject, but they are altogether without foundation. It was a proper and
+      dignified discussion of a very serious matter. Mr. Langdon expressed deep
+      regard for him and friendship but he was not inclined to add him to the
+      family; the young lady herself, in a general way, accorded with these
+      views. The applicant for favor left sadly enough, but he could not remain
+      discouraged or sad. He lectured at Cleveland with vast success, and the
+      news of it traveled quickly to Elmira. He was referred to by Cleveland
+      papers as a &ldquo;lion&rdquo; and &ldquo;the coming man of the age.&rdquo;
+      Two days later, in Pittsburgh (November 19th), he &ldquo;played&rdquo;
+      against Fanny Kemble, the favorite actress of that time, with the result
+      that Miss Kemble had an audience of two hundred against nearly ten times
+      the number who gathered to hear Mark Twain. The news of this went to
+      Elmira, too. It was in the papers there next morning; surely this was a
+      conquering hero&mdash;a gay Lochinvar from out of the West&mdash;and the
+      daughter of the house must be guarded closely, that he did not bear her
+      away. It was on the second morning following the Pittsburgh triumph, when
+      the Langdon family were gathered at breakfast, that a bushy auburn head
+      poked fearfully in at the door, and a low, humble voice said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The calf has returned; may the prodigal have some breakfast?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No one could be reserved or reprovingly distant, or any of those
+      unfriendly things with a person like that; certainly not Jervis Langdon,
+      who delighted in the humor and the tricks and turns and oddities of this
+      eccentric visitor. Giving his daughter to him was another matter, but even
+      that thought was less disturbing than it had been at the start. In truth,
+      the Langdon household had somehow grown to feel that he belonged to them.
+      The elder sister's husband, Theodore Crane, endorsed him fully. He had
+      long before read some of the Mark Twain sketches that had traveled
+      eastward in advance of their author, and had recognized, even in the
+      crudest of them, a classic charm. As for Olivia Langdon's mother and
+      sister, their happiness lay in hers. Where her heart went theirs went
+      also, and it would appear that her heart, in spite of herself, had found
+      its rightful keeper. Only young Langdon was irreconciled, and eventually
+      set out for a voyage around the world to escape the situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was only a provisional engagement at first. Jervis Langdon
+      suggested, and Samuel Clemens agreed with him, that it was proper to know
+      something of his past, as well as of his present, before the official
+      parental sanction should be given. When Mr. Langdon inquired as to the
+      names of persons of standing to whom he might write for credentials,
+      Clemens pretty confidently gave him the name of the Reverend Stebbins and
+      others of San Francisco, adding that he might write also to Joe Goodman if
+      he wanted to, but that he had lied for Goodman a hundred times and Goodman
+      would lie for him if necessary, so his testimony would be of no value. The
+      letters to the clergy were written, and Mr. Langdon also wrote one on his
+      own account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a long mail-trip to the Coast and back in those days. It might be
+      two months before replies would come from those ministers. The lecturer
+      set out again on his travels, and was radiantly and happily busy. He went
+      as far west as Illinois, had crowded houses in Chicago, visited friends
+      and kindred in Hannibal, St. Louis, and Keokuk, carrying the great news,
+      and lecturing in old familiar haunts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0075" id="link2H_4_0075">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXX. INNOCENTS AT HOME&mdash;AND &ldquo;THE INNOCENTS ABROAD&rdquo;
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      He was in Jacksonville, Illinois, at the end of January (1869), and in a
+      letter to Bliss states that he will be in Elmira two days later, and asks
+      that proofs of the book be sent there. He arrived at the Langdon home,
+      anxious to hear the reports that would make him, as the novels might say,
+      &ldquo;the happiest or the most miserable of men.&rdquo; Jervis Langdon
+      had a rather solemn look when they were alone together. Clemens asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've heard from those gentlemen out there?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, and from another gentleman I wrote concerning you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They don't appear to have been very enthusiastic, from your manner.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, yes, some of them were.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose I may ask what particular form their emotion took?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes, yes; they agree unanimously that you are a brilliant, able
+      man, a man with a future, and that you would make about the worst husband
+      on record.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The applicant for favor had a forlorn look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's nothing very evasive about that,&rdquo; he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a period of reflective silence. It was probably no more than a
+      few seconds, but it seemed longer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haven't you any other friend that you could suggest?&rdquo; Langdon
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Apparently none whose testimony would be valuable.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jervis Langdon held out his hand. &ldquo;You have at least one,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;I believe in you. I know you better than they do.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so came the crown of happiness. The engagement of Samuel Langhorne
+      Clemens and Olivia Lewis Langdon was ratified next day, February 4, 1869.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But if the friends of Mark Twain viewed the idea of the marriage with
+      scant favor, the friends of Miss Langdon regarded it with genuine alarm.
+      Elmira was a conservative place&mdash;a place of pedigree and family
+      tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, pilot, miner, wandering
+      journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the daughter of one of the
+      oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not to be lightly permitted.
+      The fact that he had achieved a national fame did not count against other
+      considerations. The social protest amounted almost to insurrection, but it
+      was not availing. The Langdon family had their doubts too, though of a
+      different sort. Their doubts lay in the fear that one, reared as their
+      daughter had been, might be unable to hold a place as the wife of this
+      intellectual giant, whom they felt that the world was preparing to honor.
+      That this delicate, sheltered girl could have the strength of mind and
+      body for her position seemed hard to believe. Their faith overbore such
+      questionings, and the future years proved how fully it was justified.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To his mother Samuel Clemens wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    She is only a little body, but she hasn't her peer in Christendom.
+    I gave her only a plain gold engagement ring, when fashion
+    imperatively demands a two-hundred-dollar diamond one, and told her
+    it was typical of her future life-namely, that she would have to
+    flourish on substance, rather than luxuries (but you see I know the
+    girl&mdash;she don't care anything about luxuries).... She spends no
+    money but her astral year's allowance, and spends nearly every cent
+    of that on other people. She will be a good, sensible little wife,
+    without any airs about her. I don't make intercession for her
+    beforehand, and ask you to love her, for there isn't any use in
+    that&mdash;you couldn't help it if you were to try. I warn you that
+    whoever comes within the fatal influence of her beautiful nature is
+    her willing slave forevermore.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      To Mrs. Crane, absent in March, her father wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    DEAR SUE,&mdash;I received your letter yesterday with a great deal of
+    pleasure, but the letter has gone in pursuit of one S. L. Clemens,
+    who has been giving us a great deal of trouble lately. We cannot
+    have a joy in our family without a feeling, on the part of the
+    little incorrigible in our family, that this wanderer must share it,
+    so, as soon as read, into her pocket and off upstairs goes your
+    letter, and in the next two minutes into the mail, so it is
+    impossible for me now to refer to it, or by reading it over gain an
+    inspiration in writing you...
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Clemens closed his lecture tour in March, acid went immediately to Elmira.
+      He had lectured between fifty and sixty times, with a return of something
+      more than $8,000, not a bad aggregate for a first season on the circuit.
+      He had planned to make a spring tour to California, but the attraction at
+      Elmira was of a sort that discouraged distant travel. Furthermore, he
+      disliked the platform, then and always. It was always a temptation to him
+      because of its quick and abundant return, but it was none the less
+      distasteful. In a letter of that spring he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I most cordially hate the lecture field. And after all, I shudder
+    to think I may never get out of it. In all conversation with Gough,
+    and Anna Dickinson, Nasby, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips,
+    and the other old stagers, I could not observe that they ever
+    expected or hoped to get out of the business. I don't want to get
+    wedded to it as they are.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He declined further engagements on the excuse that he must attend to
+      getting out his book. The revised proofs were coming now, and he and
+      gentle Livy Langdon read them together. He realized presently that with
+      her sensitive nature she had also a keen literary perception. What he
+      lacked in delicacy&mdash;and his lack was likely to be large enough in
+      that direction&mdash;she detected, and together they pruned it away. She
+      became his editor during those happy courtship days&mdash;a position which
+      she held to her death. The world owed a large debt of gratitude to Mark
+      Twain's wife, who from the very beginning&mdash;and always, so far as in
+      her strength she was able&mdash;inspired him to give only his worthiest to
+      the world, whether in written or spoken word, in counsel or in deed. Those
+      early days of their close companionship, spiritual and mental, were full
+      of revelation to Samuel Clemens, a revelation that continued from day to
+      day, and from year to year, even to the very end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter to Bliss and the proofs were full of suggested changes that
+      would refine and beautify the text. In one of them he settles the question
+      of title, which he says is to be:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                  THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
+                         or
+                THE NEW PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and we may be sure that it was Olivia Langdon's voice that gave the
+      deciding vote for the newly adopted chief title, which would take any
+      suggestion of irreverence out of the remaining words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The book was to have been issued in the spring, but during his wanderings
+      proofs had been delayed, and there was now considerable anxiety about it,
+      as the agencies had become impatient for the canvass. At the end of April
+      Clemens wrote: &ldquo;Your printers are doing well. I will hurry the
+      proofs&rdquo;; but it was not until the early part of June that the last
+      chapters were revised and returned. Then the big book, at last completed,
+      went to press on an edition of twenty thousand, a large number for any new
+      book, even to-day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In later years, through some confusion of circumstance, Mark Twain was led
+      to believe that the publication of The Innocents Abroad was long and
+      unnecessarily delayed. But this was manifestly a mistake. The book went to
+      press in June. It was a big book and a large edition. The first copy was
+      delivered July 20 (1869), and four hundred and seventeen bound volumes
+      were shipped that month. Even with the quicker mechanical processes of
+      to-day a month or more is allowed for a large book between the final
+      return of proofs and the date of publication. So it is only another
+      instance of his remembering, as he once quaintly put it, &ldquo;the thing
+      that didn't happen.&rdquo;&mdash;[In an article in the North American
+      Review (September 21, 1906) Mr. Clemens stated that he found it necessary
+      to telegraph notice that he would bring suit if the book was not
+      immediately issued. In none of the letters covering this period is there
+      any suggestion of delay on the part of the publishers, and the date of the
+      final return of proofs, together with the date of publication, preclude
+      the possibility of such a circumstance. At some period of his life he
+      doubtless sent, or contemplated sending, such a message, and this fact,
+      through some curious psychology, became confused in his mind with the
+      first edition of The Innocents Abroad.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0076" id="link2H_4_0076">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXI. THE GREAT BOOK OF TRAVEL.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      'The Innocents Abroad' was a success from the start. The machinery for its
+      sale and delivery was in full swing by August 1, and five thousand one
+      hundred and seventy copies were disposed of that month&mdash;a number that
+      had increased to more than thirty-one thousand by the first of the year.
+      It was a book of travel; its lowest price was three and a half dollars. No
+      such record had been made by a book of that description; none has equaled
+      it since.&mdash;[One must recall that this was the record only up to 1910.
+      D.W.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Mark Twain was not already famous, he was unquestionably famous now. As
+      the author of The New Pilgrim's Progress he was swept into the domain of
+      letters as one riding at the head of a cavalcade&mdash;doors and windows
+      wide with welcome and jubilant with applause. Newspapers chorused their
+      enthusiasm; the public voiced universal approval; only a few of the more
+      cultured critics seemed hesitant and doubtful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They applauded&mdash;most of them&mdash;but with reservation. Doctor
+      Holland regarded Mark Twain as a mere fun maker of ephemeral popularity,
+      and was not altogether pleasant in his dictum. Doctor Holmes, in a letter
+      to the author, speaks of the &ldquo;frequently quaint and amusing
+      conceits,&rdquo; but does not find it in his heart to refer to the book as
+      literature. It was naturally difficult for the East to concede a serious
+      value to one who approached his subject with such militant aboriginality,
+      and occasionally wrote &ldquo;those kind.&rdquo; William Dean Howells
+      reviewed the book in the Atlantic, which was of itself a distinction,
+      whether the review was favorable or otherwise. It was favorable on the
+      whole, favorable to the humor of the book, its &ldquo;delicious impudence,&rdquo;
+      the charm of its good-natured irony. The review closed:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    It is no business of ours to fix his rank among the humorists
+    California has given us, but we think he is, in an entirely
+    different way from all the others, quite worthy of the company of
+    the best.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This is praise, but not of an intemperate sort, nor very inclusive. The
+      descriptive, the poetic, the more pretentious phases of the book did not
+      receive attention. Mr. Howells was perhaps the first critic of eminence to
+      recognize in Mark Twain not only the humorist, but the supreme genius-the
+      &ldquo;Lincoln of our literature.&rdquo; This was later. The public&mdash;the
+      silent public&mdash;with what Howells calls &ldquo;the inspired knowledge
+      of the simple-hearted multitude,&rdquo; reached a similar verdict
+      forthwith. And on sufficient evidence: let the average unprejudiced person
+      of to-day take up the old volume and read a few chapters anywhere and
+      decide whether it is the work of a mere humorist, or also of a
+      philosopher, a poet, and a seer. The writer well remembers a little group
+      of &ldquo;the simple-hearted multitude&rdquo; who during the winter of '69
+      and '70 gathered each evening to hear the Innocents read aloud, and their
+      unanimous verdict that it was the &ldquo;best book of modern times.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the most daring book of its day. Passages of it were calculated to
+      take the breath of the orthodox reader; only, somehow, it made him smile,
+      too. It was all so good-natured, so openly sincere. Without doubt it
+      preached heresy&mdash;the heresy of viewing revered landmarks and relics
+      joyously, rather than lugubriously; reverentially, when they inspired
+      reverence; satirically, when they invited ridicule, and with kindliness
+      always.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain's greatest book of travel. The critical
+      and the pure in speech may object to this verdict. Brander Matthews
+      regards it second to A Tramp Abroad, the natural viewpoint of the literary
+      technician. The 'Tramp' contains better usage without doubt, but it lacks
+      the &ldquo;color&rdquo; which gives the Innocents its perennial charm. In
+      the Innocents there is a glow, a fragrance, a romance of touch, a subtle
+      something which is idyllic, something which is not quite of reality, in
+      the tale of that little company that so long ago sailed away to the
+      harbors of their illusions beyond the sea, and, wandered together through
+      old palaces and galleries, and among the tombs of the saints, and down
+      through ancient lands. There is an atmosphere about it all, a dream-like
+      quality that lies somewhere in the telling, maybe, or in the tale; at all
+      events it is there, and the world has felt it ever since. Perhaps it could
+      be defined in a single word, perhaps that word would be &ldquo;youth.&rdquo;
+      That the artist, poor True Williams, felt its inspiration is certain. We
+      may believe that Williams was not a great draftsman, but no artist ever
+      caught more perfectly the light and spirit of the author's text. Crude
+      some of the pictures are, no doubt, but they convey the very essence of
+      the story; they belong to it, they are a part of it, and they ought never
+      to perish. 'A Tramp Abroad' is a rare book, but it cannot rank with its
+      great predecessor in human charm. The public, which in the long run makes
+      mistakes, has rendered that verdict. The Innocents by far outsells the
+      Tramp, and, for that matter, any other book of travel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0077" id="link2H_4_0077">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXII.THE PURCHASE OF A PAPER.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It is curious to reflect that Mark Twain still did not regard himself as a
+      literary man. He had no literary plans for the future; he scarcely looked
+      forward to the publication of another book. He considered himself a
+      journalist; his ambition lay in the direction of retirement in some
+      prosperous newspaper enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a
+      home. During his travels he had already been casting about for a congenial
+      and substantial association in newspaperdom, and had at one time
+      considered the purchase of an interest in the Cleveland Herald. But
+      Buffalo was nearer Elmira, and when an opportunity offered, by which he
+      could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo Express for $25,000, the
+      purchase was decided upon. His lack of funds prompted a new plan for a
+      lecture tour to the Pacific coast, this time with D. R. Locke (Nasby),
+      then immensely popular, in his lecture &ldquo;Cussed Be Canaan.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens had met Nasby on the circuit, and was very fond of him. The two
+      had visited Boston together, and while there had called on Doctor Holmes;
+      this by the way. Nasby was fond of Clemens too, but doubtful about the
+      trip-doubtful about his lecture:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Your proposition takes my breath away. If I had my new lecture
+    completed I wouldn't hesitate a moment, but really isn't &ldquo;Cussed Be
+    Canaan&rdquo; too old? You know that lemon, our African brother, juicy as
+    he was in his day, has been squeezed dry. Why howl about his wrongs
+    after said wrongs have been redressed? Why screech about the
+    &ldquo;damnable spirit of Cahst&rdquo; when the victim thereof sits at the first
+    table, and his oppressor mildly takes, in hash, what he leaves? You
+    see, friend Twain, the Fifteenth Amendment busted &ldquo;Cussed Be
+    Canaan.&rdquo; I howled feelingly on the subject while it was a living
+    issue, for I felt all that I said and a great deal more; but now
+    that we have won our fight why dance frantically on the dead corpse
+    of our enemy? The Reliable Contraband is contraband no more, but a
+    citizen of the United States, and I speak of him no more.
+
+    Give me a week to think of your proposition. If I can jerk a
+    lecture in time I will go with you. The Lord knows I would like to.
+    &mdash;[Nasby's lecture, &ldquo;Cussed Be Canaan,&rdquo; opened, &ldquo;We are all
+    descended from grandfathers!&rdquo; He had a powerful voice, and always
+    just on the stroke of eight he rose and vigorously delivered this
+    sentence. Once, after lecturing an entire season&mdash;two hundred and
+    twenty-five nights&mdash;he went home to rest. That evening he sat,
+    musingly drowsing by the fire, when the clock struck eight. Without
+    a moment's thought Nasby sprang to his feet and thundered out, &ldquo;We
+    are all descended from grandfathers!&rdquo;]
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Nasby did not go, and Clemens's enthusiasm cooled at the prospect of
+      setting out alone on that long tour. Furthermore, Jervis Langdon promptly
+      insisted on advancing the money required to complete the purchase of the
+      Express, and the trade was closed.&mdash;[Mr. Langdon is just as good for
+      $25,000 for me, and has already advanced half of it in cash. I wrote and
+      asked whether I had better send him my note, or a due bill, or how he
+      would prefer to have the indebtedness made of record, and he answered
+      every other topic in the letter pleasantly, but never replied to that at
+      all. Still, I shall give my note into a hands of his business agent here,
+      and pay him the interest as it falls due.&mdash;S. L. C. to his mother.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Buffalo Express was at this time in the hands of three men&mdash;Col.
+      George F. Selkirk, J. L. Lamed, and Thomas A. Kennett. Colonel Selkirk was
+      business manager, Lamed was political editor. With the purchase of
+      Kennett's share Clemens became a sort of general and contributing editor,
+      with a more or less &ldquo;roving commission&rdquo;&mdash;his hours and
+      duties not very clearly defined. It was believed by his associates, and by
+      Clemens himself, that his known connection with the paper would give it
+      prestige and circulation, as Nasby's connection had popularized the Toledo
+      Blade. The new editor entered upon his duties August 14 (1869). The
+      members of the Buffalo press gave him a dinner that evening, and after the
+      manner of newspaper men the world over, were handsomely cordial to the
+      &ldquo;new enemy in their midst.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is an anecdote which relates that next morning, when Mark Twain
+      arrived in the Express office (it was then at 14 Swan Street), there
+      happened to be no one present who knew him. A young man rose very bruskly
+      and asked if there was any one he would like to see. It is reported that
+      he replied, with gentle deliberation:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, yes, I should like to see some young man offer the new editor
+      a chair.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is so like Mark Twain that we are inclined to accept it, though it
+      seems of doubtful circumstance. In any case it deserves to be true. His
+      &ldquo;Salutatory&rdquo; (August 18th) is sufficiently genuine:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Being a stranger, it would be immodest for me to suddenly and
+    violently assume the associate editorship of the Buffalo Express
+    without a single word of comfort or encouragement to the unoffending
+    patrons of the paper, who are about to be exposed to constant
+    attacks of my wisdom and learning. But the word shall be as brief
+    as possible. I only want to assure parties having a friendly
+    interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going to
+    hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not
+    going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to
+    make trouble.... I shall not make use of slang and vulgarity upon
+    any occasion or under any circumstances, and shall never use
+    profanity except when discussing house rent and taxes. Indeed, upon
+    a second thought, I shall not use it even then, for it is
+    unchristian, inelegant, and degrading; though, to speak truly, I do
+    not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a
+    cent without it. I shall not often meddle with politics, because we
+    have a political Editor who is already excellent and only needs to
+    serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect. I shall not
+    write any poetry unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers.
+
+    Such is my platform. I do not see any use in it, but custom is law
+    and must be obeyed.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      John Harrison Mills, who was connected with the Express in those days, has
+      written:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I cannot remember that there was any delay in getting down to his
+    work. I think within five minutes the new editor had assumed the
+    easy look of one entirely at home, pencil in hand and a clutch of
+    paper before him, with an air of preoccupation, as of one intent on
+    a task delayed. It was impossible to be conscious of the man
+    sitting there, and not feel his identity with all that he had
+    enjoyed, and the reminiscence of it he that seemed to radiate; for
+    the personality was so absolutely in accord with all the record of
+    himself and his work. I cannot say he seemed to be that vague thing
+    they call a type in race or blood, though the word, if used in his
+    case for temperament, would decidedly mean what they used to call
+    the &ldquo;sanguine.&rdquo;
+
+    I thought that, pictorially, the noble costume of the Albanian would
+    have well become him. Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the
+    horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors; or stood at the prow
+    of one of the swift craft of the Vikings. His eyes, which have been
+    variously described, were, it seemed to me, of an indescribable
+    depth of the bluish moss-agate, with a capacity of pupil dilation
+    that in certain lights had the effect of a deep black....
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Mills adds that in dress he was now &ldquo;well groomed,&rdquo; and
+      that consequently they were obliged to revise their notions as to the
+      careless negligee which gossip had reported.&mdash;[From unpublished
+      Reminiscences kindly lent to the author by Mr. Mills]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0078" id="link2H_4_0078">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXIII. THE FIRST MEETING WITH HOWELLS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Clemens' first period of editorial work was a brief one, though he made
+      frequent contributions to the paper: sketches, squibs, travel-notes, and
+      experiences, usually humorous in character. His wedding-day had been set
+      for early in the year, and it was necessary to accumulate a bank account
+      for that occasion. Before October he was out on the lecture circuit,
+      billed now for the first time for New England, nervous and apprehensive in
+      consequence, though with good hope. To Pamela he wrote (November 9th):
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To-morrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience&mdash;4,000
+      critics&mdash;and on the success of this matter depends my future success
+      in New England. But I am not distressed. Nasby is in the same boat.
+      Tonight decides the fate of his brand-new lecture. He has just left my
+      room&mdash;been reading his lecture to me&mdash;was greatly depressed. I
+      have convinced him that he has little to fear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever alarm Mark Twain may have felt was not warranted. His success
+      with the New England public was immediate and complete. He made his
+      headquarters in Boston, at Redpath's office, where there was pretty sure
+      to be a congenial company, of which he was presently the center.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was during one of these Boston sojourns that he first met William Dean
+      Howells, his future friend and literary counselor. Howells was assistant
+      editor of the Atlantic at this time; James T. Fields, its editor. Clemens
+      had been gratified by the Atlantic review, and had called to express his
+      thanks for it. He sat talking to Fields, when Howells entered the
+      editorial rooms, and on being presented to the author of the review,
+      delivered his appreciation in the form of a story, sufficiently
+      appropriate, but not qualified for the larger types.&mdash;[He said:
+      &ldquo;When I read that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was so
+      glad her baby had come white.&rdquo;]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His manner, his humor, his quaint colloquial forms all delighted Howells&mdash;more,
+      in fact, than the opulent sealskin overcoat which he affected at this
+      period&mdash;a garment astonishing rather than esthetic, as Mark Twain's
+      clothes in those days of his first regeneration were likely to be
+      startling enough, we may believe; in the conservative atmosphere of the
+      Atlantic rooms. And Howells&mdash;gentle, genial, sincere&mdash;filled
+      with the early happiness of his calling, won the heart of Mark Twain and
+      never lost it, and, what is still more notable, won his absolute and
+      unvarying confidence in all literary affairs. It was always Mark Twain's
+      habit to rely on somebody, and in matters pertaining to literature and to
+      literary people in general he laid his burden on William Dean Howells from
+      that day. Only a few weeks after that first visit we find him telegraphing
+      to Howells, asking him to look after a Californian poet, then ill and
+      friendless in Brooklyn. Clemens states that he does not know the poet, but
+      will contribute fifty dollars if Howells will petition the steamboat
+      company for a pass; and no doubt Howells complied, and spent a good deal
+      more than fifty dollars' worth of time to get the poet relieved and
+      started; it would be like him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0079" id="link2H_4_0079">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXIV. THE WEDDING-DAY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The wedding was planned, at first, either for Christmas or New-Year's Day;
+      but as the lecture engagements continued into January it was decided to
+      wait until these were filled. February 2d, a date near the anniversary of
+      the engagement, was agreed upon, also a quiet wedding with no &ldquo;tour.&rdquo;
+      The young people would go immediately to Buffalo, and take up a modest
+      residence, in a boardinghouse as comfortable, even as luxurious, as the
+      husband's financial situation justified. At least that was Samuel
+      Clemens's understanding of the matter. He felt that he was heavily in debt&mdash;that
+      his first duty was to relieve himself of that obligation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were other plans in Elmira, but in the daily and happy letters he
+      received there was no inkling of any new purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wrote to J. D. F. Slee, of Buffalo, who was associated in business with
+      Mr. Langdon, and asked him to find a suitable boarding-place, one that
+      would be sufficiently refined for the woman who was to be his wife, and
+      sufficiently reasonable to insure prosperity. In due time Slee replied
+      that, while boarding was a &ldquo;miserable business anyhow,&rdquo; he had
+      been particularly fortunate in securing a place on one of the most
+      pleasant streets&mdash;&ldquo;the family a small one and choice spirits,
+      with no predilection for taking boarders, and consenting to the present
+      arrangement only because of the anticipated pleasure of your company.&rdquo;
+      The price, Slee added, would be reasonable. As a matter of fact a house on
+      Delaware Avenue&mdash;still the fine residence street of Buffalo&mdash;had
+      been bought and furnished throughout as a present to the bride and groom.
+      It stands to-day practically unchanged&mdash;brick and mansard without,
+      Eastlake within, a type then much in vogue&mdash;spacious and handsome for
+      that period. It was completely appointed. Diagrams of the rooms had been
+      sent to Elmira and Miss Langdon herself had selected the furnishings.
+      Everything was put in readiness, including linen, cutlery, and utensils.
+      Even the servants had been engaged and the pantry and cellar had been
+      stocked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must have been hard for Olivia Langdon to keep this wonderful surprise
+      out of those daily letters. A surprise like that is always watching a
+      chance to slip out unawares, especially when one is eagerly impatient to
+      reveal it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, the traveler remained completely in the dark. He may have
+      wondered vaguely at the lack of enthusiasm in the boarding idea, and could
+      he have been certain that the sales of the book would continue, or that
+      his newspaper venture would yield an abundant harvest, he might have
+      planned his domestic beginning on a more elaborate scale. If only the
+      Tennessee land would yield the long-expected fortune now! But these were
+      all incalculable things. All that he could be sure of was the coming of
+      his great happiness, in whatever environment, and of the dragging weeks
+      between.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last the night of the final lecture came, and he was off for Elmira
+      with the smallest possible delay. Once there, the intervening days did not
+      matter. He could join in the busy preparations; he could write exuberantly
+      to his friends. To Laura Hawkins, long since Laura Frazer he sent a
+      playful line; to Jim Gillis, still digging and washing on the slopes of
+      the old Tuolumne hills, he wrote a letter which eminently belongs here:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                     Elmira, N. Y., January 26, 1870.
+
+    DEAR Jim,&mdash;I remember that old night just as well! And somewhere
+    among my relics I have your remembrance stored away. It makes my
+    heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days. Still it
+    shouldn't, for right in the depths of their poverty and their
+    pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune.
+    You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal
+    sojourn in the rain and mud of Angel's Camp&mdash;I mean that day we sat
+    around the tavern stove and heard that chap tell about the frog and
+    how they filled him with shot. And you remember how we quoted from
+    the yarn and laughed over it out there on the hillside while you and
+    dear old Stoker panned and washed. I jotted the story down in my
+    note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen
+    dollars for it&mdash;I was just that blind. But then we were so hard up.
+    I published that story, and it became widely known in America,
+    India, China, England, and the reputation it made for me has paid me
+    thousands and thousands of dollars since. Four or five months ago I
+    bought into the Express (I have ordered it sent to you as long as
+    you live, and if the bookkeeper sends you any bills you let me hear
+    of it). I went heavily in debt&mdash;never could have dared to do that,
+    Jim, if we hadn't heard the jumping Frog story that day.
+
+    And wouldn't I love to take old Stoker by the hand, and wouldn't I
+    love to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of
+    Rinalds in the &ldquo;Burning Shame!&rdquo; Where is Dick and what is he doing?
+    Give him my fervent love and warm old remembrances.
+
+    A week from to-day I shall be married-to a girl even better and
+    lovelier than the peerless &ldquo;Chapparal Quails.&rdquo; You can't come so
+    far, Jim, but still I cordially invite you to come anyhow, and I
+    invite Dick too. And if you two boys were to land here on that
+    pleasant occasion we would make you right royally welcome.
+                     Truly your friend,
+                                SAML. L. CLEMENS.
+
+    P.S.&mdash;-California plums are good. Jim, particularly when they are
+    stewed.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It had been only five years before&mdash;that day in Angel's Camp&mdash;but
+      how long ago and how far away it seemed to him now! So much had happened
+      since then, so much of which that was the beginning&mdash;so little
+      compared with the marvel of the years ahead, whose threshold he was now
+      about to cross, and not alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A day or two before the wedding he was asked to lecture on the night of
+      February 2d. He replied that he was sorry to disappoint the applicant, but
+      that he could not lecture on the night of February 2d, for the reason that
+      he was going to marry a young lady on that evening, and that he would
+      rather marry that young lady than deliver all the lectures in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so came the wedding-day. It began pleasantly; the postman brought a
+      royalty check that morning of $4,000, the accumulation of three months'
+      sales, and the Rev. Joseph Twichell and Harmony, his wife, came from
+      Hartford&mdash;Twichell to join with the Rev. Thomas K. Beecher in
+      solemnizing the marriage. Pamela Moffett, a widow now, with her daughter
+      Annie, grown to a young lady, had come all the way from St. Louis, and
+      Mrs. Fairbanks from Cleveland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet the guests were not numerous, not more than a hundred at most, so it
+      was a quiet wedding there in the Langdon parlors, those dim, stately rooms
+      that in the future would hold so much of his history&mdash;so much of the
+      story of life and death that made its beginning there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wedding-service was about seven o'clock, for Mr. Beecher had a meeting
+      at the church soon after that hour. Afterward followed the wedding-supper
+      and dancing, and the bride's father danced with the bride. To the
+      interested crowd awaiting him at the church Mr. Beecher reported that the
+      bride was very beautiful, and had on the longest white gloves he had ever
+      seen; he declared they reached to her shoulders.&mdash;[Perhaps for a
+      younger generation it should be said that Thomas K. Beecher was a brother
+      of Henry Ward Beecher. He lived and died in Elmira, the almost worshiped
+      pastor of the Park Congregational Church. He was a noble, unorthodox
+      teacher. Samuel Clemens at the time of his marriage already strongly
+      admired him, and had espoused his cause in an article signed &ldquo;S'cat!&rdquo;
+      in the Elmira Advertiser, when he (Beecher) had been assailed by the more
+      orthodox Elmira clergy. For the &ldquo;S'cat&rdquo; article see Appendix
+      I, at the end of last volume.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the next afternoon when they set out for Buffalo, accompanied by
+      the bride's parents, the groom's relatives, the Beechers, and perhaps one
+      or two others of that happy company. It was nine o'clock at night when
+      they arrived, and found Mr. Slee waiting at the station with sleighs to
+      convey the party to the &ldquo;boarding-house&rdquo; he had selected. They
+      drove and drove, and the sleigh containing the bride and groom got behind
+      and apparently was bound nowhere in particular, which disturbed the groom
+      a good deal, for he thought it proper that they should arrive first, to
+      receive their guests. He commented on Slee's poor judgment in selecting a
+      house that was so hard to find, and when at length they turned into
+      fashionable Delaware Avenue, and stopped before one of the most attractive
+      places in the neighborhood, he was beset with fear concerning the richness
+      of the locality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were on the steps when the doors opened, and a perfect fairyland of
+      lights and decoration was revealed within. The friends who had gone ahead
+      came out with greetings, to lead in the bride and groom. Servants hurried
+      forward to take bags and wraps. They were ushered inside; they were led
+      through beautiful rooms, all newly appointed and garnished. The bridegroom
+      was dazed, unable to understand the meaning of things, the apparent
+      ownership and completeness of possession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last the young wife put her hand upon his arm:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you understand, Youth,&rdquo; she said; that was always her
+      name for him. &ldquo;Don't you understand? It is ours, all ours&mdash;everything&mdash;a
+      gift from father!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But even then he could not grasp it; not at first, not until Mr. Langdon
+      brought a little box and, opening it, handed them the deeds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody quite remembers what was the first remark that Samuel Clemens made
+      then; but either then or a little later he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Langdon, whenever you are in Buffalo, if it's twice a year,
+      come right here. Bring your bag and stay overnight if you want to. It
+      sha'n't cost you a cent!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They went in to supper then, and by and by the guests were gone and the
+      young wedded pair were alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Patrick McAleer, the young coachman, who would grow old in their employ,
+      and Ellen, the cook, came in for their morning orders, and were full of
+      Irish delight at the inexperience and novelty of it all. Then they were
+      gone, and only the lovers in their new house and their new happiness
+      remained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so it was they entered the enchanted land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0080" id="link2H_4_0080">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXV. AS TO DESTINY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      If any reader has followed these chapters thus far, he may have wondered,
+      even if vaguely, at the seeming fatality of events. Mark Twain had but to
+      review his own life for justification of his doctrine of inevitability&mdash;an
+      unbroken and immutable sequence of cause and effect from the beginning.
+      Once he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When the first living atom found itself afloat on the great
+      Laurentian sea the first act of that first atom led to the second act of
+      that first atom, and so on down through the succeeding ages of all life,
+      until, if the steps could be traced, it would be shown that the first act
+      of that first atom has led inevitably to the act of my standing here in my
+      dressing-gown at this instant talking to you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed the clearest presentment ever offered in the matter of
+      predestined circumstance&mdash;predestined from the instant when that
+      primal atom felt the vital thrill. Mark Twain's early life, however
+      imperfectly recorded, exemplifies this postulate. If through the years
+      still ahead of us the course of destiny seems less clearly defined, it is
+      only because thronging events make the threads less easy to trace. The web
+      becomes richer, the pattern more intricate and confusing, but the line of
+      fate neither breaks nor falters, to the end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0081" id="link2H_4_0081">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXVI. ON THE BUFFALO &ldquo;EXPRESS&rdquo;
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      With the beginning of life in Buffalo, Mark Twain had become already a
+      world character&mdash;a man of large consequence and events. He had no
+      proper realization of this, no real sense of the size of his conquest; he
+      still regarded himself merely as a lecturer and journalist, temporarily
+      popular, but with no warrant to a permanent seat in the world's literary
+      congress. He thought his success something of an accident. The fact that
+      he was prepared to settle down as an editorial contributor to a newspaper
+      in what was then only a big village is the best evidence of a modest
+      estimate of his talents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He &ldquo;worked like a horse,&rdquo; is the verdict of those who were
+      closely associated with him on the Express. His hours were not regular,
+      but they were long. Often he was at his desk at eight in the morning, and
+      remained there until ten or eleven at night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His working costume was suited to comfort rather than show. With coat,
+      vest, collar, and tie usually removed (sometimes even his shoes), he
+      lounged in his chair, in any attitude that afforded the larger ease,
+      pulling over the exchanges; scribbling paragraphs, editorials, humorous
+      skits, and what not, as the notion came upon him. J. L. Lamed, his
+      co-worker (he sat on the opposite side of the same table), remembers that
+      Mark Twain enjoyed his work as he went along&mdash;the humor of it&mdash;and
+      that he frequently laughed as some whimsicality or new absurdity came into
+      his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I doubt,&rdquo; writes Lamed, &ldquo;if he ever enjoyed anything
+      more than the jackknife engraving that he did on a piece of board of a
+      military map of the siege of Paris, which was printed in the Express from
+      his original plate, with accompanying explanations and comments. His
+      half-day of whittling and laughter that went with it are something that I
+      find pleasant to remember. Indeed, my whole experience of association with
+      him is a happy memory, which I am fortunate in having.... What one saw of
+      him was always the actual Mark Twain, acting out of his own nature simply,
+      frankly, without pretense, and almost without reserve. It was that
+      simplicity and naturalness in the man which carried his greatest charm.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lamed, like many others, likens Mark Twain to Lincoln in various of his
+      characteristics. The two worked harmoniously together: Lamed attending to
+      the political direction of the journal, Clemens to the literary, and what
+      might be termed the sentimental side. There was no friction in the
+      division of labor, never anything but good feeling between them. Clemens
+      had a poor opinion of his own comprehension of politics, and perhaps as
+      little regard for Lamed's conception of humor. Once when the latter
+      attempted something in the way of pleasantry his associate said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better leave the humor on this paper to me, Lamed&rdquo;; and once
+      when Lamed was away attending the Republican State Convention at Saratoga,
+      and some editorial comment seemed necessary, Clemens thought it best to
+      sign the utterance, and to make humor of his shortcomings.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I do not know much about politics, and am not sitting up nights to
+    learn....
+
+    I am satisfied that these nominations are all right and sound, and
+    that they are the only ones that can bring peace to our distracted
+    country (the only political phrase I am perfectly familiar with and
+    competent to hurl at the public with fearless confidence&mdash;the other
+    editor is full of them), but being merely satisfied is not enough.
+    I always like to know before I shout. But I go for Mr. Curtis with
+    all my strength! Being certain of him, I hereby shout all I know
+    how. But the others may be a split ticket, or a scratched ticket,
+    or whatever you call it.
+
+    I will let it alone for the present. It will keep. The other young
+    man will be back to-morrow, and he will shout for it, split or no
+    split, rest assured of that. He will prance into this political
+    ring with his tomahawk and his war-whoop, and then you will hear a
+    crash and see the scalps fly. He has none of my diffidence. He
+    knows all about these nominees, and if he don't he will let on to in
+    such a natural way as to deceive the most critical. He knows
+    everything&mdash;he knows more than Webster's Unabridged and the American
+    Encyclopedia&mdash;but whether he knows anything about a subject or not
+    he is perfectly willing to discuss it. When he gets back he will
+    tell you all about these candidates as serenely as if he had been
+    acquainted with them a hundred years, though, speaking
+    confidentially, I doubt if he ever heard of any of them till to-day.
+    I am right well satisfied it is a good, sound, sensible ticket, and
+    a ticket to win; but wait till he comes.
+
+    In the mean time I go for George William Curtis and take the
+    chances.
+                                MARK TWAIN.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He had become what Mr. Howells calls entirely &ldquo;desouthernized&rdquo;
+      by this time. From having been of slaveholding stock, and a Confederate
+      soldier, he had become a most positive Republican, a rampant abolitionist&mdash;had
+      there been anything left to abolish. His sympathy had been always with the
+      oppressed, and he had now become their defender. His work on the paper
+      revealed this more and more. He wrote fewer sketches and more editorials,
+      and the editorials were likely to be either savage assaults upon some
+      human abuse, or fierce espousals of the weak. They were fearless,
+      scathing, terrific. Of some farmers of Cohocton, who had taken the law
+      into their own hands to punish a couple whom they believed to be a
+      detriment to the community, he wrote:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The men who did that deed are capable of doing any low, sneaking,
+      cowardly villainy that could be invented in perdition. They are the very
+      bastards of the devil.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He appended a full list of their names, and added:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If the farmers of Cohocton are of this complexion, what on earth
+      must a Cohocton rough be like?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But all this happened a long time ago, and we need not detail those
+      various old interests and labors here. It is enough to say that Mark Twain
+      on the Express was what he had been from the beginning, and would be to
+      the end&mdash;the zealous champion of justice and liberty; violent and
+      sometimes wrong in his viewpoint, but never less than fearless and
+      sincere. Invariably he was for the oppressed. He had a natural instinct
+      for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the under dog.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the best of his editorial contributions is a tribute to Anson
+      Burlingame, who died February 23, 1870, at St. Petersburg, on his trip
+      around the world as special ambassador for the Chinese Empire. In this
+      editorial Clemens endeavored to pay something of his debt to the noble
+      statesman. He reviewed Burlingame's astonishing career&mdash;the career
+      which had closed at forty-seven, and read like a fairy-tale-and he dwelt
+      lovingly on his hero's nobility of character. At the close he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was a good man, and a very, very great man. America, lost a son,
+      and all the world a servant, when he died.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among those early contributions to the Express is a series called &ldquo;Around
+      the World,&rdquo; an attempt at collaboration with Prof. D. R. Ford, who
+      did the actual traveling, while Mark Twain, writing in the first person,
+      gave the letters his literary stamp. At least some of the contributions
+      were written in this way, such as &ldquo;Adventures in Hayti,&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;The Pacific,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Japan.&rdquo; These letters exist
+      to-day only in the old files of the Express, and indeed this is the case
+      with most of Clemens's work for that paper. It was mainly ephemeral or
+      timely work, and its larger value has disappeared. Here and there is a
+      sentence worth remembering. Of two practical jokers who sent in a marriage
+      notice of persons not even contemplating matrimony, he said: &ldquo;This
+      deceit has been practised maliciously by a couple of men whose small souls
+      will escape through their pores some day if they do not varnish their
+      hides.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of the sketches have been preserved. &ldquo;Journalism in Tennessee,&rdquo;
+      one of the best of his wilder burlesques, is as enjoyable to-day as when
+      written. &ldquo;A Curious Dream&rdquo; made a lasting impression on his
+      Buffalo readers, and you are pretty certain to hear of it when you mention
+      Mark Twain in that city to-day. It vividly called attention to the neglect
+      of the old North Street graveyard. The gruesome vision of the ancestors
+      deserting with their coffins on their backs was even more humiliating than
+      amusing, and inspired a movement for reform. It has been effective
+      elsewhere since then, and may still be read with profit&mdash;or
+      satisfaction&mdash;for in a note at the end the reader is assured that if
+      the cemeteries of his town are kept in good order the dream is not leveled
+      at his town at all, but &ldquo;particularly and venomously at the next
+      town.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0082" id="link2H_4_0082">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXVII. THE &ldquo;GALAXY&rdquo;
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain's work on the Express represented only a portion of his
+      literary activities during his Buffalo residence. The Galaxy, an ambitious
+      New York magazine of that day&mdash;[published by Sheldon &amp; Co. at 498
+      and 500 Broadway]&mdash;proposed to him that he conduct for them a
+      humorous department. They would pay $2,400 a year for the work, and allow
+      him a free hand. There was some discussion as to book rights, but the
+      arrangement was concluded, and his first instalment, under the general
+      title of &ldquo;Memoranda,&rdquo; appeared in the May number, 1870. In his
+      Introductory he outlined what the reader might expect, such as &ldquo;exhaustive
+      statistical tables,&rdquo; &ldquo;Patent Office reports,&rdquo; and
+      &ldquo;complete instructions about farming, even from the grafting of the
+      seed to the harrowing of the matured crops.&rdquo; He declared that he
+      would throw a pathos into the subject of agriculture that would surprise
+      and delight the world. He added that the &ldquo;Memoranda&rdquo; was not
+      necessarily a humorous department.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I would not conduct an exclusively and professedly humorous
+    department for any one. I would always prefer to have the privilege
+    of printing a serious and sensible remark, in case one occurred to
+    me, without the reader's feeling obliged to consider himself
+    outraged.... Puns cannot be allowed a place in this department....
+    No circumstance, however dismal, will ever be considered a
+    sufficient excuse for the admission of that last and saddest
+    evidence of intellectual poverty, the pun.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The Galaxy was really a fine magazine, with the best contributors
+      obtainable; among them Justin McCarthy, S. M. B. Piatt, Richard Grant
+      White, and many others well known in that day, with names that still
+      flicker here and there in its literary twilight. The new department
+      appealed to Clemens, and very soon he was writing most of his sketches for
+      it. They were better literature, as a rule, than those published in his
+      own paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first number of the &ldquo;Memoranda&rdquo; was fairly representative
+      of those that followed it. &ldquo;The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef
+      Contract,&rdquo; a manuscript which he had undertaken three years before
+      and mislaid, was its initial contribution. Besides the &ldquo;Beef
+      Contract,&rdquo; there was a tribute to George Wakeman, a well-known
+      journalist of those days; a stricture on the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage, who
+      had delivered from the pulpit an argument against workingmen occupying
+      pews in fashionable churches; a presentment of the Chinese situation in
+      San Francisco, depicting the cruel treatment of the Celestial immigrant; a
+      burlesque of the Sunday-school &ldquo;good little boy&rdquo; story,&mdash;[&ldquo;The
+      Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Beef
+      Contract&rdquo; are included in Sketches New and Old; also the Chinese
+      sketch, under the title, &ldquo;Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy.&rdquo;]&mdash;and
+      several shorter skits&mdash;and anecdotes, ten pages in all; a rather
+      generous contract.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain's comment on Talmage was prompted by an article in which
+      Talmage had assumed the premise that if workingmen attended the churches
+      it would drive the better class of worshipers away. Among other things he
+      said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I have a good Christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in
+    church, and a workingman should enter the door at the other end,
+    would smell him instantly. My friend is not to blame for the
+    sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer
+    for being keener on the scent than a stupid watch-dog. The fact is,
+    if you had all the churches free, by reason of the mixing of the
+    common people with the uncommon, you would keep one-half of
+    Christendom sick at their stomach. If you are going to kill the
+    church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to do with this work
+    of evangelization.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Commenting on this Mark Twain said&mdash;well, he said a good deal more
+      than we have room for here, but a portion of his closing paragraphs is
+      worth preserving. He compares the Reverend Mr. Talmage with the early
+      disciples of Christ&mdash;Paul and Peter and the others; or, rather, he
+      contrasts him with them.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    They healed the very beggars, and held intercourse with people of a
+    villainous odor every day. If the subject of these remarks had been
+    chosen among the original Twelve Apostles he would not have
+    associated with the rest, because he could not have stood the fishy
+    smell of some of his comrades who came from around the Sea of
+    Galilee. He would have resigned his commission with some such
+    remark as he makes in the extract quoted above: &ldquo;Master, if thou art
+    going to kill the church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to
+    do with this work of evangelization.&rdquo; He is a disciple, and makes
+    that remark to the Master; the only difference is that he makes it
+    in the nineteenth instead of the first century.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Talmage was immensely popular at this time, and Mark Twain's open attack
+      on him must have shocked a good many Galaxy readers, as perhaps his
+      article on the Chinese cruelties offended the citizens of San Francisco.
+      It did not matter. He was not likely to worry over the friends he would
+      lose because of any stand taken for human justice. Lamed said of him:
+      &ldquo;He was very far from being one who tried in any way to make himself
+      popular.&rdquo; Certainly he never made any such attempt at the expense of
+      his convictions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first Galaxy instalment was a sort of platform of principles for the
+      campaign that was to follow. Not that each month's contribution contained
+      personal criticism, or a defense of the Chinese (of whom he was always the
+      champion as long as he lived), but a good many of them did. In the October
+      number he began a series of letters under the general title of &ldquo;Goldsmith's
+      Friend Abroad Again,&rdquo; supposed to have been written by a Chinese
+      immigrant in San Francisco, detailing his experience there. In a note the
+      author says: &ldquo;No experience is set down in the following letters
+      which had to be invented. Fancy is not needed to give variety to the
+      history of the Chinaman's sojourn in America. Plain fact is amply
+      sufficient.&rdquo; The letters show how the supposed Chinese writer of
+      them had set out for America, believing it to be a land whose government
+      was based on the principle that all men are created equal, and treated
+      accordingly; how, upon arriving in San Francisco, he was kicked and
+      bruised and beaten, and set upon by dogs, flung into jail, tried and
+      condemned without witnesses, his own race not being allowed to testify
+      against Americans&mdash;Irish-Americans&mdash;in the San Francisco court.
+      They are scathing, powerful letters, and one cannot read them, even in
+      this day of improved conditions, without feeling the hot waves of
+      resentment and indignation which Mark Twain must have felt when he penned
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reverend Mr. Talmage was not the only divine to receive attention in the
+      &ldquo;Memoranda.&rdquo; The Reverend Mr. Sabine, of New York, who had
+      declined to hold a church burial service for the old actor, George
+      Holland, came in for the most caustic as well as the most artistic
+      stricture of the entire series. It deserves preservation to-day, not only
+      for its literary value, but because no finer defense of the drama, no more
+      searching sermon on self-righteousness, has ever been put into concrete
+      form.&mdash;[&ldquo;The Indignity Put Upon the Remains of Gorge Holland by
+      the Rev. Mr. Sabine&rdquo;; Galaxy for February, 1871. The reader will
+      find it complete under Appendix J, at the end of last volume.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;Little Church Around the Corner&rdquo; on Twenty-ninth Street
+      received that happy title from this incident.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a little church around the corner that will, perhaps,
+      permit the service,&rdquo; Mr. Sabine had said to Holland's friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little church did permit the service, and there was conferred upon it
+      the new name, which it still bears. It has sheltered a long line of actor
+      folk and their friends since then, earning thereby reverence, gratitude,
+      and immortal memory.&mdash;[Church of the Transfiguration. Memorial
+      services were held there for Joseph Jefferson; and a memorial window, by
+      John La Farge, has been placed there in memory of Edwin Booth.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the Galaxy contributions a number are preserved in Sketches New and
+      Old. &ldquo;How I Edited an Agricultural Paper&rdquo; is one of the best
+      of these&mdash;an excellent example of Mark Twain's more extravagant style
+      of humor. It is perennially delightful; in France it has been dramatized,
+      and is still played.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A successful Galaxy feature, also preserved in the Sketches, was the
+      &ldquo;Burlesque Map of Paris,&rdquo; reprinted from the Express. The
+      Franco-Prussian War was in progress, and this travesty was particularly
+      timely. It creates only a smile of amusement to-day, but it was all fresh
+      and delightful then. Schuyler Colfax, by this time Vice-President, wrote
+      to him: &ldquo;I have had the heartiest possible laugh over it, and so
+      have all my family. You are a wicked, conscienceless wag, who ought to be
+      punished severely.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;Official Commendations,&rdquo; which accompany the map, are its
+      chief charm. They are from Grant, Bismarck, Brigham Young, and others, the
+      best one coming from one J. Smith, who says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    My wife was for years afflicted with freckles, and though everything
+    was done for her relief that could be done, all was in vain. But,
+    sir, since her first glance at your map they have entirely left her.
+    She has nothing but convulsions now.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It is said that the &ldquo;Map of Paris&rdquo; found its way to Berlin,
+      where the American students in the beer-halls used to pretend to quarrel
+      over it until they attracted the attention of the German soldiers that
+      might be present. Then they would wander away and leave it on the table
+      and watch results. The soldiers would pounce upon it and lose their
+      tempers over it; then finally abuse it and revile its author, to the
+      satisfaction of everybody.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The larger number of &ldquo;Memoranda&rdquo; sketches have properly found
+      oblivion to-day. They were all, or nearly all, collected by a Canadian
+      pirate, C. A. Backas, in a volume bearing the title of Memoranda,&mdash;[Also
+      by a harpy named John Camden Hotten (of London), of whom we shall hear
+      again. Hotten had already pirated The Innocents, and had it on the market
+      before Routledge could bring out the authorized edition. Routledge later
+      published the &ldquo;Memoranda&rdquo; under the title of Sketches,
+      including the contents of the Jumping Frog book.]&mdash;a book long ago
+      suppressed. Only about twenty of the Galaxy contributions found place in
+      Sketches New and Old, five years later, and some of these might have been
+      spared as literature. &ldquo;To Raise Poultry,&rdquo; &ldquo;John Chinaman
+      in New York,&rdquo; and &ldquo;History Repeats Itself&rdquo; are valuable
+      only as examples of his work at that period. The reader may consult them
+      for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0083" id="link2H_4_0083">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXVIII. THE PRIMROSE PATH
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But we are losing sight of more important things. From the very beginning
+      Mark Twain's home meant always more to him than his work. The life at 472
+      Delaware Avenue had begun with as fair a promise as any matrimonial
+      journey ever undertaken: There seemed nothing lacking: a beautiful home,
+      sufficient income, bright prospects&mdash;these things, with health and
+      love; constitute married happiness. Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister, Mrs.
+      Crane, at the end of February: &ldquo;Sue, we are two as happy people as
+      you ever saw. Our days seem to be made up of only bright sunlight, with no
+      shadow in them.&rdquo; In the same letter the husband added: &ldquo;Livy
+      pines and pines every day for you, and I pine and pine every day for you,
+      and when we both of us are pining at once you would think it was a whole
+      pine forest let loose.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To Redpath, who was urging lecture engagements for the coming season, he
+      wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    DEAR RED,&mdash;I am not going to lecture any more forever. I have got
+    things ciphered down to a fraction now. I know just about what it
+    will cost to live, and I can make the money without lecturing.
+    Therefore, old man, count me out.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      And still later, in May:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I guess I am out of the field permanently. Have got a lovely wife,
+    a lovely house, bewitchingly furnished, a lovely carriage, and a
+    coachman whose style and dignity are simply awe-in-spiring, nothing
+    less; and I am making more money than necessary, by considerable,
+    and therefore why crucify myself nightly on the platform? The
+    subscriber will have to be excused for the present season at least.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      So they were very happy during those early months, acquiring pleasantly
+      the education which any matrimonial experience is sure to furnish,
+      accustoming themselves to the uses of housekeeping, to life in
+      partnership, with all the discoveries and mental and spiritual adaptations
+      that belong to the close association of marriage. They were far, very far,
+      apart on many subjects. He was unpolished, untrained, impulsive, sometimes
+      violent. Twichell remembers that in the earlier days of their acquaintance
+      he wore a slouch hat pulled down in front, and smoked a cigar that
+      sometimes tilted up and touched the brim of it. The atmosphere and customs
+      of frontier life, the Westernisms of that day, still clung to him. Mrs.
+      Clemens, on the other hand, was conservative, dainty, cultured, spiritual.
+      He adored her as little less than a saint, and she became, indeed, his
+      saving grace. She had all the personal refinement which he lacked, and she
+      undertook the work of polishing and purifying her life companion. She had
+      no wish to destroy his personality, to make him over, but only to preserve
+      his best, and she set about it in the right way&mdash;gently, and with a
+      tender gratitude in each achievement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not entirely approve of certain lines of his reading; or, rather,
+      she did not understand them in those days. That he should be fond of
+      history and the sciences was natural enough, but when the Life of P. T.
+      Barnum, Written by Himself, appeared, and he sat up nights to absorb it,
+      and woke early and lighted the lamp to follow the career of the great
+      showman, she was at a loss to comprehend this particular literary passion,
+      and indeed was rather jealous of it. She did not realize then his vast
+      interest in the study of human nature, or that such a book contained what
+      Mr. Howells calls &ldquo;the root of the human matter,&rdquo; the inner
+      revelation of the human being at first hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Concerning his religious observances her task in the beginning was easy
+      enough. Clemens had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines
+      of his own. His natural kindness of heart, and especially his love for his
+      wife, inclined him toward the teachings and customs of her Christian faith&mdash;unorthodox
+      but sincere, as Christianity in the Langdon family was likely to be. It
+      took very little persuasion on his wife's part to establish family prayers
+      in their home, grace before meals, and the morning reading of a Bible
+      chapter. Joe Goodman, who made a trip East, and visited them during the
+      early days of their married life, was dumfounded to see Mark Twain ask a
+      blessing and join in family worship. Just how long these forms continued
+      cannot be known to-day; the time of their abandonment has perished from
+      the recollection of any one now living.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would seem to have been the Bible-reading that wrought the change. The
+      prayer and the blessing were to him sincere and gracious; but as the
+      readings continued he realized that he had never before considered the
+      Bible from a doctrinal point of view, as a guide to spiritual salvation.
+      To his logical reasoning mind, a large portion of it seemed absurd: a mass
+      of fables and traditions, mere mythology. From such material humanity had
+      built its mightiest edifice of hope, the doctrines of its faith. After a
+      little while he could stand it no longer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Livy,&rdquo; he said one day, &ldquo;you may keep this up if you
+      want to, but I must ask you to excuse me from it. It is making me a
+      hypocrite. I don't believe in this Bible. It contradicts my reason. I
+      can't sit here and listen to it, letting you believe that I regard it, as
+      you do, in the light of gospel, the word of God.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was moved to write an article on the human idea of God, ancient and
+      modern. It contained these paragraphs:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    The difference in importance, between the God of the Bible and the
+    God of the present day, cannot be described, it can only be vaguely
+    and inadequately figured to the mind.... If you make figures
+    to represent the earth and moon, and allow a space of one inch
+    between them, to represent the four hundred thousand miles of
+    distance which lies between the two bodies, the map will have to be
+    eleven miles long in order to bring in the nearest fixed star.
+    &mdash;[His figures were far too small. A map drawn on the scale of
+    400,000 miles to the inch would need to be 1,100 miles long to take
+    in both the earth and the nearest fixed star. On such a map the
+    earth would be one-fiftieth of an inch in diameter&mdash;the size of a
+    small grain of sand.]&mdash;So one cannot put the modern heavens on a
+    map, nor the modern God; but the Bible God and the Bible heavens can
+    be set down on a slate and yet not be discommoded....
+
+    The difference between that universe and the modern one revealed by
+    science is as the difference between a dust-flecked ray in a barn
+    and the sublime arch of the Milky Way in the skies. Its God was
+    strictly proportioned to its dimensions. His sole solicitude was
+    about a handful of truculent nomads. He worried and fretted over
+    them in a peculiarly and distractingly human way. One day he coaxed
+    and petted them beyond their due, the next he harried and lashed
+    them beyond their deserts. He sulked, he cursed, he raged, he
+    grieved, according to his mood and the circumstances, but all to no
+    purpose; his efforts were all vain, he could not govern them. When
+    the fury was on him he was blind to all reason&mdash;he not only
+    slaughtered the offender, but even his harmless little children and
+    dumb cattle....
+
+    To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive,
+    fierce and ever fickle and changeful master; to trust the true God
+    is to trust a Being who has uttered no promises, but whose
+    beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of his
+    colossal universe is proof that he is at least steadfast to his
+    purposes; whose unwritten laws, so far as they affect man, being
+    equal and impartial, show that he is just and fair; these things,
+    taken together, suggest that if he shall ordain us to live
+    hereafter, he will still be steadfast, just, and fair toward us. We
+    shall not need to require anything more.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It seems mild enough, obvious, even orthodox, now&mdash;so far have we
+      traveled in forty years. But such a declaration then would have shocked a
+      great number of sincerely devout persons. His wife prevailed upon him not
+      to print it. She respected his honesty&mdash;even his reasoning, but his
+      doubts were a long grief to her, nevertheless. In time she saw more
+      clearly with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more
+      with the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the
+      proportions of created things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They did not mingle much or long with the social life of Buffalo. They
+      received and returned calls, attended an occasional reception; but neither
+      of them found such things especially attractive in those days, so they
+      remained more and more in their own environment. There is an anecdote
+      which seems to belong here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One Sunday morning Clemens noticed smoke pouring from the upper window of
+      the house across the street. The owner and his wife, comparatively
+      newcomers, were seated upon the veranda, evidently not aware of impending
+      danger. The Clemens household thus far had delayed calling on them, but
+      Clemens himself now stepped briskly across the street. Bowing with
+      leisurely politeness, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My name is Clemens; we ought to have called on you before, and I
+      beg your pardon for intruding now in this informal way, but your house is
+      on fire.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost the only intimate friends they had in Buffalo were in the family of
+      David Gray, the poet-editor of the Courier. Gray was a gentle, lovable
+      man. &ldquo;The gentlest spirit and the loveliest that ever went clothed
+      in clay, since Sir Galahad laid him to rest,&rdquo; Mark Twain once said
+      of him. Both Gray and Clemens were friends of John Hay, and their families
+      soon became intimate. Perhaps, in time, the Clemens household would have
+      found other as good friends in the Buffalo circles; but heavy clouds that
+      had lain unseen just beyond the horizon during those earlier months of
+      marriage rose suddenly into view, and the social life, whatever it might
+      have become, was no longer a consideration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0084" id="link2H_4_0084">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXIX. THE OLD HUMAN STORY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Jervis Langdon was never able to accept his son-in-law's invitation to the
+      new home. His health began to fail that spring, and at the end of March,
+      with his physician and Mrs. Langdon, he made a trip to the South. In a
+      letter written at Richmond he said, &ldquo;I have thrown off all care,&rdquo;
+      and named a list of the four great interests in which he was involved.
+      Under &ldquo;number 5,&rdquo; he included &ldquo;everything,&rdquo;
+      adding, &ldquo;so you see how good I am to follow the counsel of my
+      children.&rdquo; He closed: &ldquo;Samuel, I love your wife and she loves
+      me. I think it is only fair that you should know it, but you need not
+      flare up. I loved her before you did, and she loved me before she did you,
+      and has not ceased since. I see no way but for you to make the most of it.&rdquo;
+      He was already a very ill man, and this cheerful letter was among the last
+      he ever wrote.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was absent six weeks and seemed to improve, but suffered an attack
+      early in May; in June his condition became critical. Clemens and his wife
+      were summoned to Elmira, and joined in the nursing, day and night. Clemens
+      surprised every one by his ability as a nurse. His delicacy and
+      thoughtfulness were unfailing; his original ways of doing things always
+      amused and interested the patient. In later years Mark Twain once said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;How much of the nursing did I do? My main watch was from midnight
+    to four in the morning, nearly four hours. My other watch was a
+    midday watch, and I think it was nearly three hours. The two
+    sisters divided the remaining seventeen hours of the twenty-four
+    hours between them, and each of them tried generously and
+    persistently to swindle the other out of a part of her watch. I
+    went to bed early every night, and tried to get sleep enough by
+    midnight to fit me for my work, but it was always a failure. I went
+    on watch sleepy and remained miserable, sleepy, and wretched,
+    straight along through the four hours. I can still see myself
+    sitting by that bed in the melancholy stillness of the sweltering
+    night, mechanically waving a palm-leaf fan over the drawn, white
+    face of the patient. I can still recall my noddings, my fleeting
+    unconsciousness, when the fan would come to a standstill in my hand,
+    and I woke up with a start and a hideous shock. During all that
+    dreary time I began to watch for the dawn long before it came. When
+    the first faint gray showed through the window-blinds I felt as no
+    doubt a castaway feels when the dim threads of the looked-for ship
+    appear against the sky. I was well and strong, but I was a man,
+    afflicted with a man's infirmity&mdash;lack of endurance.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      He always dealt with himself in this unsparing way; but those who were
+      about him then have left a different story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was all without avail. Mr. Langdon rallied, and early in July there was
+      hope for his recovery. He failed again, and on the afternoon of the 6th of
+      August he died. To Mrs. Clemens, delicate and greatly worn with the
+      anxiety and strain of watching, the blow was a crushing one. It was the
+      beginning of a series of disasters which would mark the entire remaining
+      period of their Buffalo residence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been a partial plan for spending the summer in England, and a
+      more definite one for joining the Twichells in the Adirondacks. Both of
+      these projects were now abandoned. Mrs. Clemens concluded that she would
+      be better at home than anywhere else, and invited an old school friend, a
+      Miss Emma Nye, to visit her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the shadow of death had not been lifted from the Clemens household.
+      Miss Nye presently fell ill with typhoid fever. There followed another
+      long period of anxiety and nursing, ending with the death of the visitor
+      in the new home, September 29th. The young wife was now in very delicate
+      health; genuinely ill, in fact. The happy home had become a place of
+      sorrow-of troubled nights and days. Another friend came to cheer them, and
+      on this friend's departure Mrs. Clemens drove to the railway station. It
+      was a hurried trip over rough streets to catch the train. She was
+      prostrated on her return, and a little later, November 7, 1870, her first
+      child, Langdon, was prematurely born. A dangerous illness followed, and
+      complete recovery was long delayed. But on the 12th the crisis seemed
+      passed, and the new father wrote a playful letter to the Twichells, as
+      coming from the late arrival:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    DEAR UNCLE AND AUNT,&mdash;I came into the world on the 7th inst., and
+    consequently am about five days old now. I have had wretched health
+    ever since I made my appearance... I am not corpulent, nor am
+    I robust in any way. At birth I only weighed four and one-half
+    pounds with my clothes on&mdash;and the clothes were the chief feature of
+    the weight, too, I am obliged to confess, but I am doing finely, all
+    things considered.... My little mother is very bright and
+    cheery, and I guess she is pretty happy, but I don't know what
+    about. She laughs a great deal, notwithstanding she is sick abed.
+
+    P. S.&mdash;Father says I had better write because you will be more
+    interested in me, just now, than in the rest of the family.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      A week later Clemens, as himself, wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Livy is up and the prince keeps her busy and anxious these latter
+    days and nights, but I am a bachelor up-stairs and don't have to
+    jump up and get the soothing sirup, though I would as soon do it as
+    not, I assure you. (Livy will be certain to read this letter.)
+
+    Tell Harmony that I do hold the baby, and do it pretty handily too,
+    though with occasional apprehensions that his loose head will fall
+    off. I don't have to quiet him; he hardly ever utters a cry. He is
+    always thinking about something. He is a patient, good little baby.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Further along he refers to one of his reforms:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Smoke? I always smoke from three till five on Sunday afternoons,
+    and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week, day and night. But
+    when Livy is well I smoke only those two hours on Sunday. I'm boss
+    of the habit now, and shall never let it boss me any more.
+    Originally I quit solely on Livy's account (not that I believed
+    there was the faintest reason in the matter, but just as I would
+    deprive myself of sugar in my coffee if she wished it, or quit
+    wearing socks if she thought them immoral), and I stick to it yet on
+    Livy's account, and shall always continue to do so without a pang.
+    But somehow it seems a pity that you quit, for Mrs. T. didn't mind
+    it, if I remember rightly. Ah, it is turning one's back upon a
+    kindly Providence to spurn away from us the good creature he sent to
+    make the breath of life a luxury as well as a necessity, enjoyable
+    as well as useful. To go quit smoking, when there ain't any
+    sufficient excuse for it!&mdash;why, my old boy, when they used to tell
+    me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew
+    the devotee they were wasting their puerile words upon; they little
+    knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no
+    smoking in it! But I won't persuade you, Twichell&mdash;I won't until I
+    see you again&mdash;but then we'll smoke for a week together, and then
+    shut off again.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0085" id="link2H_4_0085">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXX. LITERARY PROJECTS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The success of the Innocents naturally made a thrifty publisher like Bliss
+      anxious for a second experiment. He had begun early in the year to talk
+      about another book, but nothing had come of it beyond a project or two,
+      more or less hazy and unpursued. Clemens at one time developed a plan for
+      a Noah's Ark book, which was to detail the cruise of the Ark in diaries
+      kept by various members of it-Shem, Ham, and the others. He really wrote
+      some of it at the time, and it was an idea he never entirely lost track
+      of. All along among his manuscripts appear fragments from those ancient
+      voyagers. One of the earlier entries will show the style and purpose of
+      the undertaking. It is from Shem's record:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Friday: Papa's birthday. He is 600 years old. We celebrated it in
+    a big, black tent. Principal men of the tribe present. Afterward
+    they were shown over the ark, which was looking desolate and empty
+    and dreary on account of a misunderstanding with the workmen about
+    wages. Methuselah was as free with his criticisms as usual, and as
+    voluble and familiar, which I and my brothers do not like; for we
+    are past our one hundredth year and married. He still calls me
+    Shemmy, just as he did when I was a child of sixty. I am still but
+    a youth, it is true, but youth has its feelings, and I do not like
+    this....
+
+    Saturday: Keeping the Sabbath.
+
+    Sunday: Papa has yielded the advance and everybody is hard at work.
+    The shipyard is so crowded that the men hinder each other; everybody
+    hurrying or being hurried; the rush and confusion and shouting and
+    wrangling are astonishing to our family, who have always been used
+    to a quiet, country life.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It was from this germ that in a later day grew the diaries of Adam and
+      Eve, though nothing very satisfactory ever came of this preliminary
+      attempt. The author had faith in it, however. To Bliss he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I mean to take plenty of time and pains with the Noah's Ark book;
+    maybe it will be several years before it is all written, but it will
+    be a perfect lightning striker when it is done.
+
+    You can have the first say (that is plain enough) on that or any
+    other book I may prepare for the press, as long as you deal in a
+    fair, open, and honorable way with me. I do not think you will ever
+    find me doing otherwise with you. I can get a book ready for you
+    any time you want it; but you can't want one before this time next
+    year, so I have plenty of time.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Bliss was only temporarily appeased. He realized that to get a book ready
+      by the time he wanted it-a book of sufficient size and importance to
+      maintain the pace set by the Innocents meant rather more immediate action
+      than his author seemed to contemplate. Futhermore, he knew that other
+      publishers were besieging the author of the Innocents; a disquieting
+      thought. In early July, when Mr. Langdon's condition had temporarily
+      improved, Bliss had come to Elmira and proposed a book which should relate
+      the author's travels and experiences in the Far West. It was an inviting
+      subject, and Clemens, by this time more attracted by the idea of
+      authorship and its rewards, readily enough agreed to undertake the volume.
+      He had been offered half profits, and suggested that the new contract be
+      arranged upon these terms. Bliss, figuring on a sale of 100,000 copies,
+      proposed seven and one-half per cent. royalty as an equivalent, and the
+      contract was so arranged. In after-years, when the cost of manufacture and
+      paper had become greatly reduced, Clemens, with but a confused notion of
+      business details, believed he had been misled by Bliss in this contract,
+      and was bitter and resentful accordingly. The figures remain, however, to
+      show that Bliss dealt fairly. Seven and one-half per cent. of a
+      subscription book did represent half profits up to 100,000 copies when the
+      contract was drawn; but it required ten years to sell that quantity, and
+      in that time conditions had changed. Bliss could hardly foresee that these
+      things would be so, and as he was dead when the book touched the 100,000
+      mark he could not explain or readjust matters, whatever might have been
+      his inclination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens was pleased enough with the contract when it was made. To Orion he
+      wrote July 15 (1870):
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Per contract I must have another six-hundred-page book ready for my
+    publisher January 1st, and I only began it to-day. The subject of
+    it is a secret, because I may possibly change it. But as it stands
+    I propose to do up Nevada and California, beginning with the trip
+    across the country in the stage. Have you a memorandum of the route
+    we took, or the names of any of the stations we stopped at? Do you
+    remember any of the scenes, names, incidents, or adventures of the
+    coach trip?&mdash;for I remember next to nothing about the matter. Jot
+    down a foolscap page of items for me. I wish I could have two days'
+    talk with you.
+
+    I suppose I am to get the biggest copyright this time ever paid on a
+    subscription book in this country.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The work so promptly begun made little progress. Hard days of illness and
+      sorrow followed, and it was not until September that it was really under
+      way. His natural enthusiasm over any new undertaking possessed him. On the
+      4th he wrote Bliss:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the past week I have written the first four chapters of the book,
+      and I tell you 'The Innocents Abroad' will have to get up early to beat
+      it. It will be a book that will jump straight into continental celebrity
+      the first month it is issued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He prophesied a sale of 90,000 copies during the first twelve months and
+      declared, &ldquo;I see the capabilities of the subject.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But further disasters, even then impending, made continued effort
+      impossible; the prospect of the new book for a time became gloomy, the
+      idea of it less inspiring. Other plans presented themselves, and at one
+      time he thought of letting the Galaxy publishers get out a volume of his
+      sketches. In October he wrote Bliss that he was &ldquo;driveling along
+      tolerably fair on the book, getting off from twelve to twenty pages of
+      manuscript a day.&rdquo; Bliss naturally discouraged the Galaxy idea, and
+      realizing that the new book might be long delayed, agreed to get out a
+      volume of miscellany sufficiently large and important for subscription
+      sales. He was doubtful of the wisdom of this plan, and when Clemens
+      suddenly proposed a brand-new scheme his publisher very readily agreed to
+      hold back the publication of Sketches indefinitely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The new book was to be adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa,
+      then newly opened and of wide public interest. Clemens did not propose to
+      visit the mines himself, but to let another man do the traveling, make the
+      notes, and write or tell him the story, after which Clemens would enlarge
+      and elaborate it in his own fashion. His adaptation of the letters of
+      Professor Ford, a year earlier, had convinced him that his plan would work
+      out successfully on a larger scale; he fixed upon his old friend, J. H.
+      Riley, of Washington&mdash;[&ldquo;Riley-Newspaper Correspondent.&rdquo;
+      See Sketches.]&mdash;(earlier of San Francisco), as the proper person to
+      do the traveling. At the end of November he wrote Bliss:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I have put my greedy hands upon the best man in America for my
+    purpose, and shall start him to the diamond field in South Africa
+    within a fortnight at my expense... that the book will have a
+    perfectly beautiful sale.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He suggested that Bliss advance Riley's expense money, the amount to be
+      deducted from the first royalty returns; also he proposed an increased
+      royalty, probably in view of the startling splendor of the new idea. Bliss
+      was duly impressed, and the agreement was finally made on a basis of eight
+      and one-half per cent., with an advance of royalty sufficient to see Riley
+      to South Africa and return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens had not yet heard from Riley definitely when he wrote his glowing
+      letter to Bliss. He took it for granted that Riley, always an adventurous
+      sort, would go. When Riley wrote him that he felt morally bound to the
+      Alta, of which he was then Washington correspondent, also in certain other
+      directions till the end of the session, Clemens wrote him at great length,
+      detailing his scheme in full and urging him to write instantly to the Alta
+      and others, asking a release on the ground of being offered a rare
+      opportunity to improve his fortunes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You know right well that I would not have you depart a hair from any
+      obligation for any money. The boundless confidence that I have in you is
+      born of a conviction of your integrity in small as well as in great
+      things. I know plenty of men whose integrity I would trust to here, but
+      not off yonder in Africa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His proposal, in brief, to Riley was that the latter should make the trip
+      to Africa without expense to himself, collect memoranda, and such diamond
+      mines as might be found lying about handy. Upon his return he was to take
+      up temporary residence in the Clemens household until the book was
+      finished, after which large benefits were to accrue to everybody
+      concerned. In the end Riley obtained a release from his obligations and
+      was off for the diamond mines and fortune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor fellow! He was faithful in his mission, and it is said that he really
+      located a mining claim that would have made him and his independent for
+      all time to come; but returning home with his precious memoranda and the
+      news of good fortune, he accidentally wounded himself with a fork while
+      eating; blood-poisoning set in (they called it cancer then), and he was
+      only able to get home to die. His memoranda were never used, his mining
+      claim was never identified. Certainly, death was closely associated with
+      Mark Twain's fortunes during those earlier days of his married life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the whole the Buffalo residence was mainly a gloomy one; its ventures
+      were attended by ill-fortune. For some reason Mark Twain's connection with
+      the Express, while it had given the paper a wide reputation, had not
+      largely increased its subscription. Perhaps his work on it was too varied
+      and erratic. Nasby, who had popularized the Toledo Blade, kept steadily to
+      one line. His farmer public knew always just what to expect when their
+      weekly edition arrived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens and his wife dreamed of a new habitation, and new faces and
+      surroundings. They agreed to offer their home and his interests in the
+      Express for sale. They began to talk of Hartford, where Twichell lived,
+      and where Orion Clemens and his wife had recently located.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain's new fortunes had wrought changes in the affairs of his
+      relatives. Already, before his marriage, he had prospected towns here and
+      there with a view to finding an Eastern residence for his mother and
+      sister, and he had kept Orion's welfare always in mind. When Pamela and
+      her daughter came to his wedding he told them of a little city by the name
+      of Fredonia (New York), not far from Buffalo, where he thought they might
+      find a pleasant home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went in there by night and out by night,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;so
+      I saw none of it, but I had an intelligent, attractive audience. Prospect
+      Fredonia and let me know what it is like. Try to select a place where a
+      good many funerals pass. Ma likes funerals. If you can pick a good funeral
+      corner she will be happy.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in her later life that Jane Clemens had developed this particular
+      passion. She would consult the morning paper for any notice of obsequies
+      and attend those that were easy of access. Watching the processions go by
+      gave her a peculiar joy. Mrs. Moffett and her daughter did go to Fredonia
+      immediately following the wedding. They found it residentially attractive,
+      and rented a house before returning to St. Louis, a promptness that
+      somewhat alarmed the old lady, who did not altogether fancy the idea of
+      being suddenly set down in a strange house, in a strange land, even though
+      it would be within hailing distance of Sam and his new wife. Perhaps the
+      Fredonia funerals were sufficiently numerous and attractive, for she soon
+      became attached to the place, and entered into the spirit of the life
+      there, joining its temperance crusades, and the like, with zest and
+      enjoyment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Onion remained in St. Louis, but when Bliss established a paper called The
+      Publisher, and wanted an editor, he was chosen for the place, originally
+      offered to his brother; the latter, writing to Onion, said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you take the place with an air of perfect confidence in yourself, never
+      once letting anything show in your bearing but a quiet, modest, entire,
+      and perfect confidence in your ability to do pretty much anything in the
+      world, Bliss will think you are the very man he needs; but don't show any
+      shadow of timidity or unsoldierly diffidence, for that sort of thing is
+      fatal to advancement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I warn you thus because you are naturally given to knocking your pot over
+      in this way, when a little judicious conduct would make it boil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0086" id="link2H_4_0086">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXXI. SOME FURTHER LITERARY MATTERS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Meantime The Innocents Abroad had continued to prosper. Its author ranked
+      mainly as a humorist, but of such colossal proportions that his
+      contemporaries had seemed to dwindle; the mighty note of the &ldquo;Frog
+      of Calaveras&rdquo; had dwarfed a score of smaller peepers. At the end of
+      a year from its date of publication the book had sold up to 67,000 and was
+      continuing at the rate of several thousand monthly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are running it in staving, tiptop, first-class style,&rdquo;
+      Clemens wrote to Bliss. &ldquo;On the average ten people a day come and
+      hunt me up to tell me I am a benefactor! I guess that is a part of the
+      program we didn't expect, in the first place.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Apparently the book appealed to readers of every grade. One hundred and
+      fifteen copies were in constant circulation at the Mercantile Library, in
+      New York, while in the most remote cabins of America it was read and
+      quoted. Jack Van Nostrand, making a long horseback tour of Colorado,
+      wrote:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I stopped a week ago in a ranch but a hundred miles from nowhere. The
+      occupant had just two books: the Bible and The Innocents Abroad&mdash;the
+      former in good repair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Across the ocean the book had found no less favor, and was being
+      translated into many and strange tongues. By what seems now some veritable
+      magic its author's fame had become literally universal. The consul at
+      Hongkong, discussing English literature with a Chinese acquaintance, a
+      mandarin, mentioned The Pilgrim's Progress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, indeed, I have read it!&rdquo; the mandarin said, eagerly.
+      &ldquo;We are enjoying it in China, and shall have it soon in our own
+      language. It is by Mark Twain.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In England the book had an amazing vogue from the beginning, and English
+      readers were endeavoring to outdo the Americans in appreciation. Indeed,
+      as a rule, English readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an
+      understanding of Mark Twain's literary value with greater promptness than
+      did the same class of readers at home. There were exceptions, of course.
+      There were English critics who did not take Mark Twain seriously, there
+      were American critics who did. Among the latter was a certain William
+      Ward, an editor of a paper down in Macon, Georgia&mdash;The Beacon. Ward
+      did not hold a place with the great magazine arbiters of literary rank. He
+      was only an obscure country editor, but he wrote like a prophet. His
+      article&mdash;too long to quote in full&mdash;concerned American humorists
+      in general, from Washington Irving, through John Phoenix, Philander
+      Doesticks, Sut Lovingwood, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings and Petroleum V.
+      Nasby, down to Mark Twain. With the exception of the first and last named
+      he says of them:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    They have all had, or will have, their day. Some of them are
+    resting beneath the sod, and others still live whose work will
+    scarcely survive them. Since Irving no humorist in prose has held
+    the foundation of a permanent fame except it be Mark Twain, and
+    this, as in the case of Irving, is because he is a pure writer.
+    Aside from any subtle mirth that lurks through his composition, the
+    grace and finish of his more didactic and descriptive sentences
+    indicate more than mediocrity.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The writer then refers to Mark Twain's description of the Sphinx,
+      comparing it with Bulwer's, which he thinks may have influenced it. He was
+      mistaken in this, for Clemens had not read Bulwer&mdash;never could read
+      him at any length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the English opinions, that of The Saturday Review was perhaps most
+      doubtful. It came along late in 1870, and would hardly be worth recalling
+      if it were not for a resulting, or collateral, interest. Clemens saw
+      notice of this review before he saw the review itself. A paragraph in the
+      Boston Advertiser spoke of The Saturday Review as treating the absurdities
+      of the Innocents from a serious standpoint. The paragraph closed:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    We can imagine the delight of the humorist in reading this tribute
+    to his power; and indeed it is so amusing in itself that he can
+    hardly do better than reproduce the article in full in his next
+    monthly &ldquo;Memoranda.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The old temptation to hoax his readers prompted Mark Twain to &ldquo;reproduce&rdquo;
+      in the Galaxy, not the Review article, which he had not yet seen, but an
+      imaginary Review article, an article in which the imaginary reviewer would
+      be utterly devoid of any sense of humor and treat the most absurd
+      incidents of The New Pilgrim's Progress as if set down by the author in
+      solemn and serious earnest. The pretended review began:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Lord Macaulay died too soon. We never felt this so deeply as when
+    we finished the last chapter of the above-named extravagant work.
+    Macaulay died too soon; for none but he could mete out complete and
+    comprehensive justice to the insolence, the impudence, the
+    presumption, the mendacity, and, above all, the majestic ignorance
+    of this author.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The review goes on to cite cases of the author's gross deception. It says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Let the cultivated English student of human nature picture to
+    himself this Mark Twain as a person capable of doing the following
+    described things; and not only doing them, but, with incredible
+    innocence, printing them tranquilly and calmly in a book. For
+    instance:
+
+    He states that he entered a hair-dresser's in Paris to get a shave,
+    and the first &ldquo;rake&rdquo; the barber gave him with his razor it loosened
+    his &ldquo;hide,&rdquo; and lifted him out of the chair.
+
+    This is unquestionably extravagant. In Florence he was so annoyed
+    by beggars that he pretends to have seized and eaten one in a
+    frantic spirit of revenge. There is, of course, no truth in this.
+    He gives at full length the theatrical program, seventeen or
+    eighteen hundred years old, which he professes to have found in the
+    ruins of the Colosseum, among the dirt-and mold and rubbish. It is
+    a sufficient comment upon this subject to remark that even a cast-
+    iron program would not have lasted so long under the circumstances.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      There were two and one-half pages of this really delightful burlesque
+      which the author had written with huge-enjoyment, partly as a joke on the
+      Review, partly to trick American editors, who he believed would accept it
+      as a fresh and startling proof of the traditional English lack of humor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, as in the early sage-brush hoaxes, he rather overdid the thing.
+      Readers and editors readily enough accepted it as genuine, so far as
+      having come from The Saturday Review; but most of them, regarded it as a
+      delicious bit of humor which Mark Twain himself had taken seriously, and
+      was therefore the one sold. This was certainly startling, and by no means
+      gratifying. In the next issue he undertook that saddest of all
+      performances with tongue or pen: he explained his joke, and insisted on
+      the truth of the explanation. Then he said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    If any man doubts my word now I will kill him. No, I will not kill
+    him; I will win his money. I will bet him twenty to one, and let
+    any New York publisher hold the stakes, that the statements I have
+    above made as to the authorship of the article in question are
+    entirely true.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      But the Cincinnati Enquirer persisted in continuing the joke&mdash;in
+      &ldquo;rubbing it in,&rdquo; as we say now. The Enquirer declared that
+      Mark Twain had been intensely mortified at having been so badly taken in;
+      that his explanation in the Galaxy was &ldquo;ingenious, but unfortunately
+      not true.&rdquo; The Enquirer maintained that The Saturday Review of
+      October 8, 1870, did contain the article exactly as printed in the &ldquo;Memoranda,&rdquo;
+      and advised Mark Twain to admit that he was sold, and say no more about
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was enraging. Mark Twain had his own ideas as to how far a joke might
+      be carried without violence, and this was a good way beyond the limits. He
+      denounced the Enquirer's statement as a &ldquo;pitiful, deliberate
+      falsehood,&rdquo; in his anger falling into the old-time phrasing of
+      newspaper editorial abuse. He offered to bet them a thousand dollars in
+      cash that they could not prove their assertions, and asked pointedly, in
+      conclusion: &ldquo;Will they swallow that falsehood ignominiously, or will
+      they send an agent to the Galaxy office? I think the Cincinnati Enquirer
+      must be edited by children.&rdquo; He promised that if they did not accept
+      his financial proposition he would expose them in the next issue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The incident closed there. He was prevented, by illness in his household,
+      from contributing to the next issue, and the second issue following was
+      his final &ldquo;Memoranda&rdquo; installment. So the matter perished and
+      was forgotten. It was his last editorial hoax. Perhaps he concluded that
+      hoaxes in any form were dangerous playthings; they were too likely to go
+      off at the wrong end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was with the April number (1871) that he concluded his relations with
+      the Galaxy. In a brief valedictory he gave his reasons:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I have now written for the Galaxy a year. For the last eight
+    months, with hardly an interval, I have had for my fellows and
+    comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the sick! During
+    these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle and
+    malignantly threatened two others. All this I have experienced, yet
+    all the time have been under contract to furnish &ldquo;humorous&rdquo; matter,
+    once a month, for this magazine. I am speaking the exact truth in
+    the above details. Please to put yourself in my place and
+    contemplate the grisly grotesqueness of the situation. I think that
+    some of the &ldquo;humor&rdquo; I have written during this period could have
+    been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the solemnity
+    of the occasion.
+
+    The &ldquo;Memoranda&rdquo; will cease permanently with this issue of the
+    magazine. To be a pirate on a low salary, and with no share in the
+    profits of the business, used to be my idea of an uncomfortable
+    occupation, but I have other views now. To be a monthly humorist in
+    a cheerless time is drearier.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Without doubt he felt a glad relief in being rid of this recurrent,
+      imperative demand. He wrote to Orion that he had told the Galaxy people he
+      would not write another article, long or short, for less than $500, and
+      preferred not to do it at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Galaxy department and the work on the Express were Mark Twain's
+      farewell to journalism; for the &ldquo;Memoranda&rdquo; was essentially
+      journalistic, almost as much so, and as liberally, as his old-time
+      Enterprise position. Apparently he wrote with absolute freedom, unhampered
+      by editorial policy or restriction. The result was not always pleasant,
+      and it was not always refined. We may be certain that it was because of
+      Mrs. Clemens's heavy burdens that year, and her consequent inability to
+      exert a beneficent censorship, that more than one&mdash;more than a dozen&mdash;of
+      the &ldquo;Memoranda&rdquo; contributions were permitted to see the light
+      of print.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a whole, the literary result of Mark Twain's Buffalo period does not
+      reach the high standard of The Innocents Abroad. It was a retrogression&mdash;in
+      some measure a return to his earlier form. It had been done under
+      pressure, under heavy stress of mind, as he said. Also there was another
+      reason; neither the subject treated nor the environment of labor had
+      afforded that lofty inspiration which glorified every step of the Quaker
+      City journey. Buffalo was a progressive city&mdash;a beautiful city, as
+      American cities go&mdash;but it was hardly an inspiring city for
+      literature, and a dull, dingy newspaper office was far, very far, from the
+      pleasant decks of the Quaker City, the camp-fires of Syria, the blue sky
+      and sea of the Mediterranean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0087" id="link2H_4_0087">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXXII. THE WRITING OF &ldquo;ROUGHING IT&rdquo;
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The third book published by Mark Twa in was not the Western book he was
+      preparing for Bliss. It was a small volume, issued by Sheldon &amp; Co.,
+      entitled Mark Twain's Autobiography (Burlesque) and First Romance. The
+      Romance was the &ldquo;Awful, Terrible Medieval Romance&rdquo; which had
+      appeared in the Express at the beginning of 1870. The burlesque
+      autobiography had not previously appeared. The two made a thin little
+      book, which, in addition to its literary features, had running through it
+      a series of full-page, irrelevant pictures&mdash;-cartoons of the Erie
+      Railroad Ring, presented as illustrations of a slightly modified version
+      of &ldquo;The House That Jack Built.&rdquo; The &ldquo;House&rdquo; was
+      the Erie headquarters, the purpose being to illustrate the swindling
+      methods of the Ring. The faces of Jay Gould, James Fisk, Jr., John T.
+      Hoffman, and others of the combination, are chiefly conspicuous. The
+      publication was not important, from any standpoint. Literary burlesque is
+      rarely important, and it was far from Mark Twain's best form of
+      expression. A year or two later he realized the mistake of this book,
+      bought in the plates and destroyed them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime the new Western book was at a standstill. To Orion, in March, he
+      wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I am still nursing Livy night and day. I am nearly worn out. We
+    shall go to Elmira ten days hence (if Livy can travel on a mattress
+    then), and stay there until I finish the California book, say three
+    months. But I can't begin work right away when I get there; must
+    have a week's rest, for I have been through thirty days' terrific
+    siege.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He promised to forward some of the manuscript soon.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Hold on four or five days and I will see if I can get a few chapters
+    fixed to send to Bliss....
+
+    I have offered this house and the Express for sale, and when we go
+    to Elmira we leave here for good. I shall not select a new home
+    till the book is finished, but we have little doubt that Hartford
+    will be the place.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He disposed of his interest in the Express in April, at a sacrifice of
+      $10,000 on the purchase price. Mrs. Clemens and the baby were able to
+      travel, and without further delay he took them to Elmira, to Quarry Farm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Quarry Farm, the home of Mrs. Clemens's sister, Mrs. Theodore Crane, is a
+      beautiful hilltop, with a wide green slope, overlooking the hazy city and
+      the Chemung River, beyond which are the distant hills. It was bought quite
+      incidentally by Mr. and Mrs. Langdon, who, driving by one evening, stopped
+      to water the horses and decided that it would make a happy summer retreat,
+      where the families could combine their housekeeping arrangements during
+      vacation days. When the place had first been purchased, they had debated
+      on a name for it. They had tried several, among them &ldquo;Go-as-you-please
+      Hall,&rdquo; &ldquo;Crane's Nest,&rdquo; and had finally agreed upon
+      &ldquo;Rest and Be Thankful.&rdquo; But this was only its official name.
+      There was an abandoned quarry up the hill, a little way from the house,
+      and the title suggested by Thomas K. Beecher came more naturally to the
+      tongue. The place became Quarry Farm, and so remains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens and his wife had fully made up their minds to live in Hartford.
+      They had both conceived an affection for the place, Clemens mainly because
+      of Twichell, while both of them yearned for the congenial literary and
+      social atmosphere, and the welcome which they felt awaited them. Hartford
+      was precisely what Buffalo in that day was not&mdash;a home for the
+      literary man. It held a distinguished group of writers, most of whom the
+      Clemenses already knew. Furthermore, with Bliss as publisher of the Mark
+      Twain books, it held their chief business interests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their plans for going were not very definite as to time. Clemens found
+      that his work went better at the farm, and that Mrs. Clemens and the
+      delicate baby daily improved. They decided to remain at Quarry Farm for
+      the summer, their first summer in that beautiful place which would mean so
+      much to them in the years to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was really Joe Goodman, as much as anything, that stirred a fresh
+      enthusiasm in the new book. Goodman arrived just when the author's spirits
+      were at low ebb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Joe,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I guess I'm done for. I don't appear to
+      be able to get along at all with my work, and what I do write does not
+      seem valuable. I'm afraid I'll never be able to reach the standard of 'The
+      Innocents Abroad' again. Here is what I have written, Joe. Read it, and
+      see if that is your opinion.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Goodman took the manuscript and seated himself in a chair, while Clemens
+      went over to a table and pretended to work. Goodman read page after page,
+      critically, and was presently absorbed in it. Clemens watched him
+      furtively, till he could stand it no longer. Then he threw down his pen,
+      exclaiming:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I knew it! I knew it! I am writing nothing but rot. You have sat
+      there all this time reading without a smile, and pitying the ass I am
+      making of myself. But I am not wholly to blame. I am not strong enough to
+      fight against fate. I have been trying to write a funny book, with dead
+      people and sickness everywhere. Mr. Langdon died first, then a young lady
+      in our house, and now Mrs. Clemens and the baby have been at the point of
+      death all winter! Oh, Joe, I wish to God I could die myself!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mark,&rdquo; said Joe, &ldquo;I was reading critically, not for
+      amusement, and so far as I have read, and can judge, this is one of the
+      best things you have ever written. I have found it perfectly absorbing.
+      You are doing a great book!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens knew that Goodman never spoke except from conviction, and the
+      verdict was to him like a message of life handed down by an archangel. He
+      was a changed man instantly. He was all enthusiasm, full of his subject,
+      eager to go on. He proposed to pay Goodman a salary to stay there and keep
+      him company and furnish him with inspiration&mdash;the Pacific coast
+      atmosphere and vernacular, which he feared had slipped away from him.
+      Goodman declined the salary, but extended his visit as long as his plans
+      would permit, and the two had a happy time together, recalling old
+      Comstock days. Every morning, for a month or more, they used to tramp over
+      the farm. They fell into the habit of visiting the old quarry and pawing
+      over the fragments in search of fossil specimens. Both of them had a
+      poetic interest in geology, its infinite remotenesses and its testimonies.
+      Without scientific knowledge, they took a deep pleasure in accumulating a
+      collection, which they arranged on boards torn from an old fence, until
+      they had enough specimens to fill a small museum. They imagined they could
+      distinguish certain geological relations and families, and would talk
+      about trilobites, the Old Red Sandstone period, and the azoic age, or
+      follow random speculation to far-lying conclusions, developing vague
+      humors of phrase and fancy, having altogether a joyful good time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another interest that developed during Goodman's stay was in one Ruloff,
+      who was under death sentence for a particularly atrocious murder. The
+      papers were full of Ruloff's prodigious learning. It was said that he had
+      in preparation a work showing the unity of all languages. Goodman and
+      Clemens agreed that Ruloff's death would be a great loss to mankind, even
+      though he was clearly a villain and deserved his sentence. They decided
+      that justice would be served just as well if some stupid person were hung
+      in his place, and following out this fancy Clemens one morning put aside
+      his regular work and wrote an article to the Tribune, offering to supply a
+      substitute for Ruloff. He signed it simply &ldquo;Samuel Langhorne,&rdquo;
+      and it was published as a serious communication, without comment, so far
+      as the Tribune was concerned. Other papers, however, took it up and it was
+      widely copied and commented upon. Apparently no one ever identified, Mark
+      Twain with the authorship of the letter, which, by the way, does not
+      appear to have prolonged Ruloff's earthly usefulness.&mdash;[The reader
+      will find the Ruloff letter in full under Appendix K, at the end of last
+      volume.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Life at the farm may have furnished agricultural inspiration, for Clemens
+      wrote something about Horace Greeley's farming, also a skit concerning
+      Henry Ward Beecher's efforts in that direction. Of Mr. Beecher's farming
+      he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His strawberries would be a comfortable success if robins would eat
+      turnips.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The article amused Beecher, and perhaps Greeley was amused too, for he
+      wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    MARK,&mdash;You are mistaken as to my criticisms on your farming. I
+    never publicly made any, while you have undertaken to tell the exact
+    cost per pint of my potatoes and cabbages, truly enough the
+    inspiration of genius. If you will really betake yourself to
+    farming, or even to telling what you know about it, rather than what
+    you don't know about mine, I will not only refrain from disparaging
+    criticism, but will give you my blessing.
+
+                     Yours,  HORACE GREELEY.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The letter is in Mr. Greeley's characteristic scrawl, and no doubt
+      furnished inspiration for the turnip story in 'Roughing It', also the
+      model for the pretended facsimile of Greeley's writing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Altogether that was a busy, enterprising summer at Quarry Farm. By the
+      middle of May, Clemens wrote to Bliss that he had twelve hundred
+      manuscript pages of the new book already written, and that he was turning
+      out the remainder at the rate of from thirty to sixty-five per day. He was
+      in high spirits by this time. The family health had improved, and
+      prospects were bright.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have enough manuscript on hand now to make (allowing for engravings)
+      about four hundred pages of the book, consequently am two-thirds done. I
+      intended to run up to Hartford about the middle of the week and take it
+      along, but I find myself so thoroughly interested in my work now (a thing
+      I have not experienced for months) that I can't bear to lose a single
+      moment of the inspiration. So I will stay here and peg away as long as it
+      lasts. My present idea is to write as much more as I have already written,
+      and then collect from the mass the very best chapters and discard the
+      rest. When I get it done I want to see the man who will begin to read it
+      and not finish it. Nothing grieves me now; nothing troubles me, nothing
+      bothers me or gets my attention. I don't think of anything but the book,
+      and don't have an hour's unhappiness about anything, and don't care two
+      cents whether school keeps or not. The book will be done soon now. It will
+      be a starchy book; the dedication will be worth the price of the volume.
+      Thus:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                   TO THE LATE CAIN
+                  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
+
+    not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little
+    respect; not on account of sympathy for him, for his bloody deed
+    places him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking, but
+    out of a mere humane commiseration for him, in that it was his
+    misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent
+    insanity plea.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Probably Mrs. Clemens diverted this picturesque dedication in favor of the
+      Higbie inscription, or perhaps the author never really intended the
+      literary tribute to Cain. The impulse that inspired it, however, was
+      characteristic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a postscript to this letter he adds:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    My stock is looking up. I am getting the bulliest offers for books
+    and almanacs; am flooded with lecture invitations, and one
+    periodical offers me $6,000 cash for twelve articles of any length,
+    and on any subject, treated humorously or otherwise.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He set in to make hay while the sun was shining. In addition to the
+      California book, which was now fast nearing completion, he discussed a
+      scheme with Goodman for a six-hundred-page work which they were to do
+      jointly; he planned and wrote one or two scenes from a Western play, to be
+      built from episodes in the new book (one of them was the &ldquo;Arkansas&rdquo;
+      incident, related in Chapter XXXI); he perfected one of his several
+      inventions&mdash;an automatically adjusting vest-strap; he wrote a number
+      of sketches, made an occasional business trip to New York and Hartford;
+      prospected the latter place for a new home. The shadow which had hung over
+      the sojourn in Buffalo seemed to have lifted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had promised Bliss some contributions for his new paper, and in June he
+      sent three sketches. In an accompanying letter he says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Here are three articles which you may have if you will pay $125 for
+    the lot. If you don't want them I'll sell them to the Galaxy, but
+    not for a cent less than three times the money.... If you take them
+    pay one-tenth of the $125 in weekly instalments to Orion till he has
+    received it all.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He reconsidered his resolution not to lecture again, and closed with
+      Redpath for the coming season. He found himself in a lecture-writing
+      fever. He wrote three of them in succession: one on Artemus Ward, another
+      on &ldquo;Reminiscences of Some Pleasant Characters I Have Met,&rdquo; and
+      a third one based on chapters from the new book. Of the &ldquo;Reminiscence&rdquo;
+      lecture he wrote Redpath:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It covers my whole acquaintance; kings, lunatics, idiots, and all.&rdquo;
+      Immediately afterward he wrote that he had prepared still another lecture,
+      &ldquo;title to be announced later.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;During July I'll decide which one I like best,&rdquo; he said. He
+      instructed Redpath not to make engagements for him to lecture in churches.
+      &ldquo;I never made a success of a lecture in a church yet. People are
+      afraid to laugh in a church.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redpath was having difficulties in arranging a circuit to suit him.
+      Clemens had prejudices against certain towns and localities, prejudices
+      that were likely to change overnight. In August he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    DEAR RED,&mdash;I am different from other women; my mind changes oftener.
+    People who have no mind can easily be stead fast and firm, but when
+    a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea
+    of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo.
+    See? Therefore, if you will notice, one week I am likely to give
+    rigid instructions to confine me to New England; the next week send
+    me to Arizona; the next week withdraw my name; the next week give
+    you full, untrammeled swing; and the week following modify it. You
+    must try to keep the run of my mind, Redpath that is your business,
+    being the agent, and it always was too many for me.... Now about
+    the West this week, I am willing that you shall retain all the
+    Western engagements. But what I shall want next week is still with
+    God.
+                         Yours,  MARK.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He was in Hartford when this letter was written, arranging for residence
+      there and the removal of his belongings. He finally leased the fine Hooker
+      house on Ford Street, in that pleasant seclusion known as Nook Farm&mdash;the
+      literary part of Hartford, which included the residence of Charles Dudley
+      Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. He arranged for possession of the
+      premises October 1st. So the new home was settled upon; then learning that
+      Nasby was to be in Boston, he ran over to that city for a few days of
+      recreation after his season's labors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Preparations for removal to Hartford were not delayed. The Buffalo
+      property was disposed of, the furnishings were packed and shipped away.
+      The house which as bride and groom they had entered so happily was left
+      empty and deserted, never to be entered by them again. In the year and a
+      half of their occupancy it had seen well-nigh all the human round, all
+      that goes to make up the happiness and the sorrow of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0088" id="link2H_4_0088">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXXIII. LECTURING DAYS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Life in Hartford, in the autumn of 1871, began in the letter, rather than
+      in the spirit. The newcomers were received with a wide, neighborly
+      welcome, but the disorder of establishment and the almost immediate
+      departure of the head of the household on a protracted lecturing tour were
+      disquieting things; the atmosphere of the Clemens home during those early
+      Hartford days gave only a faint promise of its future loveliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As in a far later period, Mark Twain had resorted to lecturing to pay off
+      debt. He still owed a portion of his share in the Express; also he had
+      been obliged to obtain an advance from the lecture bureau. He dreaded, as
+      always, the tedium of travel, the clatter of hotel life, the monotony of
+      entertainment, while, more than most men, he loved the tender luxury of
+      home. It was only that he could not afford to lose the profit offered on
+      the platform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His season opened at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, October 16th, and his
+      schedule carried him hither and thither, to and fro, over distances that
+      lie between Boston and Chicago. There were opportunities to run into
+      Hartford now and then, when he was not too far away, and in November he
+      lectured there on Artemus Ward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He changed his entertainment at least twice that season. He began with the
+      &ldquo;Reminiscences,&rdquo; the lecture which he said would treat of all
+      those whom he had met, &ldquo;idiots, lunatics, and kings,&rdquo; but he
+      did not like it, or it did not go well. He wrote Redpath of the Artemus
+      Ward address:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It suits me, and I'll never deliver the nasty, nauseous
+      'Reminiscences' any more.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the Ward lecture was good for little more than a month, for on
+      December 8th he wrote again:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Notify all hands that from this time I shall talk nothing but
+    selections from my forthcoming book, 'Roughing It'. Tried it twice
+    last night; suits me tiptop.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      And somewhat later:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Had a splendid time with a splendid audience in Indianapolis last
+    night; a perfectly jammed house, just as I have all the time out
+    here.... I don't care now to have any appointments canceled. I'll
+    even &ldquo;fetch&rdquo; those Dutch Pennsylvanians with this lecture.
+
+    Have paid up $4,000 indebtedness. You are the last on my list.
+    Shall begin to pay you in a few days, and then I shall be a free man
+    again.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Undoubtedly he reveled in the triumphs of a platform tour, though at no
+      time did he regard it as a pleasure excursion. During those early weeks
+      the proofs of his new book, chasing him from place to place, did not add
+      to his comfort. Still, with large, substantial rewards in hand and in
+      prospect, one could endure much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the neighborhood of Boston there were other compensations. He could
+      spend a good part of his days at the Lyceum headquarters, in School
+      Street, where there was always congenial fellowship&mdash;Nasby, Josh
+      Billings, and the rest of the peripatetic group that about the end of the
+      year collected there. Their lectures were never tried immediately in
+      Boston, but in the outlying towns; tried and perfected&mdash;or discarded.
+      When the provincial audiences were finally satisfied, then the final. test
+      in the Boston Music Hall was made, and if this proved successful the rest
+      of the season was safe. Redpath's lecturers put up at Young's Hotel, and
+      spent their days at the bureau, smoking and spinning yarns, or talking
+      shop. Early in the evening they scattered to the outlying towns, Lowell,
+      Lexington, Concord, New Bedford. There is no such a condition to-day:
+      lecturers are few, lecture bureaus obscure; there are no great reputations
+      made on the platform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither is there any such distinct group of humorists as the one just
+      mentioned. Humor has become universal since then. Few writers of this age
+      would confess to taking their work so seriously as to be at all times
+      unsmiling in it; only about as many, in fact, as in that day would confess
+      to taking their work so lightly that they could regard life's sterner
+      phases and philosophies with a smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Josh Billings was one of the gentlest and loveliest of our pioneers of
+      laughter. The present generation is not overfamiliar even with his name,
+      but both the name and sayings of that quaint soul were on everybody's lips
+      at the time of which we are writing. His true name was Henry W. Shaw, and
+      he was a genuine, smiling philosopher, who might have built up a more
+      permanent and serious reputation had he not been induced to disfigure his
+      maxims with ridiculous spelling in order to popularize them and make them
+      bring a living price. It did not matter much with Nasby's work. An assumed
+      illiteracy belonged with the side of life which he presented; but it is
+      pathetic now to consider some of the really masterly sayings of Josh
+      Billings presented in that uncouth form which was regarded as a part of
+      humor a generation ago. Even the aphorisms that were essentially humorous
+      lose value in that degraded spelling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When a man starts down hill everything is greased for the occasion,&rdquo;
+      could hardly be improved upon by distorted orthography, and here are a few
+      more gems which have survived that deadly blight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some folks mistake vivacity for wit; whereas the difference between
+      vivacity and wit is the same as the difference between the lightning-bug
+      and the lightning.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't take the bull by the horns-take him by the tail; then you can
+      let go when you want to.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The difficulty is not that we know so much, but that we know so
+      much that isn't so.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Josh Billings, Nasby, and Mark Twain were close friends. They had
+      themselves photographed in a group, and there was always some pleasantry
+      going on among them. Josh Billings once wrote on &ldquo;Lekturing,&rdquo;
+      and under the head of &ldquo;Rule Seven,&rdquo; which treated of unwisdom
+      of inviting a lecturer to a private house, he said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Think of asking Mark Twain home with yu, for instance. Yure good
+    wife has put her house in apple-pie order for the ockashun;
+    everything is just in the right place. Yu don't smoke in yure
+    house, never. Yu don't put yure feet on the center-table, yu don't
+    skatter the nuzepapers all over the room, in utter confushion: order
+    and ekonemy governs yure premises. But if yu expeckt Mark Twain to
+    be happy, or even kumfortable yu hav got to buy a box of cigars
+    worth at least seventeen dollars and yu hav got to move all the
+    tender things out ov yure parlor. Yu hav got to skatter all the
+    latest papers around the room careless, you hav got to hav a pitcher
+    ov icewater handy, for Mark is a dry humorist. Yu hav got to ketch
+    and tie all yure yung ones, hed and foot, for Mark luvs babys only
+    in theory; yu hav got to send yure favorite kat over to the nabors
+    and hide yure poodle. These are things that hav to be done, or Mark
+    will pak hiz valise with hiz extry shirt collar and hiz lektur on
+    the Sandwich Islands, and travel around yure streets, smoking and
+    reading the sighns over the store doorways untill lektur time
+    begins.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      As we-are not likely to touch upon Mark Twain's lecturing, save only
+      lightly, hereafter, it may be as well to say something of his method at
+      this period. At all places visited by lecturers there was a committee, and
+      it was the place of the chairman to introduce the lecturer, a privilege
+      which he valued, because it gave him a momentary association with
+      distinction and fame. Clemens was a great disappointment to these
+      officials. He had learned long ago that he could introduce himself more
+      effectively than any one else. His usual formula was to present himself as
+      the chairman of the committee, introducing the lecturer of the evening;
+      then, with what was in effect a complete change of personality, to begin
+      his lecture. It was always startling and amusing, always a success; but
+      the papers finally printed this formula, which took the freshness out of
+      it, so that he had to invent others. Sometimes he got up with the frank
+      statement that he was introducing himself because he had never met any one
+      who could pay a proper tribute to his talents; but the newspapers printed
+      that too, and he often rose and began with no introduction at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever his method of beginning, Mark Twain's procedure probably was the
+      purest exemplification of the platform entertainer's art which this
+      country has ever seen. It was the art that makes you forget the
+      artisanship, the art that made each hearer forget that he was not being
+      personally entertained by a new and marvelous friend, who had traveled a
+      long way for his particular benefit. One listener has written that he sat
+      &ldquo;simmering with laughter&rdquo; through what he supposed was the
+      continuation of the introduction, waiting for the traditional lecture to
+      begin, when presently the lecturer, with a bow, disappeared, and it was
+      over. The listener looked at his watch; he had been there more than an
+      hour. He thought it could be no more than ten minutes, at most. Many have
+      tried to set down something of the effect his art produced on them, but
+      one may not clearly convey the story of a vanished presence and a silent
+      voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were other pleasant associations in Boston. Howells was there, and
+      Aldrich; also Bret Harte, who had finished his triumphal progress across
+      the continent to join the Atlantic group. Clemens appears not to have met
+      Aldrich before, though their acquaintance had begun a year earlier, when
+      Aldrich, as editor of Every Saturday, had commented on a poem entitled,
+      &ldquo;The Three Aces,&rdquo; which had appeared in the Buffalo Express.
+      Aldrich had assumed the poem to be the work of Mark Twain, and had
+      characterized it as &ldquo;a feeble imitation of Bret Harte's 'Heathen
+      Chinee.'&rdquo; Clemens, in a letter, had mildly protested as to the
+      charge of authorship, and Aldrich had promptly printed the letter with
+      apologetic explanation. A playful exchange of personal letters followed,
+      and the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the letters has a special interest here. Clemens had followed his
+      protest with an apology for it, asking that no further notice be taken of
+      the matter. Aldrich replied that it was too late to prevent &ldquo;doing
+      him justice,&rdquo; as his explanation was already on the press, but that
+      if Clemens insisted he would withdraw it in the next issue. Clemens then
+      wrote that he did not want it withdrawn, and explained that he hated to be
+      accused of plagiarizing Bret Harte, to whom he was deeply indebted for
+      literary schooling in the California days. Continuing he said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot
+    through Harte's brain? It was this. When they were trying to
+    decide upon a vignette cover for the Overland a grizzly bear (of the
+    arms of the State of California) was chosen. Nahl Bros. carved him
+    and the page was printed with him in it.
+
+    As a bear he was a success. He was a good bear, but then, it was
+    objected, he was an objectless bear&mdash;a bear that meant nothing,
+    signified nothing, simply stood there, snarling over his shoulder at
+    nothing, and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured
+    intruder upon the fair page. All hands said that none were
+    satisfied; they hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as
+    much to have him there when there was no point to him. But
+    presently Harte took a pencil and drew two simple lines under his
+    feet, and behold he was a magnificent success!&mdash;the ancient symbol
+    of California savagery, snarling at the approaching type of high and
+    progressive civilization, the first Overland locomotive! I just
+    think that was nothing less than an inspiration.&mdash;[The &ldquo;bear&rdquo; was
+    that which has always appeared on the Overland cover; the &ldquo;two
+    lines&rdquo; formed a railway track under his feet. Clemens's original
+    letter contained crude sketches illustrating these things.]
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Among the Boston group was another Californian, Ralph Keeler, an
+      eccentric, gifted, and altogether charming fellow, whom Clemens had known
+      on the Pacific slope. Keeler had been adopted by the Boston writers, and
+      was grateful and happy accordingly. He was poor of purse, but
+      inexhaustibly rich in the happier gifts of fortune. He was unfailingly
+      buoyant, light-hearted, and hopeful. On an infinitesimal capital he had
+      made a tour of many lands, and had written of it for the Atlantic. In that
+      charmed circle he was as overflowingly happy as if he had been admitted to
+      the company of the gods. Keeler was affectionately regarded by all who
+      knew him, and he offered a sort of worship in return. He often accompanied
+      Mark Twain on his lecture engagements to the various outlying towns, and
+      Clemens brought him back to his hotel for breakfast, where they had good,
+      enjoyable talks together. Once Keeler came eagerly to the hotel and made
+      his way up to Clemens's room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come with me,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Quick!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it? What's happened?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't wait to talk. Come with me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They tramped briskly through the streets till they reached the public
+      library, entered, Keeler leading the way, not stopping till he faced a row
+      of shelves filled with books. He pointed at one of them, his face radiant
+      with joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Do you see it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens looked carefully now and identified one of the books as a
+      still-born novel which Keeler had published.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is a library,&rdquo; said Keeler, eagerly, &ldquo;and they've
+      got it!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His whole being was aglow with the wonder of it. He had been
+      investigating; the library records showed that in the two years the book
+      had been there it had been taken out and read three times! It never
+      occurred to Clemens even to smile. Knowing Mark Twain, one would guess
+      that his eyes were likely to be filled with tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his book about Mark Twain, Howells tells of a luncheon which Keeler
+      gave to his more famous associates&mdash;Aldrich, Fields, Harte, Clemens,
+      and Howells himself&mdash;a merry informal occasion. Says Howells:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and
+    aimless and joyful talk&mdash;play, beginning and ending nowhere, of
+    eager laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat-
+    lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional
+    concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it
+    gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full of
+    good-fellowship, Bret Harte's leering dramatization of Clemens's
+    mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates. &ldquo;Why,
+    fellows,&rdquo; he spluttered, &ldquo;this is the dream of Mark's life,&rdquo; and I
+    remember the glance from under Clemens's feathery eyebrows which
+    betrayed his enjoyment of the fun.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Very likely Keeler gave that luncheon in celebration of his book's
+      triumph; it would be like him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Keeler's end was a mystery. The New York Tribune commissioned him to go to
+      Cuba to report the facts of some Spanish outrages. He sailed from New York
+      in the steamer, and was last seen alive the night before the vessel
+      reached Havana. He had made no secret of his mission, but had discussed it
+      in his frank, innocent way. There were some Spanish military men on the
+      ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens, commenting on the matter, once said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It may be that he was not flung into the sea, still the belief was
+      general that that was what had happened.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his book Howells refers to the doubt with which Mark Twain was then
+      received by the polite culture of Boston; which, on the other hand,
+      accepted Bret Harte as one of its own, forgiving even social shortcomings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reason is not difficult to understand. Harte had made his appeal with
+      legitimate fiction of the kind which, however fresh in flavor and
+      environment, was of a sort to be measured and classified. Harte spoke a
+      language they could understand; his humor, his pathos, his point of view
+      were all recognizable. It was an art already standardized by a master. It
+      is no reflection on the genius of Bret Harte to liken his splendid
+      achievements to those of Charles Dickens. Much of Harte's work is in no
+      way inferior to that of his great English prototype. Dickens never wrote a
+      better short story than &ldquo;The Outcasts of Poker Flats.&rdquo; He
+      never wrote as good a short story as &ldquo;The Luck of Roaring Camp.&rdquo;
+      Boston critics promptly realized these things and gave Harte his correct
+      rating. That they failed to do this with Mark Twain, lay chiefly in the
+      fact that he spoke to them in new and startling tongues. His gospels were
+      likely to be heresies; his literary eccentricities were all unclassified.
+      Of the ultrafastidious set Howells tells us that Charles Eliot Norton and
+      Prof. Francis J. Child were about the only ones who accorded him
+      unqualified approval. The others smiled and enjoyed him, but with that
+      condescension which the courtier is likely to accord to motley and the cap
+      and bells. Only the great, simple-hearted, unbiased multitude, the public,
+      which had no standards but the direct appeal from one human heart to
+      another, could recognize immediately his mightier heritage, could exalt
+      and place him on the throne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0089" id="link2H_4_0089">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXXIV. &ldquo;ROUGHING IT&rdquo;.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      Telegram to Redpath:
+    </h3>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    How in the name of God does a man find his way from here to Amherst,
+    and when must he start? Give me full particulars, and send a man
+    with me. If I had another engagement I would rot before I would
+    fill it.                S. L. CLEMENS.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This was at the end of February, and he believed that he was standing on
+      the platform for the last time. He loathed the drudgery of the work, and
+      he considered there was no further need. He was no longer in debt, and his
+      income he accounted ample. His new book, 'Roughing It',&mdash;[It was
+      Bliss who had given the new book the title of Roughing It. Innocents at
+      Home had been its provision title, certainly a misleading one, though it
+      has been retained in England for the second volume; for what reason it
+      would be difficult to explain.]&mdash;had had a large advance sale, and
+      its earnings promised to rival those of the 'Innocents'. He resolved in
+      the future to confine himself to the trade and profits of authorship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The new book had advantages in its favor. Issued early in the year, it was
+      offered at the best canvassing season; particularly so, as the author's
+      lectures had prepared the public for its reception. Furthermore, it dealt
+      with the most picturesque phases of American life, scenes and episodes
+      vastly interesting at that time, and peculiarly adapted to Mark Twain's
+      literary expression. In a different way 'Roughing It' is quite as
+      remarkable as 'The Innocents Abroad.' If it has less charm, it has greater
+      interest, and it is by no means without charm. There is something
+      delicious, for instance, in this bit of pure enjoyment of the first day's
+      overland travel:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    It was now just dawn, and as we stretched our cramped legs full
+    length on the mail-sacks, and gazed out through the windows across
+    the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist to where
+    there was an expectant look in the Eastern horizon, our perfect
+    enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy. The
+    stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping the
+    curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle
+    swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses' hoofs,
+    the cracking of the driver's whip, and his &ldquo;Hi-yi! g'lang!&rdquo; were
+    music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared to give
+    us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after us
+    with interest and envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the
+    pipe of peace, and compared all this luxury with the years of
+    tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was
+    only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had
+    found it.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Also, there is that lofty presentation of South Pass, and a picture of the
+      alkali desert, so parching, so withering in its choking realism, that it
+      makes the throat ache and the tongue dry to read it. Just a bit of the
+      desert in passing:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    The sun beats down with a dead, blistering, relentless malignity;
+    the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but
+    scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface&mdash;it is absorbed
+    before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air
+    stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the
+    brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature visible in any
+    direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its
+    monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound, not a sigh,
+    not a whisper, not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of
+    bird; not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that
+    dead air.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      As for the humor of the book, it has been chiefly famous for that. &ldquo;Buck
+      Fanshaw's Funeral&rdquo; has become a classic, and the purchase of the
+      &ldquo;Mexican Plug.&rdquo; But it is to no purpose to review the book
+      here in detail. We have already reviewed the life and environment out of
+      which it grew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without doubt the story would have contained more of the poetic and
+      contemplative, in which he was always at his best, if the subject itself,
+      as in the Innocents, had lent itself oftener to this form of writing. It
+      was the lack of that halo perhaps which caused the new book never quite to
+      rank with its great forerunner in public favor. There could hardly be any
+      other reason. It presented a fresher theme; it abounded in humor;
+      technically, it was better written; seemingly it had all the elements of
+      popularity and of permanence. It did, in fact, possess these qualities,
+      but its sales, except during the earlier months of its canvass, never
+      quite equaled those of The Innocents Abroad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Roughing It' was accepted by the public for just what it was and is, a
+      great picture of the Overland Pioneer days&mdash;a marvelous picture of
+      frontier aspects at a time when the frontier itself, even with its
+      hardships and its tragedies, was little more than a vast primal joke; when
+      all frontiersmen were obliged to be laughing philosophers in order to
+      survive the stress of its warfares.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A word here about this Western humor: It is a distinct product. It grew
+      out of a distinct condition&mdash;the battle with the frontier. The fight
+      was so desperate, to take it seriously was to surrender. Women laughed
+      that they might not weep; men, when they could no longer swear. &ldquo;Western
+      humor&rdquo; was the result. It is the freshest, wildest humor in the
+      world, but there is tragedy behind it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Roughing It' presented the picture of those early conditions with the
+      startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which, in effect, it was.
+      It was not accurate history, even of the author's own adventures. It was
+      true in its aspects, rather than in its details. The greater artist
+      disregards the truth of detail to render more strikingly a phase or a
+      condition, to produce an atmosphere, to reconstruct a vanished time. This
+      was what Mark Twain did in 'Roughing It'. He told the story of overland
+      travel and the frontier, for his own and future generations, in what is
+      essentially a picaresque novel, a work of unperishing fiction, founded on
+      fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sales of 'Roughing It' during the first three months aggregated nearly
+      forty thousand copies, and the author was lavishly elate accordingly. To
+      Orion (who had already closed his career with Bliss, by exercise of those
+      hereditary eccentricities through which he so often came to grief) he gave
+      $1,000 out of the first royalty check, in acknowledgment of the memorandum
+      book and other data which Orion had supplied. Clemens believed the new
+      book would sell one hundred thousand copies within the year; but the sale
+      diminished presently, and at the end of the first year it was considerably
+      behind the Innocents for the same period. As already stated, it required
+      ten years for Roughing It to reach the one-hundred-thousand mark, which
+      the Innocents reached in three.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0090" id="link2H_4_0090">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXXV. A BIRTH, A DEATH, AND A VOYAGE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The year 1872 was an eventful one in Mark Twain's life. At Elmira, on
+      March 19th, his second child, a little girl, whom they named Susan Olivia,
+      was born. On June 2d, in the new home in Hartford, to which they had
+      recently moved, his first child, a little boy, Langdon, died. He had never
+      been strong, his wavering life had often been uncertain, always more of
+      the spirit than the body, and in Elmira he contracted a heavy cold, or
+      perhaps it was diphtheria from the beginning. In later years, whenever
+      Clemens spoke of the little fellow, he never failed to accuse himself of
+      having been the cause of the child's death. It was Mrs. Clemens's custom
+      to drive out each morning with Langdon, and once when she was unable to go
+      Clemens himself went instead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should not have been permitted to do it,&rdquo; he said,
+      remembering. &ldquo;I was not qualified for any such responsibility as
+      that. Some one should have gone who had at least the rudiments of a mind.
+      Necessarily I would lose myself dreaming. After a while the coachman
+      looked around and noticed that the carriage-robes had dropped away from
+      the little fellow, and that he was exposed to the chilly air. He called my
+      attention to it, but it was too late. Tonsilitis or something of the sort
+      set in, and he did not get any better, so we took him to Hartford. There
+      it was pronounced diphtheria, and of course he died.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So, with or without reason, he added the blame of another tragedy to the
+      heavy burden of remorse which he would go on piling up while he lived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The blow was a terrible one to Mrs. Clemens; even the comfort of the
+      little new baby on her arm could not ease the ache in her breast. It
+      seemed to her that death was pursuing her. In one of her letters she says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel so often as if my path is to be lined with graves,&rdquo;
+      and she expresses the wish that she may drop out of life herself before
+      her sister and her husband&mdash;a wish which the years would grant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They did not return to Elmira, for it was thought that the air of the
+      shore would be better for the little girl; so they spent the summer at
+      Saybrook, Connecticut, at Fenwick Hall, leaving Orion and his wife in
+      charge of the house at Hartford.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond a few sketches, Clemens did very little literary work that summer,
+      but he planned a trip to Europe, and he invented what is still known and
+      sold as the &ldquo;Mark Twain Scrap-Book.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wrote to Orion of his proposed trip to England, and dilated upon his
+      scrap-book with considerable enthusiasm. The idea had grown out of the
+      inconvenience of finding a paste-jar, and the general mussiness of
+      scrap-book keeping. His new plan was a self-pasting scrap-book with the
+      gum laid on in narrow strips, requiring only to be dampened with a sponge
+      or other moist substance to be ready for the clipping. He states that he
+      intends to put the invention into the hands of Slote, Woodman &amp; Co.,
+      of whom Dan Slote, his old Quaker City room-mate, was the senior partner,
+      and have it manufactured for the trade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About this time began Mark Twain's long and active interest in copyright.
+      Previously he had not much considered the subject; he had taken it for
+      granted there was no step that he could take, while international piracy
+      was a recognized institution. On both sides of the water books were
+      appropriated, often without profit, sometimes even without credit, to the
+      author. To tell the truth, Clemens had at first regarded it rather in the
+      nature of a compliment that his books should be thought worth pirating in
+      England, but as time passed he realized that he was paying heavily for
+      this recognition. Furthermore, he decided that he was forfeiting a right;
+      rather that he was being deprived of it: something which it was in his
+      nature to resent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When 'Roughing It' had been ready for issue he agreed with Bliss that they
+      should try the experiment of copyrighting it in England, and see how far
+      the law would protect them against the voracious little publisher, who
+      thus far had not only snapped up everything bearing Mark Twain's
+      signature, but had included in a volume of Mark Twain sketches certain
+      examples of very weak humor with which Mark Twain had been previously
+      unfamiliar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever the English pirate's opinion of the copyright protection of
+      'Roughing It' may have been, he did not attempt to violate it. This was
+      gratifying. Clemens came to regard England as a friendly power. He decided
+      to visit it and spy out the land. He would make the acquaintance of its
+      people and institutions and write a book, which would do these things
+      justice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave out no word of his real purpose. He merely said that he was going
+      over to see his English publishers, and perhaps to arrange for a few
+      lectures. He provided himself with some stylographic note-books, by which
+      he could produce two copies of his daily memoranda&mdash;one for himself
+      and one to mail to Mrs. Clemens&mdash;and sailed on the Scotia August 21,
+      1872.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Arriving in Liverpool he took train for London, and presently the
+      wonderful charm of that old, finished country broke upon him. His &ldquo;first
+      hour in England was an hour of delight,&rdquo; he records; &ldquo;of
+      rapture and ecstasy. These are the best words I can find, but they are not
+      adequate; they are not strong enough to convey the feeling which this
+      first vision of rural England brought me.&rdquo; Then he noticed that the
+      gentleman opposite in his compartment paid no attention to the scenery,
+      but was absorbed in a green-covered volume. He was so absorbed in it that,
+      by and by, Clemens's curiosity was aroused. He shifted his position a
+      little and his eye caught the title. It was the first volume of the
+      English edition of The Innocents Abroad. This was gratifying for a moment;
+      then he remembered that the man had never laughed, never even smiled
+      during the hour of his steady reading. Clemens recalled what he had heard
+      of the English lack of humor. He wondered if this was a fair example of
+      it, and if the man could be really taking seriously every word he was
+      reading. Clemens could not look at the scenery any more for watching his
+      fellow-passenger, waiting with a fascinated interest for the paragraph
+      that would break up that iron-clad solemnity. It did not come. During all
+      the rest of the trip to London the atmosphere of the compartment remained
+      heavy with gloom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drove to the Langham Hotel, always popular with Americans, established
+      himself, and went to look up his publishers. He found the Routledges about
+      to sit down to luncheon in a private room, up-stairs, in their publishing
+      house. He joined them, and not a soul stirred from that table again until
+      evening. The Routledges had never heard Mark Twain talk before, never
+      heard any one talk who in the least resembled him. Various refreshments
+      were served during the afternoon, came and went, while this marvelous
+      creature talked on and they listened, reveling, and wondering if America
+      had any more of that sort at home. By and by dinner was served; then after
+      a long time, when there was no further excuse for keeping him there, they
+      took him to the Savage Club, where there were yet other refreshments and a
+      gathering of the clans to welcome this new arrival as a being from some
+      remote and unfamiliar star.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tom Hood, the younger, was there, and Harry Lee, and Stanley the explorer,
+      who had but just returned from finding Livingstone, and Henry Irving, and
+      many another whose name remains, though the owners of those names are all
+      dead now, and their laughter and their good-fellowship are only a part of
+      that intangible fabric which we call the past.'&mdash;[Clemens had first
+      known Stanley as a newspaper man. &ldquo;I first met him when he reported
+      a lecture of mine in St. Louis,&rdquo; he said once in a conversation
+      where the name of Stanley was mentioned.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0091" id="link2H_4_0091">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXXVI. ENGLAND
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      From that night Mark Twain's stay in England could not properly be called
+      a gloomy one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Routledge, Hood, Lee, and, in fact, all literary London, set themselves
+      the task of giving him a good time. Whatever place of interest they could
+      think of he was taken there; whatever there was to see he saw it. Dinners,
+      receptions, and assemblies were not complete without him. The White
+      Friars' Club and others gave banquets in his honor. He was the sensation
+      of the day. When he rose to speak on these occasions he was greeted with
+      wild cheers. Whatever he said they eagerly applauded&mdash;too eagerly
+      sometimes, in the fear that they might be regarded as insensible to
+      American humor. Other speakers delighted in chaffing him in order to
+      provoke his retorts. When a speaker humorously referred to his American
+      habit of carrying a cotton umbrella, his reply that he followed this
+      custom because a cotton umbrella was the only kind of an umbrella that an
+      Englishman wouldn't steal, was all over England next day, and regarded as
+      one of the finest examples of wit since the days of Swift.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The suddenness and completeness of his acceptance by the great ones of
+      London rather overwhelmed and frightened him made him timid. Joaquin
+      Miller writes:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    He was shy as a girl, although time was already coyly flirting white
+    flowers at his temples, and could hardly be coaxed to meet the
+    learned and great who wanted to take him by the hand.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Many came to call on him at his hotel, among them Charles Reade and Canon
+      Kingsley. Kingsley came twice without finding him; then wrote, asking for
+      an appointment. Reade invited his assistance on a novel. Indeed, it was in
+      England that Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come into his
+      rightful heritage. Whatever may have been the doubts concerning him in
+      America, there was no question in England. Howells says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. Lord mayors,
+    lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he
+    was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the
+    favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      After that first visit of Mark Twain's, when Americans in England,
+      referring to their great statesmen, authors, and the like, naturally
+      mentioned the names of Seward, Webster, Lowell, or Holmes, the English
+      comment was likely to be: &ldquo;Never mind those. We can turn out
+      academic Sewards by the dozen, and cultured humorists like Lowell and
+      Holmes by the score. Tell us of Lincoln, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain. We
+      cannot match these; they interest us.&rdquo; And it was true. History
+      could not match them, for they were unique.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens would have been more than human if in time he had not realized the
+      fuller meaning of this triumph, and exulted in it a little to the folks at
+      home. There never lived a more modest, less pretentious, less aggressive
+      man than Mark Twain, but there never lived a man who took a more childlike
+      delight in genuine appreciation; and, being childlike, it was only human
+      that he should wish those nearest to him to share his happiness. After one
+      memorable affair he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I have been received in a sort of tremendous way to-night by the
+    brains of London, assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of
+    London; mine being (between you and me) a name which was received
+    with a thundering outburst of spontaneous applause when the long
+    list of guests was called.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I might have perished on the spot but for the friendly support and
+      assistance of my excellent friend, Sir John Bennett.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This letter does not tell all of the incident or the real reason why he
+      might have perished on the spot. During the long roll-call of guests he
+      had lost interest a little, and was conversing in whispers with his
+      &ldquo;excellent friend,&rdquo; Sir John Bennett, stopping to applaud now
+      and then when the applause of the others indicated that some distinguished
+      name had been pronounced. All at once the applause broke out with great
+      vehemence. This must be some very distinguished person indeed. He joined
+      in it with great enthusiasm. When it was over he whispered to Sir John:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whose name was that we were just applauding?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mark Twain's.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whereupon the support was needed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor little pirate Hotten did not have a happy time during this visit. He
+      had reveled in the prospect at first, for he anticipated a large increase
+      to be derived from his purloined property; but suddenly, one morning, he
+      was aghast to find in the Spectator a signed letter from Mark Twain, in
+      which he was repudiated, referred to as &ldquo;John Camden Hottentot,&rdquo;
+      an unsavory person generally. Hotten also sent a letter to the Spectator,
+      in which he attempted to justify himself, but it was a feeble performance.
+      Clemens prepared two other communications, each worse than the other and
+      both more destructive than the first one. But these were only to relieve
+      his mind. He did not print them. In one of them he pursued the fancy of
+      John Camden Hottentot, whom he offers as a specimen to the Zoological
+      Gardens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not a bird. It is not a man. It is not a fish. It does not seem to
+      be in all respects a reptile. It has the body and features of a man, but
+      scarcely any of the instincts that belong to such a structure.... I am
+      sure that this singular little creature is the missing link between the
+      man and the hyena.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hotten had preyed upon explorer Stanley and libeled him in a so-called.
+      biography to a degree that had really aroused some feeling against Stanley
+      in England. Only for the moment&mdash;the Queen invited Stanley to
+      luncheon, and newspaper criticism ceased. Hotten was in general disrepute,
+      therefore, so it was not worth while throwing a second brick at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In fact, now that Clemens had expended his venom, on paper, Hotten seemed
+      to him rather an amusing figure than otherwise. An incident grew out of it
+      all, however, that was not amusing. E. P. Hingston, whom the reader may
+      remember as having been with Artemus Ward in Virginia City, and one of
+      that happy group that wined and dined the year away, had been engaged by
+      Hotten to write the introductory to his edition of The Innocents Abroad.
+      It was a well-written, highly complimentary appreciation. Hingston did not
+      dream that he was committing an offense, nor did Clemens himself regard it
+      as such in the beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Mark Twain's views had undergone a radical change, and with
+      characteristic dismissal of previous conditions he had forgotten that he
+      had ever had any other views than those he now held. Hingston was in
+      London, and one evening, at a gathering, approached Clemens with
+      outstretched hand. But Clemens failed to see Hingston's hand or to
+      recognize him. In after-years his conscience hurt him terribly for this.
+      He remembered it only with remorse and shame. Once, in his old age, he
+      spoke of it with deep sorrow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0092" id="link2H_4_0092">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXXVII. THE BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The book on England, which he had prepared for so carefully, was never
+      written. Hundreds of the stylographic pages were filled, and the
+      duplicates sent home for the entertainment of Olivia Clemens, but the
+      notes were not completed, and the actual writing was never begun. There
+      was too much sociability in London for one thing, and then he found that
+      he could not write entertainingly of England without introducing too many
+      personalities, and running the risk of offending those who had taken him
+      into their hearts and homes. In a word, he would have to write too
+      seriously or not at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began his memoranda industriously enough, and the volume might have
+      been as charming and as valuable as any he has left behind. The reader
+      will hardly fail to find a few of the entries interesting. They are
+      offered here as examples of his daily observation during those early weeks
+      of his stay, and to show somewhat of his purpose:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                    AN EXPATRIATE
+
+    There was once an American thief who fled his country and took
+    refuge in England. He dressed himself after the fashion of the
+    Londoners, and taught his tongue the peculiarities of the London
+    pronunciation and did his best in all ways to pass himself for a
+    native. But he did two fatal things: he stopped at the Langham
+    Hotel, and the first trip he took was to visit Stratford-on-Avon and
+    the grave of Shakespeare. These things betrayed his nationality.
+
+                  STANLEY AND THE QUEEN
+
+    See the power a monarch wields! When I arrived here, two weeks ago,
+    the papers and geographers were in a fair way to eat poor Stanley up
+    without salt or sauce. The Queen says, &ldquo;Come four hundred miles up
+    into Scotland and sit at my luncheon-table fifteen minutes&rdquo;; which,
+    being translated, means, &ldquo;Gentlemen, I believe in this man and take
+    him under my protection&rdquo;; and not another yelp is heard.
+
+                  AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM
+
+    What a place it is!
+
+    Mention some very rare curiosity of a peculiar nature&mdash;a something
+    which you have read about somewhere but never seen&mdash;they show you a
+    dozen! They show you all the possible varieties of that thing!
+    They show you curiously wrought jeweled necklaces of beaten gold,
+    worn by the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Etruscans, Greeks,
+    Britons&mdash;every people of the forgotten ages, indeed. They show you
+    the ornaments of all the tribes and peoples that live or ever did
+    live. Then they show you a cast taken from Cromwell's face in
+    death; then the venerable vase that once contained the ashes of
+    Xerxes.
+
+    I am wonderfully thankful for the British Museum. Nobody comes
+    bothering around me&mdash;nobody elbows me&mdash;all the room and all the
+    light I want, under this huge dome&mdash;no disturbing noises&mdash;and people
+    standing ready to bring me a copy of pretty much any book that ever
+    was printed under the sun&mdash;and if I choose to go wandering about the
+    long corridors and galleries of the great building the secrets of
+    all the earth and all the ages axe laid open to me. I am not
+    capable of expressing my gratitude for the British Museum&mdash;it seems
+    as if I do not know any but little words and weak ones.
+
+                WESTMINSTER ABBEY BY NIGHT
+
+    It was past eleven o'clock and I was just going to bed. But this
+    friend of mine was as reliable as he was eccentric, and so there was
+    not a doubt in my mind that his &ldquo;expedition&rdquo; had merit in it. I put
+    on my coat and boots again, and we drove away.
+
+    &ldquo;Where is it? Where are we going?&rdquo;
+
+    &ldquo;Don't worry. You'll see.&rdquo;
+
+    He was not inclined to talk. So I thought this must be a weighty
+    matter. My curiosity grew with the minutes, but I kept it manfully
+    under the surface. I watched the lamps, the signs, the numbers as
+    we thundered down the long street. I am always lost in London, day
+    or night. It was very chilly, almost bleak. People leaned against
+    the gusty blasts as if it were the dead of winter. The crowds grew
+    thinner and thinner, and the noises waxed faint and seemed far away.
+    The sky was overcast and threatening. We drove on, and still on,
+    till I wondered if we were ever going to stop. At last we passed by
+    a spacious bridge and a vast building, and presently entered a
+    gateway, passed through a sort of tunnel, and stopped in a court
+    surrounded by the black outlines of a great edifice. Then we
+    alighted, walked a dozen steps or so, and waited. In a little while
+    footsteps were heard, a man emerged from the darkness, and we
+    dropped into his wake without saying anything. He led us under an
+    archway of masonry, and from that into a roomy tunnel, through a
+    tall iron gate, which he locked behind us. We followed him down
+    this tunnel, guided more by his footsteps on the stone flagging than
+    by anything we could very distinctly see. At the end of it we came
+    to another iron gate, and our conductor stopped there and lit a
+    bull's-eye lantern. Then he unlocked the gate; and I wished he had
+    oiled it first, it grated so dismally. The gate swung open and we
+    stood on the threshold of what seemed a limitless domed and pillared
+    cavern, carved out of the solid darkness. The conductor and my
+    friend took off their hats reverently, and I did likewise. For the
+    moment that we stood thus there was not a sound, and the stillness
+    seemed to add to the solemnity of the gloom. I looked my inquiry!
+
+    &ldquo;It is the tomb of the great dead of England-Westminster Abbey.&rdquo;...
+
+    We were among the tombs; on every hand dull shapes of men, sitting,
+    standing, or stooping, inspected us curiously out of the darkness
+    &mdash;reached out their hands toward us&mdash;some appealing, some beckoning,
+    some warning us away. Effigies they were&mdash;statues over the graves;
+    but they looked human and natural in the murky shadows. Now a
+    little half-grown black and white cat squeezed herself through the
+    bars of the iron gate and came purring lovingly about us, unawed by
+    the time or the place, unimpressed by the marble pomp that
+    sepulchers a line of mighty dead that ends with a great author of
+    yesterday and began with a sceptered monarch away back in the dawn
+    of history, more than twelve hundred years ago....
+
+    Mr. Wright flashed his lantern first upon this object and then upon
+    that, and kept up a running commentary that showed there was nothing
+    about the venerable Abbey that was trivial in his eyes or void of
+    interest. He is a man in authority, being superintendent, and his
+    daily business keeps him familiar with every nook and corner of the
+    great pile. Casting a luminous ray now here, now yonder, he would
+    say:
+
+    &ldquo;Observe the height of the Abbey&mdash;one hundred and three feet to the
+    base of the roof; I measured it myself the other day. Notice the
+    base of this column&mdash;old, very old&mdash;hundreds and hundreds of years
+    &mdash;and how well they knew how to build in those old days! Notice it
+    &mdash;every stone is laid horizontally; that is to say, just as nature
+    laid it originally in the quarry not set up edgewise; in our day
+    some people set them on edge, and then wonder why they split and
+    flake. Architects cannot teach nature anything. Let me remove this
+    matting&mdash;it is put here to preserve the pavement; now there is a bit
+    of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these
+    scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before
+    time and sacrilegious idlers marred it. Now there, in the border,
+    was an inscription, once see, follow the circle-you can trace it by
+    the ornaments that have been pulled out&mdash;here is an A and there is
+    an O, and yonder another A&mdash;all beautiful Old English capitals;
+    there is no telling what the inscription was&mdash;no record left now.
+    Now move along in this direction, if you please. Yonder is where
+    old King Sebert the Saxon lies his monument is the oldest one in the
+    Abbey; Sebert died in 616,&mdash;[Clemens probably misunderstood the
+    name. It was Ethelbert who died in 616. The name Sebert does not
+    appear in any Saxon annals accessible to the author.]&mdash;and that's
+    as much, as twelve hundred and fifty years ago think of it! Twelve
+    hundred and fifty years! Now yonder is the last one&mdash;Charles
+    Dickens&mdash;there on the floor, with the brass letters on the slab&mdash;and
+    to this day the people come and put flowers on it.... There is
+    Garrick's monument; and Addison's, and Thackeray's bust&mdash;and
+    Macaulay lies there. And close to Dickens and Garrick lie Sheridan
+    and Dr. Johnson&mdash;and here is old Parr....
+
+    &ldquo;That stone there covers Campbell the poet. Here are names you know
+    pretty well&mdash;Milton, and Gray who wrote the Elegy, and Butler who
+    wrote Hudibras; and Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson&mdash;there are three
+    tablets to him scattered about the Abbey, and all got 'O, Rare Ben
+    Jonson' cut on them. You were standing on one of them just now he
+    is buried standing up. There used to be a tradition here that
+    explains it. The story goes that he did not dare ask to be buried
+    in the Abbey, so he asked King James if he would make him a present
+    of eighteen inches of English ground, and the King said 'yes,' and
+    asked him where he would have it, and he said in Westminster Abbey.
+    Well, the King wouldn't go back on his word, and so there he is,
+    sure enough-stood up on end.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The reader may regret that there are not more of these entries, and that
+      the book itself was never written. Just when he gave up the project is not
+      recorded. He was urged to lecture in London, but declined. To Mrs.
+      Clemens, in September, he wrote:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everybody says lecture, lecture, lecture, but I have not the least idea of
+      doing it; certainly not at present. Mr. Dolby, who took Dickens to
+      America, is coming to talk business tomorrow, though I have sent him word
+      once before that I can't be hired to talk here; because I have no time to
+      spare. There is too much sociability; I do not get along fast enough with
+      work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In October he declared that he was very homesick, and proposed that Mrs.
+      Clemens and Susie join him at once in London, unless she would prefer to
+      have him come home for the winter and all of them return to London in the
+      spring. So it is likely that the book was not then abandoned. He felt that
+      his visit was by no means ended; that it was, in fact, only just begun,
+      but he wanted the ones he loved most to share it with him. To his mother
+      and sister, in November, he wrote:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I came here to take notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend
+      dinners and make speeches. I have had a jolly good time, and I do hate to
+      go away from these English folks; they make a stranger feel entirely at
+      home, and they laugh so easily that it is a comfort to make after-dinner
+      speeches here. I have made hundreds of friends; and last night, in the
+      crush at the opening of the new Guild Hall Library and Museum, I was
+      surprised to meet a familiar face every other step.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All his impressions of England had been happy ones. He could deliver a
+      gentle satire now and then at certain British institutions&mdash;certain
+      London localities and features&mdash;as in his speech at the Savage Club,&mdash;[September
+      28, 1872. This is probably the most characteristic speech made by Mark
+      Twain during his first London visit; the reader will find it in full in
+      Appendix L, at the end of last volume.]&mdash;but taking the snug island
+      as a whole, its people, its institutions, its fair, rural aspects, he had
+      found in it only delight. To Mrs. Crane he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    If you and Theodore will come over in the spring with Livy and me,
+    and spend the summer, you shall see a country that is so beautiful
+    that you will be obliged to believe in fairy-land. There is nothing
+    like it elsewhere on the globe. You should have a season ticket and
+    travel up and down every day between London and Oxford and worship
+    nature.
+
+    And Theodore can browse with me among dusty old dens that look now
+    as they looked five hundred years ago; and puzzle over books in the
+    British Museum that were made before Christ was born; and in the
+    customs of their public dinners, and the ceremonies of every
+    official act, and the dresses of a thousand dignitaries, trace the
+    speech and manners of all the centuries that have dragged their
+    lagging decades over England since the Heptarchy fell asunder. I
+    would a good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you
+    over.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He sailed November 12th, on the Batavia, loaded with Christmas presents
+      for everybody; jewelry, furs, laces; also a practical steam-engine for his
+      namesake, Sam Moffett. Half-way across the Atlantic the Batavia ran into a
+      hurricane and was badly damaged by heavy seas, and driven far out of her
+      course. It was a lucky event on the whole, for she fell in with a
+      water-logged lumber bark, a complete wreck, with nine surviving sailors
+      clinging to her rigging. In the midst of the wild gale a lifeboat was
+      launched and the perishing men were rescued. Clemens prepared a graphic
+      report of the matter for the Royal Humane Society, asking that medals be
+      conferred upon the brave rescuers, a document that was signed by his
+      fellow-passengers and obtained for the men complete recognition and wide
+      celebrity. Closing, the writer said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    As might have been anticipated, if I have been of any service toward
+    rescuing these nine shipwrecked human beings by standing around the
+    deck in a furious storm, without an umbrella, keeping an eye on
+    things and seeing that they were done right, and yelling whenever a
+    cheer seemed to be the important thing, I am glad and I am
+    satisfied. I ask no reward. I would do it again under the same
+    circumstances. But what I do plead for, earnestly and sincerely, is
+    that the Royal Humane Society will remember our captain and our
+    life-boat crew, and in so remembering them increase the high honor
+    and esteem in which the society is held all over the civilized
+    world.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The Batavia reached New York November 26, 1872. Mark Twain had been absent
+      three months, during which he had been brought to at least a partial
+      realization of what his work meant to him and to mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An election had taken place during his absence&mdash;an election which
+      gratified him deeply, for it had resulted in the second presidency of
+      General Grant and in the defeat of Horace Greeley, whom he admired
+      perhaps, but not as presidential material. To Thomas Nast, who had aided
+      very effectually in Mr. Greeley's overwhelming defeat, Clemens wrote:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nast, you more than any other man have won a prodigious victory for Grant&mdash;I
+      mean, rather, for civilization and progress. Those pictures were simply
+      marvelous, and if any man in the land has a right to hold his head up and
+      be honestly proud of his share in this year's vast events that man is
+      unquestionably yourself. We all do sincerely honor you, and are proud of
+      you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Horace Greeley's peculiar abilities and eccentricities won celebrity for
+      him, rather than voters. Mark Twain once said of him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was a great man, an honest man, and served his, country well and
+      was an honor to it. Also, he was a good-natured man, but abrupt with
+      strangers if they annoyed him when he was busy. He was profane, but that
+      is nothing; the best of us is that. I did not know him well, but only just
+      casually, and by accident. I never met him but once. I called on him in
+      the Tribune office, but I was not intending to. I was looking for Whitelaw
+      Reid, and got into the wrong den. He was alone at his desk, writing, and
+      we conversed&mdash;not long, but just a little. I asked him if he was
+      well, and he said, 'What the hell do you want?' Well, I couldn't remember
+      what I wanted, so I said I would call again. But I didn't.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens did not always tell the incident just in this way. Sometimes it
+      was John Hay he was looking for instead of Reid, and the conversation with
+      Greeley varied; but perhaps there was a germ of history under it
+      somewhere, and at any rate it could have happened well enough, and not
+      have been out of character with either of the men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0093" id="link2H_4_0093">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXXVIII. &ldquo;THE GILDED AGE&rdquo;
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain did not go on the lecture circuit that winter. Redpath had
+      besought him as usual, and even in midsummer had written:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you? Won't you? We have seven thousand to eight thousand
+      dollars in engagements recorded for you,&rdquo; and he named a list of
+      towns ranging geographically from Boston to St. Paul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Clemens had no intention then of ever lecturing any more, and again in
+      November, from London, he announced (to Redpath):
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I yell again for less than $500 I'll be pretty hungry, but I
+      haven't any intention of yelling at any price.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redpath pursued him, and in January proposed $400 for a single night in
+      Philadelphia, but without result. He did lecture two nights in Steinway
+      Hall for the Mercantile Library Association, on the basis of half profits,
+      netting $1,300 for the two nights as his share; and he lectured one night
+      in Hartford, at a profit Of $1,500, for charity. Father Hawley, of
+      Hartford, had announced that his missionary work was suffering for lack of
+      funds. Some of his people were actually without food, he said, their
+      children crying with hunger. No one ever responded to an appeal like that
+      quicker than Samuel Clemens. He offered to deliver a lecture free, and to
+      bear an equal proportion of whatever expenses were incurred by the
+      committee of eight who agreed to join in forwarding the project. He gave
+      the Sandwich Island lecture, and at the close of it a large card was
+      handed him with the figures of the receipts printed upon it. It was held
+      up to view, and the house broke into a storm of cheers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did very little writing during the early weeks following his return.
+      Early in the year (January 3 and 6, 1873) he contributed two Sandwich
+      Island letters to the Tribune, in which, in his own peculiar fashion, he
+      urged annexation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must annex those people,&rdquo; he declared, and proceeded to
+      specify the blessings we could give them, such as &ldquo;leather-headed
+      juries, the insanity law, and the Tweed Ring.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    We can confer Woodhull and Clafin on them, and George Francis Train.
+    We can give them lecturers! I will go myself.
+
+    We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner
+    on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy
+    civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need!
+
+    &ldquo;Shall we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      His success in England became an incentive to certain American
+      institutions to recognize his gifts at home. Early in the year he was
+      dined as the guest of the Lotos Club of New York, and a week or two later
+      elected to its membership. This was but a beginning. Some new membership
+      or honor was offered every little while, and so many banquets that he
+      finally invented a set form for declining them. He was not yet recognized
+      as the foremost American man of letters, but undoubtedly he had become the
+      most popular; and Edwin Whipple, writing at this time, or but little
+      later, said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mark Twain is regarded chiefly as a humorist, but the exercise of
+      his real talents would rank him with the ablest of our authors in the past
+      fifty years.&rdquo; So he was beginning to be &ldquo;discovered&rdquo; in
+      high places.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was during this winter that the Clemens household enjoyed its first
+      real home life in Hartford, its first real home life anywhere since those
+      earliest days of marriage. The Hooker mansion was a comfortable place. The
+      little family had comparatively good health. Their old friends were stanch
+      and lavishly warm-hearted, and they had added many new ones. Their
+      fireside was a delightful nucleus around which gathered those they cared
+      for most, the Twichells, the Warner families, the Trumbulls&mdash;all
+      certain of a welcome there. George Warner, only a little while ago,
+      remembering, said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Clemens house was the only one I have ever known where there
+      was never any preoccupation in the evenings, and where visitors were
+      always welcome. Clemens was the best kind of a host; his evenings after
+      dinner were an unending flow of stories.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Friends living near by usually came and went at will, often without the
+      ceremony of knocking or formal leave-taking. They were more like one great
+      family in that neighborhood, with a community of interests, a unity of
+      ideals. The Warner families and the Clemenses were particularly intimate,
+      and out of their association grew Mark Twain's next important literary
+      undertaking, his collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner in 'The Gilded
+      Age'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A number of more or less absurd stories have been printed about the origin
+      of this book. It was a very simple matter, a perfectly natural
+      development.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the dinner-table one night, with the Warners present, criticisms of
+      recent novels were offered, with the usual freedom and severity of
+      dinner-table talk. The husbands were inclined to treat rather lightly the
+      novels in which their wives were finding entertainment. The wives
+      naturally retorted that the proper thing for the husbands to do was to
+      furnish the American people with better ones. This was regarded in the
+      nature of a challenge, and as such was accepted&mdash;mutually accepted:
+      that is to say, in partnership. On the spur of the moment Clemens and
+      Warner agreed that they would do a novel together, that they would begin
+      it immediately. This is the whole story of the book's origin; so far, at
+      least, as the collaboration is concerned. Clemens, in fact, had the
+      beginning of a story in his mind, but had been unwilling to undertake an
+      extended work of fiction alone. He welcomed only too eagerly, therefore,
+      the proposition of joint authorship. His purpose was to write a tale
+      around that lovable character of his youth, his mother's cousin, James
+      Lampton&mdash;to let that gentle visionary stand as the central figure
+      against a proper background. The idea appealed to Warner, and there was no
+      delay in the beginning. Clemens immediately set to work and completed 399
+      pages of the manuscript, the first eleven chapters of the book, before the
+      early flush of enthusiasm waned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Warner came over then, and Clemens read it aloud to him. Warner had some
+      plans for the story, and took it up at this point, and continued it
+      through the next twelve chapters; and so they worked alternately, &ldquo;in
+      the superstition,&rdquo; as Mark Twain long afterward declared, &ldquo;that
+      we were writing one coherent yarn, when I suppose, as a matter of fact, we
+      were writing two incoherent ones.&rdquo;&mdash;[The reader may be
+      interested in the division of labor. Clemens wrote chapters I to XI; also
+      chapters XXIV, XXV, XXVII, XXVIII, XXX, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXVI,
+      XXXVII, XLII, XLIII, XLV, LI, LII, LIII, LVII, LIX, LX, LXI, LXII, and
+      portions of chapters XXXV, XLIX, LVI. Warner wrote chapters XII to XXIII;
+      also chapters XXVI, XXIX, XXXI, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL, XLI, XLIV, XLVI,
+      XLVII, XLVIII, L, LIV, LV, LVIII, LXIII, and portions of chapters XXXV,
+      XLIX, and LVI. The work was therefore very evenly divided.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was another co-worker on The Gilded Age before the book was finally
+      completed. This was J. Hammond Trumbull, who prepared the variegated,
+      marvelous cryptographic chapter headings: Trumbull was the most learned
+      man that ever lived in Hartford. He was familiar with all literary and
+      scientific data, and according to Clemens could swear in twenty-seven
+      languages. It was thought to be a choice idea to get Trumbull to supply a
+      lingual medley of quotations to precede the chapters in the new book, the
+      purpose being to excite interest and possibly to amuse the reader&mdash;a
+      purpose which to some extent appears to have miscarried.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The book was begun in February and finished in April, so the work did not
+      lag. The result, if not highly artistic, made astonishingly good reading.
+      Warner had the touch of romance, Clemens, the gift of creating, or at
+      least of portraying, human realities. Most of his characters reflected
+      intimate personalities of his early life. Besides the apotheosis of James
+      Lampton into the immortal Sellers, Orion became Washington Hawkins, Squire
+      Clemens the judge, while Mark Twain's own personality, in a greater or
+      lesser degree, is reflected in most of his creations. As for the Tennessee
+      land, so long a will-o'the-wisp and a bugbear, it became tangible property
+      at last. Only a year or two before Clemens had written to Orion:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Oh, here! I don't want to be consulted at all about Tennessee. I
+    don't want it even mentioned to me. When I make a suggestion it is
+    for you to act upon it or throw it aside, but I beseech you never to
+    ask my advice, opinion, or consent about that hated property.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      But it came in good play now. It is the important theme of the story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain was well qualified to construct his share of the tale. He knew
+      his characters, their lives, and their atmospheres perfectly. Senator
+      Dilworthy (otherwise Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, then notorious for
+      attempted vote-buying) was familiar enough. That winter in Washington had
+      acquainted Clemens with the life there, its political intrigues, and the
+      disrepute of Congress. Warner was equally well qualified for his share of
+      the undertaking, and the chief criticism that one may offer is the one
+      stated by Clemens himself&mdash;that the divisions of the tale remain
+      divisions rather than unity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the story itself&mdash;the romance and tragedy of it&mdash;the
+      character of Laura in the hands of either author is one not easy to
+      forget. Whether this means that the work is well done, or only strikingly
+      done, the reader himself must judge. Morally, the character is not
+      justified. Laura was a victim of circumstance from the beginning. There
+      could be no poetic justice in her doom. To drag her out of a steamer
+      wreck, only to make her the victim of a scoundrel, later an adventuress,
+      and finally a murderess, all may be good art, but of a very bad kind.
+      Laura is a sort of American Becky Sharp; but there is retributive justice
+      in Becky's fate, whereas Laura's doom is warranted only by the author's
+      whim. As for her end, whatever the virtuous public of that day might have
+      done, a present-day audience would not have pelted her from the stage,
+      destroyed her future, taken away her life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The authors regarded their work highly when it was finished, but that is
+      nothing. Any author regards his work highly at the moment of its
+      completion. In later years neither of them thought very well of their
+      production; but that also is nothing. The author seldom cares very deeply
+      for his offspring once it is turned over to the public charge. The fact
+      that the story is still popular, still delights thousands of readers, when
+      a myriad of novels that have been written since it was completed have
+      lived their little day and died so utterly that even their names have
+      passed out of memory, is the best verdict as to its worth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0094" id="link2H_4_0094">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LXXXIX. PLANNING A NEW HOME
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Clemens and his wife bought a lot for the new home that winter, a fine,
+      sightly piece of land on Farmington Avenue&mdash;table-land, sloping down
+      to a pretty stream that wound through the willows and among the trees.
+      They were as delighted as children with their new purchase and the
+      prospect of building. To her sister Mrs. Clemens wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Mr. Clemens seems to glory in his sense of possession; he goes daily
+    into the lot, has had several falls trying to lay off the land by
+    sliding around on his feet....
+
+    For three days the ice has covered the trees, and they have been
+    glorious. We could do nothing but watch the beauty outside; if you
+    looked at the trees as the sun struck them, with your back toward
+    the sun, they were covered with jewels. If you looked toward the
+    sun it was all crystal whiteness, a perfect fairy-land. Then the
+    nights were moonlight, and that was a great beauty, the moon giving
+    us the same prismatic effect.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This was the storm of which Mark Twain wrote his matchless description,
+      given first in his speech on New England weather, and later preserved in
+      'Following the Equator', in more extended form. In that book he likens an
+      ice-storm to his impressions derived from reading descriptions of the Taj
+      Mahal, that wonderful tomb of a fair East Indian queen. It is a marvelous
+      bit of word-painting&mdash;his description of that majestic vision:
+      &ldquo;When every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen
+      dewdrops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of
+      Persia's diamond plume.&rdquo; It will pay any one to look up that
+      description and read it all, though it has been said, by the fortunate one
+      or two who heard him first give it utterance as an impromptu outburst,
+      that in the subsequent process of writing the bloom of its original
+      magnificence was lost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The plans for the new house were drawn forthwith by that gentle architect
+      Edward Potter, whose art to-day may be considered open to criticism, but
+      not because of any lack of originality. Hartford houses of that period
+      were mainly of the goods-box form of architecture, perfectly square,
+      typifying the commercial pursuits of many of their owners. Potter agreed
+      to get away from this idea, and a radical and even frenzied departure was
+      the result. Certainly his plans presented beautiful pictures, and all who
+      saw them were filled with wonder and delight. Architecture has lavished
+      itself in many florescent forms since then, but we may imagine that
+      Potter's &ldquo;English violet&rdquo; order of design, as he himself
+      designated it, startled, dazzled, and captivated in a day, when most
+      houses were mere habitations, built with a view to economy and the largest
+      possible amount of room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Workmen were put on the ground without delay, to prepare for the builders,
+      and work was rapidly pushed along. Then in May the whole matter was left
+      in the hands of the architect and the carpenters (with Lawyer Charles E.
+      Perkins to stand between Potter and the violent builder, who roared at
+      Potter and frightened him when he wanted changes), while the Clemens
+      household, with Clara Spaulding, a girlhood friend of Mrs. Clemens, sailed
+      away to England for a half-year holiday.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0095" id="link2H_4_0095">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XC. A LONG ENGLISH HOLIDAY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      They sailed on the Batavia, and with them went a young man named Thompson,
+      a theological student whom Clemens had consented to take as an amanuensis.
+      There is a pathetic incident connected with this young man, and it may as
+      well be set down here. Clemens found, a few weeks after his arrival in
+      England, that so great was the tax upon his time that he could make no use
+      of Thompson's services. He gave Thompson fifty dollars, and upon the
+      possibility of the young man's desiring to return to America, advanced him
+      another fifty dollars, saying that he could return it some day, and never
+      thought of it again. But the young man remembered it, and one day,
+      thirty-six years later, after a life of hardship and struggle, such as the
+      life of a country minister is apt to be, he wrote and inclosed a
+      money-order, a payment on his debt. That letter and its inclosure brought
+      only sorrow to Mark Twain. He felt that it laid upon him the accumulated
+      burden of the weary thirty-six years' struggle with ill-fortune. He
+      returned the money, of course, and in a biographical note commented:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    How pale painted heroisms of romance look beside it! Thompson's
+    heroism, which is real, which is colossal, which is sublime, and
+    which is costly beyond all estimate, is achieved in profound
+    obscurity, and its hero walks in rags to the end of his days. I had
+    forgotten Thompson completely, but he flashes before me as vividly
+    as lightning. I can see him now. It was on the deck of the
+    Batavia, in the dock. The ship was casting off, with that hubbub
+    and confusion and rushing of sailors, and shouting of orders and
+    shrieking of boatswain whistles, which marked the departure
+    preparations in those days&mdash;an impressive contrast with the solemn
+    silence which marks the departure preparations of the giant ships of
+    the present day. Mrs. Clemens, Clara Spaulding, little Susy, and
+    the nurse-maid were all properly garbed for the occasion. We all
+    had on our storm-rig, heavy clothes of somber hue, but new and
+    designed and constructed for the purpose, strictly in accordance
+    with sea-going etiquette; anything wearable on land being distinctly
+    and odiously out of the question.
+
+    Very well. On that deck, and gliding placidly among those honorable
+    and properly upholstered groups, appeared Thompson, young, grave,
+    long, slim, with an aged fuzzy plug hat towering high on the upper
+    end of him and followed by a gray duster, which flowed down, without
+    break or wrinkle, to his ankles. He came straight to us, and shook
+    hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew him. A
+    nigger in heaven could not have created a profounder astonishment.
+
+    However, Thompson didn't know that anything was happening. He had
+    no prejudices about clothes. I can still see him as he looked when
+    we passed Sandy Hook and the winds of the big ocean smote us.
+    Erect, lofty, and grand he stood facing the blast, holding his plug
+    on with both hands and his generous duster blowing out behind, level
+    with his neck. There were scoffers observing, but he didn't know
+    it; he wasn't disturbed.
+
+    In my mind, I see him once afterward, clothed as before, taking me
+    down in shorthand. The Shah of Persia had come to England and Dr.
+    Hosmer, of the Herald, had sent me to Ostend, to view his Majesty's
+    progress across the Channel and write an account of it. I can't
+    recall Thompson after that, and I wish his memory had been as poor
+    as mine.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      They had been a month in London, when the final incident referred to took
+      place&mdash;the arrival of the Shah of Persia&mdash;and were comfortably
+      quartered at the Langham Hotel. To Twichell Clemens wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    We have a luxuriously ample suite of apartments on the third floor,
+    our bedroom looking straight up Portland Place, our parlor having a
+    noble array of great windows looking out upon both streets (Portland
+    Place and the crook that joins it onto Regent Street).
+
+    Nine p.m. full twilight, rich sunset tints lingering in the west.
+
+    I am not going to write anything; rather tell it when I get back.
+    I love you and Harmony, and that is all the fresh news I've got
+    anyway. And I mean to keep that fresh all the time.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Clemens, in a letter to her sister, declared: &ldquo;It is perfectly
+      discouraging to try to write you. There is so much to write about that it
+      makes me feel as if it was no use to begin.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a period of continuous honor and entertainment. If Mark Twain had
+      been a lion on his first visit, he was little less than royalty now. His
+      rooms at the Langham were like a court. Miss Spaulding (now Mrs. John B.
+      Stanchfield) remembers that Robert Browning, Turgenieff, Sir John Millais,
+      Lord Houghton, and Sir Charles Dilke (then at the height of his fame) were
+      among those that called to pay their respects. In a recent letter she
+      says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I remember a delightful luncheon that Charles Kingsley gave for Mr.
+    Clemens; also an evening when Lord Dunraven brought Mr. Home, the
+    medium, Lord Dunraven telling many of the remarkable things he had
+    seen Mr. Home do. I remember I wanted so much to see him float out
+    of a seven or eight story window, and enter another, which Lord
+    Dunraven said he had seen him do many times. But Mr. Home had been
+    very ill, and said his power had left him. My great regret was that
+    we did not see Carlyle, who was too sad and ill for visits.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Among others they met Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland,
+      and found him so shy that it was almost impossible to get him to say a
+      word on any subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The shyest full-grown man, except Uncle Remus, I ever met,&rdquo;
+      Clemens once wrote. &ldquo;Dr. MacDonald and several other lively talkers
+      were present, and the talk went briskly on for a couple of hours, but
+      Carroll sat still all the while, except now and then when he answered a
+      question.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a dinner given by George Smalley they met Herbert Spencer, and at a
+      luncheon-party at Lord Houghton's, Sir Arthur Helps, then a world-wide
+      celebrity.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Lord Elcho, a large, vigorous man, sat at some distance down the
+    table. He was talking earnestly about the town of Godalming. It
+    was a deep, flowing, and inarticulate rumble, but I caught the
+    Godalming pretty nearly every time it broke free of the rumbling,
+    and as all the strength was on the first end of the word, it
+    startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing. In the
+    middle of the luncheon Lady Houghton rose, remarked to the guests on
+    her right and on her left, in a matter-of-fact way, &ldquo;Excuse me, I
+    have an engagement,&rdquo; and without further ceremony, she went off to
+    meet it. This would have been doubtful etiquette in America. Lord
+    Houghton told a number of delightful stories. He told them in
+    French, and I lost nothing of them but the nubs.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Little Susy and her father thrived on London life, but after a time it
+      wore on Mrs. Clemens. She delighted in the English cordiality and culture,
+      but the demands were heavy, the social forms sometimes trying. Life in
+      London was interesting, and in its way charming, but she did not enter
+      into it with quite her husband's enthusiasm and heartiness. In the end
+      they canceled all London engagements and quietly set out for Scotland. On
+      the way they rested a few days in York, a venerable place such as Mark
+      Twain always loved to describe. In a letter to Mrs. Langdon he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    For the present we shall remain in this queer old walled town, with
+    its crooked, narrow lanes, that tell us of their old day that knew
+    no wheeled vehicles; its plaster-and-timber dwellings, with upper
+    stories far overhanging the street, and thus marking their date,
+    say three hundred years ago; the stately city walls, the castellated
+    gates, the ivy-grown, foliage-sheltered, most noble and picturesque
+    ruin of St. Mary's Abbey, suggesting their date, say five hundred
+    years ago, in the heart of Crusading times and the glory of English
+    chivalry and romance; the vast Cathedral of York, with its worn
+    carvings and quaintly pictured windows, preaching of still remoter
+    days; the outlandish names of streets and courts and byways that
+    stand as a record and a memorial, all these centuries, of Danish
+    dominion here in still earlier times; the hint here and there of
+    King Arthur and his knights and their bloody fights with Saxon
+    oppressors round about this old city more than thirteen hundred
+    years gone by; and, last of all, the melancholy old stone coffins
+    and sculptured inscriptions, a venerable arch and a hoary tower of
+    stone that still remain and are kissed by the sun and caressed by
+    the shadows every day, just as the sun and the shadows have kissed
+    and, caressed them every lagging day since the Roman Emperor's
+    soldiers placed them here in the times when Jesus the Son of Mary
+    walked the streets of Nazareth a youth, with no more name or fame
+    than the Yorkshire boy who is loitering down this street this
+    moment.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      They reached Edinburgh at the end of July and secluded themselves in
+      Veitch's family hotel in George Street, intending to see no one. But this
+      plan was not a success; the social stress of London had been too much for
+      Mrs. Clemens, and she collapsed immediately after their arrival. Clemens
+      was unacquainted in Edinburgh, but remembered that Dr. John Brown, who had
+      written Rab and His Friend, lived there. He learned his address, and that
+      he was still a practising physician. He walked around to 23 Rutland
+      Street, and made himself known. Dr. Brown came forthwith, and Mrs. Clemens
+      speedily recovered under his able and inspiring treatment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The association did not end there. For nearly a month Dr. Brown was their
+      daily companion, either at the hotel, or in his own home, or on protracted
+      drives when he made his round of visits, taking these new friends along.
+      Dr. John was beloved by everybody in Edinburgh, everybody in Scotland, for
+      that matter, and his story of Rab had won him a following throughout
+      Christendom. He was an unpretentious sovereign. Clemens once wrote of him:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    His was a sweet and winning face, as beautiful a face as I have ever
+    known. Reposeful, gentle, benignant; the face of a saint at peace
+    with all the world and placidly beaming upon it the sunshine of love
+    that filled his heart.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He was the friend of all dogs, and of all people. It has been told of him
+      that once, when driving, he thrust his head suddenly out of the carriage
+      window, then resumed his place with a disappointed look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who was it?&rdquo; asked his companion. &ldquo;Some one you know?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;A dog I don't know.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He became the boon companion and playmate of little Susy, then not quite a
+      year and a half old. He called her Megalopis, a Greek term, suggested by
+      her eyes; those deep, burning eyes that seemed always so full of life's
+      sadder philosophies, and impending tragedy. In a collection of Dr. Brown's
+      letters he refers to this period. In one place he says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Had the author of The Innocents Abroad not come to Edinburgh at that
+    time we in all human probability might never have met, and what a
+    deprivation that would have been to me during the last quarter of a
+    century!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      And in another place:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I am attending the wife of Mark Twain. His real name is Clemens.
+    She is a quite lovely little woman, modest and clever, and she has a
+    girlie eighteen months old, her ludicrous miniature&mdash;and such eyes!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Those playmates, the good doctor and Megalopis, romped together through
+      the hotel rooms with that complete abandon which few grown persons can
+      assume in their play with children, and not all children can assume in
+      their play with grown-ups. They played &ldquo;bear,&rdquo; and the &ldquo;bear&rdquo;
+      (which was a very little one, so little that when it stood up behind the
+      sofa you could just get a glimpse of yellow hair) would lie in wait for
+      her victim, and spring out and surprise him and throw him into frenzies of
+      fear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost every day they made his professional rounds with him. He always
+      carried a basket of grapes for his patients. His guests brought along
+      books to read while they waited. When he stopped for a call he would say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Entertain yourselves while I go in and reduce the population.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was much sight-seeing to do in Edinburgh, and they could not quite
+      escape social affairs. There were teas and luncheons and dinners with the
+      Dunfermlines and the Abercrombies, and the MacDonalds, and with others of
+      those brave clans that no longer slew one another among the grim northern
+      crags and glens, but were as sociable and entertaining lords and ladies as
+      ever the southland could produce. They were very gentle folk indeed, and
+      Mrs. Clemens, in future years, found her heart going back oftener to
+      Edinburgh than to any other haven of those first wanderings. August 24th
+      she wrote to her sister:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    We leave Edinburgh to-morrow with sincere regret; we have had such a
+    delightful stay here&mdash;we do so regret leaving Dr. Brown and his
+    sister, thinking that we shall probably never see them again [as
+    indeed they never did].
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      They spent a day or two at Glasgow and sailed for Ireland, where they put
+      in a fortnight, and early in September were back in England again, at
+      Chester, that queer old city where; from a tower on the wall, Charles I.
+      read the story of his doom. Reginald Cholmondeley had invited them to
+      visit his country seat, beautiful Condover Hall, near Shrewsbury, and in
+      that lovely retreat they spent some happy, restful days. Then they were in
+      the whirl of London once more, but escaped for a fortnight to Paris,
+      sight-seeing and making purchases for the new home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Clemens was quite ready to return to America, by this time.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I am blue and cross and homesick [she wrote]. I suppose what makes
+    me feel the latter is because we are contemplating to stay in London
+    another month. There has not one sheet of Mr. Clemens's proof come
+    yet, and if he goes home before the book is published here he will
+    lose his copyright. And then his friends feel that it will be
+    better for him to lecture in London before his book is published,
+    not only that it will give him a larger but a more enviable
+    reputation. I would not hesitate one moment if it were simply for
+    the money that his copyright will bring him, but if his reputation
+    will be better for his staying and lecturing, of course he ought to
+    stay.... The truth is, I can't bear the thought of postponing going
+    home.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It is rather gratifying to find Olivia Clemens human, like that, now and
+      then. Otherwise, on general testimony, one might well be tempted to regard
+      her as altogether of another race and kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0096" id="link2H_4_0096">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XCI. A LONDON LECTURE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Clemens concluded to hasten the homeward journey, but to lecture a few
+      nights in London before starting. He would then accompany his little
+      family home, and return at once to continue the lecture series and protect
+      his copyright. This plan was carried out. In a communication to the
+      Standard, October 7th, he said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    SIR,&mdash;In view of the prevailing frenzy concerning the Sandwich
+    Islands, and the inflamed desire of the public to acquire
+    information concerning them, I have thought it well to tarry yet
+    another week in England and deliver a lecture upon this absorbing
+    subject. And lest it should be thought unbecoming in me, a
+    stranger, to come to the public rescue at such a time, instead of
+    leaving to abler hands a matter of so much moment, I desire to
+    explain that I do it with the best motives and the most honorable
+    intentions. I do it because I am convinced that no one can allay
+    this unwholesome excitement as effectually as I can, and to allay
+    it, and allay it as quickly as possible, is surely one thing that is
+    absolutely necessary at this juncture. I feel and know that I am
+    equal to this task, for I can allay any kind of an excitement by
+    lecturing upon it. I have saved many communities in this way. I
+    have always been able to paralyze the public interest in any topic
+    that I chose to take hold of and elucidate with all my strength.
+
+    Hoping that this explanation will show that if I am seeming to
+    intrude I am at least doing it from a high impulse, I am, sir, your
+    obedient servant,
+                         MARK TWAIN.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      A day later the following announcement appeared:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                  QUEEN'S CONCERT ROOMS,
+                   HANOVER SQUARE.
+
+            MR. GEORGE DOLBY begs to announce that
+
+                    MR. MARK TWAIN
+
+                    WILL DELIVER A
+                      LECTURE
+                       OF A
+                  HUMOROUS CHARACTER,
+
+                     AS ABOVE, ON
+           MONDAY EVENING NEXT, OCTOBER 13th, 1873,
+            AND REPEAT IT IN THE SAME PLACE, ON
+               TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 14th,
+               WEDNESDAY &ldquo;      &ldquo;  15th,
+               THURSDAY &ldquo;      &ldquo;  16th,
+               FRIDAY  &ldquo;      &ldquo;  17th,
+
+                   At Eight o'Clock,
+                       AND
+             SATURDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER 18th,
+                   At Three o'Clock.
+
+                      SUBJECT:
+         &ldquo;Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands.&rdquo;
+
+    As Mr. TWAIN has spent several months in these Islands, and is well
+    acquainted with his subject, the Lecture may be expected to furnish
+    matter of interest.
+
+           STALLS, 5s.     UNRESERVED SEATS, 3s.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The prospect of a lecture from Mark Twain interested the London public.
+      Those who had not seen him were willing to pay even for that privilege.
+      The papers were encouraging; Punch sounded a characteristic note:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+              WELCOME TO A LECTURER
+
+  &ldquo;'Tis time we Twain did show ourselves.&rdquo; 'Twas said
+    By Caesar, when one Mark had lost his head:
+    By Mark, whose head's quite bright, 'tis said again:
+    Therefore, &ldquo;go with me, friends, to bless this Twain.&rdquo;
+
+                                &mdash;Punch.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Dolby had managed the Dickens lectures, and he proved his sound business
+      judgment and experience by taking the largest available hall in London for
+      Mark Twain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the evening of October 13th, in the spacious Queen's Concert Rooms,
+      Hanover Square, Mark Twain delivered his first public address in England.
+      The subject was &ldquo;Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands,&rdquo;
+      the old lecture with which he had made his first great successes. He was
+      not introduced. He appeared on the platform in evening dress, assuming the
+      character of a manager announcing a disappointment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Clemens, he said, had fully expected to be present. He paused and loud
+      murmurs arose from the audience. He lifted his hand and they subsided.
+      Then he added, &ldquo;I am happy to say that Mark Twain is present, and
+      will now give his lecture.&rdquo; Whereupon the audience roared its
+      approval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that his triumph that week was a
+      regal one. For five successive nights and a Saturday matinee the culture
+      and fashion of London thronged to hear him discourse of their &ldquo;fellow
+      savages.&rdquo; It was a lecture event wholly without precedent. The
+      lectures of Artemus Ward,&mdash;[&ldquo;Artemus the delicious,&rdquo; as
+      Charles Reade called him, came to London in June, 1866, and gave his
+      &ldquo;piece&rdquo; in Egyptian Hall. The refined, delicate, intellectual
+      countenance, the sweet, gave, mouth, from which one might have expected
+      philosophical lectures retained their seriousness while listeners were
+      convulsed with laughter. There was something magical about it. Every
+      sentence was a surprise. He played on his audience as Liszt did on a piano
+      most easily when most effectively. Who can ever forget his attempt to stop
+      his Italian pianist&mdash;&ldquo;a count in his own country, but not much
+      account in this&rdquo;&mdash;who went on playing loudly while he was
+      trying to tell us an &ldquo;affecting incident&rdquo; that occurred near a
+      small clump of trees shown on his panorama of the Far West. The music
+      stormed on-we could see only lips and arms pathetically moving till the
+      piano suddenly ceased, and we heard-it was all we heard &ldquo;and, she
+      fainted in Reginald's arms.&rdquo; His tricks have been at tempted in many
+      theaters, but Artemus Ward was inimitable. And all the time the man was
+      dying. (Moneure D. Conway, Autobiography.)]&mdash;who had quickly become a
+      favorite in London, had prepared the public for American platform humor,
+      while the daily doings of this new American product, as reported by the
+      press, had aroused interest, or curiosity, to a high pitch. On no occasion
+      in his own country had he won such a complete triumph. The papers for a
+      week devoted columns of space to appreciation and editorial comment. The
+      Daily News of October 17th published a column-and-a-half editorial on
+      American humor, with Mark Twain's public appearance as the general text.
+      The Times referred to the continued popularity of the lectures:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    They can't be said to have more than whetted the public appetite, if
+    we are to take the fact which has been imparted to us, that the
+    holding capacity of the Hanover Square Rooms has been inadequate to
+    the demand made upon it every night by Twain's lecturing, as a
+    criterion. The last lecture of this too brief course was delivered
+    yesterday before an audience which crammed to discomfort every part
+    of the principal apartment of the Hanover Square Rooms....
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      At the close of yesterday's lecture Mark Twain was so loudly applauded
+      that he returned to the stage, and, as soon as the audience gave him a
+      chance of being heard, he said, with much apparent emotion:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Ladies and Gentlemen,&mdash;I won't keep you one single moment in this
+    suffocating atmosphere. I simply wish to say that this is the last
+    lecture I shall have the honor to deliver in London until I return
+    from America, four weeks from now. I only wish to say (here Mr.
+    Clemens faltered as if too much affected to proceed) I am very
+    grateful. I do not wish to appear pathetic, but it is something
+    magnificent for a stranger to come to the metropolis of the world
+    and be received so handsomely as I have been. I simply thank you.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The Saturday Review devoted a page, and Once a Week, under the head of
+      &ldquo;Cracking jokes,&rdquo; gave three pages, to praise of the literary
+      and lecture methods of the new American humorist. With the promise of
+      speedy return, he left London, gave the lecture once in Liverpool, and
+      with his party (October 21st) set sail for home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In mid-Atlantic he remembered Dr. Brown, and wrote him:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    We have plowed a long way over the sea, and there's twenty-two
+    hundred miles of restless water between us now, besides the railway
+    stretch. And yet you are so present with us, so close to us, that a
+    span and a whisper would bridge the distance.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      So it would seem that of all the many memories of that eventful half-year,
+      that of Dr. Brown was the most present, the most tender.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0097" id="link2H_4_0097">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XCII. FURTHER LONDON LECTURE TRIUMPHS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Orion Clemens records that he met &ldquo;Sam and Livy&rdquo; on their
+      arrival from England, November 2d, and that the president of the
+      Mercantile Library Association sent up his card &ldquo;four times,&rdquo;
+      in the hope of getting a chance to propose a lecture engagement&mdash;an
+      incident which impressed Orion deeply in its evidence of his brother's
+      towering importance. Orion himself was by this time engaged in various
+      projects. He was inventing a flying-machine, for one thing, writing a
+      Jules Verne story, reading proof on a New York daily, and contemplating
+      the lecture field. This great blaze of international appreciation which
+      had come to the little boy who used to set type for him in Hannibal, and
+      wash up the forms and cry over the dirty proof, made him gasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They went to see Booth in Hamlet [he says], and Booth sent for Sam to come
+      behind the scenes, and when Sam proposed to add a part to Hamlet, the part
+      of a bystander who makes humorous modern comment on the situations in the
+      play, Booth laughed immoderately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Proposing a sacrilege like that to Booth! To what heights had this
+      printer-pilot, miner-brother not attained!&mdash;[This idea of introducing
+      a new character in Hamlet was really attempted later by Mark Twain, with
+      the connivance of Joe Goodman [of all men], sad to relate. So far as is
+      known it is the one stain on Goodman's literary record.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens returned immediately to England&mdash;the following Saturday, in
+      fact&mdash;and was back in London lecturing again after barely a month's
+      absence. He gave the &ldquo;Roughing It&rdquo; address, this time under
+      the title of &ldquo;Roughing It on the Silver Frontier,&rdquo; and if his
+      audiences were any less enthusiastic, or his houses less crowded than
+      before, the newspapers of that day have left no record of it. It was the
+      height of the season now, and being free to do so, he threw himself into
+      the whirl of it, and for two months, beyond doubt, was the most talked-of
+      figure in London. The Athenaeum Club made him a visiting member (an honor
+      considered next to knighthood); Punch quoted him; societies banqueted him;
+      his apartments, as before; were besieged by callers. Afternoons one was
+      likely to find him in &ldquo;Poets' Corner&rdquo; of the Langham
+      smoking-room, with a group of London and American authors&mdash;Reade,
+      Collins, Miller, and the others&mdash;frankly rioting in his bold fancies.
+      Charles Warren Stoddard was in London at the time, and acted as his
+      secretary. Stoddard was a gentle poet, a delightful fellow, and Clemens
+      was very fond of him. His only complaint of Stoddard was that he did not
+      laugh enough at his humorous yarns. Clemens once said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dolby and I used to come in after the lecture, or perhaps after
+      being out to some dinner, and we liked to sit down and talk it over and
+      tell yarns, and we expected Stoddard to laugh at them, but Stoddard would
+      lie there on the couch and snore. Otherwise, as a secretary, he was
+      perfect.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great Tichborne trial was in progress then, and the spectacle of an
+      illiterate impostor trying to establish his claim as the rightful heir to
+      a great estate was highly diverting to Mark Twain.&mdash;[In a letter of
+      this period he speaks of having attended one of the Claimant's &ldquo;Evenings.&rdquo;]&mdash;He
+      wanted to preserve the evidence as future literary material, and Stoddard
+      day after day patiently collected the news reports and neatly pasted them
+      into scrap-books, where they still rest, a complete record of that now
+      forgotten farce. The Tichborne trial recalled to Mark Twain the claimant
+      in the Lampton family, who from time to time wrote him long letters,
+      urging him to join in the effort to establish his rights to the earldom of
+      Durham. This American claimant was a distant cousin, who had &ldquo;somehow
+      gotten hold of, or had fabricated a full set of documents.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Colonel Henry Watterson, just quoted (also a Lampton connection), adds:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    During the Tichborne trial Mark and I were in London, and one day he
+    said to me: &ldquo;I have investigated this Durham business down at the
+    Herald's office. There is nothing to it. The Lamptons passed out
+    of the earldom of Durham a hundred years ago. There were never any
+    estates; the title lapsed; the present earldom is a new creation,
+    not in the same family at all. But I'll tell you what: if you'll
+    put up $500, I'll put up $500 more; we'll bring our chap over here
+    and set him in as claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy's fat boy
+    won't be a marker to him.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      It was a characteristic Mark Twain project, one of the sort he never
+      earned out in reality, but loved to follow in fancy, and with the pen
+      sometimes. The &ldquo;Rightful Earl of Durham&rdquo; continued to send
+      letters for a long time after that (some of them still exist), but he did
+      not establish his claim. No one but Mark Twain ever really got anything
+      out of it. Like the Tennessee land, it furnished material by and by for a
+      book. Colonel Watterson goes on to say that Clemens was only joking about
+      having looked up the matter in the peerage; that he hadn't really looked
+      it up at all, and that the earldom lies still in the Lampton family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another of Clemens's friends in London at this time was Prentice Mulford,
+      of California. In later years Mulford acquired a wide reputation for his
+      optimistic and practical psychologies. Through them he lifted himself out
+      of the slough of despond, and he sought to extend a helping hand to
+      others. His &ldquo;White Cross Library&rdquo; had a wide reading and a
+      wide influence; perhaps has to this day. But in 1873 Mulford had not found
+      the tangibility of thought, the secret of strength; he was only finding
+      it, maybe, in his frank acknowledgment of shortcoming:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Now, Mark, I am down-very much down at present; you are up-where you
+    deserve to be. I can't ask this on the score of any past favors,
+    for there have been none. I have not always spoken of you in terms
+    of extravagant praise; have sometimes criticized you, which was due,
+    I suppose, in part to an envious spirit. I am simply human. Some
+    people in the same profession say they entertain no jealousy of
+    those more successful. I can't. They are divine; I am not.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It was only that he wished Clemens to speak a word for him to Routledge,
+      to get him a hearing for his work. He adds:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I shall be up myself some day, although my line is far apart from
+    yours. Whether you can do anything that I ask of you or not, I
+    shall be happy then, as I would be now, to do you any just and right
+    service.... Perhaps I have mistaken my vocation. Certainly, if I
+    was back with my rocker on the Tuolumne, I'd make it rattle livelier
+    than ever I did before. I have occasionally thought of London
+    Bridge, but the Thames is now so d&mdash;-d cold and dirty, and besides I
+    can swim, and any attempt at drowning would, through the mere
+    instinct of self-preservation, only result in my swimming ashore and
+    ruining my best clothes; wherefore I should be worse off than ever.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Of course Mark Twain granted the favor Mulford asked, and a great deal
+      more, no doubt, for that was his way. Mulford came up, as he had
+      prophesied, but the sea in due time claimed him, though not in the way he
+      had contemplated. Years after he was one day found drifting off the shores
+      of Long Island in an open boat, dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens made a number of notable dinner speeches during this second London
+      lecture period. His response to the toast of the &ldquo;Ladies,&rdquo;
+      delivered at the annual dinner of the Scottish Corporation of London, was
+      the sensational event of the evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was obliged to decline an invitation to the Lord Mayor's dinner,
+      whereupon his Lordship wrote to urge him to be present at least at the
+      finale, when the welcome would be &ldquo;none the less hearty,&rdquo; and
+      bespoke his attendance for any future dinners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens lectured steadily at the Hanover Square Rooms during the two
+      months of his stay in London, and it was only toward the end of this
+      astonishing engagement that the audience began to show any sign of
+      diminishing. Early in January he wrote to Twichell:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am not going to the provinces because I cannot get halls that are large
+      enough. I always felt cramped in the Hanover Square Rooms, but I find that
+      everybody here speaks with awe and respect of that prodigious hall and
+      wonders that I could fill it so long.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am hoping to be back in twenty days, but I have so much to go home to
+      and enjoy with a jubilant joy that it hardly seems possible that it can
+      come to pass in so uncertain a world as this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the same letter he speaks of attending an exhibition of Landseer's
+      paintings at the Royal Academy:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Ah, they are wonderfully beautiful! There are such rich moonlights
+    and dusks in the &ldquo;Challenge&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Combat,&rdquo; and in that long
+    flight of birds across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or
+    sunrise, for no man can ever tell t'other from which in a picture,
+    except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the
+    water), and there is such a grave analytical profundity in the face
+    of the connoisseurs; and such pathos in the picture of a fawn
+    suckling its dead mother on a snowy waste, with only the blood in
+    the footprints to hint that she is not asleep. And the way that he
+    makes animals' flesh and blood, insomuch that if the room were
+    darkened ever so little, and a motionless living animal placed
+    beside the painted one, no man could tell which was which.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I interrupted myself here, to drop a line to Shirley Brooks and suggest a
+      cartoon for Punch. It was this: in one of the Academy saloons (in a suite
+      where these pictures are) a fine bust of Landseer stands on a pedestal in
+      the center of the room. I suggested that some of Landseer's best known
+      animals be represented as having come down out of their frames in the
+      moonlight and grouped themselves about the bust in mourning attitudes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sailed January 13 (1874.), on the Paythia, and two weeks later was at
+      home, where all was going well. The Gilded Age had been issued a day or
+      two before Christmas, and was already in its third edition. By the end of
+      January 26,000 copies had been sold, a sale that had increased to 40,000 a
+      month later. The new house was progressing, though it was by no means
+      finished. Mrs. Clemens was in good health. Little Susy was full of such
+      American activities as to earn the name of &ldquo;The Modoc.&rdquo; The
+      promise of the year was bright.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0098" id="link2H_4_0098">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XCIII. THE REAL COLONEL SELLERS-GOLDEN DAYS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There are bound to be vexations, flies in the ointment, as we say. It was
+      Warner who conferred the name of Eschol Sellers on the chief figure of the
+      collaborated novel. Warner had known it as the name of an obscure person,
+      or perhaps he had only heard of it. At all events, it seemed a good one
+      for the character and had been adopted. But behold, the book had been
+      issued but a little while when there rose &ldquo;out of the vasty deeps&rdquo;
+      a genuine Eschol Sellers, who was a very respectable person. He was a
+      stout, prosperous-looking man, gray and about fifty-five years old. He
+      came into the American Publishing Company offices and asked permission to
+      look at the book. Mr. Bliss was out at the moment, but presently arrived.
+      The visitor rose and introduced himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My name is Eschol Sellers,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You have used it
+      in one of your publications. It has brought upon me a lot of ridicule. My
+      people wish me to sue you for $10,000 damages.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had documents to prove his identity, and there was only one thing to be
+      done; he must be satisfied. Bliss agreed to recall as many of the
+      offending volumes as possible and change the name on the plates. He
+      contacted the authors, and the name Beriah was substituted for the
+      offending Eschol. It turned out that the real Sellers family was a large
+      one, and that the given name Eschol was not uncommon in its several
+      branches. This particular Eschol Sellers, curiously enough, was an
+      inventor and a promoter, though of a much more substantial sort than his
+      fiction namesake. He was also a painter of considerable merit, a writer
+      and an antiquarian. He was said to have been a grandson of the famous
+      painter, Rembrandt Peale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens vowed that he would not lecture in America that winter. The
+      irrepressible Redpath besieged him as usual, and at the end of January
+      Clemens telegraphed him, as he thought, finally. Following it with a
+      letter of explanation, he added:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said to her, 'There isn't money enough in America to hire me to
+      leave you for one day.'&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Redpath was a persistent devil. He used arguments and held out
+      inducements which even Mrs. Clemens thought should not be resisted, and
+      Clemens yielded from time to time, and gave a lecture here and there
+      during February. Finally, on the 3d of March (1879.) he telegraphed his
+      tormentor:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don't you congratulate me? I never expect to stand on a lecture
+      platform again after Thursday night.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Howells tells delightfully of a visit which he and Aldrich paid to
+      Hartford just at this period. Aldrich went to visit Clemens and Howells to
+      visit Charles Dudley Warner, Clemens coming as far as Springfield to
+      welcome them.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    In the good-fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such
+    days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round. There was
+    constant running in and out of friendly houses where the lively
+    hosts and guests called one another by their Christian names or
+    nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at
+    doors. Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he
+    satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another
+    sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which
+    enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Howells tells how Clemens dilated on the advantages of subscription sale
+      over the usual methods of publication, and urged the two Boston authors to
+      prepare something which canvassers could handle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, any other means of bringing out a book is privately printing
+      it,&rdquo; he declared, and added that his subscription books in Bliss's
+      hands sold right along, &ldquo;just like the Bible.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the way back to Boston Howells and Aldrich planned a subscription book
+      which would sell straight along, like the Bible. It was to be called
+      &ldquo;Twelve Memorable Murders.&rdquo; They had dreamed two or three
+      fortunes by the time they had reached Boston, but the project ended there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We never killed a single soul,&rdquo; Howells said once to the
+      writer of this memoir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens was always urging Howells to visit him after that. He offered all
+      sorts of inducements.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    You will find us the most reasonable people in the world. We had
+    thought of precipitating upon you, George Warner and his wife one
+    day, Twichell and his jewel of a wife another day, and Charles
+    Perkins and wife another. Only those&mdash;simply members of our family
+    they are. But I'll close the door against them all, which will
+    &ldquo;fix&rdquo; all of the lot except Twichell, who will no more hesitate to
+    climb in the back window than nothing.
+
+    And you shall go to bed when you please, get up when you please,
+    talk when you please, read when you please.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      A little later he was urging Howells or Aldrich, or both of them; to come
+      to Hartford to live.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Mr. Hall, who lives in the house next to Mrs. Stowe's (just where we
+    drive in to go to our new house), will sell for $16,000 or $17,000.
+    You can do your work just as well here as in Cambridge, can't you?
+    Come! Will one of you boys buy that house? Now, say yes.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Certainly those were golden, blessed days, and perhaps, as Howells says,
+      the sun does not shine on their like any more&mdash;not in Hartford, at
+      least, for the old group that made them no longer assembles there.
+      Hartford about this time became a sort of shrine for all literary
+      visitors, and for other notables as well, whether of America or from
+      overseas. It was the half-way place between Boston and New York, and
+      pilgrims going in either direction rested there. It is said that travelers
+      arriving in America, were apt to remember two things they wished to see:
+      Niagara Falls and Mark Twain. But the Falls had no such recent advertising
+      advantage as that spectacular success in London. Visitors were apt to
+      begin in Hartford.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Howells went with considerable frequency after that, or rather with
+      regularity, twice a year, or oftener, and his coming was always hailed
+      with great rejoicing. They visited and ate around at one place and another
+      among that pleasant circle of friends. But they were happiest afterward
+      together, Clemens smoking continually, &ldquo;soothing his tense nerves
+      with a mild hot Scotch,&rdquo; says Howells, &ldquo;while we both talked,
+      and talked, and tasked of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and
+      the waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I would come away
+      hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust-shells
+      which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer.&rdquo;
+      Sometimes Clemens told the story of his early life, &ldquo;the
+      inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights story, which I could never
+      tire of even when it began to be told over again.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0099" id="link2H_4_0099">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XCIV. BEGINNING &ldquo;TOM SAWYER&rdquo;
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Clemens household went to Quarry Farm in April, leaving the new house
+      once more in the hands of the architect and builders. It was costing a
+      vast sum of money, and there was a financial stress upon land. Mrs.
+      Clemens, always prudent, became a little uneasy at times, though without
+      warrant in those days, for her business statement showed that her holdings
+      were only a little less than a quarter of a million in her own right,
+      while her husband's books and lectures had been highly remunerative, and
+      would be more so. They were justified in living in ample, even luxurious
+      comfort, and how free from financial worries they could have lived for the
+      rest of their days!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens, realizing his happiness, wrote Dr. Brown:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed I am thankful for the wifey and the child, and if there is one
+      individual creature on all this footstool who is more thoroughly and
+      uniformly and, unceasingly happy than I am I defy the world to produce him
+      and prove him. In my opinion he don't exist. I was a mighty rough, coarse,
+      unpromising subject when Livy took charge of me, four years ago, and I may
+      still be to the rest of the world, but not to her. She has made a very
+      creditable job of me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Truly fortune not only smiled, but laughed. Every mail brought great
+      bundles of letters that sang his praises. Robert Watt, who had translated
+      his books into Danish, wrote of their wide popularity among his people.
+      Madame Blanc (Th. Bentzon), who as early as 1872 had translated The
+      Jumping Frog into French, and published it, with extended comment on the
+      author and his work, in the 'Revue des deux mondes', was said to be
+      preparing a review of 'The Gilded Age'. All the world seemed ready to do
+      him honor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, one must always pay the price, usually a vexatious one. Bores
+      stopped him on the street to repeat ancient and witless stories. Invented
+      anecdotes, some of them exasperating ones, went the rounds of the press.
+      Impostors in distant localities personated him, or claimed to be near
+      relatives, and obtained favors, sometimes money, in his name. Trivial
+      letters, seeking benefactions of every kind, took the savor from his daily
+      mail. Letters from literary aspirants were so numerous that he prepared a
+      &ldquo;form&rdquo; letter of reply:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      DEAR SIR OR MADAM,&mdash;Experience has not taught me very much, still it
+      has taught me that it is not wise to criticize a piece of literature,
+      except to an enemy of the person who wrote it; then if you praise it that
+      enemy admires&mdash;you for your honest manliness, and if you dispraise it
+      he admires you for your sound judgment.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                     Yours truly,  S. L. C.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Even Orion, now in Keokuk on a chicken farm, pursued him with manuscripts
+      and proposals of schemes. Clemens had bought this farm for Orion, who had
+      counted on large and quick returns, but was planning new enterprises
+      before the first eggs were hatched. Orion Clemens was as delightful a
+      character as was ever created in fiction, but he must have been a trial
+      now and then to Mark Twain. We may gather something of this from a letter
+      written by the latter to his mother and sister at this period:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I can't &ldquo;encourage&rdquo; Orion. Nobody can do that conscientiously, for
+    the reason that before one's letter has time to reach him he is off
+    on some new wild-goose chase. Would you encourage in literature a
+    man who the older he grows the worse he writes?
+
+    I cannot encourage him to try the ministry, because he would change
+    his religion so fast that he would have to keep a traveling agent
+    under wages to go ahead of him to engage pulpits and board for him.
+
+    I cannot conscientiously encourage him to do anything but potter
+    around his little farm and put in his odd hours contriving new and
+    impossible projects at the rate of 365 a year which is his customary
+    average. He says he did well in Hannibal! Now there is a man who
+    ought to be entirely satisfied with the grandeurs, emoluments, and
+    activities of a hen farm.
+
+    If you ask me to pity Orion I can do that. I can do it every day
+    and all day long. But one can't &ldquo;encourage&rdquo; quicksilver; because
+    the instant you put your finger on it, it isn't there. No, I am
+    saying too much. He does stick to his literary and legal
+    aspirations, and he naturally would elect the very two things which
+    he is wholly and preposterously unfitted for. If I ever become
+    able, I mean to put Orion on a regular pension without revealing the
+    fact that it is a pension.
+
+    He did presently allow the pension, a liberal one, which continued
+    until neither Orion Clemens nor his wife had further earthly need of
+    it.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain for some time had contemplated one of the books that will
+      longest preserve his memory, 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'. The success
+      of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other autobiographical
+      material, and he remembered those days along the river-front in Hannibal&mdash;his
+      skylarking with Tom Blankenship, the Bowen boys, John Briggs, and the
+      rest. He had recognized these things as material&mdash;inviting material
+      it was&mdash;and now in the cool luxury of Quarry Farm he set himself to
+      spin the fabric of youth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found summer-time always his best period for literary effort, and on a
+      hillside just by the old quarry, Mrs. Crane had built for him that spring
+      a study&mdash;a little room of windows, somewhat suggestive of a
+      pilot-house&mdash;overlooking the long sweep of grass and the dreamlike
+      city below. Vines were planted that in the course of time would cover and
+      embower it; there was a tiny fireplace for chilly days. To Twichell, of
+      his new retreat, Clemens wrote:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the loveliest study you ever saw. It is octagonal, with a peaked
+      roof, each face filled with a spacious window, and it sits perched in
+      complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of
+      valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills. It is a cozy
+      nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four chairs, and
+      when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the lightning flashes
+      behind the hills beyond, and the rain beats upon the roof over my head,
+      imagine the luxury of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He worked steadily there that summer. He would go up mornings, after
+      breakfast, remaining until nearly dinner-time, say until five o'clock or
+      after, for it was not his habit to eat luncheon. Other members of the
+      family did not venture near the place, and if he was urgently wanted they
+      blew a horn. Each evening he brought down his day's performance to read to
+      the assembled family. He felt the need of audience and approval. Usually
+      he earned the latter, but not always. Once, when for a day he put aside
+      other matters to record a young undertaker's love-affair, and brought down
+      the result in the evening, fairly bubbling with the joy of it, he met with
+      a surprise. The tale was a ghastly burlesque, its humor of the most
+      disheartening, unsavory sort. No one spoke during the reading, nobody
+      laughed: The air was thick with disapproval. His voice lagged and faltered
+      toward the end. When he finished there was heavy silence. Mrs. Clemens was
+      the only one who could speak:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Youth, let's walk a little,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;Undertaker's Love Story&rdquo; is still among the manuscripts
+      of that period, but it is unlikely that it will ever see the light of
+      print.&mdash;[This tale bears no relation to &ldquo;The Undertaker's Story&rdquo;
+      in Sketches New and Old.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Tom Sawyer tale progressed steadily and satisfactorily. Clemens wrote
+      Dr. Brown:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average,
+    for some time now, on a book (a story), and consequently have been
+    so wrapped up in it, and dead to everything else, that I have fallen
+    mighty short in letter-writing....
+
+    On hot days I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with
+    brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the
+    same thin linen we make shirts of.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He incloses some photographs in this letter.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    The group [he says] represents the vine-clad carriageway in front of
+    the farm-house. On the left is Megalopis sitting in the lap of her
+    German nurse-maid. I am sitting behind them. Mrs. Crane is in the
+    center. Mr. Crane next to her. Then Mrs. Clemens and the new baby.
+    Her Irish nurse stands at her back. Then comes the table waitress,
+    a young negro girl, born free. Next to her is Auntie Cord (a
+    fragment of whose history I have just sent to a magazine). She is
+    the cook; was in slavery more than forty years; and the self-
+    satisfied wench, the last of the group, is the little baby's
+    American nurse-maid. In the middle distance my mother-in-law's
+    coachman (up on errand) has taken a position unsolicited to help out
+    the picture. No, that is not true. He was waiting there a minute
+    or two before the photographer came. In the extreme background,
+    under the archway, you glimpse my study.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;new baby,&rdquo; &ldquo;Bay,&rdquo; as they came to call her,
+      was another little daughter, born in June, a happy, healthy addition to
+      the household. In a letter written to Twichell we get a sweet summer
+      picture of this period, particularly of little sunny-haired, two-year-old
+      Susy.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    There is nothing selfish about the Modoc. She is fascinated with
+    the new baby. The Modoc rips and tears around outdoors most of the
+    time, and consequently is as hard as a pineknot and as brown as an
+    Indian. She is bosom friend to all the chickens, ducks, turkeys,
+    and guinea-hens on the place. Yesterday, as she marched along the
+    winding path that leads up the hill through the red-clover beds to
+    the summer-house, there was a long procession of these fowls
+    stringing contentedly after her, led by a stately rooster, who can
+    look over the Modoc's head. The devotion of these vassals has been
+    purchased with daily largess of Indian meal, and so the Modoc,
+    attended by her body-guard, moves in state wherever she goes.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      There were days, mainly Sundays, when he did not work at all; peaceful
+      days of lying fallow, dreaming in shady places, drowsily watching little
+      Susy, or reading with Mrs. Clemens. Howells's &ldquo;Foregone Conclusion&rdquo;
+      was running in the Atlantic that year, and they delighted in it. Clemens
+      wrote the author:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I should think that this must be the daintiest, truest, most
+    admirable workmanship that was ever put on a story. The creatures
+    of God do not act out their natures more unerringly than yours do.
+    If your genuine stories can die I wonder by what right old Walter
+    Scott's artificialities shall continue to live.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      At other times he found comfort in the society of Theodore Crane. These
+      two were always fond of each other, and often read together the books in
+      which they were mutually interested. They had portable-hammock
+      arrangements, which they placed side by side on the lawn, and read and
+      discussed through summer afternoons. The 'Mutineers of the Bounty' was one
+      of the books they liked best, and there was a story of an Iceland farmer,
+      a human document, that had an unfading interest. Also there were certain
+      articles in old numbers of the Atlantic that they read and reread. 'Pepys'
+      Diary', 'Two Years Before the Mast', and a book on the Andes were reliable
+      favorites. Mark Twain read not so many books, but read a few books often.
+      Those named were among the literature he asked for each year of his return
+      to Quarry Farm. Without them, the farm and the summer would not be the
+      same.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then there was 'Lecky's History of European Morals'; there were periods
+      when they read Lecky avidly and discussed it in original and unorthodox
+      ways. Mark Twain found an echo of his own philosophies in Lecky. He made
+      frequent marginal notes along the pages of the world's moral history&mdash;notes
+      not always quotable in the family circle. Mainly, however, they were
+      short, crisp interjections of assent or disapproval. In one place Lecky
+      refers to those who have undertaken to prove that all our morality is a
+      product of experience, holding that a desire to obtain happiness and to
+      avoid pain is the only possible motive to action; the reason, and the only
+      reason, why we should perform virtuous actions being &ldquo;that on the
+      whole such a course will bring us the greatest amount of happiness.&rdquo;
+      Clemens has indorsed these philosophies by writing on the margin, &ldquo;Sound
+      and true.&rdquo; It was the philosophy which he himself would always hold
+      (though, apparently, never live by), and in the end would embody a volume
+      of his own.&mdash;[What Is Man? Privately printed in 1906.]&mdash;In
+      another place Lecky, himself speaking, says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Fortunately we are all dependent for many of our pleasures on
+    others. Co-operation and organization are essential to our
+    happiness, and these are impossible without some restraint being
+    placed upon our appetites. Laws are made to secure this restraint,
+    and being sustained by rewards, and punishments they make it the
+    interest of the individual to regard that of the community.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Correct!&rdquo; comments Clemens. &ldquo;He has proceeded from
+      unreasoned selfishness to reasoned selfishness. All our acts, reasoned and
+      unreasoned, are selfish.&rdquo; It was a conclusion he logically never
+      departed from; not the happiest one, it would seem, at first glance, but
+      one easier to deny than to disprove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the back of an old envelope Mark Twain set down his literary
+      declaration of this period.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like history, biography, travels, curious facts and strange
+      happenings, and science. And I detest novels, poetry, and theology.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But of course the novels of Howells would be excepted; Lecky was not
+      theology, but the history of it; his taste for poetry would develop later,
+      though it would never become a fixed quantity, as was his devotion to
+      history and science. His interest in these amounted to a passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0100" id="link2H_4_0100">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XCV. AN &ldquo;ATLANTIC&rdquo; STORY AND A PLAY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The reference to &ldquo;Auntie Cord&rdquo; in the letter to Dr. Brown
+      brings us to Mark Twain's first contribution to the Atlantic Monthly.
+      Howells in his Recollections of his Atlantic editorship, after referring
+      to certain Western contributors, says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Later came Mark Twain, originally of Missouri, but then
+    provisionally of Hartford, and now ultimately of the solar system,
+    not to say the universe. He came first with &ldquo;A True Story,&rdquo; one of
+    those noble pieces of humanity with which the South has atoned
+    chiefly, if not solely, through him for all its despite to the
+    negro.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Clemens had long aspired to appear in the Atlantic, but such was his own
+      rating of his literature that he hardly hoped to qualify for its pages.
+      Twichell remembers his &ldquo;mingled astonishment and triumph&rdquo; when
+      he was invited to send something to the magazine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was obliged to &ldquo;send something&rdquo; once or twice before the
+      acceptance of &ldquo;A True Story,&rdquo; the narrative of Auntie Cord,
+      and even this acceptance brought with it the return of a fable which had
+      accompanied it, with the explanation that a fable like that would
+      disqualify the magazine for every denominational reader, though Howells
+      hastened to express his own joy in it, having been particularly touched by
+      the author's reference to Sisyphus and Atlas as ancestors of the
+      tumble-bug. The &ldquo;True Story,&rdquo; he said, with its &ldquo;realest
+      king of black talk,&rdquo; won him, and a few days later he wrote again:
+      &ldquo;This little story delights me more and more. I wish you had about
+      forty of 'em.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so, modestly enough, as became him, for the story was of the simplest,
+      most unpretentious sort, Mark Twain entered into the school of the elect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his letter to Howells, accompanying the MS., the author said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I inclose also &ldquo;A True Story,&rdquo; which has no humor in it. You can
+    pay as lightly as you choose for that if you want it, for it is
+    rather out of my line. I have not altered the old colored woman's
+    story, except to begin it at the beginning, instead of the middle,
+    as she did&mdash;and traveled both ways.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Howells in his Recollections tells of the business anxiety in the Atlantic
+      office in the effort to estimate the story's pecuniary value. Clemens and
+      Harte had raised literary rates enormously; the latter was reputed to have
+      received as much as five cents a word from affluent newspapers! But the
+      Atlantic was poor, and when sixty dollars was finally decided upon for the
+      three pages (about two and a half cents a word) the rate was regarded as
+      handsome&mdash;without precedent in Atlantic history. Howells adds that as
+      much as forty times this amount was sometimes offered to Mark Twain in
+      later years. Even in '74 he had received a much higher rate than that
+      offered by the Atlantic,&mdash;but no acceptance, then, or later, ever
+      made him happier, or seemed more richly rewarded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It&rdquo; was
+      precisely what it claimed to be.&mdash;[Atlantic Monthly for November,
+      1874; also included in Sketches New and Old.]&mdash;Auntie Cord, the
+      Auntie Rachel of that tale, cook at Quarry Farm, was a Virginia negress
+      who had been twice sold as a slave, and was proud of the fact;
+      particularly proud that she had brought $1,000 on the block. All her
+      children had been sold away from her, but it was a long time ago, and now
+      at sixty she was fat and seemingly without care. She had told her story to
+      Mrs. Crane, who had more than once tried to persuade her to tell it to
+      Clemens; but Auntie Cord was reluctant. One evening, however, when the
+      family sat on the front veranda in the moonlight, looking down on the
+      picture city, as was their habit, Auntie Cord came around to say good
+      night, and Clemens engaged her in conversation. He led up to her story,
+      and almost before she knew it she was seated at his feet telling the
+      strange tale in almost the exact words in which it was set down by him
+      next morning. It gave Mark Twain a chance to exercise two of his chief
+      gifts&mdash;transcription and portrayal. He was always greater at these
+      things than at invention. Auntie Cord's story is a little masterpiece.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wished to do more with Auntie Cord and her associates of the farm, for
+      they were extraordinarily interesting. Two other negroes on the place,
+      John Lewis and his wife (we shall hear notably of Lewis later), were not
+      always on terms of amity with Auntie Cord. They disagreed on religion, and
+      there were frequent battles in the kitchen. These depressed the mistress
+      of the house, but they gave only joy to Mark Twain. His Southern raising
+      had given him an understanding of their humors, their native emotions
+      which made these riots a spiritual gratification. He would slip around
+      among the shrubbery and listen to the noise and strife of battle, and hug
+      himself with delight. Sometimes they resorted to missiles&mdash;stones,
+      tinware&mdash;even dressed poultry which Auntie Cord was preparing for the
+      oven. Lewis was very black, Auntie Cord was a bright mulatto, Lewis's'
+      wife several shades lighter. Wherever the discussion began it promptly
+      shaded off toward the color-line and insult. Auntie Cord was a Methodist;
+      Lewis was a Dunkard. Auntie Cord was ignorant and dogmatic; Lewis could
+      read and was intelligent. Theology invariably led to personality, and
+      eventually to epithets, crockery, geology, and victuals. How the greatest
+      joker of the age did enjoy that summer warfare!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fun was not all one-sided. An incident of that summer probably
+      furnished more enjoyment for the colored members of the household than it
+      did for Mark Twain. Lewis had some fowls, and among them was a
+      particularly pestiferous guinea-hen that used to get up at three in the
+      morning and go around making the kind of a noise that a guinea-hen must
+      like and is willing to get up early to hear. Mark Twain did not care for
+      it. He stood it as long as he could one morning, then crept softly from
+      the house to stop it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a clear, bright night; locating the guinea-hen, he slipped up
+      stealthily with a stout stick. The bird was pouring out its heart, tearing
+      the moonlight to tatters. Stealing up close, Clemens made a vicious swing
+      with his bludgeon, but just then the guinea stepped forward a little, and
+      he missed. The stroke and his explosion frightened the fowl, and it
+      started to run. Clemens, with his mind now on the single purpose of
+      revenge, started after it. Around the trees, along the paths, up and down
+      the lawn, through gates and across the garden, out over the fields, they
+      raced, &ldquo;pursuer and pursued.&rdquo; The guinea nor longer sang, and
+      Clemens was presently too exhausted to swear. Hour after hour the silent,
+      deadly hunt continued, both stopping to rest at intervals; then up again
+      and away. It was like something in a dream. It was nearly breakfast-time
+      when he dragged himself into the house at last, and the guinea was resting
+      and panting under a currant-bush. Later in the day Clemens gave orders to
+      Lewis to &ldquo;kill and eat that guinea-hen,&rdquo; which Lewis did.
+      Clemens himself had then never eaten a guinea, but some years later, in
+      Paris, when the delicious breast of one of those fowls was served him, he
+      remembered and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And to think, after chasing that creature all night, John Lewis got
+      to eat him instead of me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The interest in Tom and Huck, or the inspiration for their adventures,
+      gave out at last, or was superseded by a more immediate demand. As early
+      as May, Goodman, in San Francisco, had seen a play announced there,
+      presenting the character of Colonel Sellers, dramatized by Gilbert S.
+      Densmore and played by John T. Raymond. Goodman immediately wrote Clemens;
+      also a letter came from Warner, in Hartford, who had noticed in San
+      Francisco papers announcements of the play. Of course Clemens would take
+      action immediately; he telegraphed, enjoining the performance. Then began
+      a correspondence with the dramatist and actor. This in time resulted in an
+      amicable arrangement, by which the dramatist agreed to dispose of his
+      version to Clemens. Clemens did not wait for it to arrive, but began
+      immediately a version of his own. Just how much or how little of
+      Densmore's work found its way into the completed play, as presented by
+      Raymond later, cannot be known now. Howells conveys the impression that
+      Clemens had no hand in its authorship beyond the character of Sellers as
+      taken from the book. But in a letter still extant, which Clemens wrote to
+      Howells at the time, he says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I worked a month on my play, and launched it in New York last
+    Wednesday. I believe it will go. The newspapers have been
+    complimentary. It is simply a setting for one character, Colonel
+    Sellers. As a play I guess it will not bear critical assault in
+    force.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The Warners are as charming as ever. They go shortly to the devil for a
+      year&mdash;that is, to Egypt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raymond, in a letter which he wrote to the Sun, November 3, 1874, declared
+      that &ldquo;not one line&rdquo; of Densmore's dramatization was used,
+      &ldquo;except that which was taken bodily from The Gilded Age.&rdquo;
+      During the newspaper discussion of the matter, Clemens himself prepared a
+      letter for the Hartford Post. This letter was suppressed, but it still
+      exists. In it he says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I entirely rewrote the play three separate and distinct times. I
+    had expected to use little of his [Densmore's] language and but
+    little of his plot. I do not think there are now twenty sentences
+    of Mr. Densmore's in the play, but I used so much of his plot that I
+    wrote and told him that I should pay him about as much more as I had
+    already paid him in case the play proved a success. I shall keep my
+    word.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This letter, written while the matter was fresh in his mind, is
+      undoubtedly in accordance with the facts. That Densmore was fully
+      satisfied may be gathered from an acknowledgment, in which he says:
+      &ldquo;Your letter reached me on the ad, with check. In this place permit
+      me to thank you for the very handsome manner in which you have acted in
+      this matter.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Warner, meantime, realizing that the play was constructed almost entirely
+      of the Mark Twain chapters of the book, agreed that his collaborator
+      should undertake the work and financial responsibilities of the dramatic
+      venture and reap such rewards as might result. Various stories have been
+      told of this matter, most of them untrue. There was no bitterness between
+      the friends, no semblance of an estrangement of any sort. Warner very
+      generously and promptly admitted that he was not concerned with the play,
+      its authorship, or its profits, whatever the latter might amount to.
+      Moreover, Warner was going to Egypt very soon, and his labors and
+      responsibilities were doubly sufficient as they stood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens's estimate of the play as a dramatic composition was correct
+      enough, but the public liked it, and it was a financial success from the
+      start. He employed a representative to travel with Raymond, to assist in
+      the management and in the division of spoil. The agent had instructions to
+      mail a card every day, stating the amount of his share in the profits.
+      Howells once arrived in Hartford just when this postal tide of fortune was
+      at its flood:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One hundred and fifty dollars&mdash;two hundred dollars&mdash;three
+      hundred dollars were the gay figures which they bore, and which he
+      flaunted in the air, before he sat down at the table, or rose from it to
+      brandish, and then, flinging his napkin in the chair, walked up and down
+      to exult in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once, in later years, referring to the matter, Howells said &ldquo;He was
+      never a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and he
+      wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream.&rdquo;
+      Which was a true word. Mark Twain with money was like a child with a heap
+      of bright pebbles, ready to pile up more and still more, then presently to
+      throw them all away and begin gathering anew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0101" id="link2H_4_0101">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XCVI. THE NEW HOME
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Clemenses returned to Hartford to find their new house &ldquo;ready,&rdquo;
+      though still full of workmen, decorators, plumbers, and such other minions
+      of labor as make life miserable to those with ambitions for new or
+      improved habitations. The carpenters were still on the lower floor, but
+      the family moved in and camped about in rooms up-stairs that were more or
+      less free from the invader. They had stopped in New York ten days to buy
+      carpets and furnishings, and these began to arrive, with no particular
+      place to put them; but the owners were excited and happy with it all, for
+      it was the pleasant season of the year, and all the new features of the
+      house were fascinating, while the daily progress of the decorators
+      furnished a fresh surprise when they roamed through the rooms at evening.
+      Mrs. Clemens wrote home:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    We are perfectly delighted with everything here and do so want you
+    all to see it.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Her husband, as he was likely to do, picked up the letter and finished it:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Livy appoints me to finish this; but how can a headless man perform
+    an intelligent function? I have been bully-ragged all day by the
+    builder, by his foreman, by the architect, by the tapestry devil who
+    is to upholster the furniture, by the idiot who is putting down the
+    carpets, by the scoundrel who is setting up the billiard-table (and
+    has left the balls in New York), by the wildcat who is sodding the
+    ground and finishing the driveway (after the sun went down), by a
+    book agent, whose body is in the back yard and the coroner notified.
+    Just think of this thing going on the whole day long, and I a man
+    who loathes details with all his heart! But I haven't lost my
+    temper, and I've made Livy lie down most of the time; could anybody
+    make her lie down all the time?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Warner wrote from Egypt expressing sympathy for their unfurnished state of
+      affairs, but added, &ldquo;I would rather fit out three houses and fill
+      them with furniture than to fit out one 'dahabiyeh'.&rdquo; Warner was at
+      that moment undertaking his charmingly remembered trip up the Nile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The new home was not entirely done for a long time. One never knows when a
+      big house like that&mdash;or a little house, for that matters done. But
+      they were settled at last, with all their beautiful things in place; and
+      perhaps there have been richer homes, possibly more artistic ones, but
+      there has never been a more charming home, within or without, than that
+      one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So many frequenters have tried to express the charm of that household.
+      None of them has quite succeeded, for it lay not so much in its
+      arrangement of rooms or their decorations or their outlook, though these
+      were all beautiful enough, but rather in the personality, the atmosphere;
+      and these are elusive things to convey in words. We can only see and feel
+      and recognize; we cannot translate them. Even Howells, with his subtle
+      touch, can present only an aspect here and there; an essence, as it were,
+      from a happy garden, rather than the fullness of its bloom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Mark Twain was unlike any other man that ever lived, so his house was
+      unlike any other house ever built. People asked him why he built the
+      kitchen toward the street, and he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So the servants can see the circus go by without running out into
+      the front yard.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this was probably an after-thought. The kitchen end of the house
+      extended toward Farmington Avenue, but it was by no means unbeautiful. It
+      was a pleasing detail of the general scheme. The main entrance faced at
+      right angles with the street and opened to a spacious hall. In turn, the
+      hall opened to a parlor, where there was a grand piano, and to the
+      dining-room and library, and the library opened to a little conservatory,
+      semicircular in form, of a design invented by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Says
+      Howells:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed
+    up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of the
+    fountain companied by Callas and other waterloving lilies. There,
+    while we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled
+    the pretty bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the
+    delicate accents of its varied blossoms.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      In the library was an old carved mantel which Clemens and his wife had
+      bought in Scotland, salvage from a dismantled castle, and across the top
+      of the fireplace a plate of brass with the motto, &ldquo;The ornament of a
+      house is the friends that frequent it,&rdquo; surely never more
+      appropriately inscribed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the mahogany room, a large bedroom on the ground floor, and
+      upstairs were other spacious bedrooms and many baths, while everywhere
+      were Oriental rugs and draperies, and statuary and paintings. There was a
+      fireplace under a window, after the English pattern, so that in
+      winter-time one could at the same moment watch the blaze and the falling
+      snow. The library windows looked out over the valley with the little
+      stream in it, and through and across the tree-tops. At the top of the
+      house was what became Clemens's favorite retreat, the billiard-room, and
+      here and there were unexpected little balconies, which one could step out
+      upon for the view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Below was a wide, covered veranda, the &ldquo;ombra,&rdquo; as they called
+      it, secluded from the public eye&mdash;a favorite family gathering-place
+      on pleasant days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a house might easily have all these things without being more than
+      usually attractive, and a house with a great deal less might have been as
+      full of charm; only it seemed just the proper setting for that particular
+      household, and undoubtedly it acquired the personality of its occupants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Howells assures us that there never was another home like it, and we may
+      accept his statement. It was unique. It was the home of one of the most
+      unusual and unaccountable personalities in the world, yet was perfectly
+      and serenely ordered. Mark Twain was not responsible for this blissful
+      condition. He was its beacon-light; it was around Mrs. Clemens that its
+      affairs steadily revolved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If in the four years and more of marriage Clemens had made advancement in
+      culture and capabilities, Olivia Clemens also had become something more
+      than the half-timid, inexperienced girl he had first known. In a way her
+      education had been no less notable than his. She had worked and studied,
+      and her half-year of travel and entertainment abroad had given her
+      opportunity for acquiring knowledge and confidence. Her vision of life had
+      vastly enlarged; her intellect had flowered; her grasp of practicalities
+      had become firm and sure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In spite of her delicate physical structure, her continued uncertainty of
+      health, she capably undertook the management of their large new house, and
+      supervised its economies. Any one of her undertakings was sufficient for
+      one woman, but she compassed them all. No children had more careful
+      direction than hers. No husband had more devoted attendance and
+      companionship. No household was ever directed with a sweeter and gentler
+      grace, or with greater perfection of detail. When the great ones of the
+      world came to visit America's most picturesque literary figure she gave
+      welcome to them all, and filled her place at his side with such sweet and
+      capable dignity that those who came to pay their duties to him often
+      returned to pay even greater devotion to his companion. Says Howells:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    She was, in a way, the loveliest person I have ever seen&mdash;the
+    gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united
+    wonderful tact with wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted
+    her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried in it.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      And once, in an interview with the writer of these chapters, Howells
+      declared: &ldquo;She was not only a beautiful soul, but a woman of
+      singular intellectual power. I never knew any one quite like her.&rdquo;
+      Then he added: &ldquo;Words cannot express Mrs. Clemens&mdash;her
+      fineness, her delicate, her wonderful tact with a man who was in some
+      respects, and wished to be, the most outrageous creature that ever
+      breathed.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Howells meant a good many things by that, no doubt: Clemens's violent
+      methods, for one thing, his sudden, savage impulses, which sometimes
+      worked injustice and hardship for others, though he was first to discover
+      the wrong and to repair it only too fully. Then, too, Howells may have
+      meant his boyish teasing tendency to disturb Mrs. Clemens's exquisite
+      sense of decorum.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in a
+      pair of white cowskin slippers with the hair out, and do a crippled
+      colored uncle, to the joy of all beholders. I must not say all, for I
+      remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of
+      &ldquo;Oh, Youth!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was continually doing such things as the &ldquo;crippled colored uncle,&rdquo;;
+      partly for the very joy of the performance, but partly, too, to disturb
+      her serenity, to incur her reproof, to shiver her a little&mdash;&ldquo;shock&rdquo;
+      would be too strong a word. And he liked to fancy her in a spirit and
+      attitude of belligerence, to present that fancy to those who knew the
+      measure of her gentle nature. Writing to Mrs. Howells of a picture of
+      herself in a group, he said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    You look exactly as Mrs. Clemens does after she has said: &ldquo;Indeed, I
+    do not wonder that you can frame no reply; for you know only too
+    well that your conduct admits of no excuse, palliation, or argument
+    &mdash;none!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Clemens would pretend to a visitor that she had been violently indignant
+      over some offense of his; perhaps he would say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well I contradicted her just now, and the crockery will begin to
+      fly pretty soon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She could never quite get used to this pleasantry, and a faint glow would
+      steal over her face. He liked to produce that glow. Yet always his manner
+      toward her was tenderness itself. He regarded her as some dainty bit of
+      porcelain, and it was said that he was always following her about with a
+      chair. Their union has been regarded as ideal. That is Twichell's opinion
+      and Howells's. The latter sums up:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be,
+    but from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the
+    most perfect.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0102" id="link2H_4_0102">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XCVII. THE WALK TO BOSTON
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The new home became more beautiful to them as things found their places,
+      as the year deepened; and the wonder of autumn foliage lit up their
+      landscape. Sitting on one of the little upper balconies Mrs. Clemens
+      wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    The atmosphere is very hazy, and it makes the autumn tints even more
+    soft and beautiful than usual. Mr. Twichell came for Mr. Clemens to
+    go walking with him; they returned at dinner-time, heavily laden
+    with autumn leaves.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      And as usual Clemens, finding the letter unfinished, took up the story.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Twichell came up here with me to luncheon after services, and I went
+    back home with him and took Susy along in her little carriage. We
+    have just got home again, middle of afternoon, and Livy has gone to
+    rest and left the west balcony to me. There is a shining and most
+    marvelous miracle of cloud-effects mirrored in the brook; a picture
+    which began with perfection, and has momently surpassed it ever
+    since, until at last it is almost unendurably beautiful....
+
+    There is a cloud-picture in the stream now whose hues are as
+    manifold as those in an opal and as delicate as the tintings of a
+    sea-shell. But now a muskrat is swimming through it and
+    obliterating it with the turmoil of wavelets he casts abroad from
+    his shoulders.
+
+    The customary Sunday assemblage of strangers is gathered together in
+    the grounds discussing the house.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Twichell and Clemens took a good many walks these days; long walks, for
+      Twichell was an athlete and Clemens had not then outgrown the Nevada habit
+      of pedestrian wandering. Talcott's Tower, a wooden structure about five
+      miles from Hartford, was one of their favorite objective points; and often
+      they walked out and back, talking so continuously, and so absorbed in the
+      themes of their discussions, that time and distance slipped away almost
+      unnoticed. How many things they talked of in those long walks! They
+      discussed philosophies and religions and creeds, and all the range of
+      human possibility and shortcoming, and all the phases of literature and
+      history and politics. Unorthodox discussions they were, illuminating,
+      marvelously enchanting, and vanished now forever. Sometimes they took the
+      train as far as Bloomfield, a little station on the way, and walked the
+      rest of the distance, or they took the train from Bloomfield home. It
+      seems a strange association, perhaps, the fellowship of that violent
+      dissenter with that fervent soul dedicated to church and creed, but the
+      root of their friendship lay in the frankness with which each man
+      delivered his dogmas and respected those of his companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was during one of their walks to the tower that they planned a far more
+      extraordinary undertaking&mdash;nothing less, in fact, than a walk from
+      Hartford to Boston. This was early in November. They did not delay the
+      matter, for the weather was getting too uncertain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens wrote Redpath:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      DEAR REDPATH,&mdash;Rev. J. H. Twichell and I expect to start at 8 o'clock
+      Thursday morning to walk to Boston in twenty four hours&mdash;or more. We
+      shall telegraph Young's Hotel for rooms Saturday night, in order to allow
+      for a low average of pedestrianism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was half past eight on Thursday morning, November 12, 1874, that they
+      left Twichell's house in a carriage, drove to the East Hartford bridge,
+      and there took to the road, Twichell carrying a little bag and Clemens a
+      basket of lunch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The papers had got hold of it by this time, and were watching the result.
+      They did well enough that first day, following the old Boston stage road,
+      arriving at Westford about seven o'clock in the evening, twenty-eight
+      miles from the starting-point. There was no real hotel at Westford, only a
+      sort of tavern, but it afforded the luxury of rest. &ldquo;Also,&rdquo;
+      says Twichell, in a memoranda of the trip, &ldquo;a sublimely profane
+      hostler whom you couldn't jostle with any sort of mild remark without
+      bringing down upon yourself a perfect avalanche of oaths.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was a joy to Clemens, who sat behind the stove, rubbing his lame
+      knees and fairly reveling in Twichell's discomfiture in his efforts to
+      divert the hostler's blasphemy. There was also a mellow inebriate there
+      who recommended kerosene for Clemens's lameness, and offered as testimony
+      the fact that he himself had frequently used it for stiffness in his
+      joints after lying out all night in cold weather, drunk: altogether it was
+      a notable evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Westford was about as far as they continued the journey afoot. Clemens was
+      exceedingly lame next morning, and had had a rather bad night; but he
+      swore and limped along six miles farther, to North Ashford, then gave it
+      up. They drove from North Ashford to the railway, where Clemens
+      telegraphed Redpath and Howells of their approach. To Redpath:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    We have made thirty-five miles in less than five days. This
+    demonstrates that the thing can be done. Shall now finish by rail.
+    Did you have any bets on us?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      To Howells:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Arrive by rail at seven o'clock, the first of a series of grand
+    annual pedestrian tours from Hartford to Boston to be performed by
+    us. The next will take place next year.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Redpath read his despatch to a lecture audience, with effect. Howells made
+      immediate preparation for receiving two way-worn, hungry men. He
+      telegraphed to Young's Hotel: &ldquo;You and Twichell come right up to 37
+      Concord Avenue, Cambridge, near observatory. Party waiting for you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They got to Howells's about nine o'clock, and the refreshments were
+      waiting. Miss Longfellow was there, Rose Hawthorne, John Fiske, Larkin G.
+      Mead, the sculptor, and others of their kind. Howells tells in his book
+      how Clemens, with Twichell, &ldquo;suddenly stormed in,&rdquo; and
+      immediately began to eat and drink:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with
+    his head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped
+    oysters without which no party in Cambridge was really a party,
+    exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the
+    most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of
+    their progress.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Clemens gave a dinner, next night, to Howells, Aldrich, Osgood, and the
+      rest. The papers were full of jokes concerning the Boston expedition; some
+      even had illustrations, and it was all amusing enough at the time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next morning, sitting in the writing-room of Young's Hotel, he wrote a
+      curious letter to Mrs. Clemens, though intended as much for Howells and
+      Aldrich as for her. It was dated sixty-one years ahead, and was a sort of
+      Looking Backwards, though that notable book had not yet been written. It
+      presupposed a monarchy in which the name of Boston has been changed to
+      &ldquo;Limerick,&rdquo; and Hartford to &ldquo;Dublin.&rdquo; In it,
+      Twichell has become the &ldquo;Archbishop of Dublin,&rdquo; Howells
+      &ldquo;Duke of Cambridge,&rdquo; Aldrich &ldquo;Marquis of Ponkapog,&rdquo;
+      Clemens the &ldquo;Earl of Hartford.&rdquo; It was too whimsical and
+      delightful a fancy to be forgotten.&mdash;[This remarkable and amusing
+      document will be found under Appendix M, at the end of last volume.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A long time afterward, thirty-four year, he came across this letter. He
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems curious now that I should have been dreaming dreams of a
+      future monarchy and never suspect that the monarchy was already present
+      and the Republic a thing of the past.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What he meant, was the political succession that had fostered those
+      commercial trusts which, in turn, had established party dominion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To Howells, on his return, Clemens wrote his acknowledgments, and added:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Mrs. Clemens gets upon the verge of swearing, and goes tearing
+    around in an unseemly fury when I enlarge upon the delightful time
+    we had in Boston, and she not there to have her share. I have tried
+    hard to reproduce Mrs. Howells to her, and have probably not made a
+    shining success of it.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0103" id="link2H_4_0103">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XCVIII. &ldquo;OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI&rdquo;
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Howells had been urging Clemens to do something more for the Atlantic,
+      specifically something for the January number. Clemens cudgeled his
+      brains, but finally declared he must give it up:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Mrs. Clemens has diligently persecuted me day by day with urgings to
+    go to work and do that something, but it's no use. I find I can't.
+    We are in such a state of worry and endless confusion that my head
+    won't go.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Two hours later he sent another hasty line:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I take back the remark that I can't write for the January number,
+    for Twichell and I have had a long walk in the woods, and I got to
+    telling him about old Mississippi days of steam-boating glory and
+    grandeur as I saw them (during four years) from the pilot-house. He
+    said, &ldquo;What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!&rdquo; I hadn't
+    thought of that before. Would you like a series of papers to run
+    through three months or six or nine&mdash;or about four months, say?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Howells welcomed this offer as an echo of his own thought. He had come
+      from a piloting family himself, and knew the interest that Mark Twain
+      could put into such a series.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Acting promptly under the new inspiration, Clemens forthwith sent the
+      first chapter of that monumental, that absolutely unique, series of papers
+      on Mississippi River life, which to-day constitutes one of his chief
+      claims to immortality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His first number was in the nature of an experiment. Perhaps, after all,
+      the idea would not suit the Atlantic readers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cut it, scarify it, reject it, handle it with entire freedom,&rdquo;
+      he wrote, and awaited the result.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;result&rdquo; was that Howells expressed his delight:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    The piece about the Mississippi is capital. It almost made the
+    water in our ice-pitcher muddy as I read it. I don't think I shall
+    meddle much with it, even in the way of suggestion. The sketch of
+    the low-lived little town was so good that I could have wished there
+    was more of it. I want the sketches, if you can make them, every
+    month.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain was now really interested in this new literary venture. He was
+      fairly saturated with memories. He was writing on the theme that lay
+      nearest to his heart. Within ten days he reported that he had finished
+      three of the papers, and had begun the fourth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet I have spoken of nothing but piloting as a science so far, and I
+      doubt if I ever get beyond that portion of my subject. And I don't care
+      to. Any Muggins can write about old days on the Mississippi of five
+      hundred different kinds, but I am the only man alive that can scribble
+      about the piloting of that day, and no man has ever tried to scribble
+      about it yet. Its newness pleases me all the time, and it is about the
+      only new subject I know of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He became so enthusiastic presently that he wanted to take Howells with
+      him on a trip down the Mississippi, with their wives for company, to go
+      over the old ground again and obtain added material enough for a book.
+      Howells was willing enough&mdash;agreed to go, in fact&mdash;but found it
+      hard to get away. He began to temporize and finally backed out. Clemens
+      tried to inveigle Osgood into the trip, but without success; also John
+      Hay, but Hay had a new baby at his house just then&mdash;&ldquo;three days
+      old, and with a voice beyond price,&rdquo; he said, offering it as an
+      excuse for non-acceptance. So the plan for revisiting the river and the
+      conclusion of the book were held in abeyance for nearly seven years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those early piloting chapters, as they appeared in the Atlantic,
+      constituted Mark Twain's best literary exhibit up to that time. In some
+      respects they are his best literature of any time. As pictures of an
+      intensely interesting phase of life, they are so convincing, so real, and
+      at the same time of such extraordinary charm and interest, that if the
+      English language should survive a thousand years, or ten times as long,
+      they would be as fresh and vivid at the end of that period as the day they
+      were penned. In them the atmosphere of, the river and its environment&mdash;its
+      pictures, its thousand aspects of life&mdash;are reproduced with what is
+      no less than literary necromancy. Not only does he make you smell the
+      river you can fairly hear it breathe. On the appearance of the first
+      number John Hay wrote:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is perfect; no more nor less. I don't see how you do it,&rdquo;
+      and added, &ldquo;you know what my opinion is of time not spent with you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Howells wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    You are doing the science of piloting splendidly. Every word
+    interesting, and don't you drop the series till you've got every bit
+    of anecdote and reminiscence into it.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He let Clemens write the articles to suit himself. Once he said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    If I might put in my jaw at this point I should say, stick to actual
+    fact and character in the thing and give things in detail. All that
+    belongs to the old river life is novel, and is now mostly
+    historical. Don't write at any supposed Atlantic audience, but yarn
+    it off as if into my sympathetic ear.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Clemens replied that he had no dread of the Atlantic audience; he declared
+      it was the only audience that did not require a humorist to &ldquo;paint
+      himself striped and stand on his head to amuse it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;Old Times&rdquo; papers ran through seven numbers of the
+      Atlantic. They were reprinted everywhere by the newspapers, who in that
+      day had little respect for magazine copyrights, and were promptly pirated
+      in book form in Canada. They added vastly to Mark Twain's literary
+      capital, though Howells informs us that the Atlantic circulation did not
+      thrive proportionately, for the reason that the newspapers gave the
+      articles to their readers from advanced sheets of the magazine, even
+      before the latter could be placed on sale. It so happened that in the
+      January Atlantic, which contained the first of the Mississippi papers,
+      there appeared Robert Dale Owen's article on &ldquo;Spiritualism,&rdquo;
+      which brought such humility both to author and publisher because of the
+      exposure of the medium Katie King, which came along while the magazine was
+      in press. Clemens has written this marginal note on the opening page of
+      the copy at Quarry Farm:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While this number of the Atlantic was being printed the Katie King
+      manifestations were discovered to be the cheapest, wretchedest shams and
+      frauds, and were exposed in the newspapers. The awful humiliation of it
+      unseated Robert Dale Owen's reason, and he died in the madhouse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0104" id="link2H_4_0104">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XCIX. A TYPEWRITER, AND A JOKE ON ALDRICH
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was during the trip to Boston with Twichell that Mark Twain saw for the
+      first time what was then&mdash;a brand-new invention, a typewriter; or it
+      may have been during a subsequent visit, a week or two later. At all
+      events, he had the machine and was practising on it December 9, 1874, for
+      he wrote two letters on it that day, one to Howells and the other to Orion
+      Clemens. In the latter he says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I am trying to get the hang of this new-fangled writing-machine, but
+    am not making a shining success of it. However, this is the first
+    attempt I ever have made, and yet I perceive that I shall soon
+    easily acquire a fine facility in its use. I saw the thing in
+    Boston the other day and was greatly taken with it.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He goes on to explain the new wonder, and on the whole his first attempt
+      is a very creditable performance. With his usual enthusiasm over an
+      innovation, he believes it is going to be a great help to him, and
+      proclaims its advantages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is the letter to Howells, with the errors preserved:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    You needn't answer this; I am only practicing to get three; anothe
+    slip-up there; only practici?ng ti get the hang of the thing. I
+    notice I miss fire &amp; get in a good many unnecessary letters &amp;
+    punctuation marks. I am simply using you for a target to bang at.
+    Blame my cats, but this thing requires genius in order to work it
+    just right.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      In an article written long after he tells how he was with Nasby when he
+      first saw the machine in Boston through a window, and how they went in to
+      see it perform. In the same article he states that he was the first person
+      in the world to apply the type-machine to literature, and that he thinks
+      the story of Tom Sawyer was the first type-copied manuscript.&mdash;[Tom
+      Sawyer was not then complete, and had been laid aside. The first
+      type-copied manuscript was probably early chapters of the Mississippi
+      story, two discarded typewritten pages of which still exist.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The new enthusiasm ran its course and died. Three months later, when the
+      Remington makers wrote him for a recommendation of the machine, he replied
+      that he had entirely stopped using it. The typewriter was not perfect in
+      those days, and the keys did not always respond readily. He declared it
+      was ruining his morals&mdash;that it made him &ldquo;want to swear.&rdquo;
+      He offered it to Howells because, he said, Howells had no morals anyway.
+      Howells hesitated, so Clemens traded the machine to Bliss for a
+      side-saddle. But perhaps Bliss also became afraid of its influence, for in
+      due time he brought it back. Howells, again tempted, hesitated, and this
+      time was lost. What eventually became of the machine is not history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of those, happy Atlantic dinners which Howells tells of came about the
+      end of that year. It was at the Parker House, and Emerson was there; and
+      Aldrich, and the rest of that group.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you dare to refuse the invitation,&rdquo; said Howells, and
+      naturally Clemens didn't, and wrote back:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I want you to ask Mrs. Howells to let you stay all night at the
+    Parker House and tell lies and have an improving time, and take
+    breakfast with me in the morning. I will have a good room for you
+    and a fire. Can't you tell her it always makes you sick to go home
+    late at night or something like that? That sort of thing arouses
+    Mrs. Clemens's sympathies easily.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Two memories of that old dinner remain to-day. Aldrich and Howells were
+      not satisfied with the kind of neckties that Mark Twain wore (the
+      old-fashioned black &ldquo;string&rdquo; tie, a Western survival), so they
+      made him a present of two cravats when he set out on his return for
+      Hartford. Next day he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    You and Aldrich have made one woman deeply and sincerely grateful
+    &mdash;Mrs. Clemens. For months&mdash;I may even say years&mdash;she has shown an
+    unaccountable animosity toward my necktie, even getting up in the
+    night to take it with the tongs and blackguard it, sometimes also
+    getting so far as to threaten it.
+
+    When I said you and Aldrich had given me two new neckties, and that
+    they were in a paper in my overcoat pocket, she was in a fever of
+    happiness until she found I was going to frame them; then all the
+    venom in her nature gathered itself together; insomuch that I, being
+    near to a door, went without, perceiving danger.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It is recorded that eventually he wore the neckties, and returned no more
+      to the earlier mode.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another memory of that dinner is linked to a demand that Aldrich made of
+      Clemens that night, for his photograph. Clemens, returning to Hartford,
+      put up fifty-two different specimens in as many envelopes, with the idea
+      of sending one a week for a year. Then he concluded that this was too slow
+      a process, and for a week sent one every morning to &ldquo;His Grace of
+      Ponkapog.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aldrich stood it for a few days, then protested. &ldquo;The police,&rdquo;
+      he said, &ldquo;are in the habit of swooping down upon a publication of
+      that sort.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On New-Year's no less than twenty pictures came at once&mdash;photographs
+      and prints of Mark Twain, his house, his family, his various belongings.
+      Aldrich sent a warning then that the perpetrator of this outrage was known
+      to the police as Mark Twain, alias &ldquo;The Jumping Frog,&rdquo; a
+      well-known California desperado, who would be speedily arrested and
+      brought to Ponkapog to face his victim. This letter was signed &ldquo;T.
+      Bayleigh, Chief of Police,&rdquo; and on the outside of the envelope there
+      was a statement that it would be useless for that person to send any more
+      mail-matter, as the post-office had been blown up. The jolly farce closed
+      there. It was the sort of thing that both men enjoyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aldrich was writing a story at this time which contained some Western
+      mining incident and environment. He sent the manuscript to Clemens for
+      &ldquo;expert&rdquo; consideration and advice. Clemens wrote him at great
+      length and in careful detail. He was fond of Aldrich, regarding him as one
+      of the most brilliant of men. Once, to Robert Louis Stevenson, he said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Aldrich has never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and
+    humorous sayings. None has equaled him, certainly none has
+    surpassed him, in the felicity of phrasing with which he clothed
+    these children of his fancy. Aldrich is always brilliant; he can't
+    help it; he is a fire-opal set round with rose diamonds; when he is
+    not speaking you know that his dainty fancies are twinkling and
+    glimmering around in him; when he speaks the diamonds flash. Yes,
+    he is always brilliant, he will always be brilliant; he will be
+    brilliant in hell-you will see.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Stevenson, smiling a chuckly smile, said, &ldquo;I hope not.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you will, and he will dim even those ruddy fires and look
+      like a transfigured Adonis backed against a pink sunset.&rdquo;&mdash;[North
+      American Review, September, 1906.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0105" id="link2H_4_0105">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      C. RAYMOND, MENTAL TELEGRAPHY, ETC.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Sellers play was given in Hartford, in January (1875), to as many
+      people as could crowd into the Opera House. Raymond had reached the
+      perfection of his art by that time, and the townsmen of Mark Twain saw the
+      play and the actor at their best. Kate Field played the part of Laura
+      Hawkins, and there was a Hartford girl in the company; also a Hartford
+      young man, who would one day be about as well known to playgoers as any
+      playwright or actor that America has produced. His name was William
+      Gillette, and it was largely due to Mark Twain that the author of Secret
+      Service and of the dramatic &ldquo;Sherlock Holmes&rdquo; got a fair
+      public start. Clemens and his wife loaned Gillette the three thousand
+      dollars which tided him through his period of dramatic education. Their
+      faith in his ability was justified.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hartford would naturally be enthusiastic on a first &ldquo;Sellers-Raymond&rdquo;
+      night. At the end of the fourth act there was an urgent demand for the
+      author of the play, who was supposed to be present. He was not there in
+      person, but had sent a letter, which Raymond read:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY DEAR RAYMOND,&mdash;I am aware that you are going to be welcomed to our
+      town by great audiences on both nights of your stay there, and I beg to
+      add my hearty welcome also, through this note. I cannot come to the
+      theater on either evening, Raymond, because there is something so touching
+      about your acting that I can't stand it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (I do not mention a couple of colds in my head, because I hardly mind them
+      as much as I would the erysipelas, but between you and me I would prefer
+      it if they were rights and lefts.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then there is another thing. I have always taken a pride in earning my
+      living in outside places and spending it in Hartford; I have said that no
+      good citizen would live on his own people, but go forth and make it sultry
+      for other communities and fetch home the result; and now at this late day
+      I find myself in the crushed and bleeding position of fattening myself
+      upon the spoils of my brethren! Can I support such grief as this? (This is
+      literary emotion, you understand. Take the money at the door just the
+      same.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once more I welcome you to Hartford, Raymond, but as for me let me stay at
+      home and blush.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                         Yours truly,  MARK.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The play was equally successful wherever it went. It made what in that day
+      was regarded as a fortune. One hundred thousand dollars is hardly too
+      large an estimate of the amount divided between author and actor. Raymond
+      was a great actor in that part, as he interpreted it, though he did not
+      interpret it fully, or always in its best way. The finer side, the subtle,
+      tender side of Colonel Sellers, he was likely to overlook. Yet, with a
+      natural human self-estimate, Raymond believed he had created a much
+      greater part than Mark Twain had written. Doubtless from the point of view
+      of a number of people this was so, though the idea, was naturally
+      obnoxious to Clemens. In course of time their personal relations ceased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens that winter gave another benefit for Father Hawley. In reply to an
+      invitation to appear in behalf of the poor, he wrote that he had quit the
+      lecture field, and would not return to the platform unless driven there by
+      lack of bread. But he added:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the spirit of that remark I am debarred from delivering this proposed
+      lecture, and so I fall back upon the letter of it, and emerge upon the
+      platform for this last and final time because I am confronted by a lack of
+      bread-among Father Hawley's flock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He made an introductory speech at an old-fashioned spelling-bee, given at
+      the Asylum Hill Church; a breezy, charming talk of which the following is
+      a sample:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I don't see any use in spelling a word right&mdash;and never did. I mean
+    I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of
+    spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook
+    all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. I
+    have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me;
+    there is such a breezy, unfettered originality about his
+    orthography. He always spells &ldquo;kow&rdquo; with a large &ldquo;K.&rdquo; Now that is
+    just as good as to spell it with a small one. It is better. It
+    gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope. It suggests
+    to the mind a grand, vague, impressive new kind of a cow.
+
+    He took part in the contest, and in spite of his early reputation,
+    was spelled down on the word &ldquo;chaldron,&rdquo; which he spelled
+    &ldquo;cauldron,&rdquo; as he had been taught, while the dictionary used as
+    authority gave that form as second choice.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Another time that winter, Clemens read before the Monday Evening Club a
+      paper on &ldquo;Universal Suffrage,&rdquo; which is still remembered by
+      the surviving members of that time. A paragraph or two will convey its
+      purport:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Our marvelous latter-day statesmanship has invented universal
+    suffrage. That is the finest feather in our cap. All that we
+    require of a voter is that he shall be forked, wear pantaloons
+    instead of petticoats, and bear a more or less humorous resemblance
+    to the reported image of God. He need not know anything whatever;
+    he may be wholly useless and a cumberer of the earth; he may even be
+    known to be a consummate scoundrel. No matter. While he can steer
+    clear of the penitentiary his vote is as weighty as the vote of a
+    president, a bishop, a college professor, a merchant prince. We
+    brag of our universal, unrestricted suffrage; but we are shams after
+    all, for we restrict when we come to the women.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The Monday Evening Club was an organization which included the best minds
+      of Hartford. Dr. Horace Bushnell, Prof. Calvin E. Stowe, and J. Hammond
+      Trumbull founded it back in the sixties, and it included such men as Rev.
+      Dr. Parker, Rev. Dr. Burton, Charles H. Clark, of the Courant, Warner, and
+      Twichell, with others of their kind. Clemens had been elected after his
+      first sojourn in England (February, 1873), and had then read a paper on
+      the &ldquo;License of the Press.&rdquo; The club met alternate Mondays,
+      from October to May. There was one paper for each evening, and, after the
+      usual fashion of such clubs, the reading was followed by discussion.
+      Members of that time agree that Mark Twain's association with the club had
+      a tendency to give it a life, or at least an exhilaration, which it had
+      not previously known. His papers were serious in their purpose he always
+      preferred to be serious&mdash;but they evidenced the magic gift which made
+      whatever he touched turn to literary jewelry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Psychic theories and phenomena always attracted Mark Twain. In
+      thought-transference, especially, he had a frank interest&mdash;an
+      interest awakened and kept alive by certain phenomena&mdash;psychic
+      manifestations we call them now. In his association with Mrs. Clemens it
+      not infrequently happened that one spoke the other's thought, or perhaps a
+      long-procrastinated letter to a friend would bring an answer as quickly as
+      mailed; but these are things familiar to us all. A more startling example
+      of thought-communication developed at the time of which we are writing, an
+      example which raised to a fever-point whatever interest he may have had in
+      the subject before. (He was always having these vehement interests&mdash;rages
+      we may call them, for it would be inadequate to speak of them as fads,
+      inasmuch as they tended in the direction of human enlightenment, or
+      progress, or reform.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens one morning was lying in bed when, as he says, &ldquo;suddenly a
+      red-hot new idea came whistling down into my camp.&rdquo; The idea was
+      that the time was ripe for a book that would tell the story of the
+      Comstock-of the Nevada silver mines. It seemed to him that the person best
+      qualified for the work was his old friend William Wright&mdash;Dan de
+      Quille. He had not heard from Dan, or of him, for a long time, but decided
+      to write and urge him to take up the idea. He prepared the letter, going
+      fully into the details of his plan, as was natural for him to do, then
+      laid it aside until he could see Bliss and secure his approval of the
+      scheme from a publishing standpoint. Just a week later, it was the 9th of
+      March, a letter came&mdash;a thick letter bearing a Nevada postmark, and
+      addressed in a handwriting which he presently recognized as De Quille's.
+      To a visitor who was present he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now I will do a miracle. I will tell you everything this letter
+      contains&mdash;date, signature, and all without breaking the seal.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stated what he believed was in the letter. Then he opened it and showed
+      that he had correctly given its contents, which were the same in all
+      essential details as those of his own letter, not yet mailed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In an article on &ldquo;Mental Telegraphy&rdquo; (he invented the name) he
+      relates this instance, with others, and in 'Following the Equator' and
+      elsewhere he records other such happenings. It was one of the &ldquo;mysteries&rdquo;
+      in which he never lost interest, though his concern in it in time became a
+      passive one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The result of the De Quille manifestation, however, he has not recorded.
+      Clemens immediately wrote, urging Dan to come to Hartford for an extended
+      visit. De Quille came, and put in a happy spring in his old comrade's
+      luxurious home, writing 'The Big Bonanza', which Bliss successfully
+      published a year later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain was continually inviting old friends to share his success with
+      him. Any comrade of former days found welcome in his home as often as he
+      would come, and for as long as he would stay. Clemens dropped his own
+      affairs to advise in their undertakings; and if their undertakings were
+      literary he found them a publisher. He did this for Joaquin Miller and for
+      Bret Harte, and he was always urging Goodman to make his house a home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Beecher-Tilton trial was the sensation of the spring of 1875, and
+      Clemens, in common with many others, was greatly worked up over it. The
+      printed testimony had left him decidedly in doubt as to Beecher's
+      innocence, though his blame would seem to have been less for the possible
+      offense than because of the great leader's attitude in the matter. To
+      Twichell he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His quibbling was fatal. Innocent or guilty, he should have made an
+      unqualified statement in the beginning.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Together they attended one of the sessions, on a day when Beecher himself
+      was on the witness-stand. The tension was very great; the excitement was
+      painful. Twichell thought that Beecher appeared well under the stress of
+      examination and was deeply sorry for him; Clemens was far from convinced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The feeling was especially strong in Hartford, where Henry Ward Beecher's
+      relatives were prominent, and animosities grew out of it. They are all
+      forgotten now; most of those who cherished bitterness are dead. Any
+      feeling that Clemens had in the matter lasted but a little while. Howells
+      tells us that when he met him some months after the trial ended, and was
+      tempted to mention it, Clemens discouraged any discussion of the event.
+      Says Howells:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    He would only say the man had suffered enough; as if the man had
+    expiated his wrong, and he was not going to do anything to renew his
+    penalty. I found that very curious, very delicate. His continued
+    blame could not come to the sufferer's knowledge, but he felt it his
+    duty to forbear it.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It was one hundred years, that 19th of April, since the battles of
+      Lexington and Concord, and there was to be a great celebration. The
+      Howellses had visited Hartford in March, and the Clemenses were invited to
+      Cambridge for the celebration. Only Clemens could go, which in the event
+      proved a good thing perhaps; for when Clemens and Howells set out for
+      Concord they did not go over to Boston to take the train, but decided to
+      wait for it at Cambridge. Apparently it did not occur to them that the
+      train would be jammed the moment the doors were opened at the Boston
+      station; but when it came along they saw how hopeless was their chance.
+      They had special invitations and passage from Boston, but these were only
+      mockeries now. It yeas cold and chilly, and they forlornly set out in
+      search of some sort of a conveyance. They tramped around in the mud and
+      raw wind, but vehicles were either filled or engaged, and drivers and
+      occupants were inclined to jeer at them. Clemens was taken with an acute
+      attack of indigestion, which made him rather dismal and savage. Their
+      effort finally ended with his trying to run down a tally-ho which was
+      empty inside and had a party of Harvard students riding atop. The
+      students, who did not recognize their would-be fare, enjoyed the race.
+      They encouraged their pursuer, and perhaps their driver, with merriment
+      and cheers. Clemens was handicapped by having to run in the slippery mud,
+      and soon &ldquo;dropped by the wayside.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad,&rdquo; says Howells, &ldquo;I cannot recall what he said
+      when he came back to me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They hung about a little longer, then dragged themselves home, slipped
+      into the house, and built up a fine, cheerful fire on the hearth. They
+      proposed to practise a deception on Mrs. Howells by pretending they had
+      been to Concord and returned. But it was no use. Their statements were
+      flimsy, and guilt was plainly written on their faces. Howells recalls this
+      incident delightfully, and expresses the belief that the humor of the
+      situation was finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than the actual visit
+      to Concord would have been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Twichell did not have any such trouble in attending the celebration. He
+      had adventures (he was always having adventures), but they were of a more
+      successful kind. Clemens heard the tale of them when he returned to
+      Hartford. He wrote it to Howells:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Joe Twichell preached morning and evening here last Sunday; took
+    midnight train for Boston; got an early breakfast and started by
+    rail at 7.30 A.M. for Concord; swelled around there until 1 P.M.,
+    seeing everything; then traveled on top of a train to Lexington; saw
+    everything there; traveled on top of a train to Boston (with
+    hundreds in company), deluged with dust, smoke, and cinders; yelled
+    and hurrahed all the way like a school-boy; lay flat down, to dodge
+    numerous bridges, and sailed into the depot howling with excitement
+    and as black as a chimneysweep; got to Young's Hotel at 7 P.M.; sat
+    down in the reading-room and immediately fell asleep; was promptly
+    awakened by a porter, who supposed he was drunk; wandered around an
+    hour and a half; then took 9 P.M. train, sat down in a smoking-car,
+    and remembered nothing more until awakened by conductor as the train
+    came into Hartford at 1.30 A.M. Thinks he had simply a glorious
+    time, and wouldn't have missed the Centennial for the world. He
+    would have run out to see us a moment at Cambridge but he was too
+    dirty. I wouldn't have wanted him there; his appalling energy would
+    have been an insufferable reproach to mild adventurers like you and
+    me.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0106" id="link2H_4_0106">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CI. CONCLUDING &ldquo;TOM SAWYER&rdquo;&mdash;MARK TWAIN's &ldquo;EDITORS&rdquo;
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Meantime the &ldquo;inspiration tank,&rdquo; as Clemens sometimes called
+      it, had filled up again. He had received from somewhere new afflatus for
+      the story of Tom and Huck, and was working on it steadily. The family
+      remained in Hartford, and early in July, under full head of steam, he
+      brought the story to a close. On the 5th he wrote Howells:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I have finished the story and didn't take the chap beyond boyhood.
+    I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but
+    autobiographically, like Gil Blas. I perhaps made a mistake in not
+    writing it in the first person. If I went on now, and took him into
+    manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in
+    literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him.
+    It is not a boy's book at all. It will only be read by adults. It
+    is only written for adults.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He would like to see the story in the Atlantic, he said, but doubted the
+      wisdom of serialization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By and by I shall take a boy of twelve and run him through life (in
+      the first person), but not Tom Sawyer, he would not make a good character
+      for it.&rdquo; From which we get the first glimpse of Huck's later
+      adventures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course he wanted Howells to look at the story. It was a tremendous
+      favor to ask, he said, and added, &ldquo;But I know of no other person
+      whose judgment I could venture to take, fully and entirely. Don't hesitate
+      to say no, for I know how your time is taxed, and I would have honest need
+      to blush if you said yes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Send on your MS.,&rdquo; wrote Howells. &ldquo;You've no idea what
+      I may ask you to do for me some day.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Clemens, conscience-stricken, &ldquo;blushed and weakened,&rdquo; as
+      he said. When Howells insisted, he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    But I will gladly send it to you if you will do as follows:
+    dramatize it, if you perceive that you can, and take, for your
+    remuneration, half of the first $6,000 which I receive for its
+    representation on the stage. You could alter the plot entirely if
+    you chose. I could help in the work most cheerfully after you had
+    arranged the plot. I have my eye upon two young girls who can play
+    Tom and Huck.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Howells in his reply urged Clemens to do the playwriting himself. He could
+      never find time, he said, and he doubted whether he could enter into the
+      spirit of another man's story. Clemens did begin a dramatization then or a
+      little later, but it was not completed. Mrs. Clemens, to whom he had read
+      the story as it proceeded, was as anxious as her husband for Howells's
+      opinion, for it was the first extended piece of fiction Mark Twain had
+      undertaken alone. He carried the manuscript over to Boston himself, and
+      whatever their doubts may have been, Howells's subsequent letter set them
+      at rest. He wrote that he had sat up till one in the morning to get to the
+      end of it, simply because it was impossible to leave off.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+      It is altogether the best boy story I ever read. It will be an immense
+      success, but I think you ought to treat it explicitly as a boy's story;
+      grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do, and if you should put it
+      forth as a story of boys' character from the grown-up point of view you
+      give the wrong key to it.
+    </pre>
+    <p>
+      Viewed in the light of later events, there has never been any better
+      literary opinion than that&mdash;none that has been more fully justified.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens was delighted. He wrote concerning a point here and there, one
+      inquiry referring to the use of a certain strong word. Howells's reply
+      left no doubt:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I'd have that swearing out in an instant. I suppose I didn't notice
+    it because the location was so familiar to my Western sense, and so
+    exactly the thing Huck would say, but it won't do for children.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It was in the last chapter, where Huck relates to Tom the sorrows of
+      reform and tells how they comb him &ldquo;all to thunder.&rdquo; In the
+      original, &ldquo;They comb me all to hell,&rdquo; says Huck; which
+      statement, one must agree, is more effective, more the thing Huck would be
+      likely to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens's acknowledgment of the correction was characteristic:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Mrs. Clemens received the mail this morning, and the next minute she
+    lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her
+    tongue, &ldquo;Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?&rdquo; Then I had
+    to miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to
+    her. Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape
+    with my scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go
+    a little one-sided?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The Clemens family did not go to Elmira that year. The children's health
+      seemed to require the sea-shore, and in August they went to Bateman's
+      Point, Rhode Island, where Clemens most of the time played tenpins in an
+      alley that had gone to ruin. The balls would not stay on the track; the
+      pins stood at inebriate angles. It reminded him of the old billiard-tables
+      of Western mining-camps, and furnished the same uncertainty of play. It
+      was his delight, after he had become accustomed to the eccentricities of
+      the alley, to invite in a stranger and watch his suffering and his frantic
+      effort to score.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0107" id="link2H_4_0107">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CII. &ldquo;SKETCHES NEW AND OLD&rdquo;
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The long-delayed book of Sketches, contracted for five years before, was
+      issued that autumn. &ldquo;The Jumping Frog,&rdquo; which he had bought
+      from Webb, was included in the volume, also the French translation which
+      Madame Blanc (Th. Bentzon) had made for the Revue des deux mondes, with
+      Mark Twain's retranslation back into English, a most astonishing
+      performance in its literal rendition of the French idiom. One example will
+      suffice here. It is where the stranger says to Smiley, &ldquo;I don't see
+      no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Says the French, retranslated:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than
+      each frog&rdquo; (Je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait mieux qu'aucune
+      grenouille). (If that isn't grammar gone to seed then I count myself no
+      judge.&mdash;M. T.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Possible that you not it saw not,&rdquo; said Smiley; &ldquo;possible
+      that you you comprehend frogs; possible that you not you there comprehend
+      nothing; possible that you had of the experience, and possible that you
+      not be but an amateur. Of all manner (de toute maniere) I bet forty
+      dollars that she batter in jumping, no matter which frog of the county of
+      Calaveras.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He included a number of sketches originally published with the Frog, also
+      a selection from the &ldquo;Memoranda&rdquo; and Buffalo Express
+      contributions, and he put in the story of Auntie Cord, with some matter
+      which had never hitherto appeared. True Williams illustrated the book, but
+      either it furnished him no inspiration or he was allowed too much of
+      another sort, for the pictures do not compare with his earlier work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the new matter in the book were-&ldquo;Some Fables for Good Old Boys
+      and Girls,&rdquo; in which certain wood creatures are supposed to make a
+      scientific excursion into a place at some time occupied by men. It is the
+      most pretentious feature of the book, and in its way about as good as any.
+      Like Gulliver's Travels, its object was satire, but its result is also
+      interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens was very anxious that Howells should be first to review this
+      volume. He had a superstition that Howells's verdicts were echoed by the
+      lesser reviewers, and that a book was made or damned accordingly; a belief
+      hardly warranted, for the review has seldom been written that meant to any
+      book the difference between success and failure. Howells's review of
+      Sketches may be offered as a case in point. It was highly commendatory,
+      much more so than the notice of the 'Innocents' had been, or even that of
+      'Roughing It', also more extensive than the latter. Yet after the initial
+      sale of some twenty thousand copies, mainly on the strength of the
+      author's reputation, the book made a comparatively poor showing, and soon
+      lagged far behind its predecessors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We cannot judge, of course, the taste of that day, but it appears now an
+      unattractive, incoherent volume. The pictures were absurdly bad, the
+      sketches were of unequal merit. Many of them are amusing, some of them
+      delightful, but most of them seem ephemeral. If we except &ldquo;The
+      Jumping Frog,&rdquo; and possibly &ldquo;A True Story&rdquo; (and the
+      latter was altogether out of place in the collection), there is no reason
+      to suppose that any of its contents will escape oblivion. The greater
+      number of the sketches, as Mark Twain himself presently realized and
+      declared, would better have been allowed to die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Howells did, however, take occasion to point out in his review, or at
+      least to suggest, the more serious side of Mark Twain. He particularly
+      called attention to &ldquo;A True Story,&rdquo; which the reviewers, at
+      the time of its publication in the Atlantic, had treated lightly, fearing
+      a lurking joke in it; or it may be they had not read it, for reviewers are
+      busy people. Howells spoke of it as the choicest piece of work in the
+      volume, and of its &ldquo;perfect fidelity to the tragic fact.&rdquo; He
+      urged the reader to turn to it again, and to read it as a &ldquo;simple
+      dramatic report of reality,&rdquo; such as had been equaled by no other
+      American writer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in this volume of sketches that Mark Twain first spoke in print
+      concerning copyright, showing the absurd injustice of discriminating
+      against literary ownership by statute of limitation. He did this in the
+      form of an open petition to Congress, asking that all property, real and
+      personal, should be put on the copyright basis, its period of ownership
+      limited to a &ldquo;beneficent term of forty-two years.&rdquo; Generally
+      this was regarded as a joke, as in a sense it was; but like most of Mark
+      Twain's jokes it was founded on reason and justice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The approval with which it was received by his literary associates led him
+      to still further flights. He began a determined crusade for international
+      copyright laws. It was a transcendental beginning, but it contained the
+      germ of what, in the course of time, he would be largely instrumental in
+      bringing to a ripe and magnificent conclusion. In this first effort he
+      framed a petition to enact laws by which the United States would declare
+      itself to be for right and justice, regardless of other nations, and
+      become a good example to the world by refusing to pirate the books of any
+      foreign author. He wrote to Howells, urging him to get Lowell, Longfellow,
+      Holmes, Whittier, and others to sign this petition.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+      I will then put a gentlemanly chap under wages, and send him personally to
+      every author of distinction in the country and corral the rest of the
+      signatures. Then I'll have the whole thing lithographed (about one
+      thousand copies), and move upon the President and Congress in person, but
+      in the subordinate capacity of the party who is merely the agent of better
+      and wiser men, or men whom the country cannot venture to laugh at. I will
+      ask the President to recommend the thing in his message (and if he should
+      ask me to sit down and frame the paragraph for him I should blush, but
+      still I would frame it). And then if Europe chooses to go on stealing from
+      us we would say, with noble enthusiasm, &ldquo;American lawmakers do steal, but
+      not from foreign authors&mdash;not from foreign authors,&rdquo;.... If we only
+      had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a sweat to
+      get Him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.
+    </pre>
+    <p>
+      The petition never reached Congress. Holmes agreed to sign it with a
+      smile, and the comment that governments were not in the habit of setting
+      themselves up as high moral examples, except for revenue. Longfellow also
+      pledged himself, as did a few others; but if there was any general
+      concurrence in the effort there is no memory of it now. Clemens abandoned
+      the original idea, but remained one of the most persistent and influential
+      advocates of copyright betterment, and lived to see most of his dream
+      fulfilled.&mdash;[For the petition concerning copyright term in the United
+      States, see Sketches New and Old. For the petition concerning
+      international copyright and related matters, see Appendix N, at the end of
+      last volume.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0108" id="link2H_4_0108">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CIII. &ldquo;ATLANTIC&rdquo; DAYS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was about this period that Mark Twain began to exhibit openly his more
+      serious side; that is to say his advocacy of public reforms. His paper on
+      &ldquo;Universal Suffrage&rdquo; had sounded a first note, and his
+      copyright petitions were of the same spirit. In later years he used to say
+      that he had always felt it was his mission to teach, to carry the banner
+      of moral reconstruction, and here at forty we find him furnishing
+      evidences of this inclination. In the Atlantic for October, 1875, there
+      was published an unsigned three-page article entitled, &ldquo;The Curious
+      Republic of Gondour.&rdquo; In this article was developed the idea that
+      the voting privilege should be estimated not by the individuals, but by
+      their intellectual qualifications. The republic of Gondour was a Utopia,
+      where this plan had been established:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    It was an odd idea and ingenious. You must understand the
+    constitution gave every man a vote; therefore that vote was a vested
+    right, and could not be taken away. But the constitution did not
+    say that certain individuals might not be given two votes or ten.
+    So an amendatory clause was inserted in a quiet way, a clause which
+    authorized the enlargement of the suffrage in certain cases to be
+    specified by statute....
+
+    The victory was complete. The new law was framed and passed. Under
+    it every citizen, howsoever poor or ignorant, possessed one vote, so
+    universal suffrage still reigned; but if a man possessed a good
+    common-school education and no money he had two votes, a high-school
+    education gave him four; if he had property, likewise, to the value
+    of three thousand sacos he wielded one more vote; for every fifty
+    thousand sacos a man added to his property, he was entitled to
+    another vote; a University education entitled a man to nine votes,
+    even though he owned no property.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The author goes on to show the beneficent results of this enaction; how
+      the country was benefited and glorified by this stimulus toward
+      enlightenment and industry. No one ever suspected that Mark Twain was the
+      author of this fable. It contained almost no trace of his usual literary
+      manner. Nevertheless he wrote it, and only withheld his name, as he did in
+      a few other instances, in the fear that the world might refuse to take him
+      seriously over his own signature or nom de plume.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Howells urged him to follow up the &ldquo;Gondour&rdquo; paper; to send
+      some more reports from that model land. But Clemens was engaged in other
+      things by that time, and was not pledged altogether to national reforms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was writing a skit about a bit of doggerel which was then making nights
+      and days unhappy for many undeserving persons who in an evil moment had
+      fallen upon it in some stray newspaper corner. A certain car line had
+      recently adopted the &ldquo;punch system,&rdquo; and posted in its cars,
+      for the information of passengers and conductor, this placard:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Blue Trip Slip for an 8 Cents Fare, A Buff Trip Slip for a 6 Cents Fare,
+      A Pink Trip Slip for a 3 Cents Fare, For Coupon And Transfer, Punch The
+      Tickets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Noah Brooks and Isaac Bromley were riding down-town one evening on the
+      Fourth Avenue line, when Bromley said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brooks, it's poetry. By George, it's poetry!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brooks followed the direction of Bromley's finger and read the card of
+      instructions. They began perfecting the poetic character of the notice,
+      giving it still more of a rhythmic twist and jingle; arrived at the
+      Tribune office, W. C. Wyckoff, scientific editor, and Moses P. Handy lent
+      intellectual and poetic assistance, with this result:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       Conductor, when you receive a fare,
+
+       Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
+       A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,
+       A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,
+       A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare.
+       Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
+
+    CHORUS
+       Punch, brothers! Punch with care!
+       Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It was printed, and street-car poetry became popular. Different papers had
+      a turn at it, and each usually preceded its own effort with all other
+      examples, as far as perpetrated. Clemens discovered the lines, and on one
+      of their walks recited them to Twichell. &ldquo;A Literary Nightmare&rdquo;
+      was written a few days later. In it the author tells how the jingle took
+      instant and entire possession of him and went waltzing through his brain;
+      how, when he had finished his breakfast, he couldn't tell whether he had
+      eaten anything or not; and how, when he went to finish the novel he was
+      writing, and took up his pen, he could only get it to say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Punch in the presence of the passenjare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found relief at last in telling it to his reverend friend, that is,
+      Twichell, upon whom he unloaded it with sad results.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an amusing and timely skit, and is worth reading to-day. Its
+      publication in the Atlantic had the effect of waking up horse-car poetry
+      all over the world. Howells, going to dine at Ernest Longfellow's the day
+      following its appearance, heard his host and Tom Appleton urging each
+      other to &ldquo;Punch with care.&rdquo; The Longfellow ladies had it by
+      heart. Boston was devastated by it. At home, Howells's children recited it
+      to him in chorus. The streets were full of it; in Harvard it became an
+      epidemic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was transformed into other tongues. Even Swinburne, the musical, is
+      said to have done a French version for the 'Revue des deux mondes'. * A
+      St. Louis magazine, The Western, found relief in a Latin anthem with this
+      chorus:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pungite, fratres, pungite, Pungite cum amore, Pungite pro vectore,
+      Diligentissime pungite.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+              * LE CHANT DU CONDUCTEUR
+
+           Ayant ete paye, le conducteur
+           Percera en pleine vue du voyageur,
+           Quand il regoit trois sous un coupon vert,
+           Un coupon jaune pour six sous c'est l'affaire,
+           Et pour huit sous c'est un coupon couleur
+           De rose, en pleine vue du voyageur.
+
+       CHOEUR
+           Donc, percez soigneusement, mes freres
+           Tout en pleine vue des voyageurs, etc.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0109" id="link2H_4_0109">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CIV. MARK TWAIN AND HIS WIFE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Clemens and his wife traveled to Boston for one of those happy
+      fore-gatherings with the Howellses, which continued, at one end of the
+      journey or another, for so many years. There was a luncheon with
+      Longfellow at Craigie House, and, on the return to Hartford, Clemens
+      reported to Howells how Mrs. Clemens had thrived on the happiness of the
+      visit. Also he confesses his punishment for the usual crimes:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    I &ldquo;caught it&rdquo; for letting Mrs. Howells bother and bother about her
+    coffee, when it was a &ldquo;good deal better than we get at home.&rdquo; I
+    &ldquo;caught it&rdquo; for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment and losing
+    her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that MS.
+    when the printers are done with it. I &ldquo;caught it&rdquo; once more for
+    personating that drunken Colonel James. I &ldquo;caught it&rdquo; for
+    mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and
+    when, after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I
+    had privately suggested to you that we hadn't any frames, and that
+    if you wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the
+    madam was simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she
+    said:
+
+    &ldquo;How could you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his
+    sensitive nature, upon such a repulsive er&mdash;&rdquo;
+
+    &ldquo;Oh, Howells won't mind it! You don't know Howells. Howells is a
+    man who&mdash;&rdquo;
+
+    She was gone. But George was the first person she stumbled on in
+    the hall, so she took it out of George. I am glad of that, because
+    it saved the babies.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Clemens used to admit, at a later day, that his education did not advance
+      by leaps and bounds, but gradually, very gradually; and it used to give
+      him a pathetic relief in those after-years, when that sweet presence had
+      gone out of his life, to tell the way of it, to confess over-fully,
+      perhaps, what a responsibility he had been to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He used to tell how, for a long time, he concealed his profanity from her;
+      how one morning, when he thought the door was shut between their bedroom
+      and the bathroom, he was in there dressing and shaving, accompanying these
+      trying things with language intended only for the strictest privacy; how
+      presently, when he discovered a button off the shirt he intended to put
+      on, he hurled it through the window into the yard with appropriate
+      remarks, followed it with another shirt that was in the same condition,
+      and added certain collars and neckties and bath-room requisites,
+      decorating the shrubbery outside, where the people were going by to
+      church; how in this extreme moment he heard a slight cough and turned to
+      find that the door was open! There was only one door to the bath-room, and
+      he knew he had to pass her. He felt pale and sick, and sat down for a few
+      moments to consider. He decided to assume that she was asleep, and to walk
+      out and through the room, head up, as if he had nothing on his conscience.
+      He attempted it, but without success. Half-way across the room he heard a
+      voice suddenly repeat his last terrific remark. He turned to see her
+      sitting up in bed, regarding him with a look as withering as she could
+      find in her gentle soul. The humor of it struck him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Livy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;did it sound like that?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course it did,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;only worse. I wanted you
+      to hear just how it sounded.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Livy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;it would pain me to think that when I
+      swear it sounds like that. You got the words right, Livy, but you don't
+      know the tune.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet he never willingly gave her pain, and he adored her and gloried in her
+      dominion, his life long. Howells speaks of his beautiful and tender
+      loyalty to her as the &ldquo;most moving quality of his most faithful
+      soul.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives,
+      and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all
+      the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She guarded his work sacredly; and reviewing the manuscripts which he was
+      induced to discard, and certain edited manuscripts, one gets a partial
+      idea of what the reading world owes to Olivia Clemens. Of the discarded
+      manuscripts (he seems seldom to have destroyed them) there are a
+      multitude, and among them all scarcely one that is not a proof of her
+      sanity and high regard for his literary honor. They are amusing&mdash;some
+      of them; they are interesting&mdash;some of them; they are strong and
+      virile&mdash;some of them; but they are unworthy&mdash;most of them,
+      though a number remain unfinished because theme or interest failed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain was likely to write not wisely but too much, piling up hundreds
+      of manuscript pages only because his brain was thronging as with a myriad
+      of fireflies, a swarm of darting, flashing ideas demanding release. As
+      often as not he began writing with only a nebulous idea of what he
+      proposed to do. He would start with a few characters and situations,
+      trusting in Providence to supply material as needed. So he was likely to
+      run ashore any time. As for those other attempts&mdash;stories &ldquo;unavailable&rdquo;
+      for one reason or another&mdash;he was just as apt to begin those as the
+      better sort, for somehow he could never tell the difference. That is one
+      of the hall-marks of genius&mdash;the thing which sharply differentiates
+      genius from talent. Genius is likely to rate a literary disaster as its
+      best work. Talent rarely makes that mistake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the abandoned literary undertakings of these early years of
+      authorship there is the beginning of what was doubtless intended to become
+      a book, &ldquo;The Second Advent,&rdquo; a story which opens with a very
+      doubtful miraculous conception in Arkansas, and leads only to grotesquery
+      and literary disorder. There is another, &ldquo;The Autobiography of a
+      Damn Fool,&rdquo; a burlesque on family history, hopelessly impossible;
+      yet he began it with vast enthusiasm and, until he allowed her to see the
+      manuscript, thought it especially good. &ldquo;Livy wouldn't have it,&rdquo;
+      he said, &ldquo;so I gave it up.&rdquo; There is another, &ldquo;The
+      Mysterious Chamber,&rdquo; strong and fine in conception, vividly and
+      intensely interesting; the story of a young lover who is accidentally
+      locked behind a secret door in an old castle and cannot announce himself.
+      He wanders at last down into subterranean passages beneath the castle, and
+      he lives in this isolation for twenty years. The question of sustenance
+      was the weak point in the story. Clemens could invent no way of providing
+      it, except by means of a waste or conduit from the kitchen into which
+      scraps of meat, bread, and other items of garbage were thrown. This he
+      thought sufficient, but Mrs. Clemens did not highly regard such a literary
+      device. Clemens could think of no good way to improve upon it, so this
+      effort too was consigned to the penal colony, a set of pigeonholes kept in
+      his study. To Howells and others, when they came along, he would read the
+      discarded yarns, and they were delightful enough for such a purpose, as
+      delightful as the sketches which every artist has, turned face to the
+      wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Captain Stormfield&rdquo; lay under the ban for many a year, though
+      never entirely abandoned. This manuscript was even recommended for
+      publication by Howells, who has since admitted that it would not have done
+      then; and indeed, in its original, primitive nakedness it would hardly
+      have done even in this day of wider toleration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It should be said here that there is not the least evidence (and the
+      manuscripts are full of evidence) that Mrs. Clemens was ever
+      super-sensitive, or narrow, or unliterary in her restraints. She became
+      his public, as it were, and no man ever had a more open-minded,
+      clear-headed public than that. For Mark Twain's reputation it would have
+      been better had she exercised her editorial prerogative even more actively&mdash;if,
+      in her love for him and her jealousy of his reputation, she had been even
+      more severe. She did all that lay in her strength, from the beginning to
+      the end, and if we dwell upon this phase of their life together it is
+      because it is so large a part of Mark Twain's literary story. On her
+      birthday in the year we are now closing (1875) he wrote her a letter which
+      conveys an acknowledgment of his debt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      LIVY DARLING,&mdash;Six years have gone by since I made my first great
+      success in life and won you, and thirty years have passed since Providence
+      made preparation for that happy success by sending you into the world.
+      Every day we live together adds to the security of my confidence that we
+      can never any more wish to be separated than we can imagine a regret that
+      we were ever joined. You are dearer to me to-day, my child, than you were
+      upon the last anniversary of this birthday; you were dearer then than you
+      were a year before; you have grown more and more dear from the first of
+      those anniversaries, and I do not doubt that this precious progression
+      will continue on to the end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us look forward to the coming anniversaries, with their age and their
+      gray hairs, without fear and without depression, trusting and believing
+      that the love we bear each other will be sufficient to make them blessed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So, with abounding affection for you and our babies I hail this day that
+      brings you the matronly grace and dignity of three decades!
+    </p>
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. 1, Part 2, 1866-1875, by Albert Bigelow Paine
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. 1, Part 2,
+1866-1875, by Albert Bigelow Paine
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. 1, Part 2, 1866-1875
+       The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
+
+Author: Albert Bigelow Paine
+
+Release Date: August 21, 2006 [EBook #2983]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY, ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY
+
+By Albert Bigelow Paine
+
+
+
+VOLUME I, Part 2: 1866-1875
+
+
+
+LIV
+
+
+THE LECTURER
+
+It was not easy to take up the daily struggle again, but it was
+necessary.--[Clemens once declared he had been so blue at this period
+that one morning he put a loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked
+courage to pull the trigger.]--Out of the ruck of possibilities (his
+brain always thronged with plans) he constructed three or four resolves.
+The chief of these was the trip around the world; but that lay months
+ahead, and in the mean time ways and means must be provided. Another
+intention was to finish the Hornet article, and forward it to Harper's
+Magazine--a purpose carried immediately into effect. To his delight the
+article found acceptance, and he looked forward to the day of its
+publication as the beginning of a real career. He intended to follow it
+up with a series on the islands, which in due time might result in a book
+and an income. He had gone so far as to experiment with a dedication for
+the book--an inscription to his mother, modified later for use in 'The
+Innocents Abroad'. A third plan of action was to take advantage of the
+popularity of the Hawaiian letters, and deliver a lecture on the same
+subject. But this was a fearsome prospect--he trembled when he thought
+of it. As Governor of the Third House he had been extravagantly received
+and applauded, but in that case the position of public entertainer had
+been thrust upon him. To come forward now, offering himself in the same
+capacity, was a different matter. He believed he could entertain, but he
+lacked the courage to declare himself; besides, it meant a risk of his
+slender capital. He confided his situation to Col. John McComb, of the
+Alta California, and was startled by McComb's vigorous endorsement.
+
+"Do it, by all means!" urged McComb. "It will be a grand success--I know
+it! Take the largest house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket."
+
+Frightened but resolute, he went to the leading theater manager the same
+Tom Maguire of his verses--and was offered the new opera-house at half
+rates. The next day this advertisement appeared:
+
+                MAGUIRE'S ACADEMY OF MUSIC
+               PINE STREET, NEAR MONTGOMERY
+
+                  THE SANDWICH ISLANDS
+
+                      MARK TWAIN
+
+        (HONOLULU CORRESPONDENT OF THE SACRAMENTO UNION)
+                    WILL DELIVER A
+              LECTURE ON THE SANDWICH ISLANDS
+
+                AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC
+               ON TUESDAY EVENING, OCT. 2d
+                       (1866)
+
+ In which passing mention will be made of Harris, Bishop Staley, the
+American missionaries, etc., and the absurd customs and characteristics
+  of the natives duly discussed and described. The great volcano of
+         Kilauea will also receive proper attention.
+
+                  A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA
+            is in town, but has not been engaged
+                       ALSO
+               A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS
+           will be on exhibition in the next block
+                  MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS
+were in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been abandoned
+               A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION
+ may be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to expect whatever
+                     they please.
+
+           Dress Circle, $1.00  Family Circle, 50c
+    Doors open at 7 o'clock  The Trouble to begin at 8 o'clock
+
+The story of that first lecture, as told in Roughing It, is a faithful
+one, and need only be summarized here.
+
+Expecting to find the house empty, he found it packed from the footlights
+to the walls. Sidling out from the wings--wobbly-kneed and dry of
+tongue--he was greeted by a murmur, a roar, a very crash of applause that
+frightened away his remaining vestiges of courage. Then, came reaction
+--these were his friends, and he began to talk to them. Fear melted
+away, and as tide after tide of applause rose and billowed and came
+breaking at his feet, he knew something of the exaltation of Monte Cristo
+when he declared "The world is mine!"
+
+It was a vast satisfaction to have succeeded. It was particularly
+gratifying at this time, for he dreaded going back into newspaper
+harness. Also; it softened later the disappointment resulting from
+another venture; for when the December Harper appeared, with his article,
+the printer and proof-reader had somehow converted Mark Twain into "Mark
+Swain," and his literary dream perished.
+
+As to the literary value of his lecture, it was much higher than had,
+been any portion of his letters, if we may judge from its few remaining
+fragments. One of these--a part of the description of the great volcano
+Haleakala, on the island of Maui--is a fair example of his eloquence.
+
+It is somewhat more florid than his later description of the same scene
+in Roughing It, which it otherwise resembles; and we may imagine that its
+poetry, with the added charm of its delivery, held breathless his
+hearers, many of whom believed that no purer eloquence had ever been
+uttered or written.
+
+It is worth remembering, too, that in this lecture, delivered so long
+ago, he advocated the idea of American ownership of these islands,
+dwelling at considerable length on his reasons for this ideal.
+
+--[For fragmentary extracts from this first lecture of Mark Twain and
+news comment, see Appendix D, end of last volume.]--There was a gross
+return from his venture of more than $1,200, but with his usual business
+insight, which was never foresight, he had made an arrangement by which,
+after paying bills and dividing with his manager, he had only about
+one-third of, this sum left. Still, even this was prosperity and
+triumph. He had acquired a new and lucrative profession at a bound. The
+papers lauded him as the "most piquant and humorous writer and lecturer
+on the Coast since the days of the lamented John Phoenix." He felt that
+he was on the highroad at last.
+
+Denis McCarthy, late of the Enterprise, was in San Francisco, and was
+willing to become his manager. Denis was capable and honest, and Clemens
+was fond of him. They planned a tour of the near-by towns, beginning
+with Sacramento, extending it later even to the mining camps, such as Red
+Dog and Grass Valley; also across into Nevada, with engagements at Carson
+City, Virginia, and Gold Hill. It was an exultant and hilarious
+excursion--that first lecture tour made by Denis McCarthy and Mark Twain.
+Success traveled with them everywhere, whether the lecturer looked across
+the footlights of some pretentious "opera-house" or between the two
+tallow candles of some camp "academy." Whatever the building, it was
+packed, and the returns were maximum.
+
+Those who remember him as a lecturer in that long-ago time say that his
+delivery was more quaint, his drawl more exaggerated, even than in later
+life; that his appearance and movements on the stage were natural, rather
+than graceful; that his manuscript, which he carried under his arm,
+looked like a ruffled hen. It was, in fact, originally written on sheets
+of manila paper, in large characters, so that it could be read easily by
+dim light, and it was doubtless often disordered.
+
+There was plenty of amusing experience on this tour. At one place, when
+the lecture was over, an old man came to him and said:
+
+"Be them your natural tones of eloquence?"
+
+At Grass Valley there was a rival show, consisting of a lady tight-rope
+walker and her husband. It was a small place, and the tight-rope
+attraction seemed likely to fail. The lady's husband had formerly been a
+compositor on the Enterprise, so that he felt there was a bond of
+brotherhood between him and Mark Twain.
+
+"Look here," he said. "Let's combine our shows. I'll let my wife do the
+tight-rope act outside and draw a crowd, and you go inside and lecture."
+
+The arrangement was not made.
+
+Following custom, the lecturer at first thought it necessary to be
+introduced, and at each place McCarthy had to skirmish around and find
+the proper person. At Red Dog, on the Stanislaus, the man selected
+failed to appear, and Denis had to provide another on short notice. He
+went down into the audience and captured an old fellow, who ducked and
+dodged but could not escape. Denis led him to the stage, a good deal
+frightened.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "this is the celebrated Mark Twain from
+the celebrated city of San Francisco, with his celebrated lecture about
+the celebrated Sandwich Islands."
+
+That was as far as he could go; but it was far enough. Mark Twain never
+had a better introduction. The audience was in a shouting humor from the
+start.
+
+Clemens himself used to tell of an introduction at another camp, where
+his sponsor said:
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen, I know only two things about this man: the first
+is that he's never been in jail, and the second is I don't know why."
+
+But this is probably apocryphal; there is too much "Mark Twain" in it.
+
+When he reached Virginia, Goodman said to him:
+
+"Sam, you do not need anybody to introduce you. There's a piano on the
+stage in the theater. Have it brought out in sight, and when the curtain
+rises you be seated at the piano, playing and singing that song of yours,
+'I Had an Old Horse Whose Name Was Methusalem,' and don't seem to notice
+that the curtain is up at first; then be surprised when you suddenly find
+out that it is up, and begin talking, without any further preliminaries."
+
+This proved good advice, and the lecture, thus opened, started off with
+general hilarity and applause.
+
+
+
+
+LV
+
+HIGHWAY ROBBERY
+
+His Nevada, lectures were bound to be immensely successful. The people
+regarded him as their property over there, and at Carson and Virginia the
+houses overflowed. At Virginia especially his friends urged and begged
+him to repeat the entertainment, but he resolutely declined.
+
+"I have only one lecture yet," he said. "I cannot bring myself to give
+it twice in the same town."
+
+But that irresponsible imp, Steve Gillis, who was again in Virginia,
+conceived a plan which would make it not only necessary for him to
+lecture again, but would supply him with a subject. Steve's plan was
+very simple: it was to relieve the lecturer of his funds by a friendly
+highway robbery, and let an account of the adventure furnish the new
+lecture.
+
+In 'Roughing It' Mark Twain has given a version of this mock robbery
+which is correct enough as far as it goes; but important details are
+lacking. Only a few years ago (it was April, 1907), in his cabin on
+jackass Hill, with Joseph Goodman and the writer of this history present,
+Steve Gillis made his "death-bed" confession as is here set down:
+
+"Mark's lecture was given in Piper's Opera House, October 30, 1866. The
+Virginia City people had heard many famous lectures before, but they were
+mere sideshows compared with Mark's. It could have been run to crowded
+houses for a week. We begged him to give the common people a chance; but
+he refused to repeat himself. He was going down to Carson, and was
+coming back to talk in Gold Hill about a week later, and his agent, Denis
+McCarthy, and I laid a plan to have him robbed on the Divide between Gold
+Hill and Virginia, after the Gold Hill lecture was over and he and Denis
+would be coming home with the money. The Divide was a good lonely place,
+and was famous for its hold-ups. We got City Marshal George Birdsall
+into it with us, and took in Leslie Blackburn, Pat Holland, Jimmy
+Eddington, and one or two more of Sam's old friends. We all loved him,
+and would have fought for him in a moment. That's the kind of friends
+Mark had in Nevada. If he had any enemies I never heard of them.
+
+"We didn't take in Dan de Quille, or Joe here, because Sam was Joe's
+guest, and we were afraid he would tell him. We didn't take in Dan
+because we wanted him to write it up as a genuine robbery and make a big
+sensation. That would pack the opera-house at two dollars a seat to hear
+Mark tell the story.
+
+"Well, everything went off pretty well. About the time Mark was
+finishing his lecture in Gold Hill the robbers all went up on the Divide
+to wait, but Mark's audience gave him a kind of reception after his
+lecture, and we nearly froze to death up there before he came along. By
+and by I went back to see what was the matter. Sam and Denis were
+coming, and carrying a carpet-sack about half full of silver between
+them. I shadowed them and blew a policeman's whistle as a signal to the
+boys when the lecturers were within about a hundred yards of the place. I
+heard Sam say to Denis:
+
+"'I'm glad they've got a policeman on the Divide. They never had one in
+my day.'
+
+"Just about that time the boys, all with black masks on and silver
+dollars at the sides of their tongues to disguise their voices, stepped
+out and stuck six-shooters at Sam and Denis and told them to put up their
+hands. The robbers called each other 'Beauregard' and 'Stonewall
+Jackson.' Of course Denis's hands went up, and Mark's, too, though Mark
+wasn't a bit scared or excited. He talked to the robbers in his regular
+fashion. He said:
+
+"'Don't flourish those pistols so promiscuously. They might go off by
+accident.'
+
+"They told him to hand over his watch and money; but when he started to
+take his hands down they made him put them up again. Then he asked how
+they expected him to give them his valuables with his hands up in the
+sky. He said his treasures didn't lie in heaven. He told them not to
+take his watch, which was the one Sandy Baldwin and Theodore Winters had
+given him as Governor of the Third House, but we took it all the same.
+
+"Whenever he started to put his hands down we made him put them up again.
+Once he said:
+
+"'Don't you fellows be so rough. I was tenderly reared.'
+
+"Then we told him and Denis to keep their hands up for fifteen minutes
+after we were gone--this was to give us time to get back to Virginia and
+be settled when they came along. As we were going away Mark called:
+
+"'Say, you forgot something.'
+
+"'What is it?'
+
+"Why, the carpet-bag.'
+
+"He was cool all the time. Senator Bill Stewart, in his Autobiography,
+tells a great story of how scared Mark was, and how he ran; but Stewart
+was three thousand miles from Virginia by that time, and later got mad at
+Mark because he made a joke about him in 'Roughing It'.
+
+"Denis wanted to take his hands down pretty soon after we were gone, but
+Mark said:
+
+"'No, Denis, I'm used to obeying orders when they are given in that
+convincing way; we'll just keep our hands up another fifteen minutes or
+so for good measure.'
+
+"We were waiting in a big saloon on C Street when Mark and Denis came
+along. We knew they would come in, and we expected Mark would be
+excited; but he was as unruffled as a mountain lake. He told us they had
+been robbed, and asked me if I had any money. I gave him a hundred
+dollars of his own money, and he ordered refreshments for everybody. Then
+we adjourned to the Enterprise office, where he offered a reward, and Dan
+de Quille wrote up the story and telegraphed it to the other newspapers.
+Then somebody suggested that Mark would have to give another lecture now,
+and that the robbery would make a great subject. He entered right into
+the thing, and next day we engaged Piper's Opera House, and people were
+offering five dollars apiece for front seats. It would have been the
+biggest thing that ever came to Virginia if it had come off. But we made
+a mistake, then, by taking Sandy Baldwin into the joke. We took in Joe
+here, too, and gave him the watch and money to keep, which made it hard
+for Joe afterward. But it was Sandy Baldwin that ruined us. He had Mark
+out to dinner the night before the show was to come off, and after he got
+well warmed up with champagne he thought it would be a smart thing to let
+Mark into what was really going on.
+
+"Mark didn't see it our way. He was mad clear through."
+
+At this point Joseph Goodman took up the story. He said:
+
+"Those devils put Sam's money, watch, keys, pencils, and all his things
+into my hands. I felt particularly mean at being made accessory to the
+crime, especially as Sam was my guest, and I had grave doubts as to how
+he would take it when he found out the robbery was not genuine.
+
+"I felt terribly guilty when he said:
+
+"'Joe, those d--n thieves took my keys, and I can't get into my trunk. Do
+you suppose you could get me a key that would fit my trunk?'
+
+"I said I thought I could during the day, and after Sam had gone I took
+his own key, put it in the fire and burnt it to make it look black. Then
+I took a file and scratched it here and there, to make it look as if I
+had been fitting it to the lock, feeling guilty all the time, like a man
+who is trying to hide a murder. Sam did not ask for his key that day,
+and that evening he was invited to judge Baldwin's to dinner. I thought
+he looked pretty silent and solemn when he came home; but he only said:
+
+"'Joe, let's play cards; I don't feel sleepy.'
+
+"Steve here, and two or three of the other boys who had been active in
+the robbery, were present, and they did not like Sam's manner, so they
+excused themselves and left him alone with me. We played a good while;
+then he said:
+
+"'Joe, these cards are greasy. I have got some new ones in my trunk. Did
+you get that key to-day?'
+
+"I fished out that burnt, scratched-up key with fear and trembling. But
+he didn't seem to notice it at all, and presently returned with the
+cards. Then we played, and played, and played--till one o'clock--two
+o'clock--Sam hardly saying a word, and I wondering what was going to
+happen. By and by he laid down his cards and looked at me, and said:
+
+"'Joe, Sandy Baldwin told me all about that robbery to-night. Now, Joe,
+I have found out that the law doesn't recognize a joke, and I am going to
+send every one of those fellows to the penitentiary.'
+
+"He said it with such solemn gravity, and such vindictiveness, that I
+believed he was in dead earnest.
+
+"I know that I put in two hours of the hardest work I ever did, trying to
+talk him out of that resolution. I used all the arguments about the boys
+being his oldest friends; how they all loved him, and how the joke had
+been entirely for his own good; I pleaded with him, begged him to
+reconsider; I went and got his money and his watch and laid them on the
+table; but for a time it seemed hopeless. And I could imagine those
+fellows going behind the bars, and the sensation it would make in
+California; and just as I was about to give it up he said:
+
+"'Well, Joe, I'll let it pass--this time; I'll forgive them again; I've
+had to do it so many times; but if I should see Denis McCarthy and Steve
+Gillis mounting the scaffold to-morrow, and I could save them by turning
+over my hand, I wouldn't do it!'
+
+"He canceled the lecture engagement, however, next morning, and the day
+after left on the Pioneer Stage, by the way of Donner Lake, for
+California. The boys came rather sheepishly to see him off; but he would
+make no show of relenting. When they introduced themselves as
+Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, etc., he merely said:
+
+"'Yes, and you'll all be behind the bars some day. There's been a good
+deal of robbery around here lately, and it's pretty clear now who did
+it.' They handed him a package containing the masks which the robbers
+had worn. He received it in gloomy silence; but as the stage drove away
+he put his head out of the window, and after some pretty vigorous
+admonition resumed his old smile, and called out: 'Good-by, friends;
+good-by, thieves; I bear you no malice.' So the heaviest joke was on his
+tormentors after all."
+
+This is the story of the famous Mark Twain robbery direct from
+headquarters. It has been garbled in so many ways that it seems worth
+setting down in full. Denis McCarthy, who joined him presently in San
+Francisco, received a little more punishment there.
+
+"What kind of a trip did you boys have?" a friend asked of them.
+
+Clemens, just recovering from a cold which the exposure on the Divide had
+given him, smiled grimly:
+
+"Oh, pretty good, only Denis here mistook it for a spree."
+
+He lectured again in San Francisco, this time telling the story of his
+Overland trip in 1861, and he did the daring thing of repeating three
+times the worn-out story of Horace Greeley's ride with Hank Monk, as
+given later in 'Roughing It'. People were deadly tired of that story out
+there, and when he told it the first time, with great seriousness, they
+thought he must be failing mentally. They did not laugh--they only felt
+sorry. He waited a little, as if expecting a laugh, and presently led
+around to it and told it again. The audience was astonished still more,
+and pitied him thoroughly. He seemed to be waiting pathetically in the
+dead silence for their applause, then went on with his lecture; but
+presently, with labored effort, struggled around to the old story again,
+and told it for the third time. The audience suddenly saw the joke then,
+and became vociferous and hysterical in their applause; but it was a
+narrow escape. He would have been hysterical himself if the relief had
+not came when it did.
+
+--[A side-light on the Horace Greeley story and on Mr. Greeley's
+eccentricities is furnished by Mr. Goodman:
+
+When I was going East in 1869 I happened to see Hank Monk just before I
+started. "Mr. Goodman," he said, "you tell Horace Greeley that I want to
+come East, and ask him to send me a pass." "All right, Hank," I said, "I
+will." It happened that when I got to New York City one of the first men
+I met was Greeley. "Mr. Greeley," said, "I have a message for you from
+Hank Monk." Greeley bristled and glared at me. "That--rascal?" he said,
+"He has done me more injury than any other man in America."]
+
+
+
+
+LVI
+
+BACK TO THE STATES
+
+In the mean time Clemens had completed his plan for sailing, and had
+arranged with General McComb, of the Alta California, for letters during
+his proposed trip around the world. However, he meant to visit his
+people first, and his old home. He could go back with means now, and
+with the prestige of success.
+
+"I sail to-morrow per Opposition--telegraphed you to-day," he wrote on
+December 14th, and a day later his note-book entry says:
+
+    Sailed from San Francisco in Opposition (line) steamer America,
+    Capt. Wakeman, at noon, 15th Dec., 1866. Pleasant sunny day, hills
+    brightly clad with green grass and shrubbery.
+
+So he was really going home at last! He had been gone five and a half
+years--eventful, adventurous years that had made him over completely, at
+least so far as ambitions and equipment were concerned. He had came
+away, in his early manhood, a printer and a pilot, unknown outside of his
+class. He was returning a man of thirty-one, with a fund of hard
+experience, three added professions--mining, journalism, and lecturing
+--also with a new name, already famous on the sunset slopes of its
+adoption, and beginning to be heard over the hills and far away. In some
+degree, at least, he resembled the prince of a fairy tale who, starting
+out humble and unnoticed, wins his way through a hundred adventures and
+returns with gifts and honors.
+
+The homeward voyage was a notable one. It began with a tempest a little
+way out of San Francisco--a storm terrible but brief, that brought the
+passengers from their berths to the deck, and for a time set them
+praying. Then there was Captain Ned Wakeman, a big, burly, fearless
+sailor, who had visited the edges of all continents and archipelagos; who
+had been born at sea, and never had a day's schooling in his life, but
+knew the Bible by heart; who was full of human nature and profanity, and
+believed he was the only man on the globe who knew the secret of the
+Bible miracles. He became a distinct personality in Mark Twain's work
+--the memory of him was an unfailing delight. Captain "Ned Blakely," in
+'Roughing It', who with his own hands hanged Bill Noakes, after reading
+him promiscuous chapters from the Bible, was Captain Wakeman. Captain
+"Stormfield," who had the marvelous visit to heaven, was likewise Captain
+Wakeman; and he appears in the "Idle Excursion" and elsewhere.
+
+Another event of the voyage was crossing the Nicaragua Isthmus--the trip
+across the lake and down the San Juan River--a brand-new experience,
+between shores of splendid tropic tangle, gleaming with vivid life. The
+luxuriance got into his note-book.
+
+Dark grottos, fairy festoons, tunnels, temples, columns, pillars, towers,
+pilasters, terraces, pyramids, mounds, domes, walls, in endless confusion
+of vine-work--no shape known to architecture unimitated--and all so
+webbed together that short distances within are only gained by glimpses.
+Monkeys here and there; birds warbling; gorgeous plumaged birds on the
+wing; Paradise itself, the imperial realm of beauty-nothing to wish for
+to make it perfect.
+
+But it was beyond the isthmus that the voyage loomed into proportions
+somber and terrible. The vessel they took there, the San Francisco,
+sailed from Greytown January 1, 1867, the beginning of a memorable year
+in Mark Twain's life. Next day two cases of Asiatic cholera were
+reported in the steerage. There had been a rumor of it in Nicaragua, but
+no one expected it on the ship.
+
+The nature of the disease was not hinted at until evening, when one of
+the men died. Soon after midnight, the other followed. A minister
+making the voyage home, Rev. J. G. Fackler, read the burial service. The
+gaiety of the passengers, who had become well acquainted during the
+Pacific voyage, was subdued. When the word "cholera" went among them,
+faces grew grave and frightened. On the morning of January 4th Reverend
+Fackler's services were again required. The dead man was put overboard
+within half an hour after he had ceased to breathe.
+
+Gloom settled upon the ship. All steam was made to put into Key West.
+Then some of the machinery gave way and the ship lay rolling, helplessly
+becalmed in the fierce heat of the Gulf, while repairs were being made.
+The work was done at a disadvantage, and the parts did not hold. Time
+and again they were obliged to lie to, in the deadly tropic heat,
+listening to the hopeless hammering, wondering who would be the next to
+be sewed up hastily in a blanket and slipped over the ship's side. On
+the 5th seven new cases of illness were reported. One of the crew, a man
+called "Shape," was said to be dying. A few hours later he was dead. By
+this time the Reverend Fackler himself had been taken.
+
+"So they are burying poor 'Shape' without benefit of clergy," says the
+note-book.
+
+General consternation now began to prevail. Then it was learned that the
+ship's doctor had run out of medicines. The passengers became
+demoralized. They believed their vessel was to become a charnel ship.
+Strict sanitary orders were issued, and a hospital was improvised.
+
+    Verily the ship is becoming a floating hospital herself--not an hour
+    passes but brings its fresh sensation, its new disaster, its
+    melancholy tidings. When I think of poor "Shape" and the preacher,
+    both so well when I saw them yesterday evening, I realize that I
+    myself may be dead to-morrow.
+
+    Since the last two hours all laughter, all levity, has ceased on the
+    ship--a settled gloom is upon the faces of the passengers.
+
+By noon it was evident that the minister could not survive. He died at
+two o'clock next morning; the fifth victim in less than five days. The
+machinery continued to break and the vessel to drag. The ship's doctor
+confessed to Clemens that he was helpless. There were eight patients in
+the hospital.
+
+But on January 6th they managed to make Key West, and for some reason
+were not quarantined. Twenty-one passengers immediately deserted the
+ship and were heard of no more.
+
+"I am glad they are gone. D--n them," says the notebook. Apparently he
+had never considered leaving, and a number of others remained. The
+doctor restocked his medicine-locker, and the next day they put to sea
+again. Certainly they were a daring lot of voyagers. On the 8th another
+of the patients died. Then the cooler weather seemed to check the
+contagion, and it was not until the night of the 11th, when the New York
+harbor lights were in view, that the final death occurred. There were no
+new cases by this time, and the other patients were convalescent. A
+certificate was made out that the last man had died of "dropsy." There
+would seem to have been no serious difficulty in docking the vessel and
+landing the passengers. The matter would probably be handled differently
+to-day.
+
+
+
+
+LVII
+
+OLD FRIENDS AND NEW PLANS
+
+It had been more than thirteen years since his first arrival in New York.
+Then he had been a youth, green, untraveled, eager to get away from home.
+Now a veteran, he was as eager to return.
+
+He stopped only long enough in New York to see Charles Henry Webb, late
+of California, who had put together a number of the Mark Twain sketches,
+including "The Jumping Frog," for book publication. Clemens himself
+decided to take the book to Carleton, thinking that, having missed the
+fame of the "Frog" once, he might welcome a chance to stand sponsor for
+it now. But Carleton was wary; the "Frog" had won favor, and even fame,
+in its fugitive, vagrant way, but a book was another matter. Books were
+undertaken very seriously and with plenty of consideration in those days.
+Twenty-one years later, in Switzerland, Carleton said to Mark Twain:
+
+"My chief claim to immortality is the distinction of having declined your
+first book."
+
+Clemens was ready enough to give up the book when Carleton declined it,
+but Webb said he would publish it himself, and he set about it forthwith.
+The author waited no longer now, but started for St. Louis, and was soon
+with his mother and sister, whom he had not seen since that eventful
+first year of the war. They thought he looked old, which was true
+enough, but they found him unchanged in his manner: buoyant, full of
+banter and gravely quaint remarks--he was always the same. Jane Clemens
+had grown older, too. She was nearly sixty-four, but as keen and
+vigorous as ever-proud (even if somewhat critical) of this handsome,
+brilliant man of new name and fame who had been her mischievous, wayward
+boy. She petted him, joked with him, scolded him, and inquired
+searchingly into his morals and habits. In turn he petted, comforted,
+and teased her. She decided that he was the same Sam, and always would
+be--a true prophecy.
+
+He went up to Hannibal to see old friends. Many were married; some had
+moved away; some were dead--the old story. He delivered his lecture
+there, and was the center of interest and admiration--his welcome might
+have satisfied even Tom Sawyer. From Hannibal he journeyed to Keokuk,
+where he lectured again to a crowd of old friends and new, then returned
+to St. Louis for a more extended visit.
+
+It was while he was in St. Louis that he first saw the announcement of
+the Quaker City Holy Land Excursion, and was promptly fascinated by what
+was then a brand-new idea in ocean travel--a splendid picnic--a choice
+and refined party that would sail away for a long summer's journeying to
+the most romantic of all lands and seas, the shores of the Mediterranean.
+No such argosy had ever set out before in pursuit of the golden fleece of
+happiness.
+
+His projected trip around the world lost its charm in the light of this
+idyllic dream. Henry Ward Beecher was advertised as one of the party;
+General Sherman as another; also ministers, high-class journalists--the
+best minds of the nation. Anson Burlingame had told him to associate
+with persons of refinement and intellect. He lost no time in writing to
+the Alta, proposing that they send him in this select company.
+
+Noah Brooks, who was then on the Alta, states--[In an article published
+in the Century Magazine.]--that the management was staggered by the
+proposition, but that Col. John McComb insisted that the investment in
+Mark Twain would be sound. A letter was accordingly sent, stating that a
+check for his passage would be forwarded in due season, and that meantime
+he could contribute letters from New York City. The rate for all letters
+was to be twenty dollars each. The arrangement was a godsend, in the
+fullest sense of the word, to Mark Twain.
+
+It was now April, and he was eager to get back to New York to arrange his
+passage. The Quaker City would not sail for two months yet (two eventful
+months), but the advertisement said that passages must be secured by the
+5th, and he was there on that day. Almost the first man he met was the
+chief of the New York Alta bureau with a check for twelve hundred and
+fifty dollars (the amount of his ticket) and a telegram saying, "Ship
+Mark Twain in the Holy Land Excursion and pay his passage."
+
+    --[The following letter, which bears no date, was probably handed to
+    him later in the New York Alta office as a sort of credential:
+
+    ALTA CALIFORNIA OFFICE, 42 JOHN STREET, NEW YORK.
+
+    Sam'l Clemens, Esq., New York.
+
+    DEAR SIR,--I have the honor to inform you that Fred'k. MacCrellish
+    & Co., Proprietors of Alta California, San Francisco, Cal., desire
+    to engage your services as Special Correspondent on the pleasure
+    excursion now about to proceed from this City to the Holy Land. In
+    obedience to their instructions I have secured a passage for you on
+    the vessel about to convey the excursion party referred to, and made
+    such arrangements as I hope will secure your comfort and
+    convenience. Your only instructions are that you will continue to
+    write at such times and from such places as you deem proper, and in
+    the same style that heretofore secured you the favor of the readers
+    of the Alta California. I have the honor to remain, with high
+    respect and esteem,
+
+    Your ob'dt. Servant,
+
+    JOHN J. MURPHY.]
+
+The Alta, it appears, had already applied for his berth; but, not having
+been vouched for by Mr. Beecher or some other eminent divine, Clemens was
+fearful he might not be accepted. Quite casually he was enlightened on
+this point. While waiting for attention in the shipping-office, with the
+Alta agent, he heard a newspaper man inquire what notables were going. A
+clerk, with evident pride, rattled off the names:
+
+"Lieutenant-General Sherman, Henry Ward Beecher, and Mask Twain; also
+probably General Banks."
+
+So he was billed as an attraction. It was his first surreptitious taste
+of fame on the Atlantic coast, and not without its delight. The story
+often told of his being introduced by Ned House, of the Tribune, as a
+minister, though often repeated by Mark Twain himself, was in the nature
+of a joke, and mainly apocryphal. Clemens was a good deal in House's
+company at the time, for he had made an arrangement to contribute
+occasional letters to the Tribune, and House no doubt introduced him
+jokingly as one of the Quaker City ministers.
+
+
+
+
+LVIII
+
+A NEW BOOK AND A LECTURE
+
+Webb, meantime, had pushed the Frog book along. The proofs had been read
+and the volume was about ready for issue. Clemens wrote to his mother
+April 15th:
+
+    My book will probably be in the bookseller's hands in about two
+    weeks. After that I shall lecture. Since I have been gone, the
+    boys have gotten up a "call" on me signed by two hundred
+    Californians.
+
+The lecture plan was the idea of Frank Fuller, who as acting Governor of
+Utah had known Mark Twain on the Comstock, and prophesied favorably of
+his future career. Clemens had hunted up Fuller on landing in New York
+in January, and Fuller had encouraged the lecture then; but Clemens was
+doubtful.
+
+"I have no reputation with the general public here," he said. "We
+couldn't get a baker's dozen to hear me."
+
+But Fuller was a sanguine person, with an energy and enthusiasm that were
+infectious. He insisted that the idea was sound. It would solidify Mark
+Twain's reputation on the Atlantic coast, he declared, insisting that the
+largest house in New York, Cooper Union, should be taken. Clemens had
+partially consented, and Fuller had arranged with all the Pacific slope
+people who had come East, headed by ex-Governor James W. Nye (by this
+time Senator at Washington), to sign a call for the "Inimitable Mark
+Twain" to appear before a New York audience. Fuller made Nye agree to be
+there and introduce the lecturer, and he was burningly busy and happy in
+the prospect.
+
+But Mark Twain was not happy. He looked at that spacious hall and
+imagined the little crowd of faithful Californian stragglers that might
+gather in to hear him, and the ridicule of the papers next day. He
+begged Fuller to take a smaller hall, the smallest he could get. But
+only the biggest hall in New York would satisfy Fuller. He would have
+taken a larger one if he could have found it. The lecture was announced
+for May 6th. Its subject was "Kanakadom, or the Sandwich Islands"
+--tickets fifty cents. Fuller timed it to follow a few days after Webb's
+book should appear, so that one event might help the other.
+
+Mark Twain's first book, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveyas
+County, and Other Sketches', was scheduled for May 1st, and did, in fact,
+appear on that date; but to the author it was no longer an important
+event. Jim Smiley's frog as standard-bearer of his literary procession
+was not an interesting object, so far as he was concerned--not with that
+vast, empty hall in the background and the insane undertaking of trying
+to fill it. The San Francisco venture had been as nothing compared with
+this. Fuller was working night and day with abounding joy, while the
+subject of his labor felt as if he were on the brink of a fearful
+precipice, preparing to try a pair of wings without first learning to
+fly. At one instant he was cold with fright, the next glowing with an
+infection of Fuller's faith. He devised a hundred schemes for the sale
+of seats. Once he came rushing to Fuller, saying:
+
+"Send a lot of tickets down to the Chickering Piano Company. I have
+promised to put on my programme, 'The piano used at this entertainment is
+manufactured by Chickering."'
+
+"But you don't want a piano, Mark," said Fuller, "do you?"
+
+"No, of course not; but they will distribute the tickets for the sake of
+the advertisement, whether we have the piano or not."
+
+Fuller got out a lot of handbills and hung bunches of them in the stages,
+omnibuses, and horse-cars. Clemens at first haunted these vehicles to
+see if anybody noticed the bills. The little dangling bunches seemed
+untouched. Finally two men came in; one of them pulled off a bill and
+glanced at it. His friend asked:
+
+"Who's Mark Twain?"
+
+"God knows; I don't!"
+
+The lecturer could not ride any more. He was desperate.
+
+"Fuller," he groaned, "there isn't a sign--a ripple of interest."
+
+Fuller assured him that everything was working all right "working
+underneath," Fuller said--but the lecturer was hopeless. He reported his
+impressions to the folks at home:
+
+    Everything looks shady, at least, if not dark; I have a good agent;
+    but now, after we have hired the Cooper Institute, and gone to an
+    expense in one way or another of $500, it comes out that I have got
+    to play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, Ristori, and also the
+    double troop of Japanese jugglers, the latter opening at the great
+    Academy of Music--and with all this against me I have taken the
+    largest house in New York and cannot back water.
+
+He might have added that there were other rival entertainments: "The
+Flying Scud" was at Wallack's, the "Black Crook" was at Niblo's, John
+Brougham at the Olympic; and there were at least a dozen lesser
+attractions. New York was not the inexhaustible city in those days;
+these things could gather in the public to the last man. When the day
+drew near, and only a few tickets had been sold, Clemens was desperate.
+
+"Fuller," he said, "there'll be nobody in the Cooper Union that night but
+you and me. I am on the verge of suicide. I would commit suicide if I
+had the pluck and the outfit. You must paper the house, Fuller. You
+must send out a flood of complementaries."
+
+"Very well," said Fuller; "what we want this time is reputation anyway
+--money is secondary. I'll put you before the choicest, most intelligent
+audience that ever was gathered in New York City. I will bring in the
+school-instructors--the finest body of men and women in the world."
+
+Fuller immediately sent out a deluge of complimentary tickets, inviting
+the school-teachers of New York and Brooklyn, and all the adjacent
+country, to come free and hear Mark Twain's great lecture on Kanakadom.
+This was within forty-eight hours of the time he was to appear.
+
+Senator Nye was to have joined Clemens and Fuller at the Westminster,
+where Clemens was stopping, and they waited for him there with a
+carriage, fuming and swearing, until it was evident that he was not
+coming. At last Clemens said:
+
+"Fuller, you've got to introduce me."
+
+"No," suggested Fuller; "I've got a better scheme than that. You get up
+and begin by bemeaning Nye for not being there. That will be better
+anyway."
+
+Clemens said:
+
+"Well, Fuller, I can do that. I feel that way. I'll try to think up
+something fresh and happy to say about that horse-thief."
+
+They drove to Cooper Union with trepidation. Suppose, after all, the
+school-teachers had declined to come? They went half an hour before the
+lecture was to begin. Forty years later Mark Twain said:
+
+"I couldn't keep away. I wanted to see that vast Mammoth cave and die.
+But when we got near the building I saw that all the streets were blocked
+with people, and that traffic had stopped. I couldn't believe that these
+people were trying to get into Cooper Institute; but they were, and when
+I got to the stage at last the house was jammed full-packed; there wasn't
+room enough left for a child.
+
+"I was happy and I was excited beyond expression. I poured the Sandwich
+Islands out on those people, and they laughed and shouted to my entire
+content. For an hour and fifteen minutes I was in paradise."
+
+And Fuller to-day, alive and young, when so many others of that ancient
+time and event have vanished, has added:
+
+"When Mark appeared the Californians gave a regular yell of welcome. When
+that was over he walked to the edge of the platform, looked carefully
+down in the pit, round the edges as if he were hunting for something.
+Then he said: 'There was to have been a piano here, and a senator to
+introduce me. I don't seem to discover them anywhere. The piano was a
+good one, but we will have to get along with such music as I can make
+with your help. As for the senator--Then Mark let himself go and did as
+he promised about Senator Nye. He said things that made men from the
+Pacific coast, who had known Nye, scream with delight. After that came
+his lecture. The first sentence captured the audience. From that moment
+to the end it was either in a roar of laughter or half breathless by his
+beautiful descriptive passages. People were positively ill for days,
+laughing at that lecture."
+
+So it was a success: everybody was glad to have been there; the papers
+were kind, congratulations numerous.
+
+--[Kind but not extravagant; those were burning political times, and the
+doings of mere literary people did not excite the press to the extent of
+headlines. A jam around Cooper Union to-day, followed by such an
+artistic triumph, would be a news event. On the other hand, Schuyler
+Colfax, then Speaker of the House, was reported to the extent of a
+column, nonpareil. His lecture was of no literary importance, and no
+echo of it now remains. But those were political, not artistic, days.
+
+Of Mark Twain's lecture the Times notice said:
+
+"Nearly every one present came prepared for considerable provocation for
+enjoyable laughter, and from the appearance of their mirthful faces
+leaving the hall at the conclusion of the lecture but few were
+disappointed, and it is not too much to say that seldom has so large an
+audience been so uniformly pleased as the one that listened to Mark
+Twain's quaint remarks last evening. The large hall of the Union was
+filled to its utmost capacity by fully two thousand persons, which fact
+spoke well for the reputation of the lecturer and his future success.
+Mark Twain's style is a quaint one both in manner and method, and through
+his discourse he managed to keep on the right side of the audience, and
+frequently convulsed it with hearty laughter.... During a description of
+the topography of the Sandwich Islands the lecturer surprised his hearers
+by a graphic and eloquent description of the eruption of the great
+volcano, which occurred in 1840, and his language was loudly applauded.
+
+"Judging from the success achieved by the lecturer last evening, he
+should repeat his experiment at an early date."]
+
+                   COOPER INSTITUTE
+    By Invitation of s large number of prominent Californians and
+                  Citizens of New York,
+
+                      MARK TWAIN
+
+                    WILL DELIVER A
+                  SERIO-HUMEROUS LECTURE
+                      CONERNING
+
+                      KANAKDOM
+                         OR
+                  THE SANDWICH ISLANDS,
+
+                   COOPER INSTITUTE,
+               On Monday Evening, May 6,1867.
+
+                  TICKETS FIFTY GENTS.
+ For Sale at Chickering and Sons, 852 Broadway, and at the Principal
+                       Hotel
+
+    Doors open at 7 o'clock.  The Wisdom will begin to flow at 8.
+
+Mark Twain always felt grateful to the school-teachers for that night.
+Many years later, when they wanted him to read to them in Steinway Hall,
+he gladly gave his services without charge.
+
+Nor was the lecture a complete financial failure. In spite of the flood
+of complementaries, there was a cash return of some three hundred dollars
+from the sale of tickets--a substantial aid in defraying the expenses
+which Fuller assumed and insisted on making good on his own account. That
+was Fuller's regal way; his return lay in the joy of the game, and in the
+winning of the larger stake for a friend.
+
+"Mark," he said, "it is all right. The fortune didn't come, but it will.
+The fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book just out you are
+going to be the most talked-of man in the country. Your letters for the
+Alta and the Tribune will get the widest reception of any letters of
+travel ever written."
+
+
+
+
+LIX
+
+THE FIRST BOOK
+
+With the shadow of the Cooper Institute so happily dispelled, The
+Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and his following of Other
+Sketches, became a matter of more interest. The book was a neat
+blue-and-gold volume printed by John A. Gray & Green, the old firm for
+which the boy, Sam Clemens, had set type thirteen years before. The
+title-page bore Webb's name as publisher, with the American News Company
+as selling agents. It further stated that the book was edited by "John
+Paul," that is to say by Webb himself. The dedication was in keeping
+with the general irresponsible character of the venture. It was as
+follows:
+
+                         TO
+                      JOHN SMITH
+            WHOM I HAVE KNOWN IN DIVERS AND SUNDRY
+             PLACES ABOUT THE WORLD, AND WHOSE
+               MANY AND MANIFOLD VIRTUES DID
+                ALWAYS COMMAND MY ESTEEM,
+                  I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
+
+It is said that the man to whom a volume is dedicated always buys a copy.
+If this prove true in the present instance, a princely affluence is about
+to burst upon
+                                   THE AUTHOR.
+
+The "advertisement" stated that the author had "scaled the heights of
+popularity at a single jump, and won for himself the sobriquet of the
+'Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope'; furthermore, that he was known to
+fame as the 'Moralist of the Main,'" and that as such he would be likely
+to go down to posterity, adding that it was in his secondary character,
+as humorist, rather than in his primal one of moralist, that the volume
+aimed to present him.--[The advertisement complete, with extracts from
+the book, may be found under Appendix E, at the end of last volume.]
+
+Every little while, during the forty years or more that have elapsed
+since then, some one has come forward announcing Mark Twain to be as much
+a philosopher as a humorist, as if this were a new discovery. But it was
+a discovery chiefly to the person making the announcement. Every one who
+ever knew Mark Twain at any period of his life made the same discovery.
+Every one who ever took the trouble to familiarize himself with his work
+made it. Those who did not make it have known his work only by hearsay
+and quotation, or they have read it very casually, or have been very
+dull. It would be much more of a discovery to find a book in which he
+has not been serious--a philosopher, a moralist, and a poet. Even in the
+Jumping Frog sketches, selected particularly for their inconsequence, the
+under-vein of reflection and purpose is not lacking. The answer to Moral
+Statistician--[In "Answers to Correspondents," included now in Sketches
+New and Old. An extract from it, and from "A Strange Dream," will be
+found in Appendix E.]--is fairly alive with human wisdom and righteous
+wrath. The "Strange Dream," though ending in a joke, is aglow with
+poetry. Webb's "advertisement" was playfully written, but it was
+earnestly intended, and he writes Mark Twain down a moralist--not as a
+discovery, but as a matter of course. The discoveries came along later,
+when the author's fame as a humorist had dazzled the nations.
+
+It is as well to say it here as anywhere, perhaps, that one reason why
+Mark Twain found it difficult to be accepted seriously was the fact that
+his personality was in itself so essentially humorous. His physiognomy,
+his manner of speech, this movement, his mental attitude toward events
+--all these were distinctly diverting. When we add to this that his
+medium of expression was nearly always full of the quaint phrasing and
+those surprising appositions which we recognize as amusing, it is not so
+astonishing that his deeper, wiser, more serious purpose should be
+overlooked. On the whole these unabated discoverers serve a purpose, if
+only to make the rest of their species look somewhat deeper than the
+comic phrase.
+
+The little blue-and-gold volume which presented the Frog story and
+twenty-six other sketches in covers is chiefly important to-day as being
+Mark Twain's first book. The selections in it were made for a public
+that had been too busy with a great war to learn discrimination, and most
+of them have properly found oblivion. Fewer than a dozen of them were
+included in his collected Sketches issued eight years later, and some
+even of those might have been spared; also some that were added, for that
+matter; but detailed literary criticism is not the province of this work.
+The reader may investigate and judge for himself.
+
+Clemens was pleased with the appearance of his book. To Bret Harte he
+wrote:
+
+The book is out and it is handsome. It is full of damnable errors of
+grammar and deadly inconsistencies of spelling in the Frog sketch,
+because I was away and did not read proofs; but be a friend and say
+nothing about these things. When my hurry is over, I will send you a
+copy to pisen the children with.
+
+That he had no exaggerated opinion of the book's contents or prospects we
+may gather from his letter home:
+
+As for the Frog book, I don't believe it will ever pay anything worth a
+cent. I published it simply to advertise myself, and not with the hope
+of making anything out of it.
+
+He had grown more lenient in his opinion of the merits of the Frog story
+itself since it had made friends in high places, especially since James
+Russell Lowell had pronounced it "the finest piece of humorous writing
+yet produced in America"; but compared with his lecture triumph, and his
+prospective journey to foreign seas, his book venture, at best, claimed
+no more than a casual regard. A Sandwich Island book (he had collected
+his Union letters with the idea of a volume) he gave up altogether after
+one unsuccessful offer of it to Dick & Fitzgerald.
+
+Frank Fuller's statement, that the fame had arrived, had in it some
+measure of truth. Lecture propositions came from various directions.
+Thomas Nast, then in the early day of his great popularity, proposed a
+joint tour, in which Clemens would lecture, while he, Nast, illustrated
+the remarks with lightning caricatures. But the time was too short; the
+Quaker City would sail on the 8th of June, and in the mean time the Alta
+correspondent was far behind with his New York letters. On May 29th he
+wrote:
+
+I am 18 Alta letters behind, and I must catch up or bust. I have refused
+all invitations to lecture. Don't know how my book is coming on.
+
+He worked like a slave for a week or so, almost night and day, to clean
+up matters before his departure. Then came days of idleness and
+reaction-days of waiting, during which his natural restlessness and the
+old-time regret for things done and undone, beset him.
+
+    My passage is paid, and if the ship sails I sail on her; but I make
+    no calculations, have bought no cigars, no sea-going clothing--have
+    made no preparations whatever--shall not pack my trunk till the
+    morning we sail.
+
+    All I do know or feel is that I am wild with impatience to move
+    --move--move! Curse the endless delays! They always kill me--they
+    make me neglect every duty, and then I have a conscience that tears
+    me like a wild beast. I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month.
+    I do more mean things the moment I get a chance to fold my hands and
+    sit down than ever I get forgiveness for.
+
+    Yes, we are to meet at Mr. Beach's next Thursday night, and I
+    suppose we shall have to be gotten up regardless of expense, in
+    swallow-tails, white kids and everything 'en regle'.
+
+    I am resigned to Rev. Mr. Hutchinson's or anybody else's
+    supervision. I don't mind it. I am fixed. I have got a splendid,
+    immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless roommate who is as
+    good and true and right-minded a man as ever lived--a man whose
+    blameless conduct and example will always be an eloquent sermon to
+    all who shall come within their influence. But send on the
+    professional preachers--there are none I like better to converse
+    with; if they're not narrowminded and bigoted they make good
+    companions.
+
+The "splendid immoral room-mate" was Dan Slote--"Dan," of The Innocents,
+a lovable character--all as set down. Samuel Clemens wrote one more
+letter to his mother and sister--a conscience-stricken, pessimistic
+letter of good-by written the night before sailing. Referring to the
+Alta letters he says:
+
+    I think they are the stupidest letters ever written from New York.
+    Corresponding has been a perfect drag ever since I got to the
+    States. If it continues abroad, I don't know what the Tribune and
+    Alta folk will think.
+
+He remembers Orion, who had been officially eliminated when Nevada had
+received statehood.
+
+    I often wonder if his law business is going satisfactorily. I wish
+    I had gone to Washington in the winter instead of going West. I
+    could have gouged an office out of Bill Stewart for him, and that
+    would have atoned for the loss of my home visit. But I am so
+    worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish
+    anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is
+    stored full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and
+    an accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and
+    restless moving from place to place. If I could only say I had done
+    one thing for any of you that entitled me to your good opinions (I
+    say nothing of your love, for I am sure of that, no matter how
+    unworthy of it I may make myself--from Orion down, you have always
+    given me that; all the days of my life, when God Almighty knows I
+    have seldom deserved it), I believe I could go home and stay there
+    --and I know I would care little for the world's praise or blame.
+    There is no satisfaction in the world's praise anyhow, and it has no
+    worth to me save in the way of business. I tried to gather up its
+    compliments to send you, but the work was distasteful and I dropped
+    it.
+
+    You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that
+    is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt. I can get away
+    from that at sea, and be tranquil and satisfied; and so, with my
+    parting love and benediction for Orion and all of you, I say good-by
+    and God bless you all-and welcome the wind that wafts a weary soul
+    to the sunny lands of the Mediterranean!
+
+                     Yrs. forever,
+                                SAM
+
+
+
+
+LX
+
+THE INNOCENTS AT SEA
+
+       HOLY LAND PLEASURE EXCURSION
+
+       Steamer: Quaker City.
+
+       Captain C. C. Duncan.
+
+       Left New York at 2 P.m., June 8, 1867.
+
+       Rough weather--anchored within the harbor to lay all night.
+
+That first note recorded an event momentous in Mark Twain's career--an
+event of supreme importance; if we concede that any link in a chain
+regardless of size is of more importance than any other link. Undoubtedly
+it remains the most conspicuous event, as the world views it now, in
+retrospect.
+
+The note further heads a new chapter of history in sea-voyaging. No such
+thing as the sailing of an ocean steamship with a pleasure-party on a
+long transatlantic cruise had ever occurred before. A similar project
+had been undertaken the previous year, but owing to a cholera scare in
+the East it had been abandoned. Now the dream had become a fact--a
+stupendous fact when we consider it. Such an important beginning as that
+now would in all likelihood furnish the chief news story of the day.
+
+But they had different ideas of news in those days. There were no
+headlines announcing the departure of the Quaker City--only the barest
+mention of the ship's sailing, though a prominent position was given to
+an account of a senatorial excursion-party which set out that same
+morning over the Union Pacific Railway, then under construction. Every
+name in that political party was set dawn, and not one of them except
+General Hancock will ever be heard of again. The New York Times,
+however, had some one on its editorial staff who thought it worth while
+to comment a little on the history-making Quaker City excursion. The
+writer was pleasantly complimentary to officers and passengers. He
+referred to Moses S. Beach, of the Sun, who was taking with him type and
+press, whereby he would "skilfully utilize the brains of the company for
+their mutual edification." Mr. Beecher and General Sherman would find
+talent enough aboard to make the hours go pleasantly (evidently the
+writer had not interested himself sufficiently to know that these
+gentlemen were not along), and the paragraph closed by prophesying other
+such excursions, and wishing the travelers "good speed, a happy voyage,
+and a safe return."
+
+That was handsome, especially for those days; only now, some fine day,
+when an airship shall start with a band of happy argonauts to land beyond
+the sunrise for the first time in history, we shall feature it and
+emblazon it with pictures in the Sunday papers, and weeklies, and in the
+magazines.--[The Quaker City idea was so unheard-of that in some of the
+foreign ports visited, the officials could not believe that the vessel
+was simply a pleasure-craft, and were suspicious of some dark, ulterior
+purpose.]
+
+That Henry Ward Beecher and General Sherman had concluded not to go was a
+heavy disappointment at first; but it proved only a temporary disaster.
+The inevitable amalgamation of all ship companies took place. The
+sixty-seven travelers fell into congenial groups, or they mingled and
+devised amusements, and gossiped and became a big family, as happy and as
+free from contention as families of that size are likely to be.
+
+The Quaker City was a good enough ship and sizable for her time. She was
+registered eighteen hundred tons--about one-tenth the size of
+Mediterranean excursion-steamers today--and when conditions were
+favorable she could make ten knots an hour under steam--or, at least, she
+could do it with the help of her auxiliary sails. Altogether she was a
+cozy, satisfactory ship, and they were a fortunate company who had her
+all to themselves and went out on her on that long-ago ocean gipsying.
+She has grown since then, even to the proportions of the Mayflower. It
+was necessary for her to grow to hold all of those who in later times
+claimed to have sailed in her on that voyage with Mark Twain.--[The
+Quaker City passenger list will be found under Appendix F, at the end of
+last volume.]
+
+They were not all ministers and deacons aboard the Quaker City. Clemens
+found other congenial spirits be sides his room-mate Dan Slote--among
+them the ship's surgeon, Dr. A. Reeve Jackson (the guide-destroying
+"Doctor" of The Innocents); Jack Van Nostrand, of New Jersey ("Jack");
+Julius Moulton, of St. Louis ("Moult"), and other care-free fellows, the
+smoking-room crowd which is likely to make comradeship its chief
+watchword. There were companionable people in the cabin crowd also
+--fine, intelligent men and women, especially one of the latter, a
+middle-aged, intellectual, motherly soul--Mrs. A. W. Fairbanks, of
+Cleveland, Ohio. Mrs. Fairbanks--herself a newspaper correspondent for
+her husband's paper, the Cleveland Herald had a large influence on the
+character and general tone of those Quaker City letters which established
+Mark Twain's larger fame. She was an able writer herself; her judgment
+was thoughtful, refined, unbiased--altogether of a superior sort. She
+understood Samuel Clemens, counseled him, encouraged him to read his
+letters aloud to her, became in reality "Mother Fairbanks," as they
+termed her, to him and to others of that ship who needed her kindly
+offices.
+
+In one of his home letters, later, he said of her:
+
+    She was the most refined, intelligent, cultivated lady in the ship,
+    and altogether the kindest and best. She sewed my buttons on, kept
+    my clothing in presentable trim, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I
+    behaved), lectured me awfully on the quarter-deck on moonlit
+    promenading evenings, and cured me of several bad habits. I am
+    under lasting obligations to her. She looks young because she is so
+    good, but she has a grown son and daughter at home.
+
+In one of the early letters which Mrs. Fairbanks wrote to her paper she
+is scarcely less complimentary to him, even if in a different way.
+
+    We have D.D.'s and M.D.'s--we have men of wisdom and men of wit.
+    There is one table from which is sure to come a peal of laughter,
+    and all eyes are turned toward Mark Twain, whose face is, perfectly
+    mirth-provoking. Sitting lazily at the table, scarcely genteel in
+    his appearance, there is something, I know not what, that interests
+    and attracts. I saw to-day at dinner venerable divines and sage-
+    looking men convulsed with laughter at his drolleries and quaint,
+    odd manners.
+
+It requires only a few days on shipboard for acquaintances to form, and
+presently a little afternoon group was gathering to hear Mark Twain read
+his letters. Mrs. Fairbanks was there, of course, also Mr. and Mrs. S.
+L. Severance, likewise of Cleveland, and Moses S. Beach, of the Sun, with
+his daughter Emma, a girl of seventeen. Dan Slote was likely to be
+there, too, and Jack, and the Doctor, and Charles J. Langdon, of Elmira,
+New York, a boy of eighteen, who had conceived a deep admiration for the
+brilliant writer. They were fortunate ones who first gathered to hear
+those daring, wonderful letters.
+
+But the benefit was a mutual one. He furnished a priceless entertainment,
+and he derived something equally priceless in return--the test of
+immediate audience and the boon of criticism. Mrs. Fairbanks especially
+was frankly sincere. Mr. Severance wrote afterward:
+
+    One afternoon I saw him tearing up a bunch of the soft, white paper-
+    copy paper, I guess the newspapers call it-on which he had written
+    something, and throwing the fragments into the Mediterranean. I
+    inquired of him why he cast away the fruits of his labors in that
+    manner.
+
+"Well," he drawled, "Mrs. Fairbanks thinks it oughtn't to be printed,
+and, like as not, she is right."
+
+And Emma Beach (Mrs. Abbott Thayer) remembers hearing him say:
+
+"Well, Mrs. Fairbanks has just destroyed another four hours' work for
+me."
+
+Sometimes he played chess with Emma Beach, who thought him a great hero
+because, once when a crowd of men were tormenting a young lad, a
+passenger, Mark Twain took the boy's part and made them desist.
+
+"I am sure I was right, too," she declares; "heroism came natural to
+him."
+
+Mr. Severance recalls another incident which, as he says, was trivial
+enough, but not easy to forget:
+
+We were having a little celebration over the birthday anniversary of Mrs.
+Duncan, wife of our captain. Mark Twain got up and made a little speech,
+in which he said Mrs. Duncan was really older than Methuselah because she
+knew a lot of things that Methuselah never heard of. Then he mentioned a
+number of more or less modern inventions, and wound up by saying, "What
+did Methuselah know about a barbed-wire fence?"
+
+Except Following the Equator, The Innocents Abroad comes nearer to being
+history than any other of Mark Twain's travel-books. The notes for it
+were made on the spot, and there was plenty of fact, plenty of fresh, new
+experience, plenty of incident to set down. His idea of descriptive
+travel in those days was to tell the story as it happened; also, perhaps,
+he had not then acquired the courage of his inventions. We may believe
+that the adventures with Jack, Dan, and the Doctor are elaborated here
+and there; but even those happened substantially as recorded. There is
+little to add, then, to the story of that halcyon trip, and not much to
+elucidate.
+
+The old note-books give a light here and there that is interesting. It
+is curious to be looking through them now, trying to realize that these
+penciled memoranda were the fresh, first impressions that would presently
+grow into the world's most delightful book of travel; that they were set
+down in the very midst of that care-free little company that frolicked
+through Italy, climbed wearily the arid Syrian hills. They are all dead
+now; but to us they are as alive and young to-day as when they followed
+the footprints of the Son of Man through Palestine, and stood at last
+before the Sphinx, impressed and awed by its "five thousand
+slow-revolving years."
+
+Some of the items consist of no more than a few terse, suggestive words
+--serious, humorous, sometimes profane. Others are statistical,
+descriptive, elaborated. Also there are drawings--"not copied," he marks
+them, with a pride not always justified by the result. The earlier notes
+are mainly comments on the "pilgrims," the freak pilgrims: "the
+Frenchy-looking woman who owns a dog and keeps up an interminable
+biography of him to the passengers"; the "long-legged, simple,
+wide-mouthed, horse-laughing young fellow who once made a sea voyage to
+Fortress Monroe, and quotes eternally from his experiences"; also, there
+is reference to another young man, "good, accommodating, pleasant but
+fearfully green." This young person would become the "Interrogation
+Point," in due time, and have his picture on page 71 (old edition), while
+opposite him, on page 70, would appear the "oracle," identified as one
+Doctor Andrews, who (the note-book says) had the habit of "smelling in
+guide-books for knowledge and then trying to play it for old information
+that has been festering in his brain." Sometimes there are abstract
+notes such as:
+
+How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing that no one had
+ever said it before.
+
+Of the "character" notes, the most important and elaborated is that which
+presents the "Poet Lariat." This is the entry, somewhat epitomized:
+
+                  BLOODGOOD H. CUTTER
+
+    He is fifty years old, and small of his age. He dresses in
+    homespun, and is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer, with
+    a strange proclivity for writing rhymes. He writes them on all
+    possible subjects, and gets them printed on slips of paper, with his
+    portrait at the head. These he will give to any man who comes
+    along, whether he has anything against him or not . . . .
+
+    Dan said:
+
+    "It must be a great happiness to you to sit down at the close of day
+    and put its events all down in rhymes and poetry, like Byron and
+    Shakespeare and those fellows."
+
+    "Oh yes, it is--it is--Why, many's the time I've had to get up in
+    the night when it comes on me:
+
+       Whether we're on the sea or the land
+       We've all got to go at the word of command--
+
+    "Hey! how's that?"
+
+A curious character was Cutter--a Long Island farmer with the obsession
+of rhyme. In his old age, in an interview, he said:
+
+"Mark was generally writing and he was glum. He would write what we were
+doing, and I would write poetry, and Mark would say:
+
+"'For Heaven's sake, Cutter, keep your poems to yourself.'
+
+"Yes, Mark was pretty glum, and he was generally writing."
+
+Poor old Poet Lariat--dead now with so many others of that happy crew. We
+may believe that Mark learned to be "glum" when he saw the Lariat
+approaching with his sheaf of rhymes. We may believe, too, that he was
+"generally writing." He contributed fifty-three letters to the Alta
+during that five months and six to the Tribune. They would average about
+two columns nonpareil each, which is to say four thousand words, or
+something like two hundred and fifty thousand words in all. To turn out
+an average of fifteen hundred words a day, with continuous sight-seeing
+besides, one must be generally writing during any odd intervals; those
+who are wont to regard Mark Twain as lazy may consider these statistics.
+That he detested manual labor is true enough, but at the work for which
+he was fitted and intended it may be set down here upon authority (and
+despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that to his last
+year he was the most industrious of men.
+
+
+
+
+LXI
+
+THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
+
+It was Dan, Jack, and the Doctor who with Mark Twain wandered down
+through Italy and left moral footprints that remain to this day. The
+Italian guides are wary about showing pieces of the True Cross, fragments
+of the Crown of Thorns, and the bones of saints since then. They show
+them, it is true, but with a smile; the name of Mark Twain is a
+touch-stone to test their statements. Not a guide in Italy but has heard
+the tale of that iconoclastic crew, and of the book which turned their
+marvels into myths, their relics into bywords.
+
+It was Doctor Jackson, Colonel Denny, Doctor Birch, and Samuel Clemens
+who evaded the quarantine and made the perilous night trip to Athens and
+looked upon the Parthenon and the sleeping city by moonlight. It is all
+set down in the notes, and the account varies little from that given in
+the book; only he does not tell us that Captain Duncan and the
+quartermaster, Pratt, connived at the escapade, or how the latter watched
+the shore in anxious suspense until he heard the whistle which was their
+signal to be taken aboard. It would have meant six months' imprisonment
+if they had been captured, for there was no discretion in the Greek law.
+
+It was T. D. Crocker, A. N. Sanford, Col. Peter Kinney, and William
+Gibson who were delegated to draft the address to the Emperor of Russia
+at Yalta, with Samuel L. Clemens as chairman of that committee. The
+chairman wrote the address, the opening sentence of which he grew so
+weary of hearing:
+
+    We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply
+    for recreation, and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial
+    state.
+
+The address is all set down in the notes, and there also exists the first
+rough draft, with the emendations in his own hand. He deplores the time
+it required:
+
+    That job is over. Writing addresses to emperors is not my strong
+    suit. However, if it is not as good as it might be it doesn't
+    signify--the other committeemen ought to have helped me write it;
+    they had nothing to do, and I had my hands full. But for bothering
+    with this I would have caught up entirely with my New York Tribune
+    correspondence and nearly up with the San Francisco.
+
+They wanted him also to read the address to the Emperor, but he pointed
+out that the American consul was the proper person for that office. He
+tells how the address was presented:
+
+August 26th. The Imperial carriages were in waiting at eleven, and at
+twelve we were at the palace....
+
+The Consul for Odessa read the address and the Czar said frequently,
+"Good--very good; indeed"--and at the close, "I am very, very grateful."
+
+It was not improper for him to set down all this, and much more, in his
+own note-book--not then for publication. It was in fact a very proper
+record--for today.
+
+One incident of the imperial audience Mark Twain omitted from his book,
+perhaps because the humor of it had not yet become sufficiently evident.
+"The humorous perception of a thing is a pretty slow growth sometimes,"
+he once remarked. It was about seventeen years before he could laugh
+enjoyably at a slight mistake he made at the Emperor's reception. He set
+down a memorandum of it, then, for fear it might be lost:
+
+    There were a number of great dignitaries of the Empire there, and
+    although, as a general thing, they were dressed in citizen's
+    clothing, I observed that the most of them wore a very small piece
+    of ribbon in the lapels of their coats. That little touch of color
+    struck my fancy, and it seemed to me a good idea to add it to my own
+    attractions; not imagining that it had any special significance. So
+    I stepped aside, hunted up a bit of red ribbon, and ornamented my
+    lapel with it. Presently, Count Festetics, the Grand Master of
+    ceremonies, and the only man there who was gorgeously arrayed, in
+    full official costume, began to show me a great many attentions. He
+    was particularly polite, and pleasant, and anxious to be of service
+    to me. Presently, he asked me what order of nobility I belonged to?
+    I said, "I didn't belong to any." Then he asked me what order of
+    knighthood I belonged to? I said, "None." Then he asked me what
+    the red ribbon in my buttonhole stood for? I saw, at once, what an
+    ass I had been making of myself, and was accordingly confused and
+    embarrassed. I said the first thing that came into my mind, and
+    that was that the ribbon was merely the symbol of a club of
+    journalists to which I belonged, and I was not pursued with any more
+    of Count Festetic's attentions.
+
+    Later, I got on very familiar terms with an old gentleman, whom I
+    took to be the head gardener, and walked him all about the gardens,
+    slipping my arm into his without invitation, yet without demur on
+    his part, and by and by was confused again when I found that he was
+    not a gardener at all, but the Lord High Admiral of Russia! I
+    almost made up my mind that I would never call on an Emperor again.
+
+Like all Mediterranean excursionists, those first pilgrims were
+insatiable collectors of curios, costumes, and all manner of outlandish
+things. Dan Slote had the stateroom hung and piled with such gleanings.
+At Constantinople his room-mate writes:
+
+    I thought Dan had got the state-room pretty full of rubbish at last,
+    but awhile ago his dragoman arrived with a brand-new ghastly
+    tombstone of the Oriental pattern, with his name handsomely carved
+    and gilted on it in Turkish characters. That fellow will buy a
+    Circassian slave next.
+
+It was Church, Denny, Jack, Davis, Dan, Moult, and Mark Twain who made
+the "long trip" through Syria from Beirut to Jerusalem with their
+elaborate camping outfit and decrepit nags "Jericho," "Baalbec," and the
+rest. It was better camping than that Humboldt journey of six years
+before, though the horses were not so dissimilar, and altogether it was a
+hard, nerve-racking experience, climbing the arid hills of Palestine in
+that torrid summer heat. Nobody makes that trip in summer-time now.
+Tourists hurry out of Syria before the first of April, and they do not go
+back before November. One brief quotation from Mark Twain's book gives
+us an idea of what that early party of pilgrims had to undergo:
+
+    We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple of
+    hours, and then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig-
+    trees to give me a chance to rest. It was the hottest day we had
+    seen yet--the sun-flames shot down like the shafts of fire that
+    stream out before a blow-pipe; the rays seemed to fall in a deluge
+    on the head and pass downward like rain from a roof. I imagined I
+    could distinguish between the floods of rays. I thought I could
+    tell when each flood struck my head, when it reached my shoulders,
+    and when the next one came. It was terrible.
+
+He had been ill with cholera at Damascus, a light attack; but any attack
+of that dread disease is serious enough. He tells of this in the book,
+but he does not mention, either in the book or in his notes, the attack
+which Dan Slote had some days later. It remained for William F. Church,
+of the party, to relate that incident, for it was the kind of thing that
+Mark Twain was not likely to record, or even to remember. Doctor Church
+was a deacon with orthodox views and did not approve of Mark Twain; he
+thought him sinful, irreverent, profane.
+
+"He was the worst man I ever knew," Church said; then he added, "And the
+best."
+
+What happened was this: At the end of a terrible day of heat, when the
+party had camped on the edge of a squalid Syrian village, Dan was taken
+suddenly ill. It was cholera, beyond doubt. Dan could not go on--he
+might never go on. The chances were that way. It was a serious matter
+all around. To wait with Dan meant to upset their travel schedule--it
+might mean to miss the ship. Consultation was held and a resolution
+passed (the pilgrims were always passing resolutions) to provide for Dan
+as well as possible, and leave him behind. Clemens, who had remained
+with Dan, suddenly appeared and said:
+
+"Gentlemen, I understand that you are going to leave Dan Slote here
+alone. I'll be d---d if I do!"
+
+And he didn't. He stayed there and brought Dan into Jerusalem, a few
+days late, but convalescent.
+
+Perhaps most of them were not always reverent during that Holy Land trip.
+It was a trying journey, and after fierce days of desert hills the
+reaction might not always spare even the holiest memories. Jack was
+particularly sinful. When they learned the price for a boat on Galilee,
+and the deacons who had traveled nearly half around the world to sail on
+that sacred water were confounded by the charge, Jack said:
+
+"Well, Denny, do you wonder now that Christ walked?"
+
+It was the irreverent Jack who one morning (they had camped the night
+before by the ruins of Jericho) refused to get up to see the sun rise
+across the Jordan. Deacon Church went to his tent.
+
+"Jack, my boy, get up. Here is the place where the Israelites crossed
+over into the Promised Land, and beyond are the mountains of Moab, where
+Moses lies buried."
+
+"Moses who!" said Jack.
+
+"Oh, Jack, my boy, Moses, the great lawgiver--who led the Israelites out
+of Egypt-forty years through the wilderness--to the Promised Land."
+
+"Forty years!" said Jack. "How far was it?"
+
+"It was three hundred miles, Jack; a great wilderness, and he brought
+them through in safety."
+
+Jack regarded him with scorn. "Huh, Moses--three hundred miles forty
+years--why, Ben Holiday would have brought them through in thirty-six
+hours!"--[Ben Holiday, owner of the Overland stages, and a man of great
+executive ability. This incident, a true one, is more elaborately told
+in Roughing It, but it seems pertinent here.]
+
+Jack probably learned more about the Bible during that trip-its history
+and its heroes-than during all his former years. Nor was Jack the only
+one of that group thus benefited. The sacred landmarks of Palestine
+inspire a burning interest in the Scriptures, and Mark Twain probably did
+not now regret those early Sunday-school lessons; certainly he did not
+fail to review them exhaustively on that journey. His note-books fairly
+overflow with Bible references; the Syrian chapters in The Innocents
+Abroad are permeated with the poetry and legendary beauty of the Bible
+story. The little Bible he carried on that trip, bought in
+Constantinople, was well worn by the time they reached the ship again at
+Jaffa. He must have read it with a large and persistent interest; also
+with a double benefit. For, besides the knowledge acquired, he was
+harvesting a profit--probably unsuspected at the time---viz., the
+influence of the most direct and beautiful English--the English of the
+King James version--which could not fail to affect his own literary
+method at that impressionable age. We have already noted his earlier
+admiration for that noble and simple poem, "The Burial of Moses," which
+in the Palestine note-book is copied in full. All the tendency of his
+expression lay that way, and the intense consideration of stately Bible
+phrase and imagery could hardly fail to influence his mental processes.
+The very distinct difference of style, as shown in The Innocents Abroad
+and in his earlier writings, we may believe was in no small measure due
+to his study of the King James version during those weeks in Palestine.
+
+He bought another Bible at Jerusalem; but it was not for himself. It was
+a little souvenir volume bound in olive and balsam wood, and on the
+fly-leaf is inscribed:
+
+    Mrs. Jane Clemens from her son. Jerusalem, Sept. 24, 1867.
+
+There is one more circumstance of that long cruise-recorded neither in
+the book nor the notes--an incident brief, but of more importance in the
+life of Samuel Clemens than any heretofore set down. It occurred in the
+beautiful Bay of Smyrna, on the fifth or sixth of September, while the
+vessel lay there for the Ephesus trip.
+
+Reference has been made to young Charles Langdon, of Elmira (the
+"Charley" once mentioned in the Innocents), as an admirer of Mark Twain.
+There was a good deal of difference in their ages, and they were seldom
+of the same party; but sometimes the boy invited the journalist to his
+cabin and, boy-like, exhibited his treasures. He had two sisters at
+home; and of Olivia, the youngest, he had brought a dainty miniature done
+on ivory in delicate tints--a sweet-pictured countenance, fine and
+spiritual. On that fateful day in the day of Smyrna, Samuel Clemens,
+visiting in young Langdon's cabin, was shown this portrait. He looked at
+it with long admiration, and spoke of it reverently, for the delicate
+face seemed to him to be something more than a mere human likeness. Each
+time he came, after that, he asked to see the picture, and once even
+begged to be allowed to take it away with him. The boy would not agree
+to this, and the elder man looked long and steadily at the miniature,
+resolving in his mind that some day he would meet the owner of that
+lovely face--a purpose for once in accord with that which the fates had
+arranged for him, in the day when all things were arranged, the day of
+the first beginning.
+
+
+
+
+LXII
+
+THE RETURN OF THE PILGRIMS
+
+The last note-book entry bears date of October 11th:
+
+    At sea, somewhere in the neighborhood of Malta. Very stormy.
+
+    Terrible death to be talked to death. The storm has blown two small
+    land birds and a hawk to sea and they came on board. Sea full of
+    flying-fish.
+
+That is all. There is no record of the week's travel in Spain, which a
+little group of four made under the picturesque Gibraltar guide, Benunes,
+still living and quite as picturesque at last accounts. This side-trip
+is covered in a single brief paragraph in the Innocents, and the only
+account we have of it is in a home letter, from Cadiz, of October 24th:
+
+    We left Gibraltar at noon and rode to Algeciras (4 hours), thus
+    dodging the quarantine--took dinner, and then rode horseback all
+    night in a swinging trot, and at daylight took a caleche (a-wheeled
+    vehicle), and rode 5 hours--then took cars and traveled till twelve
+    at night. That landed us at Seville, and we were over the hard part
+    of our trip and somewhat tired. Since then we have taken things
+    comparatively easy, drifting around from one town to another and
+    attracting a good deal of attention--for I guess strangers do not
+    wander through Andalusia and the other southern provinces of Spain
+    often. The country is precisely what it was when Don Quixote and
+    Sancho Panza were possible characters.
+
+    But I see now what the glory of Spain must have been when it was
+    under Moorish domination. No, I will not say that--but then when
+    one is carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of the
+    Alhambra and the supernatural beauty of the Alcazar, he is apt to
+    overflow with admiration for the splendid intellects that created
+    them.
+
+We may wish that he had left us a chapter of that idyllic journey, but it
+will never be written now. A night or two before the vessel reached New
+York there was the usual good-by assembly, and for this occasion, at Mrs.
+Severance's request, Mark Twain wrote some verses. They were not
+especially notable, for meter and rhyme did not come easy to him, but one
+prophetic stanza is worth remembering. In the opening lines the
+passengers are referred to as a fleet of vessels, then follows:
+
+       Lo! other ships of that parted fleet
+       Shall suffer this fate or that:
+       One shall be wrecked, another shall sink,
+       Or ground on treacherous flat.
+       Some shall be famed in many lands
+       As good ships, fast and fair,
+       And some shall strangely disappear,
+       Men know not when or where.
+
+The Quaker City returned to America on November 19, 1867, and Mark Twain
+found himself, if not famous, at least in very wide repute. The
+fifty-three letters to the Alta and the half-dozen to the New York
+Tribune had carried his celebrity into every corner of the States and
+Territories. Vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry, they
+came as a revelation to a public weary of the driveling, tiresome
+travel-letters of that period. They preached a new gospel in
+travel-literature: the gospel of seeing with an overflowing honesty; a
+gospel of sincerity in according praises to whatever seemed genuine, and
+ridicule to the things considered sham. It was the gospel that Mark
+Twain would continue to preach during his whole career. It became his
+chief literary message to the world-a world waiting for that message.
+
+Moreover, the letters were literature. He had received, from whatever
+source, a large and very positive literary impulse, a loftier conception
+and expression. It was at Tangier that he first struck the grander
+chord, the throbbing cadence of human story.
+
+Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered America;
+old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to
+arm for the first Crusade; old when Charlemagne and his paladins
+beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the
+fabled days of the olden time; old when Christ and his disciples walked
+the earth; stood where it stands to-day when the lips of Memnon were
+vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes.
+
+This is pure poetry. He had never touched so high a strain before, but
+he reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing
+mastery and confidence. In Venice, in Rome, in Athens, through the Holy
+Land, his retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional
+crescendo that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain,
+the ageless contemplation of the Sphinx. We cannot forego a paragraph or
+two of that word-picture:
+
+    After years of waiting it was before me at last. The great face was
+    so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not
+    of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as
+    never anything human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient.
+    If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking
+    toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing--nothing
+    but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond everything
+    of the present, and far into the past.... It was thinking of the
+    wars of the departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and
+    destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose
+    progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy
+    and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five
+    thousand slow-revolving years . . . .
+
+    The Sphinx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its
+    magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its
+    story. And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this
+    eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of
+    all ages, which reveals to one something of what we shall feel when
+    we shall stand at last in the awful presence of God.
+
+Then that closing word of Egypt. He elaborated it for the book, and did
+not improve it. Let us preserve here its original form.
+
+    We are glad to have seen Egypt. We are glad to have seen that old
+    land which taught Greece her letters--and through Greece, Rome--and
+    through Rome, the world--that venerable cradle of culture and
+    refinement which could have humanized and civilized the Children of
+    Israel, but allowed them to depart out of her borders savages--those
+    Children whom we still revere, still love, and whose sad
+    shortcomings we still excuse--not because they were savages, but
+    because they were the chosen savages of God.
+
+The Holy Land letters alone would have brought him fame. They presented
+the most graphic and sympathetic picture of Syrian travel ever written
+--one that will never become antiquated or obsolete so long as human
+nature remains unchanged. From beginning to end the tale is rarely,
+reverently told. Its closing paragraph has not been surpassed in the
+voluminous literature of that solemn land:
+
+    Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of
+    a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.
+    Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers that solemn
+    sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing
+    exists--over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs
+    motionless and dead--about whose borders nothing grows but weeds and
+    scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises
+    refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch.
+    Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of
+    Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing one finds
+    only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the
+    accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle left
+    it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in
+    their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to
+    remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour's
+    presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks
+    by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, goodwill to men,
+    is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature
+    that is pleasant to the eye. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the
+    stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and
+    is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer
+    there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the
+    wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel is
+    gone, and the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on
+    that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the
+    Holy Cross. The noted Sea of Galilee, where Roman fleets once rode
+    at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed in their ships,
+    was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and its
+    borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a shapeless ruin;
+    Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have
+    vanished from the earth, and the "desert places" round about them
+    where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's voice and ate
+    the miraculous bread sleep in the hush of a solitude that is
+    inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.
+
+    Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise?
+    Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?
+
+It would be easy to quote pages here--a pictorial sequence from Gibraltar
+to Athens, from Athens to Egypt, a radiant panoramic march. In time he
+would write technically better. He would avoid solecism, he would become
+a greater master of vocabulary and phrase, but in all the years ahead he
+would never match the lambent bloom and spontaneity of those fresh, first
+impressions of Mediterranean lands and seas. No need to mention the
+humor, the burlesque, the fearless, unrestrained ridicule of old masters
+and of sacred relics, so called. These we have kept familiar with much
+repetition. Only, the humor had grown more subtle, more restrained; the
+burlesque had become impersonal and harmless, the ridicule so frank and
+good-natured, that even the old masters themselves might have enjoyed it,
+while the most devoted churchman, unless blinded by bigotry, would find
+in it satisfaction, rather than sacrilege.
+
+The final letter was written for the New York Herald after the arrival,
+and was altogether unlike those that preceded it. Gaily satirical and
+personal--inclusively so--it might better have been left unwritten, for
+it would seem to have given needless offense to a number of goodly
+people, whose chief sin was the sedateness of years. However, it is all
+past now, and those who were old then, and perhaps queer and pious and
+stingy, do not mind any more, and those who were young and frivolous have
+all grown old too, and most of them have set out on the still farther
+voyage. Somewhere, it may be, they gather, now; and then, and lightly,
+tenderly recall their old-time journeying.
+
+
+
+
+LXIII
+
+IN WASHINGTON--A PUBLISHING PROPOSITION
+
+Clemens remained but one day in New York. Senator Stewart had written,
+about the time of the departure of the Quaker City, offering him the
+position of private secretary--a position which was to give him leisure
+for literary work, with a supporting salary as well. Stewart no doubt
+thought it would be considerably to his advantage to have the brilliant
+writer and lecturer attached to his political establishment, and Clemens
+likewise saw possibilities in the arrangement. From Naples, in August,
+he had written accepting Stewart's offer; he lost no time now in
+discussing the matter in person.--[In a letter home, August 9th, he
+referred to the arrangement: "I wrote to Bill Stewart to-day accepting
+his private secretaryship in Washington, next winter."]
+
+There seems to have been little difficulty in concluding the arrangement.
+When Clemens had been in Washington a week we find him writing:
+
+    DEAR FOLKS, Tired and sleepy--been in Congress all day and making
+    newspaper acquaintances. Stewart is to look up a clerkship in the
+    Patent Office for Orion. Things necessarily move slowly where there
+    is so much business and such armies of office-seekers to be attended
+    to. I guess it will be all right. I intend it shall be all right.
+
+    I have 18 invitations to lecture, at $100 each, in various parts
+    of the Union--have declined them all. I am for business now.
+
+    Belong on the Tribune Staff, and shall write occasionally. Am
+    offered the same berth to-day on the Herald by letter. Shall write
+    Mr. Bennett and accept, as soon as I hear from Tribune that it will
+    not interfere. Am pretty well known now--intend to be better known.
+    Am hobnobbing with these old Generals and Senators and other humbugs
+    for no good purpose. Don't have any more trouble making friends
+    than I did in California. All serene. Good-by. Shall continue on
+    the Alta.
+                     Yours affectionately,
+                                   SAM.
+
+    P.S.--I room with Bill Stewart and board at Willard's Hotel.
+
+But the secretary arrangement was a brief matter. It is impossible to
+conceive of Mark Twain as anybody's secretary, especially as the
+secretary of Senator Stewart.
+
+--[In Senator Stewart's memoirs he refers unpleasantly to Mark Twain, and
+after relating several incidents that bear only strained relations to the
+truth, states that when the writer returned from the Holy Land he
+(Stewart) offered him a secretaryship as a sort of charity. He adds that
+Mark Twain's behavior on his premises was such that a threat of a
+thrashing was necessary. The reason for such statements becomes
+apparent, however, when he adds that in 'Roughing It' the author accuses
+him of cheating, prints a picture of him with a hatch over his eye, and
+claims to have given him a sound thrashing, none of which statements,
+save only the one concerning the picture (an apparently unforgivable
+offense to his dignity), is true, as the reader may easily ascertain for
+himself.]
+
+Within a few weeks he was writing humorous accounts of "My Late
+Senatorial Secretaryship," "Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation,"
+etc., all good-natured burlesque, but inspired, we may believe, by the
+change: These articles appeared in the New York Tribune, the New York
+Citizen, and the Galaxy Magazine.
+
+There appears to have been no ill-feeling at this time between Clemens
+and Stewart. If so, it is not discoverable in any of the former's
+personal or newspaper correspondence. In fact, in his article relating
+to his "late senatorial secretaryship" he puts the joke, so far as it is
+a joke, on Senator James W. Nye, probably as an additional punishment for
+Nye's failure to appear on the night of his lecture. He established
+headquarters with a brilliant newspaper correspondent named Riley. "One
+of the best men in Washington--or elsewhere," he tells us in a brief
+sketch of that person.--[See Riley, newspaper correspondent. Sketches
+New and Old.]--He had known Riley in San Francisco; the two were
+congenial, and settled down to their several undertakings.
+
+Clemens was chiefly concerned over two things: he wished to make money
+and he wished to secure a government appointment for Orion. He had used
+up the most of his lecture accumulations, and was moderately in debt. His
+work was in demand at good rates, for those days, and with working
+opportunity he could presently dispose of his financial problem. The
+Tribune was anxious for letters; the Enterprise and Alta were waiting for
+them; the Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the magazines--all had solicited
+contributions; the lecture bureaus pursued him. Personally his outlook
+was bright.
+
+The appointment for Orion was a different matter. The powers were not
+especially interested in a brother; there were too many brothers and
+assorted relatives on the official waiting-list already. Clemens was
+offered appointments for himself--a consulship, a post-mastership; even
+that of San Francisco. From the Cabinet down, the Washington political
+contingent had read his travel-letters, and was ready to recognize
+officially the author of them in his own person and personality.
+
+Also, socially: Mark Twain found himself all at once in the midst of
+receptions, dinners, and speech-making; all very exciting for a time at
+least, but not profitable, not conducive to work. At a dinner of the
+Washington Correspondents Club his response to the toast, "Women," was
+pronounced by Schuyler Colfax to be "the best after dinner speech ever
+made." Certainly it was a refreshing departure from the prosy or
+clumsy-witted efforts common to that period. He was coming altogether
+into his own.--[This is the first of Mark Twain's after-dinner speeches
+to be preserved. The reader will find it complete, as reported next day,
+in Appendix G, at the end of last volume.]
+
+He was not immediately interested in the matter of book publication. The
+Jumping Frog book was popular, and in England had been issued by
+Routledge; but the royalty returns were modest enough and slow in
+arrival. His desire was for prompter results. His interest in book
+publication had never been an eager one, and related mainly to the
+advertising it would furnish, which he did not now need; or to the money
+return, in which he had no great faith. Yet at this very moment a letter
+for him was lying in the Tribune office in New York which would bring the
+book idea into first prominence and spell the beginning of his fortune.
+
+Among those who had read and found delight in the Tribune letters was
+Elisha Bliss, Jr., of the American Publishing Company, of Hartford. Bliss
+was a shrewd and energetic man, with a keen appreciation for humor and
+the American fondness for that literary quality. He had recently
+undertaken the management of a Hartford concern, and had somewhat alarmed
+its conservative directorate by publishing books that furnished
+entertainment to the reader as well as moral instruction. Only his
+success in paying dividends justified this heresy and averted his
+downfall. Two days after the arrival of the Quaker City Bliss wrote the
+letter above mentioned. It ran as follows:
+
+                  OFFICE OF THE AMERICAN PUBLISHING CO.
+                  HARTFORD, CONN., November 21, 1867.
+
+SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, ESQ., Tribune Office, New York.
+
+DEAR SIR,--We take the liberty to address you this, in place of a letter
+which we had recently written and were about to forward to you, not
+knowing your arrival home was expected so soon. We are desirous of
+obtaining from you a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your
+letters from the past, etc., with such interesting additions as may be
+proper. We are the publishers of A. D. Richardson's works, and flatter
+ourselves that we can give an author a favorable term and do as full
+justice to his productions as any other house in the country. We are
+perhaps the oldest subscription house in the country, and have never
+failed to give a book an immense circulation. We sold about 100,000
+copies of Richardson's F. D. and E. ('Field, Dungeon and Escape'), and
+are now printing 41,000 of 'Beyond the Mississippi', and large orders
+ahead. If you have any thought of writing a book, or could be induced to
+do so, we should be pleased to see you, and will do so. Will you do us
+the favor of reply at once, at your earliest convenience.
+
+                         Very truly etc.,
+
+                            E. BLISS, JR.,
+                            Secretary.
+
+After ten days' delay this letter was forwarded to the Tribune bureau in
+Washington, where Clemens received it. He replied promptly.
+
+                     WASHINGTON, December 2, 1867.
+
+E. BLISS, JR., ESQ., Secretary American Publishing Co.
+
+DEAR SIR,--I only received your favor of November 21st last night, at the
+rooms of the Tribune Bureau here. It was forwarded from the Tribune
+office, New York where it had lain eight or ten days. This will be a
+sufficient apology for the seeming discourtesy of my silence.
+
+I wrote fifty-two letters for the San Francisco Alta California during
+the Quaker City excursion, about half of which number have been printed
+thus far. The Alta has few exchanges in the East, and I suppose scarcely
+any of these letters have been copied on this side of the Rocky
+Mountains. I could weed them of their chief faults of construction and
+inelegancies of expression, and make a volume that would be more
+acceptable in many respects than any I could now write. When those
+letters were written my impressions were fresh, but now they have lost
+that freshness; they were warm then, they are cold now. I could strike
+out certain letters, and write new ones wherewith to supply their places.
+If you think such a book would suit your purpose, please drop me a line,
+specifying the size and general style of the volume--when the matter
+ought to be ready; whether it should have pictures in it or not; and
+particularly what your terms with me would be, and what amount of money I
+might possibly make out of it. The latter clause has a degree of
+importance for me which is almost beyond my own comprehension. But you
+understand that, of course.
+
+I have other propositions for a book, but have doubted the propriety of
+interfering with good newspaper engagements, except my way as an author
+could be demonstrated to be plain before me. But I know Richardson, and
+learned from him some months ago something of an idea of the subscription
+plan of publishing. If that is your plan invariably it looks safe.
+
+I am on the New York Tribune staff here as an "occasional," among other
+things, and a note from you addressed to
+              Very truly, etc.,
+                         SAM. L. CLEMENS,
+                         New York Tribune Bureau, Washington
+will find me, without fail.
+
+The exchange of those two letters marked the beginning of one of the most
+notable publishing connections in American literary history.
+
+Consummation, however, was somewhat delayed. Bliss was ill when the
+reply came, and could not write again in detail until nearly a month
+later. In this letter he recited the profits made by Richardson and
+others through subscription publication, and named the royalties paid.
+Richardson had received four per cent. of the sale price, a small enough
+rate for these later days; but the cost of manufacture was larger then,
+and the sale and delivery of books through agents has ever been an
+expensive process. Even Horace Greeley had received but a fraction more
+on his Great American Conflict. Bliss especially suggested and
+emphasized a "humorous work--that is to say, a work humorously inclined."
+He added that they had two arrangements for paying authors: outright
+purchase, and royalty. He invited a meeting in New York to arrange
+terms.
+
+
+
+
+LXIV
+
+OLIVIA LANGDON
+
+Clemens did in fact go to New York that same evening, to spend Christmas
+with Dan Slote, and missed Bliss's second letter. It was no matter. Fate
+had his affairs properly in hand, and had prepared an event of still
+larger moment than the publication even of Innocents Abroad. There was a
+pleasant reunion at Dan Slote's. He wrote home about it:
+
+    Charley Langdon, Jack Van Nostrand, Dan and I (all Quaker City
+    night-hawks) had a blow-out at Dan's house and a lively talk over
+    old times. I just laughed till my sides ached at some of our
+    reminiscences. It was the unholiest gang that ever cavorted through
+    Palestine, but those are the best boys in the world.
+
+This, however, was not the event; it was only preliminary to it. We are
+coming to that now. At the old St. Nicholas Hotel, which stood on the
+west of Broadway between Spring and Broome streets, there were stopping
+at this time Jervis Langdon, a wealty coal-dealer and mine-owner of
+Elmira, his son Charles and his daughter Olivia, whose pictured face
+Samuel Clemens had first seen in the Bay of Smyrna one September day.
+Young Langdon had been especially anxious to bring his distinguished
+Quaker City friend and his own people together, and two days before
+Christmas Samuel Clemens was invited to dine at the hotel. He went very
+willingly. The lovely face of that miniature had been often a part of his
+waking dreams. For the first time now he looked upon its reality. Long
+afterward he said:
+
+"It is forty years ago. From that day to this she has never been out of
+my mind."
+
+Charles Dickens was in New York then, and gave a reading that night in
+Steinway Hall. The Langdons went, and Samuel Clemens accompanied them.
+He remembered afterward that Dickens wore a black velvet coat with a
+fiery red flower in his buttonhole, and that he read the storm scene from
+Copperfield--the death of James Steerforth. But he remembered still more
+clearly the face and dress of that slender girlish figure at his side.
+
+Olivia Langdon was twenty-two years old at this time, delicate as the
+miniature he had seen, fragile to look upon, though no longer with the
+shattered health of her girlhood. At sixteen, through a fall upon the
+ice, she had become a complete invalid, confined to her bed for two
+years, unable to sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position
+except upon her back. Great physicians and surgeons, one after another,
+had done their best for her but she had failed steadily until every hope
+had died. Then, when nothing else was left to try, a certain Doctor
+Newton, of spectacular celebrity, who cured by "laying on of hands," was
+brought to Elmira to see her. Doctor Newton came into the darkened room
+and said:
+
+"Open the windows--we must have light!"
+
+They protested that she could not bear the light, but the windows were
+opened. Doctor Newton came to the bedside of the helpless girl,
+delivered a short, fervent prayer, put his arm under her shoulders, and
+bade her sit up. She had not moved for two years, and the family were
+alarmed, but she obeyed, and he assisted her into a chair. Sensation
+came back to her limbs. With his assistance she even made a feeble
+attempt to walk. He left then, saying that she would gradually improve,
+and in time be well, though probably never very strong. On the same day
+he healed a boy, crippled and drawn with fever.
+
+It turned out as he had said. Olivia Langdon improved steadily, and now
+at twenty-two, though not robust--she was never that--she was
+comparatively well. Gentle, winning, lovable, she was the family idol,
+and Samuel Clemens joined in their worship from the moment of that first
+meeting.
+
+Olivia Langdon, on her part, was at first dazed and fascinated, rather
+than attracted, by this astonishing creature, so unlike any one she had
+ever known. Her life had been circumscribed, her experiences of a simple
+sort. She had never seen anything resembling him before. Indeed, nobody
+had. Somewhat carelessly, even if correctly, attired; eagerly, rather
+than observantly, attentive; brilliant and startling, rather than
+cultured, of speech--a blazing human solitaire, unfashioned, unset,
+tossed by the drift of fortune at her feet. He disturbed rather than
+gratified her. She sensed his heresy toward the conventions and forms
+which had been her gospel; his bantering, indifferent attitude toward
+life--to her always so serious and sacred; she suspected that he even
+might have unorthodox views on matters of religion. When he had gone she
+somehow had the feeling that a great fiery meteor of unknown portent had
+swept across her sky.
+
+To her brother, who was eager for her approval of his celebrity, Miss
+Langdon conceded admiration. As for her father, he did not qualify his
+opinion. With hearty sense of humor, and a keen perception of verity and
+capability in men, Jervis Langdon accepted Samuel Clemens from the start,
+and remained his stanch admirer and friend. Clemens left that night with
+an invitation to visit Elmira by and by, and with the full intention of
+going--soon. Fate, however, had another plan. He did not see Elmira for
+the better part of a year.
+
+He saw Miss Langdon again within the week. On New-Year's Day he set
+forth to pay calls, after the fashion of the time--more lavish then than
+now. Miss Langdon was receiving with Miss Alice Hooker, a niece of Henry
+Ward Beecher, at the home of a Mrs. Berry; he decided to go there first.
+With young Langdon he arrived at eleven o'clock in the morning, and they
+did not leave until midnight. If his first impression upon Olivia
+Langdon had been meteoric, it would seem that he must now have become to
+her as a streaming comet that swept from zenith to horizon. One thing is
+certain: she had become to him the single, unvarying beacon of his future
+years. He visited Henry Ward Beecher on that trip and dined with him by
+invitation. Harriet Beecher Stowe was present, and others of that
+eminent family. Likewise his old Quaker City comrades, Moses S. and
+Emma Beach. It was a brilliant gathering, a conclave of intellectual
+gods--a triumph to be there for one who had been a printer-boy on the
+banks of the Mississippi, and only a little while before a miner with
+pick and shovel. It was gratifying to be so honored; it would be
+pleasant to write home; but the occasion lacked something too
+--everything, in fact--for when he ran his eye around the board the face
+of the minature was not there.
+
+Still there were compensations; inadequate, of course, but pleasant
+enough to remember. It was Sunday evening and the party adjourned to
+Plymouth Church. After services Mr. Beecher invited him to return home
+with him for a quiet talk. Evidently they had a good time, for in the
+letter telling of these things Samuel Clemens said: "Henry Ward Beecher
+is a brick."
+
+
+
+
+LXV
+
+A CONTRACT WITH ELISHA BLISS, JR.
+
+He returned to Washington without seeing Miss Langdon again, though he
+would seem to have had permission to write--friendly letters. A little
+later (it was on the evening of January 9th) he lectured in Washington
+--on very brief notice indeed. The arrangement for his appearance had
+been made by a friend during his absence--"a friend," Clemens declared
+afterward, "not entirely sober at the time." To his mother he wrote:
+
+I scared up a doorkeeper and was ready at the proper time, and by pure
+good luck a tolerably good house assembled and I was saved. I hardly
+knew what I was going to talk about, but it went off in splendid style.
+
+The title of the lecture delivered was "The Frozen Truth"--"more truth in
+the title than in the lecture," according to his own statement. What it
+dealt with is not remembered now. It had to do with the Quaker City
+trip, perhaps, and it seems to have brought a financial return which was
+welcome enough. Subsequently he delivered it elsewhere; though just how
+far the tour extended cannot be learned from the letters, and he had but
+little memory of it in later years.
+
+There was some further correspondence with Bliss, then about the 21st of
+January (1868) Clemens made a trip to Hartford to settle the matter.
+Bliss had been particularly anxious to meet him, personally and was a
+trifle disappointed with his appearance. Mark Twain's traveling costume
+was neither new nor neat, and he was smoking steadily a pipe of power.
+His general make-up was hardly impressive.
+
+Bliss's disturbance was momentary. Once he began to talk the rest did
+not matter. He was the author of those letters, and Bliss decided that
+personally he was even greater than they. The publisher, confined to his
+home with illness, offered him the hospitality of his household. Also,
+he made him two propositions: he would pay him ten thousand dollars cash
+for his copyright, or he would pay five per cent. royalty, which was a
+fourth more than Richardson had received. He advised the latter
+arrangement.
+
+Clemens had already taken advice and had discussed the project a good
+deal with Richardson. The ten thousand dollars was a heavy temptation,
+but he withstood it and closed on the royalty basis--"the best business
+judgment I ever displayed," he was wont to declare. A letter written to
+his mother and sister near the end of this Hartford stay is worth quoting
+pretty fully here, for the information and "character" it contains. It
+bears date of January 24th.
+
+    This is a good week for me. I stopped in the Herald office, as I
+    came through New York, to see the boys on the staff, and young James
+    Gordon Bennett asked me to write twice a week, impersonally, for the
+    Herald, and said if I would I might have full swing, and about
+    anybody and everything I wanted to. I said I must have the very
+    fullest possible swing, and he said, "All right." I said, "It's a
+    contract--" and that settled that matter.
+
+    I'll make it a point to write one letter a week anyhow. But the
+    best thing that has happened is here. This great American
+    Publishing Company kept on trying to bargain with me for a book till
+    I thought I would cut the matter short by coming up for a talk. I
+    met Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, and with his usual whole-souled
+    way of dropping his own work to give other people a lift when he
+    gets a chance, he said: "Now, here, you are one of the talented men
+    of the age--nobody is going to deny that--but in matters of business
+    I don't suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains.
+    I'll tell you what to do and how to do it." And he did.
+
+    And I listened well, and then came up here and made a splendid
+    contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large pages, with
+    illustrations, the manuscript to be placed in the publisher's hands
+    by the middle of July.--[The contract was not a formal one. There
+    was an exchange of letters agreeing to the terms, but no joint
+    document was drawn until October 16 (1868).]--My percentage is to
+    be a fourth more than they have ever paid any author except Greeley.
+    Beecher will be surprised, I guess, when he hears this.
+
+    These publishers get off the most tremendous editions of their books
+    you can imagine. I shall write to the Enterprise and Alta every
+    week, as usual, I guess, and to the Herald twice a week,
+    occasionally to the Tribune and the magazines (I have a stupid
+    article in the Galaxy, just issued), but I am not going to write to
+    this and that and the other paper any more.
+
+    I have had a tiptop time here for a few days (guest of Mr. Jno.
+    Hooker's family--Beecher's relatives--in a general way of Mr. Bliss
+    also, who is head of the publishing firm). Puritans are mighty
+    straight-laced, and they won't let me smoke in the parlor, but the
+    Almighty don't make any better people.
+
+    I have to make a speech at the annual Herald dinner on the 6th of
+    May.
+
+So the book, which would establish his claim to a peerage in the literary
+land, was arranged for, and it remained only to prepare the manuscript, a
+task which he regarded as not difficult. He had only to collate the Alta
+and Tribune letters, edit them, and write such new matter as would be
+required for completeness.
+
+Returning to Washington, he plunged into work with his usual terrific
+energy, preparing the copy--in the mean time writing newspaper
+correspondence and sketches that would bring immediate return. In
+addition to his regular contributions, he entered into a syndicate
+arrangement with John Swinton (brother of William Swinton, the historian)
+to supply letters to a list of newspapers.
+
+"I have written seven long newspaper letters and a short magazine article
+in less than two days," he wrote home, and by the end of January he had
+also prepared several chapters of his book.
+
+The San Francisco post-mastership was suggested to him again, but he put
+the temptation behind him. He refers to this more than once in his home
+letters, and it is clear that he wavered.
+
+    Judge Field said if I wanted the place he could pledge me the
+    President's appointment, and Senator Corners said he would guarantee
+    me the Senate's confirmation. It was a great temptation, but it
+    would render it impossible to fill my book contract, and I had to
+    drop the idea....
+
+    And besides I did not want the office.
+
+He made this final decision when he heard that the chief editor of the
+Alta wanted the place, and he now threw his influence in that quarter. "I
+would not take ten thousand dollars out of a friend's pocket," he said.
+
+But then suddenly came the news from Goodman that the Alta publishers had
+copyrighted his Quaker City letters and proposed getting them out in a
+book, to reimburse themselves still further on their investment. This
+was sharper than a serpent's tooth. Clemens got confirmation of the
+report by telegraph. By the same medium he protested, but to no purpose.
+Then he wrote a letter and sat down to wait. He reported his troubles to
+Orion:
+
+    I have made a superb contract for a book, and have prepared the
+    first ten chapters of the sixty or eighty, but I will bet it never
+    sees the light. Don't you let the folks at home hear that. That
+    thieving Alta copyrighted the letters, and now shows no disposition
+    to let me use them. I have done all I can by telegraph, and now
+    await the final result by mail. I only charged them for 50 letters
+    what (even in) greenbacks would amount to less than two thousand
+    dollars, intending to write a good deal for high-priced Eastern
+    papers, and now they want to publish my letters in book form
+    themselves to get back that pitiful sum.
+
+Orion was by this time back from Nevada, setting type in St. Louis. He
+was full of schemes, as usual, and his brother counsels him freely. Then
+he says:
+
+    We chase phantoms half the days of our lives. It is well if we
+    learn wisdom even then, and save the other half.
+
+    I am in for it. I must go on chasing them, until I marry, then I am
+    done with literature and all other bosh--that is, literature
+    wherewith to please the general public.
+
+    I shall write to please myself then.
+
+He closes by saying that he rather expects to go with Anson Burlingame on
+the Chinese embassy. Clearly he was pretty hopeless as to his book
+prospects.
+
+His first meeting with General Grant occurred just at this time. In one
+of his home letters he mentions, rather airily, that he will drop in
+someday on the General for an interview; and at last, through Mrs. Grant,
+an appointment was made for a Sunday evening when the General would be at
+home. He was elated with the prospect of an interview; but when he
+looked into the imperturbable, square, smileless face of the soldier he
+found himself, for the first time in his life, without anything
+particular to say. Grant nodded slightly and waited. His caller wished
+something would happen. It did. His inspiration returned.
+
+"General," he said, "I seem to be a little embarrassed. Are you?"
+
+That broke the ice. There were no further difficulties.--[Mark Twain has
+variously related this incident. It is given here in accordance with the
+letters of the period.]
+
+
+
+
+LXVI
+
+BACK TO SAN FRANCISCO
+
+Reply came from the Alta, but it was not promising. It spoke rather
+vaguely of prior arrangements and future possibilities. Clemens gathered
+that under certain conditions he might share in the profits of the
+venture. There was but one thing to do; he knew those people--some of
+them--Colonel McComb and a Mr. McCrellish intimately. He must confer
+with them in person.
+
+He was weary of Washington, anyway. The whole pitiful machinery of
+politics disgusted him. In his notebook he wrote:
+
+    Whiskey is taken into the committee rooms in demijohns and carried
+    out in demagogues.
+
+And in a letter:
+
+    This is a place to get a poor opinion of everybody in. There are
+    some pitiful intellects in this Congress! There isn't one man in
+    Washington in civil office who has the brains of Anson Burlingame,
+    and I suppose if China had not seized and saved his great talents to
+    the world this government would have discarded him when his time was
+    up.--[Anson Burlingame had by this time become China's special
+    ambassador to the nations.]
+
+Furthermore, he was down on the climate of Washington. He decided to go
+to San Francisco and see "those Alta thieves face to face." Then, if a
+book resulted, he could prepare it there among friends. Also, he could
+lecture.
+
+He had been anxious to visit his people before sailing, but matters were
+too urgent to permit delay. He obtained from Bliss an advance of royalty
+and took passage, by way of Aspinwall, on the sidewheel steamer Henry
+Chauncey, a fine vessel for those days. The name of Mark Twain was
+already known on the isthmus, and when it was learned he had arrived on
+the Chauncey a delegation welcomed him on the wharf, and provided him
+with refreshments and entertainment. Mr. Tracy Robinson, a poet, long a
+resident of that southern land, was one of the group. Beyond the isthmus
+Clemens fell in again with his old captain, Ned Wakeman, who during the
+trip told him the amazing dream that in due time would become Captain
+Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. He made the first draft of this story soon
+after his arrival in San Francisco, as a sort of travesty of Elizabeth
+Stuart Phelps's Gates Ajar, then very popular. Clemens, then and later,
+had a high opinion of Capt. Ned Wakeman's dream, but his story of it
+would pass through several stages before finally reaching the light of
+publication.--[Mr. John P. Vollmer, now of Lewiston, Idaho, a companion
+of that voyage, writes of a card game which took place beyond the
+isthmus. The notorious crippled gambler, "Smithy," figured in it, and it
+would seem to have furnished the inspiration for the exciting story in
+Chapter XXXVI of the Mississippi book.]
+
+In San Francisco matters turned out as he had hoped. Colonel McComb was
+his stanch friend; McCrellish and Woodward, the proprietors, presently
+conceded that they had already received good value for the money paid.
+The author agreed to make proper acknowledgments to the Alta in his
+preface, and the matter was settled with friendliness all around.
+
+The way was now clear, the book assured. First, however, he must provide
+himself with funds. He delivered a lecture, with the Quaker City
+excursion as his subject. On the 5th of May he wrote to Bliss:
+
+I lectured here on the trip the other night; over $1,600 in gold in the
+house; every seat taken and paid for before night.
+
+He reports that he is steadily at work, and expects to start East with
+the completed manuscript about the middle of June.
+
+But this was a miscalculation. Clemens found that the letters needed
+more preparation than he had thought. His literary vision and equipment
+had vastly altered since the beginning of that correspondence. Some of
+the chapters he rewrote; others he eliminated entirely. It required two
+months of fairly steady work to put the big manuscript together.
+
+Some of the new chapters he gave to Bret Harte for the Overland Monthly,
+then recently established. Harte himself was becoming a celebrity about
+this time. His "Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat,"
+published in early numbers of the Overland, were making a great stir in
+the East, arousing there a good deal more enthusiasm than in the magazine
+office or the city of their publication. That these two friends, each
+supreme in his own field, should have entered into their heritage so
+nearly at the same moment, is one of the many seemingly curious
+coincidences of literary history.
+
+Clemens now concluded to cover his lecture circuit of two years before.
+He was assured that it would be throwing away a precious opportunity not
+to give his new lecture to his old friends. The result justified that
+opinion. At Virginia, at Carson, and elsewhere he was received like a
+returned conqueror. He might have been accorded a Roman triumph had
+there been time and paraphernalia. Even the robbers had reformed, and
+entire safety was guaranteed him on the Divide between Virginia and Gold
+Hill. At Carson he called on Mrs. Curry, as in the old days, and among
+other things told her how snow from the Lebanon Mountains is brought to
+Damascus on the backs of camels.
+
+"Sam," she said, "that's just one of your yarns, and if you tell it in
+your lecture to-night I'll get right up and say so."
+
+But he did tell it, for it was a fact; and though Mrs. Curry did not rise
+to deny it she shook her finger at him in a way he knew.
+
+He returned to San Francisco and gave one more lecture, the last he would
+ever give in California. His preparatory advertising for that occasion
+was wholly unique, characteristic of him to the last degree. It assumed
+the form of a handbill of protest, supposed to have been issued by the
+foremost citizens of San Francisco, urging him to return to the States
+without inflicting himself further upon them. As signatures he made free
+with the names of prominent individuals, followed by those of
+organizations, institutions, "Various Benevolent Societies, Citizens on
+Foot and Horseback, and fifteen hundred in the Steerage."
+
+Following this (on the same bill) was his reply, "To the fifteen hundred
+and others," in which he insisted on another hearing:
+
+    I will torment the people if I want to.... It only costs the people
+    $1 apiece, and if they can't stand it what do they stay here for?...
+    My last lecture was not as fine as I thought it was, but I have
+    submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have
+    pronounced it good. Now, therefore, why should I withhold it?
+
+He promised positively to sail on the 6th of July if they would let him
+talk just this once. Continuing, the handbill presented a second
+protest, signed by the various clubs and business firms; also others
+bearing variously the signatures of the newspapers, and the clergy,
+ending with the brief word:
+
+    You had better go.  Yours,  CHIEF OF POLICE.
+
+All of which drollery concluded with his announcement of place and date
+of his lecture, with still further gaiety at the end. Nothing short of a
+seismic cataclysm--an earthquake, in fact--could deter a San Francisco
+audience after that. Mark Twain's farewell address, given at the
+Mercantile Library July 2 (1868), doubtless remains today the leading
+literary event in San Francisco's history.--[Copy of the lecture
+announcement, complete, will be found in Appendix H, at the end of last
+volume.]
+
+He sailed July 6th by the Pacific mail steamer Montana to Acapulco,
+caught the Henry Chauncey at Aspinwall, reached New York on the 28th, and
+a day or two later had delivered his manuscript at Hartford.
+
+But a further difficulty had arisen. Bliss was having troubles himself,
+this time, with his directors. Many reports of Mark Twain's new book had
+been traveling the rounds of the press, some of which declared it was to
+be irreverent, even blasphemous, in tone. The title selected, The New
+Pilgrim's Progress, was in itself a sacrilege. Hartford was a
+conservative place; the American Publishing Company directors were of
+orthodox persuasion. They urged Bliss to relieve the company of this
+impending disaster of heresy. When the author arrived one or more of
+them labored with him in person, without avail. As for Bliss, he was
+stanch; he believed in the book thoroughly, from every standpoint. He
+declared if the company refused to print it he would resign the
+management and publish the book himself. This was an alarming suggestion
+to the stockholders. Bliss had returned dividends--a boon altogether too
+rare in the company's former history. The objectors retired and were
+heard of no more. The manuscript was placed in the hands of Fay and Cox,
+illustrators, with an order for about two hundred and fifty pictures.
+
+Fay and Cox turned it over to True Williams, one of the well-known
+illustrators of that day. Williams was a man of great talent--of fine
+imagination and sweetness of spirit--but it was necessary to lock him in
+a room when industry was required, with nothing more exciting than cold
+water as a beverage. Clemens himself aided in the illustrating by
+obtaining of Moses S. Beach photographs from the large collection he had
+brought home.
+
+
+
+
+LXVII
+
+A VISIT TO ELMIRA
+
+Meantime he had skilfully obtained a renewal of the invitation to spend a
+week in the Langdon home.
+
+He meant to go by a fast train, but, with his natural gift for
+misunderstanding time-tables, of course took a slow one, telegraphing his
+approach from different stations along the road. Young Langdon concluded
+to go down the line as far as Waverly to meet him. When the New York
+train reached there the young man found his guest in the smoking-car,
+travel-stained and distressingly clad. Mark Twain was always
+scrupulously neat and correct of dress in later years, but in that
+earlier day neatness and style had not become habitual and did not give
+him comfort. Langdon greeted him warmly but with doubt. Finally he
+summoned courage to say, hesitatingly--"You've got some other clothes,
+haven't you?"
+
+The arriving guest was not in the least disturbed.
+
+"Oh yes," he said with enthusiasm, "I've got a fine brand-new outfit in
+this bag, all but a hat. It will be late when we get in, and I won't see
+any one to-night. You won't know me in the morning. We'll go out early
+and get a hat."
+
+This was a large relief to the younger man, and the rest of the journey
+was happy enough. True to promise, the guest appeared at daylight
+correctly, even elegantly clad, and an early trip to the shops secured
+the hat. A gay and happy week followed--a week during which Samuel
+Clemens realized more fully than ever that in his heart there was room
+for only one woman in all the world: Olivia Langdon--"Livy," as they all
+called her--and as the day of departure drew near it may be that the
+gentle girl had made some discoveries, too.
+
+No word had passed between them. Samuel Clemens had the old-fashioned
+Southern respect for courtship conventions, and for what, in that day at
+least, was regarded as honor. On the morning of the final day he said to
+young Langdon:
+
+"Charley, my week is up, and I must go home."
+
+The young man expressed a regret which was genuine enough, though not
+wholly unqualified. His older sister, Mrs. Crane, leaving just then for
+a trip to the White Mountains, had said:
+
+"Charley, I am sure Mr. Clemens is after our Livy. You mustn't let him
+carry her off before our return."
+
+The idea was a disturbing one. The young man did not urge his guest to
+prolong his-visit. He said:
+
+"We'll have to stand it, I guess, but you mustn't leave before to-night."
+
+"I ought to go by the first train," Clemens said, gloomily. "I am in
+love."
+
+"In what!"
+
+"In love-with your sister, and I ought to get away from here."
+
+The young man was now very genuinely alarmed. To him Mark Twain was a
+highly gifted, fearless, robust man--a man's man--and as such altogether
+admirable--lovable. But Olivia--Livy--she was to him little short of a
+saint. No man was good enough for her, certainly not this adventurous
+soldier of letters from the West. Delightful he was beyond doubt,
+adorable as a companion, but not a companion for Livy.
+
+"Look here, Clemens," he said, when he could get his voice. "There's a
+train in half an hour. I'll help you catch it. Don't wait till
+to-night. Go now."
+
+Clemens shook his head.
+
+"No, Charley," he said, in his gentle drawl, "I want to enjoy your
+hospitality a little longer. I promise to be circumspect, and I'll go
+to-night."
+
+That night, after dinner, when it was time to take the New York train, a
+light two-seated wagon was at the gate. The coachman was in front, and
+young Langdon and his guest took the back seat. For some reason the seat
+had not been locked in its place, and when, after the good-bys, the
+coachman touched the horse it made a quick spring forward, and the back
+seat, with both passengers, described a half-circle and came down with
+force on the cobbled street. Neither passenger was seriously hurt;
+Clemens not at all--only dazed a little for a moment. Then came an
+inspiration; here was a chance to prolong his visit. Evidently it was
+not intended that he should take that train. When the Langdon household
+gathered around with restoratives he did not recover too quickly. He
+allowed them to support or carry him into the house and place him in an
+arm-chair and apply remedies. The young daughter of the house especially
+showed anxiety and attention. This was pure happiness. He was perjuring
+himself, of course, but they say Jove laughs at such things.
+
+He recovered in a day or two, but the wide hospitality of the handsome
+Langdon home was not only offered now; it was enforced. He was still
+there two weeks later, after which he made a trip to Cleveland to confide
+in Mrs. Fairbanks how he intended to win Livy Langdon for his wife.
+
+
+
+
+LXVIII
+
+THE REV. "JOE" TWICHELL
+
+He returned to Hartford to look after the progress of his book. Some of
+it was being put into type, and with his mechanical knowledge of such
+things he was naturally interested in the process.
+
+He made his headquarters with the Blisses, then living at 821 Asylum
+Avenue, and read proof in a little upper room, where the lamp was likely
+to be burning most of the time, where the atmosphere was nearly always
+blue with smoke, and the window-sill full of cigar butts. Mrs. Bliss
+took him into the quiet social life of the neighborhood--to small church
+receptions, society gatherings and the like--all of which he seemed to
+enjoy. Most of the dwellers in that neighborhood were members of the
+Asylum Hill Congregational Church, then recently completed; all but the
+spire. It was a cultured circle, well-off in the world's goods, its male
+members, for the most part, concerned in various commercial ventures.
+
+The church stood almost across the way from the Bliss home, and Mark
+Twain, with his picturesque phrasing, referred to it as the "stub-tailed
+church," on account of its abbreviated spire; also, later, with a
+knowledge of its prosperous membership, as the "Church of the Holy
+Speculators." He was at an evening reception in the home of one of its
+members when he noticed a photograph of the unfinished building framed
+and hanging on the wall.
+
+"Why, yes," he commented, in his slow fashion, "this is the 'Church of
+the Holy Speculators.'"
+
+"Sh," cautioned Mrs. Bliss. "Its pastor is just behind you. He knows
+your work and wants to meet you." Turning, she said: "Mr. Twichell, this
+is Mr. Clemens. Most people know him as Mark Twain."
+
+And so, in this casual fashion, he met the man who was presently to
+become his closest personal friend and counselor, and would remain so for
+more than forty years.
+
+Joseph Hopkins Twichell was a man about his own age, athletic and
+handsome, a student and a devout Christian, yet a man familiar with the
+world, fond of sports, with an exuberant sense of humor and a wide
+understanding of the frailties of humankind. He had been "port waist
+oar" at Yale, and had left college to serve with General "Dan" Sickles as
+a chaplain who had followed his duties not only in the camp, but on the
+field.
+
+Mention has already been made of Mark Twain's natural leaning toward
+ministers of the gospel, and the explanation of it is easier to realize
+than to convey. He was hopelessly unorthodox--rankly rebellious as to
+creeds. Anything resembling cant or the curtailment of mental liberty
+roused only his resentment and irony. Yet something in his heart always
+warmed toward any laborer in the vineyard, and if we could put the
+explanation into a single sentence, perhaps we might say it was because
+he could meet them on that wide, common ground sympathy with mankind.
+Mark Twain's creed, then and always, may be put into three words,
+"liberty, justice, humanity." It may be put into one word, "humanity."
+
+Ministers always loved Mark Twain. They did not always approve of him,
+but they adored him: The Rev. Mr. Rising, of the Comstock, was an early
+example of his ministerial friendships, and we have seen that Henry Ward
+Beecher cultivated his company. In a San Francisco letter of two years
+before, Mark Twain wrote his mother, thinking it would please her:
+
+I am as thick as thieves with the Reverend Stebbins. I am laying for the
+Reverend Scudder and the Reverend Doctor Stone. I am running on
+preachers now altogether, and I find them gay.
+
+So it may be that his first impulse toward Joseph Twichell was due to the
+fact that he was a young member of that army whose mission is to comfort
+and uplift mankind. But it was only a little time till the impulse had
+grown into a friendship that went beyond any profession or doctrine, a
+friendship that ripened into a permanent admiration and love for "Joe"
+Twichell himself, as one of the noblest specimens of his race.
+
+He was invited to the Twichell home, where he met the young wife and got
+a glimpse of the happiness of that sweet and peaceful household. He had
+a neglected, lonely look, and he loved to gather with them at their
+fireside. He expressed his envy of their happiness, and Mrs. Twichell
+asked him why, since his affairs were growing prosperous, he did not
+establish a household of his own. Long afterward Mr. Twichell wrote:
+
+    Mark made no answer for a little, but, with his eyes bent on the
+    floor, appeared to be deeply pondering. Then he looked up, and said
+    slowly, in a voice tremulous with earnestness (with what sympathy he
+    was heard may be imagined): "I am taking thought of it. I am in
+    love beyond all telling with the dearest and best girl in the whole
+    world. I don't suppose she will marry me. I can't think it
+    possible. She ought not to. But if she doesn't I shall be sure
+    that the best thing I ever did was to fall in love with her, and
+    proud to have it known that I tried to win her!"
+
+It was only a brief time until the Twichell fireside was home to him. He
+came and went, and presently it was "Mark" and "Joe," as by and by it
+would be "Livy" and "Harmony," and in a few years "Uncle Joe" and "Uncle
+Mark," "Aunt Livy" and "Aunt Harmony," and so would remain until the
+end.
+
+
+
+
+LXIX
+
+A LECTURE TOUR
+
+James Redpath, proprietor of the Boston Lyceum Bureau, was the leading
+lecture agent of those days, and controlled all, or nearly all, of the
+platform celebrities. Mark Twain's success at the Cooper Union the year
+before had interested Redpath. He had offered engagements then and
+later, but Clemens had not been free for the regular circuit. Now there
+was no longer a reason for postponement of a contract. Redpath was eager
+for the new celebrity, and Clemens closed with him for the season of
+1868-9. With his new lecture, "The Vandal Abroad," he was presently
+earning a hundred dollars and more a night, and making most of the nights
+count.
+
+This was affluence indeed. He had become suddenly a person of
+substance-an associate of men of consequence, with a commensurate income.
+He could help his mother lavishly now, and he did.
+
+His new lecture was immensely popular. It was a resume of the 'Quaker
+City' letters--a foretaste of the book which would presently follow.
+Wherever he went, he was hailed with eager greetings. He caught such
+drifting exclamations as, "There he is! There goes Mark Twain!" People
+came out on the street to see him pass. That marvelous miracle which we
+variously call "notoriety," "popularity," "fame," had come to him. In
+his notebook he wrote, "Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the
+only, earthly certainty oblivion."
+
+The newspapers were filled with enthusiasm both as to his matter and
+method. His delivery was described as a "long, monotonous drawl, with
+the fun invariably coming in at the end of a sentence--after a pause."
+His appearance at this time is thus set down:
+
+    Mark Twain is a man of medium height, about five feet ten, sparsely
+    built, with dark reddish-brown hair and mustache. His features are
+    fair, his eyes keen and twinkling. He dresses in scrupulous evening
+    attire. In lecturing he hangs about the desk, leaning on it or
+    flirting around the corners of it, then marching and countermarching
+    in the rear of it. He seldom casts a glance at his manuscript.
+
+No doubt this fairly presents Mark Twain, the lecturer of that day. It
+was a new figure on the platform, a man with a new method. As to his
+manuscript, the item might have said that he never consulted it at all.
+He learned his lecture; what he consulted was merely a series of
+hieroglyphics, a set of crude pictures drawn by himself, suggestive of
+the subject-matter underneath new head. Certain columns represented the
+Parthenon; the Sphinx meant Egypt, and so on. His manuscript lay there
+in case of accident, but the accident did not happen.
+
+A number of his engagements were in the central part of New York, at
+points not far distant from Elmira. He had a standing invitation to
+visit the Langdon home, and he made it convenient to avail himself of
+that happiness.
+
+His was not an unruffled courtship. When at last he reached the point of
+proposing for the daughter of the house, neither the daughter nor the
+household offered any noticeable encouragement to his suit. Many absurd
+anecdotes have been told of his first interview with Mr. Langdon on the
+subject, but they are altogether without foundation. It was a proper and
+dignified discussion of a very serious matter. Mr. Langdon expressed
+deep regard for him and friendship but he was not inclined to add him to
+the family; the young lady herself, in a general way, accorded with these
+views. The applicant for favor left sadly enough, but he could not
+remain discouraged or sad. He lectured at Cleveland with vast success,
+and the news of it traveled quickly to Elmira. He was referred to by
+Cleveland papers as a "lion" and "the coming man of the age." Two days
+later, in Pittsburgh (November 19th), he "played" against Fanny Kemble,
+the favorite actress of that time, with the result that Miss Kemble had
+an audience of two hundred against nearly ten times the number who
+gathered to hear Mark Twain. The news of this went to Elmira, too. It
+was in the papers there next morning; surely this was a conquering hero
+--a gay Lochinvar from out of the West--and the daughter of the house
+must be guarded closely, that he did not bear her away. It was on the
+second morning following the Pittsburgh triumph, when the Langdon family
+were gathered at breakfast, that a bushy auburn head poked fearfully in
+at the door, and a low, humble voice said:
+
+"The calf has returned; may the prodigal have some breakfast?"
+
+No one could be reserved or reprovingly distant, or any of those
+unfriendly things with a person like that; certainly not Jervis Langdon,
+who delighted in the humor and the tricks and turns and oddities of this
+eccentric visitor. Giving his daughter to him was another matter, but
+even that thought was less disturbing than it had been at the start. In
+truth, the Langdon household had somehow grown to feel that he belonged
+to them. The elder sister's husband, Theodore Crane, endorsed him fully.
+He had long before read some of the Mark Twain sketches that had traveled
+eastward in advance of their author, and had recognized, even in the
+crudest of them, a classic charm. As for Olivia Langdon's mother and
+sister, their happiness lay in hers. Where her heart went theirs went
+also, and it would appear that her heart, in spite of herself, had found
+its rightful keeper. Only young Langdon was irreconciled, and eventually
+set out for a voyage around the world to escape the situation.
+
+There was only a provisional engagement at first. Jervis Langdon
+suggested, and Samuel Clemens agreed with him, that it was proper to know
+something of his past, as well as of his present, before the official
+parental sanction should be given. When Mr. Langdon inquired as to the
+names of persons of standing to whom he might write for credentials,
+Clemens pretty confidently gave him the name of the Reverend Stebbins and
+others of San Francisco, adding that he might write also to Joe Goodman
+if he wanted to, but that he had lied for Goodman a hundred times and
+Goodman would lie for him if necessary, so his testimony would be of no
+value. The letters to the clergy were written, and Mr. Langdon also
+wrote one on his own account.
+
+It was a long mail-trip to the Coast and back in those days. It might be
+two months before replies would come from those ministers. The lecturer
+set out again on his travels, and was radiantly and happily busy. He
+went as far west as Illinois, had crowded houses in Chicago, visited
+friends and kindred in Hannibal, St. Louis, and Keokuk, carrying the
+great news, and lecturing in old familiar haunts.
+
+
+
+
+LXX
+
+INNOCENTS AT HOME--AND "THE INNOCENTS ABROAD"
+
+He was in Jacksonville, Illinois, at the end of January (1869), and in a
+letter to Bliss states that he will be in Elmira two days later, and asks
+that proofs of the book be sent there. He arrived at the Langdon home,
+anxious to hear the reports that would make him, as the novels might say,
+"the happiest or the most miserable of men." Jervis Langdon had a rather
+solemn look when they were alone together. Clemens asked:
+
+"You've heard from those gentlemen out there?"
+
+"Yes, and from another gentleman I wrote concerning you."
+
+"They don't appear to have been very enthusiastic, from your manner."
+
+"Well, yes, some of them were."
+
+"I suppose I may ask what particular form their emotion took?"
+
+"Oh yes, yes; they agree unanimously that you are a brilliant, able man,
+a man with a future, and that you would make about the worst husband on
+record."
+
+The applicant for favor had a forlorn look.
+
+"There's nothing very evasive about that," he said:
+
+There was a period of reflective silence. It was probably no more than a
+few seconds, but it seemed longer.
+
+"Haven't you any other friend that you could suggest?" Langdon said.
+
+"Apparently none whose testimony would be valuable."
+
+Jervis Langdon held out his hand. "You have at least one," he said. "I
+believe in you. I know you better than they do."
+
+And so came the crown of happiness. The engagement of Samuel Langhorne
+Clemens and Olivia Lewis Langdon was ratified next day, February 4, 1869.
+
+But if the friends of Mark Twain viewed the idea of the marriage with
+scant favor, the friends of Miss Langdon regarded it with genuine alarm.
+Elmira was a conservative place--a place of pedigree and family
+tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, pilot, miner, wandering
+journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the daughter of one of the
+oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not to be lightly permitted.
+The fact that he had achieved a national fame did not count against other
+considerations. The social protest amounted almost to insurrection, but
+it was not availing. The Langdon family had their doubts too, though of
+a different sort. Their doubts lay in the fear that one, reared as their
+daughter had been, might be unable to hold a place as the wife of this
+intellectual giant, whom they felt that the world was preparing to honor.
+That this delicate, sheltered girl could have the strength of mind and
+body for her position seemed hard to believe. Their faith overbore such
+questionings, and the future years proved how fully it was justified.
+
+To his mother Samuel Clemens wrote:
+
+    She is only a little body, but she hasn't her peer in Christendom.
+    I gave her only a plain gold engagement ring, when fashion
+    imperatively demands a two-hundred-dollar diamond one, and told her
+    it was typical of her future life-namely, that she would have to
+    flourish on substance, rather than luxuries (but you see I know the
+    girl--she don't care anything about luxuries).... She spends no
+    money but her astral year's allowance, and spends nearly every cent
+    of that on other people. She will be a good, sensible little wife,
+    without any airs about her. I don't make intercession for her
+    beforehand, and ask you to love her, for there isn't any use in
+    that--you couldn't help it if you were to try. I warn you that
+    whoever comes within the fatal influence of her beautiful nature is
+    her willing slave forevermore.
+
+To Mrs. Crane, absent in March, her father wrote:
+
+    DEAR SUE,--I received your letter yesterday with a great deal of
+    pleasure, but the letter has gone in pursuit of one S. L. Clemens,
+    who has been giving us a great deal of trouble lately. We cannot
+    have a joy in our family without a feeling, on the part of the
+    little incorrigible in our family, that this wanderer must share it,
+    so, as soon as read, into her pocket and off upstairs goes your
+    letter, and in the next two minutes into the mail, so it is
+    impossible for me now to refer to it, or by reading it over gain an
+    inspiration in writing you. . .
+
+Clemens closed his lecture tour in March, acid went immediately to
+Elmira. He had lectured between fifty and sixty times, with a return of
+something more than $8,000, not a bad aggregate for a first season on the
+circuit. He had planned to make a spring tour to California, but the
+attraction at Elmira was of a sort that discouraged distant travel.
+Furthermore, he disliked the platform, then and always. It was always a
+temptation to him because of its quick and abundant return, but it was
+none the less distasteful. In a letter of that spring he wrote:
+
+    I most cordially hate the lecture field. And after all, I shudder
+    to think I may never get out of it. In all conversation with Gough,
+    and Anna Dickinson, Nasby, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips,
+    and the other old stagers, I could not observe that they ever
+    expected or hoped to get out of the business. I don't want to get
+    wedded to it as they are.
+
+He declined further engagements on the excuse that he must attend to
+getting out his book. The revised proofs were coming now, and he and
+gentle Livy Langdon read them together. He realized presently that with
+her sensitive nature she had also a keen literary perception. What he
+lacked in delicacy--and his lack was likely to be large enough in that
+direction--she detected, and together they pruned it away. She became
+his editor during those happy courtship days--a position which she held
+to her death. The world owed a large debt of gratitude to Mark Twain's
+wife, who from the very beginning--and always, so far as in her strength
+she was able--inspired him to give only his worthiest to the world,
+whether in written or spoken word, in counsel or in deed. Those early
+days of their close companionship, spiritual and mental, were full of
+revelation to Samuel Clemens, a revelation that continued from day to
+day, and from year to year, even to the very end.
+
+The letter to Bliss and the proofs were full of suggested changes that
+would refine and beautify the text. In one of them he settles the
+question of title, which he says is to be:
+
+                  THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
+                         or
+                THE NEW PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
+
+and we may be sure that it was Olivia Langdon's voice that gave the
+deciding vote for the newly adopted chief title, which would take any
+suggestion of irreverence out of the remaining words.
+
+The book was to have been issued in the spring, but during his wanderings
+proofs had been delayed, and there was now considerable anxiety about it,
+as the agencies had become impatient for the canvass. At the end of
+April Clemens wrote: "Your printers are doing well. I will hurry the
+proofs"; but it was not until the early part of June that the last
+chapters were revised and returned. Then the big book, at last
+completed, went to press on an edition of twenty thousand, a large number
+for any new book, even to-day.
+
+In later years, through some confusion of circumstance, Mark Twain was
+led to believe that the publication of The Innocents Abroad was long and
+unnecessarily delayed. But this was manifestly a mistake. The book went
+to press in June. It was a big book and a large edition. The first copy
+was delivered July 20 (1869), and four hundred and seventeen bound
+volumes were shipped that month. Even with the quicker mechanical
+processes of to-day a month or more is allowed for a large book between
+the final return of proofs and the date of publication. So it is only
+another instance of his remembering, as he once quaintly put it, "the
+thing that didn't happen."--[In an article in the North American Review
+(September 21, 1906) Mr. Clemens stated that he found it necessary to
+telegraph notice that he would bring suit if the book was not immediately
+issued. In none of the letters covering this period is there any
+suggestion of delay on the part of the publishers, and the date of the
+final return of proofs, together with the date of publication, preclude
+the possibility of such a circumstance. At some period of his life he
+doubtless sent, or contemplated sending, such a message, and this fact,
+through some curious psychology, became confused in his mind with the
+first edition of The Innocents Abroad.]
+
+
+
+
+LXXI
+
+THE GREAT BOOK OF TRAVEL
+
+'The Innocents Abroad' was a success from the start. The machinery for
+its sale and delivery was in full swing by August 1, and five thousand
+one hundred and seventy copies were disposed of that month--a number that
+had increased to more than thirty-one thousand by the first of the year.
+It was a book of travel; its lowest price was three and a half dollars.
+No such record had been made by a book of that description; none has
+equaled it since.--[One must recall that this was the record only up to
+1910. D.W.]
+
+If Mark Twain was not already famous, he was unquestionably famous now.
+As the author of The New Pilgrim's Progress he was swept into the domain
+of letters as one riding at the head of a cavalcade--doors and windows
+wide with welcome and jubilant with applause. Newspapers chorused their
+enthusiasm; the public voiced universal approval; only a few of the more
+cultured critics seemed hesitant and doubtful.
+
+They applauded--most of them--but with reservation. Doctor Holland
+regarded Mark Twain as a mere fun maker of ephemeral popularity, and was
+not altogether pleasant in his dictum. Doctor Holmes, in a letter to the
+author, speaks of the "frequently quaint and amusing conceits," but does
+not find it in his heart to refer to the book as literature. It was
+naturally difficult for the East to concede a serious value to one who
+approached his subject with such militant aboriginality, and occasionally
+wrote "those kind." William Dean Howells reviewed the book in the
+Atlantic, which was of itself a distinction, whether the review was
+favorable or otherwise. It was favorable on the whole, favorable to the
+humor of the book, its "delicious impudence," the charm of its
+good-natured irony. The review closed:
+
+    It is no business of ours to fix his rank among the humorists
+    California has given us, but we think he is, in an entirely
+    different way from all the others, quite worthy of the company of
+    the best.
+
+This is praise, but not of an intemperate sort, nor very inclusive. The
+descriptive, the poetic, the more pretentious phases of the book did not
+receive attention. Mr. Howells was perhaps the first critic of eminence
+to recognize in Mark Twain not only the humorist, but the supreme
+genius-the "Lincoln of our literature." This was later. The public--the
+silent public--with what Howells calls "the inspired knowledge of the
+simple-hearted multitude," reached a similar verdict forthwith. And on
+sufficient evidence: let the average unprejudiced person of to-day take
+up the old volume and read a few chapters anywhere and decide whether it
+is the work of a mere humorist, or also of a philosopher, a poet, and a
+seer. The writer well remembers a little group of "the simple-hearted
+multitude" who during the winter of '69 and '70 gathered each evening to
+hear the Innocents read aloud, and their unanimous verdict that it was
+the "best book of modern times."
+
+It was the most daring book of its day. Passages of it were calculated
+to take the breath of the orthodox reader; only, somehow, it made him
+smile, too. It was all so good-natured, so openly sincere. Without
+doubt it preached heresy--the heresy of viewing revered landmarks and
+relics joyously, rather than lugubriously; reverentially, when they
+inspired reverence; satirically, when they invited ridicule, and with
+kindliness always.
+
+The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain's greatest book of travel. The
+critical and the pure in speech may object to this verdict. Brander
+Matthews regards it second to A Tramp Abroad, the natural viewpoint of
+the literary technician. The 'Tramp' contains better usage without
+doubt, but it lacks the "color" which gives the Innocents its perennial
+charm. In the Innocents there is a glow, a fragrance, a romance of
+touch, a subtle something which is idyllic, something which is not quite
+of reality, in the tale of that little company that so long ago sailed
+away to the harbors of their illusions beyond the sea, and, wandered
+together through old palaces and galleries, and among the tombs of the
+saints, and down through ancient lands. There is an atmosphere about it
+all, a dream-like quality that lies somewhere in the telling, maybe, or
+in the tale; at all events it is there, and the world has felt it ever
+since. Perhaps it could be defined in a single word, perhaps that word
+would be "youth." That the artist, poor True Williams, felt its
+inspiration is certain. We may believe that Williams was not a great
+draftsman, but no artist ever caught more perfectly the light and spirit
+of the author's text. Crude some of the pictures are, no doubt, but they
+convey the very essence of the story; they belong to it, they are a part
+of it, and they ought never to perish. 'A Tramp Abroad' is a rare book,
+but it cannot rank with its great predecessor in human charm. The
+public, which in the long run makes mistakes, has rendered that verdict.
+The Innocents by far outsells the Tramp, and, for that matter, any other
+book of travel.
+
+
+
+THE PURCHASE OF A PAPER.
+
+It is curious to reflect that Mark Twain still did not regard himself as
+a literary man. He had no literary plans for the future; he scarcely
+looked forward to the publication of another book. He considered himself
+a journalist; his ambition lay in the direction of retirement in some
+prosperous newspaper enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a
+home. During his travels he had already been casting about for a
+congenial and substantial association in newspaperdom, and had at one
+time considered the purchase of an interest in the Cleveland Herald. But
+Buffalo was nearer Elmira, and when an opportunity offered, by which he
+could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo Express for $25,000, the
+purchase was decided upon. His lack of funds prompted a new plan for a
+lecture tour to the Pacific coast, this time with D. R. Locke (Nasby),
+then immensely popular, in his lecture "Cussed Be Canaan."
+
+Clemens had met Nasby on the circuit, and was very fond of him. The two
+had visited Boston together, and while there had called on Doctor Holmes;
+this by the way. Nasby was fond of Clemens too, but doubtful about the
+trip-doubtful about his lecture:
+
+    Your proposition takes my breath away. If I had my new lecture
+    completed I wouldn't hesitate a moment, but really isn't "Cussed Be
+    Canaan" too old? You know that lemon, our African brother, juicy as
+    he was in his day, has been squeezed dry. Why howl about his wrongs
+    after said wrongs have been redressed? Why screech about the
+    "damnable spirit of Cahst" when the victim thereof sits at the first
+    table, and his oppressor mildly takes, in hash, what he leaves? You
+    see, friend Twain, the Fifteenth Amendment busted "Cussed Be
+    Canaan." I howled feelingly on the subject while it was a living
+    issue, for I felt all that I said and a great deal more; but now
+    that we have won our fight why dance frantically on the dead corpse
+    of our enemy? The Reliable Contraband is contraband no more, but a
+    citizen of the United States, and I speak of him no more.
+
+    Give me a week to think of your proposition. If I can jerk a
+    lecture in time I will go with you. The Lord knows I would like to.
+    --[Nasby's lecture, "Cussed Be Canaan," opened, "We are all
+    descended from grandfathers!" He had a powerful voice, and always
+    just on the stroke of eight he rose and vigorously delivered this
+    sentence. Once, after lecturing an entire season--two hundred and
+    twenty-five nights--he went home to rest. That evening he sat,
+    musingly drowsing by the fire, when the clock struck eight. Without
+    a moment's thought Nasby sprang to his feet and thundered out, "We
+    are all descended from grandfathers!"]
+
+Nasby did not go, and Clemens's enthusiasm cooled at the prospect of
+setting out alone on that long tour. Furthermore, Jervis Langdon
+promptly insisted on advancing the money required to complete the
+purchase of the Express, and the trade was closed.--[Mr. Langdon is just
+as good for $25,000 for me, and has already advanced half of it in cash.
+I wrote and asked whether I had better send him my note, or a due bill,
+or how he would prefer to have the indebtedness made of record, and he
+answered every other topic in the letter pleasantly, but never replied to
+that at all. Still, I shall give my note into a hands of his business
+agent here, and pay him the interest as it falls due.--S. L. C. to his
+mother.]
+
+The Buffalo Express was at this time in the hands of three men--Col.
+George F. Selkirk, J. L. Lamed, and Thomas A. Kennett. Colonel Selkirk
+was business manager, Lamed was political editor. With the purchase of
+Kennett's share Clemens became a sort of general and contributing editor,
+with a more or less "roving commission"--his hours and duties not very
+clearly defined. It was believed by his associates, and by Clemens
+himself, that his known connection with the paper would give it prestige
+and circulation, as Nasby's connection had popularized the Toledo Blade.
+The new editor entered upon his duties August 14 (1869). The members of
+the Buffalo press gave him a dinner that evening, and after the manner of
+newspaper men the world over, were handsomely cordial to the "new enemy
+in their midst."
+
+There is an anecdote which relates that next morning, when Mark Twain
+arrived in the Express office (it was then at 14 Swan Street), there
+happened to be no one present who knew him. A young man rose very
+bruskly and asked if there was any one he would like to see. It is
+reported that he replied, with gentle deliberation:
+
+"Well, yes, I should like to see some young man offer the new editor a
+chair."
+
+It is so like Mark Twain that we are inclined to accept it, though it
+seems of doubtful circumstance. In any case it deserves to be true. His
+"Salutatory" (August 18th) is sufficiently genuine:
+
+    Being a stranger, it would be immodest for me to suddenly and
+    violently assume the associate editorship of the Buffalo Express
+    without a single word of comfort or encouragement to the unoffending
+    patrons of the paper, who are about to be exposed to constant
+    attacks of my wisdom and learning. But the word shall be as brief
+    as possible. I only want to assure parties having a friendly
+    interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going to
+    hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not
+    going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to
+    make trouble.... I shall not make use of slang and vulgarity upon
+    any occasion or under any circumstances, and shall never use
+    profanity except when discussing house rent and taxes. Indeed, upon
+    a second thought, I shall not use it even then, for it is
+    unchristian, inelegant, and degrading; though, to speak truly, I do
+    not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a
+    cent without it. I shall not often meddle with politics, because we
+    have a political Editor who is already excellent and only needs to
+    serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect. I shall not
+    write any poetry unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers.
+
+    Such is my platform. I do not see any use in it, but custom is law
+    and must be obeyed.
+
+John Harrison Mills, who was connected with the Express in those days,
+has written:
+
+    I cannot remember that there was any delay in getting down to his
+    work. I think within five minutes the new editor had assumed the
+    easy look of one entirely at home, pencil in hand and a clutch of
+    paper before him, with an air of preoccupation, as of one intent on
+    a task delayed. It was impossible to be conscious of the man
+    sitting there, and not feel his identity with all that he had
+    enjoyed, and the reminiscence of it he that seemed to radiate; for
+    the personality was so absolutely in accord with all the record of
+    himself and his work. I cannot say he seemed to be that vague thing
+    they call a type in race or blood, though the word, if used in his
+    case for temperament, would decidedly mean what they used to call
+    the "sanguine."
+
+    I thought that, pictorially, the noble costume of the Albanian would
+    have well become him. Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the
+    horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors; or stood at the prow
+    of one of the swift craft of the Vikings. His eyes, which have been
+    variously described, were, it seemed to me, of an indescribable
+    depth of the bluish moss-agate, with a capacity of pupil dilation
+    that in certain lights had the effect of a deep black....
+
+Mr. Mills adds that in dress he was now "well groomed," and that
+consequently they were obliged to revise their notions as to the careless
+negligee which gossip had reported.--[From unpublished Reminiscences
+kindly lent to the author by Mr. Mills]
+
+
+
+
+LXXIII
+
+THE FIRST MEETING WITH HOWELLS
+
+Clemens' first period of editorial work was a brief one, though he made
+frequent contributions to the paper: sketches, squibs, travel-notes, and
+experiences, usually humorous in character. His wedding-day had been set
+for early in the year, and it was necessary to accumulate a bank account
+for that occasion. Before October he was out on the lecture circuit,
+billed now for the first time for New England, nervous and apprehensive
+in consequence, though with good hope. To Pamela he wrote (November
+9th):
+
+To-morrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience
+--4,000 critics--and on the success of this matter depends my future
+success in New England. But I am not distressed. Nasby is in the same
+boat. Tonight decides the fate of his brand-new lecture. He has just
+left my room--been reading his lecture to me--was greatly depressed. I
+have convinced him that he has little to fear.
+
+Whatever alarm Mark Twain may have felt was not warranted. His success
+with the New England public was immediate and complete. He made his
+headquarters in Boston, at Redpath's office, where there was pretty sure
+to be a congenial company, of which he was presently the center.
+
+It was during one of these Boston sojourns that he first met William Dean
+Howells, his future friend and literary counselor. Howells was assistant
+editor of the Atlantic at this time; James T. Fields, its editor. Clemens
+had been gratified by the Atlantic review, and had called to express his
+thanks for it. He sat talking to Fields, when Howells entered the
+editorial rooms, and on being presented to the author of the review,
+delivered his appreciation in the form of a story, sufficiently
+appropriate, but not qualified for the larger types.--[He said: "When I
+read that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was so glad her baby
+had come white."]
+
+His manner, his humor, his quaint colloquial forms all delighted Howells
+--more, in fact, than the opulent sealskin overcoat which he affected at
+this period--a garment astonishing rather than esthetic, as Mark Twain's
+clothes in those days of his first regeneration were likely to be
+startling enough, we may believe; in the conservative atmosphere of the
+Atlantic rooms. And Howells--gentle, genial, sincere--filled with the
+early happiness of his calling, won the heart of Mark Twain and never
+lost it, and, what is still more notable, won his absolute and unvarying
+confidence in all literary affairs. It was always Mark Twain's habit to
+rely on somebody, and in matters pertaining to literature and to literary
+people in general he laid his burden on William Dean Howells from that
+day. Only a few weeks after that first visit we find him telegraphing to
+Howells, asking him to look after a Californian poet, then ill and
+friendless in Brooklyn. Clemens states that he does not know the poet,
+but will contribute fifty dollars if Howells will petition the steamboat
+company for a pass; and no doubt Howells complied, and spent a good deal
+more than fifty dollars' worth of time to get the poet relieved and
+started; it would be like him.
+
+
+
+
+LXXIV
+
+THE WEDDING-DAY
+
+The wedding was planned, at first, either for Christmas or New-Year's
+Day; but as the lecture engagements continued into January it was decided
+to wait until these were filled. February 2d, a date near the
+anniversary of the engagement, was agreed upon, also a quiet wedding with
+no "tour." The young people would go immediately to Buffalo, and take up
+a modest residence, in a boardinghouse as comfortable, even as luxurious,
+as the husband's financial situation justified. At least that was Samuel
+Clemens's understanding of the matter. He felt that he was heavily in
+debt--that his first duty was to relieve himself of that obligation.
+
+There were other plans in Elmira, but in the daily and happy letters he
+received there was no inkling of any new purpose.
+
+He wrote to J. D. F. Slee, of Buffalo, who was associated in business
+with Mr. Langdon, and asked him to find a suitable boarding-place, one
+that would be sufficiently refined for the woman who was to be his wife,
+and sufficiently reasonable to insure prosperity. In due time Slee
+replied that, while boarding was a "miserable business anyhow," he had
+been particularly fortunate in securing a place on one of the most
+pleasant streets--"the family a small one and choice spirits, with no
+predilection for taking boarders, and consenting to the present
+arrangement only because of the anticipated pleasure of your company."
+The price, Slee added, would be reasonable. As a matter of fact a house
+on Delaware Avenue--still the fine residence street of Buffalo--had been
+bought and furnished throughout as a present to the bride and groom. It
+stands to-day practically unchanged--brick and mansard without, Eastlake
+within, a type then much in vogue--spacious and handsome for that period.
+It was completely appointed. Diagrams of the rooms had been sent to
+Elmira and Miss Langdon herself had selected the furnishings. Everything
+was put in readiness, including linen, cutlery, and utensils. Even the
+servants had been engaged and the pantry and cellar had been stocked.
+
+It must have been hard for Olivia Langdon to keep this wonderful surprise
+out of those daily letters. A surprise like that is always watching a
+chance to slip out unawares, especially when one is eagerly impatient to
+reveal it.
+
+However, the traveler remained completely in the dark. He may have
+wondered vaguely at the lack of enthusiasm in the boarding idea, and
+could he have been certain that the sales of the book would continue, or
+that his newspaper venture would yield an abundant harvest, he might have
+planned his domestic beginning on a more elaborate scale. If only the
+Tennessee land would yield the long-expected fortune now! But these were
+all incalculable things. All that he could be sure of was the coming of
+his great happiness, in whatever environment, and of the dragging weeks
+between.
+
+At last the night of the final lecture came, and he was off for Elmira
+with the smallest possible delay. Once there, the intervening days did
+not matter. He could join in the busy preparations; he could write
+exuberantly to his friends. To Laura Hawkins, long since Laura Frazer he
+sent a playful line; to Jim Gillis, still digging and washing on the
+slopes of the old Tuolumne hills, he wrote a letter which eminently
+belongs here:
+
+                     Elmira, N. Y., January 26, 1870.
+
+    DEAR Jim,--I remember that old night just as well! And somewhere
+    among my relics I have your remembrance stored away. It makes my
+    heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days. Still it
+    shouldn't, for right in the depths of their poverty and their
+    pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune.
+    You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal
+    sojourn in the rain and mud of Angel's Camp--I mean that day we sat
+    around the tavern stove and heard that chap tell about the frog and
+    how they filled him with shot. And you remember how we quoted from
+    the yarn and laughed over it out there on the hillside while you and
+    dear old Stoker panned and washed. I jotted the story down in my
+    note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen
+    dollars for it--I was just that blind. But then we were so hard up.
+    I published that story, and it became widely known in America,
+    India, China, England, and the reputation it made for me has paid me
+    thousands and thousands of dollars since. Four or five months ago I
+    bought into the Express (I have ordered it sent to you as long as
+    you live, and if the bookkeeper sends you any bills you let me hear
+    of it). I went heavily in debt--never could have dared to do that,
+    Jim, if we hadn't heard the jumping Frog story that day.
+
+    And wouldn't I love to take old Stoker by the hand, and wouldn't I
+    love to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of
+    Rinalds in the "Burning Shame!" Where is Dick and what is he doing?
+    Give him my fervent love and warm old remembrances.
+
+    A week from to-day I shall be married-to a girl even better and
+    lovelier than the peerless "Chapparal Quails." You can't come so
+    far, Jim, but still I cordially invite you to come anyhow, and I
+    invite Dick too. And if you two boys were to land here on that
+    pleasant occasion we would make you right royally welcome.
+                     Truly your friend,
+                                SAML. L. CLEMENS.
+
+    P.S.---California plums are good. Jim, particularly when they are
+    stewed.
+
+It had been only five years before--that day in Angel's Camp--but how
+long ago and how far away it seemed to him now! So much had happened
+since then, so much of which that was the beginning--so little compared
+with the marvel of the years ahead, whose threshold he was now about to
+cross, and not alone.
+
+A day or two before the wedding he was asked to lecture on the night of
+February 2d. He replied that he was sorry to disappoint the applicant,
+but that he could not lecture on the night of February 2d, for the reason
+that he was going to marry a young lady on that evening, and that he
+would rather marry that young lady than deliver all the lectures in the
+world.
+
+And so came the wedding-day. It began pleasantly; the postman brought a
+royalty check that morning of $4,000, the accumulation of three months'
+sales, and the Rev. Joseph Twichell and Harmony, his wife, came from
+Hartford--Twichell to join with the Rev. Thomas K. Beecher in
+solemnizing the marriage. Pamela Moffett, a widow now, with her daughter
+Annie, grown to a young lady, had come all the way from St. Louis, and
+Mrs. Fairbanks from Cleveland.
+
+Yet the guests were not numerous, not more than a hundred at most, so it
+was a quiet wedding there in the Langdon parlors, those dim, stately
+rooms that in the future would hold so much of his history--so much of
+the story of life and death that made its beginning there.
+
+The wedding-service was about seven o'clock, for Mr. Beecher had a
+meeting at the church soon after that hour. Afterward followed the
+wedding-supper and dancing, and the bride's father danced with the bride.
+To the interested crowd awaiting him at the church Mr. Beecher reported
+that the bride was very beautiful, and had on the longest white gloves he
+had ever seen; he declared they reached to her shoulders.--[Perhaps for a
+younger generation it should be said that Thomas K. Beecher was a brother
+of Henry Ward Beecher. He lived and died in Elmira, the almost worshiped
+pastor of the Park Congregational Church. He was a noble, unorthodox
+teacher. Samuel Clemens at the time of his marriage already strongly
+admired him, and had espoused his cause in an article signed "S'cat!" in
+the Elmira Advertiser, when he (Beecher) had been assailed by the more
+orthodox Elmira clergy. For the "S'cat" article see Appendix I, at the
+end of last volume.]
+
+It was the next afternoon when they set out for Buffalo, accompanied by
+the bride's parents, the groom's relatives, the Beechers, and perhaps one
+or two others of that happy company. It was nine o'clock at night when
+they arrived, and found Mr. Slee waiting at the station with sleighs to
+convey the party to the "boarding-house" he had selected. They drove and
+drove, and the sleigh containing the bride and groom got behind and
+apparently was bound nowhere in particular, which disturbed the groom a
+good deal, for he thought it proper that they should arrive first, to
+receive their guests. He commented on Slee's poor judgment in selecting
+a house that was so hard to find, and when at length they turned into
+fashionable Delaware Avenue, and stopped before one of the most
+attractive places in the neighborhood, he was beset with fear concerning
+the richness of the locality.
+
+They were on the steps when the doors opened, and a perfect fairyland of
+lights and decoration was revealed within. The friends who had gone
+ahead came out with greetings, to lead in the bride and groom. Servants
+hurried forward to take bags and wraps. They were ushered inside; they
+were led through beautiful rooms, all newly appointed and garnished. The
+bridegroom was dazed, unable to understand the meaning of things, the
+apparent ownership and completeness of possession.
+
+At last the young wife put her hand upon his arm:
+
+"Don't you understand, Youth," she said; that was always her name for
+him. "Don't you understand? It is ours, all ours--everything--a gift
+from father!"
+
+But even then he could not grasp it; not at first, not until Mr. Langdon
+brought a little box and, opening it, handed them the deeds.
+
+Nobody quite remembers what was the first remark that Samuel Clemens made
+then; but either then or a little later he said:
+
+"Mr. Langdon, whenever you are in Buffalo, if it's twice a year, come
+right here. Bring your bag and stay overnight if you want to. It
+sha'n't cost you a cent!"
+
+They went in to supper then, and by and by the guests were gone and the
+young wedded pair were alone.
+
+Patrick McAleer, the young coachman, who would grow old in their employ,
+and Ellen, the cook, came in for their morning orders, and were full of
+Irish delight at the inexperience and novelty of it all. Then they were
+gone, and only the lovers in their new house and their new happiness
+remained.
+
+And so it was they entered the enchanted land.
+
+
+
+
+LXXV
+
+AS TO DESTINY
+
+If any reader has followed these chapters thus far, he may have wondered,
+even if vaguely, at the seeming fatality of events. Mark Twain had but
+to review his own life for justification of his doctrine of inevitability
+--an unbroken and immutable sequence of cause and effect from the
+beginning. Once he said:
+
+"When the first living atom found itself afloat on the great Laurentian
+sea the first act of that first atom led to the second act of that first
+atom, and so on down through the succeeding ages of all life, until, if
+the steps could be traced, it would be shown that the first act of that
+first atom has led inevitably to the act of my standing here in my
+dressing-gown at this instant talking to you."
+
+It seemed the clearest presentment ever offered in the matter of
+predestined circumstance--predestined from the instant when that primal
+atom felt the vital thrill. Mark Twain's early life, however imperfectly
+recorded, exemplifies this postulate. If through the years still ahead
+of us the course of destiny seems less clearly defined, it is only
+because thronging events make the threads less easy to trace. The web
+becomes richer, the pattern more intricate and confusing, but the line of
+fate neither breaks nor falters, to the end.
+
+
+
+
+LXXVI
+
+ON THE BUFFALO "EXPRESS"
+
+With the beginning of life in Buffalo, Mark Twain had become already a
+world character--a man of large consequence and events. He had no proper
+realization of this, no real sense of the size of his conquest; he still
+regarded himself merely as a lecturer and journalist, temporarily
+popular, but with no warrant to a permanent seat in the world's literary
+congress. He thought his success something of an accident. The fact
+that he was prepared to settle down as an editorial contributor to a
+newspaper in what was then only a big village is the best evidence of a
+modest estimate of his talents.
+
+He "worked like a horse," is the verdict of those who were closely
+associated with him on the Express. His hours were not regular, but they
+were long. Often he was at his desk at eight in the morning, and
+remained there until ten or eleven at night.
+
+His working costume was suited to comfort rather than show. With coat,
+vest, collar, and tie usually removed (sometimes even his shoes), he
+lounged in his chair, in any attitude that afforded the larger ease,
+pulling over the exchanges; scribbling paragraphs, editorials, humorous
+skits, and what not, as the notion came upon him. J. L. Lamed, his
+co-worker (he sat on the opposite side of the same table), remembers that
+Mark Twain enjoyed his work as he went along--the humor of it--and that
+he frequently laughed as some whimsicality or new absurdity came into his
+mind.
+
+"I doubt," writes Lamed, "if he ever enjoyed anything more than the
+jackknife engraving that he did on a piece of board of a military map of
+the siege of Paris, which was printed in the Express from his original
+plate, with accompanying explanations and comments. His half-day of
+whittling and laughter that went with it are something that I find
+pleasant to remember. Indeed, my whole experience of association with
+him is a happy memory, which I am fortunate in having.... What one saw
+of him was always the actual Mark Twain, acting out of his own nature
+simply, frankly, without pretense, and almost without reserve. It was
+that simplicity and naturalness in the man which carried his greatest
+charm."
+
+Lamed, like many others, likens Mark Twain to Lincoln in various of his
+characteristics. The two worked harmoniously together: Lamed attending
+to the political direction of the journal, Clemens to the literary, and
+what might be termed the sentimental side. There was no friction in the
+division of labor, never anything but good feeling between them. Clemens
+had a poor opinion of his own comprehension of politics, and perhaps as
+little regard for Lamed's conception of humor. Once when the latter
+attempted something in the way of pleasantry his associate said:
+
+"Better leave the humor on this paper to me, Lamed"; and once when Lamed
+was away attending the Republican State Convention at Saratoga, and some
+editorial comment seemed necessary, Clemens thought it best to sign the
+utterance, and to make humor of his shortcomings.
+
+    I do not know much about politics, and am not sitting up nights to
+    learn . . . .
+
+    I am satisfied that these nominations are all right and sound, and
+    that they are the only ones that can bring peace to our distracted
+    country (the only political phrase I am perfectly familiar with and
+    competent to hurl at the public with fearless confidence--the other
+    editor is full of them), but being merely satisfied is not enough.
+    I always like to know before I shout. But I go for Mr. Curtis with
+    all my strength! Being certain of him, I hereby shout all I know
+    how. But the others may be a split ticket, or a scratched ticket,
+    or whatever you call it.
+
+    I will let it alone for the present. It will keep. The other young
+    man will be back to-morrow, and he will shout for it, split or no
+    split, rest assured of that. He will prance into this political
+    ring with his tomahawk and his war-whoop, and then you will hear a
+    crash and see the scalps fly. He has none of my diffidence. He
+    knows all about these nominees, and if he don't he will let on to in
+    such a natural way as to deceive the most critical. He knows
+    everything--he knows more than Webster's Unabridged and the American
+    Encyclopedia--but whether he knows anything about a subject or not
+    he is perfectly willing to discuss it. When he gets back he will
+    tell you all about these candidates as serenely as if he had been
+    acquainted with them a hundred years, though, speaking
+    confidentially, I doubt if he ever heard of any of them till to-day.
+    I am right well satisfied it is a good, sound, sensible ticket, and
+    a ticket to win; but wait till he comes.
+
+    In the mean time I go for George William Curtis and take the
+    chances.
+                                MARK TWAIN.
+
+He had become what Mr. Howells calls entirely "desouthernized" by this
+time. From having been of slaveholding stock, and a Confederate soldier,
+he had become a most positive Republican, a rampant abolitionist--had
+there been anything left to abolish. His sympathy had been always with
+the oppressed, and he had now become their defender. His work on the
+paper revealed this more and more. He wrote fewer sketches and more
+editorials, and the editorials were likely to be either savage assaults
+upon some human abuse, or fierce espousals of the weak. They were
+fearless, scathing, terrific. Of some farmers of Cohocton, who had taken
+the law into their own hands to punish a couple whom they believed to be
+a detriment to the community, he wrote:
+
+"The men who did that deed are capable of doing any low, sneaking,
+cowardly villainy that could be invented in perdition. They are the very
+bastards of the devil."
+
+He appended a full list of their names, and added:
+
+"If the farmers of Cohocton are of this complexion, what on earth must a
+Cohocton rough be like?"
+
+But all this happened a long time ago, and we need not detail those
+various old interests and labors here. It is enough to say that Mark
+Twain on the Express was what he had been from the beginning, and would
+be to the end--the zealous champion of justice and liberty; violent and
+sometimes wrong in his viewpoint, but never less than fearless and
+sincere. Invariably he was for the oppressed. He had a natural instinct
+for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the under dog.
+
+Among the best of his editorial contributions is a tribute to Anson
+Burlingame, who died February 23, 1870, at St. Petersburg, on his trip
+around the world as special ambassador for the Chinese Empire. In this
+editorial Clemens endeavored to pay something of his debt to the noble
+statesman. He reviewed Burlingame's astonishing career--the career which
+had closed at forty-seven, and read like a fairy-tale-and he dwelt
+lovingly on his hero's nobility of character. At the close he said:
+
+"He was a good man, and a very, very great man. America, lost a son, and
+all the world a servant, when he died."
+
+Among those early contributions to the Express is a series called "Around
+the World," an attempt at collaboration with Prof. D. R. Ford, who did
+the actual traveling, while Mark Twain, writing in the first person, gave
+the letters his literary stamp. At least some of the contributions were
+written in this way, such as "Adventures in Hayti," "The Pacific," and
+"Japan." These letters exist to-day only in the old files of the
+Express, and indeed this is the case with most of Clemens's work for that
+paper. It was mainly ephemeral or timely work, and its larger value has
+disappeared. Here and there is a sentence worth remembering. Of two
+practical jokers who sent in a marriage notice of persons not even
+contemplating matrimony, he said: "This deceit has been practised
+maliciously by a couple of men whose small souls will escape through
+their pores some day if they do not varnish their hides."
+
+Some of the sketches have been preserved. "Journalism in Tennessee," one
+of the best of his wilder burlesques, is as enjoyable to-day as when
+written. "A Curious Dream" made a lasting impression on his Buffalo
+readers, and you are pretty certain to hear of it when you mention Mark
+Twain in that city to-day. It vividly called attention to the neglect of
+the old North Street graveyard. The gruesome vision of the ancestors
+deserting with their coffins on their backs was even more humiliating
+than amusing, and inspired a movement for reform. It has been effective
+elsewhere since then, and may still be read with profit--or satisfaction
+--for in a note at the end the reader is assured that if the cemeteries
+of his town are kept in good order the dream is not leveled at his town
+at all, but "particularly and venomously at the next town."
+
+
+
+
+LXXVII
+
+THE "GALAXY"
+
+Mark Twain's work on the Express represented only a portion of his
+literary activities during his Buffalo residence. The Galaxy, an
+ambitious New York magazine of that day--[published by Sheldon & Co. at
+498 and 500 Broadway]--proposed to him that he conduct for them a
+humorous department. They would pay $2,400 a year for the work, and
+allow him a free hand. There was some discussion as to book rights, but
+the arrangement was concluded, and his first instalment, under the
+general title of "Memoranda," appeared in the May number, 1870. In his
+Introductory he outlined what the reader might expect, such as
+"exhaustive statistical tables," "Patent Office reports," and "complete
+instructions about farming, even from the grafting of the seed to the
+harrowing of the matured crops." He declared that he would throw a
+pathos into the subject of agriculture that would surprise and delight
+the world. He added that the "Memoranda" was not necessarily a humorous
+department.
+
+    I would not conduct an exclusively and professedly humorous
+    department for any one. I would always prefer to have the privilege
+    of printing a serious and sensible remark, in case one occurred to
+    me, without the reader's feeling obliged to consider himself
+    outraged.... Puns cannot be allowed a place in this department....
+    No circumstance, however dismal, will ever be considered a
+    sufficient excuse for the admission of that last and saddest
+    evidence of intellectual poverty, the pun.
+
+The Galaxy was really a fine magazine, with the best contributors
+obtainable; among them Justin McCarthy, S. M. B. Piatt, Richard Grant
+White, and many others well known in that day, with names that still
+flicker here and there in its literary twilight. The new department
+appealed to Clemens, and very soon he was writing most of his sketches
+for it. They were better literature, as a rule, than those published in
+his own paper.
+
+The first number of the "Memoranda" was fairly representative of those
+that followed it. "The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract," a
+manuscript which he had undertaken three years before and mislaid, was
+its initial contribution. Besides the "Beef Contract," there was a
+tribute to George Wakeman, a well-known journalist of those days; a
+stricture on the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage, who had delivered from the
+pulpit an argument against workingmen occupying pews in fashionable
+churches; a presentment of the Chinese situation in San Francisco,
+depicting the cruel treatment of the Celestial immigrant; a burlesque of
+the Sunday-school "good little boy" story,--["The Story of the Good
+Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper" and the "Beef Contract" are included in
+Sketches New and Old; also the Chinese sketch, under the title,
+"Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy."]--and several shorter skits--and
+anecdotes, ten pages in all; a rather generous contract.
+
+Mark Twain's comment on Talmage was prompted by an article in which
+Talmage had assumed the premise that if workingmen attended the churches
+it would drive the better class of worshipers away. Among other things
+he said:
+
+    I have a good Christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in
+    church, and a workingman should enter the door at the other end,
+    would smell him instantly. My friend is not to blame for the
+    sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer
+    for being keener on the scent than a stupid watch-dog. The fact is,
+    if you had all the churches free, by reason of the mixing of the
+    common people with the uncommon, you would keep one-half of
+    Christendom sick at their stomach. If you are going to kill the
+    church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to do with this work
+    of evangelization.
+
+Commenting on this Mark Twain said--well, he said a good deal more than
+we have room for here, but a portion of his closing paragraphs is worth
+preserving. He compares the Reverend Mr. Talmage with the early
+disciples of Christ--Paul and Peter and the others; or, rather, he
+contrasts him with them.
+
+    They healed the very beggars, and held intercourse with people of a
+    villainous odor every day. If the subject of these remarks had been
+    chosen among the original Twelve Apostles he would not have
+    associated with the rest, because he could not have stood the fishy
+    smell of some of his comrades who came from around the Sea of
+    Galilee. He would have resigned his commission with some such
+    remark as he makes in the extract quoted above: "Master, if thou art
+    going to kill the church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to
+    do with this work of evangelization." He is a disciple, and makes
+    that remark to the Master; the only difference is that he makes it
+    in the nineteenth instead of the first century.
+
+Talmage was immensely popular at this time, and Mark Twain's open attack
+on him must have shocked a good many Galaxy readers, as perhaps his
+article on the Chinese cruelties offended the citizens of San Francisco.
+It did not matter. He was not likely to worry over the friends he would
+lose because of any stand taken for human justice. Lamed said of him:
+"He was very far from being one who tried in any way to make himself
+popular." Certainly he never made any such attempt at the expense of his
+convictions.
+
+The first Galaxy instalment was a sort of platform of principles for the
+campaign that was to follow. Not that each month's contribution
+contained personal criticism, or a defense of the Chinese (of whom he was
+always the champion as long as he lived), but a good many of them did. In
+the October number he began a series of letters under the general title
+of "Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again," supposed to have been written by a
+Chinese immigrant in San Francisco, detailing his experience there. In a
+note the author says: "No experience is set down in the following letters
+which had to be invented. Fancy is not needed to give variety to the
+history of the Chinaman's sojourn in America. Plain fact is amply
+sufficient." The letters show how the supposed Chinese writer of them
+had set out for America, believing it to be a land whose government was
+based on the principle that all men are created equal, and treated
+accordingly; how, upon arriving in San Francisco, he was kicked and
+bruised and beaten, and set upon by dogs, flung into jail, tried and
+condemned without witnesses, his own race not being allowed to testify
+against Americans--Irish-Americans--in the San Francisco court. They are
+scathing, powerful letters, and one cannot read them, even in this day of
+improved conditions, without feeling the hot waves of resentment and
+indignation which Mark Twain must have felt when he penned them.
+
+Reverend Mr. Talmage was not the only divine to receive attention in the
+"Memoranda." The Reverend Mr. Sabine, of New York, who had declined to
+hold a church burial service for the old actor, George Holland, came in
+for the most caustic as well as the most artistic stricture of the entire
+series. It deserves preservation to-day, not only for its literary
+value, but because no finer defense of the drama, no more searching
+sermon on self-righteousness, has ever been put into concrete form.
+--["The Indignity Put Upon the Remains of Gorge Holland by the Rev. Mr.
+Sabine"; Galaxy for February, 1871. The reader will find it complete
+under Appendix J, at the end of last volume.]
+
+The "Little Church Around the Corner" on Twenty-ninth Street received
+that happy title from this incident.
+
+"There is a little church around the corner that will, perhaps, permit
+the service," Mr. Sabine had said to Holland's friends.
+
+The little church did permit the service, and there was conferred upon it
+the new name, which it still bears. It has sheltered a long line of
+actor folk and their friends since then, earning thereby reverence,
+gratitude, and immortal memory.--[Church of the Transfiguration. Memorial
+services were held there for Joseph Jefferson; and a memorial window, by
+John La Farge, has been placed there in memory of Edwin Booth.]
+
+Of the Galaxy contributions a number are preserved in Sketches New and
+Old. "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper" is one of the best of these
+--an excellent example of Mark Twain's more extravagant style of humor.
+It is perennially delightful; in France it has been dramatized, and is
+still played.
+
+A successful Galaxy feature, also preserved in the Sketches, was the
+"Burlesque Map of Paris," reprinted from the Express. The
+Franco-Prussian War was in progress, and this travesty was particularly
+timely. It creates only a smile of amusement to-day, but it was all fresh
+and delightful then. Schuyler Colfax, by this time Vice-President, wrote
+to him: "I have had the heartiest possible laugh over it, and so have all
+my family. You are a wicked, conscienceless wag, who ought to be
+punished severely."
+
+The "Official Commendations," which accompany the map, are its chief
+charm. They are from Grant, Bismarck, Brigham Young, and others, the
+best one coming from one J. Smith, who says:
+
+    My wife was for years afflicted with freckles, and though everything
+    was done for her relief that could be done, all was in vain. But,
+    sir, since her first glance at your map they have entirely left her.
+    She has nothing but convulsions now.
+
+It is said that the "Map of Paris" found its way to Berlin, where the
+American students in the beer-halls used to pretend to quarrel over it
+until they attracted the attention of the German soldiers that might be
+present. Then they would wander away and leave it on the table and watch
+results. The soldiers would pounce upon it and lose their tempers over
+it; then finally abuse it and revile its author, to the satisfaction of
+everybody.
+
+The larger number of "Memoranda" sketches have properly found oblivion
+to-day. They were all, or nearly all, collected by a Canadian pirate, C.
+A. Backas, in a volume bearing the title of Memoranda,--[Also by a harpy
+named John Camden Hotten (of London), of whom we shall hear again. Hotten
+had already pirated The Innocents, and had it on the market before
+Routledge could bring out the authorized edition. Routledge later
+published the "Memoranda" under the title of Sketches, including the
+contents of the Jumping Frog book.]--a book long ago suppressed. Only
+about twenty of the Galaxy contributions found place in Sketches New and
+Old, five years later, and some of these might have been spared as
+literature. "To Raise Poultry," "John Chinaman in New York," and
+"History Repeats Itself" are valuable only as examples of his work at
+that period. The reader may consult them for himself.
+
+
+
+
+LXXVIII
+
+THE PRIMROSE PATH
+
+But we are losing sight of more important things. From the very
+beginning Mark Twain's home meant always more to him than his work. The
+life at 472 Delaware Avenue had begun with as fair a promise as any
+matrimonial journey ever undertaken: There seemed nothing lacking: a
+beautiful home, sufficient income, bright prospects--these things, with
+health and love; constitute married happiness. Mrs. Clemens wrote to her
+sister, Mrs. Crane, at the end of February: "Sue, we are two as happy
+people as you ever saw. Our days seem to be made up of only bright
+sunlight, with no shadow in them." In the same letter the husband added:
+"Livy pines and pines every day for you, and I pine and pine every day
+for you, and when we both of us are pining at once you would think it was
+a whole pine forest let loose."
+
+To Redpath, who was urging lecture engagements for the coming season, he
+wrote:
+
+    DEAR RED,--I am not going to lecture any more forever. I have got
+    things ciphered down to a fraction now. I know just about what it
+    will cost to live, and I can make the money without lecturing.
+    Therefore, old man, count me out.
+
+And still later, in May:
+
+    I guess I am out of the field permanently. Have got a lovely wife,
+    a lovely house, bewitchingly furnished, a lovely carriage, and a
+    coachman whose style and dignity are simply awe-in-spiring, nothing
+    less; and I am making more money than necessary, by considerable,
+    and therefore why crucify myself nightly on the platform? The
+    subscriber will have to be excused for the present season at least.
+
+So they were very happy during those early months, acquiring pleasantly
+the education which any matrimonial experience is sure to furnish,
+accustoming themselves to the uses of housekeeping, to life in
+partnership, with all the discoveries and mental and spiritual
+adaptations that belong to the close association of marriage. They were
+far, very far, apart on many subjects. He was unpolished, untrained,
+impulsive, sometimes violent. Twichell remembers that in the earlier
+days of their acquaintance he wore a slouch hat pulled down in front, and
+smoked a cigar that sometimes tilted up and touched the brim of it. The
+atmosphere and customs of frontier life, the Westernisms of that day,
+still clung to him. Mrs. Clemens, on the other hand, was conservative,
+dainty, cultured, spiritual. He adored her as little less than a saint,
+and she became, indeed, his saving grace. She had all the personal
+refinement which he lacked, and she undertook the work of polishing and
+purifying her life companion. She had no wish to destroy his
+personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and she set
+about it in the right way--gently, and with a tender gratitude in each
+achievement.
+
+She did not entirely approve of certain lines of his reading; or, rather,
+she did not understand them in those days. That he should be fond of
+history and the sciences was natural enough, but when the Life of P. T.
+Barnum, Written by Himself, appeared, and he sat up nights to absorb it,
+and woke early and lighted the lamp to follow the career of the great
+showman, she was at a loss to comprehend this particular literary
+passion, and indeed was rather jealous of it. She did not realize then
+his vast interest in the study of human nature, or that such a book
+contained what Mr. Howells calls "the root of the human matter," the
+inner revelation of the human being at first hand.
+
+Concerning his religious observances her task in the beginning was easy
+enough. Clemens had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines
+of his own. His natural kindness of heart, and especially his love for
+his wife, inclined him toward the teachings and customs of her Christian
+faith--unorthodox but sincere, as Christianity in the Langdon family was
+likely to be. It took very little persuasion on his wife's part to
+establish family prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the
+morning reading of a Bible chapter. Joe Goodman, who made a trip East,
+and visited them during the early days of their married life, was
+dumfounded to see Mark Twain ask a blessing and join in family worship.
+Just how long these forms continued cannot be known to-day; the time of
+their abandonment has perished from the recollection of any one now
+living.
+
+It would seem to have been the Bible-reading that wrought the change. The
+prayer and the blessing were to him sincere and gracious; but as the
+readings continued he realized that he had never before considered the
+Bible from a doctrinal point of view, as a guide to spiritual salvation.
+To his logical reasoning mind, a large portion of it seemed absurd: a
+mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology. From such material
+humanity had built its mightiest edifice of hope, the doctrines of its
+faith. After a little while he could stand it no longer.
+
+"Livy," he said one day, "you may keep this up if you want to, but I must
+ask you to excuse me from it. It is making me a hypocrite. I don't
+believe in this Bible. It contradicts my reason. I can't sit here and
+listen to it, letting you believe that I regard it, as you do, in the
+light of gospel, the word of God."
+
+He was moved to write an article on the human idea of God, ancient and
+modern. It contained these paragraphs:
+
+    The difference in importance, between the God of the Bible and the
+    God of the present day, cannot be described, it can only be vaguely
+    and inadequately figured to the mind . . . . If you make figures
+    to represent the earth and moon, and allow a space of one inch
+    between them, to represent the four hundred thousand miles of
+    distance which lies between the two bodies, the map will have to be
+    eleven miles long in order to bring in the nearest fixed star.
+    --[His figures were far too small. A map drawn on the scale of
+    400,000 miles to the inch would need to be 1,100 miles long to take
+    in both the earth and the nearest fixed star. On such a map the
+    earth would be one-fiftieth of an inch in diameter--the size of a
+    small grain of sand.]--So one cannot put the modern heavens on a
+    map, nor the modern God; but the Bible God and the Bible heavens can
+    be set down on a slate and yet not be discommoded . . . .
+
+    The difference between that universe and the modern one revealed by
+    science is as the difference between a dust-flecked ray in a barn
+    and the sublime arch of the Milky Way in the skies. Its God was
+    strictly proportioned to its dimensions. His sole solicitude was
+    about a handful of truculent nomads. He worried and fretted over
+    them in a peculiarly and distractingly human way. One day he coaxed
+    and petted them beyond their due, the next he harried and lashed
+    them beyond their deserts. He sulked, he cursed, he raged, he
+    grieved, according to his mood and the circumstances, but all to no
+    purpose; his efforts were all vain, he could not govern them. When
+    the fury was on him he was blind to all reason--he not only
+    slaughtered the offender, but even his harmless little children and
+    dumb cattle....
+
+    To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive,
+    fierce and ever fickle and changeful master; to trust the true God
+    is to trust a Being who has uttered no promises, but whose
+    beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of his
+    colossal universe is proof that he is at least steadfast to his
+    purposes; whose unwritten laws, so far as they affect man, being
+    equal and impartial, show that he is just and fair; these things,
+    taken together, suggest that if he shall ordain us to live
+    hereafter, he will still be steadfast, just, and fair toward us. We
+    shall not need to require anything more.
+
+It seems mild enough, obvious, even orthodox, now--so far have we
+traveled in forty years. But such a declaration then would have shocked
+a great number of sincerely devout persons. His wife prevailed upon him
+not to print it. She respected his honesty--even his reasoning, but his
+doubts were a long grief to her, nevertheless. In time she saw more
+clearly with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more
+with the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the
+proportions of created things.
+
+They did not mingle much or long with the social life of Buffalo. They
+received and returned calls, attended an occasional reception; but
+neither of them found such things especially attractive in those days, so
+they remained more and more in their own environment. There is an
+anecdote which seems to belong here.
+
+One Sunday morning Clemens noticed smoke pouring from the upper window of
+the house across the street. The owner and his wife, comparatively
+newcomers, were seated upon the veranda, evidently not aware of impending
+danger. The Clemens household thus far had delayed calling on them, but
+Clemens himself now stepped briskly across the street. Bowing with
+leisurely politeness, he said:
+
+"My name is Clemens; we ought to have called on you before, and I beg
+your pardon for intruding now in this informal way, but your house is on
+fire."
+
+Almost the only intimate friends they had in Buffalo were in the family
+of David Gray, the poet-editor of the Courier. Gray was a gentle,
+lovable man. "The gentlest spirit and the loveliest that ever went
+clothed in clay, since Sir Galahad laid him to rest," Mark Twain once
+said of him. Both Gray and Clemens were friends of John Hay, and their
+families soon became intimate. Perhaps, in time, the Clemens household
+would have found other as good friends in the Buffalo circles; but heavy
+clouds that had lain unseen just beyond the horizon during those earlier
+months of marriage rose suddenly into view, and the social life, whatever
+it might have become, was no longer a consideration.
+
+
+
+
+LXXIX
+
+THE OLD HUMAN STORY
+
+Jervis Langdon was never able to accept his son-in-law's invitation to
+the new home. His health began to fail that spring, and at the end of
+March, with his physician and Mrs. Langdon, he made a trip to the South.
+In a letter written at Richmond he said, "I have thrown off all care,"
+and named a list of the four great interests in which he was involved.
+Under "number 5," he included "everything," adding, "so you see how good
+I am to follow the counsel of my children." He closed: "Samuel, I love
+your wife and she loves me. I think it is only fair that you should know
+it, but you need not flare up. I loved her before you did, and she loved
+me before she did you, and has not ceased since. I see no way but for
+you to make the most of it." He was already a very ill man, and this
+cheerful letter was among the last he ever wrote.
+
+He was absent six weeks and seemed to improve, but suffered an attack
+early in May; in June his condition became critical. Clemens and his
+wife were summoned to Elmira, and joined in the nursing, day and night.
+Clemens surprised every one by his ability as a nurse. His delicacy and
+thoughtfulness were unfailing; his original ways of doing things always
+amused and interested the patient. In later years Mark Twain once said:
+
+    "How much of the nursing did I do? My main watch was from midnight
+    to four in the morning, nearly four hours. My other watch was a
+    midday watch, and I think it was nearly three hours. The two
+    sisters divided the remaining seventeen hours of the twenty-four
+    hours between them, and each of them tried generously and
+    persistently to swindle the other out of a part of her watch. I
+    went to bed early every night, and tried to get sleep enough by
+    midnight to fit me for my work, but it was always a failure. I went
+    on watch sleepy and remained miserable, sleepy, and wretched,
+    straight along through the four hours. I can still see myself
+    sitting by that bed in the melancholy stillness of the sweltering
+    night, mechanically waving a palm-leaf fan over the drawn, white
+    face of the patient. I can still recall my noddings, my fleeting
+    unconsciousness, when the fan would come to a standstill in my hand,
+    and I woke up with a start and a hideous shock. During all that
+    dreary time I began to watch for the dawn long before it came. When
+    the first faint gray showed through the window-blinds I felt as no
+    doubt a castaway feels when the dim threads of the looked-for ship
+    appear against the sky. I was well and strong, but I was a man,
+    afflicted with a man's infirmity--lack of endurance."
+
+He always dealt with himself in this unsparing way; but those who were
+about him then have left a different story.
+
+It was all without avail. Mr. Langdon rallied, and early in July there
+was hope for his recovery. He failed again, and on the afternoon of the
+6th of August he died. To Mrs. Clemens, delicate and greatly worn with
+the anxiety and strain of watching, the blow was a crushing one. It was
+the beginning of a series of disasters which would mark the entire
+remaining period of their Buffalo residence.
+
+There had been a partial plan for spending the summer in England, and a
+more definite one for joining the Twichells in the Adirondacks. Both of
+these projects were now abandoned. Mrs. Clemens concluded that she would
+be better at home than anywhere else, and invited an old school friend, a
+Miss Emma Nye, to visit her.
+
+But the shadow of death had not been lifted from the Clemens household.
+Miss Nye presently fell ill with typhoid fever. There followed another
+long period of anxiety and nursing, ending with the death of the visitor
+in the new home, September 29th. The young wife was now in very delicate
+health; genuinely ill, in fact. The happy home had become a place of
+sorrow-of troubled nights and days. Another friend came to cheer them,
+and on this friend's departure Mrs. Clemens drove to the railway station.
+It was a hurried trip over rough streets to catch the train. She was
+prostrated on her return, and a little later, November 7, 1870, her first
+child, Langdon, was prematurely born. A dangerous illness followed, and
+complete recovery was long delayed. But on the 12th the crisis seemed
+passed, and the new father wrote a playful letter to the Twichells, as
+coming from the late arrival:
+
+    DEAR UNCLE AND AUNT,--I came into the world on the 7th inst., and
+    consequently am about five days old now. I have had wretched health
+    ever since I made my appearance . . . I am not corpulent, nor am
+    I robust in any way. At birth I only weighed four and one-half
+    pounds with my clothes on--and the clothes were the chief feature of
+    the weight, too, I am obliged to confess, but I am doing finely, all
+    things considered . . . . My little mother is very bright and
+    cheery, and I guess she is pretty happy, but I don't know what
+    about. She laughs a great deal, notwithstanding she is sick abed.
+
+    P. S.--Father says I had better write because you will be more
+    interested in me, just now, than in the rest of the family.
+
+A week later Clemens, as himself, wrote:
+
+    Livy is up and the prince keeps her busy and anxious these latter
+    days and nights, but I am a bachelor up-stairs and don't have to
+    jump up and get the soothing sirup, though I would as soon do it as
+    not, I assure you. (Livy will be certain to read this letter.)
+
+    Tell Harmony that I do hold the baby, and do it pretty handily too,
+    though with occasional apprehensions that his loose head will fall
+    off. I don't have to quiet him; he hardly ever utters a cry. He is
+    always thinking about something. He is a patient, good little baby.
+
+Further along he refers to one of his reforms:
+
+    Smoke? I always smoke from three till five on Sunday afternoons,
+    and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week, day and night. But
+    when Livy is well I smoke only those two hours on Sunday. I'm boss
+    of the habit now, and shall never let it boss me any more.
+    Originally I quit solely on Livy's account (not that I believed
+    there was the faintest reason in the matter, but just as I would
+    deprive myself of sugar in my coffee if she wished it, or quit
+    wearing socks if she thought them immoral), and I stick to it yet on
+    Livy's account, and shall always continue to do so without a pang.
+    But somehow it seems a pity that you quit, for Mrs. T. didn't mind
+    it, if I remember rightly. Ah, it is turning one's back upon a
+    kindly Providence to spurn away from us the good creature he sent to
+    make the breath of life a luxury as well as a necessity, enjoyable
+    as well as useful. To go quit smoking, when there ain't any
+    sufficient excuse for it!--why, my old boy, when they used to tell
+    me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew
+    the devotee they were wasting their puerile words upon; they little
+    knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no
+    smoking in it! But I won't persuade you, Twichell--I won't until I
+    see you again--but then we'll smoke for a week together, and then
+    shut off again.
+
+
+
+
+LXXX
+
+LITERARY PROJECTS
+
+The success of the Innocents naturally made a thrifty publisher like
+Bliss anxious for a second experiment. He had begun early in the year to
+talk about another book, but nothing had come of it beyond a project or
+two, more or less hazy and unpursued. Clemens at one time developed a
+plan for a Noah's Ark book, which was to detail the cruise of the Ark in
+diaries kept by various members of it-Shem, Ham, and the others. He
+really wrote some of it at the time, and it was an idea he never entirely
+lost track of. All along among his manuscripts appear fragments from
+those ancient voyagers. One of the earlier entries will show the style
+and purpose of the undertaking. It is from Shem's record:
+
+    Friday: Papa's birthday. He is 600 years old. We celebrated it in
+    a big, black tent. Principal men of the tribe present. Afterward
+    they were shown over the ark, which was looking desolate and empty
+    and dreary on account of a misunderstanding with the workmen about
+    wages. Methuselah was as free with his criticisms as usual, and as
+    voluble and familiar, which I and my brothers do not like; for we
+    are past our one hundredth year and married. He still calls me
+    Shemmy, just as he did when I was a child of sixty. I am still but
+    a youth, it is true, but youth has its feelings, and I do not like
+    this . . . .
+
+    Saturday: Keeping the Sabbath.
+
+    Sunday: Papa has yielded the advance and everybody is hard at work.
+    The shipyard is so crowded that the men hinder each other; everybody
+    hurrying or being hurried; the rush and confusion and shouting and
+    wrangling are astonishing to our family, who have always been used
+    to a quiet, country life.
+
+It was from this germ that in a later day grew the diaries of Adam and
+Eve, though nothing very satisfactory ever came of this preliminary
+attempt. The author had faith in it, however. To Bliss he wrote:
+
+    I mean to take plenty of time and pains with the Noah's Ark book;
+    maybe it will be several years before it is all written, but it will
+    be a perfect lightning striker when it is done.
+
+    You can have the first say (that is plain enough) on that or any
+    other book I may prepare for the press, as long as you deal in a
+    fair, open, and honorable way with me. I do not think you will ever
+    find me doing otherwise with you. I can get a book ready for you
+    any time you want it; but you can't want one before this time next
+    year, so I have plenty of time.
+
+Bliss was only temporarily appeased. He realized that to get a book
+ready by the time he wanted it-a book of sufficient size and importance
+to maintain the pace set by the Innocents meant rather more immediate
+action than his author seemed to contemplate. Futhermore, he knew that
+other publishers were besieging the author of the Innocents; a
+disquieting thought. In early July, when Mr. Langdon's condition had
+temporarily improved, Bliss had come to Elmira and proposed a book which
+should relate the author's travels and experiences in the Far West. It
+was an inviting subject, and Clemens, by this time more attracted by the
+idea of authorship and its rewards, readily enough agreed to undertake
+the volume. He had been offered half profits, and suggested that the new
+contract be arranged upon these terms. Bliss, figuring on a sale of
+100,000 copies, proposed seven and one-half per cent. royalty as an
+equivalent, and the contract was so arranged. In after-years, when the
+cost of manufacture and paper had become greatly reduced, Clemens, with
+but a confused notion of business details, believed he had been misled by
+Bliss in this contract, and was bitter and resentful accordingly. The
+figures remain, however, to show that Bliss dealt fairly. Seven and
+one-half per cent. of a subscription book did represent half profits up
+to 100,000 copies when the contract was drawn; but it required ten years
+to sell that quantity, and in that time conditions had changed. Bliss
+could hardly foresee that these things would be so, and as he was dead
+when the book touched the 100,000 mark he could not explain or readjust
+matters, whatever might have been his inclination.
+
+Clemens was pleased enough with the contract when it was made. To Orion
+he wrote July 15 (1870):
+
+    Per contract I must have another six-hundred-page book ready for my
+    publisher January 1st, and I only began it to-day. The subject of
+    it is a secret, because I may possibly change it. But as it stands
+    I propose to do up Nevada and California, beginning with the trip
+    across the country in the stage. Have you a memorandum of the route
+    we took, or the names of any of the stations we stopped at? Do you
+    remember any of the scenes, names, incidents, or adventures of the
+    coach trip?--for I remember next to nothing about the matter. Jot
+    down a foolscap page of items for me. I wish I could have two days'
+    talk with you.
+
+    I suppose I am to get the biggest copyright this time ever paid on a
+    subscription book in this country.
+
+The work so promptly begun made little progress. Hard days of illness
+and sorrow followed, and it was not until September that it was really
+under way. His natural enthusiasm over any new undertaking possessed
+him. On the 4th he wrote Bliss:
+
+During the past week I have written the first four chapters of the book,
+and I tell you 'The Innocents Abroad' will have to get up early to beat
+it. It will be a book that will jump straight into continental celebrity
+the first month it is issued.
+
+He prophesied a sale of 90,000 copies during the first twelve months and
+declared, "I see the capabilities of the subject."
+
+But further disasters, even then impending, made continued effort
+impossible; the prospect of the new book for a time became gloomy, the
+idea of it less inspiring. Other plans presented themselves, and at one
+time he thought of letting the Galaxy publishers get out a volume of his
+sketches. In October he wrote Bliss that he was "driveling along
+tolerably fair on the book, getting off from twelve to twenty pages of
+manuscript a day." Bliss naturally discouraged the Galaxy idea, and
+realizing that the new book might be long delayed, agreed to get out a
+volume of miscellany sufficiently large and important for subscription
+sales. He was doubtful of the wisdom of this plan, and when Clemens
+suddenly proposed a brand-new scheme his publisher very readily agreed to
+hold back the publication of Sketches indefinitely.
+
+The new book was to be adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa,
+then newly opened and of wide public interest. Clemens did not propose
+to visit the mines himself, but to let another man do the traveling, make
+the notes, and write or tell him the story, after which Clemens would
+enlarge and elaborate it in his own fashion. His adaptation of the
+letters of Professor Ford, a year earlier, had convinced him that his
+plan would work out successfully on a larger scale; he fixed upon his old
+friend, J. H. Riley, of Washington--["Riley-Newspaper Correspondent." See
+Sketches.]--(earlier of San Francisco), as the proper person to do the
+traveling. At the end of November he wrote Bliss:
+
+    I have put my greedy hands upon the best man in America for my
+    purpose, and shall start him to the diamond field in South Africa
+    within a fortnight at my expense . . . that the book will have a
+    perfectly beautiful sale.
+
+He suggested that Bliss advance Riley's expense money, the amount to be
+deducted from the first royalty returns; also he proposed an increased
+royalty, probably in view of the startling splendor of the new idea.
+Bliss was duly impressed, and the agreement was finally made on a basis
+of eight and one-half per cent., with an advance of royalty sufficient to
+see Riley to South Africa and return.
+
+Clemens had not yet heard from Riley definitely when he wrote his glowing
+letter to Bliss. He took it for granted that Riley, always an
+adventurous sort, would go. When Riley wrote him that he felt morally
+bound to the Alta, of which he was then Washington correspondent, also in
+certain other directions till the end of the session, Clemens wrote him
+at great length, detailing his scheme in full and urging him to write
+instantly to the Alta and others, asking a release on the ground of being
+offered a rare opportunity to improve his fortunes.
+
+You know right well that I would not have you depart a hair from any
+obligation for any money. The boundless confidence that I have in you
+is born of a conviction of your integrity in small as well as in great
+things. I know plenty of men whose integrity I would trust to here, but
+not off yonder in Africa.
+
+His proposal, in brief, to Riley was that the latter should make the trip
+to Africa without expense to himself, collect memoranda, and such diamond
+mines as might be found lying about handy. Upon his return he was to
+take up temporary residence in the Clemens household until the book was
+finished, after which large benefits were to accrue to everybody
+concerned. In the end Riley obtained a release from his obligations and
+was off for the diamond mines and fortune.
+
+Poor fellow! He was faithful in his mission, and it is said that he
+really located a mining claim that would have made him and his
+independent for all time to come; but returning home with his precious
+memoranda and the news of good fortune, he accidentally wounded himself
+with a fork while eating; blood-poisoning set in (they called it cancer
+then), and he was only able to get home to die. His memoranda were never
+used, his mining claim was never identified. Certainly, death was
+closely associated with Mark Twain's fortunes during those earlier days
+of his married life.
+
+On the whole the Buffalo residence was mainly a gloomy one; its ventures
+were attended by ill-fortune. For some reason Mark Twain's connection
+with the Express, while it had given the paper a wide reputation, had not
+largely increased its subscription. Perhaps his work on it was too
+varied and erratic. Nasby, who had popularized the Toledo Blade, kept
+steadily to one line. His farmer public knew always just what to expect
+when their weekly edition arrived.
+
+Clemens and his wife dreamed of a new habitation, and new faces and
+surroundings. They agreed to offer their home and his interests in the
+Express for sale. They began to talk of Hartford, where Twichell lived,
+and where Orion Clemens and his wife had recently located.
+
+Mark Twain's new fortunes had wrought changes in the affairs of his
+relatives. Already, before his marriage, he had prospected towns here
+and there with a view to finding an Eastern residence for his mother and
+sister, and he had kept Orion's welfare always in mind. When Pamela and
+her daughter came to his wedding he told them of a little city by the
+name of Fredonia (New York), not far from Buffalo, where he thought they
+might find a pleasant home.
+
+"I went in there by night and out by night," he said, "so I saw none of
+it, but I had an intelligent, attractive audience. Prospect Fredonia and
+let me know what it is like. Try to select a place where a good many
+funerals pass. Ma likes funerals. If you can pick a good funeral corner
+she will be happy."
+
+It was in her later life that Jane Clemens had developed this particular
+passion. She would consult the morning paper for any notice of obsequies
+and attend those that were easy of access. Watching the processions go
+by gave her a peculiar joy. Mrs. Moffett and her daughter did go to
+Fredonia immediately following the wedding. They found it residentially
+attractive, and rented a house before returning to St. Louis, a
+promptness that somewhat alarmed the old lady, who did not altogether
+fancy the idea of being suddenly set down in a strange house, in a
+strange land, even though it would be within hailing distance of Sam and
+his new wife. Perhaps the Fredonia funerals were sufficiently numerous
+and attractive, for she soon became attached to the place, and entered
+into the spirit of the life there, joining its temperance crusades, and
+the like, with zest and enjoyment.
+
+Onion remained in St. Louis, but when Bliss established a paper called
+The Publisher, and wanted an editor, he was chosen for the place,
+originally offered to his brother; the latter, writing to Onion, said:
+
+If you take the place with an air of perfect confidence in yourself,
+never once letting anything show in your bearing but a quiet, modest,
+entire, and perfect confidence in your ability to do pretty much anything
+in the world, Bliss will think you are the very man he needs; but don't
+show any shadow of timidity or unsoldierly diffidence, for that sort of
+thing is fatal to advancement.
+
+I warn you thus because you are naturally given to knocking your pot over
+in this way, when a little judicious conduct would make it boil.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXI
+
+SOME FURTHER LITERARY MATTERS
+
+Meantime The Innocents Abroad had continued to prosper. Its author
+ranked mainly as a humorist, but of such colossal proportions that his
+contemporaries had seemed to dwindle; the mighty note of the "Frog of
+Calaveras" had dwarfed a score of smaller peepers. At the end of a year
+from its date of publication the book had sold up to 67,000 and was
+continuing at the rate of several thousand monthly.
+
+"You are running it in staving, tiptop, first-class style," Clemens wrote
+to Bliss. "On the average ten people a day come and hunt me up to tell
+me I am a benefactor! I guess that is a part of the program we didn't
+expect, in the first place."
+
+Apparently the book appealed to readers of every grade. One hundred and
+fifteen copies were in constant circulation at the Mercantile Library, in
+New York, while in the most remote cabins of America it was read and
+quoted. Jack Van Nostrand, making a long horseback tour of Colorado,
+wrote:
+
+I stopped a week ago in a ranch but a hundred miles from nowhere. The
+occupant had just two books: the Bible and The Innocents Abroad--the
+former in good repair.
+
+Across the ocean the book had found no less favor, and was being
+translated into many and strange tongues. By what seems now some
+veritable magic its author's fame had become literally universal. The
+consul at Hongkong, discussing English literature with a Chinese
+acquaintance, a mandarin, mentioned The Pilgrim's Progress.
+
+"Yes, indeed, I have read it!" the mandarin said, eagerly. "We are
+enjoying it in China, and shall have it soon in our own language. It is
+by Mark Twain."
+
+In England the book had an amazing vogue from the beginning, and English
+readers were endeavoring to outdo the Americans in appreciation. Indeed,
+as a rule, English readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an
+understanding of Mark Twain's literary value with greater promptness than
+did the same class of readers at home. There were exceptions, of course.
+There were English critics who did not take Mark Twain seriously, there
+were American critics who did. Among the latter was a certain William
+Ward, an editor of a paper down in Macon, Georgia--The Beacon. Ward did
+not hold a place with the great magazine arbiters of literary rank. He
+was only an obscure country editor, but he wrote like a prophet. His
+article--too long to quote in full--concerned American humorists in
+general, from Washington Irving, through John Phoenix, Philander
+Doesticks, Sut Lovingwood, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings and Petroleum V.
+Nasby, down to Mark Twain. With the exception of the first and last
+named he says of them:
+
+    They have all had, or will have, their day. Some of them are
+    resting beneath the sod, and others still live whose work will
+    scarcely survive them. Since Irving no humorist in prose has held
+    the foundation of a permanent fame except it be Mark Twain, and
+    this, as in the case of Irving, is because he is a pure writer.
+    Aside from any subtle mirth that lurks through his composition, the
+    grace and finish of his more didactic and descriptive sentences
+    indicate more than mediocrity.
+
+The writer then refers to Mark Twain's description of the Sphinx,
+comparing it with Bulwer's, which he thinks may have influenced it. He
+was mistaken in this, for Clemens had not read Bulwer--never could read
+him at any length.
+
+Of the English opinions, that of The Saturday Review was perhaps most
+doubtful. It came along late in 1870, and would hardly be worth
+recalling if it were not for a resulting, or collateral, interest.
+Clemens saw notice of this review before he saw the review itself. A
+paragraph in the Boston Advertiser spoke of The Saturday Review as
+treating the absurdities of the Innocents from a serious standpoint. The
+paragraph closed:
+
+    We can imagine the delight of the humorist in reading this tribute
+    to his power; and indeed it is so amusing in itself that he can
+    hardly do better than reproduce the article in full in his next
+    monthly "Memoranda."
+
+The old temptation to hoax his readers prompted Mark Twain to "reproduce"
+in the Galaxy, not the Review article, which he had not yet seen, but an
+imaginary Review article, an article in which the imaginary reviewer
+would be utterly devoid of any sense of humor and treat the most absurd
+incidents of The New Pilgrim's Progress as if set down by the author in
+solemn and serious earnest. The pretended review began:
+
+    Lord Macaulay died too soon. We never felt this so deeply as when
+    we finished the last chapter of the above-named extravagant work.
+    Macaulay died too soon; for none but he could mete out complete and
+    comprehensive justice to the insolence, the impudence, the
+    presumption, the mendacity, and, above all, the majestic ignorance
+    of this author.
+
+The review goes on to cite cases of the author's gross deception. It
+says:
+
+    Let the cultivated English student of human nature picture to
+    himself this Mark Twain as a person capable of doing the following
+    described things; and not only doing them, but, with incredible
+    innocence, printing them tranquilly and calmly in a book. For
+    instance:
+
+    He states that he entered a hair-dresser's in Paris to get a shave,
+    and the first "rake" the barber gave him with his razor it loosened
+    his "hide," and lifted him out of the chair.
+
+    This is unquestionably extravagant. In Florence he was so annoyed
+    by beggars that he pretends to have seized and eaten one in a
+    frantic spirit of revenge. There is, of course, no truth in this.
+    He gives at full length the theatrical program, seventeen or
+    eighteen hundred years old, which he professes to have found in the
+    ruins of the Colosseum, among the dirt-and mold and rubbish. It is
+    a sufficient comment upon this subject to remark that even a cast-
+    iron program would not have lasted so long under the circumstances.
+
+There were two and one-half pages of this really delightful burlesque
+which the author had written with huge-enjoyment, partly as a joke on the
+Review, partly to trick American editors, who he believed would accept it
+as a fresh and startling proof of the traditional English lack of humor.
+
+But, as in the early sage-brush hoaxes, he rather overdid the thing.
+Readers and editors readily enough accepted it as genuine, so far as
+having come from The Saturday Review; but most of them, regarded it as a
+delicious bit of humor which Mark Twain himself had taken seriously, and
+was therefore the one sold. This was certainly startling, and by no
+means gratifying. In the next issue he undertook that saddest of all
+performances with tongue or pen: he explained his joke, and insisted on
+the truth of the explanation. Then he said:
+
+    If any man doubts my word now I will kill him. No, I will not kill
+    him; I will win his money. I will bet him twenty to one, and let
+    any New York publisher hold the stakes, that the statements I have
+    above made as to the authorship of the article in question are
+    entirely true.
+
+But the Cincinnati Enquirer persisted in continuing the joke--in "rubbing
+it in," as we say now. The Enquirer declared that Mark Twain had been
+intensely mortified at having been so badly taken in; that his
+explanation in the Galaxy was "ingenious, but unfortunately not true."
+The Enquirer maintained that The Saturday Review of October 8, 1870, did
+contain the article exactly as printed in the "Memoranda," and advised
+Mark Twain to admit that he was sold, and say no more about it.
+
+This was enraging. Mark Twain had his own ideas as to how far a joke
+might be carried without violence, and this was a good way beyond the
+limits. He denounced the Enquirer's statement as a "pitiful, deliberate
+falsehood," in his anger falling into the old-time phrasing of newspaper
+editorial abuse. He offered to bet them a thousand dollars in cash that
+they could not prove their assertions, and asked pointedly, in
+conclusion: "Will they swallow that falsehood ignominiously, or will they
+send an agent to the Galaxy office? I think the Cincinnati Enquirer must
+be edited by children." He promised that if they did not accept his
+financial proposition he would expose them in the next issue.
+
+The incident closed there. He was prevented, by illness in his
+household, from contributing to the next issue, and the second issue
+following was his final "Memoranda" installment. So the matter perished
+and was forgotten. It was his last editorial hoax. Perhaps he concluded
+that hoaxes in any form were dangerous playthings; they were too likely
+to go off at the wrong end.
+
+It was with the April number (1871) that he concluded his relations with
+the Galaxy. In a brief valedictory he gave his reasons:
+
+    I have now written for the Galaxy a year. For the last eight
+    months, with hardly an interval, I have had for my fellows and
+    comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the sick! During
+    these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle and
+    malignantly threatened two others. All this I have experienced, yet
+    all the time have been under contract to furnish "humorous" matter,
+    once a month, for this magazine. I am speaking the exact truth in
+    the above details. Please to put yourself in my place and
+    contemplate the grisly grotesqueness of the situation. I think that
+    some of the "humor" I have written during this period could have
+    been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the solemnity
+    of the occasion.
+
+    The "Memoranda" will cease permanently with this issue of the
+    magazine. To be a pirate on a low salary, and with no share in the
+    profits of the business, used to be my idea of an uncomfortable
+    occupation, but I have other views now. To be a monthly humorist in
+    a cheerless time is drearier.
+
+Without doubt he felt a glad relief in being rid of this recurrent,
+imperative demand. He wrote to Orion that he had told the Galaxy people
+he would not write another article, long or short, for less than $500,
+and preferred not to do it at all.
+
+The Galaxy department and the work on the Express were Mark Twain's
+farewell to journalism; for the "Memoranda" was essentially journalistic,
+almost as much so, and as liberally, as his old-time Enterprise position.
+Apparently he wrote with absolute freedom, unhampered by editorial policy
+or restriction. The result was not always pleasant, and it was not
+always refined. We may be certain that it was because of Mrs. Clemens's
+heavy burdens that year, and her consequent inability to exert a
+beneficent censorship, that more than one--more than a dozen--of the
+"Memoranda" contributions were permitted to see the light of print.
+
+As a whole, the literary result of Mark Twain's Buffalo period does not
+reach the high standard of The Innocents Abroad. It was a retrogression
+--in some measure a return to his earlier form. It had been done under
+pressure, under heavy stress of mind, as he said. Also there was another
+reason; neither the subject treated nor the environment of labor had
+afforded that lofty inspiration which glorified every step of the Quaker
+City journey. Buffalo was a progressive city--a beautiful city, as
+American cities go--but it was hardly an inspiring city for literature,
+and a dull, dingy newspaper office was far, very far, from the pleasant
+decks of the Quaker City, the camp-fires of Syria, the blue sky and sea
+of the Medit&ranean.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXII
+
+THE WRITING OF "ROUGHING IT"
+
+The third book published by Mark Twain was not the Western book he was
+preparing for Bliss. It was a small volume, issued by Sheldon & Co.,
+entitled Mark Twain's Autobiography (Burlesque) and First Romance. The
+Romance was the "Awful, Terrible Medieval Romance" which had appeared in
+the Express at the beginning of 1870. The burlesque autobiography had
+not previously appeared. The two made a thin little book, which, in
+addition to its literary features, had running through it a series of
+full-page, irrelevant pictures---cartoons of the Erie Railroad Ring,
+presented as illustrations of a slightly modified version of "The House
+That Jack Built." The "House" was the Erie headquarters, the purpose
+being to illustrate the swindling methods of the Ring. The faces of Jay
+Gould, James Fisk, Jr., John T. Hoffman, and others of the combination,
+are chiefly conspicuous. The publication was not important, from any
+standpoint. Literary burlesque is rarely important, and it was far from
+Mark Twain's best form of expression. A year or two later he realized
+the mistake of this book, bought in the plates and destroyed them.
+
+Meantime the new Western book was at a standstill. To Orion, in March,
+he wrote:
+
+    I am still nursing Livy night and day. I am nearly worn out. We
+    shall go to Elmira ten days hence (if Livy can travel on a mattress
+    then), and stay there until I finish the California book, say three
+    months. But I can't begin work right away when I get there; must
+    have a week's rest, for I have been through thirty days' terrific
+    siege.
+
+He promised to forward some of the manuscript soon.
+
+    Hold on four or five days and I will see if I can get a few chapters
+    fixed to send to Bliss . . . .
+
+    I have offered this house and the Express for sale, and when we go
+    to Elmira we leave here for good. I shall not select a new home
+    till the book is finished, but we have little doubt that Hartford
+    will be the place.
+
+He disposed of his interest in the Express in April, at a sacrifice of
+$10,000 on the purchase price. Mrs. Clemens and the baby were able to
+travel, and without further delay he took them to Elmira, to Quarry Farm.
+
+Quarry Farm, the home of Mrs. Clemens's sister, Mrs. Theodore Crane, is a
+beautiful hilltop, with a wide green slope, overlooking the hazy city and
+the Chemung River, beyond which are the distant hills. It was bought
+quite incidentally by Mr. and Mrs. Langdon, who, driving by one evening,
+stopped to water the horses and decided that it would make a happy summer
+retreat, where the families could combine their housekeeping arrangements
+during vacation days. When the place had first been purchased, they had
+debated on a name for it. They had tried several, among them
+"Go-as-you-please Hall," "Crane's Nest," and had finally agreed upon
+"Rest and Be Thankful." But this was only its official name. There was
+an abandoned quarry up the hill, a little way from the house, and the
+title suggested by Thomas K. Beecher came more naturally to the tongue.
+The place became Quarry Farm, and so remains.
+
+Clemens and his wife had fully made up their minds to live in Hartford.
+They had both conceived an affection for the place, Clemens mainly
+because of Twichell, while both of them yearned for the congenial
+literary and social atmosphere, and the welcome which they felt awaited
+them. Hartford was precisely what Buffalo in that day was not--a home
+for the literary man. It held a distinguished group of writers, most of
+whom the Clemenses already knew. Furthermore, with Bliss as publisher of
+the Mark Twain books, it held their chief business interests.
+
+Their plans for going were not very definite as to time. Clemens found
+that his work went better at the farm, and that Mrs. Clemens and the
+delicate baby daily improved. They decided to remain at Quarry Farm for
+the summer, their first summer in that beautiful place which would mean
+so much to them in the years to come.
+
+It was really Joe Goodman, as much as anything, that stirred a fresh
+enthusiasm in the new book. Goodman arrived just when the author's
+spirits were at low ebb.
+
+"Joe," he said, "I guess I'm done for. I don't appear to be able to get
+along at all with my work, and what I do write does not seem valuable.
+I'm afraid I'll never be able to reach the standard of 'The Innocents
+Abroad' again. Here is what I have written, Joe. Read it, and see if
+that is your opinion."
+
+Goodman took the manuscript and seated himself in a chair, while Clemens
+went over to a table and pretended to work. Goodman read page after
+page, critically, and was presently absorbed in it. Clemens watched him
+furtively, till he could stand it no longer. Then he threw down his pen,
+exclaiming:
+
+"I knew it! I knew it! I am writing nothing but rot. You have sat
+there all this time reading without a smile, and pitying the ass I am
+making of myself. But I am not wholly to blame. I am not strong enough
+to fight against fate. I have been trying to write a funny book, with
+dead people and sickness everywhere. Mr. Langdon died first, then a
+young lady in our house, and now Mrs. Clemens and the baby have been at
+the point of death all winter! Oh, Joe, I wish to God I could die
+myself!"
+
+"Mark," said Joe, "I was reading critically, not for amusement, and so
+far as I have read, and can judge, this is one of the best things you
+have ever written. I have found it perfectly absorbing. You are doing a
+great book!"
+
+Clemens knew that Goodman never spoke except from conviction, and the
+verdict was to him like a message of life handed down by an archangel. He
+was a changed man instantly. He was all enthusiasm, full of his subject,
+eager to go on. He proposed to pay Goodman a salary to stay there and
+keep him company and furnish him with inspiration--the Pacific coast
+atmosphere and vernacular, which he feared had slipped away from him.
+Goodman declined the salary, but extended his visit as long as his plans
+would permit, and the two had a happy time together, recalling old
+Comstock days. Every morning, for a month or more, they used to tramp
+over the farm. They fell into the habit of visiting the old quarry and
+pawing over the fragments in search of fossil specimens. Both of them
+had a poetic interest in geology, its infinite remotenesses and its
+testimonies. Without scientific knowledge, they took a deep pleasure in
+accumulating a collection, which they arranged on boards torn from an old
+fence, until they had enough specimens to fill a small museum. They
+imagined they could distinguish certain geological relations and
+families, and would talk about trilobites, the Old Red Sandstone period,
+and the azoic age, or follow random speculation to far-lying conclusions,
+developing vague humors of phrase and fancy, having altogether a joyful
+good time.
+
+Another interest that developed during Goodman's stay was in one Ruloff,
+who was under death sentence for a particularly atrocious murder. The
+papers were full of Ruloff's prodigious learning. It was said that he
+had in preparation a work showing the unity of all languages. Goodman
+and Clemens agreed that Ruloff's death would be a great loss to mankind,
+even though he was clearly a villain and deserved his sentence. They
+decided that justice would be served just as well if some stupid person
+were hung in his place, and following out this fancy Clemens one morning
+put aside his regular work and wrote an article to the Tribune, offering
+to supply a substitute for Ruloff. He signed it simply "Samuel
+Langhorne," and it was published as a serious communication, without
+comment, so far as the Tribune was concerned. Other papers, however,
+took it up and it was widely copied and commented upon. Apparently no
+one ever identified, Mark Twain with the authorship of the letter, which,
+by the way, does not appear to have prolonged Ruloff's earthly
+usefulness.--[The reader will find the Ruloff letter in full under
+Appendix K, at the end of last volume.]
+
+Life at the farm may have furnished agricultural inspiration, for Clemens
+wrote something about Horace Greeley's farming, also a skit concerning
+Henry Ward Beecher's efforts in that direction. Of Mr. Beecher's farming
+he said:
+
+"His strawberries would be a comfortable success if robins would eat
+turnips."
+
+The article amused Beecher, and perhaps Greeley was amused too, for he
+wrote:
+
+    MARK,--You are mistaken as to my criticisms on your farming. I
+    never publicly made any, while you have undertaken to tell the exact
+    cost per pint of my potatoes and cabbages, truly enough the
+    inspiration of genius. If you will really betake yourself to
+    farming, or even to telling what you know about it, rather than what
+    you don't know about mine, I will not only refrain from disparaging
+    criticism, but will give you my blessing.
+
+                     Yours,  HORACE GREELEY.
+
+The letter is in Mr. Greeley's characteristic scrawl, and no doubt
+furnished inspiration for the turnip story in 'Roughing It', also the
+model for the pretended facsimile of Greeley's writing.
+
+Altogether that was a busy, enterprising summer at Quarry Farm. By the
+middle of May, Clemens wrote to Bliss that he had twelve hundred
+manuscript pages of the new book already written, and that he was turning
+out the remainder at the rate of from thirty to sixty-five per day. He
+was in high spirits by this time. The family health had improved, and
+prospects were bright.
+
+I have enough manuscript on hand now to make (allowing for engravings)
+about four hundred pages of the book, consequently am two-thirds done. I
+intended to run up to Hartford about the middle of the week and take it
+along, but I find myself so thoroughly interested in my work now (a thing
+I have not experienced for months) that I can't bear to lose a single
+moment of the inspiration. So I will stay here and peg away as long as
+it lasts. My present idea is to write as much more as I have already
+written, and then collect from the mass the very best chapters and
+discard the rest. When I get it done I want to see the man who will
+begin to read it and not finish it. Nothing grieves me now; nothing
+troubles me, nothing bothers me or gets my attention. I don't think of
+anything but the book, and don't have an hour's unhappiness about
+anything, and don't care two cents whether school keeps or not. The book
+will be done soon now. It will be a starchy book; the dedication will be
+worth the price of the volume. Thus:
+
+                   TO THE LATE CAIN
+                  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
+
+    not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little
+    respect; not on account of sympathy for him, for his bloody deed
+    places him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking, but
+    out of a mere humane commiseration for him, in that it was his
+    misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent
+    insanity plea.
+
+Probably Mrs. Clemens diverted this picturesque dedication in favor of
+the Higbie inscription, or perhaps the author never really intended the
+literary tribute to Cain. The impulse that inspired it, however, was
+characteristic.
+
+In a postscript to this letter he adds:
+
+    My stock is looking up. I am getting the bulliest offers for books
+    and almanacs; am flooded with lecture invitations, and one
+    periodical offers me $6,000 cash for twelve articles of any length,
+    and on any subject, treated humorously or otherwise.
+
+He set in to make hay while the sun was shining. In addition to the
+California book, which was now fast nearing completion, he discussed a
+scheme with Goodman for a six-hundred-page work which they were to do
+jointly; he planned and wrote one or two scenes from a Western play, to
+be built from episodes in the new book (one of them was the "Arkansas"
+incident, related in Chapter XXXI); he perfected one of his several
+inventions--an automatically adjusting vest-strap; he wrote a number of
+sketches, made an occasional business trip to New York and Hartford;
+prospected the latter place for a new home. The shadow which had hung
+over the sojourn in Buffalo seemed to have lifted.
+
+He had promised Bliss some contributions for his new paper, and in June
+he sent three sketches. In an accompanying letter he says:
+
+    Here are three articles which you may have if you will pay $125 for
+    the lot. If you don't want them I'll sell them to the Galaxy, but
+    not for a cent less than three times the money.... If you take them
+    pay one-tenth of the $125 in weekly instalments to Orion till he has
+    received it all.
+
+He reconsidered his resolution not to lecture again, and closed with
+Redpath for the coming season. He found himself in a lecture-writing
+fever. He wrote three of them in succession: one on Artemus Ward,
+another on "Reminiscences of Some Pleasant Characters I Have Met," and a
+third one based on chapters from the new book. Of the "Reminiscence"
+lecture he wrote Redpath:
+
+"It covers my whole acquaintance; kings, lunatics, idiots, and all."
+Immediately afterward he wrote that he had prepared still another
+lecture, "title to be announced later."
+
+"During July I'll decide which one I like best," he said. He instructed
+Redpath not to make engagements for him to lecture in churches. "I never
+made a success of a lecture in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh
+in a church."
+
+Redpath was having difficulties in arranging a circuit to suit him.
+Clemens had prejudices against certain towns and localities, prejudices
+that were likely to change overnight. In August he wrote:
+
+    DEAR RED,--I am different from other women; my mind changes oftener.
+    People who have no mind can easily be stead fast and firm, but when
+    a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea
+    of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo.
+    See? Therefore, if you will notice, one week I am likely to give
+    rigid instructions to confine me to New England; the next week send
+    me to Arizona; the next week withdraw my name; the next week give
+    you full, untrammeled swing; and the week following modify it. You
+    must try to keep the run of my mind, Redpath that is your business,
+    being the agent, and it always was too many for me.... Now about
+    the West this week, I am willing that you shall retain all the
+    Western engagements. But what I shall want next week is still with
+    God.
+                         Yours,  MARK.
+
+He was in Hartford when this letter was written, arranging for residence
+there and the removal of his belongings. He finally leased the fine
+Hooker house on Ford Street, in that pleasant seclusion known as Nook
+Farm--the literary part of Hartford, which included the residence of
+Charles Dudley Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. He arranged for
+possession of the premises October 1st. So the new home was settled
+upon; then learning that Nasby was to be in Boston, he ran over to that
+city for a few days of recreation after his season's labors.
+
+Preparations for removal to Hartford were not delayed. The Buffalo
+property was disposed of, the furnishings were packed and shipped away.
+The house which as bride and groom they had entered so happily was left
+empty and deserted, never to be entered by them again. In the year and a
+half of their occupancy it had seen well-nigh all the human round, all
+that goes to make up the happiness and the sorrow of life.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXIII
+
+LECTURING DAYS
+
+Life in Hartford, in the autumn of 1871, began in the letter, rather than
+in the spirit. The newcomers were received with a wide, neighborly
+welcome, but the disorder of establishment and the almost immediate
+departure of the head of the household on a protracted lecturing tour
+were disquieting things; the atmosphere of the Clemens home during those
+early Hartford days gave only a faint promise of its future loveliness.
+
+As in a far later period, Mark Twain had resorted to lecturing to pay off
+debt. He still owed a portion of his share in the Express; also he had
+been obliged to obtain an advance from the lecture bureau. He dreaded,
+as always, the tedium of travel, the clatter of hotel life, the monotony
+of entertainment, while, more than most men, he loved the tender luxury
+of home. It was only that he could not afford to lose the profit offered
+on the platform.
+
+His season opened at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, October 16th, and his
+schedule carried him hither and thither, to and fro, over distances that
+lie between Boston and Chicago. There were opportunities to run into
+Hartford now and then, when he was not too far away, and in November he
+lectured there on Artemus Ward.
+
+He changed his entertainment at least twice that season. He began with
+the "Reminiscences," the lecture which he said would treat of all those
+whom he had met, "idiots, lunatics, and kings," but he did not like it,
+or it did not go well. He wrote Redpath of the Artemus Ward address:
+
+"It suits me, and I'll never deliver the nasty, nauseous 'Reminiscences'
+any more."
+
+But the Ward lecture was good for little more than a month, for on
+December 8th he wrote again:
+
+    Notify all hands that from this time I shall talk nothing but
+    selections from my forthcoming book, 'Roughing It'. Tried it twice
+    last night; suits me tiptop.
+
+And somewhat later:
+
+    Had a splendid time with a splendid audience in Indianapolis last
+    night; a perfectly jammed house, just as I have all the time out
+    here.... I don't care now to have any appointments canceled. I'll
+    even "fetch" those Dutch Pennsylvanians with this lecture.
+
+    Have paid up $4,000 indebtedness. You are the last on my list.
+    Shall begin to pay you in a few days, and then I shall be a free man
+    again.
+
+Undoubtedly he reveled in the triumphs of a platform tour, though at no
+time did he regard it as a pleasure excursion. During those early weeks
+the proofs of his new book, chasing him from place to place, did not add
+to his comfort. Still, with large, substantial rewards in hand and in
+prospect, one could endure much.
+
+In the neighborhood of Boston there were other compensations. He could
+spend a good part of his days at the Lyceum headquarters, in School
+Street, where there was always congenial fellowship--Nasby, Josh
+Billings, and the rest of the peripatetic group that about the end of the
+year collected there. Their lectures were never tried immediately in
+Boston, but in the outlying towns; tried and perfected--or discarded.
+When the provincial audiences were finally satisfied, then the final.
+test in the Boston Music Hall was made, and if this proved successful the
+rest of the season was safe. Redpath's lecturers put up at Young's
+Hotel, and spent their days at the bureau, smoking and spinning yarns, or
+talking shop. Early in the evening they scattered to the outlying towns,
+Lowell, Lexington, Concord, New Bedford. There is no such a condition
+to-day: lecturers are few, lecture bureaus obscure; there are no great
+reputations made on the platform.
+
+Neither is there any such distinct group of humorists as the one just
+mentioned. Humor has become universal since then. Few writers of this
+age would confess to taking their work so seriously as to be at all times
+unsmiling in it; only about as many, in fact, as in that day would
+confess to taking their work so lightly that they could regard life's
+sterner phases and philosophies with a smile.
+
+Josh Billings was one of the gentlest and loveliest of our pioneers of
+laughter. The present generation is not overfamiliar even with his name,
+but both the name and sayings of that quaint soul were on everybody's
+lips at the time of which we are writing. His true name was Henry W.
+Shaw, and he was a genuine, smiling philosopher, who might have built up
+a more permanent and serious reputation had he not been induced to
+disfigure his maxims with ridiculous spelling in order to popularize them
+and make them bring a living price. It did not matter much with Nasby's
+work. An assumed illiteracy belonged with the side of life which he
+presented; but it is pathetic now to consider some of the really masterly
+sayings of Josh Billings presented in that uncouth form which was
+regarded as a part of humor a generation ago. Even the aphorisms that
+were essentially humorous lose value in that degraded spelling.
+
+"When a man starts down hill everything is greased for the occasion,"
+could hardly be improved upon by distorted orthography, and here are a
+few more gems which have survived that deadly blight.
+
+"Some folks mistake vivacity for wit; whereas the difference between
+vivacity and wit is the same as the difference between the lightning-bug
+and the lightning."
+
+"Don't take the bull by the horns-take him by the tail; then you can let
+go when you want to."
+
+"The difficulty is not that we know so much, but that we know so much
+that isn't so."
+
+Josh Billings, Nasby, and Mark Twain were close friends. They had
+themselves photographed in a group, and there was always some pleasantry
+going on among them. Josh Billings once wrote on "Lekturing," and under
+the head of "Rule Seven," which treated of unwisdom of inviting a
+lecturer to a private house, he said:
+
+    Think of asking Mark Twain home with yu, for instance. Yure good
+    wife has put her house in apple-pie order for the ockashun;
+    everything is just in the right place. Yu don't smoke in yure
+    house, never. Yu don't put yure feet on the center-table, yu don't
+    skatter the nuzepapers all over the room, in utter confushion: order
+    and ekonemy governs yure premises. But if yu expeckt Mark Twain to
+    be happy, or even kumfortable yu hav got to buy a box of cigars
+    worth at least seventeen dollars and yu hav got to move all the
+    tender things out ov yure parlor. Yu hav got to skatter all the
+    latest papers around the room careless, you hav got to hav a pitcher
+    ov icewater handy, for Mark is a dry humorist. Yu hav got to ketch
+    and tie all yure yung ones, hed and foot, for Mark luvs babys only
+    in theory; yu hav got to send yure favorite kat over to the nabors
+    and hide yure poodle. These are things that hav to be done, or Mark
+    will pak hiz valise with hiz extry shirt collar and hiz lektur on
+    the Sandwich Islands, and travel around yure streets, smoking and
+    reading the sighns over the store doorways untill lektur time
+    begins.
+
+As we-are not likely to touch upon Mark Twain's lecturing, save only
+lightly, hereafter, it may be as well to say something of his method at
+this period. At all places visited by lecturers there was a committee,
+and it was the place of the chairman to introduce the lecturer, a
+privilege which he valued, because it gave him a momentary association
+with distinction and fame. Clemens was a great disappointment to these
+officials. He had learned long ago that he could introduce himself more
+effectively than any one else. His usual formula was to present himself
+as the chairman of the committee, introducing the lecturer of the
+evening; then, with what was in effect a complete change of personality,
+to begin his lecture. It was always startling and amusing, always a
+success; but the papers finally printed this formula, which took the
+freshness out of it, so that he had to invent others. Sometimes he got
+up with the frank statement that he was introducing himself because he
+had never met any one who could pay a proper tribute to his talents; but
+the newspapers printed that too, and he often rose and began with no
+introduction at all.
+
+Whatever his method of beginning, Mark Twain's procedure probably was the
+purest exemplification of the platform entertainer's art which this
+country has ever seen. It was the art that makes you forget the
+artisanship, the art that made each hearer forget that he was not being
+personally entertained by a new and marvelous friend, who had traveled a
+long way for his particular benefit. One listener has written that he
+sat "simmering with laughter" through what he supposed was the
+continuation of the introduction, waiting for the traditional lecture to
+begin, when presently the lecturer, with a bow, disappeared, and it was
+over. The listener looked at his watch; he had been there more than an
+hour. He thought it could be no more than ten minutes, at most. Many
+have tried to set down something of the effect his art produced on them,
+but one may not clearly convey the story of a vanished presence and a
+silent voice.
+
+There were other pleasant associations in Boston. Howells was there, and
+Aldrich; also Bret Harte, who had finished his triumphal progress across
+the continent to join the Atlantic group. Clemens appears not to have
+met Aldrich before, though their acquaintance had begun a year earlier,
+when Aldrich, as editor of Every Saturday, had commented on a poem
+entitled, "The Three Aces," which had appeared in the Buffalo Express.
+Aldrich had assumed the poem to be the work of Mark Twain, and had
+characterized it as "a feeble imitation of Bret Harte's 'Heathen
+Chinee.'" Clemens, in a letter, had mildly protested as to the charge of
+authorship, and Aldrich had promptly printed the letter with apologetic
+explanation. A playful exchange of personal letters followed, and the
+beginning of a lifelong friendship.
+
+One of the letters has a special interest here. Clemens had followed his
+protest with an apology for it, asking that no further notice be taken of
+the matter. Aldrich replied that it was too late to prevent "doing him
+justice," as his explanation was already on the press, but that if
+Clemens insisted he would withdraw it in the next issue. Clemens then
+wrote that he did not want it withdrawn, and explained that he hated to
+be accused of plagiarizing Bret Harte, to whom he was deeply indebted for
+literary schooling in the California days. Continuing he said:
+
+    Do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot
+    through Harte's brain? It was this. When they were trying to
+    decide upon a vignette cover for the Overland a grizzly bear (of the
+    arms of the State of California) was chosen. Nahl Bros. carved him
+    and the page was printed with him in it.
+
+    As a bear he was a success. He was a good bear, but then, it was
+    objected, he was an objectless bear--a bear that meant nothing,
+    signified nothing, simply stood there, snarling over his shoulder at
+    nothing, and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured
+    intruder upon the fair page. All hands said that none were
+    satisfied; they hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as
+    much to have him there when there was no point to him. But
+    presently Harte took a pencil and drew two simple lines under his
+    feet, and behold he was a magnificent success!--the ancient symbol
+    of California savagery, snarling at the approaching type of high and
+    progressive civilization, the first Overland locomotive! I just
+    think that was nothing less than an inspiration.--[The "bear" was
+    that which has always appeared on the Overland cover; the "two
+    lines" formed a railway track under his feet. Clemens's original
+    letter contained crude sketches illustrating these things.]
+
+Among the Boston group was another Californian, Ralph Keeler, an
+eccentric, gifted, and altogether charming fellow, whom Clemens had known
+on the Pacific slope. Keeler had been adopted by the Boston writers, and
+was grateful and happy accordingly. He was poor of purse, but
+inexhaustibly rich in the happier gifts of fortune. He was unfailingly
+buoyant, light-hearted, and hopeful. On an infinitesimal capital he had
+made a tour of many lands, and had written of it for the Atlantic. In
+that charmed circle he was as overflowingly happy as if he had been
+admitted to the company of the gods. Keeler was affectionately regarded
+by all who knew him, and he offered a sort of worship in return. He
+often accompanied Mark Twain on his lecture engagements to the various
+outlying towns, and Clemens brought him back to his hotel for breakfast,
+where they had good, enjoyable talks together. Once Keeler came eagerly
+to the hotel and made his way up to Clemens's room.
+
+"Come with me," he said. "Quick!"
+
+"What is it? What's happened?"
+
+"Don't wait to talk. Come with me."
+
+They tramped briskly through the streets till they reached the public
+library, entered, Keeler leading the way, not stopping till he faced a
+row of shelves filled with books. He pointed at one of them, his face
+radiant with joy.
+
+"Look," he said. "Do you see it?"
+
+Clemens looked carefully now and identified one of the books as a
+still-born novel which Keeler had published.
+
+"This is a library," said Keeler, eagerly, "and they've got it!"
+
+His whole being was aglow with the wonder of it. He had been
+investigating; the library records showed that in the two years the book
+had been there it had been taken out and read three times! It never
+occurred to Clemens even to smile. Knowing Mark Twain, one would guess
+that his eyes were likely to be filled with tears.
+
+In his book about Mark Twain, Howells tells of a luncheon which Keeler
+gave to his more famous associates--Aldrich, Fields, Harte, Clemens, and
+Howells himself--a merry informal occasion. Says Howells:
+
+    Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and
+    aimless and joyful talk--play, beginning and ending nowhere, of
+    eager laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat-
+    lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional
+    concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it
+    gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full of
+    good-fellowship, Bret Harte's leering dramatization of Clemens's
+    mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates. "Why,
+    fellows," he spluttered, "this is the dream of Mark's life," and I
+    remember the glance from under Clemens's feathery eyebrows which
+    betrayed his enjoyment of the fun.
+
+Very likely Keeler gave that luncheon in celebration of his book's
+triumph; it would be like him.
+
+Keeler's end was a mystery. The New York Tribune commissioned him to go
+to Cuba to report the facts of some Spanish outrages. He sailed from New
+York in the steamer, and was last seen alive the night before the vessel
+reached Havana. He had made no secret of his mission, but had discussed
+it in his frank, innocent way. There were some Spanish military men on
+the ship.
+
+Clemens, commenting on the matter, once said:
+
+"It may be that he was not flung into the sea, still the belief was
+general that that was what had happened."
+
+In his book Howells refers to the doubt with which Mark Twain was then
+received by the polite culture of Boston; which, on the other hand,
+accepted Bret Harte as one of its own, forgiving even social
+shortcomings.
+
+The reason is not difficult to understand. Harte had made his appeal
+with legitimate fiction of the kind which, however fresh in flavor and
+environment, was of a sort to be measured and classified. Harte spoke a
+language they could understand; his humor, his pathos, his point of view
+were all recognizable. It was an art already standardized by a master.
+It is no reflection on the genius of Bret Harte to liken his splendid
+achievements to those of Charles Dickens. Much of Harte's work is in no
+way inferior to that of his great English prototype. Dickens never wrote
+a better short story than "The Outcasts of Poker Flats." He never wrote
+as good a short story as "The Luck of Roaring Camp." Boston critics
+promptly realized these things and gave Harte his correct rating. That
+they failed to do this with Mark Twain, lay chiefly in the fact that he
+spoke to them in new and startling tongues. His gospels were likely to
+be heresies; his literary eccentricities were all unclassified. Of the
+ultrafastidious set Howells tells us that Charles Eliot Norton and Prof.
+Francis J. Child were about the only ones who accorded him unqualified
+approval. The others smiled and enjoyed him, but with that condescension
+which the courtier is likely to accord to motley and the cap and bells.
+Only the great, simple-hearted, unbiased multitude, the public, which had
+no standards but the direct appeal from one human heart to another, could
+recognize immediately his mightier heritage, could exalt and place him on
+the throne.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXIV
+
+"ROUGHING IT".
+
+Telegram to Redpath:
+
+    How in the name of God does a man find his way from here to Amherst,
+    and when must he start? Give me full particulars, and send a man
+    with me. If I had another engagement I would rot before I would
+    fill it.                S. L. CLEMENS.
+
+This was at the end of February, and he believed that he was standing on
+the platform for the last time. He loathed the drudgery of the work, and
+he considered there was no further need. He was no longer in debt, and
+his income he accounted ample. His new book, 'Roughing It',--[It was
+Bliss who had given the new book the title of Roughing It. Innocents at
+Home had been its provision title, certainly a misleading one, though it
+has been retained in England for the second volume; for what reason it
+would be difficult to explain.]--had had a large advance sale, and its
+earnings promised to rival those of the 'Innocents'. He resolved in the
+future to confine himself to the trade and profits of authorship.
+
+The new book had advantages in its favor. Issued early in the year, it
+was offered at the best canvassing season; particularly so, as the
+author's lectures had prepared the public for its reception. Furthermore,
+it dealt with the most picturesque phases of American life, scenes and
+episodes vastly interesting at that time, and peculiarly adapted to Mark
+Twain's literary expression. In a different way 'Roughing It' is quite
+as remarkable as 'The Innocents Abroad.' If it has less charm, it has
+greater interest, and it is by no means without charm. There is
+something delicious, for instance, in this bit of pure enjoyment of the
+first day's overland travel:
+
+    It was now just dawn, and as we stretched our cramped legs full
+    length on the mail-sacks, and gazed out through the windows across
+    the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist to where
+    there was an expectant look in the Eastern horizon, our perfect
+    enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy. The
+    stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping the
+    curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle
+    swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses' hoofs,
+    the cracking of the driver's whip, and his "Hi-yi! g'lang!" were
+    music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared to give
+    us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after us
+    with interest and envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the
+    pipe of peace, and compared all this luxury with the years of
+    tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was
+    only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had
+    found it.
+
+Also, there is that lofty presentation of South Pass, and a picture of
+the alkali desert, so parching, so withering in its choking realism, that
+it makes the throat ache and the tongue dry to read it. Just a bit of
+the desert in passing:
+
+    The sun beats down with a dead, blistering, relentless malignity;
+    the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but
+    scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface--it is absorbed
+    before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air
+    stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the
+    brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature visible in any
+    direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its
+    monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound, not a sigh,
+    not a whisper, not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of
+    bird; not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that
+    dead air.
+
+As for the humor of the book, it has been chiefly famous for that. "Buck
+Fanshaw's Funeral" has become a classic, and the purchase of the "Mexican
+Plug." But it is to no purpose to review the book here in detail. We
+have already reviewed the life and environment out of which it grew.
+
+Without doubt the story would have contained more of the poetic and
+contemplative, in which he was always at his best, if the subject itself,
+as in the Innocents, had lent itself oftener to this form of writing. It
+was the lack of that halo perhaps which caused the new book never quite
+to rank with its great forerunner in public favor. There could hardly be
+any other reason. It presented a fresher theme; it abounded in humor;
+technically, it was better written; seemingly it had all the elements of
+popularity and of permanence. It did, in fact, possess these qualities,
+but its sales, except during the earlier months of its canvass, never
+quite equaled those of The Innocents Abroad.
+
+'Roughing It' was accepted by the public for just what it was and is, a
+great picture of the Overland Pioneer days--a marvelous picture of
+frontier aspects at a time when the frontier itself, even with its
+hardships and its tragedies, was little more than a vast primal joke;
+when all frontiersmen were obliged to be laughing philosophers in order
+to survive the stress of its warfares.
+
+A word here about this Western humor: It is a distinct product. It grew
+out of a distinct condition--the battle with the frontier. The fight was
+so desperate, to take it seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that
+they might not weep; men, when they could no longer swear. "Western
+humor" was the result. It is the freshest, wildest humor in the world,
+but there is tragedy behind it.
+
+'Roughing It' presented the picture of those early conditions with the
+startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which, in effect, it was.
+It was not accurate history, even of the author's own adventures. It was
+true in its aspects, rather than in its details. The greater artist
+disregards the truth of detail to render more strikingly a phase or a
+condition, to produce an atmosphere, to reconstruct a vanished time. This
+was what Mark Twain did in 'Roughing It'. He told the story of overland
+travel and the frontier, for his own and future generations, in what is
+essentially a picaresque novel, a work of unperishing fiction, founded on
+fact.
+
+The sales of 'Roughing It' during the first three months aggregated
+nearly forty thousand copies, and the author was lavishly elate
+accordingly. To Orion (who had already closed his career with Bliss, by
+exercise of those hereditary eccentricities through which he so often
+came to grief) he gave $1,000 out of the first royalty check, in
+acknowledgment of the memorandum book and other data which Orion had
+supplied. Clemens believed the new book would sell one hundred thousand
+copies within the year; but the sale diminished presently, and at the end
+of the first year it was considerably behind the Innocents for the same
+period. As already stated, it required ten years for Roughing It to
+reach the one-hundred-thousand mark, which the Innocents reached in
+three.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXV
+
+A BIRTH, A DEATH, AND A VOYAGE
+
+The year 1872 was an eventful one in Mark Twain's life. At Elmira, on
+March 19th, his second child, a little girl, whom they named Susan
+Olivia, was born. On June 2d, in the new home in Hartford, to which they
+had recently moved, his first child, a little boy, Langdon, died. He had
+never been strong, his wavering life had often been uncertain, always
+more of the spirit than the body, and in Elmira he contracted a heavy
+cold, or perhaps it was diphtheria from the beginning. In later years,
+whenever Clemens spoke of the little fellow, he never failed to accuse
+himself of having been the cause of the child's death. It was Mrs.
+Clemens's custom to drive out each morning with Langdon, and once when
+she was unable to go Clemens himself went instead.
+
+"I should not have been permitted to do it," he said, remembering. "I was
+not qualified for any such responsibility as that. Some one should have
+gone who had at least the rudiments of a mind. Necessarily I would lose
+myself dreaming. After a while the coachman looked around and noticed
+that the carriage-robes had dropped away from the little fellow, and that
+he was exposed to the chilly air. He called my attention to it, but it
+was too late. Tonsilitis or something of the sort set in, and he did not
+get any better, so we took him to Hartford. There it was pronounced
+diphtheria, and of course he died."
+
+So, with or without reason, he added the blame of another tragedy to the
+heavy burden of remorse which he would go on piling up while he lived.
+
+The blow was a terrible one to Mrs. Clemens; even the comfort of the
+little new baby on her arm could not ease the ache in her breast. It
+seemed to her that death was pursuing her. In one of her letters she
+says:
+
+"I feel so often as if my path is to be lined with graves," and she
+expresses the wish that she may drop out of life herself before her
+sister and her husband--a wish which the years would grant.
+
+They did not return to Elmira, for it was thought that the air of the
+shore would be better for the little girl; so they spent the summer at
+Saybrook, Connecticut, at Fenwick Hall, leaving Orion and his wife in
+charge of the house at Hartford.
+
+Beyond a few sketches, Clemens did very little literary work that summer,
+but he planned a trip to Europe, and he invented what is still known and
+sold as the "Mark Twain Scrap-Book."
+
+He wrote to Orion of his proposed trip to England, and dilated upon his
+scrap-book with considerable enthusiasm. The idea had grown out of the
+inconvenience of finding a paste-jar, and the general mussiness of
+scrap-book keeping. His new plan was a self-pasting scrap-book with the
+gum laid on in narrow strips, requiring only to be dampened with a sponge
+or other moist substance to be ready for the clipping. He states that he
+intends to put the invention into the hands of Slote, Woodman & Co., of
+whom Dan Slote, his old Quaker City room-mate, was the senior partner,
+and have it manufactured for the trade.
+
+About this time began Mark Twain's long and active interest in copyright.
+Previously he had not much considered the subject; he had taken it for
+granted there was no step that he could take, while international piracy
+was a recognized institution. On both sides of the water books were
+appropriated, often without profit, sometimes even without credit, to the
+author. To tell the truth, Clemens had at first regarded it rather in
+the nature of a compliment that his books should be thought worth
+pirating in England, but as time passed he realized that he was paying
+heavily for this recognition. Furthermore, he decided that he was
+forfeiting a right; rather that he was being deprived of it: something
+which it was in his nature to resent.
+
+When 'Roughing It' had been ready for issue he agreed with Bliss that
+they should try the experiment of copyrighting it in England, and see how
+far the law would protect them against the voracious little publisher,
+who thus far had not only snapped up everything bearing Mark Twain's
+signature, but had included in a volume of Mark Twain sketches certain
+examples of very weak humor with which Mark Twain had been previously
+unfamiliar.
+
+Whatever the English pirate's opinion of the copyright protection of
+'Roughing It' may have been, he did not attempt to violate it. This was
+gratifying. Clemens came to regard England as a friendly power. He
+decided to visit it and spy out the land. He would make the acquaintance
+of its people and institutions and write a book, which would do these
+things justice.
+
+He gave out no word of his real purpose. He merely said that he was
+going over to see his English publishers, and perhaps to arrange for a
+few lectures. He provided himself with some stylographic note-books, by
+which he could produce two copies of his daily memoranda--one for himself
+and one to mail to Mrs. Clemens--and sailed on the Scotia August 21,
+1872.
+
+Arriving in Liverpool he took train for London, and presently the
+wonderful charm of that old, finished country broke upon him. His "first
+hour in England was an hour of delight," he records; "of rapture and
+ecstasy. These are the best words I can find, but they are not adequate;
+they are not strong enough to convey the feeling which this first vision
+of rural England brought me." Then he noticed that the gentleman
+opposite in his compartment paid no attention to the scenery, but was
+absorbed in a green-covered volume. He was so absorbed in it that, by
+and by, Clemens's curiosity was aroused. He shifted his position a
+little and his eye caught the title. It was the first volume of the
+English edition of The Innocents Abroad. This was gratifying for a
+moment; then he remembered that the man had never laughed, never even
+smiled during the hour of his steady reading. Clemens recalled what he
+had heard of the English lack of humor. He wondered if this was a fair
+example of it, and if the man could be really taking seriously every word
+he was reading. Clemens could not look at the scenery any more for
+watching his fellow-passenger, waiting with a fascinated interest for the
+paragraph that would break up that iron-clad solemnity. It did not come.
+During all the rest of the trip to London the atmosphere of the
+compartment remained heavy with gloom.
+
+He drove to the Langham Hotel, always popular with Americans, established
+himself, and went to look up his publishers. He found the Routledges
+about to sit down to luncheon in a private room, up-stairs, in their
+publishing house. He joined them, and not a soul stirred from that table
+again until evening. The Routledges had never heard Mark Twain talk
+before, never heard any one talk who in the least resembled him. Various
+refreshments were served during the afternoon, came and went, while this
+marvelous creature talked on and they listened, reveling, and wondering
+if America had any more of that sort at home. By and by dinner was
+served; then after a long time, when there was no further excuse for
+keeping him there, they took him to the Savage Club, where there were yet
+other refreshments and a gathering of the clans to welcome this new
+arrival as a being from some remote and unfamiliar star.
+
+Tom Hood, the younger, was there, and Harry Lee, and Stanley the
+explorer, who had but just returned from finding Livingstone, and Henry
+Irving, and many another whose name remains, though the owners of those
+names are all dead now, and their laughter and their good-fellowship are
+only a part of that intangible fabric which we call the past.'--[Clemens
+had first known Stanley as a newspaper man. "I first met him when he
+reported a lecture of mine in St. Louis," he said once in a conversation
+where the name of Stanley was mentioned.]
+
+
+
+
+LXXXVI
+
+ENGLAND
+
+From that night Mark Twain's stay in England could not properly be called
+a gloomy one.
+
+Routledge, Hood, Lee, and, in fact, all literary London, set themselves
+the task of giving him a good time. Whatever place of interest they
+could think of he was taken there; whatever there was to see he saw it.
+Dinners, receptions, and assemblies were not complete without him. The
+White Friars' Club and others gave banquets in his honor. He was the
+sensation of the day. When he rose to speak on these occasions he was
+greeted with wild cheers. Whatever he said they eagerly applauded--too
+eagerly sometimes, in the fear that they might be regarded as insensible
+to American humor. Other speakers delighted in chaffing him in order to
+provoke his retorts. When a speaker humorously referred to his American
+habit of carrying a cotton umbrella, his reply that he followed this
+custom because a cotton umbrella was the only kind of an umbrella that an
+Englishman wouldn't steal, was all over England next day, and regarded as
+one of the finest examples of wit since the days of Swift.
+
+The suddenness and completeness of his acceptance by the great ones of
+London rather overwhelmed and frightened him made him timid. Joaquin
+Miller writes:
+
+    He was shy as a girl, although time was already coyly flirting white
+    flowers at his temples, and could hardly be coaxed to meet the
+    learned and great who wanted to take him by the hand.
+
+Many came to call on him at his hotel, among them Charles Reade and Canon
+Kingsley. Kingsley came twice without finding him; then wrote, asking
+for an appointment. Reade invited his assistance on a novel. Indeed, it
+was in England that Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come
+into his rightful heritage. Whatever may have been the doubts concerning
+him in America, there was no question in England. Howells says:
+
+    In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. Lord mayors,
+    lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he
+    was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the
+    favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation.
+
+After that first visit of Mark Twain's, when Americans in England,
+referring to their great statesmen, authors, and the like, naturally
+mentioned the names of Seward, Webster, Lowell, or Holmes, the English
+comment was likely to be: "Never mind those. We can turn out academic
+Sewards by the dozen, and cultured humorists like Lowell and Holmes by
+the score. Tell us of Lincoln, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain. We cannot
+match these; they interest us." And it was true. History could not
+match them, for they were unique.
+
+Clemens would have been more than human if in time he had not realized
+the fuller meaning of this triumph, and exulted in it a little to the
+folks at home. There never lived a more modest, less pretentious, less
+aggressive man than Mark Twain, but there never lived a man who took a
+more childlike delight in genuine appreciation; and, being childlike, it
+was only human that he should wish those nearest to him to share his
+happiness. After one memorable affair he wrote:
+
+    I have been received in a sort of tremendous way to-night by the
+    brains of London, assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of
+    London; mine being (between you and me) a name which was received
+    with a thundering outburst of spontaneous applause when the long
+    list of guests was called.
+
+I might have perished on the spot but for the friendly support and
+assistance of my excellent friend, Sir John Bennett.
+
+This letter does not tell all of the incident or the real reason why he
+might have perished on the spot. During the long roll-call of guests he
+had lost interest a little, and was conversing in whispers with his
+"excellent friend," Sir John Bennett, stopping to applaud now and then
+when the applause of the others indicated that some distinguished name
+had been pronounced. All at once the applause broke out with great
+vehemence. This must be some very distinguished person indeed. He
+joined in it with great enthusiasm. When it was over he whispered to Sir
+John:
+
+"Whose name was that we were just applauding?"
+
+"Mark Twain's."
+
+Whereupon the support was needed.
+
+Poor little pirate Hotten did not have a happy time during this visit. He
+had reveled in the prospect at first, for he anticipated a large increase
+to be derived from his purloined property; but suddenly, one morning, he
+was aghast to find in the Spectator a signed letter from Mark Twain, in
+which he was repudiated, referred to as "John Camden Hottentot," an
+unsavory person generally. Hotten also sent a letter to the Spectator,
+in which he attempted to justify himself, but it was a feeble
+performance. Clemens prepared two other communications, each worse than
+the other and both more destructive than the first one. But these were
+only to relieve his mind. He did not print them. In one of them he
+pursued the fancy of John Camden Hottentot, whom he offers as a specimen
+to the Zoological Gardens.
+
+It is not a bird. It is not a man. It is not a fish. It does not seem
+to be in all respects a reptile. It has the body and features of a man,
+but scarcely any of the instincts that belong to such a structure.... I
+am sure that this singular little creature is the missing link between
+the man and the hyena.
+
+Hotten had preyed upon explorer Stanley and libeled him in a so-called.
+biography to a degree that had really aroused some feeling against
+Stanley in England. Only for the moment--the Queen invited Stanley to
+luncheon, and newspaper criticism ceased. Hotten was in general
+disrepute, therefore, so it was not worth while throwing a second brick
+at him.
+
+In fact, now that Clemens had expended his venom, on paper, Hotten seemed
+to him rather an amusing figure than otherwise. An incident grew out of
+it all, however, that was not amusing. E. P. Hingston, whom the reader
+may remember as having been with Artemus Ward in Virginia City, and one
+of that happy group that wined and dined the year away, had been engaged
+by Hotten to write the introductory to his edition of The Innocents
+Abroad. It was a well-written, highly complimentary appreciation.
+Hingston did not dream that he was committing an offense, nor did Clemens
+himself regard it as such in the beginning.
+
+But Mark Twain's views had undergone a radical change, and with
+characteristic dismissal of previous conditions he had forgotten that he
+had ever had any other views than those he now held. Hingston was in
+London, and one evening, at a gathering, approached Clemens with
+outstretched hand. But Clemens failed to see Hingston's hand or to
+recognize him. In after-years his conscience hurt him terribly for this.
+He remembered it only with remorse and shame. Once, in his old age, he
+spoke of it with deep sorrow.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXVII
+
+THE BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+
+The book on England, which he had prepared for so carefully, was never
+written. Hundreds of the stylographic pages were filled, and the
+duplicates sent home for the entertainment of Olivia Clemens, but the
+notes were not completed, and the actual writing was never begun. There
+was too much sociability in London for one thing, and then he found that
+he could not write entertainingly of England without introducing too many
+personalities, and running the risk of offending those who had taken him
+into their hearts and homes. In a word, he would have to write too
+seriously or not at all.
+
+He began his memoranda industriously enough, and the volume might have
+been as charming and as valuable as any he has left behind. The reader
+will hardly fail to find a few of the entries interesting. They are
+offered here as examples of his daily observation during those early
+weeks of his stay, and to show somewhat of his purpose:
+
+                    AN EXPATRIATE
+
+    There was once an American thief who fled his country and took
+    refuge in England. He dressed himself after the fashion of the
+    Londoners, and taught his tongue the peculiarities of the London
+    pronunciation and did his best in all ways to pass himself for a
+    native. But he did two fatal things: he stopped at the Langham
+    Hotel, and the first trip he took was to visit Stratford-on-Avon and
+    the grave of Shakespeare. These things betrayed his nationality.
+
+                  STANLEY AND THE QUEEN
+
+    See the power a monarch wields! When I arrived here, two weeks ago,
+    the papers and geographers were in a fair way to eat poor Stanley up
+    without salt or sauce. The Queen says, "Come four hundred miles up
+    into Scotland and sit at my luncheon-table fifteen minutes"; which,
+    being translated, means, "Gentlemen, I believe in this man and take
+    him under my protection"; and not another yelp is heard.
+
+                  AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM
+
+    What a place it is!
+
+    Mention some very rare curiosity of a peculiar nature--a something
+    which you have read about somewhere but never seen--they show you a
+    dozen! They show you all the possible varieties of that thing!
+    They show you curiously wrought jeweled necklaces of beaten gold,
+    worn by the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Etruscans, Greeks,
+    Britons--every people of the forgotten ages, indeed. They show you
+    the ornaments of all the tribes and peoples that live or ever did
+    live. Then they show you a cast taken from Cromwell's face in
+    death; then the venerable vase that once contained the ashes of
+    Xerxes.
+
+    I am wonderfully thankful for the British Museum. Nobody comes
+    bothering around me--nobody elbows me--all the room and all the
+    light I want, under this huge dome--no disturbing noises--and people
+    standing ready to bring me a copy of pretty much any book that ever
+    was printed under the sun--and if I choose to go wandering about the
+    long corridors and galleries of the great building the secrets of
+    all the earth and all the ages axe laid open to me. I am not
+    capable of expressing my gratitude for the British Museum--it seems
+    as if I do not know any but little words and weak ones.
+
+                WESTMINSTER ABBEY BY NIGHT
+
+    It was past eleven o'clock and I was just going to bed. But this
+    friend of mine was as reliable as he was eccentric, and so there was
+    not a doubt in my mind that his "expedition" had merit in it. I put
+    on my coat and boots again, and we drove away.
+
+    "Where is it? Where are we going?"
+
+    "Don't worry. You'll see."
+
+    He was not inclined to talk. So I thought this must be a weighty
+    matter. My curiosity grew with the minutes, but I kept it manfully
+    under the surface. I watched the lamps, the signs, the numbers as
+    we thundered down the long street. I am always lost in London, day
+    or night. It was very chilly, almost bleak. People leaned against
+    the gusty blasts as if it were the dead of winter. The crowds grew
+    thinner and thinner, and the noises waxed faint and seemed far away.
+    The sky was overcast and threatening. We drove on, and still on,
+    till I wondered if we were ever going to stop. At last we passed by
+    a spacious bridge and a vast building, and presently entered a
+    gateway, passed through a sort of tunnel, and stopped in a court
+    surrounded by the black outlines of a great edifice. Then we
+    alighted, walked a dozen steps or so, and waited. In a little while
+    footsteps were heard, a man emerged from the darkness, and we
+    dropped into his wake without saying anything. He led us under an
+    archway of masonry, and from that into a roomy tunnel, through a
+    tall iron gate, which he locked behind us. We followed him down
+    this tunnel, guided more by his footsteps on the stone flagging than
+    by anything we could very distinctly see. At the end of it we came
+    to another iron gate, and our conductor stopped there and lit a
+    bull's-eye lantern. Then he unlocked the gate; and I wished he had
+    oiled it first, it grated so dismally. The gate swung open and we
+    stood on the threshold of what seemed a limitless domed and pillared
+    cavern, carved out of the solid darkness. The conductor and my
+    friend took off their hats reverently, and I did likewise. For the
+    moment that we stood thus there was not a sound, and the stillness
+    seemed to add to the solemnity of the gloom. I looked my inquiry!
+
+    "It is the tomb of the great dead of England-Westminster Abbey."...
+
+    We were among the tombs; on every hand dull shapes of men, sitting,
+    standing, or stooping, inspected us curiously out of the darkness
+    --reached out their hands toward us--some appealing, some beckoning,
+    some warning us away. Effigies they were--statues over the graves;
+    but they looked human and natural in the murky shadows. Now a
+    little half-grown black and white cat squeezed herself through the
+    bars of the iron gate and came purring lovingly about us, unawed by
+    the time or the place, unimpressed by the marble pomp that
+    sepulchers a line of mighty dead that ends with a great author of
+    yesterday and began with a sceptered monarch away back in the dawn
+    of history, more than twelve hundred years ago . . . .
+
+    Mr. Wright flashed his lantern first upon this object and then upon
+    that, and kept up a running commentary that showed there was nothing
+    about the venerable Abbey that was trivial in his eyes or void of
+    interest. He is a man in authority, being superintendent, and his
+    daily business keeps him familiar with every nook and corner of the
+    great pile. Casting a luminous ray now here, now yonder, he would
+    say:
+
+    "Observe the height of the Abbey--one hundred and three feet to the
+    base of the roof; I measured it myself the other day. Notice the
+    base of this column--old, very old--hundreds and hundreds of years
+    --and how well they knew how to build in those old days! Notice it
+    --every stone is laid horizontally; that is to say, just as nature
+    laid it originally in the quarry not set up edgewise; in our day
+    some people set them on edge, and then wonder why they split and
+    flake. Architects cannot teach nature anything. Let me remove this
+    matting--it is put here to preserve the pavement; now there is a bit
+    of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these
+    scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before
+    time and sacrilegious idlers marred it. Now there, in the border,
+    was an inscription, once see, follow the circle-you can trace it by
+    the ornaments that have been pulled out--here is an A and there is
+    an O, and yonder another A--all beautiful Old English capitals;
+    there is no telling what the inscription was--no record left now.
+    Now move along in this direction, if you please. Yonder is where
+    old King Sebert the Saxon lies his monument is the oldest one in the
+    Abbey; Sebert died in 616,--[Clemens probably misunderstood the
+    name. It was Ethelbert who died in 616. The name Sebert does not
+    appear in any Saxon annals accessible to the author.]--and that's
+    as much, as twelve hundred and fifty years ago think of it! Twelve
+    hundred and fifty years! Now yonder is the last one--Charles
+    Dickens--there on the floor, with the brass letters on the slab--and
+    to this day the people come and put flowers on it.... There is
+    Garrick's monument; and Addison's, and Thackeray's bust--and
+    Macaulay lies there. And close to Dickens and Garrick lie Sheridan
+    and Dr. Johnson--and here is old Parr....
+
+    "That stone there covers Campbell the poet. Here are names you know
+    pretty well--Milton, and Gray who wrote the Elegy, and Butler who
+    wrote Hudibras; and Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson--there are three
+    tablets to him scattered about the Abbey, and all got 'O, Rare Ben
+    Jonson' cut on them. You were standing on one of them just now he
+    is buried standing up. There used to be a tradition here that
+    explains it. The story goes that he did not dare ask to be buried
+    in the Abbey, so he asked King James if he would make him a present
+    of eighteen inches of English ground, and the King said 'yes,' and
+    asked him where he would have it, and he said in Westminster Abbey.
+    Well, the King wouldn't go back on his word, and so there he is,
+    sure enough-stood up on end."
+
+The reader may regret that there are not more of these entries, and that
+the book itself was never written. Just when he gave up the project is
+not recorded. He was urged to lecture in London, but declined. To Mrs.
+Clemens, in September, he wrote:
+
+Everybody says lecture, lecture, lecture, but I have not the least idea
+of doing it; certainly not at present. Mr. Dolby, who took Dickens to
+America, is coming to talk business tomorrow, though I have sent him word
+once before that I can't be hired to talk here; because I have no time to
+spare. There is too much sociability; I do not get along fast enough
+with work.
+
+In October he declared that he was very homesick, and proposed that Mrs.
+Clemens and Susie join him at once in London, unless she would prefer to
+have him come home for the winter and all of them return to London in the
+spring. So it is likely that the book was not then abandoned. He felt
+that his visit was by no means ended; that it was, in fact, only just
+begun, but he wanted the ones he loved most to share it with him. To his
+mother and sister, in November, he wrote:
+
+I came here to take notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend
+dinners and make speeches. I have had a jolly good time, and I do hate
+to go away from these English folks; they make a stranger feel entirely
+at home, and they laugh so easily that it is a comfort to make
+after-dinner speeches here. I have made hundreds of friends; and last
+night, in the crush at the opening of the new Guild Hall Library and
+Museum, I was surprised to meet a familiar face every other step.
+
+All his impressions of England had been happy ones. He could deliver a
+gentle satire now and then at certain British institutions--certain
+London localities and features--as in his speech at the Savage Club,
+--[September 28, 1872. This is probably the most characteristic speech
+made by Mark Twain during his first London visit; the reader will find it
+in full in Appendix L, at the end of last volume.]--but taking the snug
+island as a whole, its people, its institutions, its fair, rural aspects,
+he had found in it only delight. To Mrs. Crane he wrote:
+
+    If you and Theodore will come over in the spring with Livy and me,
+    and spend the summer, you shall see a country that is so beautiful
+    that you will be obliged to believe in fairy-land. There is nothing
+    like it elsewhere on the globe. You should have a season ticket and
+    travel up and down every day between London and Oxford and worship
+    nature.
+
+    And Theodore can browse with me among dusty old dens that look now
+    as they looked five hundred years ago; and puzzle over books in the
+    British Museum that were made before Christ was born; and in the
+    customs of their public dinners, and the ceremonies of every
+    official act, and the dresses of a thousand dignitaries, trace the
+    speech and manners of all the centuries that have dragged their
+    lagging decades over England since the Heptarchy fell asunder. I
+    would a good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you
+    over.
+
+He sailed November 12th, on the Batavia, loaded with Christmas presents
+for everybody; jewelry, furs, laces; also a practical steam-engine for
+his namesake, Sam Moffett. Half-way across the Atlantic the Batavia ran
+into a hurricane and was badly damaged by heavy seas, and driven far out
+of her course. It was a lucky event on the whole, for she fell in with a
+water-logged lumber bark, a complete wreck, with nine surviving sailors
+clinging to her rigging. In the midst of the wild gale a lifeboat was
+launched and the perishing men were rescued. Clemens prepared a graphic
+report of the matter for the Royal Humane Society, asking that medals be
+conferred upon the brave rescuers, a document that was signed by his
+fellow-passengers and obtained for the men complete recognition and wide
+celebrity. Closing, the writer said:
+
+    As might have been anticipated, if I have been of any service toward
+    rescuing these nine shipwrecked human beings by standing around the
+    deck in a furious storm, without an umbrella, keeping an eye on
+    things and seeing that they were done right, and yelling whenever a
+    cheer seemed to be the important thing, I am glad and I am
+    satisfied. I ask no reward. I would do it again under the same
+    circumstances. But what I do plead for, earnestly and sincerely, is
+    that the Royal Humane Society will remember our captain and our
+    life-boat crew, and in so remembering them increase the high honor
+    and esteem in which the society is held all over the civilized
+    world.
+
+The Batavia reached New York November 26, 1872. Mark Twain had been
+absent three months, during which he had been brought to at least a
+partial realization of what his work meant to him and to mankind.
+
+An election had taken place during his absence--an election which
+gratified him deeply, for it had resulted in the second presidency of
+General Grant and in the defeat of Horace Greeley, whom he admired
+perhaps, but not as presidential material. To Thomas Nast, who had aided
+very effectually in Mr. Greeley's overwhelming defeat, Clemens wrote:
+
+Nast, you more than any other man have won a prodigious victory for
+Grant--I mean, rather, for civilization and progress. Those pictures
+were simply marvelous, and if any man in the land has a right to hold his
+head up and be honestly proud of his share in this year's vast events
+that man is unquestionably yourself. We all do sincerely honor you, and
+are proud of you.
+
+Horace Greeley's peculiar abilities and eccentricities won celebrity for
+him, rather than voters. Mark Twain once said of him:
+
+"He was a great man, an honest man, and served his, country well and was
+an honor to it. Also, he was a good-natured man, but abrupt with
+strangers if they annoyed him when he was busy. He was profane, but that
+is nothing; the best of us is that. I did not know him well, but only
+just casually, and by accident. I never met him but once. I called on
+him in the Tribune office, but I was not intending to. I was looking for
+Whitelaw Reid, and got into the wrong den. He was alone at his desk,
+writing, and we conversed--not long, but just a little. I asked him if
+he was well, and he said, 'What the hell do you want?' Well, I couldn't
+remember what I wanted, so I said I would call again. But I didn't."
+
+Clemens did not always tell the incident just in this way. Sometimes it
+was John Hay he was looking for instead of Reid, and the conversation
+with Greeley varied; but perhaps there was a germ of history under it
+somewhere, and at any rate it could have happened well enough, and not
+have been out of character with either of the men.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXVIII
+
+"THE GILDED AGE"
+
+Mark Twain did not go on the lecture circuit that winter. Redpath had
+besought him as usual, and even in midsummer had written:
+
+"Will you? Won't you? We have seven thousand to eight thousand dollars
+in engagements recorded for you," and he named a list of towns ranging
+geographically from Boston to St. Paul.
+
+But Clemens had no intention then of ever lecturing any more, and again
+in November, from London, he announced (to Redpath):
+
+"When I yell again for less than $500 I'll be pretty hungry, but I
+haven't any intention of yelling at any price."
+
+Redpath pursued him, and in January proposed $400 for a single night in
+Philadelphia, but without result. He did lecture two nights in Steinway
+Hall for the Mercantile Library Association, on the basis of half
+profits, netting $1,300 for the two nights as his share; and he lectured
+one night in Hartford, at a profit Of $1,500, for charity. Father
+Hawley, of Hartford, had announced that his missionary work was suffering
+for lack of funds. Some of his people were actually without food, he
+said, their children crying with hunger. No one ever responded to an
+appeal like that quicker than Samuel Clemens. He offered to deliver a
+lecture free, and to bear an equal proportion of whatever expenses were
+incurred by the committee of eight who agreed to join in forwarding the
+project. He gave the Sandwich Island lecture, and at the close of it a
+large card was handed him with the figures of the receipts printed upon
+it. It was held up to view, and the house broke into a storm of cheers.
+
+He did very little writing during the early weeks following his return.
+Early in the year (January 3 and 6, 1873) he contributed two Sandwich
+Island letters to the Tribune, in which, in his own peculiar fashion, he
+urged annexation.
+
+"We must annex those people," he declared, and proceeded to specify the
+blessings we could give them, such as "leather-headed juries, the
+insanity law, and the Tweed Ring."
+
+    We can confer Woodhull and Clafin on them, and George Francis Train.
+    We can give them lecturers! I will go myself.
+
+    We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner
+    on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy
+    civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need!
+
+    "Shall we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?"
+
+His success in England became an incentive to certain American
+institutions to recognize his gifts at home. Early in the year he was
+dined as the guest of the Lotos Club of New York, and a week or two later
+elected to its membership. This was but a beginning. Some new
+membership or honor was offered every little while, and so many banquets
+that he finally invented a set form for declining them. He was not yet
+recognized as the foremost American man of letters, but undoubtedly he
+had become the most popular; and Edwin Whipple, writing at this time, or
+but little later, said:
+
+"Mark Twain is regarded chiefly as a humorist, but the exercise of his
+real talents would rank him with the ablest of our authors in the past
+fifty years." So he was beginning to be "discovered" in high places.
+
+It was during this winter that the Clemens household enjoyed its first
+real home life in Hartford, its first real home life anywhere since those
+earliest days of marriage. The Hooker mansion was a comfortable place.
+The little family had comparatively good health. Their old friends were
+stanch and lavishly warm-hearted, and they had added many new ones. Their
+fireside was a delightful nucleus around which gathered those they cared
+for most, the Twichells, the Warner families, the Trumbulls--all certain
+of a welcome there. George Warner, only a little while ago, remembering,
+said:
+
+"The Clemens house was the only one I have ever known where there was
+never any preoccupation in the evenings, and where visitors were always
+welcome. Clemens was the best kind of a host; his evenings after dinner
+were an unending flow of stories."
+
+Friends living near by usually came and went at will, often without the
+ceremony of knocking or formal leave-taking. They were more like one
+great family in that neighborhood, with a community of interests, a unity
+of ideals. The Warner families and the Clemenses were particularly
+intimate, and out of their association grew Mark Twain's next important
+literary undertaking, his collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner in
+'The Gilded Age'.
+
+A number of more or less absurd stories have been printed about the
+origin of this book. It was a very simple matter, a perfectly natural
+development.
+
+At the dinner-table one night, with the Warners present, criticisms of
+recent novels were offered, with the usual freedom and severity of
+dinner-table talk. The husbands were inclined to treat rather lightly
+the novels in which their wives were finding entertainment. The wives
+naturally retorted that the proper thing for the husbands to do was to
+furnish the American people with better ones. This was regarded in the
+nature of a challenge, and as such was accepted--mutually accepted: that
+is to say, in partnership. On the spur of the moment Clemens and Warner
+agreed that they would do a novel together, that they would begin it
+immediately. This is the whole story of the book's origin; so far, at
+least, as the collaboration is concerned. Clemens, in fact, had the
+beginning of a story in his mind, but had been unwilling to undertake an
+extended work of fiction alone. He welcomed only too eagerly, therefore,
+the proposition of joint authorship. His purpose was to write a tale
+around that lovable character of his youth, his mother's cousin, James
+Lampton--to let that gentle visionary stand as the central figure against
+a proper background. The idea appealed to Warner, and there was no delay
+in the beginning. Clemens immediately set to work and completed 399
+pages of the manuscript, the first eleven chapters of the book, before
+the early flush of enthusiasm waned.
+
+Warner came over then, and Clemens read it aloud to him. Warner had some
+plans for the story, and took it up at this point, and continued it
+through the next twelve chapters; and so they worked alternately, "in the
+superstition," as Mark Twain long afterward declared, "that we were
+writing one coherent yarn, when I suppose, as a matter of fact, we were
+writing two incoherent ones."--[The reader may be interested in the
+division of labor. Clemens wrote chapters I to XI; also chapters XXIV,
+XXV, XXVII, XXVIII, XXX, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XLII,
+XLIII, XLV, LI, LII, LIII, LVII, LIX, LX, LXI, LXII, and portions of
+chapters XXXV, XLIX, LVI. Warner wrote chapters XII to XXIII; also
+chapters XXVI, XXIX, XXXI, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL, XLI, XLIV, XLVI, XLVII,
+XLVIII, L, LIV, LV, LVIII, LXIII, and portions of chapters XXXV, XLIX,
+and LVI. The work was therefore very evenly divided.
+
+There was another co-worker on The Gilded Age before the book was finally
+completed. This was J. Hammond Trumbull, who prepared the variegated,
+marvelous cryptographic chapter headings: Trumbull was the most learned
+man that ever lived in Hartford. He was familiar with all literary and
+scientific data, and according to Clemens could swear in twenty-seven
+languages. It was thought to be a choice idea to get Trumbull to supply
+a lingual medley of quotations to precede the chapters in the new book,
+the purpose being to excite interest and possibly to amuse the reader--a
+purpose which to some extent appears to have miscarried.]
+
+The book was begun in February and finished in April, so the work did not
+lag. The result, if not highly artistic, made astonishingly good
+reading. Warner had the touch of romance, Clemens, the gift of creating,
+or at least of portraying, human realities. Most of his characters
+reflected intimate personalities of his early life. Besides the
+apotheosis of James Lampton into the immortal Sellers, Orion became
+Washington Hawkins, Squire Clemens the judge, while Mark Twain's own
+personality, in a greater or lesser degree, is reflected in most of his
+creations. As for the Tennessee land, so long a will-o'the-wisp and a
+bugbear, it became tangible property at last. Only a year or two before
+Clemens had written to Orion:
+
+    Oh, here! I don't want to be consulted at all about Tennessee. I
+    don't want it even mentioned to me. When I make a suggestion it is
+    for you to act upon it or throw it aside, but I beseech you never to
+    ask my advice, opinion, or consent about that hated property.
+
+But it came in good play now. It is the important theme of the story.
+
+Mark Twain was well qualified to construct his share of the tale. He
+knew his characters, their lives, and their atmospheres perfectly.
+Senator Dilworthy (otherwise Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, then notorious
+for attempted vote-buying) was familiar enough. That winter in
+Washington had acquainted Clemens with the life there, its political
+intrigues, and the disrepute of Congress. Warner was equally well
+qualified for his share of the undertaking, and the chief criticism that
+one may offer is the one stated by Clemens himself--that the divisions of
+the tale remain divisions rather than unity.
+
+As for the story itself--the romance and tragedy of it--the character of
+Laura in the hands of either author is one not easy to forget. Whether
+this means that the work is well done, or only strikingly done, the
+reader himself must judge. Morally, the character is not justified.
+Laura was a victim of circumstance from the beginning. There could be no
+poetic justice in her doom. To drag her out of a steamer wreck, only to
+make her the victim of a scoundrel, later an adventuress, and finally a
+murderess, all may be good art, but of a very bad kind. Laura is a sort
+of American Becky Sharp; but there is retributive justice in Becky's
+fate, whereas Laura's doom is warranted only by the author's whim. As
+for her end, whatever the virtuous public of that day might have done, a
+present-day audience would not have pelted her from the stage, destroyed
+her future, taken away her life.
+
+The authors regarded their work highly when it was finished, but that is
+nothing. Any author regards his work highly at the moment of its
+completion. In later years neither of them thought very well of their
+production; but that also is nothing. The author seldom cares very
+deeply for his offspring once it is turned over to the public charge. The
+fact that the story is still popular, still delights thousands of
+readers, when a myriad of novels that have been written since it was
+completed have lived their little day and died so utterly that even their
+names have passed out of memory, is the best verdict as to its worth.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXIX
+
+PLANNING A NEW HOME
+
+Clemens and his wife bought a lot for the new home that winter, a fine,
+sightly piece of land on Farmington Avenue--table-land, sloping down to a
+pretty stream that wound through the willows and among the trees. They
+were as delighted as children with their new purchase and the prospect of
+building. To her sister Mrs. Clemens wrote:
+
+    Mr. Clemens seems to glory in his sense of possession; he goes daily
+    into the lot, has had several falls trying to lay off the land by
+    sliding around on his feet....
+
+    For three days the ice has covered the trees, and they have been
+    glorious. We could do nothing but watch the beauty outside; if you
+    looked at the trees as the sun struck them, with your back toward
+    the sun, they were covered with jewels. If you looked toward the
+    sun it was all crystal whiteness, a perfect fairy-land. Then the
+    nights were moonlight, and that was a great beauty, the moon giving
+    us the same prismatic effect.
+
+This was the storm of which Mark Twain wrote his matchless description,
+given first in his speech on New England weather, and later preserved in
+'Following the Equator', in more extended form. In that book he likens
+an ice-storm to his impressions derived from reading descriptions of the
+Taj Mahal, that wonderful tomb of a fair East Indian queen. It is a
+marvelous bit of word-painting--his description of that majestic vision:
+"When every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and
+the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond
+plume." It will pay any one to look up that description and read it all,
+though it has been said, by the fortunate one or two who heard him first
+give it utterance as an impromptu outburst, that in the subsequent
+process of writing the bloom of its original magnificence was lost.
+
+The plans for the new house were drawn forthwith by that gentle architect
+Edward Potter, whose art to-day may be considered open to criticism, but
+not because of any lack of originality. Hartford houses of that period
+were mainly of the goods-box form of architecture, perfectly square,
+typifying the commercial pursuits of many of their owners. Potter agreed
+to get away from this idea, and a radical and even frenzied departure was
+the result. Certainly his plans presented beautiful pictures, and all
+who saw them were filled with wonder and delight. Architecture has
+lavished itself in many florescent forms since then, but we may imagine
+that Potter's "English violet" order of design, as he himself designated
+it, startled, dazzled, and captivated in a day, when most houses were
+mere habitations, built with a view to economy and the largest possible
+amount of room.
+
+Workmen were put on the ground without delay, to prepare for the
+builders, and work was rapidly pushed along. Then in May the whole
+matter was left in the hands of the architect and the carpenters (with
+Lawyer Charles E. Perkins to stand between Potter and the violent
+builder, who roared at Potter and frightened him when he wanted changes),
+while the Clemens household, with Clara Spaulding, a girlhood friend of
+Mrs. Clemens, sailed away to England for a half-year holiday.
+
+
+
+
+XC
+
+A LONG ENGLISH HOLIDAY
+
+They sailed on the Batavia, and with them went a young man named
+Thompson, a theological student whom Clemens had consented to take as an
+amanuensis. There is a pathetic incident connected with this young man,
+and it may as well be set down here. Clemens found, a few weeks after
+his arrival in England, that so great was the tax upon his time that he
+could make no use of Thompson's services. He gave Thompson fifty
+dollars, and upon the possibility of the young man's desiring to return
+to America, advanced him another fifty dollars, saying that he could
+return it some day, and never thought of it again. But the young man
+remembered it, and one day, thirty-six years later, after a life of
+hardship and struggle, such as the life of a country minister is apt to
+be, he wrote and inclosed a money-order, a payment on his debt. That
+letter and its inclosure brought only sorrow to Mark Twain. He felt that
+it laid upon him the accumulated burden of the weary thirty-six years'
+struggle with ill-fortune. He returned the money, of course, and in a
+biographical note commented:
+
+    How pale painted heroisms of romance look beside it! Thompson's
+    heroism, which is real, which is colossal, which is sublime, and
+    which is costly beyond all estimate, is achieved in profound
+    obscurity, and its hero walks in rags to the end of his days. I had
+    forgotten Thompson completely, but he flashes before me as vividly
+    as lightning. I can see him now. It was on the deck of the
+    Batavia, in the dock. The ship was casting off, with that hubbub
+    and confusion and rushing of sailors, and shouting of orders and
+    shrieking of boatswain whistles, which marked the departure
+    preparations in those days--an impressive contrast with the solemn
+    silence which marks the departure preparations of the giant ships of
+    the present day. Mrs. Clemens, Clara Spaulding, little Susy, and
+    the nurse-maid were all properly garbed for the occasion. We all
+    had on our storm-rig, heavy clothes of somber hue, but new and
+    designed and constructed for the purpose, strictly in accordance
+    with sea-going etiquette; anything wearable on land being distinctly
+    and odiously out of the question.
+
+    Very well. On that deck, and gliding placidly among those honorable
+    and properly upholstered groups, appeared Thompson, young, grave,
+    long, slim, with an aged fuzzy plug hat towering high on the upper
+    end of him and followed by a gray duster, which flowed down, without
+    break or wrinkle, to his ankles. He came straight to us, and shook
+    hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew him. A
+    nigger in heaven could not have created a profounder astonishment.
+
+    However, Thompson didn't know that anything was happening. He had
+    no prejudices about clothes. I can still see him as he looked when
+    we passed Sandy Hook and the winds of the big ocean smote us.
+    Erect, lofty, and grand he stood facing the blast, holding his plug
+    on with both hands and his generous duster blowing out behind, level
+    with his neck. There were scoffers observing, but he didn't know
+    it; he wasn't disturbed.
+
+    In my mind, I see him once afterward, clothed as before, taking me
+    down in shorthand. The Shah of Persia had come to England and Dr.
+    Hosmer, of the Herald, had sent me to Ostend, to view his Majesty's
+    progress across the Channel and write an account of it. I can't
+    recall Thompson after that, and I wish his memory had been as poor
+    as mine.
+
+They had been a month in London, when the final incident referred to took
+place--the arrival of the Shah of Persia--and were comfortably quartered
+at the Langham Hotel. To Twichell Clemens wrote:
+
+    We have a luxuriously ample suite of apartments on the third floor,
+    our bedroom looking straight up Portland Place, our parlor having a
+    noble array of great windows looking out upon both streets (Portland
+    Place and the crook that joins it onto Regent Street).
+
+    Nine p.m. full twilight, rich sunset tints lingering in the west.
+
+    I am not going to write anything; rather tell it when I get back.
+    I love you and Harmony, and that is all the fresh news I've got
+    anyway. And I mean to keep that fresh all the time.
+
+Mrs. Clemens, in a letter to her sister, declared: "It is perfectly
+discouraging to try to write you. There is so much to write about that
+it makes me feel as if it was no use to begin."
+
+It was a period of continuous honor and entertainment. If Mark Twain had
+been a lion on his first visit, he was little less than royalty now. His
+rooms at the Langham were like a court. Miss Spaulding (now Mrs. John B.
+Stanchfield) remembers that Robert Browning, Turgenieff, Sir John
+Millais, Lord Houghton, and Sir Charles Dilke (then at the height of his
+fame) were among those that called to pay their respects. In a recent
+letter she says:
+
+    I remember a delightful luncheon that Charles Kingsley gave for Mr.
+    Clemens; also an evening when Lord Dunraven brought Mr. Home, the
+    medium, Lord Dunraven telling many of the remarkable things he had
+    seen Mr. Home do. I remember I wanted so much to see him float out
+    of a seven or eight story window, and enter another, which Lord
+    Dunraven said he had seen him do many times. But Mr. Home had been
+    very ill, and said his power had left him. My great regret was that
+    we did not see Carlyle, who was too sad and ill for visits.
+
+Among others they met Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland,
+and found him so shy that it was almost impossible to get him to say a
+word on any subject.
+
+"The shyest full-grown man, except Uncle Remus, I ever met," Clemens once
+wrote. "Dr. MacDonald and several other lively talkers were present, and
+the talk went briskly on for a couple of hours, but Carroll sat still all
+the while, except now and then when he answered a question."
+
+At a dinner given by George Smalley they met Herbert Spencer, and at a
+luncheon-party at Lord Houghton's, Sir Arthur Helps, then a world-wide
+celebrity.
+
+    Lord Elcho, a large, vigorous man, sat at some distance down the
+    table. He was talking earnestly about the town of Godalming. It
+    was a deep, flowing, and inarticulate rumble, but I caught the
+    Godalming pretty nearly every time it broke free of the rumbling,
+    and as all the strength was on the first end of the word, it
+    startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing. In the
+    middle of the luncheon Lady Houghton rose, remarked to the guests on
+    her right and on her left, in a matter-of-fact way, "Excuse me, I
+    have an engagement," and without further ceremony, she went off to
+    meet it. This would have been doubtful etiquette in America. Lord
+    Houghton told a number of delightful stories. He told them in
+    French, and I lost nothing of them but the nubs.
+
+Little Susy and her father thrived on London life, but after a time it
+wore on Mrs. Clemens. She delighted in the English cordiality and
+culture, but the demands were heavy, the social forms sometimes trying.
+Life in London was interesting, and in its way charming, but she did not
+enter into it with quite her husband's enthusiasm and heartiness. In the
+end they canceled all London engagements and quietly set out for
+Scotland. On the way they rested a few days in York, a venerable place
+such as Mark Twain always loved to describe. In a letter to Mrs. Langdon
+he wrote:
+
+    For the present we shall remain in this queer old walled town, with
+    its crooked, narrow lanes, that tell us of their old day that knew
+    no wheeled vehicles; its plaster-and-timber dwellings, with upper
+    stories far overhanging the street, and thus marking their date,
+    say three hundred years ago; the stately city walls, the castellated
+    gates, the ivy-grown, foliage-sheltered, most noble and picturesque
+    ruin of St. Mary's Abbey, suggesting their date, say five hundred
+    years ago, in the heart of Crusading times and the glory of English
+    chivalry and romance; the vast Cathedral of York, with its worn
+    carvings and quaintly pictured windows, preaching of still remoter
+    days; the outlandish names of streets and courts and byways that
+    stand as a record and a memorial, all these centuries, of Danish
+    dominion here in still earlier times; the hint here and there of
+    King Arthur and his knights and their bloody fights with Saxon
+    oppressors round about this old city more than thirteen hundred
+    years gone by; and, last of all, the melancholy old stone coffins
+    and sculptured inscriptions, a venerable arch and a hoary tower of
+    stone that still remain and are kissed by the sun and caressed by
+    the shadows every day, just as the sun and the shadows have kissed
+    and, caressed them every lagging day since the Roman Emperor's
+    soldiers placed them here in the times when Jesus the Son of Mary
+    walked the streets of Nazareth a youth, with no more name or fame
+    than the Yorkshire boy who is loitering down this street this
+    moment.
+
+They reached Edinburgh at the end of July and secluded themselves in
+Veitch's family hotel in George Street, intending to see no one. But
+this plan was not a success; the social stress of London had been too
+much for Mrs. Clemens, and she collapsed immediately after their arrival.
+Clemens was unacquainted in Edinburgh, but remembered that Dr. John
+Brown, who had written Rab and His Friend, lived there. He learned his
+address, and that he was still a practising physician. He walked around
+to 23 Rutland Street, and made himself known. Dr. Brown came forthwith,
+and Mrs. Clemens speedily recovered under his able and inspiring
+treatment.
+
+The association did not end there. For nearly a month Dr. Brown was
+their daily companion, either at the hotel, or in his own home, or on
+protracted drives when he made his round of visits, taking these new
+friends along. Dr. John was beloved by everybody in Edinburgh, everybody
+in Scotland, for that matter, and his story of Rab had won him a
+following throughout Christendom. He was an unpretentious sovereign.
+Clemens once wrote of him:
+
+    His was a sweet and winning face, as beautiful a face as I have ever
+    known. Reposeful, gentle, benignant; the face of a saint at peace
+    with all the world and placidly beaming upon it the sunshine of love
+    that filled his heart.
+
+He was the friend of all dogs, and of all people. It has been told of
+him that once, when driving, he thrust his head suddenly out of the
+carriage window, then resumed his place with a disappointed look.
+
+"Who was it?" asked his companion. "Some one you know?"
+
+"No," he said. "A dog I don't know."
+
+He became the boon companion and playmate of little Susy, then not quite
+a year and a half old. He called her Megalopis, a Greek term, suggested
+by her eyes; those deep, burning eyes that seemed always so full of
+life's sadder philosophies, and impending tragedy. In a collection of
+Dr. Brown's letters he refers to this period. In one place he says:
+
+    Had the author of The Innocents Abroad not come to Edinburgh at that
+    time we in all human probability might never have met, and what a
+    deprivation that would have been to me during the last quarter of a
+    century!
+
+And in another place:
+
+    I am attending the wife of Mark Twain. His real name is Clemens.
+    She is a quite lovely little woman, modest and clever, and she has a
+    girlie eighteen months old, her ludicrous miniature--and such eyes!
+
+Those playmates, the good doctor and Megalopis, romped together through
+the hotel rooms with that complete abandon which few grown persons can
+assume in their play with children, and not all children can assume in
+their play with grown-ups. They played "bear," and the "bear" (which was
+a very little one, so little that when it stood up behind the sofa you
+could just get a glimpse of yellow hair) would lie in wait for her
+victim, and spring out and surprise him and throw him into frenzies of
+fear.
+
+Almost every day they made his professional rounds with him. He always
+carried a basket of grapes for his patients. His guests brought along
+books to read while they waited. When he stopped for a call he would
+say:
+
+"Entertain yourselves while I go in and reduce the population."
+
+There was much sight-seeing to do in Edinburgh, and they could not quite
+escape social affairs. There were teas and luncheons and dinners with
+the Dunfermlines and the Abercrombies, and the MacDonalds, and with
+others of those brave clans that no longer slew one another among the
+grim northern crags and glens, but were as sociable and entertaining
+lords and ladies as ever the southland could produce. They were very
+gentle folk indeed, and Mrs. Clemens, in future years, found her heart
+going back oftener to Edinburgh than to any other haven of those first
+wanderings. August 24th she wrote to her sister:
+
+    We leave Edinburgh to-morrow with sincere regret; we have had such a
+    delightful stay here--we do so regret leaving Dr. Brown and his
+    sister, thinking that we shall probably never see them again [as
+    indeed they never did].
+
+They spent a day or two at Glasgow and sailed for Ireland, where they put
+in a fortnight, and early in September were back in England again, at
+Chester, that queer old city where; from a tower on the wall, Charles I.
+read the story of his doom. Reginald Cholmondeley had invited them to
+visit his country seat, beautiful Condover Hall, near Shrewsbury, and in
+that lovely retreat they spent some happy, restful days. Then they were
+in the whirl of London once more, but escaped for a fortnight to Paris,
+sight-seeing and making purchases for the new home.
+
+Mrs. Clemens was quite ready to return to America, by this time.
+
+    I am blue and cross and homesick [she wrote]. I suppose what makes
+    me feel the latter is because we are contemplating to stay in London
+    another month. There has not one sheet of Mr. Clemens's proof come
+    yet, and if he goes home before the book is published here he will
+    lose his copyright. And then his friends feel that it will be
+    better for him to lecture in London before his book is published,
+    not only that it will give him a larger but a more enviable
+    reputation. I would not hesitate one moment if it were simply for
+    the money that his copyright will bring him, but if his reputation
+    will be better for his staying and lecturing, of course he ought to
+    stay.... The truth is, I can't bear the thought of postponing going
+    home.
+
+It is rather gratifying to find Olivia Clemens human, like that, now and
+then. Otherwise, on general testimony, one might well be tempted to
+regard her as altogether of another race and kind.
+
+
+
+
+XCI
+
+A LONDON LECTURE
+
+Clemens concluded to hasten the homeward journey, but to lecture a few
+nights in London before starting. He would then accompany his little
+family home, and return at once to continue the lecture series and
+protect his copyright. This plan was carried out. In a communication to
+the Standard, October 7th, he said:
+
+    SIR,--In view of the prevailing frenzy concerning the Sandwich
+    Islands, and the inflamed desire of the public to acquire
+    information concerning them, I have thought it well to tarry yet
+    another week in England and deliver a lecture upon this absorbing
+    subject. And lest it should be thought unbecoming in me, a
+    stranger, to come to the public rescue at such a time, instead of
+    leaving to abler hands a matter of so much moment, I desire to
+    explain that I do it with the best motives and the most honorable
+    intentions. I do it because I am convinced that no one can allay
+    this unwholesome excitement as effectually as I can, and to allay
+    it, and allay it as quickly as possible, is surely one thing that is
+    absolutely necessary at this juncture. I feel and know that I am
+    equal to this task, for I can allay any kind of an excitement by
+    lecturing upon it. I have saved many communities in this way. I
+    have always been able to paralyze the public interest in any topic
+    that I chose to take hold of and elucidate with all my strength.
+
+    Hoping that this explanation will show that if I am seeming to
+    intrude I am at least doing it from a high impulse, I am, sir, your
+    obedient servant,
+                         MARK TWAIN.
+
+A day later the following announcement appeared:
+
+                  QUEEN'S CONCERT ROOMS,
+                   HANOVER SQUARE.
+
+            MR. GEORGE DOLBY begs to announce that
+
+                    MR. MARK TWAIN
+
+                    WILL DELIVER A
+                      LECTURE
+                       OF A
+                  HUMOROUS CHARACTER,
+
+                     AS ABOVE, ON
+           MONDAY EVENING NEXT, OCTOBER 13th, 1873,
+            AND REPEAT IT IN THE SAME PLACE, ON
+               TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 14th,
+               WEDNESDAY "      "  15th,
+               THURSDAY "      "  16th,
+               FRIDAY  "      "  17th,
+
+                   At Eight o'Clock,
+                       AND
+             SATURDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER 18th,
+                   At Three o'Clock.
+
+                      SUBJECT:
+         "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands."
+
+    As Mr. TWAIN has spent several months in these Islands, and is well
+    acquainted with his subject, the Lecture may be expected to furnish
+    matter of interest.
+
+           STALLS, 5s.     UNRESERVED SEATS, 3s.
+
+The prospect of a lecture from Mark Twain interested the London public.
+Those who had not seen him were willing to pay even for that privilege.
+The papers were encouraging; Punch sounded a characteristic note:
+
+              WELCOME TO A LECTURER
+
+  "'Tis time we Twain did show ourselves." 'Twas said
+    By Caesar, when one Mark had lost his head:
+    By Mark, whose head's quite bright, 'tis said again:
+    Therefore, "go with me, friends, to bless this Twain."
+
+                                --Punch.
+
+Dolby had managed the Dickens lectures, and he proved his sound business
+judgment and experience by taking the largest available hall in London
+for Mark Twain.
+
+On the evening of October 13th, in the spacious Queen's Concert Rooms,
+Hanover Square, Mark Twain delivered his first public address in England.
+The subject was "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands," the old
+lecture with which he had made his first great successes. He was not
+introduced. He appeared on the platform in evening dress, assuming the
+character of a manager announcing a disappointment.
+
+Mr. Clemens, he said, had fully expected to be present. He paused and
+loud murmurs arose from the audience. He lifted his hand and they
+subsided. Then he added, "I am happy to say that Mark Twain is present,
+and will now give his lecture." Whereupon the audience roared its
+approval.
+
+It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that his triumph that week was
+a regal one. For five successive nights and a Saturday matinee the
+culture and fashion of London thronged to hear him discourse of their
+"fellow savages." It was a lecture event wholly without precedent. The
+lectures of Artemus Ward,--["Artemus the delicious," as Charles Reade
+called him, came to London in June, 1866, and gave his "piece" in
+Egyptian Hall. The refined, delicate, intellectual countenance, the
+sweet, gave, mouth, from which one might have expected philosophical
+lectures retained their seriousness while listeners were convulsed with
+laughter. There was something magical about it. Every sentence was a
+surprise. He played on his audience as Liszt did on a piano most easily
+when most effectively. Who can ever forget his attempt to stop his
+Italian pianist--"a count in his own country, but not much account in
+this"--who went on playing loudly while he was trying to tell us an
+"affecting incident" that occurred near a small clump of trees shown on
+his panorama of the Far West. The music stormed on-we could see only
+lips and arms pathetically moving till the piano suddenly ceased, and we
+heard-it was all we heard "and, she fainted in Reginald's arms." His
+tricks have been at tempted in many theaters, but Artemus Ward was
+inimitable. And all the time the man was dying. (Moneure D. Conway,
+Autobiography.)]--who had quickly become a favorite in London, had
+prepared the public for American platform humor, while the daily doings
+of this new American product, as reported by the press, had aroused
+interest, or curiosity, to a high pitch. On no occasion in his own
+country had he won such a complete triumph. The papers for a week
+devoted columns of space to appreciation and editorial comment. The
+Daily News of October 17th published a column-and-a-half editorial on
+American humor, with Mark Twain's public appearance as the general text.
+The Times referred to the continued popularity of the lectures:
+
+    They can't be said to have more than whetted the public appetite, if
+    we are to take the fact which has been imparted to us, that the
+    holding capacity of the Hanover Square Rooms has been inadequate to
+    the demand made upon it every night by Twain's lecturing, as a
+    criterion. The last lecture of this too brief course was delivered
+    yesterday before an audience which crammed to discomfort every part
+    of the principal apartment of the Hanover Square Rooms....
+
+At the close of yesterday's lecture Mark Twain was so loudly applauded
+that he returned to the stage, and, as soon as the audience gave him a
+chance of being heard, he said, with much apparent emotion:
+
+    "Ladies and Gentlemen,--I won't keep you one single moment in this
+    suffocating atmosphere. I simply wish to say that this is the last
+    lecture I shall have the honor to deliver in London until I return
+    from America, four weeks from now. I only wish to say (here Mr.
+    Clemens faltered as if too much affected to proceed) I am very
+    grateful. I do not wish to appear pathetic, but it is something
+    magnificent for a stranger to come to the metropolis of the world
+    and be received so handsomely as I have been. I simply thank you."
+
+The Saturday Review devoted a page, and Once a Week, under the head of
+"Cracking jokes," gave three pages, to praise of the literary and lecture
+methods of the new American humorist. With the promise of speedy return,
+he left London, gave the lecture once in Liverpool, and with his party
+(October 21st) set sail for home.
+
+In mid-Atlantic he remembered Dr. Brown, and wrote him:
+
+    We have plowed a long way over the sea, and there's twenty-two
+    hundred miles of restless water between us now, besides the railway
+    stretch. And yet you are so present with us, so close to us, that a
+    span and a whisper would bridge the distance.
+
+So it would seem that of all the many memories of that eventful
+half-year, that of Dr. Brown was the most present, the most tender.
+
+
+
+
+XCII
+
+FURTHER LONDON LECTURE TRIUMPHS
+
+Orion Clemens records that he met "Sam and Livy" on their arrival from
+England, November 2d, and that the president of the Mercantile Library
+Association sent up his card "four times," in the hope of getting a
+chance to propose a lecture engagement--an incident which impressed Orion
+deeply in its evidence of his brother's towering importance. Orion
+himself was by this time engaged in various projects. He was inventing a
+flying-machine, for one thing, writing a Jules Verne story, reading proof
+on a New York daily, and contemplating the lecture field. This great
+blaze of international appreciation which had come to the little boy who
+used to set type for him in Hannibal, and wash up the forms and cry over
+the dirty proof, made him gasp.
+
+They went to see Booth in Hamlet [he says], and Booth sent for Sam to
+come behind the scenes, and when Sam proposed to add a part to Hamlet,
+the part of a bystander who makes humorous modern comment on the
+situations in the play, Booth laughed immoderately.
+
+Proposing a sacrilege like that to Booth! To what heights had this
+printer-pilot, miner-brother not attained!--[This idea of introducing a
+new character in Hamlet was really attempted later by Mark Twain, with
+the connivance of Joe Goodman [of all men], sad to relate. So far as is
+known it is the one stain on Goodman's literary record.]
+
+Clemens returned immediately to England--the following Saturday, in fact
+--and was back in London lecturing again after barely a month's absence.
+He gave the "Roughing It" address, this time under the title of "Roughing
+It on the Silver Frontier," and if his audiences were any less
+enthusiastic, or his houses less crowded than before, the newspapers of
+that day have left no record of it. It was the height of the season now,
+and being free to do so, he threw himself into the whirl of it, and for
+two months, beyond doubt, was the most talked-of figure in London. The
+Athenaeum Club made him a visiting member (an honor considered next to
+knighthood); Punch quoted him; societies banqueted him; his apartments,
+as before; were besieged by callers. Afternoons one was likely to find
+him in "Poets' Corner" of the Langham smoking-room, with a group of
+London and American authors--Reade, Collins, Miller, and the others
+--frankly rioting in his bold fancies. Charles Warren Stoddard was in
+London at the time, and acted as his secretary. Stoddard was a gentle
+poet, a delightful fellow, and Clemens was very fond of him. His only
+complaint of Stoddard was that he did not laugh enough at his humorous
+yarns. Clemens once said:
+
+"Dolby and I used to come in after the lecture, or perhaps after being
+out to some dinner, and we liked to sit down and talk it over and tell
+yarns, and we expected Stoddard to laugh at them, but Stoddard would lie
+there on the couch and snore. Otherwise, as a secretary, he was
+perfect."
+
+The great Tichborne trial was in progress then, and the spectacle of an
+illiterate impostor trying to establish his claim as the rightful heir to
+a great estate was highly diverting to Mark Twain.--[In a letter of this
+period he speaks of having attended one of the Claimant's "Evenings."]
+--He wanted to preserve the evidence as future literary material, and
+Stoddard day after day patiently collected the news reports and neatly
+pasted them into scrap-books, where they still rest, a complete record of
+that now forgotten farce. The Tichborne trial recalled to Mark Twain the
+claimant in the Lampton family, who from time to time wrote him long
+letters, urging him to join in the effort to establish his rights to the
+earldom of Durham. This American claimant was a distant cousin, who had
+"somehow gotten hold of, or had fabricated a full set of documents."
+
+Colonel Henry Watterson, just quoted (also a Lampton connection), adds:
+
+    During the Tichborne trial Mark and I were in London, and one day he
+    said to me: "I have investigated this Durham business down at the
+    Herald's office. There is nothing to it. The Lamptons passed out
+    of the earldom of Durham a hundred years ago. There were never any
+    estates; the title lapsed; the present earldom is a new creation,
+    not in the same family at all. But I'll tell you what: if you'll
+    put up $500, I'll put up $500 more; we'll bring our chap over here
+    and set him in as claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy's fat boy
+    won't be a marker to him."
+
+It was a characteristic Mark Twain project, one of the sort he never
+earned out in reality, but loved to follow in fancy, and with the pen
+sometimes. The "Rightful Earl of Durham" continued to send letters for a
+long time after that (some of them still exist), but he did not establish
+his claim. No one but Mark Twain ever really got anything out of it.
+Like the Tennessee land, it furnished material by and by for a book.
+Colonel Watterson goes on to say that Clemens was only joking about
+having looked up the matter in the peerage; that he hadn't really looked
+it up at all, and that the earldom lies still in the Lampton family.
+
+Another of Clemens's friends in London at this time was Prentice Mulford,
+of California. In later years Mulford acquired a wide reputation for his
+optimistic and practical psychologies. Through them he lifted himself
+out of the slough of despond, and he sought to extend a helping hand to
+others. His "White Cross Library" had a wide reading and a wide
+influence; perhaps has to this day. But in 1873 Mulford had not found
+the tangibility of thought, the secret of strength; he was only finding
+it, maybe, in his frank acknowledgment of shortcoming:
+
+    Now, Mark, I am down-very much down at present; you are up-where you
+    deserve to be. I can't ask this on the score of any past favors,
+    for there have been none. I have not always spoken of you in terms
+    of extravagant praise; have sometimes criticized you, which was due,
+    I suppose, in part to an envious spirit. I am simply human. Some
+    people in the same profession say they entertain no jealousy of
+    those more successful. I can't. They are divine; I am not.
+
+It was only that he wished Clemens to speak a word for him to Routledge,
+to get him a hearing for his work. He adds:
+
+    I shall be up myself some day, although my line is far apart from
+    yours. Whether you can do anything that I ask of you or not, I
+    shall be happy then, as I would be now, to do you any just and right
+    service.... Perhaps I have mistaken my vocation. Certainly, if I
+    was back with my rocker on the Tuolumne, I'd make it rattle livelier
+    than ever I did before. I have occasionally thought of London
+    Bridge, but the Thames is now so d---d cold and dirty, and besides I
+    can swim, and any attempt at drowning would, through the mere
+    instinct of self-preservation, only result in my swimming ashore and
+    ruining my best clothes; wherefore I should be worse off than ever.
+
+Of course Mark Twain granted the favor Mulford asked, and a great deal
+more, no doubt, for that was his way. Mulford came up, as he had
+prophesied, but the sea in due time claimed him, though not in the way he
+had contemplated. Years after he was one day found drifting off the
+shores of Long Island in an open boat, dead.
+
+Clemens made a number of notable dinner speeches during this second
+London lecture period. His response to the toast of the "Ladies,"
+delivered at the annual dinner of the Scottish Corporation of London, was
+the sensational event of the evening.
+
+He was obliged to decline an invitation to the Lord Mayor's dinner,
+whereupon his Lordship wrote to urge him to be present at least at the
+finale, when the welcome would be "none the less hearty," and bespoke his
+attendance for any future dinners.
+
+Clemens lectured steadily at the Hanover Square Rooms during the two
+months of his stay in London, and it was only toward the end of this
+astonishing engagement that the audience began to show any sign of
+diminishing. Early in January he wrote to Twichell:
+
+I am not going to the provinces because I cannot get halls that are large
+enough. I always felt cramped in the Hanover Square Rooms, but I find
+that everybody here speaks with awe and respect of that prodigious hall
+and wonders that I could fill it so long.
+
+I am hoping to be back in twenty days, but I have so much to go home to
+and enjoy with a jubilant joy that it hardly seems possible that it can
+come to pass in so uncertain a world as this.
+
+In the same letter he speaks of attending an exhibition of Landseer's
+paintings at the Royal Academy:
+
+    Ah, they are wonderfully beautiful! There are such rich moonlights
+    and dusks in the "Challenge" and the "Combat," and in that long
+    flight of birds across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or
+    sunrise, for no man can ever tell t'other from which in a picture,
+    except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the
+    water), and there is such a grave analytical profundity in the face
+    of the connoisseurs; and such pathos in the picture of a fawn
+    suckling its dead mother on a snowy waste, with only the blood in
+    the footprints to hint that she is not asleep. And the way that he
+    makes animals' flesh and blood, insomuch that if the room were
+    darkened ever so little, and a motionless living animal placed
+    beside the painted one, no man could tell which was which.
+
+I interrupted myself here, to drop a line to Shirley Brooks and suggest a
+cartoon for Punch. It was this: in one of the Academy saloons (in a
+suite where these pictures are) a fine bust of Landseer stands on a
+pedestal in the center of the room. I suggested that some of Landseer's
+best known animals be represented as having come down out of their frames
+in the moonlight and grouped themselves about the bust in mourning
+attitudes.
+
+He sailed January 13 (1874.), on the Paythia, and two weeks later was at
+home, where all was going well. The Gilded Age had been issued a day or
+two before Christmas, and was already in its third edition. By the end
+of January 26,000 copies had been sold, a sale that had increased to
+40,000 a month later. The new house was progressing, though it was by no
+means finished. Mrs. Clemens was in good health. Little Susy was full
+of such American activities as to earn the name of "The Modoc." The
+promise of the year was bright.
+
+
+
+
+XCIII
+
+THE REAL COLONEL SELLERS-GOLDEN DAYS
+
+There are bound to be vexations, flies in the ointment, as we say. It
+was Warner who conferred the name of Eschol Sellers on the chief figure
+of the collaborated novel. Warner had known it as the name of an obscure
+person, or perhaps he had only heard of it. At all events, it seemed a
+good one for the character and had been adopted. But behold, the book
+had been issued but a little while when there rose "out of the vasty
+deeps" a genuine Eschol Sellers, who was a very respectable person. He
+was a stout, prosperous-looking man, gray and about fifty-five years old.
+He came into the American Publishing Company offices and asked permission
+to look at the book. Mr. Bliss was out at the moment, but presently
+arrived. The visitor rose and introduced himself.
+
+"My name is Eschol Sellers," he said. "You have used it in one of your
+publications. It has brought upon me a lot of ridicule. My people wish
+me to sue you for $10,000 damages."
+
+He had documents to prove his identity, and there was only one thing to
+be done; he must be satisfied. Bliss agreed to recall as many of the
+offending volumes as possible and change the name on the plates. He
+contacted the authors, and the name Beriah was substituted for the
+offending Eschol. It turned out that the real Sellers family was a large
+one, and that the given name Eschol was not uncommon in its several
+branches. This particular Eschol Sellers, curiously enough, was an
+inventor and a promoter, though of a much more substantial sort than his
+fiction namesake. He was also a painter of considerable merit, a writer
+and an antiquarian. He was said to have been a grandson of the famous
+painter, Rembrandt Peale.
+
+Clemens vowed that he would not lecture in America that winter. The
+irrepressible Redpath besieged him as usual, and at the end of January
+Clemens telegraphed him, as he thought, finally. Following it with a
+letter of explanation, he added:
+
+"I said to her, 'There isn't money enough in America to hire me to leave
+you for one day.'"
+
+But Redpath was a persistent devil. He used arguments and held out
+inducements which even Mrs. Clemens thought should not be resisted, and
+Clemens yielded from time to time, and gave a lecture here and there
+during February. Finally, on the 3d of March (1879.) he telegraphed his
+tormentor:
+
+"Why don't you congratulate me? I never expect to stand on a lecture
+platform again after Thursday night."
+
+Howells tells delightfully of a visit which he and Aldrich paid to
+Hartford just at this period. Aldrich went to visit Clemens and Howells
+to visit Charles Dudley Warner, Clemens coming as far as Springfield to
+welcome them.
+
+    In the good-fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such
+    days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round. There was
+    constant running in and out of friendly houses where the lively
+    hosts and guests called one another by their Christian names or
+    nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at
+    doors. Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he
+    satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another
+    sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which
+    enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance.
+
+Howells tells how Clemens dilated on the advantages of subscription sale
+over the usual methods of publication, and urged the two Boston authors
+to prepare something which canvassers could handle.
+
+"Why, any other means of bringing out a book is privately printing it,"
+he declared, and added that his subscription books in Bliss's hands sold
+right along, "just like the Bible."
+
+On the way back to Boston Howells and Aldrich planned a subscription book
+which would sell straight along, like the Bible. It was to be called
+"Twelve Memorable Murders." They had dreamed two or three fortunes by
+the time they had reached Boston, but the project ended there.
+
+"We never killed a single soul," Howells said once to the writer of this
+memoir.
+
+Clemens was always urging Howells to visit him after that. He offered
+all sorts of inducements.
+
+    You will find us the most reasonable people in the world. We had
+    thought of precipitating upon you, George Warner and his wife one
+    day, Twichell and his jewel of a wife another day, and Charles
+    Perkins and wife another. Only those--simply members of our family
+    they are. But I'll close the door against them all, which will
+    "fix" all of the lot except Twichell, who will no more hesitate to
+    climb in the back window than nothing.
+
+    And you shall go to bed when you please, get up when you please,
+    talk when you please, read when you please.
+
+A little later he was urging Howells or Aldrich, or both of them; to come
+to Hartford to live.
+
+    Mr. Hall, who lives in the house next to Mrs. Stowe's (just where we
+    drive in to go to our new house), will sell for $16,000 or $17,000.
+    You can do your work just as well here as in Cambridge, can't you?
+    Come! Will one of you boys buy that house? Now, say yes.
+
+Certainly those were golden, blessed days, and perhaps, as Howells says,
+the sun does not shine on their like any more--not in Hartford, at least,
+for the old group that made them no longer assembles there. Hartford
+about this time became a sort of shrine for all literary visitors, and
+for other notables as well, whether of America or from overseas. It was
+the half-way place between Boston and New York, and pilgrims going in
+either direction rested there. It is said that travelers arriving in
+America, were apt to remember two things they wished to see: Niagara
+Falls and Mark Twain. But the Falls had no such recent advertising
+advantage as that spectacular success in London. Visitors were apt to
+begin in Hartford.
+
+Howells went with considerable frequency after that, or rather with
+regularity, twice a year, or oftener, and his coming was always hailed
+with great rejoicing. They visited and ate around at one place and
+another among that pleasant circle of friends. But they were happiest
+afterward together, Clemens smoking continually, "soothing his tense
+nerves with a mild hot Scotch," says Howells, "while we both talked, and
+talked, and tasked of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and the
+waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I would come away
+hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust-shells
+which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer."
+Sometimes Clemens told the story of his early life, "the inexhaustible,
+the fairy, the Arabian Nights story, which I could never tire of even
+when it began to be told over again."
+
+
+
+
+XCIV
+
+BEGINNING "TOM SAWYER"
+
+The Clemens household went to Quarry Farm in April, leaving the new house
+once more in the hands of the architect and builders. It was costing a
+vast sum of money, and there was a financial stress upon land. Mrs.
+Clemens, always prudent, became a little uneasy at times, though without
+warrant in those days, for her business statement showed that her
+holdings were only a little less than a quarter of a million in her own
+right, while her husband's books and lectures had been highly
+remunerative, and would be more so. They were justified in living in
+ample, even luxurious comfort, and how free from financial worries they
+could have lived for the rest of their days!
+
+Clemens, realizing his happiness, wrote Dr. Brown:
+
+Indeed I am thankful for the wifey and the child, and if there is one
+individual creature on all this footstool who is more thoroughly and
+uniformly and, unceasingly happy than I am I defy the world to produce
+him and prove him. In my opinion he don't exist. I was a mighty rough,
+coarse, unpromising subject when Livy took charge of me, four years ago,
+and I may still be to the rest of the world, but not to her. She has
+made a very creditable job of me.
+
+Truly fortune not only smiled, but laughed. Every mail brought great
+bundles of letters that sang his praises. Robert Watt, who had
+translated his books into Danish, wrote of their wide popularity among
+his people. Madame Blanc (Th. Bentzon), who as early as 1872 had
+translated The Jumping Frog into French, and published it, with extended
+comment on the author and his work, in the 'Revue des deux mondes', was
+said to be preparing a review of 'The Gilded Age'. All the world seemed
+ready to do him honor.
+
+Of course, one must always pay the price, usually a vexatious one. Bores
+stopped him on the street to repeat ancient and witless stories. Invented
+anecdotes, some of them exasperating ones, went the rounds of the press.
+Impostors in distant localities personated him, or claimed to be near
+relatives, and obtained favors, sometimes money, in his name. Trivial
+letters, seeking benefactions of every kind, took the savor from his
+daily mail. Letters from literary aspirants were so numerous that he
+prepared a "form" letter of reply:
+
+DEAR SIR OR MADAM,--Experience has not taught me very much, still it has
+taught me that it is not wise to criticize a piece of literature, except
+to an enemy of the person who wrote it; then if you praise it that enemy
+admires--you for your honest manliness, and if you dispraise it he
+admires you for your sound judgment.
+
+                     Yours truly,  S. L. C.
+
+Even Orion, now in Keokuk on a chicken farm, pursued him with manuscripts
+and proposals of schemes. Clemens had bought this farm for Orion, who
+had counted on large and quick returns, but was planning new enterprises
+before the first eggs were hatched. Orion Clemens was as delightful a
+character as was ever created in fiction, but he must have been a trial
+now and then to Mark Twain. We may gather something of this from a
+letter written by the latter to his mother and sister at this period:
+
+    I can't "encourage" Orion. Nobody can do that conscientiously, for
+    the reason that before one's letter has time to reach him he is off
+    on some new wild-goose chase. Would you encourage in literature a
+    man who the older he grows the worse he writes?
+
+    I cannot encourage him to try the ministry, because he would change
+    his religion so fast that he would have to keep a traveling agent
+    under wages to go ahead of him to engage pulpits and board for him.
+
+    I cannot conscientiously encourage him to do anything but potter
+    around his little farm and put in his odd hours contriving new and
+    impossible projects at the rate of 365 a year which is his customary
+    average. He says he did well in Hannibal! Now there is a man who
+    ought to be entirely satisfied with the grandeurs, emoluments, and
+    activities of a hen farm.
+
+    If you ask me to pity Orion I can do that. I can do it every day
+    and all day long. But one can't "encourage" quicksilver; because
+    the instant you put your finger on it, it isn't there. No, I am
+    saying too much. He does stick to his literary and legal
+    aspirations, and he naturally would elect the very two things which
+    he is wholly and preposterously unfitted for. If I ever become
+    able, I mean to put Orion on a regular pension without revealing the
+    fact that it is a pension.
+
+    He did presently allow the pension, a liberal one, which continued
+    until neither Orion Clemens nor his wife had further earthly need of
+    it.
+
+Mark Twain for some time had contemplated one of the books that will
+longest preserve his memory, 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'. The success
+of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other autobiographical
+material, and he remembered those days along the river-front in Hannibal
+--his skylarking with Tom Blankenship, the Bowen boys, John Briggs, and
+the rest. He had recognized these things as material--inviting material
+it was--and now in the cool luxury of Quarry Farm he set himself to spin
+the fabric of youth.
+
+He found summer-time always his best period for literary effort, and on a
+hillside just by the old quarry, Mrs. Crane had built for him that spring
+a study--a little room of windows, somewhat suggestive of a pilot-house
+--overlooking the long sweep of grass and the dreamlike city below.
+Vines were planted that in the course of time would cover and embower it;
+there was a tiny fireplace for chilly days. To Twichell, of his new
+retreat, Clemens wrote:
+
+It is the loveliest study you ever saw. It is octagonal, with a peaked
+roof, each face filled with a spacious window, and it sits perched in
+complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of
+valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills. It is a
+cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four
+chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the
+lightning flashes behind the hills beyond, and the rain beats upon the
+roof over my head, imagine the luxury of it.
+
+He worked steadily there that summer. He would go up mornings, after
+breakfast, remaining until nearly dinner-time, say until five o'clock or
+after, for it was not his habit to eat luncheon. Other members of the
+family did not venture near the place, and if he was urgently wanted they
+blew a horn. Each evening he brought down his day's performance to read
+to the assembled family. He felt the need of audience and approval.
+Usually he earned the latter, but not always. Once, when for a day he
+put aside other matters to record a young undertaker's love-affair, and
+brought down the result in the evening, fairly bubbling with the joy of
+it, he met with a surprise. The tale was a ghastly burlesque, its humor
+of the most disheartening, unsavory sort. No one spoke during the
+reading, nobody laughed: The air was thick with disapproval. His voice
+lagged and faltered toward the end. When he finished there was heavy
+silence. Mrs. Clemens was the only one who could speak:
+
+"Youth, let's walk a little," she said.
+
+The "Undertaker's Love Story" is still among the manuscripts of that
+period, but it is unlikely that it will ever see the light of print.
+--[This tale bears no relation to "The Undertaker's Story" in Sketches
+New and Old.]
+
+The Tom Sawyer tale progressed steadily and satisfactorily. Clemens
+wrote Dr. Brown:
+
+    I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average,
+    for some time now, on a book (a story), and consequently have been
+    so wrapped up in it, and dead to everything else, that I have fallen
+    mighty short in letter-writing....
+
+    On hot days I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with
+    brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the
+    same thin linen we make shirts of.
+
+He incloses some photographs in this letter.
+
+    The group [he says] represents the vine-clad carriageway in front of
+    the farm-house. On the left is Megalopis sitting in the lap of her
+    German nurse-maid. I am sitting behind them. Mrs. Crane is in the
+    center. Mr. Crane next to her. Then Mrs. Clemens and the new baby.
+    Her Irish nurse stands at her back. Then comes the table waitress,
+    a young negro girl, born free. Next to her is Auntie Cord (a
+    fragment of whose history I have just sent to a magazine). She is
+    the cook; was in slavery more than forty years; and the self-
+    satisfied wench, the last of the group, is the little baby's
+    American nurse-maid. In the middle distance my mother-in-law's
+    coachman (up on errand) has taken a position unsolicited to help out
+    the picture. No, that is not true. He was waiting there a minute
+    or two before the photographer came. In the extreme background,
+    under the archway, you glimpse my study.
+
+The "new baby," "Bay," as they came to call her, was another little
+daughter, born in June, a happy, healthy addition to the household. In a
+letter written to Twichell we get a sweet summer picture of this period,
+particularly of little sunny-haired, two-year-old Susy.
+
+    There is nothing selfish about the Modoc. She is fascinated with
+    the new baby. The Modoc rips and tears around outdoors most of the
+    time, and consequently is as hard as a pineknot and as brown as an
+    Indian. She is bosom friend to all the chickens, ducks, turkeys,
+    and guinea-hens on the place. Yesterday, as she marched along the
+    winding path that leads up the hill through the red-clover beds to
+    the summer-house, there was a long procession of these fowls
+    stringing contentedly after her, led by a stately rooster, who can
+    look over the Modoc's head. The devotion of these vassals has been
+    purchased with daily largess of Indian meal, and so the Modoc,
+    attended by her body-guard, moves in state wherever she goes.
+
+There were days, mainly Sundays, when he did not work at all; peaceful
+days of lying fallow, dreaming in shady places, drowsily watching little
+Susy, or reading with Mrs. Clemens. Howells's "Foregone Conclusion" was
+running in the Atlantic that year, and they delighted in it. Clemens
+wrote the author:
+
+    I should think that this must be the daintiest, truest, most
+    admirable workmanship that was ever put on a story. The creatures
+    of God do not act out their natures more unerringly than yours do.
+    If your genuine stories can die I wonder by what right old Walter
+    Scott's artificialities shall continue to live.
+
+At other times he found comfort in the society of Theodore Crane. These
+two were always fond of each other, and often read together the books in
+which they were mutually interested. They had portable-hammock
+arrangements, which they placed side by side on the lawn, and read and
+discussed through summer afternoons. The 'Mutineers of the Bounty' was
+one of the books they liked best, and there was a story of an Iceland
+farmer, a human document, that had an unfading interest. Also there were
+certain articles in old numbers of the Atlantic that they read and
+reread. 'Pepys' Diary', 'Two Years Before the Mast', and a book on the
+Andes were reliable favorites. Mark Twain read not so many books, but
+read a few books often. Those named were among the literature he asked
+for each year of his return to Quarry Farm. Without them, the farm and
+the summer would not be the same.
+
+Then there was 'Lecky's History of European Morals'; there were periods
+when they read Lecky avidly and discussed it in original and unorthodox
+ways. Mark Twain found an echo of his own philosophies in Lecky. He
+made frequent marginal notes along the pages of the world's moral
+history--notes not always quotable in the family circle. Mainly,
+however, they were short, crisp interjections of assent or disapproval.
+In one place Lecky refers to those who have undertaken to prove that all
+our morality is a product of experience, holding that a desire to obtain
+happiness and to avoid pain is the only possible motive to action; the
+reason, and the only reason, why we should perform virtuous actions being
+"that on the whole such a course will bring us the greatest amount of
+happiness." Clemens has indorsed these philosophies by writing on the
+margin, "Sound and true." It was the philosophy which he himself would
+always hold (though, apparently, never live by), and in the end would
+embody a volume of his own.--[What Is Man? Privately printed in 1906.]
+--In another place Lecky, himself speaking, says:
+
+    Fortunately we are all dependent for many of our pleasures on
+    others. Co-operation and organization are essential to our
+    happiness, and these are impossible without some restraint being
+    placed upon our appetites. Laws are made to secure this restraint,
+    and being sustained by rewards, and punishments they make it the
+    interest of the individual to regard that of the community.
+
+"Correct!" comments Clemens. "He has proceeded from unreasoned
+selfishness to reasoned selfishness. All our acts, reasoned and
+unreasoned, are selfish." It was a conclusion he logically never
+departed from; not the happiest one, it would seem, at first glance, but
+one easier to deny than to disprove.
+
+On the back of an old envelope Mark Twain set down his literary
+declaration of this period.
+
+"I like history, biography, travels, curious facts and strange
+happenings, and science. And I detest novels, poetry, and theology."
+
+But of course the novels of Howells would be excepted; Lecky was not
+theology, but the history of it; his taste for poetry would develop
+later, though it would never become a fixed quantity, as was his devotion
+to history and science. His interest in these amounted to a passion.
+
+
+
+
+XCV
+
+AN "ATLANTIC" STORY AND A PLAY
+
+The reference to "Auntie Cord" in the letter to Dr. Brown brings us to
+Mark Twain's first contribution to the Atlantic Monthly. Howells in his
+Recollections of his Atlantic editorship, after referring to certain
+Western contributors, says:
+
+    Later came Mark Twain, originally of Missouri, but then
+    provisionally of Hartford, and now ultimately of the solar system,
+    not to say the universe. He came first with "A True Story," one of
+    those noble pieces of humanity with which the South has atoned
+    chiefly, if not solely, through him for all its despite to the
+    negro.
+
+Clemens had long aspired to appear in the Atlantic, but such was his own
+rating of his literature that he hardly hoped to qualify for its pages.
+Twichell remembers his "mingled astonishment and triumph" when he was
+invited to send something to the magazine.
+
+He was obliged to "send something" once or twice before the acceptance of
+"A True Story," the narrative of Auntie Cord, and even this acceptance
+brought with it the return of a fable which had accompanied it, with the
+explanation that a fable like that would disqualify the magazine for
+every denominational reader, though Howells hastened to express his own
+joy in it, having been particularly touched by the author's reference to
+Sisyphus and Atlas as ancestors of the tumble-bug. The "True Story," he
+said, with its "realest king of black talk," won him, and a few days
+later he wrote again: "This little story delights me more and more. I
+wish you had about forty of 'em."
+
+And so, modestly enough, as became him, for the story was of the
+simplest, most unpretentious sort, Mark Twain entered into the school of
+the elect.
+
+In his letter to Howells, accompanying the MS., the author said:
+
+    I inclose also "A True Story," which has no humor in it. You can
+    pay as lightly as you choose for that if you want it, for it is
+    rather out of my line. I have not altered the old colored woman's
+    story, except to begin it at the beginning, instead of the middle,
+    as she did--and traveled both ways.
+
+Howells in his Recollections tells of the business anxiety in the
+Atlantic office in the effort to estimate the story's pecuniary value.
+Clemens and Harte had raised literary rates enormously; the latter was
+reputed to have received as much as five cents a word from affluent
+newspapers! But the Atlantic was poor, and when sixty dollars was
+finally decided upon for the three pages (about two and a half cents a
+word) the rate was regarded as handsome--without precedent in Atlantic
+history. Howells adds that as much as forty times this amount was
+sometimes offered to Mark Twain in later years. Even in '74 he had
+received a much higher rate than that offered by the Atlantic,--but no
+acceptance, then, or later, ever made him happier, or seemed more richly
+rewarded.
+
+"A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It" was precisely what
+it claimed to be.--[Atlantic Monthly for November, 1874; also included in
+Sketches New and Old.]--Auntie Cord, the Auntie Rachel of that tale, cook
+at Quarry Farm, was a Virginia negress who had been twice sold as a
+slave, and was proud of the fact; particularly proud that she had brought
+$1,000 on the block. All her children had been sold away from her, but
+it was a long time ago, and now at sixty she was fat and seemingly
+without care. She had told her story to Mrs. Crane, who had more than
+once tried to persuade her to tell it to Clemens; but Auntie Cord was
+reluctant. One evening, however, when the family sat on the front
+veranda in the moonlight, looking down on the picture city, as was their
+habit, Auntie Cord came around to say good night, and Clemens engaged her
+in conversation. He led up to her story, and almost before she knew it
+she was seated at his feet telling the strange tale in almost the exact
+words in which it was set down by him next morning. It gave Mark Twain a
+chance to exercise two of his chief gifts--transcription and portrayal.
+He was always greater at these things than at invention. Auntie Cord's
+story is a little masterpiece.
+
+He wished to do more with Auntie Cord and her associates of the farm, for
+they were extraordinarily interesting. Two other negroes on the place,
+John Lewis and his wife (we shall hear notably of Lewis later), were not
+always on terms of amity with Auntie Cord. They disagreed on religion,
+and there were frequent battles in the kitchen. These depressed the
+mistress of the house, but they gave only joy to Mark Twain. His
+Southern raising had given him an understanding of their humors, their
+native emotions which made these riots a spiritual gratification. He
+would slip around among the shrubbery and listen to the noise and strife
+of battle, and hug himself with delight. Sometimes they resorted to
+missiles--stones, tinware--even dressed poultry which Auntie Cord was
+preparing for the oven. Lewis was very black, Auntie Cord was a bright
+mulatto, Lewis's' wife several shades lighter. Wherever the discussion
+began it promptly shaded off toward the color-line and insult. Auntie
+Cord was a Methodist; Lewis was a Dunkard. Auntie Cord was ignorant and
+dogmatic; Lewis could read and was intelligent. Theology invariably led
+to personality, and eventually to epithets, crockery, geology, and
+victuals. How the greatest joker of the age did enjoy that summer
+warfare!
+
+The fun was not all one-sided. An incident of that summer probably
+furnished more enjoyment for the colored members of the household than it
+did for Mark Twain. Lewis had some fowls, and among them was a
+particularly pestiferous guinea-hen that used to get up at three in the
+morning and go around making the kind of a noise that a guinea-hen must
+like and is willing to get up early to hear. Mark Twain did not care for
+it. He stood it as long as he could one morning, then crept softly from
+the house to stop it.
+
+It was a clear, bright night; locating the guinea-hen, he slipped up
+stealthily with a stout stick. The bird was pouring out its heart,
+tearing the moonlight to tatters. Stealing up close, Clemens made a
+vicious swing with his bludgeon, but just then the guinea stepped forward
+a little, and he missed. The stroke and his explosion frightened the
+fowl, and it started to run. Clemens, with his mind now on the single
+purpose of revenge, started after it. Around the trees, along the paths,
+up and down the lawn, through gates and across the garden, out over the
+fields, they raced, "pursuer and pursued." The guinea nor longer sang,
+and Clemens was presently too exhausted to swear. Hour after hour the
+silent, deadly hunt continued, both stopping to rest at intervals; then
+up again and away. It was like something in a dream. It was nearly
+breakfast-time when he dragged himself into the house at last, and the
+guinea was resting and panting under a currant-bush. Later in the day
+Clemens gave orders to Lewis to "kill and eat that guinea-hen," which
+Lewis did. Clemens himself had then never eaten a guinea, but some years
+later, in Paris, when the delicious breast of one of those fowls was
+served him, he remembered and said:
+
+"And to think, after chasing that creature all night, John Lewis got to
+eat him instead of me."
+
+The interest in Tom and Huck, or the inspiration for their adventures,
+gave out at last, or was superseded by a more immediate demand. As early
+as May, Goodman, in San Francisco, had seen a play announced there,
+presenting the character of Colonel Sellers, dramatized by Gilbert S.
+Densmore and played by John T. Raymond. Goodman immediately wrote
+Clemens; also a letter came from Warner, in Hartford, who had noticed in
+San Francisco papers announcements of the play. Of course Clemens would
+take action immediately; he telegraphed, enjoining the performance. Then
+began a correspondence with the dramatist and actor. This in time
+resulted in an amicable arrangement, by which the dramatist agreed to
+dispose of his version to Clemens. Clemens did not wait for it to
+arrive, but began immediately a version of his own. Just how much or how
+little of Densmore's work found its way into the completed play, as
+presented by Raymond later, cannot be known now. Howells conveys the
+impression that Clemens had no hand in its authorship beyond the
+character of Sellers as taken from the book. But in a letter still
+extant, which Clemens wrote to Howells at the time, he says:
+
+    I worked a month on my play, and launched it in New York last
+    Wednesday. I believe it will go. The newspapers have been
+    complimentary. It is simply a setting for one character, Colonel
+    Sellers. As a play I guess it will not bear critical assault in
+    force.
+
+The Warners are as charming as ever. They go shortly to the devil for a
+year--that is, to Egypt.
+
+Raymond, in a letter which he wrote to the Sun, November 3, 1874,
+declared that "not one line" of Densmore's dramatization was used,
+"except that which was taken bodily from The Gilded Age." During the
+newspaper discussion of the matter, Clemens himself prepared a letter for
+the Hartford Post. This letter was suppressed, but it still exists. In
+it he says:
+
+    I entirely rewrote the play three separate and distinct times. I
+    had expected to use little of his [Densmore's] language and but
+    little of his plot. I do not think there are now twenty sentences
+    of Mr. Densmore's in the play, but I used so much of his plot that I
+    wrote and told him that I should pay him about as much more as I had
+    already paid him in case the play proved a success. I shall keep my
+    word.
+
+This letter, written while the matter was fresh in his mind, is
+undoubtedly in accordance with the facts. That Densmore was fully
+satisfied may be gathered from an acknowledgment, in which he says: "Your
+letter reached me on the ad, with check. In this place permit me to
+thank you for the very handsome manner in which you have acted in this
+matter."
+
+Warner, meantime, realizing that the play was constructed almost entirely
+of the Mark Twain chapters of the book, agreed that his collaborator
+should undertake the work and financial responsibilities of the dramatic
+venture and reap such rewards as might result. Various stories have been
+told of this matter, most of them untrue. There was no bitterness
+between the friends, no semblance of an estrangement of any sort. Warner
+very generously and promptly admitted that he was not concerned with the
+play, its authorship, or its profits, whatever the latter might amount
+to. Moreover, Warner was going to Egypt very soon, and his labors and
+responsibilities were doubly sufficient as they stood.
+
+Clemens's estimate of the play as a dramatic composition was correct
+enough, but the public liked it, and it was a financial success from the
+start. He employed a representative to travel with Raymond, to assist in
+the management and in the division of spoil. The agent had instructions
+to mail a card every day, stating the amount of his share in the profits.
+Howells once arrived in Hartford just when this postal tide of fortune
+was at its flood:
+
+One hundred and fifty dollars--two hundred dollars--three hundred dollars
+were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in the air,
+before he sat down at the table, or rose from it to brandish, and then,
+flinging his napkin in the chair, walked up and down to exult in.
+
+Once, in later years, referring to the matter, Howells said "He was never
+a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and he wanted
+more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream." Which was a
+true word. Mark Twain with money was like a child with a heap of bright
+pebbles, ready to pile up more and still more, then presently to throw
+them all away and begin gathering anew.
+
+
+
+
+XCVI
+
+THE NEW HOME
+
+The Clemenses returned to Hartford to find their new house "ready,"
+though still full of workmen, decorators, plumbers, and such other
+minions of labor as make life miserable to those with ambitions for new
+or improved habitations. The carpenters were still on the lower floor,
+but the family moved in and camped about in rooms up-stairs that were
+more or less free from the invader. They had stopped in New York ten
+days to buy carpets and furnishings, and these began to arrive, with no
+particular place to put them; but the owners were excited and happy with
+it all, for it was the pleasant season of the year, and all the new
+features of the house were fascinating, while the daily progress of the
+decorators furnished a fresh surprise when they roamed through the rooms
+at evening. Mrs. Clemens wrote home:
+
+    We are perfectly delighted with everything here and do so want you
+    all to see it.
+
+Her husband, as he was likely to do, picked up the letter and finished
+it:
+
+    Livy appoints me to finish this; but how can a headless man perform
+    an intelligent function? I have been bully-ragged all day by the
+    builder, by his foreman, by the architect, by the tapestry devil who
+    is to upholster the furniture, by the idiot who is putting down the
+    carpets, by the scoundrel who is setting up the billiard-table (and
+    has left the balls in New York), by the wildcat who is sodding the
+    ground and finishing the driveway (after the sun went down), by a
+    book agent, whose body is in the back yard and the coroner notified.
+    Just think of this thing going on the whole day long, and I a man
+    who loathes details with all his heart! But I haven't lost my
+    temper, and I've made Livy lie down most of the time; could anybody
+    make her lie down all the time?
+
+Warner wrote from Egypt expressing sympathy for their unfurnished state
+of affairs, but added, "I would rather fit out three houses and fill them
+with furniture than to fit out one 'dahabiyeh'." Warner was at that
+moment undertaking his charmingly remembered trip up the Nile.
+
+The new home was not entirely done for a long time. One never knows when
+a big house like that--or a little house, for that matters done. But
+they were settled at last, with all their beautiful things in place; and
+perhaps there have been richer homes, possibly more artistic ones, but
+there has never been a more charming home, within or without, than that
+one.
+
+So many frequenters have tried to express the charm of that household.
+None of them has quite succeeded, for it lay not so much in its
+arrangement of rooms or their decorations or their outlook, though these
+were all beautiful enough, but rather in the personality, the atmosphere;
+and these are elusive things to convey in words. We can only see and
+feel and recognize; we cannot translate them. Even Howells, with his
+subtle touch, can present only an aspect here and there; an essence, as
+it were, from a happy garden, rather than the fullness of its bloom.
+
+As Mark Twain was unlike any other man that ever lived, so his house was
+unlike any other house ever built. People asked him why he built the
+kitchen toward the street, and he said:
+
+"So the servants can see the circus go by without running out into the
+front yard."
+
+But this was probably an after-thought. The kitchen end of the house
+extended toward Farmington Avenue, but it was by no means unbeautiful. It
+was a pleasing detail of the general scheme. The main entrance faced at
+right angles with the street and opened to a spacious hall. In turn, the
+hall opened to a parlor, where there was a grand piano, and to the
+dining-room and library, and the library opened to a little conservatory,
+semicircular in form, of a design invented by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Says
+Howells:
+
+    The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed
+    up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of the
+    fountain companied by Callas and other waterloving lilies. There,
+    while we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled
+    the pretty bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the
+    delicate accents of its varied blossoms.
+
+In the library was an old carved mantel which Clemens and his wife had
+bought in Scotland, salvage from a dismantled castle, and across the top
+of the fireplace a plate of brass with the motto, "The ornament of a
+house is the friends that frequent it," surely never more appropriately
+inscribed.
+
+There was the mahogany room, a large bedroom on the ground floor, and
+upstairs were other spacious bedrooms and many baths, while everywhere
+were Oriental rugs and draperies, and statuary and paintings. There was
+a fireplace under a window, after the English pattern, so that in
+winter-time one could at the same moment watch the blaze and the falling
+snow. The library windows looked out over the valley with the little
+stream in it, and through and across the tree-tops. At the top of the
+house was what became Clemens's favorite retreat, the billiard-room, and
+here and there were unexpected little balconies, which one could step out
+upon for the view.
+
+Below was a wide, covered veranda, the "ombra," as they called it,
+secluded from the public eye--a favorite family gathering-place on
+pleasant days.
+
+But a house might easily have all these things without being more than
+usually attractive, and a house with a great deal less might have been as
+full of charm; only it seemed just the proper setting for that particular
+household, and undoubtedly it acquired the personality of its occupants.
+
+Howells assures us that there never was another home like it, and we may
+accept his statement. It was unique. It was the home of one of the most
+unusual and unaccountable personalities in the world, yet was perfectly
+and serenely ordered. Mark Twain was not responsible for this blissful
+condition. He was its beacon-light; it was around Mrs. Clemens that its
+affairs steadily revolved.
+
+If in the four years and more of marriage Clemens had made advancement in
+culture and capabilities, Olivia Clemens also had become something more
+than the half-timid, inexperienced girl he had first known. In a way her
+education had been no less notable than his. She had worked and studied,
+and her half-year of travel and entertainment abroad had given her
+opportunity for acquiring knowledge and confidence. Her vision of life
+had vastly enlarged; her intellect had flowered; her grasp of
+practicalities had become firm and sure.
+
+In spite of her delicate physical structure, her continued uncertainty of
+health, she capably undertook the management of their large new house,
+and supervised its economies. Any one of her undertakings was sufficient
+for one woman, but she compassed them all. No children had more careful
+direction than hers. No husband had more devoted attendance and
+companionship. No household was ever directed with a sweeter and gentler
+grace, or with greater perfection of detail. When the great ones of the
+world came to visit America's most picturesque literary figure she gave
+welcome to them all, and filled her place at his side with such sweet and
+capable dignity that those who came to pay their duties to him often
+returned to pay even greater devotion to his companion. Says Howells:
+
+    She was, in a way, the loveliest person I have ever seen--the
+    gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united
+    wonderful tact with wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted
+    her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried in it.
+
+And once, in an interview with the writer of these chapters, Howells
+declared: "She was not only a beautiful soul, but a woman of singular
+intellectual power. I never knew any one quite like her." Then he
+added: "Words cannot express Mrs. Clemens--her fineness, her delicate,
+her wonderful tact with a man who was in some respects, and wished to be,
+the most outrageous creature that ever breathed."
+
+Howells meant a good many things by that, no doubt: Clemens's violent
+methods, for one thing, his sudden, savage impulses, which sometimes
+worked injustice and hardship for others, though he was first to discover
+the wrong and to repair it only too fully. Then, too, Howells may have
+meant his boyish teasing tendency to disturb Mrs. Clemens's exquisite
+sense of decorum.
+
+Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in a
+pair of white cowskin slippers with the hair out, and do a crippled
+colored uncle, to the joy of all beholders. I must not say all, for I
+remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of
+"Oh, Youth!"
+
+He was continually doing such things as the "crippled colored uncle,";
+partly for the very joy of the performance, but partly, too, to disturb
+her serenity, to incur her reproof, to shiver her a little--"shock" would
+be too strong a word. And he liked to fancy her in a spirit and attitude
+of belligerence, to present that fancy to those who knew the measure of
+her gentle nature. Writing to Mrs. Howells of a picture of herself in a
+group, he said:
+
+    You look exactly as Mrs. Clemens does after she has said: "Indeed, I
+    do not wonder that you can frame no reply; for you know only too
+    well that your conduct admits of no excuse, palliation, or argument
+    --none!"
+
+Clemens would pretend to a visitor that she had been violently indignant
+over some offense of his; perhaps he would say:
+
+"Well I contradicted her just now, and the crockery will begin to fly
+pretty soon."
+
+She could never quite get used to this pleasantry, and a faint glow would
+steal over her face. He liked to produce that glow. Yet always his
+manner toward her was tenderness itself. He regarded her as some dainty
+bit of porcelain, and it was said that he was always following her about
+with a chair. Their union has been regarded as ideal. That is
+Twichell's opinion and Howells's. The latter sums up:
+
+    Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be,
+    but from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the
+    most perfect.
+
+
+
+
+XCVII
+
+THE WALK TO BOSTON
+
+The new home became more beautiful to them as things found their places,
+as the year deepened; and the wonder of autumn foliage lit up their
+landscape. Sitting on one of the little upper balconies Mrs. Clemens
+wrote:
+
+    The atmosphere is very hazy, and it makes the autumn tints even more
+    soft and beautiful than usual. Mr. Twichell came for Mr. Clemens to
+    go walking with him; they returned at dinner-time, heavily laden
+    with autumn leaves.
+
+And as usual Clemens, finding the letter unfinished, took up the story.
+
+    Twichell came up here with me to luncheon after services, and I went
+    back home with him and took Susy along in her little carriage. We
+    have just got home again, middle of afternoon, and Livy has gone to
+    rest and left the west balcony to me. There is a shining and most
+    marvelous miracle of cloud-effects mirrored in the brook; a picture
+    which began with perfection, and has momently surpassed it ever
+    since, until at last it is almost unendurably beautiful....
+
+    There is a cloud-picture in the stream now whose hues are as
+    manifold as those in an opal and as delicate as the tintings of a
+    sea-shell. But now a muskrat is swimming through it and
+    obliterating it with the turmoil of wavelets he casts abroad from
+    his shoulders.
+
+    The customary Sunday assemblage of strangers is gathered together in
+    the grounds discussing the house.
+
+Twichell and Clemens took a good many walks these days; long walks, for
+Twichell was an athlete and Clemens had not then outgrown the Nevada
+habit of pedestrian wandering. Talcott's Tower, a wooden structure about
+five miles from Hartford, was one of their favorite objective points; and
+often they walked out and back, talking so continuously, and so absorbed
+in the themes of their discussions, that time and distance slipped away
+almost unnoticed. How many things they talked of in those long walks!
+They discussed philosophies and religions and creeds, and all the range
+of human possibility and shortcoming, and all the phases of literature
+and history and politics. Unorthodox discussions they were,
+illuminating, marvelously enchanting, and vanished now forever. Sometimes
+they took the train as far as Bloomfield, a little station on the way,
+and walked the rest of the distance, or they took the train from
+Bloomfield home. It seems a strange association, perhaps, the fellowship
+of that violent dissenter with that fervent soul dedicated to church and
+creed, but the root of their friendship lay in the frankness with which
+each man delivered his dogmas and respected those of his companion.
+
+It was during one of their walks to the tower that they planned a far
+more extraordinary undertaking--nothing less, in fact, than a walk from
+Hartford to Boston. This was early in November. They did not delay the
+matter, for the weather was getting too uncertain.
+
+Clemens wrote Redpath:
+
+DEAR REDPATH,--Rev. J. H. Twichell and I expect to start at 8 o'clock
+Thursday morning to walk to Boston in twenty four hours--or more. We
+shall telegraph Young's Hotel for rooms Saturday night, in order to allow
+for a low average of pedestrianism.
+
+It was half past eight on Thursday morning, November 12, 1874, that they
+left Twichell's house in a carriage, drove to the East Hartford bridge,
+and there took to the road, Twichell carrying a little bag and Clemens a
+basket of lunch.
+
+The papers had got hold of it by this time, and were watching the result.
+They did well enough that first day, following the old Boston stage road,
+arriving at Westford about seven o'clock in the evening, twenty-eight
+miles from the starting-point. There was no real hotel at Westford, only
+a sort of tavern, but it afforded the luxury of rest. "Also," says
+Twichell, in a memoranda of the trip, "a sublimely profane hostler whom
+you couldn't jostle with any sort of mild remark without bringing down
+upon yourself a perfect avalanche of oaths."
+
+This was a joy to Clemens, who sat behind the stove, rubbing his lame
+knees and fairly reveling in Twichell's discomfiture in his efforts to
+divert the hostler's blasphemy. There was also a mellow inebriate there
+who recommended kerosene for Clemens's lameness, and offered as testimony
+the fact that he himself had frequently used it for stiffness in his
+joints after lying out all night in cold weather, drunk: altogether it
+was a notable evening.
+
+Westford was about as far as they continued the journey afoot. Clemens
+was exceedingly lame next morning, and had had a rather bad night; but he
+swore and limped along six miles farther, to North Ashford, then gave it
+up. They drove from North Ashford to the railway, where Clemens
+telegraphed Redpath and Howells of their approach. To Redpath:
+
+    We have made thirty-five miles in less than five days. This
+    demonstrates that the thing can be done. Shall now finish by rail.
+    Did you have any bets on us?
+
+To Howells:
+
+    Arrive by rail at seven o'clock, the first of a series of grand
+    annual pedestrian tours from Hartford to Boston to be performed by
+    us. The next will take place next year.
+
+Redpath read his despatch to a lecture audience, with effect. Howells
+made immediate preparation for receiving two way-worn, hungry men. He
+telegraphed to Young's Hotel: "You and Twichell come right up to 37
+Concord Avenue, Cambridge, near observatory. Party waiting for you."
+
+They got to Howells's about nine o'clock, and the refreshments were
+waiting. Miss Longfellow was there, Rose Hawthorne, John Fiske, Larkin
+G. Mead, the sculptor, and others of their kind. Howells tells in his
+book how Clemens, with Twichell, "suddenly stormed in," and immediately
+began to eat and drink:
+
+    I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with
+    his head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped
+    oysters without which no party in Cambridge was really a party,
+    exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the
+    most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of
+    their progress.
+
+Clemens gave a dinner, next night, to Howells, Aldrich, Osgood, and the
+rest. The papers were full of jokes concerning the Boston expedition;
+some even had illustrations, and it was all amusing enough at the time.
+
+Next morning, sitting in the writing-room of Young's Hotel, he wrote a
+curious letter to Mrs. Clemens, though intended as much for Howells and
+Aldrich as for her. It was dated sixty-one years ahead, and was a sort
+of Looking Backwards, though that notable book had not yet been written.
+It presupposed a monarchy in which the name of Boston has been changed to
+"Limerick," and Hartford to "Dublin." In it, Twichell has become the
+"Archbishop of Dublin," Howells "Duke of Cambridge," Aldrich "Marquis of
+Ponkapog," Clemens the "Earl of Hartford." It was too whimsical and
+delightful a fancy to be forgotten.--[This remarkable and amusing
+document will be found under Appendix M, at the end of last volume.]
+
+A long time afterward, thirty-four year, he came across this letter. He
+said:
+
+"It seems curious now that I should have been dreaming dreams of a future
+monarchy and never suspect that the monarchy was already present and the
+Republic a thing of the past."
+
+What he meant, was the political succession that had fostered those
+commercial trusts which, in turn, had established party dominion.
+
+To Howells, on his return, Clemens wrote his acknowledgments, and added:
+
+    Mrs. Clemens gets upon the verge of swearing, and goes tearing
+    around in an unseemly fury when I enlarge upon the delightful time
+    we had in Boston, and she not there to have her share. I have tried
+    hard to reproduce Mrs. Howells to her, and have probably not made a
+    shining success of it.
+
+
+
+
+XCVIII
+
+"OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI"
+
+Howells had been urging Clemens to do something more for the Atlantic,
+specifically something for the January number. Clemens cudgeled his
+brains, but finally declared he must give it up:
+
+    Mrs. Clemens has diligently persecuted me day by day with urgings to
+    go to work and do that something, but it's no use. I find I can't.
+    We are in such a state of worry and endless confusion that my head
+    won't go.
+
+Two hours later he sent another hasty line:
+
+    I take back the remark that I can't write for the January number,
+    for Twichell and I have had a long walk in the woods, and I got to
+    telling him about old Mississippi days of steam-boating glory and
+    grandeur as I saw them (during four years) from the pilot-house. He
+    said, "What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!" I hadn't
+    thought of that before. Would you like a series of papers to run
+    through three months or six or nine--or about four months, say?
+
+Howells welcomed this offer as an echo of his own thought. He had come
+from a piloting family himself, and knew the interest that Mark Twain
+could put into such a series.
+
+Acting promptly under the new inspiration, Clemens forthwith sent the
+first chapter of that monumental, that absolutely unique, series of
+papers on Mississippi River life, which to-day constitutes one of his
+chief claims to immortality.
+
+His first number was in the nature of an experiment. Perhaps, after all,
+the idea would not suit the Atlantic readers.
+
+"Cut it, scarify it, reject it, handle it with entire freedom," he wrote,
+and awaited the result.
+
+The "result" was that Howells expressed his delight:
+
+    The piece about the Mississippi is capital. It almost made the
+    water in our ice-pitcher muddy as I read it. I don't think I shall
+    meddle much with it, even in the way of suggestion. The sketch of
+    the low-lived little town was so good that I could have wished there
+    was more of it. I want the sketches, if you can make them, every
+    month.
+
+Mark Twain was now really interested in this new literary venture. He
+was fairly saturated with memories. He was writing on the theme that lay
+nearest to his heart. Within ten days he reported that he had finished
+three of the papers, and had begun the fourth.
+
+And yet I have spoken of nothing but piloting as a science so far, and I
+doubt if I ever get beyond that portion of my subject. And I don't care
+to. Any Muggins can write about old days on the Mississippi of five
+hundred different kinds, but I am the only man alive that can scribble
+about the piloting of that day, and no man has ever tried to scribble
+about it yet. Its newness pleases me all the time, and it is about the
+only new subject I know of.
+
+He became so enthusiastic presently that he wanted to take Howells with
+him on a trip down the Mississippi, with their wives for company, to go
+over the old ground again and obtain added material enough for a book.
+Howells was willing enough--agreed to go, in fact--but found it hard to
+get away. He began to temporize and finally backed out. Clemens tried
+to inveigle Osgood into the trip, but without success; also John Hay, but
+Hay had a new baby at his house just then--"three days old, and with a
+voice beyond price," he said, offering it as an excuse for
+non-acceptance. So the plan for revisiting the river and the conclusion
+of the book were held in abeyance for nearly seven years.
+
+Those early piloting chapters, as they appeared in the Atlantic,
+constituted Mark Twain's best literary exhibit up to that time. In some
+respects they are his best literature of any time. As pictures of an
+intensely interesting phase of life, they are so convincing, so real, and
+at the same time of such extraordinary charm and interest, that if the
+English language should survive a thousand years, or ten times as long,
+they would be as fresh and vivid at the end of that period as the day
+they were penned. In them the atmosphere of, the river and its
+environment--its pictures, its thousand aspects of life--are reproduced
+with what is no less than literary necromancy. Not only does he make you
+smell the river you can fairly hear it breathe. On the appearance of the
+first number John Hay wrote:
+
+"It is perfect; no more nor less. I don't see how you do it," and added,
+"you know what my opinion is of time not spent with you."
+
+Howells wrote:
+
+    You are doing the science of piloting splendidly. Every word
+    interesting, and don't you drop the series till you've got every bit
+    of anecdote and reminiscence into it.
+
+He let Clemens write the articles to suit himself. Once he said:
+
+    If I might put in my jaw at this point I should say, stick to actual
+    fact and character in the thing and give things in detail. All that
+    belongs to the old river life is novel, and is now mostly
+    historical. Don't write at any supposed Atlantic audience, but yarn
+    it off as if into my sympathetic ear.
+
+Clemens replied that he had no dread of the Atlantic audience; he
+declared it was the only audience that did not require a humorist to
+"paint himself striped and stand on his head to amuse it."
+
+The "Old Times" papers ran through seven numbers of the Atlantic. They
+were reprinted everywhere by the newspapers, who in that day had little
+respect for magazine copyrights, and were promptly pirated in book form
+in Canada. They added vastly to Mark Twain's literary capital, though
+Howells informs us that the Atlantic circulation did not thrive
+proportionately, for the reason that the newspapers gave the articles to
+their readers from advanced sheets of the magazine, even before the
+latter could be placed on sale. It so happened that in the January
+Atlantic, which contained the first of the Mississippi papers, there
+appeared Robert Dale Owen's article on "Spiritualism," which brought such
+humility both to author and publisher because of the exposure of the
+medium Katie King, which came along while the magazine was in press.
+Clemens has written this marginal note on the opening page of the copy at
+Quarry Farm:
+
+While this number of the Atlantic was being printed the Katie King
+manifestations were discovered to be the cheapest, wretchedest shams and
+frauds, and were exposed in the newspapers. The awful humiliation of it
+unseated Robert Dale Owen's reason, and he died in the madhouse.
+
+
+
+
+XCIX
+
+A TYPEWRITER, AND A JOKE ON ALDRICH
+
+It was during the trip to Boston with Twichell that Mark Twain saw for
+the first time what was then--a brand-new invention, a typewriter; or it
+may have been during a subsequent visit, a week or two later. At all
+events, he had the machine and was practising on it December 9, 1874, for
+he wrote two letters on it that day, one to Howells and the other to
+Orion Clemens. In the latter he says:
+
+    I am trying to get the hang of this new-fangled writing-machine, but
+    am not making a shining success of it. However, this is the first
+    attempt I ever have made, and yet I perceive that I shall soon
+    easily acquire a fine facility in its use. I saw the thing in
+    Boston the other day and was greatly taken with it.
+
+He goes on to explain the new wonder, and on the whole his first attempt
+is a very creditable performance. With his usual enthusiasm over an
+innovation, he believes it is going to be a great help to him, and
+proclaims its advantages.
+
+This is the letter to Howells, with the errors preserved:
+
+    You needn't answer this; I am only practicing to get three; anothe
+    slip-up there; only practici?ng ti get the hang of the thing. I
+    notice I miss fire & get in a good many unnecessary letters &
+    punctuation marks. I am simply using you for a target to bang at.
+    Blame my cats, but this thing requires genius in order to work it
+    just right.
+
+In an article written long after he tells how he was with Nasby when he
+first saw the machine in Boston through a window, and how they went in to
+see it perform. In the same article he states that he was the first
+person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature, and that he
+thinks the story of Tom Sawyer was the first type-copied manuscript.
+--[Tom Sawyer was not then complete, and had been laid aside. The first
+type-copied manuscript was probably early chapters of the Mississippi
+story, two discarded typewritten pages of which still exist.]
+
+The new enthusiasm ran its course and died. Three months later, when the
+Remington makers wrote him for a recommendation of the machine, he
+replied that he had entirely stopped using it. The typewriter was not
+perfect in those days, and the keys did not always respond readily. He
+declared it was ruining his morals--that it made him "want to swear." He
+offered it to Howells because, he said, Howells had no morals anyway.
+Howells hesitated, so Clemens traded the machine to Bliss for a
+side-saddle. But perhaps Bliss also became afraid of its influence, for
+in due time he brought it back. Howells, again tempted, hesitated, and
+this time was lost. What eventually became of the machine is not
+history.
+
+One of those, happy Atlantic dinners which Howells tells of came about
+the end of that year. It was at the Parker House, and Emerson was there;
+and Aldrich, and the rest of that group.
+
+"Don't you dare to refuse the invitation," said Howells, and naturally
+Clemens didn't, and wrote back:
+
+    I want you to ask Mrs. Howells to let you stay all night at the
+    Parker House and tell lies and have an improving time, and take
+    breakfast with me in the morning. I will have a good room for you
+    and a fire. Can't you tell her it always makes you sick to go home
+    late at night or something like that? That sort of thing arouses
+    Mrs. Clemens's sympathies easily.
+
+Two memories of that old dinner remain to-day. Aldrich and Howells were
+not satisfied with the kind of neckties that Mark Twain wore (the
+old-fashioned black "string" tie, a Western survival), so they made him a
+present of two cravats when he set out on his return for Hartford. Next
+day he wrote:
+
+    You and Aldrich have made one woman deeply and sincerely grateful
+    --Mrs. Clemens. For months--I may even say years--she has shown an
+    unaccountable animosity toward my necktie, even getting up in the
+    night to take it with the tongs and blackguard it, sometimes also
+    getting so far as to threaten it.
+
+    When I said you and Aldrich had given me two new neckties, and that
+    they were in a paper in my overcoat pocket, she was in a fever of
+    happiness until she found I was going to frame them; then all the
+    venom in her nature gathered itself together; insomuch that I, being
+    near to a door, went without, perceiving danger.
+
+It is recorded that eventually he wore the neckties, and returned no more
+to the earlier mode.
+
+Another memory of that dinner is linked to a demand that Aldrich made of
+Clemens that night, for his photograph. Clemens, returning to Hartford,
+put up fifty-two different specimens in as many envelopes, with the idea
+of sending one a week for a year. Then he concluded that this was too
+slow a process, and for a week sent one every morning to "His Grace of
+Ponkapog."
+
+Aldrich stood it for a few days, then protested. "The police," he said,
+"are in the habit of swooping down upon a publication of that sort."
+
+On New-Year's no less than twenty pictures came at once--photographs and
+prints of Mark Twain, his house, his family, his various belongings.
+Aldrich sent a warning then that the perpetrator of this outrage was
+known to the police as Mark Twain, alias "The Jumping Frog," a well-known
+California desperado, who would be speedily arrested and brought to
+Ponkapog to face his victim. This letter was signed "T. Bayleigh, Chief
+of Police," and on the outside of the envelope there was a statement that
+it would be useless for that person to send any more mail-matter, as the
+post-office had been blown up. The jolly farce closed there. It was the
+sort of thing that both men enjoyed.
+
+Aldrich was writing a story at this time which contained some Western
+mining incident and environment. He sent the manuscript to Clemens for
+"expert" consideration and advice. Clemens wrote him at great length and
+in careful detail. He was fond of Aldrich, regarding him as one of the
+most brilliant of men. Once, to Robert Louis Stevenson, he said:
+
+    "Aldrich has never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and
+    humorous sayings. None has equaled him, certainly none has
+    surpassed him, in the felicity of phrasing with which he clothed
+    these children of his fancy. Aldrich is always brilliant; he can't
+    help it; he is a fire-opal set round with rose diamonds; when he is
+    not speaking you know that his dainty fancies are twinkling and
+    glimmering around in him; when he speaks the diamonds flash. Yes,
+    he is always brilliant, he will always be brilliant; he will be
+    brilliant in hell-you will see."
+
+Stevenson, smiling a chuckly smile, said, "I hope not."
+
+"Well, you will, and he will dim even those ruddy fires and look like a
+transfigured Adonis backed against a pink sunset."--[North American
+Review, September, 1906.]
+
+
+
+
+C
+
+RAYMOND, MENTAL TELEGRAPHY, ETC.
+
+The Sellers play was given in Hartford, in January (1875), to as many
+people as could crowd into the Opera House. Raymond had reached the
+perfection of his art by that time, and the townsmen of Mark Twain saw
+the play and the actor at their best. Kate Field played the part of
+Laura Hawkins, and there was a Hartford girl in the company; also a
+Hartford young man, who would one day be about as well known to playgoers
+as any playwright or actor that America has produced. His name was
+William Gillette, and it was largely due to Mark Twain that the author of
+Secret Service and of the dramatic "Sherlock Holmes" got a fair public
+start. Clemens and his wife loaned Gillette the three thousand dollars
+which tided him through his period of dramatic education. Their faith in
+his ability was justified.
+
+Hartford would naturally be enthusiastic on a first "Sellers-Raymond"
+night. At the end of the fourth act there was an urgent demand for the
+author of the play, who was supposed to be present. He was not there in
+person, but had sent a letter, which Raymond read:
+
+MY DEAR RAYMOND,--I am aware that you are going to be welcomed to our
+town by great audiences on both nights of your stay there, and I beg to
+add my hearty welcome also, through this note. I cannot come to the
+theater on either evening, Raymond, because there is something so
+touching about your acting that I can't stand it.
+
+(I do not mention a couple of colds in my head, because I hardly mind
+them as much as I would the erysipelas, but between you and me I would
+prefer it if they were rights and lefts.)
+
+And then there is another thing. I have always taken a pride in earning
+my living in outside places and spending it in Hartford; I have said that
+no good citizen would live on his own people, but go forth and make it
+sultry for other communities and fetch home the result; and now at this
+late day I find myself in the crushed and bleeding position of fattening
+myself upon the spoils of my brethren! Can I support such grief as this?
+(This is literary emotion, you understand. Take the money at the door
+just the same.)
+
+Once more I welcome you to Hartford, Raymond, but as for me let me stay
+at home and blush.
+
+                         Yours truly,  MARK.
+
+The play was equally successful wherever it went. It made what in that
+day was regarded as a fortune. One hundred thousand dollars is hardly
+too large an estimate of the amount divided between author and actor.
+Raymond was a great actor in that part, as he interpreted it, though he
+did not interpret it fully, or always in its best way. The finer side,
+the subtle, tender side of Colonel Sellers, he was likely to overlook.
+Yet, with a natural human self-estimate, Raymond believed he had created
+a much greater part than Mark Twain had written. Doubtless from the
+point of view of a number of people this was so, though the idea, was
+naturally obnoxious to Clemens. In course of time their personal
+relations ceased.
+
+Clemens that winter gave another benefit for Father Hawley. In reply to
+an invitation to appear in behalf of the poor, he wrote that he had quit
+the lecture field, and would not return to the platform unless driven
+there by lack of bread. But he added:
+
+By the spirit of that remark I am debarred from delivering this proposed
+lecture, and so I fall back upon the letter of it, and emerge upon the
+platform for this last and final time because I am confronted by a lack
+of bread-among Father Hawley's flock.
+
+He made an introductory speech at an old-fashioned spelling-bee, given at
+the Asylum Hill Church; a breezy, charming talk of which the following is
+a sample:
+
+    I don't see any use in spelling a word right--and never did. I mean
+    I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of
+    spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook
+    all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. I
+    have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me;
+    there is such a breezy, unfettered originality about his
+    orthography. He always spells "kow" with a large "K." Now that is
+    just as good as to spell it with a small one. It is better. It
+    gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope. It suggests
+    to the mind a grand, vague, impressive new kind of a cow.
+
+    He took part in the contest, and in spite of his early reputation,
+    was spelled down on the word "chaldron," which he spelled
+    "cauldron," as he had been taught, while the dictionary used as
+    authority gave that form as second choice.
+
+Another time that winter, Clemens read before the Monday Evening Club a
+paper on "Universal Suffrage," which is still remembered by the surviving
+members of that time. A paragraph or two will convey its purport:
+
+    Our marvelous latter-day statesmanship has invented universal
+    suffrage. That is the finest feather in our cap. All that we
+    require of a voter is that he shall be forked, wear pantaloons
+    instead of petticoats, and bear a more or less humorous resemblance
+    to the reported image of God. He need not know anything whatever;
+    he may be wholly useless and a cumberer of the earth; he may even be
+    known to be a consummate scoundrel. No matter. While he can steer
+    clear of the penitentiary his vote is as weighty as the vote of a
+    president, a bishop, a college professor, a merchant prince. We
+    brag of our universal, unrestricted suffrage; but we are shams after
+    all, for we restrict when we come to the women.
+
+The Monday Evening Club was an organization which included the best minds
+of Hartford. Dr. Horace Bushnell, Prof. Calvin E. Stowe, and J. Hammond
+Trumbull founded it back in the sixties, and it included such men as Rev.
+Dr. Parker, Rev. Dr. Burton, Charles H. Clark, of the Courant, Warner,
+and Twichell, with others of their kind. Clemens had been elected after
+his first sojourn in England (February, 1873), and had then read a paper
+on the "License of the Press." The club met alternate Mondays, from
+October to May. There was one paper for each evening, and, after the
+usual fashion of such clubs, the reading was followed by discussion.
+Members of that time agree that Mark Twain's association with the club
+had a tendency to give it a life, or at least an exhilaration, which it
+had not previously known. His papers were serious in their purpose he
+always preferred to be serious--but they evidenced the magic gift which
+made whatever he touched turn to literary jewelry.
+
+Psychic theories and phenomena always attracted Mark Twain. In
+thought-transference, especially, he had a frank interest--an interest
+awakened and kept alive by certain phenomena--psychic manifestations we
+call them now. In his association with Mrs. Clemens it not infrequently
+happened that one spoke the other's thought, or perhaps a
+long-procrastinated letter to a friend would bring an answer as quickly
+as mailed; but these are things familiar to us all. A more startling
+example of thought-communication developed at the time of which we are
+writing, an example which raised to a fever-point whatever interest he
+may have had in the subject before. (He was always having these vehement
+interests--rages we may call them, for it would be inadequate to speak of
+them as fads, inasmuch as they tended in the direction of human
+enlightenment, or progress, or reform.)
+
+Clemens one morning was lying in bed when, as he says, "suddenly a red-hot
+new idea came whistling down into my camp." The idea was that the time
+was ripe for a book that would tell the story of the Comstock-of the
+Nevada silver mines. It seemed to him that the person best qualified for
+the work was his old friend William Wright--Dan de Quille. He had not
+heard from Dan, or of him, for a long time, but decided to write and urge
+him to take up the idea. He prepared the letter, going fully into the
+details of his plan, as was natural for him to do, then laid it aside
+until he could see Bliss and secure his approval of the scheme from a
+publishing standpoint. Just a week later, it was the 9th of March, a
+letter came--a thick letter bearing a Nevada postmark, and addressed in a
+handwriting which he presently recognized as De Quille's. To a visitor
+who was present he said:
+
+"Now I will do a miracle. I will tell you everything this letter
+contains--date, signature, and all without breaking the seal."
+
+He stated what he believed was in the letter. Then he opened it and
+showed that he had correctly given its contents, which were the same in
+all essential details as those of his own letter, not yet mailed.
+
+In an article on "Mental Telegraphy" (he invented the name) he relates
+this instance, with others, and in 'Following the Equator' and elsewhere
+he records other such happenings. It was one of the "mysteries" in which
+he never lost interest, though his concern in it in time became a passive
+one.
+
+The result of the De Quille manifestation, however, he has not recorded.
+Clemens immediately wrote, urging Dan to come to Hartford for an extended
+visit. De Quille came, and put in a happy spring in his old comrade's
+luxurious home, writing 'The Big Bonanza', which Bliss successfully
+published a year later.
+
+Mark Twain was continually inviting old friends to share his success with
+him. Any comrade of former days found welcome in his home as often as he
+would come, and for as long as he would stay. Clemens dropped his own
+affairs to advise in their undertakings; and if their undertakings were
+literary he found them a publisher. He did this for Joaquin Miller and
+for Bret Harte, and he was always urging Goodman to make his house a
+home.
+
+The Beecher-Tilton trial was the sensation of the spring of 1875, and
+Clemens, in common with many others, was greatly worked up over it. The
+printed testimony had left him decidedly in doubt as to Beecher's
+innocence, though his blame would seem to have been less for the possible
+offense than because of the great leader's attitude in the matter. To
+Twichell he said:
+
+"His quibbling was fatal. Innocent or guilty, he should have made an
+unqualified statement in the beginning."
+
+Together they attended one of the sessions, on a day when Beecher himself
+was on the witness-stand. The tension was very great; the excitement was
+painful. Twichell thought that Beecher appeared well under the stress of
+examination and was deeply sorry for him; Clemens was far from convinced.
+
+The feeling was especially strong in Hartford, where Henry Ward Beecher's
+relatives were prominent, and animosities grew out of it. They are all
+forgotten now; most of those who cherished bitterness are dead. Any
+feeling that Clemens had in the matter lasted but a little while. Howells
+tells us that when he met him some months after the trial ended, and was
+tempted to mention it, Clemens discouraged any discussion of the event.
+Says Howells:
+
+    He would only say the man had suffered enough; as if the man had
+    expiated his wrong, and he was not going to do anything to renew his
+    penalty. I found that very curious, very delicate. His continued
+    blame could not come to the sufferer's knowledge, but he felt it his
+    duty to forbear it.
+
+It was one hundred years, that 19th of April, since the battles of
+Lexington and Concord, and there was to be a great celebration. The
+Howellses had visited Hartford in March, and the Clemenses were invited
+to Cambridge for the celebration. Only Clemens could go, which in the
+event proved a good thing perhaps; for when Clemens and Howells set out
+for Concord they did not go over to Boston to take the train, but decided
+to wait for it at Cambridge. Apparently it did not occur to them that
+the train would be jammed the moment the doors were opened at the Boston
+station; but when it came along they saw how hopeless was their chance.
+They had special invitations and passage from Boston, but these were only
+mockeries now. It yeas cold and chilly, and they forlornly set out in
+search of some sort of a conveyance. They tramped around in the mud and
+raw wind, but vehicles were either filled or engaged, and drivers and
+occupants were inclined to jeer at them. Clemens was taken with an acute
+attack of indigestion, which made him rather dismal and savage. Their
+effort finally ended with his trying to run down a tally-ho which was
+empty inside and had a party of Harvard students riding atop. The
+students, who did not recognize their would-be fare, enjoyed the race.
+They encouraged their pursuer, and perhaps their driver, with merriment
+and cheers. Clemens was handicapped by having to run in the slippery
+mud, and soon "dropped by the wayside."
+
+"I am glad," says Howells, "I cannot recall what he said when he came
+back to me."
+
+They hung about a little longer, then dragged themselves home, slipped
+into the house, and built up a fine, cheerful fire on the hearth. They
+proposed to practise a deception on Mrs. Howells by pretending they had
+been to Concord and returned. But it was no use. Their statements were
+flimsy, and guilt was plainly written on their faces. Howells recalls
+this incident delightfully, and expresses the belief that the humor of
+the situation was finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than the actual
+visit to Concord would have been.
+
+Twichell did not have any such trouble in attending the celebration. He
+had adventures (he was always having adventures), but they were of a more
+successful kind. Clemens heard the tale of them when he returned to
+Hartford. He wrote it to Howells:
+
+    Joe Twichell preached morning and evening here last Sunday; took
+    midnight train for Boston; got an early breakfast and started by
+    rail at 7.30 A.M. for Concord; swelled around there until 1 P.M.,
+    seeing everything; then traveled on top of a train to Lexington; saw
+    everything there; traveled on top of a train to Boston (with
+    hundreds in company), deluged with dust, smoke, and cinders; yelled
+    and hurrahed all the way like a school-boy; lay flat down, to dodge
+    numerous bridges, and sailed into the depot howling with excitement
+    and as black as a chimneysweep; got to Young's Hotel at 7 P.M.; sat
+    down in the reading-room and immediately fell asleep; was promptly
+    awakened by a porter, who supposed he was drunk; wandered around an
+    hour and a half; then took 9 P.M. train, sat down in a smoking-car,
+    and remembered nothing more until awakened by conductor as the train
+    came into Hartford at 1.30 A.M. Thinks he had simply a glorious
+    time, and wouldn't have missed the Centennial for the world. He
+    would have run out to see us a moment at Cambridge but he was too
+    dirty. I wouldn't have wanted him there; his appalling energy would
+    have been an insufferable reproach to mild adventurers like you and
+    me.
+
+
+
+
+CI
+
+CONCLUDING "TOM SAWYER"--MARK TWAIN's "EDITORS"
+
+Meantime the "inspiration tank," as Clemens sometimes called it, had
+filled up again. He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the
+story of Tom and Huck, and was working on it steadily. The family
+remained in Hartford, and early in July, under full head of steam, he
+brought the story to a close. On the 5th he wrote Howells:
+
+    I have finished the story and didn't take the chap beyond boyhood.
+    I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but
+    autobiographically, like Gil Blas. I perhaps made a mistake in not
+    writing it in the first person. If I went on now, and took him into
+    manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in
+    literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him.
+    It is not a boy's book at all. It will only be read by adults. It
+    is only written for adults.
+
+He would like to see the story in the Atlantic, he said, but doubted the
+wisdom of serialization.
+
+"By and by I shall take a boy of twelve and run him through life (in the
+first person), but not Tam Sawyer, he would not make a good character for
+it." From which we get the first glimpse of Huck's later adventures.
+
+Of course he wanted Howells to look at the story. It was a tremendous
+favor to ask, he said, and added, "But I know of no other person whose
+judgment I could venture to take, fully and entirely. Don't hesitate to
+say no, for I know how your time is taxed, and I would have honest need
+to blush if you said yes."
+
+"Send on your MS.," wrote Howells. "You've no idea what I may ask you to
+do for me some day."
+
+But Clemens, conscience-stricken, "blushed and weakened," as he said.
+When Howells insisted, he wrote:
+
+    But I will gladly send it to you if you will do as follows:
+    dramatize it, if you perceive that you can, and take, for your
+    remuneration, half of the first $6,000 which I receive for its
+    representation on the stage. You could alter the plot entirely if
+    you chose. I could help in the work most cheerfully after you had
+    arranged the plot. I have my eye upon two young girls who can play
+    Tom and Huck.
+
+Howells in his reply urged. Clemens to do the playwriting himself. He
+could never find time, he said, and he doubted whether he could enter
+into the spirit of another man's story. Clemens did begin a
+dramatization then or a little later, but it was not completed. Mrs.
+Clemens, to whom he had read the story as it proceeded, was as anxious as
+her husband for Howells's opinion, for it was the first extended piece of
+fiction Mark Twain had undertaken alone. He carried the manuscript over
+to Boston himself, and whatever their doubts may have been, Howells's
+subsequent letter set them at rest. He wrote that he had sat up till one
+in the morning to get to the end of it, simply because it was impossible
+to leave off.
+
+It is altogether the best boy story I ever read. It will be an immense
+success, but I think you ought to treat it explicitly as a boy's story;
+grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do, and if you should put it
+forth as a story of boys' character from the grown-up point of view you
+give the wrong key to it.
+
+Viewed in the light of later events, there has never been any better
+literary opinion than that--none that has been more fully justified.
+
+Clemens was delighted. He wrote concerning a point here and there, one
+inquiry referring to the use of a certain strong word. Howells's reply
+left no doubt:
+
+    I'd have that swearing out in an instant. I suppose I didn't notice
+    it because the location was so familiar to my Western sense, and so
+    exactly the thing Huck would say, but it won't do for children.
+
+It was in the last chapter, where Huck relates to Tom the sorrows of
+reform and tells how they comb him "all to thunder." In the original,
+"They comb me all to hell," says Huck; which statement, one must agree,
+is more effective, more the thing Huck would be likely to say.
+
+Clemens's acknowledgment of the correction was characteristic:
+
+    Mrs. Clemens received the mail this morning, and the next minute she
+    lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her
+    tongue, "Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?" Then I had
+    to miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to
+    her. Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape
+    with my scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go
+    a little one-sided?
+
+The Clemens family did not, go to Elmira that year. The children's
+health seemed to require the sea-shore, and in August they went to
+Bateman's Point, Rhode Island, where Clemens most of the time played
+tenpins in an alley that had gone to ruin. The balls would not stay on
+the track; the pins stood at inebriate angles. It reminded him of the
+old billiard-tables of Western mining-camps, and furnished the same
+uncertainty of play. It was his delight, after he had become accustomed
+to the eccentricities of the alley, to invite in a stranger and watch his
+suffering and his frantic effort to score.
+
+
+
+
+CII
+
+"SKETCHES NEW AND OLD"
+
+The long-delayed book of Sketches, contracted for five years before, was
+issued that autumn. "The Jumping Frog," which he had bought from Webb,
+was included in the volume, also the French translation which Madame
+Blanc (Th. Bentzon) had made for the Revue des deux mondes, with Mark
+Twain's retranslation back into English, a most astonishing performance
+in its literal rendition of the French idiom. One example will suffice
+here. It is where the stranger says to Smiley, "I don't see no p'ints
+about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."
+
+Says the French, retranslated:
+
+"Eh bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each
+frog" (Je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait mieux qu'aucune
+grenouille). (If that isn't grammar gone to seed then I count myself no
+judge.--M. T.)
+
+"Possible that you not it saw not," said Smiley; "possible that you you
+comprehend frogs; possible that you not you there comprehend nothing;
+possible that you had of the experience, and possible that you not be but
+an amateur. Of all manner (de toute maniere) I bet forty dollars that
+she batter in jumping, no matter which frog of the county of Calaveras."
+
+He included a number of sketches originally published with the Frog, also
+a selection from the "Memoranda" and Buffalo Express contributions, and
+he put in the story of Auntie Cord, with some matter which had never
+hitherto appeared. True Williams illustrated the book, but either it
+furnished him no inspiration or he was allowed too much of another sort,
+for the pictures do not compare with his earlier work.
+
+Among the new matter in the book were-"Some Fables for Good Old Boys and
+Girls," in which certain wood creatures are supposed to make a scientific
+excursion into a place at some time occupied by men. It is the most
+pretentious feature of the book, and in its way about as good as any.
+Like Gulliver's Travels, its object was satire, but its result is also
+interest.
+
+Clemens was very anxious that Howells should be first to review this
+volume. He had a superstition that Howells's verdicts were echoed by the
+lesser reviewers, and that a book was made or damned accordingly; a
+belief hardly warranted, for the review has seldom been written that
+meant to any book the difference between success and failure. Howells's
+review of Sketches may be offered as a case in point. It was highly
+commendatory, much more so than the notice of the 'Innocents' had been,
+or even that of 'Roughing It', also more extensive than the latter. Yet
+after the initial sale of some twenty thousand copies, mainly on the
+strength of the author's reputation, the book made a comparatively poor
+showing, and soon lagged far behind its predecessors.
+
+We cannot judge, of course, the taste of that day, but it appears now an
+unattractive, incoherent volume. The pictures were absurdly bad, the
+sketches were of unequal merit. Many of them are amusing, some of them
+delightful, but most of them seem ephemeral. If we except "The Jumping
+Frog," and possibly "A True Story" (and the latter was altogether out of
+place in the collection), there is no reason to suppose that any of its
+contents will escape oblivion. The greater number of the sketches, as
+Mark Twain himself presently realized and declared, would better have
+been allowed to die.
+
+Howells did, however, take occasion to point out in his review, or at
+least to suggest, the more serious side of Mark Twain. He particularly
+called attention to "A True Story," which the reviewers, at the time of
+its publication in the Atlantic, had treated lightly, fearing a lurking
+joke in it; or it may be they had not read it, for reviewers are busy
+people. Howells spoke of it as the choicest piece of work in the volume,
+and of its "perfect fidelity to the tragic fact." He urged the reader to
+turn to it again, and to read it as a "simple dramatic report of
+reality," such as had been equaled by no other American writer.
+
+It was in this volume of sketches that Mark Twain first spoke in print
+concerning copyright, showing the absurd injustice of discriminating
+against literary ownership by statute of limitation. He did this in the
+form of an open petition to Congress, asking that all property, real and
+personal, should be put on the copyright basis, its period of ownership
+limited to a "beneficent term of forty-two years." Generally this was
+regarded as a joke, as in a sense it was; but like most of Mark Twain's
+jokes it was founded on reason and justice.
+
+The approval with which it was received by his literary associates led
+him to still further flights. He began a determined crusade for
+international copyright laws. It was a transcendental beginning, but it
+contained the germ of what, in the course of time, he would be largely
+instrumental in bringing to a ripe and magnificent conclusion. In this
+first effort he framed a petition to enact laws by which the United
+States would declare itself to be for right and justice, regardless of
+other nations, and become a good example to the world by refusing to
+pirate the books of any foreign author. He wrote to Howells, urging him
+to get Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and others to sign this
+petition.
+
+I will then put a gentlemanly chap under wages, and send him personally
+to every author of distinction in the country and corral the rest of the
+signatures. Then I'll have the whole thing lithographed (about one
+thousand copies), and move upon the President and Congress in person, but
+in the subordinate capacity of the party who is merely the agent of
+better and wiser men, or men whom the country cannot venture to laugh at.
+I will ask the President to recommend the thing in his message (and if he
+should ask me to sit down and frame the paragraph for him I should blush,
+but still I would frame it). And then if Europe chooses to go on
+stealing from us we would say, with noble enthusiasm, "American lawmakers
+do steal, but not from foreign authors--not from foreign authors,".... If
+we only had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a
+sweat to get Him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.
+
+The petition never reached Congress. Holmes agreed to sign it with a
+smile, and the comment that governments were not in the habit of setting
+themselves up as high moral examples, except for revenue. Longfellow
+also pledged himself, as did a few others; but if there was any general
+concurrence in the effort there is no memory of it now. Clemens
+abandoned the original idea, but remained one of the most persistent and
+influential advocates of copyright betterment, and lived to see most of
+his dream fulfilled.--[For the petition concerning copyright term in the
+United States, see Sketches New and Old. For the petition concerning
+international copyright and related matters, see Appendix N, at the end
+of last volume.]
+
+
+
+
+CIII
+
+"ATLANTIC" DAYS
+
+It was about this period that Mark Twain began to exhibit openly his more
+serious side; that is to say his advocacy of public reforms. His paper
+on "Universal Suffrage" had sounded a first note, and his copyright
+petitions were of the same spirit. In later years he used to say that he
+had always felt it was his mission to teach, to carry the banner of moral
+reconstruction, and here at forty we find him furnishing evidences of
+this inclination. In the Atlantic for October, 1875, there was published
+an unsigned three-page article entitled, "The Curious Republic of
+Gondour." In this article was developed the idea that the voting
+privilege should be estimated not by the individuals, but by their
+intellectual qualifications. The republic of Gondour was a Utopia, where
+this plan had been established:
+
+    It was an odd idea and ingenious. You must understand the
+    constitution gave every man a vote; therefore that vote was a vested
+    right, and could not be taken away. But the constitution did not
+    say that certain individuals might not be given two votes or ten.
+    So an amendatory clause was inserted in a quiet way, a clause which
+    authorized the enlargement of the suffrage in certain cases to be
+    specified by statute....
+
+    The victory was complete. The new law was framed and passed. Under
+    it every citizen, howsoever poor or ignorant, possessed one vote, so
+    universal suffrage still reigned; but if a man possessed a good
+    common-school education and no money he had two votes, a high-school
+    education gave him four; if he had property, likewise, to the value
+    of three thousand sacos he wielded one more vote; for every fifty
+    thousand sacos a man added to his property, he was entitled to
+    another vote; a University education entitled a man to nine votes,
+    even though he owned no property.
+
+The author goes on to show the beneficent results of this enaction; how
+the country was benefited and glorified by this stimulus toward
+enlightenment and industry. No one ever suspected that Mark Twain was
+the author of this fable. It contained almost no trace of his usual
+literary manner. Nevertheless he wrote it, and only withheld his name,
+as he did in a few other instances, in the fear that the world might
+refuse to take him seriously over his own signature or nom de plume.
+
+Howells urged him to follow up the "Gondour" paper; to send some more
+reports from that model land. But Clemens was engaged in other things by
+that time, and was not pledged altogether to national reforms.
+
+He was writing a skit about a bit of doggerel which was then making
+nights and days unhappy for many undeserving persons who in an evil
+moment had fallen upon it in some stray newspaper corner. A certain car
+line had recently adopted the "punch system," and posted in its cars, for
+the information of passengers and conductor, this placard:
+
+A Blue Trip Slip for an 8 Cents Fare, A Buff Trip Slip for a 6 Cents
+Fare, A Pink Trip Slip for a 3 Cents Fare, For Coupon And Transfer, Punch
+The Tickets.
+
+Noah Brooks and Isaac Bromley were riding down-town one evening on the
+Fourth Avenue line, when Bromley said:
+
+"Brooks, it's poetry. By George, it's poetry!"
+
+Brooks followed the direction of Bromley's finger and read the card of
+instructions. They began perfecting the poetic character of the notice,
+giving it still more of a rhythmic twist and jingle; arrived at the
+Tribune office, W. C. Wyckoff, scientific editor, and Moses P. Handy lent
+intellectual and poetic assistance, with this result:
+
+       Conductor, when you receive a fare,
+
+       Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
+       A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,
+       A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,
+       A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare.
+       Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
+
+    CHORUS
+       Punch, brothers! Punch with care!
+       Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
+
+It was printed, and street-car poetry became popular. Different papers
+had a turn at it, and each usually preceded its own effort with all other
+examples, as far as perpetrated. Clemens discovered the lines, and on
+one of their walks recited them to Twichell. "A Literary Nightmare" was
+written a few days later. In it the author tells how the jingle took
+instant and entire possession of him and went waltzing through his brain;
+how, when he had finished his breakfast, he couldn't tell whether he had
+eaten anything or not; and how, when he went to finish the novel he was
+writing, and took up his pen, he could only get it to say:
+
+Punch in the presence of the passenjare.
+
+He found relief at last in telling it to his reverend friend, that is,
+Twichell, upon whom he unloaded it with sad results.
+
+It was an amusing and timely skit, and is worth reading to-day. Its
+publication in the Atlantic had the effect of waking up horse-car poetry
+all over the world. Howells, going to dine at Ernest Longfellow's the
+day following its appearance, heard his host and Tom Appleton urging each
+other to "Punch with care." The Longfellow ladies had it by heart.
+Boston was devastated by it. At home, Howells's children recited it to
+him in chorus. The streets were full of it; in Harvard it became an
+epidemic.
+
+It was transformed into other tongues. Even Swinburne, the musical, is
+said to have done a French version for the 'Revue des deux mondes'*. A
+St. Louis magazine, The Western, found relief in a Latin anthem with this
+chorus:
+
+Pungite, fratres, pungite, Pungite cum amore, Pungite pro vectore,
+Diligentissime pungite.
+
+              * LE CHANT DU CONDUCTEUR
+
+           Ayant ete paye, le conducteur
+           Percera en pleine vue du voyageur,
+           Quand il regoit trois sous un coupon vert,
+           Un coupon jaune pour six sous c'est l'affaire,
+           Et pour huit sous c'est un coupon couleur
+           De rose, en pleine vue du voyageur.
+
+       CHOEUR
+           Donc, percez soigneusement, mes freres
+           Tout en pleine vue des voyageurs, etc.
+
+
+
+
+CIV
+
+MARK TWAIN AND HIS WIFE
+
+Clemens and his wife traveled to Boston for one of those happy
+fore-gatherings with the Howellses, which continued, at one end of the
+journey or another, for so many years. There was a luncheon with
+Longfellow at Craigie House, and, on the return to Hartford, Clemens
+reported to Howells how Mrs. Clemens had thrived on the happiness of the
+visit. Also he confesses his punishment for the usual crimes:
+
+    I "caught it" for letting Mrs. Howells bother and bother about her
+    coffee, when it was a "good deal better than we get at home." I
+    "caught it" for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment and losing
+    her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that MS.
+    when the printers are done with it. I "caught it" once more for
+    personating that drunken Colonel James. I "caught it" for
+    mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and
+    when, after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I
+    had privately suggested to you that we hadn't any frames, and that
+    if you wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the
+    madam was simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she
+    said:
+
+    "How could you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his
+    sensitive nature, upon such a repulsive er--"
+
+    "Oh, Howells won't mind it! You don't know Howells. Howells is a
+    man who--"
+
+    She was gone. But George was the first person she stumbled on in
+    the hall, so she took it out of George. I am glad of that, because
+    it saved the babies.
+
+Clemens used to admit, at a later day, that his education did not advance
+by leaps and bounds, but gradually, very gradually; and it used to give
+him a pathetic relief in those after-years, when that sweet presence had
+gone out of his life, to tell the way of it, to confess over-fully,
+perhaps, what a responsibility he had been to her.
+
+He used to tell how, for a long time, he concealed his profanity from
+her; how one morning, when he thought the door was shut between their
+bedroom and the bathroom, he was in there dressing and shaving,
+accompanying these trying things with language intended only for the
+strictest privacy; how presently, when he discovered a button off the
+shirt he intended to put on, he hurled it through the window into the
+yard with appropriate remarks, followed it with another shirt that was in
+the same condition, and added certain collars and neckties and bath-room
+requisites, decorating the shrubbery outside, where the people were going
+by to church; how in this extreme moment he heard a slight cough and
+turned to find that the door was open! There was only one door to the
+bath-room, and he knew he had to pass her. He felt pale and sick, and
+sat down for a few moments to consider. He decided to assume that she
+was asleep, and to walk out and through the room, head up, as if he had
+nothing on his conscience. He attempted it, but without success.
+Half-way across the room he heard a voice suddenly repeat his last
+terrific remark. He turned to see her sitting up in bed, regarding him
+with a look as withering as she could find in her gentle soul. The humor
+of it struck him.
+
+"Livy," he said, "did it sound like that?"
+
+"Of course it did," she said, "only worse. I wanted you to hear just how
+it sounded."
+
+"Livy," he said, "it would pain me to think that when I swear it sounds
+like that. You got the words right, Livy, but you don't know the tune."
+
+Yet he never willingly gave her pain, and he adored her and gloried in
+her dominion, his life long. Howells speaks of his beautiful and tender
+loyalty to her as the "most moving quality of his most faithful soul."
+
+It was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives,
+and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all
+the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character.
+
+She guarded his work sacredly; and reviewing the manuscripts which he was
+induced to discard, and certain edited manuscripts, one gets a partial
+idea of what the reading world owes to Olivia Clemens. Of the discarded.
+manuscripts (he seems seldom to have destroyed them) there are a
+multitude, and among them all scarcely one that is not a proof of her
+sanity and high regard for his literary honor. They are amusing--some of
+them; they are interesting--some of them; they are strong and virile
+--some of them; but they are unworthy--most of them, though a number
+remain unfinished because theme or interest failed.
+
+Mark Twain was likely to write not wisely but too much, piling up
+hundreds of manuscript pages only because his brain was thronging as with
+a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of darting, flashing ideas demanding
+release. As often as not he began writing with only a nebulous idea of
+what he proposed to do. He would start with a few characters and
+situations, trusting in Providence to supply material as needed. So he
+was likely to run ashore any time. As for those other attempts--stories
+"unavailable" for one reason or another--he was just as apt to begin
+those as the better sort, for somehow he could never tell the difference.
+That is one of the hall-marks of genius--the thing which sharply
+differentiates genius from talent. Genius is likely to rate a literary
+disaster as its best work. Talent rarely makes that mistake.
+
+Among the abandoned literary undertakings of these early years of
+authorship there is the beginning of what was doubtless intended to
+become a book, "The Second Advent," a story which opens with a very
+doubtful miraculous conception in Arkansas, and leads only to grotesquery
+and literary disorder. There is another, "The Autobiography of a Damn
+Fool," a burlesque on family history, hopelessly impossible; yet he began
+it with vast enthusiasm and, until he allowed her to see the manuscript,
+thought it especially good. "Livy wouldn't have it," he said, "so I gave
+it up." There is another, "The Mysterious Chamber," strong and fine in
+conception, vividly and intensely interesting; the story of a young lover
+who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old castle and
+cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down into subterranean
+passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation for twenty
+years. The question of sustenance was the weak point in the story.
+Clemens could invent no way of providing it, except by means of a waste
+or conduit from the kitchen into which scraps of meat, bread, and other
+items of garbage were thrown. This he thought sufficient, but Mrs.
+Clemens did not highly regard such a literary device. Clemens could
+think of no good way to improve upon it, so this effort too was consigned
+to the penal colony, a set of pigeonholes kept in his study. To Howells
+and others, when they came along, he would read the discarded yarns, and
+they were delightful enough for such a purpose, as delightful as the
+sketches which every artist has, turned face to the wall.
+
+"Captain Stormfield" lay under the ban for many a year, though never
+entirely abandoned. This manuscript was even recommended for publication
+by Howells, who has since admitted that it would not have done then; and
+indeed, in its original, primitive nakedness it would hardly have done
+even in this day of wider toleration.
+
+It should be said here that there is not the least evidence (and the
+manuscripts are full of evidence) that Mrs. Clemens was ever
+super-sensitive, or narrow, or unliterary in her restraints. She became
+his public, as it were, and no man ever had a more open-minded,
+clear-headed public than that. For Mark Twain's reputation it would have
+been better had she exercised her editorial prerogative even more
+actively--if, in her love for him and her jealousy of his reputation, she
+had been even more severe. She did all that lay in her strength, from
+the beginning to the end, and if we dwell upon this phase of their life
+together it is because it is so large a part of Mark Twain's literary
+story. On her birthday in the year we are now closing (1875) he wrote
+her a letter which conveys an acknowledgment of his debt.
+
+LIVY DARLING,--Six years have gone by since I made my first great success
+in life and won you, and thirty years have passed since Providence made
+preparation for that happy success by sending you into the world. Every
+day we live together adds to the security of my confidence that we can
+never any more wish to be separated than we can imagine a regret that we
+were ever joined. You are dearer to me to-day, my child, than you were
+upon the last anniversary of this birthday; you were dearer then than you
+were a year before; you have grown more and more dear from the first of
+those anniversaries, and I do not doubt that this precious progression
+will continue on to the end.
+
+Let us look forward to the coming anniversaries, with their age and their
+gray hairs, without fear and without depression, trusting and believing
+that the love we bear each other will be sufficient to make them blessed.
+
+So, with abounding affection for you and our babies I hail this day that
+brings you the matronly grace and dignity of three decades!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. 1, Part
+2, 1866-1875, by Albert Bigelow Paine
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #2983 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2983)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. 1, Part 2,
+1866-1875, by Albert Bigelow Paine
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
+
+
+Title: Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. 1, Part 2, 1866-1875
+       The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
+
+Author: Albert Bigelow Paine
+
+Release Date: August 21, 2006 [EBook #2983]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY, ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY
+
+By Albert Bigelow Paine
+
+
+
+VOLUME I, Part 2: 1866-1875
+
+
+
+LIV
+
+
+THE LECTURER
+
+It was not easy to take up the daily struggle again, but it was
+necessary.--[Clemens once declared he had been so blue at this period
+that one morning he put a loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked
+courage to pull the trigger.]--Out of the ruck of possibilities (his
+brain always thronged with plans) he constructed three or four resolves.
+The chief of these was the trip around the world; but that lay months
+ahead, and in the mean time ways and means must be provided. Another
+intention was to finish the Hornet article, and forward it to Harper's
+Magazine--a purpose carried immediately into effect. To his delight the
+article found acceptance, and he looked forward to the day of its
+publication as the beginning of a real career. He intended to follow it
+up with a series on the islands, which in due time might result in a book
+and an income. He had gone so far as to experiment with a dedication for
+the book--an inscription to his mother, modified later for use in 'The
+Innocents Abroad'. A third plan of action was to take advantage of the
+popularity of the Hawaiian letters, and deliver a lecture on the same
+subject. But this was a fearsome prospect--he trembled when he thought
+of it. As Governor of the Third House he had been extravagantly received
+and applauded, but in that case the position of public entertainer had
+been thrust upon him. To come forward now, offering himself in the same
+capacity, was a different matter. He believed he could entertain, but he
+lacked the courage to declare himself; besides, it meant a risk of his
+slender capital. He confided his situation to Col. John McComb, of the
+Alta California, and was startled by McComb's vigorous endorsement.
+
+"Do it, by all means!" urged McComb. "It will be a grand success--I know
+it! Take the largest house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket."
+
+Frightened but resolute, he went to the leading theater manager the same
+Tom Maguire of his verses--and was offered the new opera-house at half
+rates. The next day this advertisement appeared:
+
+                MAGUIRE'S ACADEMY OF MUSIC
+               PINE STREET, NEAR MONTGOMERY
+
+                  THE SANDWICH ISLANDS
+
+                      MARK TWAIN
+
+        (HONOLULU CORRESPONDENT OF THE SACRAMENTO UNION)
+                    WILL DELIVER A
+              LECTURE ON THE SANDWICH ISLANDS
+
+                AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC
+               ON TUESDAY EVENING, OCT. 2d
+                       (1866)
+
+ In which passing mention will be made of Harris, Bishop Staley, the
+American missionaries, etc., and the absurd customs and characteristics
+  of the natives duly discussed and described. The great volcano of
+         Kilauea will also receive proper attention.
+
+                  A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA
+            is in town, but has not been engaged
+                       ALSO
+               A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS
+           will be on exhibition in the next block
+                  MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS
+were in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been abandoned
+               A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION
+ may be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to expect whatever
+                     they please.
+
+           Dress Circle, $1.00  Family Circle, 50c
+    Doors open at 7 o'clock  The Trouble to begin at 8 o'clock
+
+The story of that first lecture, as told in Roughing It, is a faithful
+one, and need only be summarized here.
+
+Expecting to find the house empty, he found it packed from the footlights
+to the walls. Sidling out from the wings--wobbly-kneed and dry of
+tongue--he was greeted by a murmur, a roar, a very crash of applause that
+frightened away his remaining vestiges of courage. Then, came reaction
+--these were his friends, and he began to talk to them. Fear melted
+away, and as tide after tide of applause rose and billowed and came
+breaking at his feet, he knew something of the exaltation of Monte Cristo
+when he declared "The world is mine!"
+
+It was a vast satisfaction to have succeeded. It was particularly
+gratifying at this time, for he dreaded going back into newspaper
+harness. Also; it softened later the disappointment resulting from
+another venture; for when the December Harper appeared, with his article,
+the printer and proof-reader had somehow converted Mark Twain into "Mark
+Swain," and his literary dream perished.
+
+As to the literary value of his lecture, it was much higher than had,
+been any portion of his letters, if we may judge from its few remaining
+fragments. One of these--a part of the description of the great volcano
+Haleakala, on the island of Maui--is a fair example of his eloquence.
+
+It is somewhat more florid than his later description of the same scene
+in Roughing It, which it otherwise resembles; and we may imagine that its
+poetry, with the added charm of its delivery, held breathless his
+hearers, many of whom believed that no purer eloquence had ever been
+uttered or written.
+
+It is worth remembering, too, that in this lecture, delivered so long
+ago, he advocated the idea of American ownership of these islands,
+dwelling at considerable length on his reasons for this ideal.
+
+--[For fragmentary extracts from this first lecture of Mark Twain and
+news comment, see Appendix D, end of last volume.]--There was a gross
+return from his venture of more than $1,200, but with his usual business
+insight, which was never foresight, he had made an arrangement by which,
+after paying bills and dividing with his manager, he had only about
+one-third of, this sum left. Still, even this was prosperity and
+triumph. He had acquired a new and lucrative profession at a bound. The
+papers lauded him as the "most piquant and humorous writer and lecturer
+on the Coast since the days of the lamented John Phoenix." He felt that
+he was on the highroad at last.
+
+Denis McCarthy, late of the Enterprise, was in San Francisco, and was
+willing to become his manager. Denis was capable and honest, and Clemens
+was fond of him. They planned a tour of the near-by towns, beginning
+with Sacramento, extending it later even to the mining camps, such as Red
+Dog and Grass Valley; also across into Nevada, with engagements at Carson
+City, Virginia, and Gold Hill. It was an exultant and hilarious
+excursion--that first lecture tour made by Denis McCarthy and Mark Twain.
+Success traveled with them everywhere, whether the lecturer looked across
+the footlights of some pretentious "opera-house" or between the two
+tallow candles of some camp "academy." Whatever the building, it was
+packed, and the returns were maximum.
+
+Those who remember him as a lecturer in that long-ago time say that his
+delivery was more quaint, his drawl more exaggerated, even than in later
+life; that his appearance and movements on the stage were natural, rather
+than graceful; that his manuscript, which he carried under his arm,
+looked like a ruffled hen. It was, in fact, originally written on sheets
+of manila paper, in large characters, so that it could be read easily by
+dim light, and it was doubtless often disordered.
+
+There was plenty of amusing experience on this tour. At one place, when
+the lecture was over, an old man came to him and said:
+
+"Be them your natural tones of eloquence?"
+
+At Grass Valley there was a rival show, consisting of a lady tight-rope
+walker and her husband. It was a small place, and the tight-rope
+attraction seemed likely to fail. The lady's husband had formerly been a
+compositor on the Enterprise, so that he felt there was a bond of
+brotherhood between him and Mark Twain.
+
+"Look here," he said. "Let's combine our shows. I'll let my wife do the
+tight-rope act outside and draw a crowd, and you go inside and lecture."
+
+The arrangement was not made.
+
+Following custom, the lecturer at first thought it necessary to be
+introduced, and at each place McCarthy had to skirmish around and find
+the proper person. At Red Dog, on the Stanislaus, the man selected
+failed to appear, and Denis had to provide another on short notice. He
+went down into the audience and captured an old fellow, who ducked and
+dodged but could not escape. Denis led him to the stage, a good deal
+frightened.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "this is the celebrated Mark Twain from
+the celebrated city of San Francisco, with his celebrated lecture about
+the celebrated Sandwich Islands."
+
+That was as far as he could go; but it was far enough. Mark Twain never
+had a better introduction. The audience was in a shouting humor from the
+start.
+
+Clemens himself used to tell of an introduction at another camp, where
+his sponsor said:
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen, I know only two things about this man: the first
+is that he's never been in jail, and the second is I don't know why."
+
+But this is probably apocryphal; there is too much "Mark Twain" in it.
+
+When he reached Virginia, Goodman said to him:
+
+"Sam, you do not need anybody to introduce you. There's a piano on the
+stage in the theater. Have it brought out in sight, and when the curtain
+rises you be seated at the piano, playing and singing that song of yours,
+'I Had an Old Horse Whose Name Was Methusalem,' and don't seem to notice
+that the curtain is up at first; then be surprised when you suddenly find
+out that it is up, and begin talking, without any further preliminaries."
+
+This proved good advice, and the lecture, thus opened, started off with
+general hilarity and applause.
+
+
+
+
+LV
+
+HIGHWAY ROBBERY
+
+His Nevada, lectures were bound to be immensely successful. The people
+regarded him as their property over there, and at Carson and Virginia the
+houses overflowed. At Virginia especially his friends urged and begged
+him to repeat the entertainment, but he resolutely declined.
+
+"I have only one lecture yet," he said. "I cannot bring myself to give
+it twice in the same town."
+
+But that irresponsible imp, Steve Gillis, who was again in Virginia,
+conceived a plan which would make it not only necessary for him to
+lecture again, but would supply him with a subject. Steve's plan was
+very simple: it was to relieve the lecturer of his funds by a friendly
+highway robbery, and let an account of the adventure furnish the new
+lecture.
+
+In 'Roughing It' Mark Twain has given a version of this mock robbery
+which is correct enough as far as it goes; but important details are
+lacking. Only a few years ago (it was April, 1907), in his cabin on
+jackass Hill, with Joseph Goodman and the writer of this history present,
+Steve Gillis made his "death-bed" confession as is here set down:
+
+"Mark's lecture was given in Piper's Opera House, October 30, 1866. The
+Virginia City people had heard many famous lectures before, but they were
+mere sideshows compared with Mark's. It could have been run to crowded
+houses for a week. We begged him to give the common people a chance; but
+he refused to repeat himself. He was going down to Carson, and was
+coming back to talk in Gold Hill about a week later, and his agent, Denis
+McCarthy, and I laid a plan to have him robbed on the Divide between Gold
+Hill and Virginia, after the Gold Hill lecture was over and he and Denis
+would be coming home with the money. The Divide was a good lonely place,
+and was famous for its hold-ups. We got City Marshal George Birdsall
+into it with us, and took in Leslie Blackburn, Pat Holland, Jimmy
+Eddington, and one or two more of Sam's old friends. We all loved him,
+and would have fought for him in a moment. That's the kind of friends
+Mark had in Nevada. If he had any enemies I never heard of them.
+
+"We didn't take in Dan de Quille, or Joe here, because Sam was Joe's
+guest, and we were afraid he would tell him. We didn't take in Dan
+because we wanted him to write it up as a genuine robbery and make a big
+sensation. That would pack the opera-house at two dollars a seat to hear
+Mark tell the story.
+
+"Well, everything went off pretty well. About the time Mark was
+finishing his lecture in Gold Hill the robbers all went up on the Divide
+to wait, but Mark's audience gave him a kind of reception after his
+lecture, and we nearly froze to death up there before he came along. By
+and by I went back to see what was the matter. Sam and Denis were
+coming, and carrying a carpet-sack about half full of silver between
+them. I shadowed them and blew a policeman's whistle as a signal to the
+boys when the lecturers were within about a hundred yards of the place. I
+heard Sam say to Denis:
+
+"'I'm glad they've got a policeman on the Divide. They never had one in
+my day.'
+
+"Just about that time the boys, all with black masks on and silver
+dollars at the sides of their tongues to disguise their voices, stepped
+out and stuck six-shooters at Sam and Denis and told them to put up their
+hands. The robbers called each other 'Beauregard' and 'Stonewall
+Jackson.' Of course Denis's hands went up, and Mark's, too, though Mark
+wasn't a bit scared or excited. He talked to the robbers in his regular
+fashion. He said:
+
+"'Don't flourish those pistols so promiscuously. They might go off by
+accident.'
+
+"They told him to hand over his watch and money; but when he started to
+take his hands down they made him put them up again. Then he asked how
+they expected him to give them his valuables with his hands up in the
+sky. He said his treasures didn't lie in heaven. He told them not to
+take his watch, which was the one Sandy Baldwin and Theodore Winters had
+given him as Governor of the Third House, but we took it all the same.
+
+"Whenever he started to put his hands down we made him put them up again.
+Once he said:
+
+"'Don't you fellows be so rough. I was tenderly reared.'
+
+"Then we told him and Denis to keep their hands up for fifteen minutes
+after we were gone--this was to give us time to get back to Virginia and
+be settled when they came along. As we were going away Mark called:
+
+"'Say, you forgot something.'
+
+"'What is it?'
+
+"Why, the carpet-bag.'
+
+"He was cool all the time. Senator Bill Stewart, in his Autobiography,
+tells a great story of how scared Mark was, and how he ran; but Stewart
+was three thousand miles from Virginia by that time, and later got mad at
+Mark because he made a joke about him in 'Roughing It'.
+
+"Denis wanted to take his hands down pretty soon after we were gone, but
+Mark said:
+
+"'No, Denis, I'm used to obeying orders when they are given in that
+convincing way; we'll just keep our hands up another fifteen minutes or
+so for good measure.'
+
+"We were waiting in a big saloon on C Street when Mark and Denis came
+along. We knew they would come in, and we expected Mark would be
+excited; but he was as unruffled as a mountain lake. He told us they had
+been robbed, and asked me if I had any money. I gave him a hundred
+dollars of his own money, and he ordered refreshments for everybody. Then
+we adjourned to the Enterprise office, where he offered a reward, and Dan
+de Quille wrote up the story and telegraphed it to the other newspapers.
+Then somebody suggested that Mark would have to give another lecture now,
+and that the robbery would make a great subject. He entered right into
+the thing, and next day we engaged Piper's Opera House, and people were
+offering five dollars apiece for front seats. It would have been the
+biggest thing that ever came to Virginia if it had come off. But we made
+a mistake, then, by taking Sandy Baldwin into the joke. We took in Joe
+here, too, and gave him the watch and money to keep, which made it hard
+for Joe afterward. But it was Sandy Baldwin that ruined us. He had Mark
+out to dinner the night before the show was to come off, and after he got
+well warmed up with champagne he thought it would be a smart thing to let
+Mark into what was really going on.
+
+"Mark didn't see it our way. He was mad clear through."
+
+At this point Joseph Goodman took up the story. He said:
+
+"Those devils put Sam's money, watch, keys, pencils, and all his things
+into my hands. I felt particularly mean at being made accessory to the
+crime, especially as Sam was my guest, and I had grave doubts as to how
+he would take it when he found out the robbery was not genuine.
+
+"I felt terribly guilty when he said:
+
+"'Joe, those d--n thieves took my keys, and I can't get into my trunk. Do
+you suppose you could get me a key that would fit my trunk?'
+
+"I said I thought I could during the day, and after Sam had gone I took
+his own key, put it in the fire and burnt it to make it look black. Then
+I took a file and scratched it here and there, to make it look as if I
+had been fitting it to the lock, feeling guilty all the time, like a man
+who is trying to hide a murder. Sam did not ask for his key that day,
+and that evening he was invited to judge Baldwin's to dinner. I thought
+he looked pretty silent and solemn when he came home; but he only said:
+
+"'Joe, let's play cards; I don't feel sleepy.'
+
+"Steve here, and two or three of the other boys who had been active in
+the robbery, were present, and they did not like Sam's manner, so they
+excused themselves and left him alone with me. We played a good while;
+then he said:
+
+"'Joe, these cards are greasy. I have got some new ones in my trunk. Did
+you get that key to-day?'
+
+"I fished out that burnt, scratched-up key with fear and trembling. But
+he didn't seem to notice it at all, and presently returned with the
+cards. Then we played, and played, and played--till one o'clock--two
+o'clock--Sam hardly saying a word, and I wondering what was going to
+happen. By and by he laid down his cards and looked at me, and said:
+
+"'Joe, Sandy Baldwin told me all about that robbery to-night. Now, Joe,
+I have found out that the law doesn't recognize a joke, and I am going to
+send every one of those fellows to the penitentiary.'
+
+"He said it with such solemn gravity, and such vindictiveness, that I
+believed he was in dead earnest.
+
+"I know that I put in two hours of the hardest work I ever did, trying to
+talk him out of that resolution. I used all the arguments about the boys
+being his oldest friends; how they all loved him, and how the joke had
+been entirely for his own good; I pleaded with him, begged him to
+reconsider; I went and got his money and his watch and laid them on the
+table; but for a time it seemed hopeless. And I could imagine those
+fellows going behind the bars, and the sensation it would make in
+California; and just as I was about to give it up he said:
+
+"'Well, Joe, I'll let it pass--this time; I'll forgive them again; I've
+had to do it so many times; but if I should see Denis McCarthy and Steve
+Gillis mounting the scaffold to-morrow, and I could save them by turning
+over my hand, I wouldn't do it!'
+
+"He canceled the lecture engagement, however, next morning, and the day
+after left on the Pioneer Stage, by the way of Donner Lake, for
+California. The boys came rather sheepishly to see him off; but he would
+make no show of relenting. When they introduced themselves as
+Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, etc., he merely said:
+
+"'Yes, and you'll all be behind the bars some day. There's been a good
+deal of robbery around here lately, and it's pretty clear now who did
+it.' They handed him a package containing the masks which the robbers
+had worn. He received it in gloomy silence; but as the stage drove away
+he put his head out of the window, and after some pretty vigorous
+admonition resumed his old smile, and called out: 'Good-by, friends;
+good-by, thieves; I bear you no malice.' So the heaviest joke was on his
+tormentors after all."
+
+This is the story of the famous Mark Twain robbery direct from
+headquarters. It has been garbled in so many ways that it seems worth
+setting down in full. Denis McCarthy, who joined him presently in San
+Francisco, received a little more punishment there.
+
+"What kind of a trip did you boys have?" a friend asked of them.
+
+Clemens, just recovering from a cold which the exposure on the Divide had
+given him, smiled grimly:
+
+"Oh, pretty good, only Denis here mistook it for a spree."
+
+He lectured again in San Francisco, this time telling the story of his
+Overland trip in 1861, and he did the daring thing of repeating three
+times the worn-out story of Horace Greeley's ride with Hank Monk, as
+given later in 'Roughing It'. People were deadly tired of that story out
+there, and when he told it the first time, with great seriousness, they
+thought he must be failing mentally. They did not laugh--they only felt
+sorry. He waited a little, as if expecting a laugh, and presently led
+around to it and told it again. The audience was astonished still more,
+and pitied him thoroughly. He seemed to be waiting pathetically in the
+dead silence for their applause, then went on with his lecture; but
+presently, with labored effort, struggled around to the old story again,
+and told it for the third time. The audience suddenly saw the joke then,
+and became vociferous and hysterical in their applause; but it was a
+narrow escape. He would have been hysterical himself if the relief had
+not came when it did.
+
+--[A side-light on the Horace Greeley story and on Mr. Greeley's
+eccentricities is furnished by Mr. Goodman:
+
+When I was going East in 1869 I happened to see Hank Monk just before I
+started. "Mr. Goodman," he said, "you tell Horace Greeley that I want to
+come East, and ask him to send me a pass." "All right, Hank," I said, "I
+will." It happened that when I got to New York City one of the first men
+I met was Greeley. "Mr. Greeley," said, "I have a message for you from
+Hank Monk." Greeley bristled and glared at me. "That--rascal?" he said,
+"He has done me more injury than any other man in America."]
+
+
+
+
+LVI
+
+BACK TO THE STATES
+
+In the mean time Clemens had completed his plan for sailing, and had
+arranged with General McComb, of the Alta California, for letters during
+his proposed trip around the world. However, he meant to visit his
+people first, and his old home. He could go back with means now, and
+with the prestige of success.
+
+"I sail to-morrow per Opposition--telegraphed you to-day," he wrote on
+December 14th, and a day later his note-book entry says:
+
+    Sailed from San Francisco in Opposition (line) steamer America,
+    Capt. Wakeman, at noon, 15th Dec., 1866. Pleasant sunny day, hills
+    brightly clad with green grass and shrubbery.
+
+So he was really going home at last! He had been gone five and a half
+years--eventful, adventurous years that had made him over completely, at
+least so far as ambitions and equipment were concerned. He had came
+away, in his early manhood, a printer and a pilot, unknown outside of his
+class. He was returning a man of thirty-one, with a fund of hard
+experience, three added professions--mining, journalism, and lecturing
+--also with a new name, already famous on the sunset slopes of its
+adoption, and beginning to be heard over the hills and far away. In some
+degree, at least, he resembled the prince of a fairy tale who, starting
+out humble and unnoticed, wins his way through a hundred adventures and
+returns with gifts and honors.
+
+The homeward voyage was a notable one. It began with a tempest a little
+way out of San Francisco--a storm terrible but brief, that brought the
+passengers from their berths to the deck, and for a time set them
+praying. Then there was Captain Ned Wakeman, a big, burly, fearless
+sailor, who had visited the edges of all continents and archipelagos; who
+had been born at sea, and never had a day's schooling in his life, but
+knew the Bible by heart; who was full of human nature and profanity, and
+believed he was the only man on the globe who knew the secret of the
+Bible miracles. He became a distinct personality in Mark Twain's work
+--the memory of him was an unfailing delight. Captain "Ned Blakely," in
+'Roughing It', who with his own hands hanged Bill Noakes, after reading
+him promiscuous chapters from the Bible, was Captain Wakeman. Captain
+"Stormfield," who had the marvelous visit to heaven, was likewise Captain
+Wakeman; and he appears in the "Idle Excursion" and elsewhere.
+
+Another event of the voyage was crossing the Nicaragua Isthmus--the trip
+across the lake and down the San Juan River--a brand-new experience,
+between shores of splendid tropic tangle, gleaming with vivid life. The
+luxuriance got into his note-book.
+
+Dark grottos, fairy festoons, tunnels, temples, columns, pillars, towers,
+pilasters, terraces, pyramids, mounds, domes, walls, in endless confusion
+of vine-work--no shape known to architecture unimitated--and all so
+webbed together that short distances within are only gained by glimpses.
+Monkeys here and there; birds warbling; gorgeous plumaged birds on the
+wing; Paradise itself, the imperial realm of beauty-nothing to wish for
+to make it perfect.
+
+But it was beyond the isthmus that the voyage loomed into proportions
+somber and terrible. The vessel they took there, the San Francisco,
+sailed from Greytown January 1, 1867, the beginning of a memorable year
+in Mark Twain's life. Next day two cases of Asiatic cholera were
+reported in the steerage. There had been a rumor of it in Nicaragua, but
+no one expected it on the ship.
+
+The nature of the disease was not hinted at until evening, when one of
+the men died. Soon after midnight, the other followed. A minister
+making the voyage home, Rev. J. G. Fackler, read the burial service. The
+gaiety of the passengers, who had become well acquainted during the
+Pacific voyage, was subdued. When the word "cholera" went among them,
+faces grew grave and frightened. On the morning of January 4th Reverend
+Fackler's services were again required. The dead man was put overboard
+within half an hour after he had ceased to breathe.
+
+Gloom settled upon the ship. All steam was made to put into Key West.
+Then some of the machinery gave way and the ship lay rolling, helplessly
+becalmed in the fierce heat of the Gulf, while repairs were being made.
+The work was done at a disadvantage, and the parts did not hold. Time
+and again they were obliged to lie to, in the deadly tropic heat,
+listening to the hopeless hammering, wondering who would be the next to
+be sewed up hastily in a blanket and slipped over the ship's side. On
+the 5th seven new cases of illness were reported. One of the crew, a man
+called "Shape," was said to be dying. A few hours later he was dead. By
+this time the Reverend Fackler himself had been taken.
+
+"So they are burying poor 'Shape' without benefit of clergy," says the
+note-book.
+
+General consternation now began to prevail. Then it was learned that the
+ship's doctor had run out of medicines. The passengers became
+demoralized. They believed their vessel was to become a charnel ship.
+Strict sanitary orders were issued, and a hospital was improvised.
+
+    Verily the ship is becoming a floating hospital herself--not an hour
+    passes but brings its fresh sensation, its new disaster, its
+    melancholy tidings. When I think of poor "Shape" and the preacher,
+    both so well when I saw them yesterday evening, I realize that I
+    myself may be dead to-morrow.
+
+    Since the last two hours all laughter, all levity, has ceased on the
+    ship--a settled gloom is upon the faces of the passengers.
+
+By noon it was evident that the minister could not survive. He died at
+two o'clock next morning; the fifth victim in less than five days. The
+machinery continued to break and the vessel to drag. The ship's doctor
+confessed to Clemens that he was helpless. There were eight patients in
+the hospital.
+
+But on January 6th they managed to make Key West, and for some reason
+were not quarantined. Twenty-one passengers immediately deserted the
+ship and were heard of no more.
+
+"I am glad they are gone. D--n them," says the notebook. Apparently he
+had never considered leaving, and a number of others remained. The
+doctor restocked his medicine-locker, and the next day they put to sea
+again. Certainly they were a daring lot of voyagers. On the 8th another
+of the patients died. Then the cooler weather seemed to check the
+contagion, and it was not until the night of the 11th, when the New York
+harbor lights were in view, that the final death occurred. There were no
+new cases by this time, and the other patients were convalescent. A
+certificate was made out that the last man had died of "dropsy." There
+would seem to have been no serious difficulty in docking the vessel and
+landing the passengers. The matter would probably be handled differently
+to-day.
+
+
+
+
+LVII
+
+OLD FRIENDS AND NEW PLANS
+
+It had been more than thirteen years since his first arrival in New York.
+Then he had been a youth, green, untraveled, eager to get away from home.
+Now a veteran, he was as eager to return.
+
+He stopped only long enough in New York to see Charles Henry Webb, late
+of California, who had put together a number of the Mark Twain sketches,
+including "The Jumping Frog," for book publication. Clemens himself
+decided to take the book to Carleton, thinking that, having missed the
+fame of the "Frog" once, he might welcome a chance to stand sponsor for
+it now. But Carleton was wary; the "Frog" had won favor, and even fame,
+in its fugitive, vagrant way, but a book was another matter. Books were
+undertaken very seriously and with plenty of consideration in those days.
+Twenty-one years later, in Switzerland, Carleton said to Mark Twain:
+
+"My chief claim to immortality is the distinction of having declined your
+first book."
+
+Clemens was ready enough to give up the book when Carleton declined it,
+but Webb said he would publish it himself, and he set about it forthwith.
+The author waited no longer now, but started for St. Louis, and was soon
+with his mother and sister, whom he had not seen since that eventful
+first year of the war. They thought he looked old, which was true
+enough, but they found him unchanged in his manner: buoyant, full of
+banter and gravely quaint remarks--he was always the same. Jane Clemens
+had grown older, too. She was nearly sixty-four, but as keen and
+vigorous as ever-proud (even if somewhat critical) of this handsome,
+brilliant man of new name and fame who had been her mischievous, wayward
+boy. She petted him, joked with him, scolded him, and inquired
+searchingly into his morals and habits. In turn he petted, comforted,
+and teased her. She decided that he was the same Sam, and always would
+be--a true prophecy.
+
+He went up to Hannibal to see old friends. Many were married; some had
+moved away; some were dead--the old story. He delivered his lecture
+there, and was the center of interest and admiration--his welcome might
+have satisfied even Tom Sawyer. From Hannibal he journeyed to Keokuk,
+where he lectured again to a crowd of old friends and new, then returned
+to St. Louis for a more extended visit.
+
+It was while he was in St. Louis that he first saw the announcement of
+the Quaker City Holy Land Excursion, and was promptly fascinated by what
+was then a brand-new idea in ocean travel--a splendid picnic--a choice
+and refined party that would sail away for a long summer's journeying to
+the most romantic of all lands and seas, the shores of the Mediterranean.
+No such argosy had ever set out before in pursuit of the golden fleece of
+happiness.
+
+His projected trip around the world lost its charm in the light of this
+idyllic dream. Henry Ward Beecher was advertised as one of the party;
+General Sherman as another; also ministers, high-class journalists--the
+best minds of the nation. Anson Burlingame had told him to associate
+with persons of refinement and intellect. He lost no time in writing to
+the Alta, proposing that they send him in this select company.
+
+Noah Brooks, who was then on the Alta, states--[In an article published
+in the Century Magazine.]--that the management was staggered by the
+proposition, but that Col. John McComb insisted that the investment in
+Mark Twain would be sound. A letter was accordingly sent, stating that a
+check for his passage would be forwarded in due season, and that meantime
+he could contribute letters from New York City. The rate for all letters
+was to be twenty dollars each. The arrangement was a godsend, in the
+fullest sense of the word, to Mark Twain.
+
+It was now April, and he was eager to get back to New York to arrange his
+passage. The Quaker City would not sail for two months yet (two eventful
+months), but the advertisement said that passages must be secured by the
+5th, and he was there on that day. Almost the first man he met was the
+chief of the New York Alta bureau with a check for twelve hundred and
+fifty dollars (the amount of his ticket) and a telegram saying, "Ship
+Mark Twain in the Holy Land Excursion and pay his passage."
+
+    --[The following letter, which bears no date, was probably handed to
+    him later in the New York Alta office as a sort of credential:
+
+    ALTA CALIFORNIA OFFICE, 42 JOHN STREET, NEW YORK.
+
+    Sam'l Clemens, Esq., New York.
+
+    DEAR SIR,--I have the honor to inform you that Fred'k. MacCrellish
+    & Co., Proprietors of Alta California, San Francisco, Cal., desire
+    to engage your services as Special Correspondent on the pleasure
+    excursion now about to proceed from this City to the Holy Land. In
+    obedience to their instructions I have secured a passage for you on
+    the vessel about to convey the excursion party referred to, and made
+    such arrangements as I hope will secure your comfort and
+    convenience. Your only instructions are that you will continue to
+    write at such times and from such places as you deem proper, and in
+    the same style that heretofore secured you the favor of the readers
+    of the Alta California. I have the honor to remain, with high
+    respect and esteem,
+
+    Your ob'dt. Servant,
+
+    JOHN J. MURPHY.]
+
+The Alta, it appears, had already applied for his berth; but, not having
+been vouched for by Mr. Beecher or some other eminent divine, Clemens was
+fearful he might not be accepted. Quite casually he was enlightened on
+this point. While waiting for attention in the shipping-office, with the
+Alta agent, he heard a newspaper man inquire what notables were going. A
+clerk, with evident pride, rattled off the names:
+
+"Lieutenant-General Sherman, Henry Ward Beecher, and Mask Twain; also
+probably General Banks."
+
+So he was billed as an attraction. It was his first surreptitious taste
+of fame on the Atlantic coast, and not without its delight. The story
+often told of his being introduced by Ned House, of the Tribune, as a
+minister, though often repeated by Mark Twain himself, was in the nature
+of a joke, and mainly apocryphal. Clemens was a good deal in House's
+company at the time, for he had made an arrangement to contribute
+occasional letters to the Tribune, and House no doubt introduced him
+jokingly as one of the Quaker City ministers.
+
+
+
+
+LVIII
+
+A NEW BOOK AND A LECTURE
+
+Webb, meantime, had pushed the Frog book along. The proofs had been read
+and the volume was about ready for issue. Clemens wrote to his mother
+April 15th:
+
+    My book will probably be in the bookseller's hands in about two
+    weeks. After that I shall lecture. Since I have been gone, the
+    boys have gotten up a "call" on me signed by two hundred
+    Californians.
+
+The lecture plan was the idea of Frank Fuller, who as acting Governor of
+Utah had known Mark Twain on the Comstock, and prophesied favorably of
+his future career. Clemens had hunted up Fuller on landing in New York
+in January, and Fuller had encouraged the lecture then; but Clemens was
+doubtful.
+
+"I have no reputation with the general public here," he said. "We
+couldn't get a baker's dozen to hear me."
+
+But Fuller was a sanguine person, with an energy and enthusiasm that were
+infectious. He insisted that the idea was sound. It would solidify Mark
+Twain's reputation on the Atlantic coast, he declared, insisting that the
+largest house in New York, Cooper Union, should be taken. Clemens had
+partially consented, and Fuller had arranged with all the Pacific slope
+people who had come East, headed by ex-Governor James W. Nye (by this
+time Senator at Washington), to sign a call for the "Inimitable Mark
+Twain" to appear before a New York audience. Fuller made Nye agree to be
+there and introduce the lecturer, and he was burningly busy and happy in
+the prospect.
+
+But Mark Twain was not happy. He looked at that spacious hall and
+imagined the little crowd of faithful Californian stragglers that might
+gather in to hear him, and the ridicule of the papers next day. He
+begged Fuller to take a smaller hall, the smallest he could get. But
+only the biggest hall in New York would satisfy Fuller. He would have
+taken a larger one if he could have found it. The lecture was announced
+for May 6th. Its subject was "Kanakadom, or the Sandwich Islands"
+--tickets fifty cents. Fuller timed it to follow a few days after Webb's
+book should appear, so that one event might help the other.
+
+Mark Twain's first book, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveyas
+County, and Other Sketches', was scheduled for May 1st, and did, in fact,
+appear on that date; but to the author it was no longer an important
+event. Jim Smiley's frog as standard-bearer of his literary procession
+was not an interesting object, so far as he was concerned--not with that
+vast, empty hall in the background and the insane undertaking of trying
+to fill it. The San Francisco venture had been as nothing compared with
+this. Fuller was working night and day with abounding joy, while the
+subject of his labor felt as if he were on the brink of a fearful
+precipice, preparing to try a pair of wings without first learning to
+fly. At one instant he was cold with fright, the next glowing with an
+infection of Fuller's faith. He devised a hundred schemes for the sale
+of seats. Once he came rushing to Fuller, saying:
+
+"Send a lot of tickets down to the Chickering Piano Company. I have
+promised to put on my programme, 'The piano used at this entertainment is
+manufactured by Chickering."'
+
+"But you don't want a piano, Mark," said Fuller, "do you?"
+
+"No, of course not; but they will distribute the tickets for the sake of
+the advertisement, whether we have the piano or not."
+
+Fuller got out a lot of handbills and hung bunches of them in the stages,
+omnibuses, and horse-cars. Clemens at first haunted these vehicles to
+see if anybody noticed the bills. The little dangling bunches seemed
+untouched. Finally two men came in; one of them pulled off a bill and
+glanced at it. His friend asked:
+
+"Who's Mark Twain?"
+
+"God knows; I don't!"
+
+The lecturer could not ride any more. He was desperate.
+
+"Fuller," he groaned, "there isn't a sign--a ripple of interest."
+
+Fuller assured him that everything was working all right "working
+underneath," Fuller said--but the lecturer was hopeless. He reported his
+impressions to the folks at home:
+
+    Everything looks shady, at least, if not dark; I have a good agent;
+    but now, after we have hired the Cooper Institute, and gone to an
+    expense in one way or another of $500, it comes out that I have got
+    to play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, Ristori, and also the
+    double troop of Japanese jugglers, the latter opening at the great
+    Academy of Music--and with all this against me I have taken the
+    largest house in New York and cannot back water.
+
+He might have added that there were other rival entertainments: "The
+Flying Scud" was at Wallack's, the "Black Crook" was at Niblo's, John
+Brougham at the Olympic; and there were at least a dozen lesser
+attractions. New York was not the inexhaustible city in those days;
+these things could gather in the public to the last man. When the day
+drew near, and only a few tickets had been sold, Clemens was desperate.
+
+"Fuller," he said, "there'll be nobody in the Cooper Union that night but
+you and me. I am on the verge of suicide. I would commit suicide if I
+had the pluck and the outfit. You must paper the house, Fuller. You
+must send out a flood of complementaries."
+
+"Very well," said Fuller; "what we want this time is reputation anyway
+--money is secondary. I'll put you before the choicest, most intelligent
+audience that ever was gathered in New York City. I will bring in the
+school-instructors--the finest body of men and women in the world."
+
+Fuller immediately sent out a deluge of complimentary tickets, inviting
+the school-teachers of New York and Brooklyn, and all the adjacent
+country, to come free and hear Mark Twain's great lecture on Kanakadom.
+This was within forty-eight hours of the time he was to appear.
+
+Senator Nye was to have joined Clemens and Fuller at the Westminster,
+where Clemens was stopping, and they waited for him there with a
+carriage, fuming and swearing, until it was evident that he was not
+coming. At last Clemens said:
+
+"Fuller, you've got to introduce me."
+
+"No," suggested Fuller; "I've got a better scheme than that. You get up
+and begin by bemeaning Nye for not being there. That will be better
+anyway."
+
+Clemens said:
+
+"Well, Fuller, I can do that. I feel that way. I'll try to think up
+something fresh and happy to say about that horse-thief."
+
+They drove to Cooper Union with trepidation. Suppose, after all, the
+school-teachers had declined to come? They went half an hour before the
+lecture was to begin. Forty years later Mark Twain said:
+
+"I couldn't keep away. I wanted to see that vast Mammoth cave and die.
+But when we got near the building I saw that all the streets were blocked
+with people, and that traffic had stopped. I couldn't believe that these
+people were trying to get into Cooper Institute; but they were, and when
+I got to the stage at last the house was jammed full-packed; there wasn't
+room enough left for a child.
+
+"I was happy and I was excited beyond expression. I poured the Sandwich
+Islands out on those people, and they laughed and shouted to my entire
+content. For an hour and fifteen minutes I was in paradise."
+
+And Fuller to-day, alive and young, when so many others of that ancient
+time and event have vanished, has added:
+
+"When Mark appeared the Californians gave a regular yell of welcome. When
+that was over he walked to the edge of the platform, looked carefully
+down in the pit, round the edges as if he were hunting for something.
+Then he said: 'There was to have been a piano here, and a senator to
+introduce me. I don't seem to discover them anywhere. The piano was a
+good one, but we will have to get along with such music as I can make
+with your help. As for the senator--Then Mark let himself go and did as
+he promised about Senator Nye. He said things that made men from the
+Pacific coast, who had known Nye, scream with delight. After that came
+his lecture. The first sentence captured the audience. From that moment
+to the end it was either in a roar of laughter or half breathless by his
+beautiful descriptive passages. People were positively ill for days,
+laughing at that lecture."
+
+So it was a success: everybody was glad to have been there; the papers
+were kind, congratulations numerous.
+
+--[Kind but not extravagant; those were burning political times, and the
+doings of mere literary people did not excite the press to the extent of
+headlines. A jam around Cooper Union to-day, followed by such an
+artistic triumph, would be a news event. On the other hand, Schuyler
+Colfax, then Speaker of the House, was reported to the extent of a
+column, nonpareil. His lecture was of no literary importance, and no
+echo of it now remains. But those were political, not artistic, days.
+
+Of Mark Twain's lecture the Times notice said:
+
+"Nearly every one present came prepared for considerable provocation for
+enjoyable laughter, and from the appearance of their mirthful faces
+leaving the hall at the conclusion of the lecture but few were
+disappointed, and it is not too much to say that seldom has so large an
+audience been so uniformly pleased as the one that listened to Mark
+Twain's quaint remarks last evening. The large hall of the Union was
+filled to its utmost capacity by fully two thousand persons, which fact
+spoke well for the reputation of the lecturer and his future success.
+Mark Twain's style is a quaint one both in manner and method, and through
+his discourse he managed to keep on the right side of the audience, and
+frequently convulsed it with hearty laughter.... During a description of
+the topography of the Sandwich Islands the lecturer surprised his hearers
+by a graphic and eloquent description of the eruption of the great
+volcano, which occurred in 1840, and his language was loudly applauded.
+
+"Judging from the success achieved by the lecturer last evening, he
+should repeat his experiment at an early date."]
+
+                   COOPER INSTITUTE
+    By Invitation of s large number of prominent Californians and
+                  Citizens of New York,
+
+                      MARK TWAIN
+
+                    WILL DELIVER A
+                  SERIO-HUMEROUS LECTURE
+                      CONERNING
+
+                      KANAKDOM
+                         OR
+                  THE SANDWICH ISLANDS,
+
+                   COOPER INSTITUTE,
+               On Monday Evening, May 6,1867.
+
+                  TICKETS FIFTY GENTS.
+ For Sale at Chickering and Sons, 852 Broadway, and at the Principal
+                       Hotel
+
+    Doors open at 7 o'clock.  The Wisdom will begin to flow at 8.
+
+Mark Twain always felt grateful to the school-teachers for that night.
+Many years later, when they wanted him to read to them in Steinway Hall,
+he gladly gave his services without charge.
+
+Nor was the lecture a complete financial failure. In spite of the flood
+of complementaries, there was a cash return of some three hundred dollars
+from the sale of tickets--a substantial aid in defraying the expenses
+which Fuller assumed and insisted on making good on his own account. That
+was Fuller's regal way; his return lay in the joy of the game, and in the
+winning of the larger stake for a friend.
+
+"Mark," he said, "it is all right. The fortune didn't come, but it will.
+The fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book just out you are
+going to be the most talked-of man in the country. Your letters for the
+Alta and the Tribune will get the widest reception of any letters of
+travel ever written."
+
+
+
+
+LIX
+
+THE FIRST BOOK
+
+With the shadow of the Cooper Institute so happily dispelled, The
+Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and his following of Other
+Sketches, became a matter of more interest. The book was a neat
+blue-and-gold volume printed by John A. Gray & Green, the old firm for
+which the boy, Sam Clemens, had set type thirteen years before. The
+title-page bore Webb's name as publisher, with the American News Company
+as selling agents. It further stated that the book was edited by "John
+Paul," that is to say by Webb himself. The dedication was in keeping
+with the general irresponsible character of the venture. It was as
+follows:
+
+                         TO
+                      JOHN SMITH
+            WHOM I HAVE KNOWN IN DIVERS AND SUNDRY
+             PLACES ABOUT THE WORLD, AND WHOSE
+               MANY AND MANIFOLD VIRTUES DID
+                ALWAYS COMMAND MY ESTEEM,
+                  I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
+
+It is said that the man to whom a volume is dedicated always buys a copy.
+If this prove true in the present instance, a princely affluence is about
+to burst upon
+                                   THE AUTHOR.
+
+The "advertisement" stated that the author had "scaled the heights of
+popularity at a single jump, and won for himself the sobriquet of the
+'Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope'; furthermore, that he was known to
+fame as the 'Moralist of the Main,'" and that as such he would be likely
+to go down to posterity, adding that it was in his secondary character,
+as humorist, rather than in his primal one of moralist, that the volume
+aimed to present him.--[The advertisement complete, with extracts from
+the book, may be found under Appendix E, at the end of last volume.]
+
+Every little while, during the forty years or more that have elapsed
+since then, some one has come forward announcing Mark Twain to be as much
+a philosopher as a humorist, as if this were a new discovery. But it was
+a discovery chiefly to the person making the announcement. Every one who
+ever knew Mark Twain at any period of his life made the same discovery.
+Every one who ever took the trouble to familiarize himself with his work
+made it. Those who did not make it have known his work only by hearsay
+and quotation, or they have read it very casually, or have been very
+dull. It would be much more of a discovery to find a book in which he
+has not been serious--a philosopher, a moralist, and a poet. Even in the
+Jumping Frog sketches, selected particularly for their inconsequence, the
+under-vein of reflection and purpose is not lacking. The answer to Moral
+Statistician--[In "Answers to Correspondents," included now in Sketches
+New and Old. An extract from it, and from "A Strange Dream," will be
+found in Appendix E.]--is fairly alive with human wisdom and righteous
+wrath. The "Strange Dream," though ending in a joke, is aglow with
+poetry. Webb's "advertisement" was playfully written, but it was
+earnestly intended, and he writes Mark Twain down a moralist--not as a
+discovery, but as a matter of course. The discoveries came along later,
+when the author's fame as a humorist had dazzled the nations.
+
+It is as well to say it here as anywhere, perhaps, that one reason why
+Mark Twain found it difficult to be accepted seriously was the fact that
+his personality was in itself so essentially humorous. His physiognomy,
+his manner of speech, this movement, his mental attitude toward events
+--all these were distinctly diverting. When we add to this that his
+medium of expression was nearly always full of the quaint phrasing and
+those surprising appositions which we recognize as amusing, it is not so
+astonishing that his deeper, wiser, more serious purpose should be
+overlooked. On the whole these unabated discoverers serve a purpose, if
+only to make the rest of their species look somewhat deeper than the
+comic phrase.
+
+The little blue-and-gold volume which presented the Frog story and
+twenty-six other sketches in covers is chiefly important to-day as being
+Mark Twain's first book. The selections in it were made for a public
+that had been too busy with a great war to learn discrimination, and most
+of them have properly found oblivion. Fewer than a dozen of them were
+included in his collected Sketches issued eight years later, and some
+even of those might have been spared; also some that were added, for that
+matter; but detailed literary criticism is not the province of this work.
+The reader may investigate and judge for himself.
+
+Clemens was pleased with the appearance of his book. To Bret Harte he
+wrote:
+
+The book is out and it is handsome. It is full of damnable errors of
+grammar and deadly inconsistencies of spelling in the Frog sketch,
+because I was away and did not read proofs; but be a friend and say
+nothing about these things. When my hurry is over, I will send you a
+copy to pisen the children with.
+
+That he had no exaggerated opinion of the book's contents or prospects we
+may gather from his letter home:
+
+As for the Frog book, I don't believe it will ever pay anything worth a
+cent. I published it simply to advertise myself, and not with the hope
+of making anything out of it.
+
+He had grown more lenient in his opinion of the merits of the Frog story
+itself since it had made friends in high places, especially since James
+Russell Lowell had pronounced it "the finest piece of humorous writing
+yet produced in America"; but compared with his lecture triumph, and his
+prospective journey to foreign seas, his book venture, at best, claimed
+no more than a casual regard. A Sandwich Island book (he had collected
+his Union letters with the idea of a volume) he gave up altogether after
+one unsuccessful offer of it to Dick & Fitzgerald.
+
+Frank Fuller's statement, that the fame had arrived, had in it some
+measure of truth. Lecture propositions came from various directions.
+Thomas Nast, then in the early day of his great popularity, proposed a
+joint tour, in which Clemens would lecture, while he, Nast, illustrated
+the remarks with lightning caricatures. But the time was too short; the
+Quaker City would sail on the 8th of June, and in the mean time the Alta
+correspondent was far behind with his New York letters. On May 29th he
+wrote:
+
+I am 18 Alta letters behind, and I must catch up or bust. I have refused
+all invitations to lecture. Don't know how my book is coming on.
+
+He worked like a slave for a week or so, almost night and day, to clean
+up matters before his departure. Then came days of idleness and
+reaction-days of waiting, during which his natural restlessness and the
+old-time regret for things done and undone, beset him.
+
+    My passage is paid, and if the ship sails I sail on her; but I make
+    no calculations, have bought no cigars, no sea-going clothing--have
+    made no preparations whatever--shall not pack my trunk till the
+    morning we sail.
+
+    All I do know or feel is that I am wild with impatience to move
+    --move--move! Curse the endless delays! They always kill me--they
+    make me neglect every duty, and then I have a conscience that tears
+    me like a wild beast. I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month.
+    I do more mean things the moment I get a chance to fold my hands and
+    sit down than ever I get forgiveness for.
+
+    Yes, we are to meet at Mr. Beach's next Thursday night, and I
+    suppose we shall have to be gotten up regardless of expense, in
+    swallow-tails, white kids and everything 'en regle'.
+
+    I am resigned to Rev. Mr. Hutchinson's or anybody else's
+    supervision. I don't mind it. I am fixed. I have got a splendid,
+    immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless roommate who is as
+    good and true and right-minded a man as ever lived--a man whose
+    blameless conduct and example will always be an eloquent sermon to
+    all who shall come within their influence. But send on the
+    professional preachers--there are none I like better to converse
+    with; if they're not narrowminded and bigoted they make good
+    companions.
+
+The "splendid immoral room-mate" was Dan Slote--"Dan," of The Innocents,
+a lovable character--all as set down. Samuel Clemens wrote one more
+letter to his mother and sister--a conscience-stricken, pessimistic
+letter of good-by written the night before sailing. Referring to the
+Alta letters he says:
+
+    I think they are the stupidest letters ever written from New York.
+    Corresponding has been a perfect drag ever since I got to the
+    States. If it continues abroad, I don't know what the Tribune and
+    Alta folk will think.
+
+He remembers Orion, who had been officially eliminated when Nevada had
+received statehood.
+
+    I often wonder if his law business is going satisfactorily. I wish
+    I had gone to Washington in the winter instead of going West. I
+    could have gouged an office out of Bill Stewart for him, and that
+    would have atoned for the loss of my home visit. But I am so
+    worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish
+    anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is
+    stored full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and
+    an accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and
+    restless moving from place to place. If I could only say I had done
+    one thing for any of you that entitled me to your good opinions (I
+    say nothing of your love, for I am sure of that, no matter how
+    unworthy of it I may make myself--from Orion down, you have always
+    given me that; all the days of my life, when God Almighty knows I
+    have seldom deserved it), I believe I could go home and stay there
+    --and I know I would care little for the world's praise or blame.
+    There is no satisfaction in the world's praise anyhow, and it has no
+    worth to me save in the way of business. I tried to gather up its
+    compliments to send you, but the work was distasteful and I dropped
+    it.
+
+    You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that
+    is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt. I can get away
+    from that at sea, and be tranquil and satisfied; and so, with my
+    parting love and benediction for Orion and all of you, I say good-by
+    and God bless you all-and welcome the wind that wafts a weary soul
+    to the sunny lands of the Mediterranean!
+
+                     Yrs. forever,
+                                SAM
+
+
+
+
+LX
+
+THE INNOCENTS AT SEA
+
+       HOLY LAND PLEASURE EXCURSION
+
+       Steamer: Quaker City.
+
+       Captain C. C. Duncan.
+
+       Left New York at 2 P.m., June 8, 1867.
+
+       Rough weather--anchored within the harbor to lay all night.
+
+That first note recorded an event momentous in Mark Twain's career--an
+event of supreme importance; if we concede that any link in a chain
+regardless of size is of more importance than any other link. Undoubtedly
+it remains the most conspicuous event, as the world views it now, in
+retrospect.
+
+The note further heads a new chapter of history in sea-voyaging. No such
+thing as the sailing of an ocean steamship with a pleasure-party on a
+long transatlantic cruise had ever occurred before. A similar project
+had been undertaken the previous year, but owing to a cholera scare in
+the East it had been abandoned. Now the dream had become a fact--a
+stupendous fact when we consider it. Such an important beginning as that
+now would in all likelihood furnish the chief news story of the day.
+
+But they had different ideas of news in those days. There were no
+headlines announcing the departure of the Quaker City--only the barest
+mention of the ship's sailing, though a prominent position was given to
+an account of a senatorial excursion-party which set out that same
+morning over the Union Pacific Railway, then under construction. Every
+name in that political party was set dawn, and not one of them except
+General Hancock will ever be heard of again. The New York Times,
+however, had some one on its editorial staff who thought it worth while
+to comment a little on the history-making Quaker City excursion. The
+writer was pleasantly complimentary to officers and passengers. He
+referred to Moses S. Beach, of the Sun, who was taking with him type and
+press, whereby he would "skilfully utilize the brains of the company for
+their mutual edification." Mr. Beecher and General Sherman would find
+talent enough aboard to make the hours go pleasantly (evidently the
+writer had not interested himself sufficiently to know that these
+gentlemen were not along), and the paragraph closed by prophesying other
+such excursions, and wishing the travelers "good speed, a happy voyage,
+and a safe return."
+
+That was handsome, especially for those days; only now, some fine day,
+when an airship shall start with a band of happy argonauts to land beyond
+the sunrise for the first time in history, we shall feature it and
+emblazon it with pictures in the Sunday papers, and weeklies, and in the
+magazines.--[The Quaker City idea was so unheard-of that in some of the
+foreign ports visited, the officials could not believe that the vessel
+was simply a pleasure-craft, and were suspicious of some dark, ulterior
+purpose.]
+
+That Henry Ward Beecher and General Sherman had concluded not to go was a
+heavy disappointment at first; but it proved only a temporary disaster.
+The inevitable amalgamation of all ship companies took place. The
+sixty-seven travelers fell into congenial groups, or they mingled and
+devised amusements, and gossiped and became a big family, as happy and as
+free from contention as families of that size are likely to be.
+
+The Quaker City was a good enough ship and sizable for her time. She was
+registered eighteen hundred tons--about one-tenth the size of
+Mediterranean excursion-steamers today--and when conditions were
+favorable she could make ten knots an hour under steam--or, at least, she
+could do it with the help of her auxiliary sails. Altogether she was a
+cozy, satisfactory ship, and they were a fortunate company who had her
+all to themselves and went out on her on that long-ago ocean gipsying.
+She has grown since then, even to the proportions of the Mayflower. It
+was necessary for her to grow to hold all of those who in later times
+claimed to have sailed in her on that voyage with Mark Twain.--[The
+Quaker City passenger list will be found under Appendix F, at the end of
+last volume.]
+
+They were not all ministers and deacons aboard the Quaker City. Clemens
+found other congenial spirits be sides his room-mate Dan Slote--among
+them the ship's surgeon, Dr. A. Reeve Jackson (the guide-destroying
+"Doctor" of The Innocents); Jack Van Nostrand, of New Jersey ("Jack");
+Julius Moulton, of St. Louis ("Moult"), and other care-free fellows, the
+smoking-room crowd which is likely to make comradeship its chief
+watchword. There were companionable people in the cabin crowd also
+--fine, intelligent men and women, especially one of the latter, a
+middle-aged, intellectual, motherly soul--Mrs. A. W. Fairbanks, of
+Cleveland, Ohio. Mrs. Fairbanks--herself a newspaper correspondent for
+her husband's paper, the Cleveland Herald had a large influence on the
+character and general tone of those Quaker City letters which established
+Mark Twain's larger fame. She was an able writer herself; her judgment
+was thoughtful, refined, unbiased--altogether of a superior sort. She
+understood Samuel Clemens, counseled him, encouraged him to read his
+letters aloud to her, became in reality "Mother Fairbanks," as they
+termed her, to him and to others of that ship who needed her kindly
+offices.
+
+In one of his home letters, later, he said of her:
+
+    She was the most refined, intelligent, cultivated lady in the ship,
+    and altogether the kindest and best. She sewed my buttons on, kept
+    my clothing in presentable trim, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I
+    behaved), lectured me awfully on the quarter-deck on moonlit
+    promenading evenings, and cured me of several bad habits. I am
+    under lasting obligations to her. She looks young because she is so
+    good, but she has a grown son and daughter at home.
+
+In one of the early letters which Mrs. Fairbanks wrote to her paper she
+is scarcely less complimentary to him, even if in a different way.
+
+    We have D.D.'s and M.D.'s--we have men of wisdom and men of wit.
+    There is one table from which is sure to come a peal of laughter,
+    and all eyes are turned toward Mark Twain, whose face is, perfectly
+    mirth-provoking. Sitting lazily at the table, scarcely genteel in
+    his appearance, there is something, I know not what, that interests
+    and attracts. I saw to-day at dinner venerable divines and sage-
+    looking men convulsed with laughter at his drolleries and quaint,
+    odd manners.
+
+It requires only a few days on shipboard for acquaintances to form, and
+presently a little afternoon group was gathering to hear Mark Twain read
+his letters. Mrs. Fairbanks was there, of course, also Mr. and Mrs. S.
+L. Severance, likewise of Cleveland, and Moses S. Beach, of the Sun, with
+his daughter Emma, a girl of seventeen. Dan Slote was likely to be
+there, too, and Jack, and the Doctor, and Charles J. Langdon, of Elmira,
+New York, a boy of eighteen, who had conceived a deep admiration for the
+brilliant writer. They were fortunate ones who first gathered to hear
+those daring, wonderful letters.
+
+But the benefit was a mutual one. He furnished a priceless entertainment,
+and he derived something equally priceless in return--the test of
+immediate audience and the boon of criticism. Mrs. Fairbanks especially
+was frankly sincere. Mr. Severance wrote afterward:
+
+    One afternoon I saw him tearing up a bunch of the soft, white paper-
+    copy paper, I guess the newspapers call it-on which he had written
+    something, and throwing the fragments into the Mediterranean. I
+    inquired of him why he cast away the fruits of his labors in that
+    manner.
+
+"Well," he drawled, "Mrs. Fairbanks thinks it oughtn't to be printed,
+and, like as not, she is right."
+
+And Emma Beach (Mrs. Abbott Thayer) remembers hearing him say:
+
+"Well, Mrs. Fairbanks has just destroyed another four hours' work for
+me."
+
+Sometimes he played chess with Emma Beach, who thought him a great hero
+because, once when a crowd of men were tormenting a young lad, a
+passenger, Mark Twain took the boy's part and made them desist.
+
+"I am sure I was right, too," she declares; "heroism came natural to
+him."
+
+Mr. Severance recalls another incident which, as he says, was trivial
+enough, but not easy to forget:
+
+We were having a little celebration over the birthday anniversary of Mrs.
+Duncan, wife of our captain. Mark Twain got up and made a little speech,
+in which he said Mrs. Duncan was really older than Methuselah because she
+knew a lot of things that Methuselah never heard of. Then he mentioned a
+number of more or less modern inventions, and wound up by saying, "What
+did Methuselah know about a barbed-wire fence?"
+
+Except Following the Equator, The Innocents Abroad comes nearer to being
+history than any other of Mark Twain's travel-books. The notes for it
+were made on the spot, and there was plenty of fact, plenty of fresh, new
+experience, plenty of incident to set down. His idea of descriptive
+travel in those days was to tell the story as it happened; also, perhaps,
+he had not then acquired the courage of his inventions. We may believe
+that the adventures with Jack, Dan, and the Doctor are elaborated here
+and there; but even those happened substantially as recorded. There is
+little to add, then, to the story of that halcyon trip, and not much to
+elucidate.
+
+The old note-books give a light here and there that is interesting. It
+is curious to be looking through them now, trying to realize that these
+penciled memoranda were the fresh, first impressions that would presently
+grow into the world's most delightful book of travel; that they were set
+down in the very midst of that care-free little company that frolicked
+through Italy, climbed wearily the arid Syrian hills. They are all dead
+now; but to us they are as alive and young to-day as when they followed
+the footprints of the Son of Man through Palestine, and stood at last
+before the Sphinx, impressed and awed by its "five thousand
+slow-revolving years."
+
+Some of the items consist of no more than a few terse, suggestive words
+--serious, humorous, sometimes profane. Others are statistical,
+descriptive, elaborated. Also there are drawings--"not copied," he marks
+them, with a pride not always justified by the result. The earlier notes
+are mainly comments on the "pilgrims," the freak pilgrims: "the
+Frenchy-looking woman who owns a dog and keeps up an interminable
+biography of him to the passengers"; the "long-legged, simple,
+wide-mouthed, horse-laughing young fellow who once made a sea voyage to
+Fortress Monroe, and quotes eternally from his experiences"; also, there
+is reference to another young man, "good, accommodating, pleasant but
+fearfully green." This young person would become the "Interrogation
+Point," in due time, and have his picture on page 71 (old edition), while
+opposite him, on page 70, would appear the "oracle," identified as one
+Doctor Andrews, who (the note-book says) had the habit of "smelling in
+guide-books for knowledge and then trying to play it for old information
+that has been festering in his brain." Sometimes there are abstract
+notes such as:
+
+How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing that no one had
+ever said it before.
+
+Of the "character" notes, the most important and elaborated is that which
+presents the "Poet Lariat." This is the entry, somewhat epitomized:
+
+                  BLOODGOOD H. CUTTER
+
+    He is fifty years old, and small of his age. He dresses in
+    homespun, and is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer, with
+    a strange proclivity for writing rhymes. He writes them on all
+    possible subjects, and gets them printed on slips of paper, with his
+    portrait at the head. These he will give to any man who comes
+    along, whether he has anything against him or not . . . .
+
+    Dan said:
+
+    "It must be a great happiness to you to sit down at the close of day
+    and put its events all down in rhymes and poetry, like Byron and
+    Shakespeare and those fellows."
+
+    "Oh yes, it is--it is--Why, many's the time I've had to get up in
+    the night when it comes on me:
+
+       Whether we're on the sea or the land
+       We've all got to go at the word of command--
+
+    "Hey! how's that?"
+
+A curious character was Cutter--a Long Island farmer with the obsession
+of rhyme. In his old age, in an interview, he said:
+
+"Mark was generally writing and he was glum. He would write what we were
+doing, and I would write poetry, and Mark would say:
+
+"'For Heaven's sake, Cutter, keep your poems to yourself.'
+
+"Yes, Mark was pretty glum, and he was generally writing."
+
+Poor old Poet Lariat--dead now with so many others of that happy crew. We
+may believe that Mark learned to be "glum" when he saw the Lariat
+approaching with his sheaf of rhymes. We may believe, too, that he was
+"generally writing." He contributed fifty-three letters to the Alta
+during that five months and six to the Tribune. They would average about
+two columns nonpareil each, which is to say four thousand words, or
+something like two hundred and fifty thousand words in all. To turn out
+an average of fifteen hundred words a day, with continuous sight-seeing
+besides, one must be generally writing during any odd intervals; those
+who are wont to regard Mark Twain as lazy may consider these statistics.
+That he detested manual labor is true enough, but at the work for which
+he was fitted and intended it may be set down here upon authority (and
+despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that to his last
+year he was the most industrious of men.
+
+
+
+
+LXI
+
+THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
+
+It was Dan, Jack, and the Doctor who with Mark Twain wandered down
+through Italy and left moral footprints that remain to this day. The
+Italian guides are wary about showing pieces of the True Cross, fragments
+of the Crown of Thorns, and the bones of saints since then. They show
+them, it is true, but with a smile; the name of Mark Twain is a
+touch-stone to test their statements. Not a guide in Italy but has heard
+the tale of that iconoclastic crew, and of the book which turned their
+marvels into myths, their relics into bywords.
+
+It was Doctor Jackson, Colonel Denny, Doctor Birch, and Samuel Clemens
+who evaded the quarantine and made the perilous night trip to Athens and
+looked upon the Parthenon and the sleeping city by moonlight. It is all
+set down in the notes, and the account varies little from that given in
+the book; only he does not tell us that Captain Duncan and the
+quartermaster, Pratt, connived at the escapade, or how the latter watched
+the shore in anxious suspense until he heard the whistle which was their
+signal to be taken aboard. It would have meant six months' imprisonment
+if they had been captured, for there was no discretion in the Greek law.
+
+It was T. D. Crocker, A. N. Sanford, Col. Peter Kinney, and William
+Gibson who were delegated to draft the address to the Emperor of Russia
+at Yalta, with Samuel L. Clemens as chairman of that committee. The
+chairman wrote the address, the opening sentence of which he grew so
+weary of hearing:
+
+    We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply
+    for recreation, and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial
+    state.
+
+The address is all set down in the notes, and there also exists the first
+rough draft, with the emendations in his own hand. He deplores the time
+it required:
+
+    That job is over. Writing addresses to emperors is not my strong
+    suit. However, if it is not as good as it might be it doesn't
+    signify--the other committeemen ought to have helped me write it;
+    they had nothing to do, and I had my hands full. But for bothering
+    with this I would have caught up entirely with my New York Tribune
+    correspondence and nearly up with the San Francisco.
+
+They wanted him also to read the address to the Emperor, but he pointed
+out that the American consul was the proper person for that office. He
+tells how the address was presented:
+
+August 26th. The Imperial carriages were in waiting at eleven, and at
+twelve we were at the palace....
+
+The Consul for Odessa read the address and the Czar said frequently,
+"Good--very good; indeed"--and at the close, "I am very, very grateful."
+
+It was not improper for him to set down all this, and much more, in his
+own note-book--not then for publication. It was in fact a very proper
+record--for today.
+
+One incident of the imperial audience Mark Twain omitted from his book,
+perhaps because the humor of it had not yet become sufficiently evident.
+"The humorous perception of a thing is a pretty slow growth sometimes,"
+he once remarked. It was about seventeen years before he could laugh
+enjoyably at a slight mistake he made at the Emperor's reception. He set
+down a memorandum of it, then, for fear it might be lost:
+
+    There were a number of great dignitaries of the Empire there, and
+    although, as a general thing, they were dressed in citizen's
+    clothing, I observed that the most of them wore a very small piece
+    of ribbon in the lapels of their coats. That little touch of color
+    struck my fancy, and it seemed to me a good idea to add it to my own
+    attractions; not imagining that it had any special significance. So
+    I stepped aside, hunted up a bit of red ribbon, and ornamented my
+    lapel with it. Presently, Count Festetics, the Grand Master of
+    ceremonies, and the only man there who was gorgeously arrayed, in
+    full official costume, began to show me a great many attentions. He
+    was particularly polite, and pleasant, and anxious to be of service
+    to me. Presently, he asked me what order of nobility I belonged to?
+    I said, "I didn't belong to any." Then he asked me what order of
+    knighthood I belonged to? I said, "None." Then he asked me what
+    the red ribbon in my buttonhole stood for? I saw, at once, what an
+    ass I had been making of myself, and was accordingly confused and
+    embarrassed. I said the first thing that came into my mind, and
+    that was that the ribbon was merely the symbol of a club of
+    journalists to which I belonged, and I was not pursued with any more
+    of Count Festetic's attentions.
+
+    Later, I got on very familiar terms with an old gentleman, whom I
+    took to be the head gardener, and walked him all about the gardens,
+    slipping my arm into his without invitation, yet without demur on
+    his part, and by and by was confused again when I found that he was
+    not a gardener at all, but the Lord High Admiral of Russia! I
+    almost made up my mind that I would never call on an Emperor again.
+
+Like all Mediterranean excursionists, those first pilgrims were
+insatiable collectors of curios, costumes, and all manner of outlandish
+things. Dan Slote had the stateroom hung and piled with such gleanings.
+At Constantinople his room-mate writes:
+
+    I thought Dan had got the state-room pretty full of rubbish at last,
+    but awhile ago his dragoman arrived with a brand-new ghastly
+    tombstone of the Oriental pattern, with his name handsomely carved
+    and gilted on it in Turkish characters. That fellow will buy a
+    Circassian slave next.
+
+It was Church, Denny, Jack, Davis, Dan, Moult, and Mark Twain who made
+the "long trip" through Syria from Beirut to Jerusalem with their
+elaborate camping outfit and decrepit nags "Jericho," "Baalbec," and the
+rest. It was better camping than that Humboldt journey of six years
+before, though the horses were not so dissimilar, and altogether it was a
+hard, nerve-racking experience, climbing the arid hills of Palestine in
+that torrid summer heat. Nobody makes that trip in summer-time now.
+Tourists hurry out of Syria before the first of April, and they do not go
+back before November. One brief quotation from Mark Twain's book gives
+us an idea of what that early party of pilgrims had to undergo:
+
+    We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple of
+    hours, and then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig-
+    trees to give me a chance to rest. It was the hottest day we had
+    seen yet--the sun-flames shot down like the shafts of fire that
+    stream out before a blow-pipe; the rays seemed to fall in a deluge
+    on the head and pass downward like rain from a roof. I imagined I
+    could distinguish between the floods of rays. I thought I could
+    tell when each flood struck my head, when it reached my shoulders,
+    and when the next one came. It was terrible.
+
+He had been ill with cholera at Damascus, a light attack; but any attack
+of that dread disease is serious enough. He tells of this in the book,
+but he does not mention, either in the book or in his notes, the attack
+which Dan Slote had some days later. It remained for William F. Church,
+of the party, to relate that incident, for it was the kind of thing that
+Mark Twain was not likely to record, or even to remember. Doctor Church
+was a deacon with orthodox views and did not approve of Mark Twain; he
+thought him sinful, irreverent, profane.
+
+"He was the worst man I ever knew," Church said; then he added, "And the
+best."
+
+What happened was this: At the end of a terrible day of heat, when the
+party had camped on the edge of a squalid Syrian village, Dan was taken
+suddenly ill. It was cholera, beyond doubt. Dan could not go on--he
+might never go on. The chances were that way. It was a serious matter
+all around. To wait with Dan meant to upset their travel schedule--it
+might mean to miss the ship. Consultation was held and a resolution
+passed (the pilgrims were always passing resolutions) to provide for Dan
+as well as possible, and leave him behind. Clemens, who had remained
+with Dan, suddenly appeared and said:
+
+"Gentlemen, I understand that you are going to leave Dan Slote here
+alone. I'll be d---d if I do!"
+
+And he didn't. He stayed there and brought Dan into Jerusalem, a few
+days late, but convalescent.
+
+Perhaps most of them were not always reverent during that Holy Land trip.
+It was a trying journey, and after fierce days of desert hills the
+reaction might not always spare even the holiest memories. Jack was
+particularly sinful. When they learned the price for a boat on Galilee,
+and the deacons who had traveled nearly half around the world to sail on
+that sacred water were confounded by the charge, Jack said:
+
+"Well, Denny, do you wonder now that Christ walked?"
+
+It was the irreverent Jack who one morning (they had camped the night
+before by the ruins of Jericho) refused to get up to see the sun rise
+across the Jordan. Deacon Church went to his tent.
+
+"Jack, my boy, get up. Here is the place where the Israelites crossed
+over into the Promised Land, and beyond are the mountains of Moab, where
+Moses lies buried."
+
+"Moses who!" said Jack.
+
+"Oh, Jack, my boy, Moses, the great lawgiver--who led the Israelites out
+of Egypt-forty years through the wilderness--to the Promised Land."
+
+"Forty years!" said Jack. "How far was it?"
+
+"It was three hundred miles, Jack; a great wilderness, and he brought
+them through in safety."
+
+Jack regarded him with scorn. "Huh, Moses--three hundred miles forty
+years--why, Ben Holiday would have brought them through in thirty-six
+hours!"--[Ben Holiday, owner of the Overland stages, and a man of great
+executive ability. This incident, a true one, is more elaborately told
+in Roughing It, but it seems pertinent here.]
+
+Jack probably learned more about the Bible during that trip-its history
+and its heroes-than during all his former years. Nor was Jack the only
+one of that group thus benefited. The sacred landmarks of Palestine
+inspire a burning interest in the Scriptures, and Mark Twain probably did
+not now regret those early Sunday-school lessons; certainly he did not
+fail to review them exhaustively on that journey. His note-books fairly
+overflow with Bible references; the Syrian chapters in The Innocents
+Abroad are permeated with the poetry and legendary beauty of the Bible
+story. The little Bible he carried on that trip, bought in
+Constantinople, was well worn by the time they reached the ship again at
+Jaffa. He must have read it with a large and persistent interest; also
+with a double benefit. For, besides the knowledge acquired, he was
+harvesting a profit--probably unsuspected at the time---viz., the
+influence of the most direct and beautiful English--the English of the
+King James version--which could not fail to affect his own literary
+method at that impressionable age. We have already noted his earlier
+admiration for that noble and simple poem, "The Burial of Moses," which
+in the Palestine note-book is copied in full. All the tendency of his
+expression lay that way, and the intense consideration of stately Bible
+phrase and imagery could hardly fail to influence his mental processes.
+The very distinct difference of style, as shown in The Innocents Abroad
+and in his earlier writings, we may believe was in no small measure due
+to his study of the King James version during those weeks in Palestine.
+
+He bought another Bible at Jerusalem; but it was not for himself. It was
+a little souvenir volume bound in olive and balsam wood, and on the
+fly-leaf is inscribed:
+
+    Mrs. Jane Clemens from her son. Jerusalem, Sept. 24, 1867.
+
+There is one more circumstance of that long cruise-recorded neither in
+the book nor the notes--an incident brief, but of more importance in the
+life of Samuel Clemens than any heretofore set down. It occurred in the
+beautiful Bay of Smyrna, on the fifth or sixth of September, while the
+vessel lay there for the Ephesus trip.
+
+Reference has been made to young Charles Langdon, of Elmira (the
+"Charley" once mentioned in the Innocents), as an admirer of Mark Twain.
+There was a good deal of difference in their ages, and they were seldom
+of the same party; but sometimes the boy invited the journalist to his
+cabin and, boy-like, exhibited his treasures. He had two sisters at
+home; and of Olivia, the youngest, he had brought a dainty miniature done
+on ivory in delicate tints--a sweet-pictured countenance, fine and
+spiritual. On that fateful day in the day of Smyrna, Samuel Clemens,
+visiting in young Langdon's cabin, was shown this portrait. He looked at
+it with long admiration, and spoke of it reverently, for the delicate
+face seemed to him to be something more than a mere human likeness. Each
+time he came, after that, he asked to see the picture, and once even
+begged to be allowed to take it away with him. The boy would not agree
+to this, and the elder man looked long and steadily at the miniature,
+resolving in his mind that some day he would meet the owner of that
+lovely face--a purpose for once in accord with that which the fates had
+arranged for him, in the day when all things were arranged, the day of
+the first beginning.
+
+
+
+
+LXII
+
+THE RETURN OF THE PILGRIMS
+
+The last note-book entry bears date of October 11th:
+
+    At sea, somewhere in the neighborhood of Malta. Very stormy.
+
+    Terrible death to be talked to death. The storm has blown two small
+    land birds and a hawk to sea and they came on board. Sea full of
+    flying-fish.
+
+That is all. There is no record of the week's travel in Spain, which a
+little group of four made under the picturesque Gibraltar guide, Benunes,
+still living and quite as picturesque at last accounts. This side-trip
+is covered in a single brief paragraph in the Innocents, and the only
+account we have of it is in a home letter, from Cadiz, of October 24th:
+
+    We left Gibraltar at noon and rode to Algeciras (4 hours), thus
+    dodging the quarantine--took dinner, and then rode horseback all
+    night in a swinging trot, and at daylight took a caleche (a-wheeled
+    vehicle), and rode 5 hours--then took cars and traveled till twelve
+    at night. That landed us at Seville, and we were over the hard part
+    of our trip and somewhat tired. Since then we have taken things
+    comparatively easy, drifting around from one town to another and
+    attracting a good deal of attention--for I guess strangers do not
+    wander through Andalusia and the other southern provinces of Spain
+    often. The country is precisely what it was when Don Quixote and
+    Sancho Panza were possible characters.
+
+    But I see now what the glory of Spain must have been when it was
+    under Moorish domination. No, I will not say that--but then when
+    one is carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of the
+    Alhambra and the supernatural beauty of the Alcazar, he is apt to
+    overflow with admiration for the splendid intellects that created
+    them.
+
+We may wish that he had left us a chapter of that idyllic journey, but it
+will never be written now. A night or two before the vessel reached New
+York there was the usual good-by assembly, and for this occasion, at Mrs.
+Severance's request, Mark Twain wrote some verses. They were not
+especially notable, for meter and rhyme did not come easy to him, but one
+prophetic stanza is worth remembering. In the opening lines the
+passengers are referred to as a fleet of vessels, then follows:
+
+       Lo! other ships of that parted fleet
+       Shall suffer this fate or that:
+       One shall be wrecked, another shall sink,
+       Or ground on treacherous flat.
+       Some shall be famed in many lands
+       As good ships, fast and fair,
+       And some shall strangely disappear,
+       Men know not when or where.
+
+The Quaker City returned to America on November 19, 1867, and Mark Twain
+found himself, if not famous, at least in very wide repute. The
+fifty-three letters to the Alta and the half-dozen to the New York
+Tribune had carried his celebrity into every corner of the States and
+Territories. Vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry, they
+came as a revelation to a public weary of the driveling, tiresome
+travel-letters of that period. They preached a new gospel in
+travel-literature: the gospel of seeing with an overflowing honesty; a
+gospel of sincerity in according praises to whatever seemed genuine, and
+ridicule to the things considered sham. It was the gospel that Mark
+Twain would continue to preach during his whole career. It became his
+chief literary message to the world-a world waiting for that message.
+
+Moreover, the letters were literature. He had received, from whatever
+source, a large and very positive literary impulse, a loftier conception
+and expression. It was at Tangier that he first struck the grander
+chord, the throbbing cadence of human story.
+
+Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered America;
+old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to
+arm for the first Crusade; old when Charlemagne and his paladins
+beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the
+fabled days of the olden time; old when Christ and his disciples walked
+the earth; stood where it stands to-day when the lips of Memnon were
+vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes.
+
+This is pure poetry. He had never touched so high a strain before, but
+he reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing
+mastery and confidence. In Venice, in Rome, in Athens, through the Holy
+Land, his retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional
+crescendo that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain,
+the ageless contemplation of the Sphinx. We cannot forego a paragraph or
+two of that word-picture:
+
+    After years of waiting it was before me at last. The great face was
+    so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not
+    of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as
+    never anything human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient.
+    If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking
+    toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing--nothing
+    but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond everything
+    of the present, and far into the past.... It was thinking of the
+    wars of the departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and
+    destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose
+    progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy
+    and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five
+    thousand slow-revolving years . . . .
+
+    The Sphinx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its
+    magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its
+    story. And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this
+    eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of
+    all ages, which reveals to one something of what we shall feel when
+    we shall stand at last in the awful presence of God.
+
+Then that closing word of Egypt. He elaborated it for the book, and did
+not improve it. Let us preserve here its original form.
+
+    We are glad to have seen Egypt. We are glad to have seen that old
+    land which taught Greece her letters--and through Greece, Rome--and
+    through Rome, the world--that venerable cradle of culture and
+    refinement which could have humanized and civilized the Children of
+    Israel, but allowed them to depart out of her borders savages--those
+    Children whom we still revere, still love, and whose sad
+    shortcomings we still excuse--not because they were savages, but
+    because they were the chosen savages of God.
+
+The Holy Land letters alone would have brought him fame. They presented
+the most graphic and sympathetic picture of Syrian travel ever written
+--one that will never become antiquated or obsolete so long as human
+nature remains unchanged. From beginning to end the tale is rarely,
+reverently told. Its closing paragraph has not been surpassed in the
+voluminous literature of that solemn land:
+
+    Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of
+    a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.
+    Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers that solemn
+    sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing
+    exists--over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs
+    motionless and dead--about whose borders nothing grows but weeds and
+    scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises
+    refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch.
+    Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of
+    Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing one finds
+    only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the
+    accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle left
+    it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in
+    their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to
+    remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour's
+    presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks
+    by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, goodwill to men,
+    is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature
+    that is pleasant to the eye. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the
+    stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and
+    is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer
+    there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the
+    wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel is
+    gone, and the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on
+    that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the
+    Holy Cross. The noted Sea of Galilee, where Roman fleets once rode
+    at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed in their ships,
+    was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and its
+    borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a shapeless ruin;
+    Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have
+    vanished from the earth, and the "desert places" round about them
+    where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's voice and ate
+    the miraculous bread sleep in the hush of a solitude that is
+    inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.
+
+    Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise?
+    Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?
+
+It would be easy to quote pages here--a pictorial sequence from Gibraltar
+to Athens, from Athens to Egypt, a radiant panoramic march. In time he
+would write technically better. He would avoid solecism, he would become
+a greater master of vocabulary and phrase, but in all the years ahead he
+would never match the lambent bloom and spontaneity of those fresh, first
+impressions of Mediterranean lands and seas. No need to mention the
+humor, the burlesque, the fearless, unrestrained ridicule of old masters
+and of sacred relics, so called. These we have kept familiar with much
+repetition. Only, the humor had grown more subtle, more restrained; the
+burlesque had become impersonal and harmless, the ridicule so frank and
+good-natured, that even the old masters themselves might have enjoyed it,
+while the most devoted churchman, unless blinded by bigotry, would find
+in it satisfaction, rather than sacrilege.
+
+The final letter was written for the New York Herald after the arrival,
+and was altogether unlike those that preceded it. Gaily satirical and
+personal--inclusively so--it might better have been left unwritten, for
+it would seem to have given needless offense to a number of goodly
+people, whose chief sin was the sedateness of years. However, it is all
+past now, and those who were old then, and perhaps queer and pious and
+stingy, do not mind any more, and those who were young and frivolous have
+all grown old too, and most of them have set out on the still farther
+voyage. Somewhere, it may be, they gather, now; and then, and lightly,
+tenderly recall their old-time journeying.
+
+
+
+
+LXIII
+
+IN WASHINGTON--A PUBLISHING PROPOSITION
+
+Clemens remained but one day in New York. Senator Stewart had written,
+about the time of the departure of the Quaker City, offering him the
+position of private secretary--a position which was to give him leisure
+for literary work, with a supporting salary as well. Stewart no doubt
+thought it would be considerably to his advantage to have the brilliant
+writer and lecturer attached to his political establishment, and Clemens
+likewise saw possibilities in the arrangement. From Naples, in August,
+he had written accepting Stewart's offer; he lost no time now in
+discussing the matter in person.--[In a letter home, August 9th, he
+referred to the arrangement: "I wrote to Bill Stewart to-day accepting
+his private secretaryship in Washington, next winter."]
+
+There seems to have been little difficulty in concluding the arrangement.
+When Clemens had been in Washington a week we find him writing:
+
+    DEAR FOLKS, Tired and sleepy--been in Congress all day and making
+    newspaper acquaintances. Stewart is to look up a clerkship in the
+    Patent Office for Orion. Things necessarily move slowly where there
+    is so much business and such armies of office-seekers to be attended
+    to. I guess it will be all right. I intend it shall be all right.
+
+    I have 18 invitations to lecture, at $100 each, in various parts
+    of the Union--have declined them all. I am for business now.
+
+    Belong on the Tribune Staff, and shall write occasionally. Am
+    offered the same berth to-day on the Herald by letter. Shall write
+    Mr. Bennett and accept, as soon as I hear from Tribune that it will
+    not interfere. Am pretty well known now--intend to be better known.
+    Am hobnobbing with these old Generals and Senators and other humbugs
+    for no good purpose. Don't have any more trouble making friends
+    than I did in California. All serene. Good-by. Shall continue on
+    the Alta.
+                     Yours affectionately,
+                                   SAM.
+
+    P.S.--I room with Bill Stewart and board at Willard's Hotel.
+
+But the secretary arrangement was a brief matter. It is impossible to
+conceive of Mark Twain as anybody's secretary, especially as the
+secretary of Senator Stewart.
+
+--[In Senator Stewart's memoirs he refers unpleasantly to Mark Twain, and
+after relating several incidents that bear only strained relations to the
+truth, states that when the writer returned from the Holy Land he
+(Stewart) offered him a secretaryship as a sort of charity. He adds that
+Mark Twain's behavior on his premises was such that a threat of a
+thrashing was necessary. The reason for such statements becomes
+apparent, however, when he adds that in 'Roughing It' the author accuses
+him of cheating, prints a picture of him with a hatch over his eye, and
+claims to have given him a sound thrashing, none of which statements,
+save only the one concerning the picture (an apparently unforgivable
+offense to his dignity), is true, as the reader may easily ascertain for
+himself.]
+
+Within a few weeks he was writing humorous accounts of "My Late
+Senatorial Secretaryship," "Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation,"
+etc., all good-natured burlesque, but inspired, we may believe, by the
+change: These articles appeared in the New York Tribune, the New York
+Citizen, and the Galaxy Magazine.
+
+There appears to have been no ill-feeling at this time between Clemens
+and Stewart. If so, it is not discoverable in any of the former's
+personal or newspaper correspondence. In fact, in his article relating
+to his "late senatorial secretaryship" he puts the joke, so far as it is
+a joke, on Senator James W. Nye, probably as an additional punishment for
+Nye's failure to appear on the night of his lecture. He established
+headquarters with a brilliant newspaper correspondent named Riley. "One
+of the best men in Washington--or elsewhere," he tells us in a brief
+sketch of that person.--[See Riley, newspaper correspondent. Sketches
+New and Old.]--He had known Riley in San Francisco; the two were
+congenial, and settled down to their several undertakings.
+
+Clemens was chiefly concerned over two things: he wished to make money
+and he wished to secure a government appointment for Orion. He had used
+up the most of his lecture accumulations, and was moderately in debt. His
+work was in demand at good rates, for those days, and with working
+opportunity he could presently dispose of his financial problem. The
+Tribune was anxious for letters; the Enterprise and Alta were waiting for
+them; the Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the magazines--all had solicited
+contributions; the lecture bureaus pursued him. Personally his outlook
+was bright.
+
+The appointment for Orion was a different matter. The powers were not
+especially interested in a brother; there were too many brothers and
+assorted relatives on the official waiting-list already. Clemens was
+offered appointments for himself--a consulship, a post-mastership; even
+that of San Francisco. From the Cabinet down, the Washington political
+contingent had read his travel-letters, and was ready to recognize
+officially the author of them in his own person and personality.
+
+Also, socially: Mark Twain found himself all at once in the midst of
+receptions, dinners, and speech-making; all very exciting for a time at
+least, but not profitable, not conducive to work. At a dinner of the
+Washington Correspondents Club his response to the toast, "Women," was
+pronounced by Schuyler Colfax to be "the best after dinner speech ever
+made." Certainly it was a refreshing departure from the prosy or
+clumsy-witted efforts common to that period. He was coming altogether
+into his own.--[This is the first of Mark Twain's after-dinner speeches
+to be preserved. The reader will find it complete, as reported next day,
+in Appendix G, at the end of last volume.]
+
+He was not immediately interested in the matter of book publication. The
+Jumping Frog book was popular, and in England had been issued by
+Routledge; but the royalty returns were modest enough and slow in
+arrival. His desire was for prompter results. His interest in book
+publication had never been an eager one, and related mainly to the
+advertising it would furnish, which he did not now need; or to the money
+return, in which he had no great faith. Yet at this very moment a letter
+for him was lying in the Tribune office in New York which would bring the
+book idea into first prominence and spell the beginning of his fortune.
+
+Among those who had read and found delight in the Tribune letters was
+Elisha Bliss, Jr., of the American Publishing Company, of Hartford. Bliss
+was a shrewd and energetic man, with a keen appreciation for humor and
+the American fondness for that literary quality. He had recently
+undertaken the management of a Hartford concern, and had somewhat alarmed
+its conservative directorate by publishing books that furnished
+entertainment to the reader as well as moral instruction. Only his
+success in paying dividends justified this heresy and averted his
+downfall. Two days after the arrival of the Quaker City Bliss wrote the
+letter above mentioned. It ran as follows:
+
+                  OFFICE OF THE AMERICAN PUBLISHING CO.
+                  HARTFORD, CONN., November 21, 1867.
+
+SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, ESQ., Tribune Office, New York.
+
+DEAR SIR,--We take the liberty to address you this, in place of a letter
+which we had recently written and were about to forward to you, not
+knowing your arrival home was expected so soon. We are desirous of
+obtaining from you a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your
+letters from the past, etc., with such interesting additions as may be
+proper. We are the publishers of A. D. Richardson's works, and flatter
+ourselves that we can give an author a favorable term and do as full
+justice to his productions as any other house in the country. We are
+perhaps the oldest subscription house in the country, and have never
+failed to give a book an immense circulation. We sold about 100,000
+copies of Richardson's F. D. and E. ('Field, Dungeon and Escape'), and
+are now printing 41,000 of 'Beyond the Mississippi', and large orders
+ahead. If you have any thought of writing a book, or could be induced to
+do so, we should be pleased to see you, and will do so. Will you do us
+the favor of reply at once, at your earliest convenience.
+
+                         Very truly etc.,
+
+                            E. BLISS, JR.,
+                            Secretary.
+
+After ten days' delay this letter was forwarded to the Tribune bureau in
+Washington, where Clemens received it. He replied promptly.
+
+                     WASHINGTON, December 2, 1867.
+
+E. BLISS, JR., ESQ., Secretary American Publishing Co.
+
+DEAR SIR,--I only received your favor of November 21st last night, at the
+rooms of the Tribune Bureau here. It was forwarded from the Tribune
+office, New York where it had lain eight or ten days. This will be a
+sufficient apology for the seeming discourtesy of my silence.
+
+I wrote fifty-two letters for the San Francisco Alta California during
+the Quaker City excursion, about half of which number have been printed
+thus far. The Alta has few exchanges in the East, and I suppose scarcely
+any of these letters have been copied on this side of the Rocky
+Mountains. I could weed them of their chief faults of construction and
+inelegancies of expression, and make a volume that would be more
+acceptable in many respects than any I could now write. When those
+letters were written my impressions were fresh, but now they have lost
+that freshness; they were warm then, they are cold now. I could strike
+out certain letters, and write new ones wherewith to supply their places.
+If you think such a book would suit your purpose, please drop me a line,
+specifying the size and general style of the volume--when the matter
+ought to be ready; whether it should have pictures in it or not; and
+particularly what your terms with me would be, and what amount of money I
+might possibly make out of it. The latter clause has a degree of
+importance for me which is almost beyond my own comprehension. But you
+understand that, of course.
+
+I have other propositions for a book, but have doubted the propriety of
+interfering with good newspaper engagements, except my way as an author
+could be demonstrated to be plain before me. But I know Richardson, and
+learned from him some months ago something of an idea of the subscription
+plan of publishing. If that is your plan invariably it looks safe.
+
+I am on the New York Tribune staff here as an "occasional," among other
+things, and a note from you addressed to
+              Very truly, etc.,
+                         SAM. L. CLEMENS,
+                         New York Tribune Bureau, Washington
+will find me, without fail.
+
+The exchange of those two letters marked the beginning of one of the most
+notable publishing connections in American literary history.
+
+Consummation, however, was somewhat delayed. Bliss was ill when the
+reply came, and could not write again in detail until nearly a month
+later. In this letter he recited the profits made by Richardson and
+others through subscription publication, and named the royalties paid.
+Richardson had received four per cent. of the sale price, a small enough
+rate for these later days; but the cost of manufacture was larger then,
+and the sale and delivery of books through agents has ever been an
+expensive process. Even Horace Greeley had received but a fraction more
+on his Great American Conflict. Bliss especially suggested and
+emphasized a "humorous work--that is to say, a work humorously inclined."
+He added that they had two arrangements for paying authors: outright
+purchase, and royalty. He invited a meeting in New York to arrange
+terms.
+
+
+
+
+LXIV
+
+OLIVIA LANGDON
+
+Clemens did in fact go to New York that same evening, to spend Christmas
+with Dan Slote, and missed Bliss's second letter. It was no matter. Fate
+had his affairs properly in hand, and had prepared an event of still
+larger moment than the publication even of Innocents Abroad. There was a
+pleasant reunion at Dan Slote's. He wrote home about it:
+
+    Charley Langdon, Jack Van Nostrand, Dan and I (all Quaker City
+    night-hawks) had a blow-out at Dan's house and a lively talk over
+    old times. I just laughed till my sides ached at some of our
+    reminiscences. It was the unholiest gang that ever cavorted through
+    Palestine, but those are the best boys in the world.
+
+This, however, was not the event; it was only preliminary to it. We are
+coming to that now. At the old St. Nicholas Hotel, which stood on the
+west of Broadway between Spring and Broome streets, there were stopping
+at this time Jervis Langdon, a wealty coal-dealer and mine-owner of
+Elmira, his son Charles and his daughter Olivia, whose pictured face
+Samuel Clemens had first seen in the Bay of Smyrna one September day.
+Young Langdon had been especially anxious to bring his distinguished
+Quaker City friend and his own people together, and two days before
+Christmas Samuel Clemens was invited to dine at the hotel. He went very
+willingly. The lovely face of that miniature had been often a part of his
+waking dreams. For the first time now he looked upon its reality. Long
+afterward he said:
+
+"It is forty years ago. From that day to this she has never been out of
+my mind."
+
+Charles Dickens was in New York then, and gave a reading that night in
+Steinway Hall. The Langdons went, and Samuel Clemens accompanied them.
+He remembered afterward that Dickens wore a black velvet coat with a
+fiery red flower in his buttonhole, and that he read the storm scene from
+Copperfield--the death of James Steerforth. But he remembered still more
+clearly the face and dress of that slender girlish figure at his side.
+
+Olivia Langdon was twenty-two years old at this time, delicate as the
+miniature he had seen, fragile to look upon, though no longer with the
+shattered health of her girlhood. At sixteen, through a fall upon the
+ice, she had become a complete invalid, confined to her bed for two
+years, unable to sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position
+except upon her back. Great physicians and surgeons, one after another,
+had done their best for her but she had failed steadily until every hope
+had died. Then, when nothing else was left to try, a certain Doctor
+Newton, of spectacular celebrity, who cured by "laying on of hands," was
+brought to Elmira to see her. Doctor Newton came into the darkened room
+and said:
+
+"Open the windows--we must have light!"
+
+They protested that she could not bear the light, but the windows were
+opened. Doctor Newton came to the bedside of the helpless girl,
+delivered a short, fervent prayer, put his arm under her shoulders, and
+bade her sit up. She had not moved for two years, and the family were
+alarmed, but she obeyed, and he assisted her into a chair. Sensation
+came back to her limbs. With his assistance she even made a feeble
+attempt to walk. He left then, saying that she would gradually improve,
+and in time be well, though probably never very strong. On the same day
+he healed a boy, crippled and drawn with fever.
+
+It turned out as he had said. Olivia Langdon improved steadily, and now
+at twenty-two, though not robust--she was never that--she was
+comparatively well. Gentle, winning, lovable, she was the family idol,
+and Samuel Clemens joined in their worship from the moment of that first
+meeting.
+
+Olivia Langdon, on her part, was at first dazed and fascinated, rather
+than attracted, by this astonishing creature, so unlike any one she had
+ever known. Her life had been circumscribed, her experiences of a simple
+sort. She had never seen anything resembling him before. Indeed, nobody
+had. Somewhat carelessly, even if correctly, attired; eagerly, rather
+than observantly, attentive; brilliant and startling, rather than
+cultured, of speech--a blazing human solitaire, unfashioned, unset,
+tossed by the drift of fortune at her feet. He disturbed rather than
+gratified her. She sensed his heresy toward the conventions and forms
+which had been her gospel; his bantering, indifferent attitude toward
+life--to her always so serious and sacred; she suspected that he even
+might have unorthodox views on matters of religion. When he had gone she
+somehow had the feeling that a great fiery meteor of unknown portent had
+swept across her sky.
+
+To her brother, who was eager for her approval of his celebrity, Miss
+Langdon conceded admiration. As for her father, he did not qualify his
+opinion. With hearty sense of humor, and a keen perception of verity and
+capability in men, Jervis Langdon accepted Samuel Clemens from the start,
+and remained his stanch admirer and friend. Clemens left that night with
+an invitation to visit Elmira by and by, and with the full intention of
+going--soon. Fate, however, had another plan. He did not see Elmira for
+the better part of a year.
+
+He saw Miss Langdon again within the week. On New-Year's Day he set
+forth to pay calls, after the fashion of the time--more lavish then than
+now. Miss Langdon was receiving with Miss Alice Hooker, a niece of Henry
+Ward Beecher, at the home of a Mrs. Berry; he decided to go there first.
+With young Langdon he arrived at eleven o'clock in the morning, and they
+did not leave until midnight. If his first impression upon Olivia
+Langdon had been meteoric, it would seem that he must now have become to
+her as a streaming comet that swept from zenith to horizon. One thing is
+certain: she had become to him the single, unvarying beacon of his future
+years. He visited Henry Ward Beecher on that trip and dined with him by
+invitation. Harriet Beecher Stowe was present, and others of that
+eminent family. Likewise his old Quaker City comrades, Moses S. and
+Emma Beach. It was a brilliant gathering, a conclave of intellectual
+gods--a triumph to be there for one who had been a printer-boy on the
+banks of the Mississippi, and only a little while before a miner with
+pick and shovel. It was gratifying to be so honored; it would be
+pleasant to write home; but the occasion lacked something too
+--everything, in fact--for when he ran his eye around the board the face
+of the minature was not there.
+
+Still there were compensations; inadequate, of course, but pleasant
+enough to remember. It was Sunday evening and the party adjourned to
+Plymouth Church. After services Mr. Beecher invited him to return home
+with him for a quiet talk. Evidently they had a good time, for in the
+letter telling of these things Samuel Clemens said: "Henry Ward Beecher
+is a brick."
+
+
+
+
+LXV
+
+A CONTRACT WITH ELISHA BLISS, JR.
+
+He returned to Washington without seeing Miss Langdon again, though he
+would seem to have had permission to write--friendly letters. A little
+later (it was on the evening of January 9th) he lectured in Washington
+--on very brief notice indeed. The arrangement for his appearance had
+been made by a friend during his absence--"a friend," Clemens declared
+afterward, "not entirely sober at the time." To his mother he wrote:
+
+I scared up a doorkeeper and was ready at the proper time, and by pure
+good luck a tolerably good house assembled and I was saved. I hardly
+knew what I was going to talk about, but it went off in splendid style.
+
+The title of the lecture delivered was "The Frozen Truth"--"more truth in
+the title than in the lecture," according to his own statement. What it
+dealt with is not remembered now. It had to do with the Quaker City
+trip, perhaps, and it seems to have brought a financial return which was
+welcome enough. Subsequently he delivered it elsewhere; though just how
+far the tour extended cannot be learned from the letters, and he had but
+little memory of it in later years.
+
+There was some further correspondence with Bliss, then about the 21st of
+January (1868) Clemens made a trip to Hartford to settle the matter.
+Bliss had been particularly anxious to meet him, personally and was a
+trifle disappointed with his appearance. Mark Twain's traveling costume
+was neither new nor neat, and he was smoking steadily a pipe of power.
+His general make-up was hardly impressive.
+
+Bliss's disturbance was momentary. Once he began to talk the rest did
+not matter. He was the author of those letters, and Bliss decided that
+personally he was even greater than they. The publisher, confined to his
+home with illness, offered him the hospitality of his household. Also,
+he made him two propositions: he would pay him ten thousand dollars cash
+for his copyright, or he would pay five per cent. royalty, which was a
+fourth more than Richardson had received. He advised the latter
+arrangement.
+
+Clemens had already taken advice and had discussed the project a good
+deal with Richardson. The ten thousand dollars was a heavy temptation,
+but he withstood it and closed on the royalty basis--"the best business
+judgment I ever displayed," he was wont to declare. A letter written to
+his mother and sister near the end of this Hartford stay is worth quoting
+pretty fully here, for the information and "character" it contains. It
+bears date of January 24th.
+
+    This is a good week for me. I stopped in the Herald office, as I
+    came through New York, to see the boys on the staff, and young James
+    Gordon Bennett asked me to write twice a week, impersonally, for the
+    Herald, and said if I would I might have full swing, and about
+    anybody and everything I wanted to. I said I must have the very
+    fullest possible swing, and he said, "All right." I said, "It's a
+    contract--" and that settled that matter.
+
+    I'll make it a point to write one letter a week anyhow. But the
+    best thing that has happened is here. This great American
+    Publishing Company kept on trying to bargain with me for a book till
+    I thought I would cut the matter short by coming up for a talk. I
+    met Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, and with his usual whole-souled
+    way of dropping his own work to give other people a lift when he
+    gets a chance, he said: "Now, here, you are one of the talented men
+    of the age--nobody is going to deny that--but in matters of business
+    I don't suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains.
+    I'll tell you what to do and how to do it." And he did.
+
+    And I listened well, and then came up here and made a splendid
+    contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large pages, with
+    illustrations, the manuscript to be placed in the publisher's hands
+    by the middle of July.--[The contract was not a formal one. There
+    was an exchange of letters agreeing to the terms, but no joint
+    document was drawn until October 16 (1868).]--My percentage is to
+    be a fourth more than they have ever paid any author except Greeley.
+    Beecher will be surprised, I guess, when he hears this.
+
+    These publishers get off the most tremendous editions of their books
+    you can imagine. I shall write to the Enterprise and Alta every
+    week, as usual, I guess, and to the Herald twice a week,
+    occasionally to the Tribune and the magazines (I have a stupid
+    article in the Galaxy, just issued), but I am not going to write to
+    this and that and the other paper any more.
+
+    I have had a tiptop time here for a few days (guest of Mr. Jno.
+    Hooker's family--Beecher's relatives--in a general way of Mr. Bliss
+    also, who is head of the publishing firm). Puritans are mighty
+    straight-laced, and they won't let me smoke in the parlor, but the
+    Almighty don't make any better people.
+
+    I have to make a speech at the annual Herald dinner on the 6th of
+    May.
+
+So the book, which would establish his claim to a peerage in the literary
+land, was arranged for, and it remained only to prepare the manuscript, a
+task which he regarded as not difficult. He had only to collate the Alta
+and Tribune letters, edit them, and write such new matter as would be
+required for completeness.
+
+Returning to Washington, he plunged into work with his usual terrific
+energy, preparing the copy--in the mean time writing newspaper
+correspondence and sketches that would bring immediate return. In
+addition to his regular contributions, he entered into a syndicate
+arrangement with John Swinton (brother of William Swinton, the historian)
+to supply letters to a list of newspapers.
+
+"I have written seven long newspaper letters and a short magazine article
+in less than two days," he wrote home, and by the end of January he had
+also prepared several chapters of his book.
+
+The San Francisco post-mastership was suggested to him again, but he put
+the temptation behind him. He refers to this more than once in his home
+letters, and it is clear that he wavered.
+
+    Judge Field said if I wanted the place he could pledge me the
+    President's appointment, and Senator Corners said he would guarantee
+    me the Senate's confirmation. It was a great temptation, but it
+    would render it impossible to fill my book contract, and I had to
+    drop the idea....
+
+    And besides I did not want the office.
+
+He made this final decision when he heard that the chief editor of the
+Alta wanted the place, and he now threw his influence in that quarter. "I
+would not take ten thousand dollars out of a friend's pocket," he said.
+
+But then suddenly came the news from Goodman that the Alta publishers had
+copyrighted his Quaker City letters and proposed getting them out in a
+book, to reimburse themselves still further on their investment. This
+was sharper than a serpent's tooth. Clemens got confirmation of the
+report by telegraph. By the same medium he protested, but to no purpose.
+Then he wrote a letter and sat down to wait. He reported his troubles to
+Orion:
+
+    I have made a superb contract for a book, and have prepared the
+    first ten chapters of the sixty or eighty, but I will bet it never
+    sees the light. Don't you let the folks at home hear that. That
+    thieving Alta copyrighted the letters, and now shows no disposition
+    to let me use them. I have done all I can by telegraph, and now
+    await the final result by mail. I only charged them for 50 letters
+    what (even in) greenbacks would amount to less than two thousand
+    dollars, intending to write a good deal for high-priced Eastern
+    papers, and now they want to publish my letters in book form
+    themselves to get back that pitiful sum.
+
+Orion was by this time back from Nevada, setting type in St. Louis. He
+was full of schemes, as usual, and his brother counsels him freely. Then
+he says:
+
+    We chase phantoms half the days of our lives. It is well if we
+    learn wisdom even then, and save the other half.
+
+    I am in for it. I must go on chasing them, until I marry, then I am
+    done with literature and all other bosh--that is, literature
+    wherewith to please the general public.
+
+    I shall write to please myself then.
+
+He closes by saying that he rather expects to go with Anson Burlingame on
+the Chinese embassy. Clearly he was pretty hopeless as to his book
+prospects.
+
+His first meeting with General Grant occurred just at this time. In one
+of his home letters he mentions, rather airily, that he will drop in
+someday on the General for an interview; and at last, through Mrs. Grant,
+an appointment was made for a Sunday evening when the General would be at
+home. He was elated with the prospect of an interview; but when he
+looked into the imperturbable, square, smileless face of the soldier he
+found himself, for the first time in his life, without anything
+particular to say. Grant nodded slightly and waited. His caller wished
+something would happen. It did. His inspiration returned.
+
+"General," he said, "I seem to be a little embarrassed. Are you?"
+
+That broke the ice. There were no further difficulties.--[Mark Twain has
+variously related this incident. It is given here in accordance with the
+letters of the period.]
+
+
+
+
+LXVI
+
+BACK TO SAN FRANCISCO
+
+Reply came from the Alta, but it was not promising. It spoke rather
+vaguely of prior arrangements and future possibilities. Clemens gathered
+that under certain conditions he might share in the profits of the
+venture. There was but one thing to do; he knew those people--some of
+them--Colonel McComb and a Mr. McCrellish intimately. He must confer
+with them in person.
+
+He was weary of Washington, anyway. The whole pitiful machinery of
+politics disgusted him. In his notebook he wrote:
+
+    Whiskey is taken into the committee rooms in demijohns and carried
+    out in demagogues.
+
+And in a letter:
+
+    This is a place to get a poor opinion of everybody in. There are
+    some pitiful intellects in this Congress! There isn't one man in
+    Washington in civil office who has the brains of Anson Burlingame,
+    and I suppose if China had not seized and saved his great talents to
+    the world this government would have discarded him when his time was
+    up.--[Anson Burlingame had by this time become China's special
+    ambassador to the nations.]
+
+Furthermore, he was down on the climate of Washington. He decided to go
+to San Francisco and see "those Alta thieves face to face." Then, if a
+book resulted, he could prepare it there among friends. Also, he could
+lecture.
+
+He had been anxious to visit his people before sailing, but matters were
+too urgent to permit delay. He obtained from Bliss an advance of royalty
+and took passage, by way of Aspinwall, on the sidewheel steamer Henry
+Chauncey, a fine vessel for those days. The name of Mark Twain was
+already known on the isthmus, and when it was learned he had arrived on
+the Chauncey a delegation welcomed him on the wharf, and provided him
+with refreshments and entertainment. Mr. Tracy Robinson, a poet, long a
+resident of that southern land, was one of the group. Beyond the isthmus
+Clemens fell in again with his old captain, Ned Wakeman, who during the
+trip told him the amazing dream that in due time would become Captain
+Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. He made the first draft of this story soon
+after his arrival in San Francisco, as a sort of travesty of Elizabeth
+Stuart Phelps's Gates Ajar, then very popular. Clemens, then and later,
+had a high opinion of Capt. Ned Wakeman's dream, but his story of it
+would pass through several stages before finally reaching the light of
+publication.--[Mr. John P. Vollmer, now of Lewiston, Idaho, a companion
+of that voyage, writes of a card game which took place beyond the
+isthmus. The notorious crippled gambler, "Smithy," figured in it, and it
+would seem to have furnished the inspiration for the exciting story in
+Chapter XXXVI of the Mississippi book.]
+
+In San Francisco matters turned out as he had hoped. Colonel McComb was
+his stanch friend; McCrellish and Woodward, the proprietors, presently
+conceded that they had already received good value for the money paid.
+The author agreed to make proper acknowledgments to the Alta in his
+preface, and the matter was settled with friendliness all around.
+
+The way was now clear, the book assured. First, however, he must provide
+himself with funds. He delivered a lecture, with the Quaker City
+excursion as his subject. On the 5th of May he wrote to Bliss:
+
+I lectured here on the trip the other night; over $1,600 in gold in the
+house; every seat taken and paid for before night.
+
+He reports that he is steadily at work, and expects to start East with
+the completed manuscript about the middle of June.
+
+But this was a miscalculation. Clemens found that the letters needed
+more preparation than he had thought. His literary vision and equipment
+had vastly altered since the beginning of that correspondence. Some of
+the chapters he rewrote; others he eliminated entirely. It required two
+months of fairly steady work to put the big manuscript together.
+
+Some of the new chapters he gave to Bret Harte for the Overland Monthly,
+then recently established. Harte himself was becoming a celebrity about
+this time. His "Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat,"
+published in early numbers of the Overland, were making a great stir in
+the East, arousing there a good deal more enthusiasm than in the magazine
+office or the city of their publication. That these two friends, each
+supreme in his own field, should have entered into their heritage so
+nearly at the same moment, is one of the many seemingly curious
+coincidences of literary history.
+
+Clemens now concluded to cover his lecture circuit of two years before.
+He was assured that it would be throwing away a precious opportunity not
+to give his new lecture to his old friends. The result justified that
+opinion. At Virginia, at Carson, and elsewhere he was received like a
+returned conqueror. He might have been accorded a Roman triumph had
+there been time and paraphernalia. Even the robbers had reformed, and
+entire safety was guaranteed him on the Divide between Virginia and Gold
+Hill. At Carson he called on Mrs. Curry, as in the old days, and among
+other things told her how snow from the Lebanon Mountains is brought to
+Damascus on the backs of camels.
+
+"Sam," she said, "that's just one of your yarns, and if you tell it in
+your lecture to-night I'll get right up and say so."
+
+But he did tell it, for it was a fact; and though Mrs. Curry did not rise
+to deny it she shook her finger at him in a way he knew.
+
+He returned to San Francisco and gave one more lecture, the last he would
+ever give in California. His preparatory advertising for that occasion
+was wholly unique, characteristic of him to the last degree. It assumed
+the form of a handbill of protest, supposed to have been issued by the
+foremost citizens of San Francisco, urging him to return to the States
+without inflicting himself further upon them. As signatures he made free
+with the names of prominent individuals, followed by those of
+organizations, institutions, "Various Benevolent Societies, Citizens on
+Foot and Horseback, and fifteen hundred in the Steerage."
+
+Following this (on the same bill) was his reply, "To the fifteen hundred
+and others," in which he insisted on another hearing:
+
+    I will torment the people if I want to.... It only costs the people
+    $1 apiece, and if they can't stand it what do they stay here for?...
+    My last lecture was not as fine as I thought it was, but I have
+    submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have
+    pronounced it good. Now, therefore, why should I withhold it?
+
+He promised positively to sail on the 6th of July if they would let him
+talk just this once. Continuing, the handbill presented a second
+protest, signed by the various clubs and business firms; also others
+bearing variously the signatures of the newspapers, and the clergy,
+ending with the brief word:
+
+    You had better go.  Yours,  CHIEF OF POLICE.
+
+All of which drollery concluded with his announcement of place and date
+of his lecture, with still further gaiety at the end. Nothing short of a
+seismic cataclysm--an earthquake, in fact--could deter a San Francisco
+audience after that. Mark Twain's farewell address, given at the
+Mercantile Library July 2 (1868), doubtless remains today the leading
+literary event in San Francisco's history.--[Copy of the lecture
+announcement, complete, will be found in Appendix H, at the end of last
+volume.]
+
+He sailed July 6th by the Pacific mail steamer Montana to Acapulco,
+caught the Henry Chauncey at Aspinwall, reached New York on the 28th, and
+a day or two later had delivered his manuscript at Hartford.
+
+But a further difficulty had arisen. Bliss was having troubles himself,
+this time, with his directors. Many reports of Mark Twain's new book had
+been traveling the rounds of the press, some of which declared it was to
+be irreverent, even blasphemous, in tone. The title selected, The New
+Pilgrim's Progress, was in itself a sacrilege. Hartford was a
+conservative place; the American Publishing Company directors were of
+orthodox persuasion. They urged Bliss to relieve the company of this
+impending disaster of heresy. When the author arrived one or more of
+them labored with him in person, without avail. As for Bliss, he was
+stanch; he believed in the book thoroughly, from every standpoint. He
+declared if the company refused to print it he would resign the
+management and publish the book himself. This was an alarming suggestion
+to the stockholders. Bliss had returned dividends--a boon altogether too
+rare in the company's former history. The objectors retired and were
+heard of no more. The manuscript was placed in the hands of Fay and Cox,
+illustrators, with an order for about two hundred and fifty pictures.
+
+Fay and Cox turned it over to True Williams, one of the well-known
+illustrators of that day. Williams was a man of great talent--of fine
+imagination and sweetness of spirit--but it was necessary to lock him in
+a room when industry was required, with nothing more exciting than cold
+water as a beverage. Clemens himself aided in the illustrating by
+obtaining of Moses S. Beach photographs from the large collection he had
+brought home.
+
+
+
+
+LXVII
+
+A VISIT TO ELMIRA
+
+Meantime he had skilfully obtained a renewal of the invitation to spend a
+week in the Langdon home.
+
+He meant to go by a fast train, but, with his natural gift for
+misunderstanding time-tables, of course took a slow one, telegraphing his
+approach from different stations along the road. Young Langdon concluded
+to go down the line as far as Waverly to meet him. When the New York
+train reached there the young man found his guest in the smoking-car,
+travel-stained and distressingly clad. Mark Twain was always
+scrupulously neat and correct of dress in later years, but in that
+earlier day neatness and style had not become habitual and did not give
+him comfort. Langdon greeted him warmly but with doubt. Finally he
+summoned courage to say, hesitatingly--"You've got some other clothes,
+haven't you?"
+
+The arriving guest was not in the least disturbed.
+
+"Oh yes," he said with enthusiasm, "I've got a fine brand-new outfit in
+this bag, all but a hat. It will be late when we get in, and I won't see
+any one to-night. You won't know me in the morning. We'll go out early
+and get a hat."
+
+This was a large relief to the younger man, and the rest of the journey
+was happy enough. True to promise, the guest appeared at daylight
+correctly, even elegantly clad, and an early trip to the shops secured
+the hat. A gay and happy week followed--a week during which Samuel
+Clemens realized more fully than ever that in his heart there was room
+for only one woman in all the world: Olivia Langdon--"Livy," as they all
+called her--and as the day of departure drew near it may be that the
+gentle girl had made some discoveries, too.
+
+No word had passed between them. Samuel Clemens had the old-fashioned
+Southern respect for courtship conventions, and for what, in that day at
+least, was regarded as honor. On the morning of the final day he said to
+young Langdon:
+
+"Charley, my week is up, and I must go home."
+
+The young man expressed a regret which was genuine enough, though not
+wholly unqualified. His older sister, Mrs. Crane, leaving just then for
+a trip to the White Mountains, had said:
+
+"Charley, I am sure Mr. Clemens is after our Livy. You mustn't let him
+carry her off before our return."
+
+The idea was a disturbing one. The young man did not urge his guest to
+prolong his-visit. He said:
+
+"We'll have to stand it, I guess, but you mustn't leave before to-night."
+
+"I ought to go by the first train," Clemens said, gloomily. "I am in
+love."
+
+"In what!"
+
+"In love-with your sister, and I ought to get away from here."
+
+The young man was now very genuinely alarmed. To him Mark Twain was a
+highly gifted, fearless, robust man--a man's man--and as such altogether
+admirable--lovable. But Olivia--Livy--she was to him little short of a
+saint. No man was good enough for her, certainly not this adventurous
+soldier of letters from the West. Delightful he was beyond doubt,
+adorable as a companion, but not a companion for Livy.
+
+"Look here, Clemens," he said, when he could get his voice. "There's a
+train in half an hour. I'll help you catch it. Don't wait till
+to-night. Go now."
+
+Clemens shook his head.
+
+"No, Charley," he said, in his gentle drawl, "I want to enjoy your
+hospitality a little longer. I promise to be circumspect, and I'll go
+to-night."
+
+That night, after dinner, when it was time to take the New York train, a
+light two-seated wagon was at the gate. The coachman was in front, and
+young Langdon and his guest took the back seat. For some reason the seat
+had not been locked in its place, and when, after the good-bys, the
+coachman touched the horse it made a quick spring forward, and the back
+seat, with both passengers, described a half-circle and came down with
+force on the cobbled street. Neither passenger was seriously hurt;
+Clemens not at all--only dazed a little for a moment. Then came an
+inspiration; here was a chance to prolong his visit. Evidently it was
+not intended that he should take that train. When the Langdon household
+gathered around with restoratives he did not recover too quickly. He
+allowed them to support or carry him into the house and place him in an
+arm-chair and apply remedies. The young daughter of the house especially
+showed anxiety and attention. This was pure happiness. He was perjuring
+himself, of course, but they say Jove laughs at such things.
+
+He recovered in a day or two, but the wide hospitality of the handsome
+Langdon home was not only offered now; it was enforced. He was still
+there two weeks later, after which he made a trip to Cleveland to confide
+in Mrs. Fairbanks how he intended to win Livy Langdon for his wife.
+
+
+
+
+LXVIII
+
+THE REV. "JOE" TWICHELL
+
+He returned to Hartford to look after the progress of his book. Some of
+it was being put into type, and with his mechanical knowledge of such
+things he was naturally interested in the process.
+
+He made his headquarters with the Blisses, then living at 821 Asylum
+Avenue, and read proof in a little upper room, where the lamp was likely
+to be burning most of the time, where the atmosphere was nearly always
+blue with smoke, and the window-sill full of cigar butts. Mrs. Bliss
+took him into the quiet social life of the neighborhood--to small church
+receptions, society gatherings and the like--all of which he seemed to
+enjoy. Most of the dwellers in that neighborhood were members of the
+Asylum Hill Congregational Church, then recently completed; all but the
+spire. It was a cultured circle, well-off in the world's goods, its male
+members, for the most part, concerned in various commercial ventures.
+
+The church stood almost across the way from the Bliss home, and Mark
+Twain, with his picturesque phrasing, referred to it as the "stub-tailed
+church," on account of its abbreviated spire; also, later, with a
+knowledge of its prosperous membership, as the "Church of the Holy
+Speculators." He was at an evening reception in the home of one of its
+members when he noticed a photograph of the unfinished building framed
+and hanging on the wall.
+
+"Why, yes," he commented, in his slow fashion, "this is the 'Church of
+the Holy Speculators.'"
+
+"Sh," cautioned Mrs. Bliss. "Its pastor is just behind you. He knows
+your work and wants to meet you." Turning, she said: "Mr. Twichell, this
+is Mr. Clemens. Most people know him as Mark Twain."
+
+And so, in this casual fashion, he met the man who was presently to
+become his closest personal friend and counselor, and would remain so for
+more than forty years.
+
+Joseph Hopkins Twichell was a man about his own age, athletic and
+handsome, a student and a devout Christian, yet a man familiar with the
+world, fond of sports, with an exuberant sense of humor and a wide
+understanding of the frailties of humankind. He had been "port waist
+oar" at Yale, and had left college to serve with General "Dan" Sickles as
+a chaplain who had followed his duties not only in the camp, but on the
+field.
+
+Mention has already been made of Mark Twain's natural leaning toward
+ministers of the gospel, and the explanation of it is easier to realize
+than to convey. He was hopelessly unorthodox--rankly rebellious as to
+creeds. Anything resembling cant or the curtailment of mental liberty
+roused only his resentment and irony. Yet something in his heart always
+warmed toward any laborer in the vineyard, and if we could put the
+explanation into a single sentence, perhaps we might say it was because
+he could meet them on that wide, common ground sympathy with mankind.
+Mark Twain's creed, then and always, may be put into three words,
+"liberty, justice, humanity." It may be put into one word, "humanity."
+
+Ministers always loved Mark Twain. They did not always approve of him,
+but they adored him: The Rev. Mr. Rising, of the Comstock, was an early
+example of his ministerial friendships, and we have seen that Henry Ward
+Beecher cultivated his company. In a San Francisco letter of two years
+before, Mark Twain wrote his mother, thinking it would please her:
+
+I am as thick as thieves with the Reverend Stebbins. I am laying for the
+Reverend Scudder and the Reverend Doctor Stone. I am running on
+preachers now altogether, and I find them gay.
+
+So it may be that his first impulse toward Joseph Twichell was due to the
+fact that he was a young member of that army whose mission is to comfort
+and uplift mankind. But it was only a little time till the impulse had
+grown into a friendship that went beyond any profession or doctrine, a
+friendship that ripened into a permanent admiration and love for "Joe"
+Twichell himself, as one of the noblest specimens of his race.
+
+He was invited to the Twichell home, where he met the young wife and got
+a glimpse of the happiness of that sweet and peaceful household. He had
+a neglected, lonely look, and he loved to gather with them at their
+fireside. He expressed his envy of their happiness, and Mrs. Twichell
+asked him why, since his affairs were growing prosperous, he did not
+establish a household of his own. Long afterward Mr. Twichell wrote:
+
+    Mark made no answer for a little, but, with his eyes bent on the
+    floor, appeared to be deeply pondering. Then he looked up, and said
+    slowly, in a voice tremulous with earnestness (with what sympathy he
+    was heard may be imagined): "I am taking thought of it. I am in
+    love beyond all telling with the dearest and best girl in the whole
+    world. I don't suppose she will marry me. I can't think it
+    possible. She ought not to. But if she doesn't I shall be sure
+    that the best thing I ever did was to fall in love with her, and
+    proud to have it known that I tried to win her!"
+
+It was only a brief time until the Twichell fireside was home to him. He
+came and went, and presently it was "Mark" and "Joe," as by and by it
+would be "Livy" and "Harmony," and in a few years "Uncle Joe" and "Uncle
+Mark," "Aunt Livy" and "Aunt Harmony," and so would remain until the
+end.
+
+
+
+
+LXIX
+
+A LECTURE TOUR
+
+James Redpath, proprietor of the Boston Lyceum Bureau, was the leading
+lecture agent of those days, and controlled all, or nearly all, of the
+platform celebrities. Mark Twain's success at the Cooper Union the year
+before had interested Redpath. He had offered engagements then and
+later, but Clemens had not been free for the regular circuit. Now there
+was no longer a reason for postponement of a contract. Redpath was eager
+for the new celebrity, and Clemens closed with him for the season of
+1868-9. With his new lecture, "The Vandal Abroad," he was presently
+earning a hundred dollars and more a night, and making most of the nights
+count.
+
+This was affluence indeed. He had become suddenly a person of
+substance-an associate of men of consequence, with a commensurate income.
+He could help his mother lavishly now, and he did.
+
+His new lecture was immensely popular. It was a resume of the 'Quaker
+City' letters--a foretaste of the book which would presently follow.
+Wherever he went, he was hailed with eager greetings. He caught such
+drifting exclamations as, "There he is! There goes Mark Twain!" People
+came out on the street to see him pass. That marvelous miracle which we
+variously call "notoriety," "popularity," "fame," had come to him. In
+his notebook he wrote, "Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the
+only, earthly certainty oblivion."
+
+The newspapers were filled with enthusiasm both as to his matter and
+method. His delivery was described as a "long, monotonous drawl, with
+the fun invariably coming in at the end of a sentence--after a pause."
+His appearance at this time is thus set down:
+
+    Mark Twain is a man of medium height, about five feet ten, sparsely
+    built, with dark reddish-brown hair and mustache. His features are
+    fair, his eyes keen and twinkling. He dresses in scrupulous evening
+    attire. In lecturing he hangs about the desk, leaning on it or
+    flirting around the corners of it, then marching and countermarching
+    in the rear of it. He seldom casts a glance at his manuscript.
+
+No doubt this fairly presents Mark Twain, the lecturer of that day. It
+was a new figure on the platform, a man with a new method. As to his
+manuscript, the item might have said that he never consulted it at all.
+He learned his lecture; what he consulted was merely a series of
+hieroglyphics, a set of crude pictures drawn by himself, suggestive of
+the subject-matter underneath new head. Certain columns represented the
+Parthenon; the Sphinx meant Egypt, and so on. His manuscript lay there
+in case of accident, but the accident did not happen.
+
+A number of his engagements were in the central part of New York, at
+points not far distant from Elmira. He had a standing invitation to
+visit the Langdon home, and he made it convenient to avail himself of
+that happiness.
+
+His was not an unruffled courtship. When at last he reached the point of
+proposing for the daughter of the house, neither the daughter nor the
+household offered any noticeable encouragement to his suit. Many absurd
+anecdotes have been told of his first interview with Mr. Langdon on the
+subject, but they are altogether without foundation. It was a proper and
+dignified discussion of a very serious matter. Mr. Langdon expressed
+deep regard for him and friendship but he was not inclined to add him to
+the family; the young lady herself, in a general way, accorded with these
+views. The applicant for favor left sadly enough, but he could not
+remain discouraged or sad. He lectured at Cleveland with vast success,
+and the news of it traveled quickly to Elmira. He was referred to by
+Cleveland papers as a "lion" and "the coming man of the age." Two days
+later, in Pittsburgh (November 19th), he "played" against Fanny Kemble,
+the favorite actress of that time, with the result that Miss Kemble had
+an audience of two hundred against nearly ten times the number who
+gathered to hear Mark Twain. The news of this went to Elmira, too. It
+was in the papers there next morning; surely this was a conquering hero
+--a gay Lochinvar from out of the West--and the daughter of the house
+must be guarded closely, that he did not bear her away. It was on the
+second morning following the Pittsburgh triumph, when the Langdon family
+were gathered at breakfast, that a bushy auburn head poked fearfully in
+at the door, and a low, humble voice said:
+
+"The calf has returned; may the prodigal have some breakfast?"
+
+No one could be reserved or reprovingly distant, or any of those
+unfriendly things with a person like that; certainly not Jervis Langdon,
+who delighted in the humor and the tricks and turns and oddities of this
+eccentric visitor. Giving his daughter to him was another matter, but
+even that thought was less disturbing than it had been at the start. In
+truth, the Langdon household had somehow grown to feel that he belonged
+to them. The elder sister's husband, Theodore Crane, endorsed him fully.
+He had long before read some of the Mark Twain sketches that had traveled
+eastward in advance of their author, and had recognized, even in the
+crudest of them, a classic charm. As for Olivia Langdon's mother and
+sister, their happiness lay in hers. Where her heart went theirs went
+also, and it would appear that her heart, in spite of herself, had found
+its rightful keeper. Only young Langdon was irreconciled, and eventually
+set out for a voyage around the world to escape the situation.
+
+There was only a provisional engagement at first. Jervis Langdon
+suggested, and Samuel Clemens agreed with him, that it was proper to know
+something of his past, as well as of his present, before the official
+parental sanction should be given. When Mr. Langdon inquired as to the
+names of persons of standing to whom he might write for credentials,
+Clemens pretty confidently gave him the name of the Reverend Stebbins and
+others of San Francisco, adding that he might write also to Joe Goodman
+if he wanted to, but that he had lied for Goodman a hundred times and
+Goodman would lie for him if necessary, so his testimony would be of no
+value. The letters to the clergy were written, and Mr. Langdon also
+wrote one on his own account.
+
+It was a long mail-trip to the Coast and back in those days. It might be
+two months before replies would come from those ministers. The lecturer
+set out again on his travels, and was radiantly and happily busy. He
+went as far west as Illinois, had crowded houses in Chicago, visited
+friends and kindred in Hannibal, St. Louis, and Keokuk, carrying the
+great news, and lecturing in old familiar haunts.
+
+
+
+
+LXX
+
+INNOCENTS AT HOME--AND "THE INNOCENTS ABROAD"
+
+He was in Jacksonville, Illinois, at the end of January (1869), and in a
+letter to Bliss states that he will be in Elmira two days later, and asks
+that proofs of the book be sent there. He arrived at the Langdon home,
+anxious to hear the reports that would make him, as the novels might say,
+"the happiest or the most miserable of men." Jervis Langdon had a rather
+solemn look when they were alone together. Clemens asked:
+
+"You've heard from those gentlemen out there?"
+
+"Yes, and from another gentleman I wrote concerning you."
+
+"They don't appear to have been very enthusiastic, from your manner."
+
+"Well, yes, some of them were."
+
+"I suppose I may ask what particular form their emotion took?"
+
+"Oh yes, yes; they agree unanimously that you are a brilliant, able man,
+a man with a future, and that you would make about the worst husband on
+record."
+
+The applicant for favor had a forlorn look.
+
+"There's nothing very evasive about that," he said:
+
+There was a period of reflective silence. It was probably no more than a
+few seconds, but it seemed longer.
+
+"Haven't you any other friend that you could suggest?" Langdon said.
+
+"Apparently none whose testimony would be valuable."
+
+Jervis Langdon held out his hand. "You have at least one," he said. "I
+believe in you. I know you better than they do."
+
+And so came the crown of happiness. The engagement of Samuel Langhorne
+Clemens and Olivia Lewis Langdon was ratified next day, February 4, 1869.
+
+But if the friends of Mark Twain viewed the idea of the marriage with
+scant favor, the friends of Miss Langdon regarded it with genuine alarm.
+Elmira was a conservative place--a place of pedigree and family
+tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, pilot, miner, wandering
+journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the daughter of one of the
+oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not to be lightly permitted.
+The fact that he had achieved a national fame did not count against other
+considerations. The social protest amounted almost to insurrection, but
+it was not availing. The Langdon family had their doubts too, though of
+a different sort. Their doubts lay in the fear that one, reared as their
+daughter had been, might be unable to hold a place as the wife of this
+intellectual giant, whom they felt that the world was preparing to honor.
+That this delicate, sheltered girl could have the strength of mind and
+body for her position seemed hard to believe. Their faith overbore such
+questionings, and the future years proved how fully it was justified.
+
+To his mother Samuel Clemens wrote:
+
+    She is only a little body, but she hasn't her peer in Christendom.
+    I gave her only a plain gold engagement ring, when fashion
+    imperatively demands a two-hundred-dollar diamond one, and told her
+    it was typical of her future life-namely, that she would have to
+    flourish on substance, rather than luxuries (but you see I know the
+    girl--she don't care anything about luxuries).... She spends no
+    money but her astral year's allowance, and spends nearly every cent
+    of that on other people. She will be a good, sensible little wife,
+    without any airs about her. I don't make intercession for her
+    beforehand, and ask you to love her, for there isn't any use in
+    that--you couldn't help it if you were to try. I warn you that
+    whoever comes within the fatal influence of her beautiful nature is
+    her willing slave forevermore.
+
+To Mrs. Crane, absent in March, her father wrote:
+
+    DEAR SUE,--I received your letter yesterday with a great deal of
+    pleasure, but the letter has gone in pursuit of one S. L. Clemens,
+    who has been giving us a great deal of trouble lately. We cannot
+    have a joy in our family without a feeling, on the part of the
+    little incorrigible in our family, that this wanderer must share it,
+    so, as soon as read, into her pocket and off upstairs goes your
+    letter, and in the next two minutes into the mail, so it is
+    impossible for me now to refer to it, or by reading it over gain an
+    inspiration in writing you. . .
+
+Clemens closed his lecture tour in March, acid went immediately to
+Elmira. He had lectured between fifty and sixty times, with a return of
+something more than $8,000, not a bad aggregate for a first season on the
+circuit. He had planned to make a spring tour to California, but the
+attraction at Elmira was of a sort that discouraged distant travel.
+Furthermore, he disliked the platform, then and always. It was always a
+temptation to him because of its quick and abundant return, but it was
+none the less distasteful. In a letter of that spring he wrote:
+
+    I most cordially hate the lecture field. And after all, I shudder
+    to think I may never get out of it. In all conversation with Gough,
+    and Anna Dickinson, Nasby, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips,
+    and the other old stagers, I could not observe that they ever
+    expected or hoped to get out of the business. I don't want to get
+    wedded to it as they are.
+
+He declined further engagements on the excuse that he must attend to
+getting out his book. The revised proofs were coming now, and he and
+gentle Livy Langdon read them together. He realized presently that with
+her sensitive nature she had also a keen literary perception. What he
+lacked in delicacy--and his lack was likely to be large enough in that
+direction--she detected, and together they pruned it away. She became
+his editor during those happy courtship days--a position which she held
+to her death. The world owed a large debt of gratitude to Mark Twain's
+wife, who from the very beginning--and always, so far as in her strength
+she was able--inspired him to give only his worthiest to the world,
+whether in written or spoken word, in counsel or in deed. Those early
+days of their close companionship, spiritual and mental, were full of
+revelation to Samuel Clemens, a revelation that continued from day to
+day, and from year to year, even to the very end.
+
+The letter to Bliss and the proofs were full of suggested changes that
+would refine and beautify the text. In one of them he settles the
+question of title, which he says is to be:
+
+                  THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
+                         or
+                THE NEW PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
+
+and we may be sure that it was Olivia Langdon's voice that gave the
+deciding vote for the newly adopted chief title, which would take any
+suggestion of irreverence out of the remaining words.
+
+The book was to have been issued in the spring, but during his wanderings
+proofs had been delayed, and there was now considerable anxiety about it,
+as the agencies had become impatient for the canvass. At the end of
+April Clemens wrote: "Your printers are doing well. I will hurry the
+proofs"; but it was not until the early part of June that the last
+chapters were revised and returned. Then the big book, at last
+completed, went to press on an edition of twenty thousand, a large number
+for any new book, even to-day.
+
+In later years, through some confusion of circumstance, Mark Twain was
+led to believe that the publication of The Innocents Abroad was long and
+unnecessarily delayed. But this was manifestly a mistake. The book went
+to press in June. It was a big book and a large edition. The first copy
+was delivered July 20 (1869), and four hundred and seventeen bound
+volumes were shipped that month. Even with the quicker mechanical
+processes of to-day a month or more is allowed for a large book between
+the final return of proofs and the date of publication. So it is only
+another instance of his remembering, as he once quaintly put it, "the
+thing that didn't happen."--[In an article in the North American Review
+(September 21, 1906) Mr. Clemens stated that he found it necessary to
+telegraph notice that he would bring suit if the book was not immediately
+issued. In none of the letters covering this period is there any
+suggestion of delay on the part of the publishers, and the date of the
+final return of proofs, together with the date of publication, preclude
+the possibility of such a circumstance. At some period of his life he
+doubtless sent, or contemplated sending, such a message, and this fact,
+through some curious psychology, became confused in his mind with the
+first edition of The Innocents Abroad.]
+
+
+
+
+LXXI
+
+THE GREAT BOOK OF TRAVEL
+
+'The Innocents Abroad' was a success from the start. The machinery for
+its sale and delivery was in full swing by August 1, and five thousand
+one hundred and seventy copies were disposed of that month--a number that
+had increased to more than thirty-one thousand by the first of the year.
+It was a book of travel; its lowest price was three and a half dollars.
+No such record had been made by a book of that description; none has
+equaled it since.--[One must recall that this was the record only up to
+1910. D.W.]
+
+If Mark Twain was not already famous, he was unquestionably famous now.
+As the author of The New Pilgrim's Progress he was swept into the domain
+of letters as one riding at the head of a cavalcade--doors and windows
+wide with welcome and jubilant with applause. Newspapers chorused their
+enthusiasm; the public voiced universal approval; only a few of the more
+cultured critics seemed hesitant and doubtful.
+
+They applauded--most of them--but with reservation. Doctor Holland
+regarded Mark Twain as a mere fun maker of ephemeral popularity, and was
+not altogether pleasant in his dictum. Doctor Holmes, in a letter to the
+author, speaks of the "frequently quaint and amusing conceits," but does
+not find it in his heart to refer to the book as literature. It was
+naturally difficult for the East to concede a serious value to one who
+approached his subject with such militant aboriginality, and occasionally
+wrote "those kind." William Dean Howells reviewed the book in the
+Atlantic, which was of itself a distinction, whether the review was
+favorable or otherwise. It was favorable on the whole, favorable to the
+humor of the book, its "delicious impudence," the charm of its
+good-natured irony. The review closed:
+
+    It is no business of ours to fix his rank among the humorists
+    California has given us, but we think he is, in an entirely
+    different way from all the others, quite worthy of the company of
+    the best.
+
+This is praise, but not of an intemperate sort, nor very inclusive. The
+descriptive, the poetic, the more pretentious phases of the book did not
+receive attention. Mr. Howells was perhaps the first critic of eminence
+to recognize in Mark Twain not only the humorist, but the supreme
+genius-the "Lincoln of our literature." This was later. The public--the
+silent public--with what Howells calls "the inspired knowledge of the
+simple-hearted multitude," reached a similar verdict forthwith. And on
+sufficient evidence: let the average unprejudiced person of to-day take
+up the old volume and read a few chapters anywhere and decide whether it
+is the work of a mere humorist, or also of a philosopher, a poet, and a
+seer. The writer well remembers a little group of "the simple-hearted
+multitude" who during the winter of '69 and '70 gathered each evening to
+hear the Innocents read aloud, and their unanimous verdict that it was
+the "best book of modern times."
+
+It was the most daring book of its day. Passages of it were calculated
+to take the breath of the orthodox reader; only, somehow, it made him
+smile, too. It was all so good-natured, so openly sincere. Without
+doubt it preached heresy--the heresy of viewing revered landmarks and
+relics joyously, rather than lugubriously; reverentially, when they
+inspired reverence; satirically, when they invited ridicule, and with
+kindliness always.
+
+The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain's greatest book of travel. The
+critical and the pure in speech may object to this verdict. Brander
+Matthews regards it second to A Tramp Abroad, the natural viewpoint of
+the literary technician. The 'Tramp' contains better usage without
+doubt, but it lacks the "color" which gives the Innocents its perennial
+charm. In the Innocents there is a glow, a fragrance, a romance of
+touch, a subtle something which is idyllic, something which is not quite
+of reality, in the tale of that little company that so long ago sailed
+away to the harbors of their illusions beyond the sea, and, wandered
+together through old palaces and galleries, and among the tombs of the
+saints, and down through ancient lands. There is an atmosphere about it
+all, a dream-like quality that lies somewhere in the telling, maybe, or
+in the tale; at all events it is there, and the world has felt it ever
+since. Perhaps it could be defined in a single word, perhaps that word
+would be "youth." That the artist, poor True Williams, felt its
+inspiration is certain. We may believe that Williams was not a great
+draftsman, but no artist ever caught more perfectly the light and spirit
+of the author's text. Crude some of the pictures are, no doubt, but they
+convey the very essence of the story; they belong to it, they are a part
+of it, and they ought never to perish. 'A Tramp Abroad' is a rare book,
+but it cannot rank with its great predecessor in human charm. The
+public, which in the long run makes mistakes, has rendered that verdict.
+The Innocents by far outsells the Tramp, and, for that matter, any other
+book of travel.
+
+
+
+THE PURCHASE OF A PAPER.
+
+It is curious to reflect that Mark Twain still did not regard himself as
+a literary man. He had no literary plans for the future; he scarcely
+looked forward to the publication of another book. He considered himself
+a journalist; his ambition lay in the direction of retirement in some
+prosperous newspaper enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a
+home. During his travels he had already been casting about for a
+congenial and substantial association in newspaperdom, and had at one
+time considered the purchase of an interest in the Cleveland Herald. But
+Buffalo was nearer Elmira, and when an opportunity offered, by which he
+could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo Express for $25,000, the
+purchase was decided upon. His lack of funds prompted a new plan for a
+lecture tour to the Pacific coast, this time with D. R. Locke (Nasby),
+then immensely popular, in his lecture "Cussed Be Canaan."
+
+Clemens had met Nasby on the circuit, and was very fond of him. The two
+had visited Boston together, and while there had called on Doctor Holmes;
+this by the way. Nasby was fond of Clemens too, but doubtful about the
+trip-doubtful about his lecture:
+
+    Your proposition takes my breath away. If I had my new lecture
+    completed I wouldn't hesitate a moment, but really isn't "Cussed Be
+    Canaan" too old? You know that lemon, our African brother, juicy as
+    he was in his day, has been squeezed dry. Why howl about his wrongs
+    after said wrongs have been redressed? Why screech about the
+    "damnable spirit of Cahst" when the victim thereof sits at the first
+    table, and his oppressor mildly takes, in hash, what he leaves? You
+    see, friend Twain, the Fifteenth Amendment busted "Cussed Be
+    Canaan." I howled feelingly on the subject while it was a living
+    issue, for I felt all that I said and a great deal more; but now
+    that we have won our fight why dance frantically on the dead corpse
+    of our enemy? The Reliable Contraband is contraband no more, but a
+    citizen of the United States, and I speak of him no more.
+
+    Give me a week to think of your proposition. If I can jerk a
+    lecture in time I will go with you. The Lord knows I would like to.
+    --[Nasby's lecture, "Cussed Be Canaan," opened, "We are all
+    descended from grandfathers!" He had a powerful voice, and always
+    just on the stroke of eight he rose and vigorously delivered this
+    sentence. Once, after lecturing an entire season--two hundred and
+    twenty-five nights--he went home to rest. That evening he sat,
+    musingly drowsing by the fire, when the clock struck eight. Without
+    a moment's thought Nasby sprang to his feet and thundered out, "We
+    are all descended from grandfathers!"]
+
+Nasby did not go, and Clemens's enthusiasm cooled at the prospect of
+setting out alone on that long tour. Furthermore, Jervis Langdon
+promptly insisted on advancing the money required to complete the
+purchase of the Express, and the trade was closed.--[Mr. Langdon is just
+as good for $25,000 for me, and has already advanced half of it in cash.
+I wrote and asked whether I had better send him my note, or a due bill,
+or how he would prefer to have the indebtedness made of record, and he
+answered every other topic in the letter pleasantly, but never replied to
+that at all. Still, I shall give my note into a hands of his business
+agent here, and pay him the interest as it falls due.--S. L. C. to his
+mother.]
+
+The Buffalo Express was at this time in the hands of three men--Col.
+George F. Selkirk, J. L. Lamed, and Thomas A. Kennett. Colonel Selkirk
+was business manager, Lamed was political editor. With the purchase of
+Kennett's share Clemens became a sort of general and contributing editor,
+with a more or less "roving commission"--his hours and duties not very
+clearly defined. It was believed by his associates, and by Clemens
+himself, that his known connection with the paper would give it prestige
+and circulation, as Nasby's connection had popularized the Toledo Blade.
+The new editor entered upon his duties August 14 (1869). The members of
+the Buffalo press gave him a dinner that evening, and after the manner of
+newspaper men the world over, were handsomely cordial to the "new enemy
+in their midst."
+
+There is an anecdote which relates that next morning, when Mark Twain
+arrived in the Express office (it was then at 14 Swan Street), there
+happened to be no one present who knew him. A young man rose very
+bruskly and asked if there was any one he would like to see. It is
+reported that he replied, with gentle deliberation:
+
+"Well, yes, I should like to see some young man offer the new editor a
+chair."
+
+It is so like Mark Twain that we are inclined to accept it, though it
+seems of doubtful circumstance. In any case it deserves to be true. His
+"Salutatory" (August 18th) is sufficiently genuine:
+
+    Being a stranger, it would be immodest for me to suddenly and
+    violently assume the associate editorship of the Buffalo Express
+    without a single word of comfort or encouragement to the unoffending
+    patrons of the paper, who are about to be exposed to constant
+    attacks of my wisdom and learning. But the word shall be as brief
+    as possible. I only want to assure parties having a friendly
+    interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going to
+    hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not
+    going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to
+    make trouble.... I shall not make use of slang and vulgarity upon
+    any occasion or under any circumstances, and shall never use
+    profanity except when discussing house rent and taxes. Indeed, upon
+    a second thought, I shall not use it even then, for it is
+    unchristian, inelegant, and degrading; though, to speak truly, I do
+    not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a
+    cent without it. I shall not often meddle with politics, because we
+    have a political Editor who is already excellent and only needs to
+    serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect. I shall not
+    write any poetry unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers.
+
+    Such is my platform. I do not see any use in it, but custom is law
+    and must be obeyed.
+
+John Harrison Mills, who was connected with the Express in those days,
+has written:
+
+    I cannot remember that there was any delay in getting down to his
+    work. I think within five minutes the new editor had assumed the
+    easy look of one entirely at home, pencil in hand and a clutch of
+    paper before him, with an air of preoccupation, as of one intent on
+    a task delayed. It was impossible to be conscious of the man
+    sitting there, and not feel his identity with all that he had
+    enjoyed, and the reminiscence of it he that seemed to radiate; for
+    the personality was so absolutely in accord with all the record of
+    himself and his work. I cannot say he seemed to be that vague thing
+    they call a type in race or blood, though the word, if used in his
+    case for temperament, would decidedly mean what they used to call
+    the "sanguine."
+
+    I thought that, pictorially, the noble costume of the Albanian would
+    have well become him. Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the
+    horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors; or stood at the prow
+    of one of the swift craft of the Vikings. His eyes, which have been
+    variously described, were, it seemed to me, of an indescribable
+    depth of the bluish moss-agate, with a capacity of pupil dilation
+    that in certain lights had the effect of a deep black....
+
+Mr. Mills adds that in dress he was now "well groomed," and that
+consequently they were obliged to revise their notions as to the careless
+negligee which gossip had reported.--[From unpublished Reminiscences
+kindly lent to the author by Mr. Mills]
+
+
+
+
+LXXIII
+
+THE FIRST MEETING WITH HOWELLS
+
+Clemens' first period of editorial work was a brief one, though he made
+frequent contributions to the paper: sketches, squibs, travel-notes, and
+experiences, usually humorous in character. His wedding-day had been set
+for early in the year, and it was necessary to accumulate a bank account
+for that occasion. Before October he was out on the lecture circuit,
+billed now for the first time for New England, nervous and apprehensive
+in consequence, though with good hope. To Pamela he wrote (November
+9th):
+
+To-morrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience
+--4,000 critics--and on the success of this matter depends my future
+success in New England. But I am not distressed. Nasby is in the same
+boat. Tonight decides the fate of his brand-new lecture. He has just
+left my room--been reading his lecture to me--was greatly depressed. I
+have convinced him that he has little to fear.
+
+Whatever alarm Mark Twain may have felt was not warranted. His success
+with the New England public was immediate and complete. He made his
+headquarters in Boston, at Redpath's office, where there was pretty sure
+to be a congenial company, of which he was presently the center.
+
+It was during one of these Boston sojourns that he first met William Dean
+Howells, his future friend and literary counselor. Howells was assistant
+editor of the Atlantic at this time; James T. Fields, its editor. Clemens
+had been gratified by the Atlantic review, and had called to express his
+thanks for it. He sat talking to Fields, when Howells entered the
+editorial rooms, and on being presented to the author of the review,
+delivered his appreciation in the form of a story, sufficiently
+appropriate, but not qualified for the larger types.--[He said: "When I
+read that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was so glad her baby
+had come white."]
+
+His manner, his humor, his quaint colloquial forms all delighted Howells
+--more, in fact, than the opulent sealskin overcoat which he affected at
+this period--a garment astonishing rather than esthetic, as Mark Twain's
+clothes in those days of his first regeneration were likely to be
+startling enough, we may believe; in the conservative atmosphere of the
+Atlantic rooms. And Howells--gentle, genial, sincere--filled with the
+early happiness of his calling, won the heart of Mark Twain and never
+lost it, and, what is still more notable, won his absolute and unvarying
+confidence in all literary affairs. It was always Mark Twain's habit to
+rely on somebody, and in matters pertaining to literature and to literary
+people in general he laid his burden on William Dean Howells from that
+day. Only a few weeks after that first visit we find him telegraphing to
+Howells, asking him to look after a Californian poet, then ill and
+friendless in Brooklyn. Clemens states that he does not know the poet,
+but will contribute fifty dollars if Howells will petition the steamboat
+company for a pass; and no doubt Howells complied, and spent a good deal
+more than fifty dollars' worth of time to get the poet relieved and
+started; it would be like him.
+
+
+
+
+LXXIV
+
+THE WEDDING-DAY
+
+The wedding was planned, at first, either for Christmas or New-Year's
+Day; but as the lecture engagements continued into January it was decided
+to wait until these were filled. February 2d, a date near the
+anniversary of the engagement, was agreed upon, also a quiet wedding with
+no "tour." The young people would go immediately to Buffalo, and take up
+a modest residence, in a boardinghouse as comfortable, even as luxurious,
+as the husband's financial situation justified. At least that was Samuel
+Clemens's understanding of the matter. He felt that he was heavily in
+debt--that his first duty was to relieve himself of that obligation.
+
+There were other plans in Elmira, but in the daily and happy letters he
+received there was no inkling of any new purpose.
+
+He wrote to J. D. F. Slee, of Buffalo, who was associated in business
+with Mr. Langdon, and asked him to find a suitable boarding-place, one
+that would be sufficiently refined for the woman who was to be his wife,
+and sufficiently reasonable to insure prosperity. In due time Slee
+replied that, while boarding was a "miserable business anyhow," he had
+been particularly fortunate in securing a place on one of the most
+pleasant streets--"the family a small one and choice spirits, with no
+predilection for taking boarders, and consenting to the present
+arrangement only because of the anticipated pleasure of your company."
+The price, Slee added, would be reasonable. As a matter of fact a house
+on Delaware Avenue--still the fine residence street of Buffalo--had been
+bought and furnished throughout as a present to the bride and groom. It
+stands to-day practically unchanged--brick and mansard without, Eastlake
+within, a type then much in vogue--spacious and handsome for that period.
+It was completely appointed. Diagrams of the rooms had been sent to
+Elmira and Miss Langdon herself had selected the furnishings. Everything
+was put in readiness, including linen, cutlery, and utensils. Even the
+servants had been engaged and the pantry and cellar had been stocked.
+
+It must have been hard for Olivia Langdon to keep this wonderful surprise
+out of those daily letters. A surprise like that is always watching a
+chance to slip out unawares, especially when one is eagerly impatient to
+reveal it.
+
+However, the traveler remained completely in the dark. He may have
+wondered vaguely at the lack of enthusiasm in the boarding idea, and
+could he have been certain that the sales of the book would continue, or
+that his newspaper venture would yield an abundant harvest, he might have
+planned his domestic beginning on a more elaborate scale. If only the
+Tennessee land would yield the long-expected fortune now! But these were
+all incalculable things. All that he could be sure of was the coming of
+his great happiness, in whatever environment, and of the dragging weeks
+between.
+
+At last the night of the final lecture came, and he was off for Elmira
+with the smallest possible delay. Once there, the intervening days did
+not matter. He could join in the busy preparations; he could write
+exuberantly to his friends. To Laura Hawkins, long since Laura Frazer he
+sent a playful line; to Jim Gillis, still digging and washing on the
+slopes of the old Tuolumne hills, he wrote a letter which eminently
+belongs here:
+
+                     Elmira, N. Y., January 26, 1870.
+
+    DEAR Jim,--I remember that old night just as well! And somewhere
+    among my relics I have your remembrance stored away. It makes my
+    heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days. Still it
+    shouldn't, for right in the depths of their poverty and their
+    pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune.
+    You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal
+    sojourn in the rain and mud of Angel's Camp--I mean that day we sat
+    around the tavern stove and heard that chap tell about the frog and
+    how they filled him with shot. And you remember how we quoted from
+    the yarn and laughed over it out there on the hillside while you and
+    dear old Stoker panned and washed. I jotted the story down in my
+    note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen
+    dollars for it--I was just that blind. But then we were so hard up.
+    I published that story, and it became widely known in America,
+    India, China, England, and the reputation it made for me has paid me
+    thousands and thousands of dollars since. Four or five months ago I
+    bought into the Express (I have ordered it sent to you as long as
+    you live, and if the bookkeeper sends you any bills you let me hear
+    of it). I went heavily in debt--never could have dared to do that,
+    Jim, if we hadn't heard the jumping Frog story that day.
+
+    And wouldn't I love to take old Stoker by the hand, and wouldn't I
+    love to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of
+    Rinalds in the "Burning Shame!" Where is Dick and what is he doing?
+    Give him my fervent love and warm old remembrances.
+
+    A week from to-day I shall be married-to a girl even better and
+    lovelier than the peerless "Chapparal Quails." You can't come so
+    far, Jim, but still I cordially invite you to come anyhow, and I
+    invite Dick too. And if you two boys were to land here on that
+    pleasant occasion we would make you right royally welcome.
+                     Truly your friend,
+                                SAML. L. CLEMENS.
+
+    P.S.---California plums are good. Jim, particularly when they are
+    stewed.
+
+It had been only five years before--that day in Angel's Camp--but how
+long ago and how far away it seemed to him now! So much had happened
+since then, so much of which that was the beginning--so little compared
+with the marvel of the years ahead, whose threshold he was now about to
+cross, and not alone.
+
+A day or two before the wedding he was asked to lecture on the night of
+February 2d. He replied that he was sorry to disappoint the applicant,
+but that he could not lecture on the night of February 2d, for the reason
+that he was going to marry a young lady on that evening, and that he
+would rather marry that young lady than deliver all the lectures in the
+world.
+
+And so came the wedding-day. It began pleasantly; the postman brought a
+royalty check that morning of $4,000, the accumulation of three months'
+sales, and the Rev. Joseph Twichell and Harmony, his wife, came from
+Hartford--Twichell to join with the Rev. Thomas K. Beecher in
+solemnizing the marriage. Pamela Moffett, a widow now, with her daughter
+Annie, grown to a young lady, had come all the way from St. Louis, and
+Mrs. Fairbanks from Cleveland.
+
+Yet the guests were not numerous, not more than a hundred at most, so it
+was a quiet wedding there in the Langdon parlors, those dim, stately
+rooms that in the future would hold so much of his history--so much of
+the story of life and death that made its beginning there.
+
+The wedding-service was about seven o'clock, for Mr. Beecher had a
+meeting at the church soon after that hour. Afterward followed the
+wedding-supper and dancing, and the bride's father danced with the bride.
+To the interested crowd awaiting him at the church Mr. Beecher reported
+that the bride was very beautiful, and had on the longest white gloves he
+had ever seen; he declared they reached to her shoulders.--[Perhaps for a
+younger generation it should be said that Thomas K. Beecher was a brother
+of Henry Ward Beecher. He lived and died in Elmira, the almost worshiped
+pastor of the Park Congregational Church. He was a noble, unorthodox
+teacher. Samuel Clemens at the time of his marriage already strongly
+admired him, and had espoused his cause in an article signed "S'cat!" in
+the Elmira Advertiser, when he (Beecher) had been assailed by the more
+orthodox Elmira clergy. For the "S'cat" article see Appendix I, at the
+end of last volume.]
+
+It was the next afternoon when they set out for Buffalo, accompanied by
+the bride's parents, the groom's relatives, the Beechers, and perhaps one
+or two others of that happy company. It was nine o'clock at night when
+they arrived, and found Mr. Slee waiting at the station with sleighs to
+convey the party to the "boarding-house" he had selected. They drove and
+drove, and the sleigh containing the bride and groom got behind and
+apparently was bound nowhere in particular, which disturbed the groom a
+good deal, for he thought it proper that they should arrive first, to
+receive their guests. He commented on Slee's poor judgment in selecting
+a house that was so hard to find, and when at length they turned into
+fashionable Delaware Avenue, and stopped before one of the most
+attractive places in the neighborhood, he was beset with fear concerning
+the richness of the locality.
+
+They were on the steps when the doors opened, and a perfect fairyland of
+lights and decoration was revealed within. The friends who had gone
+ahead came out with greetings, to lead in the bride and groom. Servants
+hurried forward to take bags and wraps. They were ushered inside; they
+were led through beautiful rooms, all newly appointed and garnished. The
+bridegroom was dazed, unable to understand the meaning of things, the
+apparent ownership and completeness of possession.
+
+At last the young wife put her hand upon his arm:
+
+"Don't you understand, Youth," she said; that was always her name for
+him. "Don't you understand? It is ours, all ours--everything--a gift
+from father!"
+
+But even then he could not grasp it; not at first, not until Mr. Langdon
+brought a little box and, opening it, handed them the deeds.
+
+Nobody quite remembers what was the first remark that Samuel Clemens made
+then; but either then or a little later he said:
+
+"Mr. Langdon, whenever you are in Buffalo, if it's twice a year, come
+right here. Bring your bag and stay overnight if you want to. It
+sha'n't cost you a cent!"
+
+They went in to supper then, and by and by the guests were gone and the
+young wedded pair were alone.
+
+Patrick McAleer, the young coachman, who would grow old in their employ,
+and Ellen, the cook, came in for their morning orders, and were full of
+Irish delight at the inexperience and novelty of it all. Then they were
+gone, and only the lovers in their new house and their new happiness
+remained.
+
+And so it was they entered the enchanted land.
+
+
+
+
+LXXV
+
+AS TO DESTINY
+
+If any reader has followed these chapters thus far, he may have wondered,
+even if vaguely, at the seeming fatality of events. Mark Twain had but
+to review his own life for justification of his doctrine of inevitability
+--an unbroken and immutable sequence of cause and effect from the
+beginning. Once he said:
+
+"When the first living atom found itself afloat on the great Laurentian
+sea the first act of that first atom led to the second act of that first
+atom, and so on down through the succeeding ages of all life, until, if
+the steps could be traced, it would be shown that the first act of that
+first atom has led inevitably to the act of my standing here in my
+dressing-gown at this instant talking to you."
+
+It seemed the clearest presentment ever offered in the matter of
+predestined circumstance--predestined from the instant when that primal
+atom felt the vital thrill. Mark Twain's early life, however imperfectly
+recorded, exemplifies this postulate. If through the years still ahead
+of us the course of destiny seems less clearly defined, it is only
+because thronging events make the threads less easy to trace. The web
+becomes richer, the pattern more intricate and confusing, but the line of
+fate neither breaks nor falters, to the end.
+
+
+
+
+LXXVI
+
+ON THE BUFFALO "EXPRESS"
+
+With the beginning of life in Buffalo, Mark Twain had become already a
+world character--a man of large consequence and events. He had no proper
+realization of this, no real sense of the size of his conquest; he still
+regarded himself merely as a lecturer and journalist, temporarily
+popular, but with no warrant to a permanent seat in the world's literary
+congress. He thought his success something of an accident. The fact
+that he was prepared to settle down as an editorial contributor to a
+newspaper in what was then only a big village is the best evidence of a
+modest estimate of his talents.
+
+He "worked like a horse," is the verdict of those who were closely
+associated with him on the Express. His hours were not regular, but they
+were long. Often he was at his desk at eight in the morning, and
+remained there until ten or eleven at night.
+
+His working costume was suited to comfort rather than show. With coat,
+vest, collar, and tie usually removed (sometimes even his shoes), he
+lounged in his chair, in any attitude that afforded the larger ease,
+pulling over the exchanges; scribbling paragraphs, editorials, humorous
+skits, and what not, as the notion came upon him. J. L. Lamed, his
+co-worker (he sat on the opposite side of the same table), remembers that
+Mark Twain enjoyed his work as he went along--the humor of it--and that
+he frequently laughed as some whimsicality or new absurdity came into his
+mind.
+
+"I doubt," writes Lamed, "if he ever enjoyed anything more than the
+jackknife engraving that he did on a piece of board of a military map of
+the siege of Paris, which was printed in the Express from his original
+plate, with accompanying explanations and comments. His half-day of
+whittling and laughter that went with it are something that I find
+pleasant to remember. Indeed, my whole experience of association with
+him is a happy memory, which I am fortunate in having.... What one saw
+of him was always the actual Mark Twain, acting out of his own nature
+simply, frankly, without pretense, and almost without reserve. It was
+that simplicity and naturalness in the man which carried his greatest
+charm."
+
+Lamed, like many others, likens Mark Twain to Lincoln in various of his
+characteristics. The two worked harmoniously together: Lamed attending
+to the political direction of the journal, Clemens to the literary, and
+what might be termed the sentimental side. There was no friction in the
+division of labor, never anything but good feeling between them. Clemens
+had a poor opinion of his own comprehension of politics, and perhaps as
+little regard for Lamed's conception of humor. Once when the latter
+attempted something in the way of pleasantry his associate said:
+
+"Better leave the humor on this paper to me, Lamed"; and once when Lamed
+was away attending the Republican State Convention at Saratoga, and some
+editorial comment seemed necessary, Clemens thought it best to sign the
+utterance, and to make humor of his shortcomings.
+
+    I do not know much about politics, and am not sitting up nights to
+    learn . . . .
+
+    I am satisfied that these nominations are all right and sound, and
+    that they are the only ones that can bring peace to our distracted
+    country (the only political phrase I am perfectly familiar with and
+    competent to hurl at the public with fearless confidence--the other
+    editor is full of them), but being merely satisfied is not enough.
+    I always like to know before I shout. But I go for Mr. Curtis with
+    all my strength! Being certain of him, I hereby shout all I know
+    how. But the others may be a split ticket, or a scratched ticket,
+    or whatever you call it.
+
+    I will let it alone for the present. It will keep. The other young
+    man will be back to-morrow, and he will shout for it, split or no
+    split, rest assured of that. He will prance into this political
+    ring with his tomahawk and his war-whoop, and then you will hear a
+    crash and see the scalps fly. He has none of my diffidence. He
+    knows all about these nominees, and if he don't he will let on to in
+    such a natural way as to deceive the most critical. He knows
+    everything--he knows more than Webster's Unabridged and the American
+    Encyclopedia--but whether he knows anything about a subject or not
+    he is perfectly willing to discuss it. When he gets back he will
+    tell you all about these candidates as serenely as if he had been
+    acquainted with them a hundred years, though, speaking
+    confidentially, I doubt if he ever heard of any of them till to-day.
+    I am right well satisfied it is a good, sound, sensible ticket, and
+    a ticket to win; but wait till he comes.
+
+    In the mean time I go for George William Curtis and take the
+    chances.
+                                MARK TWAIN.
+
+He had become what Mr. Howells calls entirely "desouthernized" by this
+time. From having been of slaveholding stock, and a Confederate soldier,
+he had become a most positive Republican, a rampant abolitionist--had
+there been anything left to abolish. His sympathy had been always with
+the oppressed, and he had now become their defender. His work on the
+paper revealed this more and more. He wrote fewer sketches and more
+editorials, and the editorials were likely to be either savage assaults
+upon some human abuse, or fierce espousals of the weak. They were
+fearless, scathing, terrific. Of some farmers of Cohocton, who had taken
+the law into their own hands to punish a couple whom they believed to be
+a detriment to the community, he wrote:
+
+"The men who did that deed are capable of doing any low, sneaking,
+cowardly villainy that could be invented in perdition. They are the very
+bastards of the devil."
+
+He appended a full list of their names, and added:
+
+"If the farmers of Cohocton are of this complexion, what on earth must a
+Cohocton rough be like?"
+
+But all this happened a long time ago, and we need not detail those
+various old interests and labors here. It is enough to say that Mark
+Twain on the Express was what he had been from the beginning, and would
+be to the end--the zealous champion of justice and liberty; violent and
+sometimes wrong in his viewpoint, but never less than fearless and
+sincere. Invariably he was for the oppressed. He had a natural instinct
+for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the under dog.
+
+Among the best of his editorial contributions is a tribute to Anson
+Burlingame, who died February 23, 1870, at St. Petersburg, on his trip
+around the world as special ambassador for the Chinese Empire. In this
+editorial Clemens endeavored to pay something of his debt to the noble
+statesman. He reviewed Burlingame's astonishing career--the career which
+had closed at forty-seven, and read like a fairy-tale-and he dwelt
+lovingly on his hero's nobility of character. At the close he said:
+
+"He was a good man, and a very, very great man. America, lost a son, and
+all the world a servant, when he died."
+
+Among those early contributions to the Express is a series called "Around
+the World," an attempt at collaboration with Prof. D. R. Ford, who did
+the actual traveling, while Mark Twain, writing in the first person, gave
+the letters his literary stamp. At least some of the contributions were
+written in this way, such as "Adventures in Hayti," "The Pacific," and
+"Japan." These letters exist to-day only in the old files of the
+Express, and indeed this is the case with most of Clemens's work for that
+paper. It was mainly ephemeral or timely work, and its larger value has
+disappeared. Here and there is a sentence worth remembering. Of two
+practical jokers who sent in a marriage notice of persons not even
+contemplating matrimony, he said: "This deceit has been practised
+maliciously by a couple of men whose small souls will escape through
+their pores some day if they do not varnish their hides."
+
+Some of the sketches have been preserved. "Journalism in Tennessee," one
+of the best of his wilder burlesques, is as enjoyable to-day as when
+written. "A Curious Dream" made a lasting impression on his Buffalo
+readers, and you are pretty certain to hear of it when you mention Mark
+Twain in that city to-day. It vividly called attention to the neglect of
+the old North Street graveyard. The gruesome vision of the ancestors
+deserting with their coffins on their backs was even more humiliating
+than amusing, and inspired a movement for reform. It has been effective
+elsewhere since then, and may still be read with profit--or satisfaction
+--for in a note at the end the reader is assured that if the cemeteries
+of his town are kept in good order the dream is not leveled at his town
+at all, but "particularly and venomously at the next town."
+
+
+
+
+LXXVII
+
+THE "GALAXY"
+
+Mark Twain's work on the Express represented only a portion of his
+literary activities during his Buffalo residence. The Galaxy, an
+ambitious New York magazine of that day--[published by Sheldon & Co. at
+498 and 500 Broadway]--proposed to him that he conduct for them a
+humorous department. They would pay $2,400 a year for the work, and
+allow him a free hand. There was some discussion as to book rights, but
+the arrangement was concluded, and his first instalment, under the
+general title of "Memoranda," appeared in the May number, 1870. In his
+Introductory he outlined what the reader might expect, such as
+"exhaustive statistical tables," "Patent Office reports," and "complete
+instructions about farming, even from the grafting of the seed to the
+harrowing of the matured crops." He declared that he would throw a
+pathos into the subject of agriculture that would surprise and delight
+the world. He added that the "Memoranda" was not necessarily a humorous
+department.
+
+    I would not conduct an exclusively and professedly humorous
+    department for any one. I would always prefer to have the privilege
+    of printing a serious and sensible remark, in case one occurred to
+    me, without the reader's feeling obliged to consider himself
+    outraged.... Puns cannot be allowed a place in this department....
+    No circumstance, however dismal, will ever be considered a
+    sufficient excuse for the admission of that last and saddest
+    evidence of intellectual poverty, the pun.
+
+The Galaxy was really a fine magazine, with the best contributors
+obtainable; among them Justin McCarthy, S. M. B. Piatt, Richard Grant
+White, and many others well known in that day, with names that still
+flicker here and there in its literary twilight. The new department
+appealed to Clemens, and very soon he was writing most of his sketches
+for it. They were better literature, as a rule, than those published in
+his own paper.
+
+The first number of the "Memoranda" was fairly representative of those
+that followed it. "The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract," a
+manuscript which he had undertaken three years before and mislaid, was
+its initial contribution. Besides the "Beef Contract," there was a
+tribute to George Wakeman, a well-known journalist of those days; a
+stricture on the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage, who had delivered from the
+pulpit an argument against workingmen occupying pews in fashionable
+churches; a presentment of the Chinese situation in San Francisco,
+depicting the cruel treatment of the Celestial immigrant; a burlesque of
+the Sunday-school "good little boy" story,--["The Story of the Good
+Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper" and the "Beef Contract" are included in
+Sketches New and Old; also the Chinese sketch, under the title,
+"Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy."]--and several shorter skits--and
+anecdotes, ten pages in all; a rather generous contract.
+
+Mark Twain's comment on Talmage was prompted by an article in which
+Talmage had assumed the premise that if workingmen attended the churches
+it would drive the better class of worshipers away. Among other things
+he said:
+
+    I have a good Christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in
+    church, and a workingman should enter the door at the other end,
+    would smell him instantly. My friend is not to blame for the
+    sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer
+    for being keener on the scent than a stupid watch-dog. The fact is,
+    if you had all the churches free, by reason of the mixing of the
+    common people with the uncommon, you would keep one-half of
+    Christendom sick at their stomach. If you are going to kill the
+    church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to do with this work
+    of evangelization.
+
+Commenting on this Mark Twain said--well, he said a good deal more than
+we have room for here, but a portion of his closing paragraphs is worth
+preserving. He compares the Reverend Mr. Talmage with the early
+disciples of Christ--Paul and Peter and the others; or, rather, he
+contrasts him with them.
+
+    They healed the very beggars, and held intercourse with people of a
+    villainous odor every day. If the subject of these remarks had been
+    chosen among the original Twelve Apostles he would not have
+    associated with the rest, because he could not have stood the fishy
+    smell of some of his comrades who came from around the Sea of
+    Galilee. He would have resigned his commission with some such
+    remark as he makes in the extract quoted above: "Master, if thou art
+    going to kill the church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to
+    do with this work of evangelization." He is a disciple, and makes
+    that remark to the Master; the only difference is that he makes it
+    in the nineteenth instead of the first century.
+
+Talmage was immensely popular at this time, and Mark Twain's open attack
+on him must have shocked a good many Galaxy readers, as perhaps his
+article on the Chinese cruelties offended the citizens of San Francisco.
+It did not matter. He was not likely to worry over the friends he would
+lose because of any stand taken for human justice. Lamed said of him:
+"He was very far from being one who tried in any way to make himself
+popular." Certainly he never made any such attempt at the expense of his
+convictions.
+
+The first Galaxy instalment was a sort of platform of principles for the
+campaign that was to follow. Not that each month's contribution
+contained personal criticism, or a defense of the Chinese (of whom he was
+always the champion as long as he lived), but a good many of them did. In
+the October number he began a series of letters under the general title
+of "Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again," supposed to have been written by a
+Chinese immigrant in San Francisco, detailing his experience there. In a
+note the author says: "No experience is set down in the following letters
+which had to be invented. Fancy is not needed to give variety to the
+history of the Chinaman's sojourn in America. Plain fact is amply
+sufficient." The letters show how the supposed Chinese writer of them
+had set out for America, believing it to be a land whose government was
+based on the principle that all men are created equal, and treated
+accordingly; how, upon arriving in San Francisco, he was kicked and
+bruised and beaten, and set upon by dogs, flung into jail, tried and
+condemned without witnesses, his own race not being allowed to testify
+against Americans--Irish-Americans--in the San Francisco court. They are
+scathing, powerful letters, and one cannot read them, even in this day of
+improved conditions, without feeling the hot waves of resentment and
+indignation which Mark Twain must have felt when he penned them.
+
+Reverend Mr. Talmage was not the only divine to receive attention in the
+"Memoranda." The Reverend Mr. Sabine, of New York, who had declined to
+hold a church burial service for the old actor, George Holland, came in
+for the most caustic as well as the most artistic stricture of the entire
+series. It deserves preservation to-day, not only for its literary
+value, but because no finer defense of the drama, no more searching
+sermon on self-righteousness, has ever been put into concrete form.
+--["The Indignity Put Upon the Remains of Gorge Holland by the Rev. Mr.
+Sabine"; Galaxy for February, 1871. The reader will find it complete
+under Appendix J, at the end of last volume.]
+
+The "Little Church Around the Corner" on Twenty-ninth Street received
+that happy title from this incident.
+
+"There is a little church around the corner that will, perhaps, permit
+the service," Mr. Sabine had said to Holland's friends.
+
+The little church did permit the service, and there was conferred upon it
+the new name, which it still bears. It has sheltered a long line of
+actor folk and their friends since then, earning thereby reverence,
+gratitude, and immortal memory.--[Church of the Transfiguration. Memorial
+services were held there for Joseph Jefferson; and a memorial window, by
+John La Farge, has been placed there in memory of Edwin Booth.]
+
+Of the Galaxy contributions a number are preserved in Sketches New and
+Old. "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper" is one of the best of these
+--an excellent example of Mark Twain's more extravagant style of humor.
+It is perennially delightful; in France it has been dramatized, and is
+still played.
+
+A successful Galaxy feature, also preserved in the Sketches, was the
+"Burlesque Map of Paris," reprinted from the Express. The
+Franco-Prussian War was in progress, and this travesty was particularly
+timely. It creates only a smile of amusement to-day, but it was all fresh
+and delightful then. Schuyler Colfax, by this time Vice-President, wrote
+to him: "I have had the heartiest possible laugh over it, and so have all
+my family. You are a wicked, conscienceless wag, who ought to be
+punished severely."
+
+The "Official Commendations," which accompany the map, are its chief
+charm. They are from Grant, Bismarck, Brigham Young, and others, the
+best one coming from one J. Smith, who says:
+
+    My wife was for years afflicted with freckles, and though everything
+    was done for her relief that could be done, all was in vain. But,
+    sir, since her first glance at your map they have entirely left her.
+    She has nothing but convulsions now.
+
+It is said that the "Map of Paris" found its way to Berlin, where the
+American students in the beer-halls used to pretend to quarrel over it
+until they attracted the attention of the German soldiers that might be
+present. Then they would wander away and leave it on the table and watch
+results. The soldiers would pounce upon it and lose their tempers over
+it; then finally abuse it and revile its author, to the satisfaction of
+everybody.
+
+The larger number of "Memoranda" sketches have properly found oblivion
+to-day. They were all, or nearly all, collected by a Canadian pirate, C.
+A. Backas, in a volume bearing the title of Memoranda,--[Also by a harpy
+named John Camden Hotten (of London), of whom we shall hear again. Hotten
+had already pirated The Innocents, and had it on the market before
+Routledge could bring out the authorized edition. Routledge later
+published the "Memoranda" under the title of Sketches, including the
+contents of the Jumping Frog book.]--a book long ago suppressed. Only
+about twenty of the Galaxy contributions found place in Sketches New and
+Old, five years later, and some of these might have been spared as
+literature. "To Raise Poultry," "John Chinaman in New York," and
+"History Repeats Itself" are valuable only as examples of his work at
+that period. The reader may consult them for himself.
+
+
+
+
+LXXVIII
+
+THE PRIMROSE PATH
+
+But we are losing sight of more important things. From the very
+beginning Mark Twain's home meant always more to him than his work. The
+life at 472 Delaware Avenue had begun with as fair a promise as any
+matrimonial journey ever undertaken: There seemed nothing lacking: a
+beautiful home, sufficient income, bright prospects--these things, with
+health and love; constitute married happiness. Mrs. Clemens wrote to her
+sister, Mrs. Crane, at the end of February: "Sue, we are two as happy
+people as you ever saw. Our days seem to be made up of only bright
+sunlight, with no shadow in them." In the same letter the husband added:
+"Livy pines and pines every day for you, and I pine and pine every day
+for you, and when we both of us are pining at once you would think it was
+a whole pine forest let loose."
+
+To Redpath, who was urging lecture engagements for the coming season, he
+wrote:
+
+    DEAR RED,--I am not going to lecture any more forever. I have got
+    things ciphered down to a fraction now. I know just about what it
+    will cost to live, and I can make the money without lecturing.
+    Therefore, old man, count me out.
+
+And still later, in May:
+
+    I guess I am out of the field permanently. Have got a lovely wife,
+    a lovely house, bewitchingly furnished, a lovely carriage, and a
+    coachman whose style and dignity are simply awe-in-spiring, nothing
+    less; and I am making more money than necessary, by considerable,
+    and therefore why crucify myself nightly on the platform? The
+    subscriber will have to be excused for the present season at least.
+
+So they were very happy during those early months, acquiring pleasantly
+the education which any matrimonial experience is sure to furnish,
+accustoming themselves to the uses of housekeeping, to life in
+partnership, with all the discoveries and mental and spiritual
+adaptations that belong to the close association of marriage. They were
+far, very far, apart on many subjects. He was unpolished, untrained,
+impulsive, sometimes violent. Twichell remembers that in the earlier
+days of their acquaintance he wore a slouch hat pulled down in front, and
+smoked a cigar that sometimes tilted up and touched the brim of it. The
+atmosphere and customs of frontier life, the Westernisms of that day,
+still clung to him. Mrs. Clemens, on the other hand, was conservative,
+dainty, cultured, spiritual. He adored her as little less than a saint,
+and she became, indeed, his saving grace. She had all the personal
+refinement which he lacked, and she undertook the work of polishing and
+purifying her life companion. She had no wish to destroy his
+personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and she set
+about it in the right way--gently, and with a tender gratitude in each
+achievement.
+
+She did not entirely approve of certain lines of his reading; or, rather,
+she did not understand them in those days. That he should be fond of
+history and the sciences was natural enough, but when the Life of P. T.
+Barnum, Written by Himself, appeared, and he sat up nights to absorb it,
+and woke early and lighted the lamp to follow the career of the great
+showman, she was at a loss to comprehend this particular literary
+passion, and indeed was rather jealous of it. She did not realize then
+his vast interest in the study of human nature, or that such a book
+contained what Mr. Howells calls "the root of the human matter," the
+inner revelation of the human being at first hand.
+
+Concerning his religious observances her task in the beginning was easy
+enough. Clemens had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines
+of his own. His natural kindness of heart, and especially his love for
+his wife, inclined him toward the teachings and customs of her Christian
+faith--unorthodox but sincere, as Christianity in the Langdon family was
+likely to be. It took very little persuasion on his wife's part to
+establish family prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the
+morning reading of a Bible chapter. Joe Goodman, who made a trip East,
+and visited them during the early days of their married life, was
+dumfounded to see Mark Twain ask a blessing and join in family worship.
+Just how long these forms continued cannot be known to-day; the time of
+their abandonment has perished from the recollection of any one now
+living.
+
+It would seem to have been the Bible-reading that wrought the change. The
+prayer and the blessing were to him sincere and gracious; but as the
+readings continued he realized that he had never before considered the
+Bible from a doctrinal point of view, as a guide to spiritual salvation.
+To his logical reasoning mind, a large portion of it seemed absurd: a
+mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology. From such material
+humanity had built its mightiest edifice of hope, the doctrines of its
+faith. After a little while he could stand it no longer.
+
+"Livy," he said one day, "you may keep this up if you want to, but I must
+ask you to excuse me from it. It is making me a hypocrite. I don't
+believe in this Bible. It contradicts my reason. I can't sit here and
+listen to it, letting you believe that I regard it, as you do, in the
+light of gospel, the word of God."
+
+He was moved to write an article on the human idea of God, ancient and
+modern. It contained these paragraphs:
+
+    The difference in importance, between the God of the Bible and the
+    God of the present day, cannot be described, it can only be vaguely
+    and inadequately figured to the mind . . . . If you make figures
+    to represent the earth and moon, and allow a space of one inch
+    between them, to represent the four hundred thousand miles of
+    distance which lies between the two bodies, the map will have to be
+    eleven miles long in order to bring in the nearest fixed star.
+    --[His figures were far too small. A map drawn on the scale of
+    400,000 miles to the inch would need to be 1,100 miles long to take
+    in both the earth and the nearest fixed star. On such a map the
+    earth would be one-fiftieth of an inch in diameter--the size of a
+    small grain of sand.]--So one cannot put the modern heavens on a
+    map, nor the modern God; but the Bible God and the Bible heavens can
+    be set down on a slate and yet not be discommoded . . . .
+
+    The difference between that universe and the modern one revealed by
+    science is as the difference between a dust-flecked ray in a barn
+    and the sublime arch of the Milky Way in the skies. Its God was
+    strictly proportioned to its dimensions. His sole solicitude was
+    about a handful of truculent nomads. He worried and fretted over
+    them in a peculiarly and distractingly human way. One day he coaxed
+    and petted them beyond their due, the next he harried and lashed
+    them beyond their deserts. He sulked, he cursed, he raged, he
+    grieved, according to his mood and the circumstances, but all to no
+    purpose; his efforts were all vain, he could not govern them. When
+    the fury was on him he was blind to all reason--he not only
+    slaughtered the offender, but even his harmless little children and
+    dumb cattle....
+
+    To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive,
+    fierce and ever fickle and changeful master; to trust the true God
+    is to trust a Being who has uttered no promises, but whose
+    beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of his
+    colossal universe is proof that he is at least steadfast to his
+    purposes; whose unwritten laws, so far as they affect man, being
+    equal and impartial, show that he is just and fair; these things,
+    taken together, suggest that if he shall ordain us to live
+    hereafter, he will still be steadfast, just, and fair toward us. We
+    shall not need to require anything more.
+
+It seems mild enough, obvious, even orthodox, now--so far have we
+traveled in forty years. But such a declaration then would have shocked
+a great number of sincerely devout persons. His wife prevailed upon him
+not to print it. She respected his honesty--even his reasoning, but his
+doubts were a long grief to her, nevertheless. In time she saw more
+clearly with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more
+with the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the
+proportions of created things.
+
+They did not mingle much or long with the social life of Buffalo. They
+received and returned calls, attended an occasional reception; but
+neither of them found such things especially attractive in those days, so
+they remained more and more in their own environment. There is an
+anecdote which seems to belong here.
+
+One Sunday morning Clemens noticed smoke pouring from the upper window of
+the house across the street. The owner and his wife, comparatively
+newcomers, were seated upon the veranda, evidently not aware of impending
+danger. The Clemens household thus far had delayed calling on them, but
+Clemens himself now stepped briskly across the street. Bowing with
+leisurely politeness, he said:
+
+"My name is Clemens; we ought to have called on you before, and I beg
+your pardon for intruding now in this informal way, but your house is on
+fire."
+
+Almost the only intimate friends they had in Buffalo were in the family
+of David Gray, the poet-editor of the Courier. Gray was a gentle,
+lovable man. "The gentlest spirit and the loveliest that ever went
+clothed in clay, since Sir Galahad laid him to rest," Mark Twain once
+said of him. Both Gray and Clemens were friends of John Hay, and their
+families soon became intimate. Perhaps, in time, the Clemens household
+would have found other as good friends in the Buffalo circles; but heavy
+clouds that had lain unseen just beyond the horizon during those earlier
+months of marriage rose suddenly into view, and the social life, whatever
+it might have become, was no longer a consideration.
+
+
+
+
+LXXIX
+
+THE OLD HUMAN STORY
+
+Jervis Langdon was never able to accept his son-in-law's invitation to
+the new home. His health began to fail that spring, and at the end of
+March, with his physician and Mrs. Langdon, he made a trip to the South.
+In a letter written at Richmond he said, "I have thrown off all care,"
+and named a list of the four great interests in which he was involved.
+Under "number 5," he included "everything," adding, "so you see how good
+I am to follow the counsel of my children." He closed: "Samuel, I love
+your wife and she loves me. I think it is only fair that you should know
+it, but you need not flare up. I loved her before you did, and she loved
+me before she did you, and has not ceased since. I see no way but for
+you to make the most of it." He was already a very ill man, and this
+cheerful letter was among the last he ever wrote.
+
+He was absent six weeks and seemed to improve, but suffered an attack
+early in May; in June his condition became critical. Clemens and his
+wife were summoned to Elmira, and joined in the nursing, day and night.
+Clemens surprised every one by his ability as a nurse. His delicacy and
+thoughtfulness were unfailing; his original ways of doing things always
+amused and interested the patient. In later years Mark Twain once said:
+
+    "How much of the nursing did I do? My main watch was from midnight
+    to four in the morning, nearly four hours. My other watch was a
+    midday watch, and I think it was nearly three hours. The two
+    sisters divided the remaining seventeen hours of the twenty-four
+    hours between them, and each of them tried generously and
+    persistently to swindle the other out of a part of her watch. I
+    went to bed early every night, and tried to get sleep enough by
+    midnight to fit me for my work, but it was always a failure. I went
+    on watch sleepy and remained miserable, sleepy, and wretched,
+    straight along through the four hours. I can still see myself
+    sitting by that bed in the melancholy stillness of the sweltering
+    night, mechanically waving a palm-leaf fan over the drawn, white
+    face of the patient. I can still recall my noddings, my fleeting
+    unconsciousness, when the fan would come to a standstill in my hand,
+    and I woke up with a start and a hideous shock. During all that
+    dreary time I began to watch for the dawn long before it came. When
+    the first faint gray showed through the window-blinds I felt as no
+    doubt a castaway feels when the dim threads of the looked-for ship
+    appear against the sky. I was well and strong, but I was a man,
+    afflicted with a man's infirmity--lack of endurance."
+
+He always dealt with himself in this unsparing way; but those who were
+about him then have left a different story.
+
+It was all without avail. Mr. Langdon rallied, and early in July there
+was hope for his recovery. He failed again, and on the afternoon of the
+6th of August he died. To Mrs. Clemens, delicate and greatly worn with
+the anxiety and strain of watching, the blow was a crushing one. It was
+the beginning of a series of disasters which would mark the entire
+remaining period of their Buffalo residence.
+
+There had been a partial plan for spending the summer in England, and a
+more definite one for joining the Twichells in the Adirondacks. Both of
+these projects were now abandoned. Mrs. Clemens concluded that she would
+be better at home than anywhere else, and invited an old school friend, a
+Miss Emma Nye, to visit her.
+
+But the shadow of death had not been lifted from the Clemens household.
+Miss Nye presently fell ill with typhoid fever. There followed another
+long period of anxiety and nursing, ending with the death of the visitor
+in the new home, September 29th. The young wife was now in very delicate
+health; genuinely ill, in fact. The happy home had become a place of
+sorrow-of troubled nights and days. Another friend came to cheer them,
+and on this friend's departure Mrs. Clemens drove to the railway station.
+It was a hurried trip over rough streets to catch the train. She was
+prostrated on her return, and a little later, November 7, 1870, her first
+child, Langdon, was prematurely born. A dangerous illness followed, and
+complete recovery was long delayed. But on the 12th the crisis seemed
+passed, and the new father wrote a playful letter to the Twichells, as
+coming from the late arrival:
+
+    DEAR UNCLE AND AUNT,--I came into the world on the 7th inst., and
+    consequently am about five days old now. I have had wretched health
+    ever since I made my appearance . . . I am not corpulent, nor am
+    I robust in any way. At birth I only weighed four and one-half
+    pounds with my clothes on--and the clothes were the chief feature of
+    the weight, too, I am obliged to confess, but I am doing finely, all
+    things considered . . . . My little mother is very bright and
+    cheery, and I guess she is pretty happy, but I don't know what
+    about. She laughs a great deal, notwithstanding she is sick abed.
+
+    P. S.--Father says I had better write because you will be more
+    interested in me, just now, than in the rest of the family.
+
+A week later Clemens, as himself, wrote:
+
+    Livy is up and the prince keeps her busy and anxious these latter
+    days and nights, but I am a bachelor up-stairs and don't have to
+    jump up and get the soothing sirup, though I would as soon do it as
+    not, I assure you. (Livy will be certain to read this letter.)
+
+    Tell Harmony that I do hold the baby, and do it pretty handily too,
+    though with occasional apprehensions that his loose head will fall
+    off. I don't have to quiet him; he hardly ever utters a cry. He is
+    always thinking about something. He is a patient, good little baby.
+
+Further along he refers to one of his reforms:
+
+    Smoke? I always smoke from three till five on Sunday afternoons,
+    and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week, day and night. But
+    when Livy is well I smoke only those two hours on Sunday. I'm boss
+    of the habit now, and shall never let it boss me any more.
+    Originally I quit solely on Livy's account (not that I believed
+    there was the faintest reason in the matter, but just as I would
+    deprive myself of sugar in my coffee if she wished it, or quit
+    wearing socks if she thought them immoral), and I stick to it yet on
+    Livy's account, and shall always continue to do so without a pang.
+    But somehow it seems a pity that you quit, for Mrs. T. didn't mind
+    it, if I remember rightly. Ah, it is turning one's back upon a
+    kindly Providence to spurn away from us the good creature he sent to
+    make the breath of life a luxury as well as a necessity, enjoyable
+    as well as useful. To go quit smoking, when there ain't any
+    sufficient excuse for it!--why, my old boy, when they used to tell
+    me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew
+    the devotee they were wasting their puerile words upon; they little
+    knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no
+    smoking in it! But I won't persuade you, Twichell--I won't until I
+    see you again--but then we'll smoke for a week together, and then
+    shut off again.
+
+
+
+
+LXXX
+
+LITERARY PROJECTS
+
+The success of the Innocents naturally made a thrifty publisher like
+Bliss anxious for a second experiment. He had begun early in the year to
+talk about another book, but nothing had come of it beyond a project or
+two, more or less hazy and unpursued. Clemens at one time developed a
+plan for a Noah's Ark book, which was to detail the cruise of the Ark in
+diaries kept by various members of it-Shem, Ham, and the others. He
+really wrote some of it at the time, and it was an idea he never entirely
+lost track of. All along among his manuscripts appear fragments from
+those ancient voyagers. One of the earlier entries will show the style
+and purpose of the undertaking. It is from Shem's record:
+
+    Friday: Papa's birthday. He is 600 years old. We celebrated it in
+    a big, black tent. Principal men of the tribe present. Afterward
+    they were shown over the ark, which was looking desolate and empty
+    and dreary on account of a misunderstanding with the workmen about
+    wages. Methuselah was as free with his criticisms as usual, and as
+    voluble and familiar, which I and my brothers do not like; for we
+    are past our one hundredth year and married. He still calls me
+    Shemmy, just as he did when I was a child of sixty. I am still but
+    a youth, it is true, but youth has its feelings, and I do not like
+    this . . . .
+
+    Saturday: Keeping the Sabbath.
+
+    Sunday: Papa has yielded the advance and everybody is hard at work.
+    The shipyard is so crowded that the men hinder each other; everybody
+    hurrying or being hurried; the rush and confusion and shouting and
+    wrangling are astonishing to our family, who have always been used
+    to a quiet, country life.
+
+It was from this germ that in a later day grew the diaries of Adam and
+Eve, though nothing very satisfactory ever came of this preliminary
+attempt. The author had faith in it, however. To Bliss he wrote:
+
+    I mean to take plenty of time and pains with the Noah's Ark book;
+    maybe it will be several years before it is all written, but it will
+    be a perfect lightning striker when it is done.
+
+    You can have the first say (that is plain enough) on that or any
+    other book I may prepare for the press, as long as you deal in a
+    fair, open, and honorable way with me. I do not think you will ever
+    find me doing otherwise with you. I can get a book ready for you
+    any time you want it; but you can't want one before this time next
+    year, so I have plenty of time.
+
+Bliss was only temporarily appeased. He realized that to get a book
+ready by the time he wanted it-a book of sufficient size and importance
+to maintain the pace set by the Innocents meant rather more immediate
+action than his author seemed to contemplate. Futhermore, he knew that
+other publishers were besieging the author of the Innocents; a
+disquieting thought. In early July, when Mr. Langdon's condition had
+temporarily improved, Bliss had come to Elmira and proposed a book which
+should relate the author's travels and experiences in the Far West. It
+was an inviting subject, and Clemens, by this time more attracted by the
+idea of authorship and its rewards, readily enough agreed to undertake
+the volume. He had been offered half profits, and suggested that the new
+contract be arranged upon these terms. Bliss, figuring on a sale of
+100,000 copies, proposed seven and one-half per cent. royalty as an
+equivalent, and the contract was so arranged. In after-years, when the
+cost of manufacture and paper had become greatly reduced, Clemens, with
+but a confused notion of business details, believed he had been misled by
+Bliss in this contract, and was bitter and resentful accordingly. The
+figures remain, however, to show that Bliss dealt fairly. Seven and
+one-half per cent. of a subscription book did represent half profits up
+to 100,000 copies when the contract was drawn; but it required ten years
+to sell that quantity, and in that time conditions had changed. Bliss
+could hardly foresee that these things would be so, and as he was dead
+when the book touched the 100,000 mark he could not explain or readjust
+matters, whatever might have been his inclination.
+
+Clemens was pleased enough with the contract when it was made. To Orion
+he wrote July 15 (1870):
+
+    Per contract I must have another six-hundred-page book ready for my
+    publisher January 1st, and I only began it to-day. The subject of
+    it is a secret, because I may possibly change it. But as it stands
+    I propose to do up Nevada and California, beginning with the trip
+    across the country in the stage. Have you a memorandum of the route
+    we took, or the names of any of the stations we stopped at? Do you
+    remember any of the scenes, names, incidents, or adventures of the
+    coach trip?--for I remember next to nothing about the matter. Jot
+    down a foolscap page of items for me. I wish I could have two days'
+    talk with you.
+
+    I suppose I am to get the biggest copyright this time ever paid on a
+    subscription book in this country.
+
+The work so promptly begun made little progress. Hard days of illness
+and sorrow followed, and it was not until September that it was really
+under way. His natural enthusiasm over any new undertaking possessed
+him. On the 4th he wrote Bliss:
+
+During the past week I have written the first four chapters of the book,
+and I tell you 'The Innocents Abroad' will have to get up early to beat
+it. It will be a book that will jump straight into continental celebrity
+the first month it is issued.
+
+He prophesied a sale of 90,000 copies during the first twelve months and
+declared, "I see the capabilities of the subject."
+
+But further disasters, even then impending, made continued effort
+impossible; the prospect of the new book for a time became gloomy, the
+idea of it less inspiring. Other plans presented themselves, and at one
+time he thought of letting the Galaxy publishers get out a volume of his
+sketches. In October he wrote Bliss that he was "driveling along
+tolerably fair on the book, getting off from twelve to twenty pages of
+manuscript a day." Bliss naturally discouraged the Galaxy idea, and
+realizing that the new book might be long delayed, agreed to get out a
+volume of miscellany sufficiently large and important for subscription
+sales. He was doubtful of the wisdom of this plan, and when Clemens
+suddenly proposed a brand-new scheme his publisher very readily agreed to
+hold back the publication of Sketches indefinitely.
+
+The new book was to be adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa,
+then newly opened and of wide public interest. Clemens did not propose
+to visit the mines himself, but to let another man do the traveling, make
+the notes, and write or tell him the story, after which Clemens would
+enlarge and elaborate it in his own fashion. His adaptation of the
+letters of Professor Ford, a year earlier, had convinced him that his
+plan would work out successfully on a larger scale; he fixed upon his old
+friend, J. H. Riley, of Washington--["Riley-Newspaper Correspondent." See
+Sketches.]--(earlier of San Francisco), as the proper person to do the
+traveling. At the end of November he wrote Bliss:
+
+    I have put my greedy hands upon the best man in America for my
+    purpose, and shall start him to the diamond field in South Africa
+    within a fortnight at my expense . . . that the book will have a
+    perfectly beautiful sale.
+
+He suggested that Bliss advance Riley's expense money, the amount to be
+deducted from the first royalty returns; also he proposed an increased
+royalty, probably in view of the startling splendor of the new idea.
+Bliss was duly impressed, and the agreement was finally made on a basis
+of eight and one-half per cent., with an advance of royalty sufficient to
+see Riley to South Africa and return.
+
+Clemens had not yet heard from Riley definitely when he wrote his glowing
+letter to Bliss. He took it for granted that Riley, always an
+adventurous sort, would go. When Riley wrote him that he felt morally
+bound to the Alta, of which he was then Washington correspondent, also in
+certain other directions till the end of the session, Clemens wrote him
+at great length, detailing his scheme in full and urging him to write
+instantly to the Alta and others, asking a release on the ground of being
+offered a rare opportunity to improve his fortunes.
+
+You know right well that I would not have you depart a hair from any
+obligation for any money. The boundless confidence that I have in you
+is born of a conviction of your integrity in small as well as in great
+things. I know plenty of men whose integrity I would trust to here, but
+not off yonder in Africa.
+
+His proposal, in brief, to Riley was that the latter should make the trip
+to Africa without expense to himself, collect memoranda, and such diamond
+mines as might be found lying about handy. Upon his return he was to
+take up temporary residence in the Clemens household until the book was
+finished, after which large benefits were to accrue to everybody
+concerned. In the end Riley obtained a release from his obligations and
+was off for the diamond mines and fortune.
+
+Poor fellow! He was faithful in his mission, and it is said that he
+really located a mining claim that would have made him and his
+independent for all time to come; but returning home with his precious
+memoranda and the news of good fortune, he accidentally wounded himself
+with a fork while eating; blood-poisoning set in (they called it cancer
+then), and he was only able to get home to die. His memoranda were never
+used, his mining claim was never identified. Certainly, death was
+closely associated with Mark Twain's fortunes during those earlier days
+of his married life.
+
+On the whole the Buffalo residence was mainly a gloomy one; its ventures
+were attended by ill-fortune. For some reason Mark Twain's connection
+with the Express, while it had given the paper a wide reputation, had not
+largely increased its subscription. Perhaps his work on it was too
+varied and erratic. Nasby, who had popularized the Toledo Blade, kept
+steadily to one line. His farmer public knew always just what to expect
+when their weekly edition arrived.
+
+Clemens and his wife dreamed of a new habitation, and new faces and
+surroundings. They agreed to offer their home and his interests in the
+Express for sale. They began to talk of Hartford, where Twichell lived,
+and where Orion Clemens and his wife had recently located.
+
+Mark Twain's new fortunes had wrought changes in the affairs of his
+relatives. Already, before his marriage, he had prospected towns here
+and there with a view to finding an Eastern residence for his mother and
+sister, and he had kept Orion's welfare always in mind. When Pamela and
+her daughter came to his wedding he told them of a little city by the
+name of Fredonia (New York), not far from Buffalo, where he thought they
+might find a pleasant home.
+
+"I went in there by night and out by night," he said, "so I saw none of
+it, but I had an intelligent, attractive audience. Prospect Fredonia and
+let me know what it is like. Try to select a place where a good many
+funerals pass. Ma likes funerals. If you can pick a good funeral corner
+she will be happy."
+
+It was in her later life that Jane Clemens had developed this particular
+passion. She would consult the morning paper for any notice of obsequies
+and attend those that were easy of access. Watching the processions go
+by gave her a peculiar joy. Mrs. Moffett and her daughter did go to
+Fredonia immediately following the wedding. They found it residentially
+attractive, and rented a house before returning to St. Louis, a
+promptness that somewhat alarmed the old lady, who did not altogether
+fancy the idea of being suddenly set down in a strange house, in a
+strange land, even though it would be within hailing distance of Sam and
+his new wife. Perhaps the Fredonia funerals were sufficiently numerous
+and attractive, for she soon became attached to the place, and entered
+into the spirit of the life there, joining its temperance crusades, and
+the like, with zest and enjoyment.
+
+Onion remained in St. Louis, but when Bliss established a paper called
+The Publisher, and wanted an editor, he was chosen for the place,
+originally offered to his brother; the latter, writing to Onion, said:
+
+If you take the place with an air of perfect confidence in yourself,
+never once letting anything show in your bearing but a quiet, modest,
+entire, and perfect confidence in your ability to do pretty much anything
+in the world, Bliss will think you are the very man he needs; but don't
+show any shadow of timidity or unsoldierly diffidence, for that sort of
+thing is fatal to advancement.
+
+I warn you thus because you are naturally given to knocking your pot over
+in this way, when a little judicious conduct would make it boil.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXI
+
+SOME FURTHER LITERARY MATTERS
+
+Meantime The Innocents Abroad had continued to prosper. Its author
+ranked mainly as a humorist, but of such colossal proportions that his
+contemporaries had seemed to dwindle; the mighty note of the "Frog of
+Calaveras" had dwarfed a score of smaller peepers. At the end of a year
+from its date of publication the book had sold up to 67,000 and was
+continuing at the rate of several thousand monthly.
+
+"You are running it in staving, tiptop, first-class style," Clemens wrote
+to Bliss. "On the average ten people a day come and hunt me up to tell
+me I am a benefactor! I guess that is a part of the program we didn't
+expect, in the first place."
+
+Apparently the book appealed to readers of every grade. One hundred and
+fifteen copies were in constant circulation at the Mercantile Library, in
+New York, while in the most remote cabins of America it was read and
+quoted. Jack Van Nostrand, making a long horseback tour of Colorado,
+wrote:
+
+I stopped a week ago in a ranch but a hundred miles from nowhere. The
+occupant had just two books: the Bible and The Innocents Abroad--the
+former in good repair.
+
+Across the ocean the book had found no less favor, and was being
+translated into many and strange tongues. By what seems now some
+veritable magic its author's fame had become literally universal. The
+consul at Hongkong, discussing English literature with a Chinese
+acquaintance, a mandarin, mentioned The Pilgrim's Progress.
+
+"Yes, indeed, I have read it!" the mandarin said, eagerly. "We are
+enjoying it in China, and shall have it soon in our own language. It is
+by Mark Twain."
+
+In England the book had an amazing vogue from the beginning, and English
+readers were endeavoring to outdo the Americans in appreciation. Indeed,
+as a rule, English readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an
+understanding of Mark Twain's literary value with greater promptness than
+did the same class of readers at home. There were exceptions, of course.
+There were English critics who did not take Mark Twain seriously, there
+were American critics who did. Among the latter was a certain William
+Ward, an editor of a paper down in Macon, Georgia--The Beacon. Ward did
+not hold a place with the great magazine arbiters of literary rank. He
+was only an obscure country editor, but he wrote like a prophet. His
+article--too long to quote in full--concerned American humorists in
+general, from Washington Irving, through John Phoenix, Philander
+Doesticks, Sut Lovingwood, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings and Petroleum V.
+Nasby, down to Mark Twain. With the exception of the first and last
+named he says of them:
+
+    They have all had, or will have, their day. Some of them are
+    resting beneath the sod, and others still live whose work will
+    scarcely survive them. Since Irving no humorist in prose has held
+    the foundation of a permanent fame except it be Mark Twain, and
+    this, as in the case of Irving, is because he is a pure writer.
+    Aside from any subtle mirth that lurks through his composition, the
+    grace and finish of his more didactic and descriptive sentences
+    indicate more than mediocrity.
+
+The writer then refers to Mark Twain's description of the Sphinx,
+comparing it with Bulwer's, which he thinks may have influenced it. He
+was mistaken in this, for Clemens had not read Bulwer--never could read
+him at any length.
+
+Of the English opinions, that of The Saturday Review was perhaps most
+doubtful. It came along late in 1870, and would hardly be worth
+recalling if it were not for a resulting, or collateral, interest.
+Clemens saw notice of this review before he saw the review itself. A
+paragraph in the Boston Advertiser spoke of The Saturday Review as
+treating the absurdities of the Innocents from a serious standpoint. The
+paragraph closed:
+
+    We can imagine the delight of the humorist in reading this tribute
+    to his power; and indeed it is so amusing in itself that he can
+    hardly do better than reproduce the article in full in his next
+    monthly "Memoranda."
+
+The old temptation to hoax his readers prompted Mark Twain to "reproduce"
+in the Galaxy, not the Review article, which he had not yet seen, but an
+imaginary Review article, an article in which the imaginary reviewer
+would be utterly devoid of any sense of humor and treat the most absurd
+incidents of The New Pilgrim's Progress as if set down by the author in
+solemn and serious earnest. The pretended review began:
+
+    Lord Macaulay died too soon. We never felt this so deeply as when
+    we finished the last chapter of the above-named extravagant work.
+    Macaulay died too soon; for none but he could mete out complete and
+    comprehensive justice to the insolence, the impudence, the
+    presumption, the mendacity, and, above all, the majestic ignorance
+    of this author.
+
+The review goes on to cite cases of the author's gross deception. It
+says:
+
+    Let the cultivated English student of human nature picture to
+    himself this Mark Twain as a person capable of doing the following
+    described things; and not only doing them, but, with incredible
+    innocence, printing them tranquilly and calmly in a book. For
+    instance:
+
+    He states that he entered a hair-dresser's in Paris to get a shave,
+    and the first "rake" the barber gave him with his razor it loosened
+    his "hide," and lifted him out of the chair.
+
+    This is unquestionably extravagant. In Florence he was so annoyed
+    by beggars that he pretends to have seized and eaten one in a
+    frantic spirit of revenge. There is, of course, no truth in this.
+    He gives at full length the theatrical program, seventeen or
+    eighteen hundred years old, which he professes to have found in the
+    ruins of the Colosseum, among the dirt-and mold and rubbish. It is
+    a sufficient comment upon this subject to remark that even a cast-
+    iron program would not have lasted so long under the circumstances.
+
+There were two and one-half pages of this really delightful burlesque
+which the author had written with huge-enjoyment, partly as a joke on the
+Review, partly to trick American editors, who he believed would accept it
+as a fresh and startling proof of the traditional English lack of humor.
+
+But, as in the early sage-brush hoaxes, he rather overdid the thing.
+Readers and editors readily enough accepted it as genuine, so far as
+having come from The Saturday Review; but most of them, regarded it as a
+delicious bit of humor which Mark Twain himself had taken seriously, and
+was therefore the one sold. This was certainly startling, and by no
+means gratifying. In the next issue he undertook that saddest of all
+performances with tongue or pen: he explained his joke, and insisted on
+the truth of the explanation. Then he said:
+
+    If any man doubts my word now I will kill him. No, I will not kill
+    him; I will win his money. I will bet him twenty to one, and let
+    any New York publisher hold the stakes, that the statements I have
+    above made as to the authorship of the article in question are
+    entirely true.
+
+But the Cincinnati Enquirer persisted in continuing the joke--in "rubbing
+it in," as we say now. The Enquirer declared that Mark Twain had been
+intensely mortified at having been so badly taken in; that his
+explanation in the Galaxy was "ingenious, but unfortunately not true."
+The Enquirer maintained that The Saturday Review of October 8, 1870, did
+contain the article exactly as printed in the "Memoranda," and advised
+Mark Twain to admit that he was sold, and say no more about it.
+
+This was enraging. Mark Twain had his own ideas as to how far a joke
+might be carried without violence, and this was a good way beyond the
+limits. He denounced the Enquirer's statement as a "pitiful, deliberate
+falsehood," in his anger falling into the old-time phrasing of newspaper
+editorial abuse. He offered to bet them a thousand dollars in cash that
+they could not prove their assertions, and asked pointedly, in
+conclusion: "Will they swallow that falsehood ignominiously, or will they
+send an agent to the Galaxy office? I think the Cincinnati Enquirer must
+be edited by children." He promised that if they did not accept his
+financial proposition he would expose them in the next issue.
+
+The incident closed there. He was prevented, by illness in his
+household, from contributing to the next issue, and the second issue
+following was his final "Memoranda" installment. So the matter perished
+and was forgotten. It was his last editorial hoax. Perhaps he concluded
+that hoaxes in any form were dangerous playthings; they were too likely
+to go off at the wrong end.
+
+It was with the April number (1871) that he concluded his relations with
+the Galaxy. In a brief valedictory he gave his reasons:
+
+    I have now written for the Galaxy a year. For the last eight
+    months, with hardly an interval, I have had for my fellows and
+    comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the sick! During
+    these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle and
+    malignantly threatened two others. All this I have experienced, yet
+    all the time have been under contract to furnish "humorous" matter,
+    once a month, for this magazine. I am speaking the exact truth in
+    the above details. Please to put yourself in my place and
+    contemplate the grisly grotesqueness of the situation. I think that
+    some of the "humor" I have written during this period could have
+    been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the solemnity
+    of the occasion.
+
+    The "Memoranda" will cease permanently with this issue of the
+    magazine. To be a pirate on a low salary, and with no share in the
+    profits of the business, used to be my idea of an uncomfortable
+    occupation, but I have other views now. To be a monthly humorist in
+    a cheerless time is drearier.
+
+Without doubt he felt a glad relief in being rid of this recurrent,
+imperative demand. He wrote to Orion that he had told the Galaxy people
+he would not write another article, long or short, for less than $500,
+and preferred not to do it at all.
+
+The Galaxy department and the work on the Express were Mark Twain's
+farewell to journalism; for the "Memoranda" was essentially journalistic,
+almost as much so, and as liberally, as his old-time Enterprise position.
+Apparently he wrote with absolute freedom, unhampered by editorial policy
+or restriction. The result was not always pleasant, and it was not
+always refined. We may be certain that it was because of Mrs. Clemens's
+heavy burdens that year, and her consequent inability to exert a
+beneficent censorship, that more than one--more than a dozen--of the
+"Memoranda" contributions were permitted to see the light of print.
+
+As a whole, the literary result of Mark Twain's Buffalo period does not
+reach the high standard of The Innocents Abroad. It was a retrogression
+--in some measure a return to his earlier form. It had been done under
+pressure, under heavy stress of mind, as he said. Also there was another
+reason; neither the subject treated nor the environment of labor had
+afforded that lofty inspiration which glorified every step of the Quaker
+City journey. Buffalo was a progressive city--a beautiful city, as
+American cities go--but it was hardly an inspiring city for literature,
+and a dull, dingy newspaper office was far, very far, from the pleasant
+decks of the Quaker City, the camp-fires of Syria, the blue sky and sea
+of the Medit&ranean.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXII
+
+THE WRITING OF "ROUGHING IT"
+
+The third book published by Mark Twain was not the Western book he was
+preparing for Bliss. It was a small volume, issued by Sheldon & Co.,
+entitled Mark Twain's Autobiography (Burlesque) and First Romance. The
+Romance was the "Awful, Terrible Medieval Romance" which had appeared in
+the Express at the beginning of 1870. The burlesque autobiography had
+not previously appeared. The two made a thin little book, which, in
+addition to its literary features, had running through it a series of
+full-page, irrelevant pictures---cartoons of the Erie Railroad Ring,
+presented as illustrations of a slightly modified version of "The House
+That Jack Built." The "House" was the Erie headquarters, the purpose
+being to illustrate the swindling methods of the Ring. The faces of Jay
+Gould, James Fisk, Jr., John T. Hoffman, and others of the combination,
+are chiefly conspicuous. The publication was not important, from any
+standpoint. Literary burlesque is rarely important, and it was far from
+Mark Twain's best form of expression. A year or two later he realized
+the mistake of this book, bought in the plates and destroyed them.
+
+Meantime the new Western book was at a standstill. To Orion, in March,
+he wrote:
+
+    I am still nursing Livy night and day. I am nearly worn out. We
+    shall go to Elmira ten days hence (if Livy can travel on a mattress
+    then), and stay there until I finish the California book, say three
+    months. But I can't begin work right away when I get there; must
+    have a week's rest, for I have been through thirty days' terrific
+    siege.
+
+He promised to forward some of the manuscript soon.
+
+    Hold on four or five days and I will see if I can get a few chapters
+    fixed to send to Bliss . . . .
+
+    I have offered this house and the Express for sale, and when we go
+    to Elmira we leave here for good. I shall not select a new home
+    till the book is finished, but we have little doubt that Hartford
+    will be the place.
+
+He disposed of his interest in the Express in April, at a sacrifice of
+$10,000 on the purchase price. Mrs. Clemens and the baby were able to
+travel, and without further delay he took them to Elmira, to Quarry Farm.
+
+Quarry Farm, the home of Mrs. Clemens's sister, Mrs. Theodore Crane, is a
+beautiful hilltop, with a wide green slope, overlooking the hazy city and
+the Chemung River, beyond which are the distant hills. It was bought
+quite incidentally by Mr. and Mrs. Langdon, who, driving by one evening,
+stopped to water the horses and decided that it would make a happy summer
+retreat, where the families could combine their housekeeping arrangements
+during vacation days. When the place had first been purchased, they had
+debated on a name for it. They had tried several, among them
+"Go-as-you-please Hall," "Crane's Nest," and had finally agreed upon
+"Rest and Be Thankful." But this was only its official name. There was
+an abandoned quarry up the hill, a little way from the house, and the
+title suggested by Thomas K. Beecher came more naturally to the tongue.
+The place became Quarry Farm, and so remains.
+
+Clemens and his wife had fully made up their minds to live in Hartford.
+They had both conceived an affection for the place, Clemens mainly
+because of Twichell, while both of them yearned for the congenial
+literary and social atmosphere, and the welcome which they felt awaited
+them. Hartford was precisely what Buffalo in that day was not--a home
+for the literary man. It held a distinguished group of writers, most of
+whom the Clemenses already knew. Furthermore, with Bliss as publisher of
+the Mark Twain books, it held their chief business interests.
+
+Their plans for going were not very definite as to time. Clemens found
+that his work went better at the farm, and that Mrs. Clemens and the
+delicate baby daily improved. They decided to remain at Quarry Farm for
+the summer, their first summer in that beautiful place which would mean
+so much to them in the years to come.
+
+It was really Joe Goodman, as much as anything, that stirred a fresh
+enthusiasm in the new book. Goodman arrived just when the author's
+spirits were at low ebb.
+
+"Joe," he said, "I guess I'm done for. I don't appear to be able to get
+along at all with my work, and what I do write does not seem valuable.
+I'm afraid I'll never be able to reach the standard of 'The Innocents
+Abroad' again. Here is what I have written, Joe. Read it, and see if
+that is your opinion."
+
+Goodman took the manuscript and seated himself in a chair, while Clemens
+went over to a table and pretended to work. Goodman read page after
+page, critically, and was presently absorbed in it. Clemens watched him
+furtively, till he could stand it no longer. Then he threw down his pen,
+exclaiming:
+
+"I knew it! I knew it! I am writing nothing but rot. You have sat
+there all this time reading without a smile, and pitying the ass I am
+making of myself. But I am not wholly to blame. I am not strong enough
+to fight against fate. I have been trying to write a funny book, with
+dead people and sickness everywhere. Mr. Langdon died first, then a
+young lady in our house, and now Mrs. Clemens and the baby have been at
+the point of death all winter! Oh, Joe, I wish to God I could die
+myself!"
+
+"Mark," said Joe, "I was reading critically, not for amusement, and so
+far as I have read, and can judge, this is one of the best things you
+have ever written. I have found it perfectly absorbing. You are doing a
+great book!"
+
+Clemens knew that Goodman never spoke except from conviction, and the
+verdict was to him like a message of life handed down by an archangel. He
+was a changed man instantly. He was all enthusiasm, full of his subject,
+eager to go on. He proposed to pay Goodman a salary to stay there and
+keep him company and furnish him with inspiration--the Pacific coast
+atmosphere and vernacular, which he feared had slipped away from him.
+Goodman declined the salary, but extended his visit as long as his plans
+would permit, and the two had a happy time together, recalling old
+Comstock days. Every morning, for a month or more, they used to tramp
+over the farm. They fell into the habit of visiting the old quarry and
+pawing over the fragments in search of fossil specimens. Both of them
+had a poetic interest in geology, its infinite remotenesses and its
+testimonies. Without scientific knowledge, they took a deep pleasure in
+accumulating a collection, which they arranged on boards torn from an old
+fence, until they had enough specimens to fill a small museum. They
+imagined they could distinguish certain geological relations and
+families, and would talk about trilobites, the Old Red Sandstone period,
+and the azoic age, or follow random speculation to far-lying conclusions,
+developing vague humors of phrase and fancy, having altogether a joyful
+good time.
+
+Another interest that developed during Goodman's stay was in one Ruloff,
+who was under death sentence for a particularly atrocious murder. The
+papers were full of Ruloff's prodigious learning. It was said that he
+had in preparation a work showing the unity of all languages. Goodman
+and Clemens agreed that Ruloff's death would be a great loss to mankind,
+even though he was clearly a villain and deserved his sentence. They
+decided that justice would be served just as well if some stupid person
+were hung in his place, and following out this fancy Clemens one morning
+put aside his regular work and wrote an article to the Tribune, offering
+to supply a substitute for Ruloff. He signed it simply "Samuel
+Langhorne," and it was published as a serious communication, without
+comment, so far as the Tribune was concerned. Other papers, however,
+took it up and it was widely copied and commented upon. Apparently no
+one ever identified, Mark Twain with the authorship of the letter, which,
+by the way, does not appear to have prolonged Ruloff's earthly
+usefulness.--[The reader will find the Ruloff letter in full under
+Appendix K, at the end of last volume.]
+
+Life at the farm may have furnished agricultural inspiration, for Clemens
+wrote something about Horace Greeley's farming, also a skit concerning
+Henry Ward Beecher's efforts in that direction. Of Mr. Beecher's farming
+he said:
+
+"His strawberries would be a comfortable success if robins would eat
+turnips."
+
+The article amused Beecher, and perhaps Greeley was amused too, for he
+wrote:
+
+    MARK,--You are mistaken as to my criticisms on your farming. I
+    never publicly made any, while you have undertaken to tell the exact
+    cost per pint of my potatoes and cabbages, truly enough the
+    inspiration of genius. If you will really betake yourself to
+    farming, or even to telling what you know about it, rather than what
+    you don't know about mine, I will not only refrain from disparaging
+    criticism, but will give you my blessing.
+
+                     Yours,  HORACE GREELEY.
+
+The letter is in Mr. Greeley's characteristic scrawl, and no doubt
+furnished inspiration for the turnip story in 'Roughing It', also the
+model for the pretended facsimile of Greeley's writing.
+
+Altogether that was a busy, enterprising summer at Quarry Farm. By the
+middle of May, Clemens wrote to Bliss that he had twelve hundred
+manuscript pages of the new book already written, and that he was turning
+out the remainder at the rate of from thirty to sixty-five per day. He
+was in high spirits by this time. The family health had improved, and
+prospects were bright.
+
+I have enough manuscript on hand now to make (allowing for engravings)
+about four hundred pages of the book, consequently am two-thirds done. I
+intended to run up to Hartford about the middle of the week and take it
+along, but I find myself so thoroughly interested in my work now (a thing
+I have not experienced for months) that I can't bear to lose a single
+moment of the inspiration. So I will stay here and peg away as long as
+it lasts. My present idea is to write as much more as I have already
+written, and then collect from the mass the very best chapters and
+discard the rest. When I get it done I want to see the man who will
+begin to read it and not finish it. Nothing grieves me now; nothing
+troubles me, nothing bothers me or gets my attention. I don't think of
+anything but the book, and don't have an hour's unhappiness about
+anything, and don't care two cents whether school keeps or not. The book
+will be done soon now. It will be a starchy book; the dedication will be
+worth the price of the volume. Thus:
+
+                   TO THE LATE CAIN
+                  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
+
+    not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little
+    respect; not on account of sympathy for him, for his bloody deed
+    places him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking, but
+    out of a mere humane commiseration for him, in that it was his
+    misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent
+    insanity plea.
+
+Probably Mrs. Clemens diverted this picturesque dedication in favor of
+the Higbie inscription, or perhaps the author never really intended the
+literary tribute to Cain. The impulse that inspired it, however, was
+characteristic.
+
+In a postscript to this letter he adds:
+
+    My stock is looking up. I am getting the bulliest offers for books
+    and almanacs; am flooded with lecture invitations, and one
+    periodical offers me $6,000 cash for twelve articles of any length,
+    and on any subject, treated humorously or otherwise.
+
+He set in to make hay while the sun was shining. In addition to the
+California book, which was now fast nearing completion, he discussed a
+scheme with Goodman for a six-hundred-page work which they were to do
+jointly; he planned and wrote one or two scenes from a Western play, to
+be built from episodes in the new book (one of them was the "Arkansas"
+incident, related in Chapter XXXI); he perfected one of his several
+inventions--an automatically adjusting vest-strap; he wrote a number of
+sketches, made an occasional business trip to New York and Hartford;
+prospected the latter place for a new home. The shadow which had hung
+over the sojourn in Buffalo seemed to have lifted.
+
+He had promised Bliss some contributions for his new paper, and in June
+he sent three sketches. In an accompanying letter he says:
+
+    Here are three articles which you may have if you will pay $125 for
+    the lot. If you don't want them I'll sell them to the Galaxy, but
+    not for a cent less than three times the money.... If you take them
+    pay one-tenth of the $125 in weekly instalments to Orion till he has
+    received it all.
+
+He reconsidered his resolution not to lecture again, and closed with
+Redpath for the coming season. He found himself in a lecture-writing
+fever. He wrote three of them in succession: one on Artemus Ward,
+another on "Reminiscences of Some Pleasant Characters I Have Met," and a
+third one based on chapters from the new book. Of the "Reminiscence"
+lecture he wrote Redpath:
+
+"It covers my whole acquaintance; kings, lunatics, idiots, and all."
+Immediately afterward he wrote that he had prepared still another
+lecture, "title to be announced later."
+
+"During July I'll decide which one I like best," he said. He instructed
+Redpath not to make engagements for him to lecture in churches. "I never
+made a success of a lecture in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh
+in a church."
+
+Redpath was having difficulties in arranging a circuit to suit him.
+Clemens had prejudices against certain towns and localities, prejudices
+that were likely to change overnight. In August he wrote:
+
+    DEAR RED,--I am different from other women; my mind changes oftener.
+    People who have no mind can easily be stead fast and firm, but when
+    a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea
+    of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo.
+    See? Therefore, if you will notice, one week I am likely to give
+    rigid instructions to confine me to New England; the next week send
+    me to Arizona; the next week withdraw my name; the next week give
+    you full, untrammeled swing; and the week following modify it. You
+    must try to keep the run of my mind, Redpath that is your business,
+    being the agent, and it always was too many for me.... Now about
+    the West this week, I am willing that you shall retain all the
+    Western engagements. But what I shall want next week is still with
+    God.
+                         Yours,  MARK.
+
+He was in Hartford when this letter was written, arranging for residence
+there and the removal of his belongings. He finally leased the fine
+Hooker house on Ford Street, in that pleasant seclusion known as Nook
+Farm--the literary part of Hartford, which included the residence of
+Charles Dudley Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. He arranged for
+possession of the premises October 1st. So the new home was settled
+upon; then learning that Nasby was to be in Boston, he ran over to that
+city for a few days of recreation after his season's labors.
+
+Preparations for removal to Hartford were not delayed. The Buffalo
+property was disposed of, the furnishings were packed and shipped away.
+The house which as bride and groom they had entered so happily was left
+empty and deserted, never to be entered by them again. In the year and a
+half of their occupancy it had seen well-nigh all the human round, all
+that goes to make up the happiness and the sorrow of life.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXIII
+
+LECTURING DAYS
+
+Life in Hartford, in the autumn of 1871, began in the letter, rather than
+in the spirit. The newcomers were received with a wide, neighborly
+welcome, but the disorder of establishment and the almost immediate
+departure of the head of the household on a protracted lecturing tour
+were disquieting things; the atmosphere of the Clemens home during those
+early Hartford days gave only a faint promise of its future loveliness.
+
+As in a far later period, Mark Twain had resorted to lecturing to pay off
+debt. He still owed a portion of his share in the Express; also he had
+been obliged to obtain an advance from the lecture bureau. He dreaded,
+as always, the tedium of travel, the clatter of hotel life, the monotony
+of entertainment, while, more than most men, he loved the tender luxury
+of home. It was only that he could not afford to lose the profit offered
+on the platform.
+
+His season opened at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, October 16th, and his
+schedule carried him hither and thither, to and fro, over distances that
+lie between Boston and Chicago. There were opportunities to run into
+Hartford now and then, when he was not too far away, and in November he
+lectured there on Artemus Ward.
+
+He changed his entertainment at least twice that season. He began with
+the "Reminiscences," the lecture which he said would treat of all those
+whom he had met, "idiots, lunatics, and kings," but he did not like it,
+or it did not go well. He wrote Redpath of the Artemus Ward address:
+
+"It suits me, and I'll never deliver the nasty, nauseous 'Reminiscences'
+any more."
+
+But the Ward lecture was good for little more than a month, for on
+December 8th he wrote again:
+
+    Notify all hands that from this time I shall talk nothing but
+    selections from my forthcoming book, 'Roughing It'. Tried it twice
+    last night; suits me tiptop.
+
+And somewhat later:
+
+    Had a splendid time with a splendid audience in Indianapolis last
+    night; a perfectly jammed house, just as I have all the time out
+    here.... I don't care now to have any appointments canceled. I'll
+    even "fetch" those Dutch Pennsylvanians with this lecture.
+
+    Have paid up $4,000 indebtedness. You are the last on my list.
+    Shall begin to pay you in a few days, and then I shall be a free man
+    again.
+
+Undoubtedly he reveled in the triumphs of a platform tour, though at no
+time did he regard it as a pleasure excursion. During those early weeks
+the proofs of his new book, chasing him from place to place, did not add
+to his comfort. Still, with large, substantial rewards in hand and in
+prospect, one could endure much.
+
+In the neighborhood of Boston there were other compensations. He could
+spend a good part of his days at the Lyceum headquarters, in School
+Street, where there was always congenial fellowship--Nasby, Josh
+Billings, and the rest of the peripatetic group that about the end of the
+year collected there. Their lectures were never tried immediately in
+Boston, but in the outlying towns; tried and perfected--or discarded.
+When the provincial audiences were finally satisfied, then the final.
+test in the Boston Music Hall was made, and if this proved successful the
+rest of the season was safe. Redpath's lecturers put up at Young's
+Hotel, and spent their days at the bureau, smoking and spinning yarns, or
+talking shop. Early in the evening they scattered to the outlying towns,
+Lowell, Lexington, Concord, New Bedford. There is no such a condition
+to-day: lecturers are few, lecture bureaus obscure; there are no great
+reputations made on the platform.
+
+Neither is there any such distinct group of humorists as the one just
+mentioned. Humor has become universal since then. Few writers of this
+age would confess to taking their work so seriously as to be at all times
+unsmiling in it; only about as many, in fact, as in that day would
+confess to taking their work so lightly that they could regard life's
+sterner phases and philosophies with a smile.
+
+Josh Billings was one of the gentlest and loveliest of our pioneers of
+laughter. The present generation is not overfamiliar even with his name,
+but both the name and sayings of that quaint soul were on everybody's
+lips at the time of which we are writing. His true name was Henry W.
+Shaw, and he was a genuine, smiling philosopher, who might have built up
+a more permanent and serious reputation had he not been induced to
+disfigure his maxims with ridiculous spelling in order to popularize them
+and make them bring a living price. It did not matter much with Nasby's
+work. An assumed illiteracy belonged with the side of life which he
+presented; but it is pathetic now to consider some of the really masterly
+sayings of Josh Billings presented in that uncouth form which was
+regarded as a part of humor a generation ago. Even the aphorisms that
+were essentially humorous lose value in that degraded spelling.
+
+"When a man starts down hill everything is greased for the occasion,"
+could hardly be improved upon by distorted orthography, and here are a
+few more gems which have survived that deadly blight.
+
+"Some folks mistake vivacity for wit; whereas the difference between
+vivacity and wit is the same as the difference between the lightning-bug
+and the lightning."
+
+"Don't take the bull by the horns-take him by the tail; then you can let
+go when you want to."
+
+"The difficulty is not that we know so much, but that we know so much
+that isn't so."
+
+Josh Billings, Nasby, and Mark Twain were close friends. They had
+themselves photographed in a group, and there was always some pleasantry
+going on among them. Josh Billings once wrote on "Lekturing," and under
+the head of "Rule Seven," which treated of unwisdom of inviting a
+lecturer to a private house, he said:
+
+    Think of asking Mark Twain home with yu, for instance. Yure good
+    wife has put her house in apple-pie order for the ockashun;
+    everything is just in the right place. Yu don't smoke in yure
+    house, never. Yu don't put yure feet on the center-table, yu don't
+    skatter the nuzepapers all over the room, in utter confushion: order
+    and ekonemy governs yure premises. But if yu expeckt Mark Twain to
+    be happy, or even kumfortable yu hav got to buy a box of cigars
+    worth at least seventeen dollars and yu hav got to move all the
+    tender things out ov yure parlor. Yu hav got to skatter all the
+    latest papers around the room careless, you hav got to hav a pitcher
+    ov icewater handy, for Mark is a dry humorist. Yu hav got to ketch
+    and tie all yure yung ones, hed and foot, for Mark luvs babys only
+    in theory; yu hav got to send yure favorite kat over to the nabors
+    and hide yure poodle. These are things that hav to be done, or Mark
+    will pak hiz valise with hiz extry shirt collar and hiz lektur on
+    the Sandwich Islands, and travel around yure streets, smoking and
+    reading the sighns over the store doorways untill lektur time
+    begins.
+
+As we-are not likely to touch upon Mark Twain's lecturing, save only
+lightly, hereafter, it may be as well to say something of his method at
+this period. At all places visited by lecturers there was a committee,
+and it was the place of the chairman to introduce the lecturer, a
+privilege which he valued, because it gave him a momentary association
+with distinction and fame. Clemens was a great disappointment to these
+officials. He had learned long ago that he could introduce himself more
+effectively than any one else. His usual formula was to present himself
+as the chairman of the committee, introducing the lecturer of the
+evening; then, with what was in effect a complete change of personality,
+to begin his lecture. It was always startling and amusing, always a
+success; but the papers finally printed this formula, which took the
+freshness out of it, so that he had to invent others. Sometimes he got
+up with the frank statement that he was introducing himself because he
+had never met any one who could pay a proper tribute to his talents; but
+the newspapers printed that too, and he often rose and began with no
+introduction at all.
+
+Whatever his method of beginning, Mark Twain's procedure probably was the
+purest exemplification of the platform entertainer's art which this
+country has ever seen. It was the art that makes you forget the
+artisanship, the art that made each hearer forget that he was not being
+personally entertained by a new and marvelous friend, who had traveled a
+long way for his particular benefit. One listener has written that he
+sat "simmering with laughter" through what he supposed was the
+continuation of the introduction, waiting for the traditional lecture to
+begin, when presently the lecturer, with a bow, disappeared, and it was
+over. The listener looked at his watch; he had been there more than an
+hour. He thought it could be no more than ten minutes, at most. Many
+have tried to set down something of the effect his art produced on them,
+but one may not clearly convey the story of a vanished presence and a
+silent voice.
+
+There were other pleasant associations in Boston. Howells was there, and
+Aldrich; also Bret Harte, who had finished his triumphal progress across
+the continent to join the Atlantic group. Clemens appears not to have
+met Aldrich before, though their acquaintance had begun a year earlier,
+when Aldrich, as editor of Every Saturday, had commented on a poem
+entitled, "The Three Aces," which had appeared in the Buffalo Express.
+Aldrich had assumed the poem to be the work of Mark Twain, and had
+characterized it as "a feeble imitation of Bret Harte's 'Heathen
+Chinee.'" Clemens, in a letter, had mildly protested as to the charge of
+authorship, and Aldrich had promptly printed the letter with apologetic
+explanation. A playful exchange of personal letters followed, and the
+beginning of a lifelong friendship.
+
+One of the letters has a special interest here. Clemens had followed his
+protest with an apology for it, asking that no further notice be taken of
+the matter. Aldrich replied that it was too late to prevent "doing him
+justice," as his explanation was already on the press, but that if
+Clemens insisted he would withdraw it in the next issue. Clemens then
+wrote that he did not want it withdrawn, and explained that he hated to
+be accused of plagiarizing Bret Harte, to whom he was deeply indebted for
+literary schooling in the California days. Continuing he said:
+
+    Do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot
+    through Harte's brain? It was this. When they were trying to
+    decide upon a vignette cover for the Overland a grizzly bear (of the
+    arms of the State of California) was chosen. Nahl Bros. carved him
+    and the page was printed with him in it.
+
+    As a bear he was a success. He was a good bear, but then, it was
+    objected, he was an objectless bear--a bear that meant nothing,
+    signified nothing, simply stood there, snarling over his shoulder at
+    nothing, and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured
+    intruder upon the fair page. All hands said that none were
+    satisfied; they hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as
+    much to have him there when there was no point to him. But
+    presently Harte took a pencil and drew two simple lines under his
+    feet, and behold he was a magnificent success!--the ancient symbol
+    of California savagery, snarling at the approaching type of high and
+    progressive civilization, the first Overland locomotive! I just
+    think that was nothing less than an inspiration.--[The "bear" was
+    that which has always appeared on the Overland cover; the "two
+    lines" formed a railway track under his feet. Clemens's original
+    letter contained crude sketches illustrating these things.]
+
+Among the Boston group was another Californian, Ralph Keeler, an
+eccentric, gifted, and altogether charming fellow, whom Clemens had known
+on the Pacific slope. Keeler had been adopted by the Boston writers, and
+was grateful and happy accordingly. He was poor of purse, but
+inexhaustibly rich in the happier gifts of fortune. He was unfailingly
+buoyant, light-hearted, and hopeful. On an infinitesimal capital he had
+made a tour of many lands, and had written of it for the Atlantic. In
+that charmed circle he was as overflowingly happy as if he had been
+admitted to the company of the gods. Keeler was affectionately regarded
+by all who knew him, and he offered a sort of worship in return. He
+often accompanied Mark Twain on his lecture engagements to the various
+outlying towns, and Clemens brought him back to his hotel for breakfast,
+where they had good, enjoyable talks together. Once Keeler came eagerly
+to the hotel and made his way up to Clemens's room.
+
+"Come with me," he said. "Quick!"
+
+"What is it? What's happened?"
+
+"Don't wait to talk. Come with me."
+
+They tramped briskly through the streets till they reached the public
+library, entered, Keeler leading the way, not stopping till he faced a
+row of shelves filled with books. He pointed at one of them, his face
+radiant with joy.
+
+"Look," he said. "Do you see it?"
+
+Clemens looked carefully now and identified one of the books as a
+still-born novel which Keeler had published.
+
+"This is a library," said Keeler, eagerly, "and they've got it!"
+
+His whole being was aglow with the wonder of it. He had been
+investigating; the library records showed that in the two years the book
+had been there it had been taken out and read three times! It never
+occurred to Clemens even to smile. Knowing Mark Twain, one would guess
+that his eyes were likely to be filled with tears.
+
+In his book about Mark Twain, Howells tells of a luncheon which Keeler
+gave to his more famous associates--Aldrich, Fields, Harte, Clemens, and
+Howells himself--a merry informal occasion. Says Howells:
+
+    Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and
+    aimless and joyful talk--play, beginning and ending nowhere, of
+    eager laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat-
+    lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional
+    concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it
+    gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full of
+    good-fellowship, Bret Harte's leering dramatization of Clemens's
+    mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates. "Why,
+    fellows," he spluttered, "this is the dream of Mark's life," and I
+    remember the glance from under Clemens's feathery eyebrows which
+    betrayed his enjoyment of the fun.
+
+Very likely Keeler gave that luncheon in celebration of his book's
+triumph; it would be like him.
+
+Keeler's end was a mystery. The New York Tribune commissioned him to go
+to Cuba to report the facts of some Spanish outrages. He sailed from New
+York in the steamer, and was last seen alive the night before the vessel
+reached Havana. He had made no secret of his mission, but had discussed
+it in his frank, innocent way. There were some Spanish military men on
+the ship.
+
+Clemens, commenting on the matter, once said:
+
+"It may be that he was not flung into the sea, still the belief was
+general that that was what had happened."
+
+In his book Howells refers to the doubt with which Mark Twain was then
+received by the polite culture of Boston; which, on the other hand,
+accepted Bret Harte as one of its own, forgiving even social
+shortcomings.
+
+The reason is not difficult to understand. Harte had made his appeal
+with legitimate fiction of the kind which, however fresh in flavor and
+environment, was of a sort to be measured and classified. Harte spoke a
+language they could understand; his humor, his pathos, his point of view
+were all recognizable. It was an art already standardized by a master.
+It is no reflection on the genius of Bret Harte to liken his splendid
+achievements to those of Charles Dickens. Much of Harte's work is in no
+way inferior to that of his great English prototype. Dickens never wrote
+a better short story than "The Outcasts of Poker Flats." He never wrote
+as good a short story as "The Luck of Roaring Camp." Boston critics
+promptly realized these things and gave Harte his correct rating. That
+they failed to do this with Mark Twain, lay chiefly in the fact that he
+spoke to them in new and startling tongues. His gospels were likely to
+be heresies; his literary eccentricities were all unclassified. Of the
+ultrafastidious set Howells tells us that Charles Eliot Norton and Prof.
+Francis J. Child were about the only ones who accorded him unqualified
+approval. The others smiled and enjoyed him, but with that condescension
+which the courtier is likely to accord to motley and the cap and bells.
+Only the great, simple-hearted, unbiased multitude, the public, which had
+no standards but the direct appeal from one human heart to another, could
+recognize immediately his mightier heritage, could exalt and place him on
+the throne.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXIV
+
+"ROUGHING IT".
+
+Telegram to Redpath:
+
+    How in the name of God does a man find his way from here to Amherst,
+    and when must he start? Give me full particulars, and send a man
+    with me. If I had another engagement I would rot before I would
+    fill it.                S. L. CLEMENS.
+
+This was at the end of February, and he believed that he was standing on
+the platform for the last time. He loathed the drudgery of the work, and
+he considered there was no further need. He was no longer in debt, and
+his income he accounted ample. His new book, 'Roughing It',--[It was
+Bliss who had given the new book the title of Roughing It. Innocents at
+Home had been its provision title, certainly a misleading one, though it
+has been retained in England for the second volume; for what reason it
+would be difficult to explain.]--had had a large advance sale, and its
+earnings promised to rival those of the 'Innocents'. He resolved in the
+future to confine himself to the trade and profits of authorship.
+
+The new book had advantages in its favor. Issued early in the year, it
+was offered at the best canvassing season; particularly so, as the
+author's lectures had prepared the public for its reception. Furthermore,
+it dealt with the most picturesque phases of American life, scenes and
+episodes vastly interesting at that time, and peculiarly adapted to Mark
+Twain's literary expression. In a different way 'Roughing It' is quite
+as remarkable as 'The Innocents Abroad.' If it has less charm, it has
+greater interest, and it is by no means without charm. There is
+something delicious, for instance, in this bit of pure enjoyment of the
+first day's overland travel:
+
+    It was now just dawn, and as we stretched our cramped legs full
+    length on the mail-sacks, and gazed out through the windows across
+    the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist to where
+    there was an expectant look in the Eastern horizon, our perfect
+    enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy. The
+    stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping the
+    curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle
+    swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses' hoofs,
+    the cracking of the driver's whip, and his "Hi-yi! g'lang!" were
+    music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared to give
+    us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after us
+    with interest and envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the
+    pipe of peace, and compared all this luxury with the years of
+    tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was
+    only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had
+    found it.
+
+Also, there is that lofty presentation of South Pass, and a picture of
+the alkali desert, so parching, so withering in its choking realism, that
+it makes the throat ache and the tongue dry to read it. Just a bit of
+the desert in passing:
+
+    The sun beats down with a dead, blistering, relentless malignity;
+    the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but
+    scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface--it is absorbed
+    before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air
+    stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the
+    brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature visible in any
+    direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its
+    monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound, not a sigh,
+    not a whisper, not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of
+    bird; not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that
+    dead air.
+
+As for the humor of the book, it has been chiefly famous for that. "Buck
+Fanshaw's Funeral" has become a classic, and the purchase of the "Mexican
+Plug." But it is to no purpose to review the book here in detail. We
+have already reviewed the life and environment out of which it grew.
+
+Without doubt the story would have contained more of the poetic and
+contemplative, in which he was always at his best, if the subject itself,
+as in the Innocents, had lent itself oftener to this form of writing. It
+was the lack of that halo perhaps which caused the new book never quite
+to rank with its great forerunner in public favor. There could hardly be
+any other reason. It presented a fresher theme; it abounded in humor;
+technically, it was better written; seemingly it had all the elements of
+popularity and of permanence. It did, in fact, possess these qualities,
+but its sales, except during the earlier months of its canvass, never
+quite equaled those of The Innocents Abroad.
+
+'Roughing It' was accepted by the public for just what it was and is, a
+great picture of the Overland Pioneer days--a marvelous picture of
+frontier aspects at a time when the frontier itself, even with its
+hardships and its tragedies, was little more than a vast primal joke;
+when all frontiersmen were obliged to be laughing philosophers in order
+to survive the stress of its warfares.
+
+A word here about this Western humor: It is a distinct product. It grew
+out of a distinct condition--the battle with the frontier. The fight was
+so desperate, to take it seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that
+they might not weep; men, when they could no longer swear. "Western
+humor" was the result. It is the freshest, wildest humor in the world,
+but there is tragedy behind it.
+
+'Roughing It' presented the picture of those early conditions with the
+startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which, in effect, it was.
+It was not accurate history, even of the author's own adventures. It was
+true in its aspects, rather than in its details. The greater artist
+disregards the truth of detail to render more strikingly a phase or a
+condition, to produce an atmosphere, to reconstruct a vanished time. This
+was what Mark Twain did in 'Roughing It'. He told the story of overland
+travel and the frontier, for his own and future generations, in what is
+essentially a picaresque novel, a work of unperishing fiction, founded on
+fact.
+
+The sales of 'Roughing It' during the first three months aggregated
+nearly forty thousand copies, and the author was lavishly elate
+accordingly. To Orion (who had already closed his career with Bliss, by
+exercise of those hereditary eccentricities through which he so often
+came to grief) he gave $1,000 out of the first royalty check, in
+acknowledgment of the memorandum book and other data which Orion had
+supplied. Clemens believed the new book would sell one hundred thousand
+copies within the year; but the sale diminished presently, and at the end
+of the first year it was considerably behind the Innocents for the same
+period. As already stated, it required ten years for Roughing It to
+reach the one-hundred-thousand mark, which the Innocents reached in
+three.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXV
+
+A BIRTH, A DEATH, AND A VOYAGE
+
+The year 1872 was an eventful one in Mark Twain's life. At Elmira, on
+March 19th, his second child, a little girl, whom they named Susan
+Olivia, was born. On June 2d, in the new home in Hartford, to which they
+had recently moved, his first child, a little boy, Langdon, died. He had
+never been strong, his wavering life had often been uncertain, always
+more of the spirit than the body, and in Elmira he contracted a heavy
+cold, or perhaps it was diphtheria from the beginning. In later years,
+whenever Clemens spoke of the little fellow, he never failed to accuse
+himself of having been the cause of the child's death. It was Mrs.
+Clemens's custom to drive out each morning with Langdon, and once when
+she was unable to go Clemens himself went instead.
+
+"I should not have been permitted to do it," he said, remembering. "I was
+not qualified for any such responsibility as that. Some one should have
+gone who had at least the rudiments of a mind. Necessarily I would lose
+myself dreaming. After a while the coachman looked around and noticed
+that the carriage-robes had dropped away from the little fellow, and that
+he was exposed to the chilly air. He called my attention to it, but it
+was too late. Tonsilitis or something of the sort set in, and he did not
+get any better, so we took him to Hartford. There it was pronounced
+diphtheria, and of course he died."
+
+So, with or without reason, he added the blame of another tragedy to the
+heavy burden of remorse which he would go on piling up while he lived.
+
+The blow was a terrible one to Mrs. Clemens; even the comfort of the
+little new baby on her arm could not ease the ache in her breast. It
+seemed to her that death was pursuing her. In one of her letters she
+says:
+
+"I feel so often as if my path is to be lined with graves," and she
+expresses the wish that she may drop out of life herself before her
+sister and her husband--a wish which the years would grant.
+
+They did not return to Elmira, for it was thought that the air of the
+shore would be better for the little girl; so they spent the summer at
+Saybrook, Connecticut, at Fenwick Hall, leaving Orion and his wife in
+charge of the house at Hartford.
+
+Beyond a few sketches, Clemens did very little literary work that summer,
+but he planned a trip to Europe, and he invented what is still known and
+sold as the "Mark Twain Scrap-Book."
+
+He wrote to Orion of his proposed trip to England, and dilated upon his
+scrap-book with considerable enthusiasm. The idea had grown out of the
+inconvenience of finding a paste-jar, and the general mussiness of
+scrap-book keeping. His new plan was a self-pasting scrap-book with the
+gum laid on in narrow strips, requiring only to be dampened with a sponge
+or other moist substance to be ready for the clipping. He states that he
+intends to put the invention into the hands of Slote, Woodman & Co., of
+whom Dan Slote, his old Quaker City room-mate, was the senior partner,
+and have it manufactured for the trade.
+
+About this time began Mark Twain's long and active interest in copyright.
+Previously he had not much considered the subject; he had taken it for
+granted there was no step that he could take, while international piracy
+was a recognized institution. On both sides of the water books were
+appropriated, often without profit, sometimes even without credit, to the
+author. To tell the truth, Clemens had at first regarded it rather in
+the nature of a compliment that his books should be thought worth
+pirating in England, but as time passed he realized that he was paying
+heavily for this recognition. Furthermore, he decided that he was
+forfeiting a right; rather that he was being deprived of it: something
+which it was in his nature to resent.
+
+When 'Roughing It' had been ready for issue he agreed with Bliss that
+they should try the experiment of copyrighting it in England, and see how
+far the law would protect them against the voracious little publisher,
+who thus far had not only snapped up everything bearing Mark Twain's
+signature, but had included in a volume of Mark Twain sketches certain
+examples of very weak humor with which Mark Twain had been previously
+unfamiliar.
+
+Whatever the English pirate's opinion of the copyright protection of
+'Roughing It' may have been, he did not attempt to violate it. This was
+gratifying. Clemens came to regard England as a friendly power. He
+decided to visit it and spy out the land. He would make the acquaintance
+of its people and institutions and write a book, which would do these
+things justice.
+
+He gave out no word of his real purpose. He merely said that he was
+going over to see his English publishers, and perhaps to arrange for a
+few lectures. He provided himself with some stylographic note-books, by
+which he could produce two copies of his daily memoranda--one for himself
+and one to mail to Mrs. Clemens--and sailed on the Scotia August 21,
+1872.
+
+Arriving in Liverpool he took train for London, and presently the
+wonderful charm of that old, finished country broke upon him. His "first
+hour in England was an hour of delight," he records; "of rapture and
+ecstasy. These are the best words I can find, but they are not adequate;
+they are not strong enough to convey the feeling which this first vision
+of rural England brought me." Then he noticed that the gentleman
+opposite in his compartment paid no attention to the scenery, but was
+absorbed in a green-covered volume. He was so absorbed in it that, by
+and by, Clemens's curiosity was aroused. He shifted his position a
+little and his eye caught the title. It was the first volume of the
+English edition of The Innocents Abroad. This was gratifying for a
+moment; then he remembered that the man had never laughed, never even
+smiled during the hour of his steady reading. Clemens recalled what he
+had heard of the English lack of humor. He wondered if this was a fair
+example of it, and if the man could be really taking seriously every word
+he was reading. Clemens could not look at the scenery any more for
+watching his fellow-passenger, waiting with a fascinated interest for the
+paragraph that would break up that iron-clad solemnity. It did not come.
+During all the rest of the trip to London the atmosphere of the
+compartment remained heavy with gloom.
+
+He drove to the Langham Hotel, always popular with Americans, established
+himself, and went to look up his publishers. He found the Routledges
+about to sit down to luncheon in a private room, up-stairs, in their
+publishing house. He joined them, and not a soul stirred from that table
+again until evening. The Routledges had never heard Mark Twain talk
+before, never heard any one talk who in the least resembled him. Various
+refreshments were served during the afternoon, came and went, while this
+marvelous creature talked on and they listened, reveling, and wondering
+if America had any more of that sort at home. By and by dinner was
+served; then after a long time, when there was no further excuse for
+keeping him there, they took him to the Savage Club, where there were yet
+other refreshments and a gathering of the clans to welcome this new
+arrival as a being from some remote and unfamiliar star.
+
+Tom Hood, the younger, was there, and Harry Lee, and Stanley the
+explorer, who had but just returned from finding Livingstone, and Henry
+Irving, and many another whose name remains, though the owners of those
+names are all dead now, and their laughter and their good-fellowship are
+only a part of that intangible fabric which we call the past.'--[Clemens
+had first known Stanley as a newspaper man. "I first met him when he
+reported a lecture of mine in St. Louis," he said once in a conversation
+where the name of Stanley was mentioned.]
+
+
+
+
+LXXXVI
+
+ENGLAND
+
+From that night Mark Twain's stay in England could not properly be called
+a gloomy one.
+
+Routledge, Hood, Lee, and, in fact, all literary London, set themselves
+the task of giving him a good time. Whatever place of interest they
+could think of he was taken there; whatever there was to see he saw it.
+Dinners, receptions, and assemblies were not complete without him. The
+White Friars' Club and others gave banquets in his honor. He was the
+sensation of the day. When he rose to speak on these occasions he was
+greeted with wild cheers. Whatever he said they eagerly applauded--too
+eagerly sometimes, in the fear that they might be regarded as insensible
+to American humor. Other speakers delighted in chaffing him in order to
+provoke his retorts. When a speaker humorously referred to his American
+habit of carrying a cotton umbrella, his reply that he followed this
+custom because a cotton umbrella was the only kind of an umbrella that an
+Englishman wouldn't steal, was all over England next day, and regarded as
+one of the finest examples of wit since the days of Swift.
+
+The suddenness and completeness of his acceptance by the great ones of
+London rather overwhelmed and frightened him made him timid. Joaquin
+Miller writes:
+
+    He was shy as a girl, although time was already coyly flirting white
+    flowers at his temples, and could hardly be coaxed to meet the
+    learned and great who wanted to take him by the hand.
+
+Many came to call on him at his hotel, among them Charles Reade and Canon
+Kingsley. Kingsley came twice without finding him; then wrote, asking
+for an appointment. Reade invited his assistance on a novel. Indeed, it
+was in England that Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come
+into his rightful heritage. Whatever may have been the doubts concerning
+him in America, there was no question in England. Howells says:
+
+    In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. Lord mayors,
+    lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he
+    was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the
+    favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation.
+
+After that first visit of Mark Twain's, when Americans in England,
+referring to their great statesmen, authors, and the like, naturally
+mentioned the names of Seward, Webster, Lowell, or Holmes, the English
+comment was likely to be: "Never mind those. We can turn out academic
+Sewards by the dozen, and cultured humorists like Lowell and Holmes by
+the score. Tell us of Lincoln, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain. We cannot
+match these; they interest us." And it was true. History could not
+match them, for they were unique.
+
+Clemens would have been more than human if in time he had not realized
+the fuller meaning of this triumph, and exulted in it a little to the
+folks at home. There never lived a more modest, less pretentious, less
+aggressive man than Mark Twain, but there never lived a man who took a
+more childlike delight in genuine appreciation; and, being childlike, it
+was only human that he should wish those nearest to him to share his
+happiness. After one memorable affair he wrote:
+
+    I have been received in a sort of tremendous way to-night by the
+    brains of London, assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of
+    London; mine being (between you and me) a name which was received
+    with a thundering outburst of spontaneous applause when the long
+    list of guests was called.
+
+I might have perished on the spot but for the friendly support and
+assistance of my excellent friend, Sir John Bennett.
+
+This letter does not tell all of the incident or the real reason why he
+might have perished on the spot. During the long roll-call of guests he
+had lost interest a little, and was conversing in whispers with his
+"excellent friend," Sir John Bennett, stopping to applaud now and then
+when the applause of the others indicated that some distinguished name
+had been pronounced. All at once the applause broke out with great
+vehemence. This must be some very distinguished person indeed. He
+joined in it with great enthusiasm. When it was over he whispered to Sir
+John:
+
+"Whose name was that we were just applauding?"
+
+"Mark Twain's."
+
+Whereupon the support was needed.
+
+Poor little pirate Hotten did not have a happy time during this visit. He
+had reveled in the prospect at first, for he anticipated a large increase
+to be derived from his purloined property; but suddenly, one morning, he
+was aghast to find in the Spectator a signed letter from Mark Twain, in
+which he was repudiated, referred to as "John Camden Hottentot," an
+unsavory person generally. Hotten also sent a letter to the Spectator,
+in which he attempted to justify himself, but it was a feeble
+performance. Clemens prepared two other communications, each worse than
+the other and both more destructive than the first one. But these were
+only to relieve his mind. He did not print them. In one of them he
+pursued the fancy of John Camden Hottentot, whom he offers as a specimen
+to the Zoological Gardens.
+
+It is not a bird. It is not a man. It is not a fish. It does not seem
+to be in all respects a reptile. It has the body and features of a man,
+but scarcely any of the instincts that belong to such a structure.... I
+am sure that this singular little creature is the missing link between
+the man and the hyena.
+
+Hotten had preyed upon explorer Stanley and libeled him in a so-called.
+biography to a degree that had really aroused some feeling against
+Stanley in England. Only for the moment--the Queen invited Stanley to
+luncheon, and newspaper criticism ceased. Hotten was in general
+disrepute, therefore, so it was not worth while throwing a second brick
+at him.
+
+In fact, now that Clemens had expended his venom, on paper, Hotten seemed
+to him rather an amusing figure than otherwise. An incident grew out of
+it all, however, that was not amusing. E. P. Hingston, whom the reader
+may remember as having been with Artemus Ward in Virginia City, and one
+of that happy group that wined and dined the year away, had been engaged
+by Hotten to write the introductory to his edition of The Innocents
+Abroad. It was a well-written, highly complimentary appreciation.
+Hingston did not dream that he was committing an offense, nor did Clemens
+himself regard it as such in the beginning.
+
+But Mark Twain's views had undergone a radical change, and with
+characteristic dismissal of previous conditions he had forgotten that he
+had ever had any other views than those he now held. Hingston was in
+London, and one evening, at a gathering, approached Clemens with
+outstretched hand. But Clemens failed to see Hingston's hand or to
+recognize him. In after-years his conscience hurt him terribly for this.
+He remembered it only with remorse and shame. Once, in his old age, he
+spoke of it with deep sorrow.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXVII
+
+THE BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+
+The book on England, which he had prepared for so carefully, was never
+written. Hundreds of the stylographic pages were filled, and the
+duplicates sent home for the entertainment of Olivia Clemens, but the
+notes were not completed, and the actual writing was never begun. There
+was too much sociability in London for one thing, and then he found that
+he could not write entertainingly of England without introducing too many
+personalities, and running the risk of offending those who had taken him
+into their hearts and homes. In a word, he would have to write too
+seriously or not at all.
+
+He began his memoranda industriously enough, and the volume might have
+been as charming and as valuable as any he has left behind. The reader
+will hardly fail to find a few of the entries interesting. They are
+offered here as examples of his daily observation during those early
+weeks of his stay, and to show somewhat of his purpose:
+
+                    AN EXPATRIATE
+
+    There was once an American thief who fled his country and took
+    refuge in England. He dressed himself after the fashion of the
+    Londoners, and taught his tongue the peculiarities of the London
+    pronunciation and did his best in all ways to pass himself for a
+    native. But he did two fatal things: he stopped at the Langham
+    Hotel, and the first trip he took was to visit Stratford-on-Avon and
+    the grave of Shakespeare. These things betrayed his nationality.
+
+                  STANLEY AND THE QUEEN
+
+    See the power a monarch wields! When I arrived here, two weeks ago,
+    the papers and geographers were in a fair way to eat poor Stanley up
+    without salt or sauce. The Queen says, "Come four hundred miles up
+    into Scotland and sit at my luncheon-table fifteen minutes"; which,
+    being translated, means, "Gentlemen, I believe in this man and take
+    him under my protection"; and not another yelp is heard.
+
+                  AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM
+
+    What a place it is!
+
+    Mention some very rare curiosity of a peculiar nature--a something
+    which you have read about somewhere but never seen--they show you a
+    dozen! They show you all the possible varieties of that thing!
+    They show you curiously wrought jeweled necklaces of beaten gold,
+    worn by the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Etruscans, Greeks,
+    Britons--every people of the forgotten ages, indeed. They show you
+    the ornaments of all the tribes and peoples that live or ever did
+    live. Then they show you a cast taken from Cromwell's face in
+    death; then the venerable vase that once contained the ashes of
+    Xerxes.
+
+    I am wonderfully thankful for the British Museum. Nobody comes
+    bothering around me--nobody elbows me--all the room and all the
+    light I want, under this huge dome--no disturbing noises--and people
+    standing ready to bring me a copy of pretty much any book that ever
+    was printed under the sun--and if I choose to go wandering about the
+    long corridors and galleries of the great building the secrets of
+    all the earth and all the ages axe laid open to me. I am not
+    capable of expressing my gratitude for the British Museum--it seems
+    as if I do not know any but little words and weak ones.
+
+                WESTMINSTER ABBEY BY NIGHT
+
+    It was past eleven o'clock and I was just going to bed. But this
+    friend of mine was as reliable as he was eccentric, and so there was
+    not a doubt in my mind that his "expedition" had merit in it. I put
+    on my coat and boots again, and we drove away.
+
+    "Where is it? Where are we going?"
+
+    "Don't worry. You'll see."
+
+    He was not inclined to talk. So I thought this must be a weighty
+    matter. My curiosity grew with the minutes, but I kept it manfully
+    under the surface. I watched the lamps, the signs, the numbers as
+    we thundered down the long street. I am always lost in London, day
+    or night. It was very chilly, almost bleak. People leaned against
+    the gusty blasts as if it were the dead of winter. The crowds grew
+    thinner and thinner, and the noises waxed faint and seemed far away.
+    The sky was overcast and threatening. We drove on, and still on,
+    till I wondered if we were ever going to stop. At last we passed by
+    a spacious bridge and a vast building, and presently entered a
+    gateway, passed through a sort of tunnel, and stopped in a court
+    surrounded by the black outlines of a great edifice. Then we
+    alighted, walked a dozen steps or so, and waited. In a little while
+    footsteps were heard, a man emerged from the darkness, and we
+    dropped into his wake without saying anything. He led us under an
+    archway of masonry, and from that into a roomy tunnel, through a
+    tall iron gate, which he locked behind us. We followed him down
+    this tunnel, guided more by his footsteps on the stone flagging than
+    by anything we could very distinctly see. At the end of it we came
+    to another iron gate, and our conductor stopped there and lit a
+    bull's-eye lantern. Then he unlocked the gate; and I wished he had
+    oiled it first, it grated so dismally. The gate swung open and we
+    stood on the threshold of what seemed a limitless domed and pillared
+    cavern, carved out of the solid darkness. The conductor and my
+    friend took off their hats reverently, and I did likewise. For the
+    moment that we stood thus there was not a sound, and the stillness
+    seemed to add to the solemnity of the gloom. I looked my inquiry!
+
+    "It is the tomb of the great dead of England-Westminster Abbey."...
+
+    We were among the tombs; on every hand dull shapes of men, sitting,
+    standing, or stooping, inspected us curiously out of the darkness
+    --reached out their hands toward us--some appealing, some beckoning,
+    some warning us away. Effigies they were--statues over the graves;
+    but they looked human and natural in the murky shadows. Now a
+    little half-grown black and white cat squeezed herself through the
+    bars of the iron gate and came purring lovingly about us, unawed by
+    the time or the place, unimpressed by the marble pomp that
+    sepulchers a line of mighty dead that ends with a great author of
+    yesterday and began with a sceptered monarch away back in the dawn
+    of history, more than twelve hundred years ago . . . .
+
+    Mr. Wright flashed his lantern first upon this object and then upon
+    that, and kept up a running commentary that showed there was nothing
+    about the venerable Abbey that was trivial in his eyes or void of
+    interest. He is a man in authority, being superintendent, and his
+    daily business keeps him familiar with every nook and corner of the
+    great pile. Casting a luminous ray now here, now yonder, he would
+    say:
+
+    "Observe the height of the Abbey--one hundred and three feet to the
+    base of the roof; I measured it myself the other day. Notice the
+    base of this column--old, very old--hundreds and hundreds of years
+    --and how well they knew how to build in those old days! Notice it
+    --every stone is laid horizontally; that is to say, just as nature
+    laid it originally in the quarry not set up edgewise; in our day
+    some people set them on edge, and then wonder why they split and
+    flake. Architects cannot teach nature anything. Let me remove this
+    matting--it is put here to preserve the pavement; now there is a bit
+    of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these
+    scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before
+    time and sacrilegious idlers marred it. Now there, in the border,
+    was an inscription, once see, follow the circle-you can trace it by
+    the ornaments that have been pulled out--here is an A and there is
+    an O, and yonder another A--all beautiful Old English capitals;
+    there is no telling what the inscription was--no record left now.
+    Now move along in this direction, if you please. Yonder is where
+    old King Sebert the Saxon lies his monument is the oldest one in the
+    Abbey; Sebert died in 616,--[Clemens probably misunderstood the
+    name. It was Ethelbert who died in 616. The name Sebert does not
+    appear in any Saxon annals accessible to the author.]--and that's
+    as much, as twelve hundred and fifty years ago think of it! Twelve
+    hundred and fifty years! Now yonder is the last one--Charles
+    Dickens--there on the floor, with the brass letters on the slab--and
+    to this day the people come and put flowers on it.... There is
+    Garrick's monument; and Addison's, and Thackeray's bust--and
+    Macaulay lies there. And close to Dickens and Garrick lie Sheridan
+    and Dr. Johnson--and here is old Parr....
+
+    "That stone there covers Campbell the poet. Here are names you know
+    pretty well--Milton, and Gray who wrote the Elegy, and Butler who
+    wrote Hudibras; and Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson--there are three
+    tablets to him scattered about the Abbey, and all got 'O, Rare Ben
+    Jonson' cut on them. You were standing on one of them just now he
+    is buried standing up. There used to be a tradition here that
+    explains it. The story goes that he did not dare ask to be buried
+    in the Abbey, so he asked King James if he would make him a present
+    of eighteen inches of English ground, and the King said 'yes,' and
+    asked him where he would have it, and he said in Westminster Abbey.
+    Well, the King wouldn't go back on his word, and so there he is,
+    sure enough-stood up on end."
+
+The reader may regret that there are not more of these entries, and that
+the book itself was never written. Just when he gave up the project is
+not recorded. He was urged to lecture in London, but declined. To Mrs.
+Clemens, in September, he wrote:
+
+Everybody says lecture, lecture, lecture, but I have not the least idea
+of doing it; certainly not at present. Mr. Dolby, who took Dickens to
+America, is coming to talk business tomorrow, though I have sent him word
+once before that I can't be hired to talk here; because I have no time to
+spare. There is too much sociability; I do not get along fast enough
+with work.
+
+In October he declared that he was very homesick, and proposed that Mrs.
+Clemens and Susie join him at once in London, unless she would prefer to
+have him come home for the winter and all of them return to London in the
+spring. So it is likely that the book was not then abandoned. He felt
+that his visit was by no means ended; that it was, in fact, only just
+begun, but he wanted the ones he loved most to share it with him. To his
+mother and sister, in November, he wrote:
+
+I came here to take notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend
+dinners and make speeches. I have had a jolly good time, and I do hate
+to go away from these English folks; they make a stranger feel entirely
+at home, and they laugh so easily that it is a comfort to make
+after-dinner speeches here. I have made hundreds of friends; and last
+night, in the crush at the opening of the new Guild Hall Library and
+Museum, I was surprised to meet a familiar face every other step.
+
+All his impressions of England had been happy ones. He could deliver a
+gentle satire now and then at certain British institutions--certain
+London localities and features--as in his speech at the Savage Club,
+--[September 28, 1872. This is probably the most characteristic speech
+made by Mark Twain during his first London visit; the reader will find it
+in full in Appendix L, at the end of last volume.]--but taking the snug
+island as a whole, its people, its institutions, its fair, rural aspects,
+he had found in it only delight. To Mrs. Crane he wrote:
+
+    If you and Theodore will come over in the spring with Livy and me,
+    and spend the summer, you shall see a country that is so beautiful
+    that you will be obliged to believe in fairy-land. There is nothing
+    like it elsewhere on the globe. You should have a season ticket and
+    travel up and down every day between London and Oxford and worship
+    nature.
+
+    And Theodore can browse with me among dusty old dens that look now
+    as they looked five hundred years ago; and puzzle over books in the
+    British Museum that were made before Christ was born; and in the
+    customs of their public dinners, and the ceremonies of every
+    official act, and the dresses of a thousand dignitaries, trace the
+    speech and manners of all the centuries that have dragged their
+    lagging decades over England since the Heptarchy fell asunder. I
+    would a good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you
+    over.
+
+He sailed November 12th, on the Batavia, loaded with Christmas presents
+for everybody; jewelry, furs, laces; also a practical steam-engine for
+his namesake, Sam Moffett. Half-way across the Atlantic the Batavia ran
+into a hurricane and was badly damaged by heavy seas, and driven far out
+of her course. It was a lucky event on the whole, for she fell in with a
+water-logged lumber bark, a complete wreck, with nine surviving sailors
+clinging to her rigging. In the midst of the wild gale a lifeboat was
+launched and the perishing men were rescued. Clemens prepared a graphic
+report of the matter for the Royal Humane Society, asking that medals be
+conferred upon the brave rescuers, a document that was signed by his
+fellow-passengers and obtained for the men complete recognition and wide
+celebrity. Closing, the writer said:
+
+    As might have been anticipated, if I have been of any service toward
+    rescuing these nine shipwrecked human beings by standing around the
+    deck in a furious storm, without an umbrella, keeping an eye on
+    things and seeing that they were done right, and yelling whenever a
+    cheer seemed to be the important thing, I am glad and I am
+    satisfied. I ask no reward. I would do it again under the same
+    circumstances. But what I do plead for, earnestly and sincerely, is
+    that the Royal Humane Society will remember our captain and our
+    life-boat crew, and in so remembering them increase the high honor
+    and esteem in which the society is held all over the civilized
+    world.
+
+The Batavia reached New York November 26, 1872. Mark Twain had been
+absent three months, during which he had been brought to at least a
+partial realization of what his work meant to him and to mankind.
+
+An election had taken place during his absence--an election which
+gratified him deeply, for it had resulted in the second presidency of
+General Grant and in the defeat of Horace Greeley, whom he admired
+perhaps, but not as presidential material. To Thomas Nast, who had aided
+very effectually in Mr. Greeley's overwhelming defeat, Clemens wrote:
+
+Nast, you more than any other man have won a prodigious victory for
+Grant--I mean, rather, for civilization and progress. Those pictures
+were simply marvelous, and if any man in the land has a right to hold his
+head up and be honestly proud of his share in this year's vast events
+that man is unquestionably yourself. We all do sincerely honor you, and
+are proud of you.
+
+Horace Greeley's peculiar abilities and eccentricities won celebrity for
+him, rather than voters. Mark Twain once said of him:
+
+"He was a great man, an honest man, and served his, country well and was
+an honor to it. Also, he was a good-natured man, but abrupt with
+strangers if they annoyed him when he was busy. He was profane, but that
+is nothing; the best of us is that. I did not know him well, but only
+just casually, and by accident. I never met him but once. I called on
+him in the Tribune office, but I was not intending to. I was looking for
+Whitelaw Reid, and got into the wrong den. He was alone at his desk,
+writing, and we conversed--not long, but just a little. I asked him if
+he was well, and he said, 'What the hell do you want?' Well, I couldn't
+remember what I wanted, so I said I would call again. But I didn't."
+
+Clemens did not always tell the incident just in this way. Sometimes it
+was John Hay he was looking for instead of Reid, and the conversation
+with Greeley varied; but perhaps there was a germ of history under it
+somewhere, and at any rate it could have happened well enough, and not
+have been out of character with either of the men.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXVIII
+
+"THE GILDED AGE"
+
+Mark Twain did not go on the lecture circuit that winter. Redpath had
+besought him as usual, and even in midsummer had written:
+
+"Will you? Won't you? We have seven thousand to eight thousand dollars
+in engagements recorded for you," and he named a list of towns ranging
+geographically from Boston to St. Paul.
+
+But Clemens had no intention then of ever lecturing any more, and again
+in November, from London, he announced (to Redpath):
+
+"When I yell again for less than $500 I'll be pretty hungry, but I
+haven't any intention of yelling at any price."
+
+Redpath pursued him, and in January proposed $400 for a single night in
+Philadelphia, but without result. He did lecture two nights in Steinway
+Hall for the Mercantile Library Association, on the basis of half
+profits, netting $1,300 for the two nights as his share; and he lectured
+one night in Hartford, at a profit Of $1,500, for charity. Father
+Hawley, of Hartford, had announced that his missionary work was suffering
+for lack of funds. Some of his people were actually without food, he
+said, their children crying with hunger. No one ever responded to an
+appeal like that quicker than Samuel Clemens. He offered to deliver a
+lecture free, and to bear an equal proportion of whatever expenses were
+incurred by the committee of eight who agreed to join in forwarding the
+project. He gave the Sandwich Island lecture, and at the close of it a
+large card was handed him with the figures of the receipts printed upon
+it. It was held up to view, and the house broke into a storm of cheers.
+
+He did very little writing during the early weeks following his return.
+Early in the year (January 3 and 6, 1873) he contributed two Sandwich
+Island letters to the Tribune, in which, in his own peculiar fashion, he
+urged annexation.
+
+"We must annex those people," he declared, and proceeded to specify the
+blessings we could give them, such as "leather-headed juries, the
+insanity law, and the Tweed Ring."
+
+    We can confer Woodhull and Clafin on them, and George Francis Train.
+    We can give them lecturers! I will go myself.
+
+    We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner
+    on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy
+    civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need!
+
+    "Shall we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?"
+
+His success in England became an incentive to certain American
+institutions to recognize his gifts at home. Early in the year he was
+dined as the guest of the Lotos Club of New York, and a week or two later
+elected to its membership. This was but a beginning. Some new
+membership or honor was offered every little while, and so many banquets
+that he finally invented a set form for declining them. He was not yet
+recognized as the foremost American man of letters, but undoubtedly he
+had become the most popular; and Edwin Whipple, writing at this time, or
+but little later, said:
+
+"Mark Twain is regarded chiefly as a humorist, but the exercise of his
+real talents would rank him with the ablest of our authors in the past
+fifty years." So he was beginning to be "discovered" in high places.
+
+It was during this winter that the Clemens household enjoyed its first
+real home life in Hartford, its first real home life anywhere since those
+earliest days of marriage. The Hooker mansion was a comfortable place.
+The little family had comparatively good health. Their old friends were
+stanch and lavishly warm-hearted, and they had added many new ones. Their
+fireside was a delightful nucleus around which gathered those they cared
+for most, the Twichells, the Warner families, the Trumbulls--all certain
+of a welcome there. George Warner, only a little while ago, remembering,
+said:
+
+"The Clemens house was the only one I have ever known where there was
+never any preoccupation in the evenings, and where visitors were always
+welcome. Clemens was the best kind of a host; his evenings after dinner
+were an unending flow of stories."
+
+Friends living near by usually came and went at will, often without the
+ceremony of knocking or formal leave-taking. They were more like one
+great family in that neighborhood, with a community of interests, a unity
+of ideals. The Warner families and the Clemenses were particularly
+intimate, and out of their association grew Mark Twain's next important
+literary undertaking, his collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner in
+'The Gilded Age'.
+
+A number of more or less absurd stories have been printed about the
+origin of this book. It was a very simple matter, a perfectly natural
+development.
+
+At the dinner-table one night, with the Warners present, criticisms of
+recent novels were offered, with the usual freedom and severity of
+dinner-table talk. The husbands were inclined to treat rather lightly
+the novels in which their wives were finding entertainment. The wives
+naturally retorted that the proper thing for the husbands to do was to
+furnish the American people with better ones. This was regarded in the
+nature of a challenge, and as such was accepted--mutually accepted: that
+is to say, in partnership. On the spur of the moment Clemens and Warner
+agreed that they would do a novel together, that they would begin it
+immediately. This is the whole story of the book's origin; so far, at
+least, as the collaboration is concerned. Clemens, in fact, had the
+beginning of a story in his mind, but had been unwilling to undertake an
+extended work of fiction alone. He welcomed only too eagerly, therefore,
+the proposition of joint authorship. His purpose was to write a tale
+around that lovable character of his youth, his mother's cousin, James
+Lampton--to let that gentle visionary stand as the central figure against
+a proper background. The idea appealed to Warner, and there was no delay
+in the beginning. Clemens immediately set to work and completed 399
+pages of the manuscript, the first eleven chapters of the book, before
+the early flush of enthusiasm waned.
+
+Warner came over then, and Clemens read it aloud to him. Warner had some
+plans for the story, and took it up at this point, and continued it
+through the next twelve chapters; and so they worked alternately, "in the
+superstition," as Mark Twain long afterward declared, "that we were
+writing one coherent yarn, when I suppose, as a matter of fact, we were
+writing two incoherent ones."--[The reader may be interested in the
+division of labor. Clemens wrote chapters I to XI; also chapters XXIV,
+XXV, XXVII, XXVIII, XXX, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XLII,
+XLIII, XLV, LI, LII, LIII, LVII, LIX, LX, LXI, LXII, and portions of
+chapters XXXV, XLIX, LVI. Warner wrote chapters XII to XXIII; also
+chapters XXVI, XXIX, XXXI, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL, XLI, XLIV, XLVI, XLVII,
+XLVIII, L, LIV, LV, LVIII, LXIII, and portions of chapters XXXV, XLIX,
+and LVI. The work was therefore very evenly divided.
+
+There was another co-worker on The Gilded Age before the book was finally
+completed. This was J. Hammond Trumbull, who prepared the variegated,
+marvelous cryptographic chapter headings: Trumbull was the most learned
+man that ever lived in Hartford. He was familiar with all literary and
+scientific data, and according to Clemens could swear in twenty-seven
+languages. It was thought to be a choice idea to get Trumbull to supply
+a lingual medley of quotations to precede the chapters in the new book,
+the purpose being to excite interest and possibly to amuse the reader--a
+purpose which to some extent appears to have miscarried.]
+
+The book was begun in February and finished in April, so the work did not
+lag. The result, if not highly artistic, made astonishingly good
+reading. Warner had the touch of romance, Clemens, the gift of creating,
+or at least of portraying, human realities. Most of his characters
+reflected intimate personalities of his early life. Besides the
+apotheosis of James Lampton into the immortal Sellers, Orion became
+Washington Hawkins, Squire Clemens the judge, while Mark Twain's own
+personality, in a greater or lesser degree, is reflected in most of his
+creations. As for the Tennessee land, so long a will-o'the-wisp and a
+bugbear, it became tangible property at last. Only a year or two before
+Clemens had written to Orion:
+
+    Oh, here! I don't want to be consulted at all about Tennessee. I
+    don't want it even mentioned to me. When I make a suggestion it is
+    for you to act upon it or throw it aside, but I beseech you never to
+    ask my advice, opinion, or consent about that hated property.
+
+But it came in good play now. It is the important theme of the story.
+
+Mark Twain was well qualified to construct his share of the tale. He
+knew his characters, their lives, and their atmospheres perfectly.
+Senator Dilworthy (otherwise Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, then notorious
+for attempted vote-buying) was familiar enough. That winter in
+Washington had acquainted Clemens with the life there, its political
+intrigues, and the disrepute of Congress. Warner was equally well
+qualified for his share of the undertaking, and the chief criticism that
+one may offer is the one stated by Clemens himself--that the divisions of
+the tale remain divisions rather than unity.
+
+As for the story itself--the romance and tragedy of it--the character of
+Laura in the hands of either author is one not easy to forget. Whether
+this means that the work is well done, or only strikingly done, the
+reader himself must judge. Morally, the character is not justified.
+Laura was a victim of circumstance from the beginning. There could be no
+poetic justice in her doom. To drag her out of a steamer wreck, only to
+make her the victim of a scoundrel, later an adventuress, and finally a
+murderess, all may be good art, but of a very bad kind. Laura is a sort
+of American Becky Sharp; but there is retributive justice in Becky's
+fate, whereas Laura's doom is warranted only by the author's whim. As
+for her end, whatever the virtuous public of that day might have done, a
+present-day audience would not have pelted her from the stage, destroyed
+her future, taken away her life.
+
+The authors regarded their work highly when it was finished, but that is
+nothing. Any author regards his work highly at the moment of its
+completion. In later years neither of them thought very well of their
+production; but that also is nothing. The author seldom cares very
+deeply for his offspring once it is turned over to the public charge. The
+fact that the story is still popular, still delights thousands of
+readers, when a myriad of novels that have been written since it was
+completed have lived their little day and died so utterly that even their
+names have passed out of memory, is the best verdict as to its worth.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXIX
+
+PLANNING A NEW HOME
+
+Clemens and his wife bought a lot for the new home that winter, a fine,
+sightly piece of land on Farmington Avenue--table-land, sloping down to a
+pretty stream that wound through the willows and among the trees. They
+were as delighted as children with their new purchase and the prospect of
+building. To her sister Mrs. Clemens wrote:
+
+    Mr. Clemens seems to glory in his sense of possession; he goes daily
+    into the lot, has had several falls trying to lay off the land by
+    sliding around on his feet....
+
+    For three days the ice has covered the trees, and they have been
+    glorious. We could do nothing but watch the beauty outside; if you
+    looked at the trees as the sun struck them, with your back toward
+    the sun, they were covered with jewels. If you looked toward the
+    sun it was all crystal whiteness, a perfect fairy-land. Then the
+    nights were moonlight, and that was a great beauty, the moon giving
+    us the same prismatic effect.
+
+This was the storm of which Mark Twain wrote his matchless description,
+given first in his speech on New England weather, and later preserved in
+'Following the Equator', in more extended form. In that book he likens
+an ice-storm to his impressions derived from reading descriptions of the
+Taj Mahal, that wonderful tomb of a fair East Indian queen. It is a
+marvelous bit of word-painting--his description of that majestic vision:
+"When every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and
+the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond
+plume." It will pay any one to look up that description and read it all,
+though it has been said, by the fortunate one or two who heard him first
+give it utterance as an impromptu outburst, that in the subsequent
+process of writing the bloom of its original magnificence was lost.
+
+The plans for the new house were drawn forthwith by that gentle architect
+Edward Potter, whose art to-day may be considered open to criticism, but
+not because of any lack of originality. Hartford houses of that period
+were mainly of the goods-box form of architecture, perfectly square,
+typifying the commercial pursuits of many of their owners. Potter agreed
+to get away from this idea, and a radical and even frenzied departure was
+the result. Certainly his plans presented beautiful pictures, and all
+who saw them were filled with wonder and delight. Architecture has
+lavished itself in many florescent forms since then, but we may imagine
+that Potter's "English violet" order of design, as he himself designated
+it, startled, dazzled, and captivated in a day, when most houses were
+mere habitations, built with a view to economy and the largest possible
+amount of room.
+
+Workmen were put on the ground without delay, to prepare for the
+builders, and work was rapidly pushed along. Then in May the whole
+matter was left in the hands of the architect and the carpenters (with
+Lawyer Charles E. Perkins to stand between Potter and the violent
+builder, who roared at Potter and frightened him when he wanted changes),
+while the Clemens household, with Clara Spaulding, a girlhood friend of
+Mrs. Clemens, sailed away to England for a half-year holiday.
+
+
+
+
+XC
+
+A LONG ENGLISH HOLIDAY
+
+They sailed on the Batavia, and with them went a young man named
+Thompson, a theological student whom Clemens had consented to take as an
+amanuensis. There is a pathetic incident connected with this young man,
+and it may as well be set down here. Clemens found, a few weeks after
+his arrival in England, that so great was the tax upon his time that he
+could make no use of Thompson's services. He gave Thompson fifty
+dollars, and upon the possibility of the young man's desiring to return
+to America, advanced him another fifty dollars, saying that he could
+return it some day, and never thought of it again. But the young man
+remembered it, and one day, thirty-six years later, after a life of
+hardship and struggle, such as the life of a country minister is apt to
+be, he wrote and inclosed a money-order, a payment on his debt. That
+letter and its inclosure brought only sorrow to Mark Twain. He felt that
+it laid upon him the accumulated burden of the weary thirty-six years'
+struggle with ill-fortune. He returned the money, of course, and in a
+biographical note commented:
+
+    How pale painted heroisms of romance look beside it! Thompson's
+    heroism, which is real, which is colossal, which is sublime, and
+    which is costly beyond all estimate, is achieved in profound
+    obscurity, and its hero walks in rags to the end of his days. I had
+    forgotten Thompson completely, but he flashes before me as vividly
+    as lightning. I can see him now. It was on the deck of the
+    Batavia, in the dock. The ship was casting off, with that hubbub
+    and confusion and rushing of sailors, and shouting of orders and
+    shrieking of boatswain whistles, which marked the departure
+    preparations in those days--an impressive contrast with the solemn
+    silence which marks the departure preparations of the giant ships of
+    the present day. Mrs. Clemens, Clara Spaulding, little Susy, and
+    the nurse-maid were all properly garbed for the occasion. We all
+    had on our storm-rig, heavy clothes of somber hue, but new and
+    designed and constructed for the purpose, strictly in accordance
+    with sea-going etiquette; anything wearable on land being distinctly
+    and odiously out of the question.
+
+    Very well. On that deck, and gliding placidly among those honorable
+    and properly upholstered groups, appeared Thompson, young, grave,
+    long, slim, with an aged fuzzy plug hat towering high on the upper
+    end of him and followed by a gray duster, which flowed down, without
+    break or wrinkle, to his ankles. He came straight to us, and shook
+    hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew him. A
+    nigger in heaven could not have created a profounder astonishment.
+
+    However, Thompson didn't know that anything was happening. He had
+    no prejudices about clothes. I can still see him as he looked when
+    we passed Sandy Hook and the winds of the big ocean smote us.
+    Erect, lofty, and grand he stood facing the blast, holding his plug
+    on with both hands and his generous duster blowing out behind, level
+    with his neck. There were scoffers observing, but he didn't know
+    it; he wasn't disturbed.
+
+    In my mind, I see him once afterward, clothed as before, taking me
+    down in shorthand. The Shah of Persia had come to England and Dr.
+    Hosmer, of the Herald, had sent me to Ostend, to view his Majesty's
+    progress across the Channel and write an account of it. I can't
+    recall Thompson after that, and I wish his memory had been as poor
+    as mine.
+
+They had been a month in London, when the final incident referred to took
+place--the arrival of the Shah of Persia--and were comfortably quartered
+at the Langham Hotel. To Twichell Clemens wrote:
+
+    We have a luxuriously ample suite of apartments on the third floor,
+    our bedroom looking straight up Portland Place, our parlor having a
+    noble array of great windows looking out upon both streets (Portland
+    Place and the crook that joins it onto Regent Street).
+
+    Nine p.m. full twilight, rich sunset tints lingering in the west.
+
+    I am not going to write anything; rather tell it when I get back.
+    I love you and Harmony, and that is all the fresh news I've got
+    anyway. And I mean to keep that fresh all the time.
+
+Mrs. Clemens, in a letter to her sister, declared: "It is perfectly
+discouraging to try to write you. There is so much to write about that
+it makes me feel as if it was no use to begin."
+
+It was a period of continuous honor and entertainment. If Mark Twain had
+been a lion on his first visit, he was little less than royalty now. His
+rooms at the Langham were like a court. Miss Spaulding (now Mrs. John B.
+Stanchfield) remembers that Robert Browning, Turgenieff, Sir John
+Millais, Lord Houghton, and Sir Charles Dilke (then at the height of his
+fame) were among those that called to pay their respects. In a recent
+letter she says:
+
+    I remember a delightful luncheon that Charles Kingsley gave for Mr.
+    Clemens; also an evening when Lord Dunraven brought Mr. Home, the
+    medium, Lord Dunraven telling many of the remarkable things he had
+    seen Mr. Home do. I remember I wanted so much to see him float out
+    of a seven or eight story window, and enter another, which Lord
+    Dunraven said he had seen him do many times. But Mr. Home had been
+    very ill, and said his power had left him. My great regret was that
+    we did not see Carlyle, who was too sad and ill for visits.
+
+Among others they met Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland,
+and found him so shy that it was almost impossible to get him to say a
+word on any subject.
+
+"The shyest full-grown man, except Uncle Remus, I ever met," Clemens once
+wrote. "Dr. MacDonald and several other lively talkers were present, and
+the talk went briskly on for a couple of hours, but Carroll sat still all
+the while, except now and then when he answered a question."
+
+At a dinner given by George Smalley they met Herbert Spencer, and at a
+luncheon-party at Lord Houghton's, Sir Arthur Helps, then a world-wide
+celebrity.
+
+    Lord Elcho, a large, vigorous man, sat at some distance down the
+    table. He was talking earnestly about the town of Godalming. It
+    was a deep, flowing, and inarticulate rumble, but I caught the
+    Godalming pretty nearly every time it broke free of the rumbling,
+    and as all the strength was on the first end of the word, it
+    startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing. In the
+    middle of the luncheon Lady Houghton rose, remarked to the guests on
+    her right and on her left, in a matter-of-fact way, "Excuse me, I
+    have an engagement," and without further ceremony, she went off to
+    meet it. This would have been doubtful etiquette in America. Lord
+    Houghton told a number of delightful stories. He told them in
+    French, and I lost nothing of them but the nubs.
+
+Little Susy and her father thrived on London life, but after a time it
+wore on Mrs. Clemens. She delighted in the English cordiality and
+culture, but the demands were heavy, the social forms sometimes trying.
+Life in London was interesting, and in its way charming, but she did not
+enter into it with quite her husband's enthusiasm and heartiness. In the
+end they canceled all London engagements and quietly set out for
+Scotland. On the way they rested a few days in York, a venerable place
+such as Mark Twain always loved to describe. In a letter to Mrs. Langdon
+he wrote:
+
+    For the present we shall remain in this queer old walled town, with
+    its crooked, narrow lanes, that tell us of their old day that knew
+    no wheeled vehicles; its plaster-and-timber dwellings, with upper
+    stories far overhanging the street, and thus marking their date,
+    say three hundred years ago; the stately city walls, the castellated
+    gates, the ivy-grown, foliage-sheltered, most noble and picturesque
+    ruin of St. Mary's Abbey, suggesting their date, say five hundred
+    years ago, in the heart of Crusading times and the glory of English
+    chivalry and romance; the vast Cathedral of York, with its worn
+    carvings and quaintly pictured windows, preaching of still remoter
+    days; the outlandish names of streets and courts and byways that
+    stand as a record and a memorial, all these centuries, of Danish
+    dominion here in still earlier times; the hint here and there of
+    King Arthur and his knights and their bloody fights with Saxon
+    oppressors round about this old city more than thirteen hundred
+    years gone by; and, last of all, the melancholy old stone coffins
+    and sculptured inscriptions, a venerable arch and a hoary tower of
+    stone that still remain and are kissed by the sun and caressed by
+    the shadows every day, just as the sun and the shadows have kissed
+    and, caressed them every lagging day since the Roman Emperor's
+    soldiers placed them here in the times when Jesus the Son of Mary
+    walked the streets of Nazareth a youth, with no more name or fame
+    than the Yorkshire boy who is loitering down this street this
+    moment.
+
+They reached Edinburgh at the end of July and secluded themselves in
+Veitch's family hotel in George Street, intending to see no one. But
+this plan was not a success; the social stress of London had been too
+much for Mrs. Clemens, and she collapsed immediately after their arrival.
+Clemens was unacquainted in Edinburgh, but remembered that Dr. John
+Brown, who had written Rab and His Friend, lived there. He learned his
+address, and that he was still a practising physician. He walked around
+to 23 Rutland Street, and made himself known. Dr. Brown came forthwith,
+and Mrs. Clemens speedily recovered under his able and inspiring
+treatment.
+
+The association did not end there. For nearly a month Dr. Brown was
+their daily companion, either at the hotel, or in his own home, or on
+protracted drives when he made his round of visits, taking these new
+friends along. Dr. John was beloved by everybody in Edinburgh, everybody
+in Scotland, for that matter, and his story of Rab had won him a
+following throughout Christendom. He was an unpretentious sovereign.
+Clemens once wrote of him:
+
+    His was a sweet and winning face, as beautiful a face as I have ever
+    known. Reposeful, gentle, benignant; the face of a saint at peace
+    with all the world and placidly beaming upon it the sunshine of love
+    that filled his heart.
+
+He was the friend of all dogs, and of all people. It has been told of
+him that once, when driving, he thrust his head suddenly out of the
+carriage window, then resumed his place with a disappointed look.
+
+"Who was it?" asked his companion. "Some one you know?"
+
+"No," he said. "A dog I don't know."
+
+He became the boon companion and playmate of little Susy, then not quite
+a year and a half old. He called her Megalopis, a Greek term, suggested
+by her eyes; those deep, burning eyes that seemed always so full of
+life's sadder philosophies, and impending tragedy. In a collection of
+Dr. Brown's letters he refers to this period. In one place he says:
+
+    Had the author of The Innocents Abroad not come to Edinburgh at that
+    time we in all human probability might never have met, and what a
+    deprivation that would have been to me during the last quarter of a
+    century!
+
+And in another place:
+
+    I am attending the wife of Mark Twain. His real name is Clemens.
+    She is a quite lovely little woman, modest and clever, and she has a
+    girlie eighteen months old, her ludicrous miniature--and such eyes!
+
+Those playmates, the good doctor and Megalopis, romped together through
+the hotel rooms with that complete abandon which few grown persons can
+assume in their play with children, and not all children can assume in
+their play with grown-ups. They played "bear," and the "bear" (which was
+a very little one, so little that when it stood up behind the sofa you
+could just get a glimpse of yellow hair) would lie in wait for her
+victim, and spring out and surprise him and throw him into frenzies of
+fear.
+
+Almost every day they made his professional rounds with him. He always
+carried a basket of grapes for his patients. His guests brought along
+books to read while they waited. When he stopped for a call he would
+say:
+
+"Entertain yourselves while I go in and reduce the population."
+
+There was much sight-seeing to do in Edinburgh, and they could not quite
+escape social affairs. There were teas and luncheons and dinners with
+the Dunfermlines and the Abercrombies, and the MacDonalds, and with
+others of those brave clans that no longer slew one another among the
+grim northern crags and glens, but were as sociable and entertaining
+lords and ladies as ever the southland could produce. They were very
+gentle folk indeed, and Mrs. Clemens, in future years, found her heart
+going back oftener to Edinburgh than to any other haven of those first
+wanderings. August 24th she wrote to her sister:
+
+    We leave Edinburgh to-morrow with sincere regret; we have had such a
+    delightful stay here--we do so regret leaving Dr. Brown and his
+    sister, thinking that we shall probably never see them again [as
+    indeed they never did].
+
+They spent a day or two at Glasgow and sailed for Ireland, where they put
+in a fortnight, and early in September were back in England again, at
+Chester, that queer old city where; from a tower on the wall, Charles I.
+read the story of his doom. Reginald Cholmondeley had invited them to
+visit his country seat, beautiful Condover Hall, near Shrewsbury, and in
+that lovely retreat they spent some happy, restful days. Then they were
+in the whirl of London once more, but escaped for a fortnight to Paris,
+sight-seeing and making purchases for the new home.
+
+Mrs. Clemens was quite ready to return to America, by this time.
+
+    I am blue and cross and homesick [she wrote]. I suppose what makes
+    me feel the latter is because we are contemplating to stay in London
+    another month. There has not one sheet of Mr. Clemens's proof come
+    yet, and if he goes home before the book is published here he will
+    lose his copyright. And then his friends feel that it will be
+    better for him to lecture in London before his book is published,
+    not only that it will give him a larger but a more enviable
+    reputation. I would not hesitate one moment if it were simply for
+    the money that his copyright will bring him, but if his reputation
+    will be better for his staying and lecturing, of course he ought to
+    stay.... The truth is, I can't bear the thought of postponing going
+    home.
+
+It is rather gratifying to find Olivia Clemens human, like that, now and
+then. Otherwise, on general testimony, one might well be tempted to
+regard her as altogether of another race and kind.
+
+
+
+
+XCI
+
+A LONDON LECTURE
+
+Clemens concluded to hasten the homeward journey, but to lecture a few
+nights in London before starting. He would then accompany his little
+family home, and return at once to continue the lecture series and
+protect his copyright. This plan was carried out. In a communication to
+the Standard, October 7th, he said:
+
+    SIR,--In view of the prevailing frenzy concerning the Sandwich
+    Islands, and the inflamed desire of the public to acquire
+    information concerning them, I have thought it well to tarry yet
+    another week in England and deliver a lecture upon this absorbing
+    subject. And lest it should be thought unbecoming in me, a
+    stranger, to come to the public rescue at such a time, instead of
+    leaving to abler hands a matter of so much moment, I desire to
+    explain that I do it with the best motives and the most honorable
+    intentions. I do it because I am convinced that no one can allay
+    this unwholesome excitement as effectually as I can, and to allay
+    it, and allay it as quickly as possible, is surely one thing that is
+    absolutely necessary at this juncture. I feel and know that I am
+    equal to this task, for I can allay any kind of an excitement by
+    lecturing upon it. I have saved many communities in this way. I
+    have always been able to paralyze the public interest in any topic
+    that I chose to take hold of and elucidate with all my strength.
+
+    Hoping that this explanation will show that if I am seeming to
+    intrude I am at least doing it from a high impulse, I am, sir, your
+    obedient servant,
+                         MARK TWAIN.
+
+A day later the following announcement appeared:
+
+                  QUEEN'S CONCERT ROOMS,
+                   HANOVER SQUARE.
+
+            MR. GEORGE DOLBY begs to announce that
+
+                    MR. MARK TWAIN
+
+                    WILL DELIVER A
+                      LECTURE
+                       OF A
+                  HUMOROUS CHARACTER,
+
+                     AS ABOVE, ON
+           MONDAY EVENING NEXT, OCTOBER 13th, 1873,
+            AND REPEAT IT IN THE SAME PLACE, ON
+               TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 14th,
+               WEDNESDAY "      "  15th,
+               THURSDAY "      "  16th,
+               FRIDAY  "      "  17th,
+
+                   At Eight o'Clock,
+                       AND
+             SATURDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER 18th,
+                   At Three o'Clock.
+
+                      SUBJECT:
+         "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands."
+
+    As Mr. TWAIN has spent several months in these Islands, and is well
+    acquainted with his subject, the Lecture may be expected to furnish
+    matter of interest.
+
+           STALLS, 5s.     UNRESERVED SEATS, 3s.
+
+The prospect of a lecture from Mark Twain interested the London public.
+Those who had not seen him were willing to pay even for that privilege.
+The papers were encouraging; Punch sounded a characteristic note:
+
+              WELCOME TO A LECTURER
+
+  "'Tis time we Twain did show ourselves." 'Twas said
+    By Caesar, when one Mark had lost his head:
+    By Mark, whose head's quite bright, 'tis said again:
+    Therefore, "go with me, friends, to bless this Twain."
+
+                                --Punch.
+
+Dolby had managed the Dickens lectures, and he proved his sound business
+judgment and experience by taking the largest available hall in London
+for Mark Twain.
+
+On the evening of October 13th, in the spacious Queen's Concert Rooms,
+Hanover Square, Mark Twain delivered his first public address in England.
+The subject was "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands," the old
+lecture with which he had made his first great successes. He was not
+introduced. He appeared on the platform in evening dress, assuming the
+character of a manager announcing a disappointment.
+
+Mr. Clemens, he said, had fully expected to be present. He paused and
+loud murmurs arose from the audience. He lifted his hand and they
+subsided. Then he added, "I am happy to say that Mark Twain is present,
+and will now give his lecture." Whereupon the audience roared its
+approval.
+
+It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that his triumph that week was
+a regal one. For five successive nights and a Saturday matinee the
+culture and fashion of London thronged to hear him discourse of their
+"fellow savages." It was a lecture event wholly without precedent. The
+lectures of Artemus Ward,--["Artemus the delicious," as Charles Reade
+called him, came to London in June, 1866, and gave his "piece" in
+Egyptian Hall. The refined, delicate, intellectual countenance, the
+sweet, gave, mouth, from which one might have expected philosophical
+lectures retained their seriousness while listeners were convulsed with
+laughter. There was something magical about it. Every sentence was a
+surprise. He played on his audience as Liszt did on a piano most easily
+when most effectively. Who can ever forget his attempt to stop his
+Italian pianist--"a count in his own country, but not much account in
+this"--who went on playing loudly while he was trying to tell us an
+"affecting incident" that occurred near a small clump of trees shown on
+his panorama of the Far West. The music stormed on-we could see only
+lips and arms pathetically moving till the piano suddenly ceased, and we
+heard-it was all we heard "and, she fainted in Reginald's arms." His
+tricks have been at tempted in many theaters, but Artemus Ward was
+inimitable. And all the time the man was dying. (Moneure D. Conway,
+Autobiography.)]--who had quickly become a favorite in London, had
+prepared the public for American platform humor, while the daily doings
+of this new American product, as reported by the press, had aroused
+interest, or curiosity, to a high pitch. On no occasion in his own
+country had he won such a complete triumph. The papers for a week
+devoted columns of space to appreciation and editorial comment. The
+Daily News of October 17th published a column-and-a-half editorial on
+American humor, with Mark Twain's public appearance as the general text.
+The Times referred to the continued popularity of the lectures:
+
+    They can't be said to have more than whetted the public appetite, if
+    we are to take the fact which has been imparted to us, that the
+    holding capacity of the Hanover Square Rooms has been inadequate to
+    the demand made upon it every night by Twain's lecturing, as a
+    criterion. The last lecture of this too brief course was delivered
+    yesterday before an audience which crammed to discomfort every part
+    of the principal apartment of the Hanover Square Rooms....
+
+At the close of yesterday's lecture Mark Twain was so loudly applauded
+that he returned to the stage, and, as soon as the audience gave him a
+chance of being heard, he said, with much apparent emotion:
+
+    "Ladies and Gentlemen,--I won't keep you one single moment in this
+    suffocating atmosphere. I simply wish to say that this is the last
+    lecture I shall have the honor to deliver in London until I return
+    from America, four weeks from now. I only wish to say (here Mr.
+    Clemens faltered as if too much affected to proceed) I am very
+    grateful. I do not wish to appear pathetic, but it is something
+    magnificent for a stranger to come to the metropolis of the world
+    and be received so handsomely as I have been. I simply thank you."
+
+The Saturday Review devoted a page, and Once a Week, under the head of
+"Cracking jokes," gave three pages, to praise of the literary and lecture
+methods of the new American humorist. With the promise of speedy return,
+he left London, gave the lecture once in Liverpool, and with his party
+(October 21st) set sail for home.
+
+In mid-Atlantic he remembered Dr. Brown, and wrote him:
+
+    We have plowed a long way over the sea, and there's twenty-two
+    hundred miles of restless water between us now, besides the railway
+    stretch. And yet you are so present with us, so close to us, that a
+    span and a whisper would bridge the distance.
+
+So it would seem that of all the many memories of that eventful
+half-year, that of Dr. Brown was the most present, the most tender.
+
+
+
+
+XCII
+
+FURTHER LONDON LECTURE TRIUMPHS
+
+Orion Clemens records that he met "Sam and Livy" on their arrival from
+England, November 2d, and that the president of the Mercantile Library
+Association sent up his card "four times," in the hope of getting a
+chance to propose a lecture engagement--an incident which impressed Orion
+deeply in its evidence of his brother's towering importance. Orion
+himself was by this time engaged in various projects. He was inventing a
+flying-machine, for one thing, writing a Jules Verne story, reading proof
+on a New York daily, and contemplating the lecture field. This great
+blaze of international appreciation which had come to the little boy who
+used to set type for him in Hannibal, and wash up the forms and cry over
+the dirty proof, made him gasp.
+
+They went to see Booth in Hamlet [he says], and Booth sent for Sam to
+come behind the scenes, and when Sam proposed to add a part to Hamlet,
+the part of a bystander who makes humorous modern comment on the
+situations in the play, Booth laughed immoderately.
+
+Proposing a sacrilege like that to Booth! To what heights had this
+printer-pilot, miner-brother not attained!--[This idea of introducing a
+new character in Hamlet was really attempted later by Mark Twain, with
+the connivance of Joe Goodman [of all men], sad to relate. So far as is
+known it is the one stain on Goodman's literary record.]
+
+Clemens returned immediately to England--the following Saturday, in fact
+--and was back in London lecturing again after barely a month's absence.
+He gave the "Roughing It" address, this time under the title of "Roughing
+It on the Silver Frontier," and if his audiences were any less
+enthusiastic, or his houses less crowded than before, the newspapers of
+that day have left no record of it. It was the height of the season now,
+and being free to do so, he threw himself into the whirl of it, and for
+two months, beyond doubt, was the most talked-of figure in London. The
+Athenaeum Club made him a visiting member (an honor considered next to
+knighthood); Punch quoted him; societies banqueted him; his apartments,
+as before; were besieged by callers. Afternoons one was likely to find
+him in "Poets' Corner" of the Langham smoking-room, with a group of
+London and American authors--Reade, Collins, Miller, and the others
+--frankly rioting in his bold fancies. Charles Warren Stoddard was in
+London at the time, and acted as his secretary. Stoddard was a gentle
+poet, a delightful fellow, and Clemens was very fond of him. His only
+complaint of Stoddard was that he did not laugh enough at his humorous
+yarns. Clemens once said:
+
+"Dolby and I used to come in after the lecture, or perhaps after being
+out to some dinner, and we liked to sit down and talk it over and tell
+yarns, and we expected Stoddard to laugh at them, but Stoddard would lie
+there on the couch and snore. Otherwise, as a secretary, he was
+perfect."
+
+The great Tichborne trial was in progress then, and the spectacle of an
+illiterate impostor trying to establish his claim as the rightful heir to
+a great estate was highly diverting to Mark Twain.--[In a letter of this
+period he speaks of having attended one of the Claimant's "Evenings."]
+--He wanted to preserve the evidence as future literary material, and
+Stoddard day after day patiently collected the news reports and neatly
+pasted them into scrap-books, where they still rest, a complete record of
+that now forgotten farce. The Tichborne trial recalled to Mark Twain the
+claimant in the Lampton family, who from time to time wrote him long
+letters, urging him to join in the effort to establish his rights to the
+earldom of Durham. This American claimant was a distant cousin, who had
+"somehow gotten hold of, or had fabricated a full set of documents."
+
+Colonel Henry Watterson, just quoted (also a Lampton connection), adds:
+
+    During the Tichborne trial Mark and I were in London, and one day he
+    said to me: "I have investigated this Durham business down at the
+    Herald's office. There is nothing to it. The Lamptons passed out
+    of the earldom of Durham a hundred years ago. There were never any
+    estates; the title lapsed; the present earldom is a new creation,
+    not in the same family at all. But I'll tell you what: if you'll
+    put up $500, I'll put up $500 more; we'll bring our chap over here
+    and set him in as claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy's fat boy
+    won't be a marker to him."
+
+It was a characteristic Mark Twain project, one of the sort he never
+earned out in reality, but loved to follow in fancy, and with the pen
+sometimes. The "Rightful Earl of Durham" continued to send letters for a
+long time after that (some of them still exist), but he did not establish
+his claim. No one but Mark Twain ever really got anything out of it.
+Like the Tennessee land, it furnished material by and by for a book.
+Colonel Watterson goes on to say that Clemens was only joking about
+having looked up the matter in the peerage; that he hadn't really looked
+it up at all, and that the earldom lies still in the Lampton family.
+
+Another of Clemens's friends in London at this time was Prentice Mulford,
+of California. In later years Mulford acquired a wide reputation for his
+optimistic and practical psychologies. Through them he lifted himself
+out of the slough of despond, and he sought to extend a helping hand to
+others. His "White Cross Library" had a wide reading and a wide
+influence; perhaps has to this day. But in 1873 Mulford had not found
+the tangibility of thought, the secret of strength; he was only finding
+it, maybe, in his frank acknowledgment of shortcoming:
+
+    Now, Mark, I am down-very much down at present; you are up-where you
+    deserve to be. I can't ask this on the score of any past favors,
+    for there have been none. I have not always spoken of you in terms
+    of extravagant praise; have sometimes criticized you, which was due,
+    I suppose, in part to an envious spirit. I am simply human. Some
+    people in the same profession say they entertain no jealousy of
+    those more successful. I can't. They are divine; I am not.
+
+It was only that he wished Clemens to speak a word for him to Routledge,
+to get him a hearing for his work. He adds:
+
+    I shall be up myself some day, although my line is far apart from
+    yours. Whether you can do anything that I ask of you or not, I
+    shall be happy then, as I would be now, to do you any just and right
+    service.... Perhaps I have mistaken my vocation. Certainly, if I
+    was back with my rocker on the Tuolumne, I'd make it rattle livelier
+    than ever I did before. I have occasionally thought of London
+    Bridge, but the Thames is now so d---d cold and dirty, and besides I
+    can swim, and any attempt at drowning would, through the mere
+    instinct of self-preservation, only result in my swimming ashore and
+    ruining my best clothes; wherefore I should be worse off than ever.
+
+Of course Mark Twain granted the favor Mulford asked, and a great deal
+more, no doubt, for that was his way. Mulford came up, as he had
+prophesied, but the sea in due time claimed him, though not in the way he
+had contemplated. Years after he was one day found drifting off the
+shores of Long Island in an open boat, dead.
+
+Clemens made a number of notable dinner speeches during this second
+London lecture period. His response to the toast of the "Ladies,"
+delivered at the annual dinner of the Scottish Corporation of London, was
+the sensational event of the evening.
+
+He was obliged to decline an invitation to the Lord Mayor's dinner,
+whereupon his Lordship wrote to urge him to be present at least at the
+finale, when the welcome would be "none the less hearty," and bespoke his
+attendance for any future dinners.
+
+Clemens lectured steadily at the Hanover Square Rooms during the two
+months of his stay in London, and it was only toward the end of this
+astonishing engagement that the audience began to show any sign of
+diminishing. Early in January he wrote to Twichell:
+
+I am not going to the provinces because I cannot get halls that are large
+enough. I always felt cramped in the Hanover Square Rooms, but I find
+that everybody here speaks with awe and respect of that prodigious hall
+and wonders that I could fill it so long.
+
+I am hoping to be back in twenty days, but I have so much to go home to
+and enjoy with a jubilant joy that it hardly seems possible that it can
+come to pass in so uncertain a world as this.
+
+In the same letter he speaks of attending an exhibition of Landseer's
+paintings at the Royal Academy:
+
+    Ah, they are wonderfully beautiful! There are such rich moonlights
+    and dusks in the "Challenge" and the "Combat," and in that long
+    flight of birds across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or
+    sunrise, for no man can ever tell t'other from which in a picture,
+    except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the
+    water), and there is such a grave analytical profundity in the face
+    of the connoisseurs; and such pathos in the picture of a fawn
+    suckling its dead mother on a snowy waste, with only the blood in
+    the footprints to hint that she is not asleep. And the way that he
+    makes animals' flesh and blood, insomuch that if the room were
+    darkened ever so little, and a motionless living animal placed
+    beside the painted one, no man could tell which was which.
+
+I interrupted myself here, to drop a line to Shirley Brooks and suggest a
+cartoon for Punch. It was this: in one of the Academy saloons (in a
+suite where these pictures are) a fine bust of Landseer stands on a
+pedestal in the center of the room. I suggested that some of Landseer's
+best known animals be represented as having come down out of their frames
+in the moonlight and grouped themselves about the bust in mourning
+attitudes.
+
+He sailed January 13 (1874.), on the Paythia, and two weeks later was at
+home, where all was going well. The Gilded Age had been issued a day or
+two before Christmas, and was already in its third edition. By the end
+of January 26,000 copies had been sold, a sale that had increased to
+40,000 a month later. The new house was progressing, though it was by no
+means finished. Mrs. Clemens was in good health. Little Susy was full
+of such American activities as to earn the name of "The Modoc." The
+promise of the year was bright.
+
+
+
+
+XCIII
+
+THE REAL COLONEL SELLERS-GOLDEN DAYS
+
+There are bound to be vexations, flies in the ointment, as we say. It
+was Warner who conferred the name of Eschol Sellers on the chief figure
+of the collaborated novel. Warner had known it as the name of an obscure
+person, or perhaps he had only heard of it. At all events, it seemed a
+good one for the character and had been adopted. But behold, the book
+had been issued but a little while when there rose "out of the vasty
+deeps" a genuine Eschol Sellers, who was a very respectable person. He
+was a stout, prosperous-looking man, gray and about fifty-five years old.
+He came into the American Publishing Company offices and asked permission
+to look at the book. Mr. Bliss was out at the moment, but presently
+arrived. The visitor rose and introduced himself.
+
+"My name is Eschol Sellers," he said. "You have used it in one of your
+publications. It has brought upon me a lot of ridicule. My people wish
+me to sue you for $10,000 damages."
+
+He had documents to prove his identity, and there was only one thing to
+be done; he must be satisfied. Bliss agreed to recall as many of the
+offending volumes as possible and change the name on the plates. He
+contacted the authors, and the name Beriah was substituted for the
+offending Eschol. It turned out that the real Sellers family was a large
+one, and that the given name Eschol was not uncommon in its several
+branches. This particular Eschol Sellers, curiously enough, was an
+inventor and a promoter, though of a much more substantial sort than his
+fiction namesake. He was also a painter of considerable merit, a writer
+and an antiquarian. He was said to have been a grandson of the famous
+painter, Rembrandt Peale.
+
+Clemens vowed that he would not lecture in America that winter. The
+irrepressible Redpath besieged him as usual, and at the end of January
+Clemens telegraphed him, as he thought, finally. Following it with a
+letter of explanation, he added:
+
+"I said to her, 'There isn't money enough in America to hire me to leave
+you for one day.'"
+
+But Redpath was a persistent devil. He used arguments and held out
+inducements which even Mrs. Clemens thought should not be resisted, and
+Clemens yielded from time to time, and gave a lecture here and there
+during February. Finally, on the 3d of March (1879.) he telegraphed his
+tormentor:
+
+"Why don't you congratulate me? I never expect to stand on a lecture
+platform again after Thursday night."
+
+Howells tells delightfully of a visit which he and Aldrich paid to
+Hartford just at this period. Aldrich went to visit Clemens and Howells
+to visit Charles Dudley Warner, Clemens coming as far as Springfield to
+welcome them.
+
+    In the good-fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such
+    days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round. There was
+    constant running in and out of friendly houses where the lively
+    hosts and guests called one another by their Christian names or
+    nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at
+    doors. Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he
+    satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another
+    sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which
+    enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance.
+
+Howells tells how Clemens dilated on the advantages of subscription sale
+over the usual methods of publication, and urged the two Boston authors
+to prepare something which canvassers could handle.
+
+"Why, any other means of bringing out a book is privately printing it,"
+he declared, and added that his subscription books in Bliss's hands sold
+right along, "just like the Bible."
+
+On the way back to Boston Howells and Aldrich planned a subscription book
+which would sell straight along, like the Bible. It was to be called
+"Twelve Memorable Murders." They had dreamed two or three fortunes by
+the time they had reached Boston, but the project ended there.
+
+"We never killed a single soul," Howells said once to the writer of this
+memoir.
+
+Clemens was always urging Howells to visit him after that. He offered
+all sorts of inducements.
+
+    You will find us the most reasonable people in the world. We had
+    thought of precipitating upon you, George Warner and his wife one
+    day, Twichell and his jewel of a wife another day, and Charles
+    Perkins and wife another. Only those--simply members of our family
+    they are. But I'll close the door against them all, which will
+    "fix" all of the lot except Twichell, who will no more hesitate to
+    climb in the back window than nothing.
+
+    And you shall go to bed when you please, get up when you please,
+    talk when you please, read when you please.
+
+A little later he was urging Howells or Aldrich, or both of them; to come
+to Hartford to live.
+
+    Mr. Hall, who lives in the house next to Mrs. Stowe's (just where we
+    drive in to go to our new house), will sell for $16,000 or $17,000.
+    You can do your work just as well here as in Cambridge, can't you?
+    Come! Will one of you boys buy that house? Now, say yes.
+
+Certainly those were golden, blessed days, and perhaps, as Howells says,
+the sun does not shine on their like any more--not in Hartford, at least,
+for the old group that made them no longer assembles there. Hartford
+about this time became a sort of shrine for all literary visitors, and
+for other notables as well, whether of America or from overseas. It was
+the half-way place between Boston and New York, and pilgrims going in
+either direction rested there. It is said that travelers arriving in
+America, were apt to remember two things they wished to see: Niagara
+Falls and Mark Twain. But the Falls had no such recent advertising
+advantage as that spectacular success in London. Visitors were apt to
+begin in Hartford.
+
+Howells went with considerable frequency after that, or rather with
+regularity, twice a year, or oftener, and his coming was always hailed
+with great rejoicing. They visited and ate around at one place and
+another among that pleasant circle of friends. But they were happiest
+afterward together, Clemens smoking continually, "soothing his tense
+nerves with a mild hot Scotch," says Howells, "while we both talked, and
+talked, and tasked of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and the
+waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I would come away
+hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust-shells
+which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer."
+Sometimes Clemens told the story of his early life, "the inexhaustible,
+the fairy, the Arabian Nights story, which I could never tire of even
+when it began to be told over again."
+
+
+
+
+XCIV
+
+BEGINNING "TOM SAWYER"
+
+The Clemens household went to Quarry Farm in April, leaving the new house
+once more in the hands of the architect and builders. It was costing a
+vast sum of money, and there was a financial stress upon land. Mrs.
+Clemens, always prudent, became a little uneasy at times, though without
+warrant in those days, for her business statement showed that her
+holdings were only a little less than a quarter of a million in her own
+right, while her husband's books and lectures had been highly
+remunerative, and would be more so. They were justified in living in
+ample, even luxurious comfort, and how free from financial worries they
+could have lived for the rest of their days!
+
+Clemens, realizing his happiness, wrote Dr. Brown:
+
+Indeed I am thankful for the wifey and the child, and if there is one
+individual creature on all this footstool who is more thoroughly and
+uniformly and, unceasingly happy than I am I defy the world to produce
+him and prove him. In my opinion he don't exist. I was a mighty rough,
+coarse, unpromising subject when Livy took charge of me, four years ago,
+and I may still be to the rest of the world, but not to her. She has
+made a very creditable job of me.
+
+Truly fortune not only smiled, but laughed. Every mail brought great
+bundles of letters that sang his praises. Robert Watt, who had
+translated his books into Danish, wrote of their wide popularity among
+his people. Madame Blanc (Th. Bentzon), who as early as 1872 had
+translated The Jumping Frog into French, and published it, with extended
+comment on the author and his work, in the 'Revue des deux mondes', was
+said to be preparing a review of 'The Gilded Age'. All the world seemed
+ready to do him honor.
+
+Of course, one must always pay the price, usually a vexatious one. Bores
+stopped him on the street to repeat ancient and witless stories. Invented
+anecdotes, some of them exasperating ones, went the rounds of the press.
+Impostors in distant localities personated him, or claimed to be near
+relatives, and obtained favors, sometimes money, in his name. Trivial
+letters, seeking benefactions of every kind, took the savor from his
+daily mail. Letters from literary aspirants were so numerous that he
+prepared a "form" letter of reply:
+
+DEAR SIR OR MADAM,--Experience has not taught me very much, still it has
+taught me that it is not wise to criticize a piece of literature, except
+to an enemy of the person who wrote it; then if you praise it that enemy
+admires--you for your honest manliness, and if you dispraise it he
+admires you for your sound judgment.
+
+                     Yours truly,  S. L. C.
+
+Even Orion, now in Keokuk on a chicken farm, pursued him with manuscripts
+and proposals of schemes. Clemens had bought this farm for Orion, who
+had counted on large and quick returns, but was planning new enterprises
+before the first eggs were hatched. Orion Clemens was as delightful a
+character as was ever created in fiction, but he must have been a trial
+now and then to Mark Twain. We may gather something of this from a
+letter written by the latter to his mother and sister at this period:
+
+    I can't "encourage" Orion. Nobody can do that conscientiously, for
+    the reason that before one's letter has time to reach him he is off
+    on some new wild-goose chase. Would you encourage in literature a
+    man who the older he grows the worse he writes?
+
+    I cannot encourage him to try the ministry, because he would change
+    his religion so fast that he would have to keep a traveling agent
+    under wages to go ahead of him to engage pulpits and board for him.
+
+    I cannot conscientiously encourage him to do anything but potter
+    around his little farm and put in his odd hours contriving new and
+    impossible projects at the rate of 365 a year which is his customary
+    average. He says he did well in Hannibal! Now there is a man who
+    ought to be entirely satisfied with the grandeurs, emoluments, and
+    activities of a hen farm.
+
+    If you ask me to pity Orion I can do that. I can do it every day
+    and all day long. But one can't "encourage" quicksilver; because
+    the instant you put your finger on it, it isn't there. No, I am
+    saying too much. He does stick to his literary and legal
+    aspirations, and he naturally would elect the very two things which
+    he is wholly and preposterously unfitted for. If I ever become
+    able, I mean to put Orion on a regular pension without revealing the
+    fact that it is a pension.
+
+    He did presently allow the pension, a liberal one, which continued
+    until neither Orion Clemens nor his wife had further earthly need of
+    it.
+
+Mark Twain for some time had contemplated one of the books that will
+longest preserve his memory, 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'. The success
+of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other autobiographical
+material, and he remembered those days along the river-front in Hannibal
+--his skylarking with Tom Blankenship, the Bowen boys, John Briggs, and
+the rest. He had recognized these things as material--inviting material
+it was--and now in the cool luxury of Quarry Farm he set himself to spin
+the fabric of youth.
+
+He found summer-time always his best period for literary effort, and on a
+hillside just by the old quarry, Mrs. Crane had built for him that spring
+a study--a little room of windows, somewhat suggestive of a pilot-house
+--overlooking the long sweep of grass and the dreamlike city below.
+Vines were planted that in the course of time would cover and embower it;
+there was a tiny fireplace for chilly days. To Twichell, of his new
+retreat, Clemens wrote:
+
+It is the loveliest study you ever saw. It is octagonal, with a peaked
+roof, each face filled with a spacious window, and it sits perched in
+complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of
+valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills. It is a
+cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four
+chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the
+lightning flashes behind the hills beyond, and the rain beats upon the
+roof over my head, imagine the luxury of it.
+
+He worked steadily there that summer. He would go up mornings, after
+breakfast, remaining until nearly dinner-time, say until five o'clock or
+after, for it was not his habit to eat luncheon. Other members of the
+family did not venture near the place, and if he was urgently wanted they
+blew a horn. Each evening he brought down his day's performance to read
+to the assembled family. He felt the need of audience and approval.
+Usually he earned the latter, but not always. Once, when for a day he
+put aside other matters to record a young undertaker's love-affair, and
+brought down the result in the evening, fairly bubbling with the joy of
+it, he met with a surprise. The tale was a ghastly burlesque, its humor
+of the most disheartening, unsavory sort. No one spoke during the
+reading, nobody laughed: The air was thick with disapproval. His voice
+lagged and faltered toward the end. When he finished there was heavy
+silence. Mrs. Clemens was the only one who could speak:
+
+"Youth, let's walk a little," she said.
+
+The "Undertaker's Love Story" is still among the manuscripts of that
+period, but it is unlikely that it will ever see the light of print.
+--[This tale bears no relation to "The Undertaker's Story" in Sketches
+New and Old.]
+
+The Tom Sawyer tale progressed steadily and satisfactorily. Clemens
+wrote Dr. Brown:
+
+    I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average,
+    for some time now, on a book (a story), and consequently have been
+    so wrapped up in it, and dead to everything else, that I have fallen
+    mighty short in letter-writing....
+
+    On hot days I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with
+    brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the
+    same thin linen we make shirts of.
+
+He incloses some photographs in this letter.
+
+    The group [he says] represents the vine-clad carriageway in front of
+    the farm-house. On the left is Megalopis sitting in the lap of her
+    German nurse-maid. I am sitting behind them. Mrs. Crane is in the
+    center. Mr. Crane next to her. Then Mrs. Clemens and the new baby.
+    Her Irish nurse stands at her back. Then comes the table waitress,
+    a young negro girl, born free. Next to her is Auntie Cord (a
+    fragment of whose history I have just sent to a magazine). She is
+    the cook; was in slavery more than forty years; and the self-
+    satisfied wench, the last of the group, is the little baby's
+    American nurse-maid. In the middle distance my mother-in-law's
+    coachman (up on errand) has taken a position unsolicited to help out
+    the picture. No, that is not true. He was waiting there a minute
+    or two before the photographer came. In the extreme background,
+    under the archway, you glimpse my study.
+
+The "new baby," "Bay," as they came to call her, was another little
+daughter, born in June, a happy, healthy addition to the household. In a
+letter written to Twichell we get a sweet summer picture of this period,
+particularly of little sunny-haired, two-year-old Susy.
+
+    There is nothing selfish about the Modoc. She is fascinated with
+    the new baby. The Modoc rips and tears around outdoors most of the
+    time, and consequently is as hard as a pineknot and as brown as an
+    Indian. She is bosom friend to all the chickens, ducks, turkeys,
+    and guinea-hens on the place. Yesterday, as she marched along the
+    winding path that leads up the hill through the red-clover beds to
+    the summer-house, there was a long procession of these fowls
+    stringing contentedly after her, led by a stately rooster, who can
+    look over the Modoc's head. The devotion of these vassals has been
+    purchased with daily largess of Indian meal, and so the Modoc,
+    attended by her body-guard, moves in state wherever she goes.
+
+There were days, mainly Sundays, when he did not work at all; peaceful
+days of lying fallow, dreaming in shady places, drowsily watching little
+Susy, or reading with Mrs. Clemens. Howells's "Foregone Conclusion" was
+running in the Atlantic that year, and they delighted in it. Clemens
+wrote the author:
+
+    I should think that this must be the daintiest, truest, most
+    admirable workmanship that was ever put on a story. The creatures
+    of God do not act out their natures more unerringly than yours do.
+    If your genuine stories can die I wonder by what right old Walter
+    Scott's artificialities shall continue to live.
+
+At other times he found comfort in the society of Theodore Crane. These
+two were always fond of each other, and often read together the books in
+which they were mutually interested. They had portable-hammock
+arrangements, which they placed side by side on the lawn, and read and
+discussed through summer afternoons. The 'Mutineers of the Bounty' was
+one of the books they liked best, and there was a story of an Iceland
+farmer, a human document, that had an unfading interest. Also there were
+certain articles in old numbers of the Atlantic that they read and
+reread. 'Pepys' Diary', 'Two Years Before the Mast', and a book on the
+Andes were reliable favorites. Mark Twain read not so many books, but
+read a few books often. Those named were among the literature he asked
+for each year of his return to Quarry Farm. Without them, the farm and
+the summer would not be the same.
+
+Then there was 'Lecky's History of European Morals'; there were periods
+when they read Lecky avidly and discussed it in original and unorthodox
+ways. Mark Twain found an echo of his own philosophies in Lecky. He
+made frequent marginal notes along the pages of the world's moral
+history--notes not always quotable in the family circle. Mainly,
+however, they were short, crisp interjections of assent or disapproval.
+In one place Lecky refers to those who have undertaken to prove that all
+our morality is a product of experience, holding that a desire to obtain
+happiness and to avoid pain is the only possible motive to action; the
+reason, and the only reason, why we should perform virtuous actions being
+"that on the whole such a course will bring us the greatest amount of
+happiness." Clemens has indorsed these philosophies by writing on the
+margin, "Sound and true." It was the philosophy which he himself would
+always hold (though, apparently, never live by), and in the end would
+embody a volume of his own.--[What Is Man? Privately printed in 1906.]
+--In another place Lecky, himself speaking, says:
+
+    Fortunately we are all dependent for many of our pleasures on
+    others. Co-operation and organization are essential to our
+    happiness, and these are impossible without some restraint being
+    placed upon our appetites. Laws are made to secure this restraint,
+    and being sustained by rewards, and punishments they make it the
+    interest of the individual to regard that of the community.
+
+"Correct!" comments Clemens. "He has proceeded from unreasoned
+selfishness to reasoned selfishness. All our acts, reasoned and
+unreasoned, are selfish." It was a conclusion he logically never
+departed from; not the happiest one, it would seem, at first glance, but
+one easier to deny than to disprove.
+
+On the back of an old envelope Mark Twain set down his literary
+declaration of this period.
+
+"I like history, biography, travels, curious facts and strange
+happenings, and science. And I detest novels, poetry, and theology."
+
+But of course the novels of Howells would be excepted; Lecky was not
+theology, but the history of it; his taste for poetry would develop
+later, though it would never become a fixed quantity, as was his devotion
+to history and science. His interest in these amounted to a passion.
+
+
+
+
+XCV
+
+AN "ATLANTIC" STORY AND A PLAY
+
+The reference to "Auntie Cord" in the letter to Dr. Brown brings us to
+Mark Twain's first contribution to the Atlantic Monthly. Howells in his
+Recollections of his Atlantic editorship, after referring to certain
+Western contributors, says:
+
+    Later came Mark Twain, originally of Missouri, but then
+    provisionally of Hartford, and now ultimately of the solar system,
+    not to say the universe. He came first with "A True Story," one of
+    those noble pieces of humanity with which the South has atoned
+    chiefly, if not solely, through him for all its despite to the
+    negro.
+
+Clemens had long aspired to appear in the Atlantic, but such was his own
+rating of his literature that he hardly hoped to qualify for its pages.
+Twichell remembers his "mingled astonishment and triumph" when he was
+invited to send something to the magazine.
+
+He was obliged to "send something" once or twice before the acceptance of
+"A True Story," the narrative of Auntie Cord, and even this acceptance
+brought with it the return of a fable which had accompanied it, with the
+explanation that a fable like that would disqualify the magazine for
+every denominational reader, though Howells hastened to express his own
+joy in it, having been particularly touched by the author's reference to
+Sisyphus and Atlas as ancestors of the tumble-bug. The "True Story," he
+said, with its "realest king of black talk," won him, and a few days
+later he wrote again: "This little story delights me more and more. I
+wish you had about forty of 'em."
+
+And so, modestly enough, as became him, for the story was of the
+simplest, most unpretentious sort, Mark Twain entered into the school of
+the elect.
+
+In his letter to Howells, accompanying the MS., the author said:
+
+    I inclose also "A True Story," which has no humor in it. You can
+    pay as lightly as you choose for that if you want it, for it is
+    rather out of my line. I have not altered the old colored woman's
+    story, except to begin it at the beginning, instead of the middle,
+    as she did--and traveled both ways.
+
+Howells in his Recollections tells of the business anxiety in the
+Atlantic office in the effort to estimate the story's pecuniary value.
+Clemens and Harte had raised literary rates enormously; the latter was
+reputed to have received as much as five cents a word from affluent
+newspapers! But the Atlantic was poor, and when sixty dollars was
+finally decided upon for the three pages (about two and a half cents a
+word) the rate was regarded as handsome--without precedent in Atlantic
+history. Howells adds that as much as forty times this amount was
+sometimes offered to Mark Twain in later years. Even in '74 he had
+received a much higher rate than that offered by the Atlantic,--but no
+acceptance, then, or later, ever made him happier, or seemed more richly
+rewarded.
+
+"A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It" was precisely what
+it claimed to be.--[Atlantic Monthly for November, 1874; also included in
+Sketches New and Old.]--Auntie Cord, the Auntie Rachel of that tale, cook
+at Quarry Farm, was a Virginia negress who had been twice sold as a
+slave, and was proud of the fact; particularly proud that she had brought
+$1,000 on the block. All her children had been sold away from her, but
+it was a long time ago, and now at sixty she was fat and seemingly
+without care. She had told her story to Mrs. Crane, who had more than
+once tried to persuade her to tell it to Clemens; but Auntie Cord was
+reluctant. One evening, however, when the family sat on the front
+veranda in the moonlight, looking down on the picture city, as was their
+habit, Auntie Cord came around to say good night, and Clemens engaged her
+in conversation. He led up to her story, and almost before she knew it
+she was seated at his feet telling the strange tale in almost the exact
+words in which it was set down by him next morning. It gave Mark Twain a
+chance to exercise two of his chief gifts--transcription and portrayal.
+He was always greater at these things than at invention. Auntie Cord's
+story is a little masterpiece.
+
+He wished to do more with Auntie Cord and her associates of the farm, for
+they were extraordinarily interesting. Two other negroes on the place,
+John Lewis and his wife (we shall hear notably of Lewis later), were not
+always on terms of amity with Auntie Cord. They disagreed on religion,
+and there were frequent battles in the kitchen. These depressed the
+mistress of the house, but they gave only joy to Mark Twain. His
+Southern raising had given him an understanding of their humors, their
+native emotions which made these riots a spiritual gratification. He
+would slip around among the shrubbery and listen to the noise and strife
+of battle, and hug himself with delight. Sometimes they resorted to
+missiles--stones, tinware--even dressed poultry which Auntie Cord was
+preparing for the oven. Lewis was very black, Auntie Cord was a bright
+mulatto, Lewis's' wife several shades lighter. Wherever the discussion
+began it promptly shaded off toward the color-line and insult. Auntie
+Cord was a Methodist; Lewis was a Dunkard. Auntie Cord was ignorant and
+dogmatic; Lewis could read and was intelligent. Theology invariably led
+to personality, and eventually to epithets, crockery, geology, and
+victuals. How the greatest joker of the age did enjoy that summer
+warfare!
+
+The fun was not all one-sided. An incident of that summer probably
+furnished more enjoyment for the colored members of the household than it
+did for Mark Twain. Lewis had some fowls, and among them was a
+particularly pestiferous guinea-hen that used to get up at three in the
+morning and go around making the kind of a noise that a guinea-hen must
+like and is willing to get up early to hear. Mark Twain did not care for
+it. He stood it as long as he could one morning, then crept softly from
+the house to stop it.
+
+It was a clear, bright night; locating the guinea-hen, he slipped up
+stealthily with a stout stick. The bird was pouring out its heart,
+tearing the moonlight to tatters. Stealing up close, Clemens made a
+vicious swing with his bludgeon, but just then the guinea stepped forward
+a little, and he missed. The stroke and his explosion frightened the
+fowl, and it started to run. Clemens, with his mind now on the single
+purpose of revenge, started after it. Around the trees, along the paths,
+up and down the lawn, through gates and across the garden, out over the
+fields, they raced, "pursuer and pursued." The guinea nor longer sang,
+and Clemens was presently too exhausted to swear. Hour after hour the
+silent, deadly hunt continued, both stopping to rest at intervals; then
+up again and away. It was like something in a dream. It was nearly
+breakfast-time when he dragged himself into the house at last, and the
+guinea was resting and panting under a currant-bush. Later in the day
+Clemens gave orders to Lewis to "kill and eat that guinea-hen," which
+Lewis did. Clemens himself had then never eaten a guinea, but some years
+later, in Paris, when the delicious breast of one of those fowls was
+served him, he remembered and said:
+
+"And to think, after chasing that creature all night, John Lewis got to
+eat him instead of me."
+
+The interest in Tom and Huck, or the inspiration for their adventures,
+gave out at last, or was superseded by a more immediate demand. As early
+as May, Goodman, in San Francisco, had seen a play announced there,
+presenting the character of Colonel Sellers, dramatized by Gilbert S.
+Densmore and played by John T. Raymond. Goodman immediately wrote
+Clemens; also a letter came from Warner, in Hartford, who had noticed in
+San Francisco papers announcements of the play. Of course Clemens would
+take action immediately; he telegraphed, enjoining the performance. Then
+began a correspondence with the dramatist and actor. This in time
+resulted in an amicable arrangement, by which the dramatist agreed to
+dispose of his version to Clemens. Clemens did not wait for it to
+arrive, but began immediately a version of his own. Just how much or how
+little of Densmore's work found its way into the completed play, as
+presented by Raymond later, cannot be known now. Howells conveys the
+impression that Clemens had no hand in its authorship beyond the
+character of Sellers as taken from the book. But in a letter still
+extant, which Clemens wrote to Howells at the time, he says:
+
+    I worked a month on my play, and launched it in New York last
+    Wednesday. I believe it will go. The newspapers have been
+    complimentary. It is simply a setting for one character, Colonel
+    Sellers. As a play I guess it will not bear critical assault in
+    force.
+
+The Warners are as charming as ever. They go shortly to the devil for a
+year--that is, to Egypt.
+
+Raymond, in a letter which he wrote to the Sun, November 3, 1874,
+declared that "not one line" of Densmore's dramatization was used,
+"except that which was taken bodily from The Gilded Age." During the
+newspaper discussion of the matter, Clemens himself prepared a letter for
+the Hartford Post. This letter was suppressed, but it still exists. In
+it he says:
+
+    I entirely rewrote the play three separate and distinct times. I
+    had expected to use little of his [Densmore's] language and but
+    little of his plot. I do not think there are now twenty sentences
+    of Mr. Densmore's in the play, but I used so much of his plot that I
+    wrote and told him that I should pay him about as much more as I had
+    already paid him in case the play proved a success. I shall keep my
+    word.
+
+This letter, written while the matter was fresh in his mind, is
+undoubtedly in accordance with the facts. That Densmore was fully
+satisfied may be gathered from an acknowledgment, in which he says: "Your
+letter reached me on the ad, with check. In this place permit me to
+thank you for the very handsome manner in which you have acted in this
+matter."
+
+Warner, meantime, realizing that the play was constructed almost entirely
+of the Mark Twain chapters of the book, agreed that his collaborator
+should undertake the work and financial responsibilities of the dramatic
+venture and reap such rewards as might result. Various stories have been
+told of this matter, most of them untrue. There was no bitterness
+between the friends, no semblance of an estrangement of any sort. Warner
+very generously and promptly admitted that he was not concerned with the
+play, its authorship, or its profits, whatever the latter might amount
+to. Moreover, Warner was going to Egypt very soon, and his labors and
+responsibilities were doubly sufficient as they stood.
+
+Clemens's estimate of the play as a dramatic composition was correct
+enough, but the public liked it, and it was a financial success from the
+start. He employed a representative to travel with Raymond, to assist in
+the management and in the division of spoil. The agent had instructions
+to mail a card every day, stating the amount of his share in the profits.
+Howells once arrived in Hartford just when this postal tide of fortune
+was at its flood:
+
+One hundred and fifty dollars--two hundred dollars--three hundred dollars
+were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in the air,
+before he sat down at the table, or rose from it to brandish, and then,
+flinging his napkin in the chair, walked up and down to exult in.
+
+Once, in later years, referring to the matter, Howells said "He was never
+a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and he wanted
+more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream." Which was a
+true word. Mark Twain with money was like a child with a heap of bright
+pebbles, ready to pile up more and still more, then presently to throw
+them all away and begin gathering anew.
+
+
+
+
+XCVI
+
+THE NEW HOME
+
+The Clemenses returned to Hartford to find their new house "ready,"
+though still full of workmen, decorators, plumbers, and such other
+minions of labor as make life miserable to those with ambitions for new
+or improved habitations. The carpenters were still on the lower floor,
+but the family moved in and camped about in rooms up-stairs that were
+more or less free from the invader. They had stopped in New York ten
+days to buy carpets and furnishings, and these began to arrive, with no
+particular place to put them; but the owners were excited and happy with
+it all, for it was the pleasant season of the year, and all the new
+features of the house were fascinating, while the daily progress of the
+decorators furnished a fresh surprise when they roamed through the rooms
+at evening. Mrs. Clemens wrote home:
+
+    We are perfectly delighted with everything here and do so want you
+    all to see it.
+
+Her husband, as he was likely to do, picked up the letter and finished
+it:
+
+    Livy appoints me to finish this; but how can a headless man perform
+    an intelligent function? I have been bully-ragged all day by the
+    builder, by his foreman, by the architect, by the tapestry devil who
+    is to upholster the furniture, by the idiot who is putting down the
+    carpets, by the scoundrel who is setting up the billiard-table (and
+    has left the balls in New York), by the wildcat who is sodding the
+    ground and finishing the driveway (after the sun went down), by a
+    book agent, whose body is in the back yard and the coroner notified.
+    Just think of this thing going on the whole day long, and I a man
+    who loathes details with all his heart! But I haven't lost my
+    temper, and I've made Livy lie down most of the time; could anybody
+    make her lie down all the time?
+
+Warner wrote from Egypt expressing sympathy for their unfurnished state
+of affairs, but added, "I would rather fit out three houses and fill them
+with furniture than to fit out one 'dahabiyeh'." Warner was at that
+moment undertaking his charmingly remembered trip up the Nile.
+
+The new home was not entirely done for a long time. One never knows when
+a big house like that--or a little house, for that matters done. But
+they were settled at last, with all their beautiful things in place; and
+perhaps there have been richer homes, possibly more artistic ones, but
+there has never been a more charming home, within or without, than that
+one.
+
+So many frequenters have tried to express the charm of that household.
+None of them has quite succeeded, for it lay not so much in its
+arrangement of rooms or their decorations or their outlook, though these
+were all beautiful enough, but rather in the personality, the atmosphere;
+and these are elusive things to convey in words. We can only see and
+feel and recognize; we cannot translate them. Even Howells, with his
+subtle touch, can present only an aspect here and there; an essence, as
+it were, from a happy garden, rather than the fullness of its bloom.
+
+As Mark Twain was unlike any other man that ever lived, so his house was
+unlike any other house ever built. People asked him why he built the
+kitchen toward the street, and he said:
+
+"So the servants can see the circus go by without running out into the
+front yard."
+
+But this was probably an after-thought. The kitchen end of the house
+extended toward Farmington Avenue, but it was by no means unbeautiful. It
+was a pleasing detail of the general scheme. The main entrance faced at
+right angles with the street and opened to a spacious hall. In turn, the
+hall opened to a parlor, where there was a grand piano, and to the
+dining-room and library, and the library opened to a little conservatory,
+semicircular in form, of a design invented by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Says
+Howells:
+
+    The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed
+    up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of the
+    fountain companied by Callas and other waterloving lilies. There,
+    while we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled
+    the pretty bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the
+    delicate accents of its varied blossoms.
+
+In the library was an old carved mantel which Clemens and his wife had
+bought in Scotland, salvage from a dismantled castle, and across the top
+of the fireplace a plate of brass with the motto, "The ornament of a
+house is the friends that frequent it," surely never more appropriately
+inscribed.
+
+There was the mahogany room, a large bedroom on the ground floor, and
+upstairs were other spacious bedrooms and many baths, while everywhere
+were Oriental rugs and draperies, and statuary and paintings. There was
+a fireplace under a window, after the English pattern, so that in
+winter-time one could at the same moment watch the blaze and the falling
+snow. The library windows looked out over the valley with the little
+stream in it, and through and across the tree-tops. At the top of the
+house was what became Clemens's favorite retreat, the billiard-room, and
+here and there were unexpected little balconies, which one could step out
+upon for the view.
+
+Below was a wide, covered veranda, the "ombra," as they called it,
+secluded from the public eye--a favorite family gathering-place on
+pleasant days.
+
+But a house might easily have all these things without being more than
+usually attractive, and a house with a great deal less might have been as
+full of charm; only it seemed just the proper setting for that particular
+household, and undoubtedly it acquired the personality of its occupants.
+
+Howells assures us that there never was another home like it, and we may
+accept his statement. It was unique. It was the home of one of the most
+unusual and unaccountable personalities in the world, yet was perfectly
+and serenely ordered. Mark Twain was not responsible for this blissful
+condition. He was its beacon-light; it was around Mrs. Clemens that its
+affairs steadily revolved.
+
+If in the four years and more of marriage Clemens had made advancement in
+culture and capabilities, Olivia Clemens also had become something more
+than the half-timid, inexperienced girl he had first known. In a way her
+education had been no less notable than his. She had worked and studied,
+and her half-year of travel and entertainment abroad had given her
+opportunity for acquiring knowledge and confidence. Her vision of life
+had vastly enlarged; her intellect had flowered; her grasp of
+practicalities had become firm and sure.
+
+In spite of her delicate physical structure, her continued uncertainty of
+health, she capably undertook the management of their large new house,
+and supervised its economies. Any one of her undertakings was sufficient
+for one woman, but she compassed them all. No children had more careful
+direction than hers. No husband had more devoted attendance and
+companionship. No household was ever directed with a sweeter and gentler
+grace, or with greater perfection of detail. When the great ones of the
+world came to visit America's most picturesque literary figure she gave
+welcome to them all, and filled her place at his side with such sweet and
+capable dignity that those who came to pay their duties to him often
+returned to pay even greater devotion to his companion. Says Howells:
+
+    She was, in a way, the loveliest person I have ever seen--the
+    gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united
+    wonderful tact with wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted
+    her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried in it.
+
+And once, in an interview with the writer of these chapters, Howells
+declared: "She was not only a beautiful soul, but a woman of singular
+intellectual power. I never knew any one quite like her." Then he
+added: "Words cannot express Mrs. Clemens--her fineness, her delicate,
+her wonderful tact with a man who was in some respects, and wished to be,
+the most outrageous creature that ever breathed."
+
+Howells meant a good many things by that, no doubt: Clemens's violent
+methods, for one thing, his sudden, savage impulses, which sometimes
+worked injustice and hardship for others, though he was first to discover
+the wrong and to repair it only too fully. Then, too, Howells may have
+meant his boyish teasing tendency to disturb Mrs. Clemens's exquisite
+sense of decorum.
+
+Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in a
+pair of white cowskin slippers with the hair out, and do a crippled
+colored uncle, to the joy of all beholders. I must not say all, for I
+remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of
+"Oh, Youth!"
+
+He was continually doing such things as the "crippled colored uncle,";
+partly for the very joy of the performance, but partly, too, to disturb
+her serenity, to incur her reproof, to shiver her a little--"shock" would
+be too strong a word. And he liked to fancy her in a spirit and attitude
+of belligerence, to present that fancy to those who knew the measure of
+her gentle nature. Writing to Mrs. Howells of a picture of herself in a
+group, he said:
+
+    You look exactly as Mrs. Clemens does after she has said: "Indeed, I
+    do not wonder that you can frame no reply; for you know only too
+    well that your conduct admits of no excuse, palliation, or argument
+    --none!"
+
+Clemens would pretend to a visitor that she had been violently indignant
+over some offense of his; perhaps he would say:
+
+"Well I contradicted her just now, and the crockery will begin to fly
+pretty soon."
+
+She could never quite get used to this pleasantry, and a faint glow would
+steal over her face. He liked to produce that glow. Yet always his
+manner toward her was tenderness itself. He regarded her as some dainty
+bit of porcelain, and it was said that he was always following her about
+with a chair. Their union has been regarded as ideal. That is
+Twichell's opinion and Howells's. The latter sums up:
+
+    Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be,
+    but from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the
+    most perfect.
+
+
+
+
+XCVII
+
+THE WALK TO BOSTON
+
+The new home became more beautiful to them as things found their places,
+as the year deepened; and the wonder of autumn foliage lit up their
+landscape. Sitting on one of the little upper balconies Mrs. Clemens
+wrote:
+
+    The atmosphere is very hazy, and it makes the autumn tints even more
+    soft and beautiful than usual. Mr. Twichell came for Mr. Clemens to
+    go walking with him; they returned at dinner-time, heavily laden
+    with autumn leaves.
+
+And as usual Clemens, finding the letter unfinished, took up the story.
+
+    Twichell came up here with me to luncheon after services, and I went
+    back home with him and took Susy along in her little carriage. We
+    have just got home again, middle of afternoon, and Livy has gone to
+    rest and left the west balcony to me. There is a shining and most
+    marvelous miracle of cloud-effects mirrored in the brook; a picture
+    which began with perfection, and has momently surpassed it ever
+    since, until at last it is almost unendurably beautiful....
+
+    There is a cloud-picture in the stream now whose hues are as
+    manifold as those in an opal and as delicate as the tintings of a
+    sea-shell. But now a muskrat is swimming through it and
+    obliterating it with the turmoil of wavelets he casts abroad from
+    his shoulders.
+
+    The customary Sunday assemblage of strangers is gathered together in
+    the grounds discussing the house.
+
+Twichell and Clemens took a good many walks these days; long walks, for
+Twichell was an athlete and Clemens had not then outgrown the Nevada
+habit of pedestrian wandering. Talcott's Tower, a wooden structure about
+five miles from Hartford, was one of their favorite objective points; and
+often they walked out and back, talking so continuously, and so absorbed
+in the themes of their discussions, that time and distance slipped away
+almost unnoticed. How many things they talked of in those long walks!
+They discussed philosophies and religions and creeds, and all the range
+of human possibility and shortcoming, and all the phases of literature
+and history and politics. Unorthodox discussions they were,
+illuminating, marvelously enchanting, and vanished now forever. Sometimes
+they took the train as far as Bloomfield, a little station on the way,
+and walked the rest of the distance, or they took the train from
+Bloomfield home. It seems a strange association, perhaps, the fellowship
+of that violent dissenter with that fervent soul dedicated to church and
+creed, but the root of their friendship lay in the frankness with which
+each man delivered his dogmas and respected those of his companion.
+
+It was during one of their walks to the tower that they planned a far
+more extraordinary undertaking--nothing less, in fact, than a walk from
+Hartford to Boston. This was early in November. They did not delay the
+matter, for the weather was getting too uncertain.
+
+Clemens wrote Redpath:
+
+DEAR REDPATH,--Rev. J. H. Twichell and I expect to start at 8 o'clock
+Thursday morning to walk to Boston in twenty four hours--or more. We
+shall telegraph Young's Hotel for rooms Saturday night, in order to allow
+for a low average of pedestrianism.
+
+It was half past eight on Thursday morning, November 12, 1874, that they
+left Twichell's house in a carriage, drove to the East Hartford bridge,
+and there took to the road, Twichell carrying a little bag and Clemens a
+basket of lunch.
+
+The papers had got hold of it by this time, and were watching the result.
+They did well enough that first day, following the old Boston stage road,
+arriving at Westford about seven o'clock in the evening, twenty-eight
+miles from the starting-point. There was no real hotel at Westford, only
+a sort of tavern, but it afforded the luxury of rest. "Also," says
+Twichell, in a memoranda of the trip, "a sublimely profane hostler whom
+you couldn't jostle with any sort of mild remark without bringing down
+upon yourself a perfect avalanche of oaths."
+
+This was a joy to Clemens, who sat behind the stove, rubbing his lame
+knees and fairly reveling in Twichell's discomfiture in his efforts to
+divert the hostler's blasphemy. There was also a mellow inebriate there
+who recommended kerosene for Clemens's lameness, and offered as testimony
+the fact that he himself had frequently used it for stiffness in his
+joints after lying out all night in cold weather, drunk: altogether it
+was a notable evening.
+
+Westford was about as far as they continued the journey afoot. Clemens
+was exceedingly lame next morning, and had had a rather bad night; but he
+swore and limped along six miles farther, to North Ashford, then gave it
+up. They drove from North Ashford to the railway, where Clemens
+telegraphed Redpath and Howells of their approach. To Redpath:
+
+    We have made thirty-five miles in less than five days. This
+    demonstrates that the thing can be done. Shall now finish by rail.
+    Did you have any bets on us?
+
+To Howells:
+
+    Arrive by rail at seven o'clock, the first of a series of grand
+    annual pedestrian tours from Hartford to Boston to be performed by
+    us. The next will take place next year.
+
+Redpath read his despatch to a lecture audience, with effect. Howells
+made immediate preparation for receiving two way-worn, hungry men. He
+telegraphed to Young's Hotel: "You and Twichell come right up to 37
+Concord Avenue, Cambridge, near observatory. Party waiting for you."
+
+They got to Howells's about nine o'clock, and the refreshments were
+waiting. Miss Longfellow was there, Rose Hawthorne, John Fiske, Larkin
+G. Mead, the sculptor, and others of their kind. Howells tells in his
+book how Clemens, with Twichell, "suddenly stormed in," and immediately
+began to eat and drink:
+
+    I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with
+    his head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped
+    oysters without which no party in Cambridge was really a party,
+    exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the
+    most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of
+    their progress.
+
+Clemens gave a dinner, next night, to Howells, Aldrich, Osgood, and the
+rest. The papers were full of jokes concerning the Boston expedition;
+some even had illustrations, and it was all amusing enough at the time.
+
+Next morning, sitting in the writing-room of Young's Hotel, he wrote a
+curious letter to Mrs. Clemens, though intended as much for Howells and
+Aldrich as for her. It was dated sixty-one years ahead, and was a sort
+of Looking Backwards, though that notable book had not yet been written.
+It presupposed a monarchy in which the name of Boston has been changed to
+"Limerick," and Hartford to "Dublin." In it, Twichell has become the
+"Archbishop of Dublin," Howells "Duke of Cambridge," Aldrich "Marquis of
+Ponkapog," Clemens the "Earl of Hartford." It was too whimsical and
+delightful a fancy to be forgotten.--[This remarkable and amusing
+document will be found under Appendix M, at the end of last volume.]
+
+A long time afterward, thirty-four year, he came across this letter. He
+said:
+
+"It seems curious now that I should have been dreaming dreams of a future
+monarchy and never suspect that the monarchy was already present and the
+Republic a thing of the past."
+
+What he meant, was the political succession that had fostered those
+commercial trusts which, in turn, had established party dominion.
+
+To Howells, on his return, Clemens wrote his acknowledgments, and added:
+
+    Mrs. Clemens gets upon the verge of swearing, and goes tearing
+    around in an unseemly fury when I enlarge upon the delightful time
+    we had in Boston, and she not there to have her share. I have tried
+    hard to reproduce Mrs. Howells to her, and have probably not made a
+    shining success of it.
+
+
+
+
+XCVIII
+
+"OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI"
+
+Howells had been urging Clemens to do something more for the Atlantic,
+specifically something for the January number. Clemens cudgeled his
+brains, but finally declared he must give it up:
+
+    Mrs. Clemens has diligently persecuted me day by day with urgings to
+    go to work and do that something, but it's no use. I find I can't.
+    We are in such a state of worry and endless confusion that my head
+    won't go.
+
+Two hours later he sent another hasty line:
+
+    I take back the remark that I can't write for the January number,
+    for Twichell and I have had a long walk in the woods, and I got to
+    telling him about old Mississippi days of steam-boating glory and
+    grandeur as I saw them (during four years) from the pilot-house. He
+    said, "What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!" I hadn't
+    thought of that before. Would you like a series of papers to run
+    through three months or six or nine--or about four months, say?
+
+Howells welcomed this offer as an echo of his own thought. He had come
+from a piloting family himself, and knew the interest that Mark Twain
+could put into such a series.
+
+Acting promptly under the new inspiration, Clemens forthwith sent the
+first chapter of that monumental, that absolutely unique, series of
+papers on Mississippi River life, which to-day constitutes one of his
+chief claims to immortality.
+
+His first number was in the nature of an experiment. Perhaps, after all,
+the idea would not suit the Atlantic readers.
+
+"Cut it, scarify it, reject it, handle it with entire freedom," he wrote,
+and awaited the result.
+
+The "result" was that Howells expressed his delight:
+
+    The piece about the Mississippi is capital. It almost made the
+    water in our ice-pitcher muddy as I read it. I don't think I shall
+    meddle much with it, even in the way of suggestion. The sketch of
+    the low-lived little town was so good that I could have wished there
+    was more of it. I want the sketches, if you can make them, every
+    month.
+
+Mark Twain was now really interested in this new literary venture. He
+was fairly saturated with memories. He was writing on the theme that lay
+nearest to his heart. Within ten days he reported that he had finished
+three of the papers, and had begun the fourth.
+
+And yet I have spoken of nothing but piloting as a science so far, and I
+doubt if I ever get beyond that portion of my subject. And I don't care
+to. Any Muggins can write about old days on the Mississippi of five
+hundred different kinds, but I am the only man alive that can scribble
+about the piloting of that day, and no man has ever tried to scribble
+about it yet. Its newness pleases me all the time, and it is about the
+only new subject I know of.
+
+He became so enthusiastic presently that he wanted to take Howells with
+him on a trip down the Mississippi, with their wives for company, to go
+over the old ground again and obtain added material enough for a book.
+Howells was willing enough--agreed to go, in fact--but found it hard to
+get away. He began to temporize and finally backed out. Clemens tried
+to inveigle Osgood into the trip, but without success; also John Hay, but
+Hay had a new baby at his house just then--"three days old, and with a
+voice beyond price," he said, offering it as an excuse for
+non-acceptance. So the plan for revisiting the river and the conclusion
+of the book were held in abeyance for nearly seven years.
+
+Those early piloting chapters, as they appeared in the Atlantic,
+constituted Mark Twain's best literary exhibit up to that time. In some
+respects they are his best literature of any time. As pictures of an
+intensely interesting phase of life, they are so convincing, so real, and
+at the same time of such extraordinary charm and interest, that if the
+English language should survive a thousand years, or ten times as long,
+they would be as fresh and vivid at the end of that period as the day
+they were penned. In them the atmosphere of, the river and its
+environment--its pictures, its thousand aspects of life--are reproduced
+with what is no less than literary necromancy. Not only does he make you
+smell the river you can fairly hear it breathe. On the appearance of the
+first number John Hay wrote:
+
+"It is perfect; no more nor less. I don't see how you do it," and added,
+"you know what my opinion is of time not spent with you."
+
+Howells wrote:
+
+    You are doing the science of piloting splendidly. Every word
+    interesting, and don't you drop the series till you've got every bit
+    of anecdote and reminiscence into it.
+
+He let Clemens write the articles to suit himself. Once he said:
+
+    If I might put in my jaw at this point I should say, stick to actual
+    fact and character in the thing and give things in detail. All that
+    belongs to the old river life is novel, and is now mostly
+    historical. Don't write at any supposed Atlantic audience, but yarn
+    it off as if into my sympathetic ear.
+
+Clemens replied that he had no dread of the Atlantic audience; he
+declared it was the only audience that did not require a humorist to
+"paint himself striped and stand on his head to amuse it."
+
+The "Old Times" papers ran through seven numbers of the Atlantic. They
+were reprinted everywhere by the newspapers, who in that day had little
+respect for magazine copyrights, and were promptly pirated in book form
+in Canada. They added vastly to Mark Twain's literary capital, though
+Howells informs us that the Atlantic circulation did not thrive
+proportionately, for the reason that the newspapers gave the articles to
+their readers from advanced sheets of the magazine, even before the
+latter could be placed on sale. It so happened that in the January
+Atlantic, which contained the first of the Mississippi papers, there
+appeared Robert Dale Owen's article on "Spiritualism," which brought such
+humility both to author and publisher because of the exposure of the
+medium Katie King, which came along while the magazine was in press.
+Clemens has written this marginal note on the opening page of the copy at
+Quarry Farm:
+
+While this number of the Atlantic was being printed the Katie King
+manifestations were discovered to be the cheapest, wretchedest shams and
+frauds, and were exposed in the newspapers. The awful humiliation of it
+unseated Robert Dale Owen's reason, and he died in the madhouse.
+
+
+
+
+XCIX
+
+A TYPEWRITER, AND A JOKE ON ALDRICH
+
+It was during the trip to Boston with Twichell that Mark Twain saw for
+the first time what was then--a brand-new invention, a typewriter; or it
+may have been during a subsequent visit, a week or two later. At all
+events, he had the machine and was practising on it December 9, 1874, for
+he wrote two letters on it that day, one to Howells and the other to
+Orion Clemens. In the latter he says:
+
+    I am trying to get the hang of this new-fangled writing-machine, but
+    am not making a shining success of it. However, this is the first
+    attempt I ever have made, and yet I perceive that I shall soon
+    easily acquire a fine facility in its use. I saw the thing in
+    Boston the other day and was greatly taken with it.
+
+He goes on to explain the new wonder, and on the whole his first attempt
+is a very creditable performance. With his usual enthusiasm over an
+innovation, he believes it is going to be a great help to him, and
+proclaims its advantages.
+
+This is the letter to Howells, with the errors preserved:
+
+    You needn't answer this; I am only practicing to get three; anothe
+    slip-up there; only practici?ng ti get the hang of the thing. I
+    notice I miss fire & get in a good many unnecessary letters &
+    punctuation marks. I am simply using you for a target to bang at.
+    Blame my cats, but this thing requires genius in order to work it
+    just right.
+
+In an article written long after he tells how he was with Nasby when he
+first saw the machine in Boston through a window, and how they went in to
+see it perform. In the same article he states that he was the first
+person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature, and that he
+thinks the story of Tom Sawyer was the first type-copied manuscript.
+--[Tom Sawyer was not then complete, and had been laid aside. The first
+type-copied manuscript was probably early chapters of the Mississippi
+story, two discarded typewritten pages of which still exist.]
+
+The new enthusiasm ran its course and died. Three months later, when the
+Remington makers wrote him for a recommendation of the machine, he
+replied that he had entirely stopped using it. The typewriter was not
+perfect in those days, and the keys did not always respond readily. He
+declared it was ruining his morals--that it made him "want to swear." He
+offered it to Howells because, he said, Howells had no morals anyway.
+Howells hesitated, so Clemens traded the machine to Bliss for a
+side-saddle. But perhaps Bliss also became afraid of its influence, for
+in due time he brought it back. Howells, again tempted, hesitated, and
+this time was lost. What eventually became of the machine is not
+history.
+
+One of those, happy Atlantic dinners which Howells tells of came about
+the end of that year. It was at the Parker House, and Emerson was there;
+and Aldrich, and the rest of that group.
+
+"Don't you dare to refuse the invitation," said Howells, and naturally
+Clemens didn't, and wrote back:
+
+    I want you to ask Mrs. Howells to let you stay all night at the
+    Parker House and tell lies and have an improving time, and take
+    breakfast with me in the morning. I will have a good room for you
+    and a fire. Can't you tell her it always makes you sick to go home
+    late at night or something like that? That sort of thing arouses
+    Mrs. Clemens's sympathies easily.
+
+Two memories of that old dinner remain to-day. Aldrich and Howells were
+not satisfied with the kind of neckties that Mark Twain wore (the
+old-fashioned black "string" tie, a Western survival), so they made him a
+present of two cravats when he set out on his return for Hartford. Next
+day he wrote:
+
+    You and Aldrich have made one woman deeply and sincerely grateful
+    --Mrs. Clemens. For months--I may even say years--she has shown an
+    unaccountable animosity toward my necktie, even getting up in the
+    night to take it with the tongs and blackguard it, sometimes also
+    getting so far as to threaten it.
+
+    When I said you and Aldrich had given me two new neckties, and that
+    they were in a paper in my overcoat pocket, she was in a fever of
+    happiness until she found I was going to frame them; then all the
+    venom in her nature gathered itself together; insomuch that I, being
+    near to a door, went without, perceiving danger.
+
+It is recorded that eventually he wore the neckties, and returned no more
+to the earlier mode.
+
+Another memory of that dinner is linked to a demand that Aldrich made of
+Clemens that night, for his photograph. Clemens, returning to Hartford,
+put up fifty-two different specimens in as many envelopes, with the idea
+of sending one a week for a year. Then he concluded that this was too
+slow a process, and for a week sent one every morning to "His Grace of
+Ponkapog."
+
+Aldrich stood it for a few days, then protested. "The police," he said,
+"are in the habit of swooping down upon a publication of that sort."
+
+On New-Year's no less than twenty pictures came at once--photographs and
+prints of Mark Twain, his house, his family, his various belongings.
+Aldrich sent a warning then that the perpetrator of this outrage was
+known to the police as Mark Twain, alias "The Jumping Frog," a well-known
+California desperado, who would be speedily arrested and brought to
+Ponkapog to face his victim. This letter was signed "T. Bayleigh, Chief
+of Police," and on the outside of the envelope there was a statement that
+it would be useless for that person to send any more mail-matter, as the
+post-office had been blown up. The jolly farce closed there. It was the
+sort of thing that both men enjoyed.
+
+Aldrich was writing a story at this time which contained some Western
+mining incident and environment. He sent the manuscript to Clemens for
+"expert" consideration and advice. Clemens wrote him at great length and
+in careful detail. He was fond of Aldrich, regarding him as one of the
+most brilliant of men. Once, to Robert Louis Stevenson, he said:
+
+    "Aldrich has never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and
+    humorous sayings. None has equaled him, certainly none has
+    surpassed him, in the felicity of phrasing with which he clothed
+    these children of his fancy. Aldrich is always brilliant; he can't
+    help it; he is a fire-opal set round with rose diamonds; when he is
+    not speaking you know that his dainty fancies are twinkling and
+    glimmering around in him; when he speaks the diamonds flash. Yes,
+    he is always brilliant, he will always be brilliant; he will be
+    brilliant in hell-you will see."
+
+Stevenson, smiling a chuckly smile, said, "I hope not."
+
+"Well, you will, and he will dim even those ruddy fires and look like a
+transfigured Adonis backed against a pink sunset."--[North American
+Review, September, 1906.]
+
+
+
+
+C
+
+RAYMOND, MENTAL TELEGRAPHY, ETC.
+
+The Sellers play was given in Hartford, in January (1875), to as many
+people as could crowd into the Opera House. Raymond had reached the
+perfection of his art by that time, and the townsmen of Mark Twain saw
+the play and the actor at their best. Kate Field played the part of
+Laura Hawkins, and there was a Hartford girl in the company; also a
+Hartford young man, who would one day be about as well known to playgoers
+as any playwright or actor that America has produced. His name was
+William Gillette, and it was largely due to Mark Twain that the author of
+Secret Service and of the dramatic "Sherlock Holmes" got a fair public
+start. Clemens and his wife loaned Gillette the three thousand dollars
+which tided him through his period of dramatic education. Their faith in
+his ability was justified.
+
+Hartford would naturally be enthusiastic on a first "Sellers-Raymond"
+night. At the end of the fourth act there was an urgent demand for the
+author of the play, who was supposed to be present. He was not there in
+person, but had sent a letter, which Raymond read:
+
+MY DEAR RAYMOND,--I am aware that you are going to be welcomed to our
+town by great audiences on both nights of your stay there, and I beg to
+add my hearty welcome also, through this note. I cannot come to the
+theater on either evening, Raymond, because there is something so
+touching about your acting that I can't stand it.
+
+(I do not mention a couple of colds in my head, because I hardly mind
+them as much as I would the erysipelas, but between you and me I would
+prefer it if they were rights and lefts.)
+
+And then there is another thing. I have always taken a pride in earning
+my living in outside places and spending it in Hartford; I have said that
+no good citizen would live on his own people, but go forth and make it
+sultry for other communities and fetch home the result; and now at this
+late day I find myself in the crushed and bleeding position of fattening
+myself upon the spoils of my brethren! Can I support such grief as this?
+(This is literary emotion, you understand. Take the money at the door
+just the same.)
+
+Once more I welcome you to Hartford, Raymond, but as for me let me stay
+at home and blush.
+
+                         Yours truly,  MARK.
+
+The play was equally successful wherever it went. It made what in that
+day was regarded as a fortune. One hundred thousand dollars is hardly
+too large an estimate of the amount divided between author and actor.
+Raymond was a great actor in that part, as he interpreted it, though he
+did not interpret it fully, or always in its best way. The finer side,
+the subtle, tender side of Colonel Sellers, he was likely to overlook.
+Yet, with a natural human self-estimate, Raymond believed he had created
+a much greater part than Mark Twain had written. Doubtless from the
+point of view of a number of people this was so, though the idea, was
+naturally obnoxious to Clemens. In course of time their personal
+relations ceased.
+
+Clemens that winter gave another benefit for Father Hawley. In reply to
+an invitation to appear in behalf of the poor, he wrote that he had quit
+the lecture field, and would not return to the platform unless driven
+there by lack of bread. But he added:
+
+By the spirit of that remark I am debarred from delivering this proposed
+lecture, and so I fall back upon the letter of it, and emerge upon the
+platform for this last and final time because I am confronted by a lack
+of bread-among Father Hawley's flock.
+
+He made an introductory speech at an old-fashioned spelling-bee, given at
+the Asylum Hill Church; a breezy, charming talk of which the following is
+a sample:
+
+    I don't see any use in spelling a word right--and never did. I mean
+    I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of
+    spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook
+    all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. I
+    have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me;
+    there is such a breezy, unfettered originality about his
+    orthography. He always spells "kow" with a large "K." Now that is
+    just as good as to spell it with a small one. It is better. It
+    gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope. It suggests
+    to the mind a grand, vague, impressive new kind of a cow.
+
+    He took part in the contest, and in spite of his early reputation,
+    was spelled down on the word "chaldron," which he spelled
+    "cauldron," as he had been taught, while the dictionary used as
+    authority gave that form as second choice.
+
+Another time that winter, Clemens read before the Monday Evening Club a
+paper on "Universal Suffrage," which is still remembered by the surviving
+members of that time. A paragraph or two will convey its purport:
+
+    Our marvelous latter-day statesmanship has invented universal
+    suffrage. That is the finest feather in our cap. All that we
+    require of a voter is that he shall be forked, wear pantaloons
+    instead of petticoats, and bear a more or less humorous resemblance
+    to the reported image of God. He need not know anything whatever;
+    he may be wholly useless and a cumberer of the earth; he may even be
+    known to be a consummate scoundrel. No matter. While he can steer
+    clear of the penitentiary his vote is as weighty as the vote of a
+    president, a bishop, a college professor, a merchant prince. We
+    brag of our universal, unrestricted suffrage; but we are shams after
+    all, for we restrict when we come to the women.
+
+The Monday Evening Club was an organization which included the best minds
+of Hartford. Dr. Horace Bushnell, Prof. Calvin E. Stowe, and J. Hammond
+Trumbull founded it back in the sixties, and it included such men as Rev.
+Dr. Parker, Rev. Dr. Burton, Charles H. Clark, of the Courant, Warner,
+and Twichell, with others of their kind. Clemens had been elected after
+his first sojourn in England (February, 1873), and had then read a paper
+on the "License of the Press." The club met alternate Mondays, from
+October to May. There was one paper for each evening, and, after the
+usual fashion of such clubs, the reading was followed by discussion.
+Members of that time agree that Mark Twain's association with the club
+had a tendency to give it a life, or at least an exhilaration, which it
+had not previously known. His papers were serious in their purpose he
+always preferred to be serious--but they evidenced the magic gift which
+made whatever he touched turn to literary jewelry.
+
+Psychic theories and phenomena always attracted Mark Twain. In
+thought-transference, especially, he had a frank interest--an interest
+awakened and kept alive by certain phenomena--psychic manifestations we
+call them now. In his association with Mrs. Clemens it not infrequently
+happened that one spoke the other's thought, or perhaps a
+long-procrastinated letter to a friend would bring an answer as quickly
+as mailed; but these are things familiar to us all. A more startling
+example of thought-communication developed at the time of which we are
+writing, an example which raised to a fever-point whatever interest he
+may have had in the subject before. (He was always having these vehement
+interests--rages we may call them, for it would be inadequate to speak of
+them as fads, inasmuch as they tended in the direction of human
+enlightenment, or progress, or reform.)
+
+Clemens one morning was lying in bed when, as he says, "suddenly a red-hot
+new idea came whistling down into my camp." The idea was that the time
+was ripe for a book that would tell the story of the Comstock-of the
+Nevada silver mines. It seemed to him that the person best qualified for
+the work was his old friend William Wright--Dan de Quille. He had not
+heard from Dan, or of him, for a long time, but decided to write and urge
+him to take up the idea. He prepared the letter, going fully into the
+details of his plan, as was natural for him to do, then laid it aside
+until he could see Bliss and secure his approval of the scheme from a
+publishing standpoint. Just a week later, it was the 9th of March, a
+letter came--a thick letter bearing a Nevada postmark, and addressed in a
+handwriting which he presently recognized as De Quille's. To a visitor
+who was present he said:
+
+"Now I will do a miracle. I will tell you everything this letter
+contains--date, signature, and all without breaking the seal."
+
+He stated what he believed was in the letter. Then he opened it and
+showed that he had correctly given its contents, which were the same in
+all essential details as those of his own letter, not yet mailed.
+
+In an article on "Mental Telegraphy" (he invented the name) he relates
+this instance, with others, and in 'Following the Equator' and elsewhere
+he records other such happenings. It was one of the "mysteries" in which
+he never lost interest, though his concern in it in time became a passive
+one.
+
+The result of the De Quille manifestation, however, he has not recorded.
+Clemens immediately wrote, urging Dan to come to Hartford for an extended
+visit. De Quille came, and put in a happy spring in his old comrade's
+luxurious home, writing 'The Big Bonanza', which Bliss successfully
+published a year later.
+
+Mark Twain was continually inviting old friends to share his success with
+him. Any comrade of former days found welcome in his home as often as he
+would come, and for as long as he would stay. Clemens dropped his own
+affairs to advise in their undertakings; and if their undertakings were
+literary he found them a publisher. He did this for Joaquin Miller and
+for Bret Harte, and he was always urging Goodman to make his house a
+home.
+
+The Beecher-Tilton trial was the sensation of the spring of 1875, and
+Clemens, in common with many others, was greatly worked up over it. The
+printed testimony had left him decidedly in doubt as to Beecher's
+innocence, though his blame would seem to have been less for the possible
+offense than because of the great leader's attitude in the matter. To
+Twichell he said:
+
+"His quibbling was fatal. Innocent or guilty, he should have made an
+unqualified statement in the beginning."
+
+Together they attended one of the sessions, on a day when Beecher himself
+was on the witness-stand. The tension was very great; the excitement was
+painful. Twichell thought that Beecher appeared well under the stress of
+examination and was deeply sorry for him; Clemens was far from convinced.
+
+The feeling was especially strong in Hartford, where Henry Ward Beecher's
+relatives were prominent, and animosities grew out of it. They are all
+forgotten now; most of those who cherished bitterness are dead. Any
+feeling that Clemens had in the matter lasted but a little while. Howells
+tells us that when he met him some months after the trial ended, and was
+tempted to mention it, Clemens discouraged any discussion of the event.
+Says Howells:
+
+    He would only say the man had suffered enough; as if the man had
+    expiated his wrong, and he was not going to do anything to renew his
+    penalty. I found that very curious, very delicate. His continued
+    blame could not come to the sufferer's knowledge, but he felt it his
+    duty to forbear it.
+
+It was one hundred years, that 19th of April, since the battles of
+Lexington and Concord, and there was to be a great celebration. The
+Howellses had visited Hartford in March, and the Clemenses were invited
+to Cambridge for the celebration. Only Clemens could go, which in the
+event proved a good thing perhaps; for when Clemens and Howells set out
+for Concord they did not go over to Boston to take the train, but decided
+to wait for it at Cambridge. Apparently it did not occur to them that
+the train would be jammed the moment the doors were opened at the Boston
+station; but when it came along they saw how hopeless was their chance.
+They had special invitations and passage from Boston, but these were only
+mockeries now. It yeas cold and chilly, and they forlornly set out in
+search of some sort of a conveyance. They tramped around in the mud and
+raw wind, but vehicles were either filled or engaged, and drivers and
+occupants were inclined to jeer at them. Clemens was taken with an acute
+attack of indigestion, which made him rather dismal and savage. Their
+effort finally ended with his trying to run down a tally-ho which was
+empty inside and had a party of Harvard students riding atop. The
+students, who did not recognize their would-be fare, enjoyed the race.
+They encouraged their pursuer, and perhaps their driver, with merriment
+and cheers. Clemens was handicapped by having to run in the slippery
+mud, and soon "dropped by the wayside."
+
+"I am glad," says Howells, "I cannot recall what he said when he came
+back to me."
+
+They hung about a little longer, then dragged themselves home, slipped
+into the house, and built up a fine, cheerful fire on the hearth. They
+proposed to practise a deception on Mrs. Howells by pretending they had
+been to Concord and returned. But it was no use. Their statements were
+flimsy, and guilt was plainly written on their faces. Howells recalls
+this incident delightfully, and expresses the belief that the humor of
+the situation was finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than the actual
+visit to Concord would have been.
+
+Twichell did not have any such trouble in attending the celebration. He
+had adventures (he was always having adventures), but they were of a more
+successful kind. Clemens heard the tale of them when he returned to
+Hartford. He wrote it to Howells:
+
+    Joe Twichell preached morning and evening here last Sunday; took
+    midnight train for Boston; got an early breakfast and started by
+    rail at 7.30 A.M. for Concord; swelled around there until 1 P.M.,
+    seeing everything; then traveled on top of a train to Lexington; saw
+    everything there; traveled on top of a train to Boston (with
+    hundreds in company), deluged with dust, smoke, and cinders; yelled
+    and hurrahed all the way like a school-boy; lay flat down, to dodge
+    numerous bridges, and sailed into the depot howling with excitement
+    and as black as a chimneysweep; got to Young's Hotel at 7 P.M.; sat
+    down in the reading-room and immediately fell asleep; was promptly
+    awakened by a porter, who supposed he was drunk; wandered around an
+    hour and a half; then took 9 P.M. train, sat down in a smoking-car,
+    and remembered nothing more until awakened by conductor as the train
+    came into Hartford at 1.30 A.M. Thinks he had simply a glorious
+    time, and wouldn't have missed the Centennial for the world. He
+    would have run out to see us a moment at Cambridge but he was too
+    dirty. I wouldn't have wanted him there; his appalling energy would
+    have been an insufferable reproach to mild adventurers like you and
+    me.
+
+
+
+
+CI
+
+CONCLUDING "TOM SAWYER"--MARK TWAIN's "EDITORS"
+
+Meantime the "inspiration tank," as Clemens sometimes called it, had
+filled up again. He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the
+story of Tom and Huck, and was working on it steadily. The family
+remained in Hartford, and early in July, under full head of steam, he
+brought the story to a close. On the 5th he wrote Howells:
+
+    I have finished the story and didn't take the chap beyond boyhood.
+    I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but
+    autobiographically, like Gil Blas. I perhaps made a mistake in not
+    writing it in the first person. If I went on now, and took him into
+    manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in
+    literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him.
+    It is not a boy's book at all. It will only be read by adults. It
+    is only written for adults.
+
+He would like to see the story in the Atlantic, he said, but doubted the
+wisdom of serialization.
+
+"By and by I shall take a boy of twelve and run him through life (in the
+first person), but not Tam Sawyer, he would not make a good character for
+it." From which we get the first glimpse of Huck's later adventures.
+
+Of course he wanted Howells to look at the story. It was a tremendous
+favor to ask, he said, and added, "But I know of no other person whose
+judgment I could venture to take, fully and entirely. Don't hesitate to
+say no, for I know how your time is taxed, and I would have honest need
+to blush if you said yes."
+
+"Send on your MS.," wrote Howells. "You've no idea what I may ask you to
+do for me some day."
+
+But Clemens, conscience-stricken, "blushed and weakened," as he said.
+When Howells insisted, he wrote:
+
+    But I will gladly send it to you if you will do as follows:
+    dramatize it, if you perceive that you can, and take, for your
+    remuneration, half of the first $6,000 which I receive for its
+    representation on the stage. You could alter the plot entirely if
+    you chose. I could help in the work most cheerfully after you had
+    arranged the plot. I have my eye upon two young girls who can play
+    Tom and Huck.
+
+Howells in his reply urged. Clemens to do the playwriting himself. He
+could never find time, he said, and he doubted whether he could enter
+into the spirit of another man's story. Clemens did begin a
+dramatization then or a little later, but it was not completed. Mrs.
+Clemens, to whom he had read the story as it proceeded, was as anxious as
+her husband for Howells's opinion, for it was the first extended piece of
+fiction Mark Twain had undertaken alone. He carried the manuscript over
+to Boston himself, and whatever their doubts may have been, Howells's
+subsequent letter set them at rest. He wrote that he had sat up till one
+in the morning to get to the end of it, simply because it was impossible
+to leave off.
+
+It is altogether the best boy story I ever read. It will be an immense
+success, but I think you ought to treat it explicitly as a boy's story;
+grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do, and if you should put it
+forth as a story of boys' character from the grown-up point of view you
+give the wrong key to it.
+
+Viewed in the light of later events, there has never been any better
+literary opinion than that--none that has been more fully justified.
+
+Clemens was delighted. He wrote concerning a point here and there, one
+inquiry referring to the use of a certain strong word. Howells's reply
+left no doubt:
+
+    I'd have that swearing out in an instant. I suppose I didn't notice
+    it because the location was so familiar to my Western sense, and so
+    exactly the thing Huck would say, but it won't do for children.
+
+It was in the last chapter, where Huck relates to Tom the sorrows of
+reform and tells how they comb him "all to thunder." In the original,
+"They comb me all to hell," says Huck; which statement, one must agree,
+is more effective, more the thing Huck would be likely to say.
+
+Clemens's acknowledgment of the correction was characteristic:
+
+    Mrs. Clemens received the mail this morning, and the next minute she
+    lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her
+    tongue, "Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?" Then I had
+    to miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to
+    her. Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape
+    with my scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go
+    a little one-sided?
+
+The Clemens family did not, go to Elmira that year. The children's
+health seemed to require the sea-shore, and in August they went to
+Bateman's Point, Rhode Island, where Clemens most of the time played
+tenpins in an alley that had gone to ruin. The balls would not stay on
+the track; the pins stood at inebriate angles. It reminded him of the
+old billiard-tables of Western mining-camps, and furnished the same
+uncertainty of play. It was his delight, after he had become accustomed
+to the eccentricities of the alley, to invite in a stranger and watch his
+suffering and his frantic effort to score.
+
+
+
+
+CII
+
+"SKETCHES NEW AND OLD"
+
+The long-delayed book of Sketches, contracted for five years before, was
+issued that autumn. "The Jumping Frog," which he had bought from Webb,
+was included in the volume, also the French translation which Madame
+Blanc (Th. Bentzon) had made for the Revue des deux mondes, with Mark
+Twain's retranslation back into English, a most astonishing performance
+in its literal rendition of the French idiom. One example will suffice
+here. It is where the stranger says to Smiley, "I don't see no p'ints
+about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."
+
+Says the French, retranslated:
+
+"Eh bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each
+frog" (Je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait mieux qu'aucune
+grenouille). (If that isn't grammar gone to seed then I count myself no
+judge.--M. T.)
+
+"Possible that you not it saw not," said Smiley; "possible that you you
+comprehend frogs; possible that you not you there comprehend nothing;
+possible that you had of the experience, and possible that you not be but
+an amateur. Of all manner (de toute maniere) I bet forty dollars that
+she batter in jumping, no matter which frog of the county of Calaveras."
+
+He included a number of sketches originally published with the Frog, also
+a selection from the "Memoranda" and Buffalo Express contributions, and
+he put in the story of Auntie Cord, with some matter which had never
+hitherto appeared. True Williams illustrated the book, but either it
+furnished him no inspiration or he was allowed too much of another sort,
+for the pictures do not compare with his earlier work.
+
+Among the new matter in the book were-"Some Fables for Good Old Boys and
+Girls," in which certain wood creatures are supposed to make a scientific
+excursion into a place at some time occupied by men. It is the most
+pretentious feature of the book, and in its way about as good as any.
+Like Gulliver's Travels, its object was satire, but its result is also
+interest.
+
+Clemens was very anxious that Howells should be first to review this
+volume. He had a superstition that Howells's verdicts were echoed by the
+lesser reviewers, and that a book was made or damned accordingly; a
+belief hardly warranted, for the review has seldom been written that
+meant to any book the difference between success and failure. Howells's
+review of Sketches may be offered as a case in point. It was highly
+commendatory, much more so than the notice of the 'Innocents' had been,
+or even that of 'Roughing It', also more extensive than the latter. Yet
+after the initial sale of some twenty thousand copies, mainly on the
+strength of the author's reputation, the book made a comparatively poor
+showing, and soon lagged far behind its predecessors.
+
+We cannot judge, of course, the taste of that day, but it appears now an
+unattractive, incoherent volume. The pictures were absurdly bad, the
+sketches were of unequal merit. Many of them are amusing, some of them
+delightful, but most of them seem ephemeral. If we except "The Jumping
+Frog," and possibly "A True Story" (and the latter was altogether out of
+place in the collection), there is no reason to suppose that any of its
+contents will escape oblivion. The greater number of the sketches, as
+Mark Twain himself presently realized and declared, would better have
+been allowed to die.
+
+Howells did, however, take occasion to point out in his review, or at
+least to suggest, the more serious side of Mark Twain. He particularly
+called attention to "A True Story," which the reviewers, at the time of
+its publication in the Atlantic, had treated lightly, fearing a lurking
+joke in it; or it may be they had not read it, for reviewers are busy
+people. Howells spoke of it as the choicest piece of work in the volume,
+and of its "perfect fidelity to the tragic fact." He urged the reader to
+turn to it again, and to read it as a "simple dramatic report of
+reality," such as had been equaled by no other American writer.
+
+It was in this volume of sketches that Mark Twain first spoke in print
+concerning copyright, showing the absurd injustice of discriminating
+against literary ownership by statute of limitation. He did this in the
+form of an open petition to Congress, asking that all property, real and
+personal, should be put on the copyright basis, its period of ownership
+limited to a "beneficent term of forty-two years." Generally this was
+regarded as a joke, as in a sense it was; but like most of Mark Twain's
+jokes it was founded on reason and justice.
+
+The approval with which it was received by his literary associates led
+him to still further flights. He began a determined crusade for
+international copyright laws. It was a transcendental beginning, but it
+contained the germ of what, in the course of time, he would be largely
+instrumental in bringing to a ripe and magnificent conclusion. In this
+first effort he framed a petition to enact laws by which the United
+States would declare itself to be for right and justice, regardless of
+other nations, and become a good example to the world by refusing to
+pirate the books of any foreign author. He wrote to Howells, urging him
+to get Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and others to sign this
+petition.
+
+I will then put a gentlemanly chap under wages, and send him personally
+to every author of distinction in the country and corral the rest of the
+signatures. Then I'll have the whole thing lithographed (about one
+thousand copies), and move upon the President and Congress in person, but
+in the subordinate capacity of the party who is merely the agent of
+better and wiser men, or men whom the country cannot venture to laugh at.
+I will ask the President to recommend the thing in his message (and if he
+should ask me to sit down and frame the paragraph for him I should blush,
+but still I would frame it). And then if Europe chooses to go on
+stealing from us we would say, with noble enthusiasm, "American lawmakers
+do steal, but not from foreign authors--not from foreign authors,".... If
+we only had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a
+sweat to get Him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.
+
+The petition never reached Congress. Holmes agreed to sign it with a
+smile, and the comment that governments were not in the habit of setting
+themselves up as high moral examples, except for revenue. Longfellow
+also pledged himself, as did a few others; but if there was any general
+concurrence in the effort there is no memory of it now. Clemens
+abandoned the original idea, but remained one of the most persistent and
+influential advocates of copyright betterment, and lived to see most of
+his dream fulfilled.--[For the petition concerning copyright term in the
+United States, see Sketches New and Old. For the petition concerning
+international copyright and related matters, see Appendix N, at the end
+of last volume.]
+
+
+
+
+CIII
+
+"ATLANTIC" DAYS
+
+It was about this period that Mark Twain began to exhibit openly his more
+serious side; that is to say his advocacy of public reforms. His paper
+on "Universal Suffrage" had sounded a first note, and his copyright
+petitions were of the same spirit. In later years he used to say that he
+had always felt it was his mission to teach, to carry the banner of moral
+reconstruction, and here at forty we find him furnishing evidences of
+this inclination. In the Atlantic for October, 1875, there was published
+an unsigned three-page article entitled, "The Curious Republic of
+Gondour." In this article was developed the idea that the voting
+privilege should be estimated not by the individuals, but by their
+intellectual qualifications. The republic of Gondour was a Utopia, where
+this plan had been established:
+
+    It was an odd idea and ingenious. You must understand the
+    constitution gave every man a vote; therefore that vote was a vested
+    right, and could not be taken away. But the constitution did not
+    say that certain individuals might not be given two votes or ten.
+    So an amendatory clause was inserted in a quiet way, a clause which
+    authorized the enlargement of the suffrage in certain cases to be
+    specified by statute....
+
+    The victory was complete. The new law was framed and passed. Under
+    it every citizen, howsoever poor or ignorant, possessed one vote, so
+    universal suffrage still reigned; but if a man possessed a good
+    common-school education and no money he had two votes, a high-school
+    education gave him four; if he had property, likewise, to the value
+    of three thousand sacos he wielded one more vote; for every fifty
+    thousand sacos a man added to his property, he was entitled to
+    another vote; a University education entitled a man to nine votes,
+    even though he owned no property.
+
+The author goes on to show the beneficent results of this enaction; how
+the country was benefited and glorified by this stimulus toward
+enlightenment and industry. No one ever suspected that Mark Twain was
+the author of this fable. It contained almost no trace of his usual
+literary manner. Nevertheless he wrote it, and only withheld his name,
+as he did in a few other instances, in the fear that the world might
+refuse to take him seriously over his own signature or nom de plume.
+
+Howells urged him to follow up the "Gondour" paper; to send some more
+reports from that model land. But Clemens was engaged in other things by
+that time, and was not pledged altogether to national reforms.
+
+He was writing a skit about a bit of doggerel which was then making
+nights and days unhappy for many undeserving persons who in an evil
+moment had fallen upon it in some stray newspaper corner. A certain car
+line had recently adopted the "punch system," and posted in its cars, for
+the information of passengers and conductor, this placard:
+
+A Blue Trip Slip for an 8 Cents Fare, A Buff Trip Slip for a 6 Cents
+Fare, A Pink Trip Slip for a 3 Cents Fare, For Coupon And Transfer, Punch
+The Tickets.
+
+Noah Brooks and Isaac Bromley were riding down-town one evening on the
+Fourth Avenue line, when Bromley said:
+
+"Brooks, it's poetry. By George, it's poetry!"
+
+Brooks followed the direction of Bromley's finger and read the card of
+instructions. They began perfecting the poetic character of the notice,
+giving it still more of a rhythmic twist and jingle; arrived at the
+Tribune office, W. C. Wyckoff, scientific editor, and Moses P. Handy lent
+intellectual and poetic assistance, with this result:
+
+       Conductor, when you receive a fare,
+
+       Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
+       A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,
+       A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,
+       A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare.
+       Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
+
+    CHORUS
+       Punch, brothers! Punch with care!
+       Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
+
+It was printed, and street-car poetry became popular. Different papers
+had a turn at it, and each usually preceded its own effort with all other
+examples, as far as perpetrated. Clemens discovered the lines, and on
+one of their walks recited them to Twichell. "A Literary Nightmare" was
+written a few days later. In it the author tells how the jingle took
+instant and entire possession of him and went waltzing through his brain;
+how, when he had finished his breakfast, he couldn't tell whether he had
+eaten anything or not; and how, when he went to finish the novel he was
+writing, and took up his pen, he could only get it to say:
+
+Punch in the presence of the passenjare.
+
+He found relief at last in telling it to his reverend friend, that is,
+Twichell, upon whom he unloaded it with sad results.
+
+It was an amusing and timely skit, and is worth reading to-day. Its
+publication in the Atlantic had the effect of waking up horse-car poetry
+all over the world. Howells, going to dine at Ernest Longfellow's the
+day following its appearance, heard his host and Tom Appleton urging each
+other to "Punch with care." The Longfellow ladies had it by heart.
+Boston was devastated by it. At home, Howells's children recited it to
+him in chorus. The streets were full of it; in Harvard it became an
+epidemic.
+
+It was transformed into other tongues. Even Swinburne, the musical, is
+said to have done a French version for the 'Revue des deux mondes'*. A
+St. Louis magazine, The Western, found relief in a Latin anthem with this
+chorus:
+
+Pungite, fratres, pungite, Pungite cum amore, Pungite pro vectore,
+Diligentissime pungite.
+
+              * LE CHANT DU CONDUCTEUR
+
+           Ayant ete paye, le conducteur
+           Percera en pleine vue du voyageur,
+           Quand il regoit trois sous un coupon vert,
+           Un coupon jaune pour six sous c'est l'affaire,
+           Et pour huit sous c'est un coupon couleur
+           De rose, en pleine vue du voyageur.
+
+       CHOEUR
+           Donc, percez soigneusement, mes freres
+           Tout en pleine vue des voyageurs, etc.
+
+
+
+
+CIV
+
+MARK TWAIN AND HIS WIFE
+
+Clemens and his wife traveled to Boston for one of those happy
+fore-gatherings with the Howellses, which continued, at one end of the
+journey or another, for so many years. There was a luncheon with
+Longfellow at Craigie House, and, on the return to Hartford, Clemens
+reported to Howells how Mrs. Clemens had thrived on the happiness of the
+visit. Also he confesses his punishment for the usual crimes:
+
+    I "caught it" for letting Mrs. Howells bother and bother about her
+    coffee, when it was a "good deal better than we get at home." I
+    "caught it" for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment and losing
+    her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that MS.
+    when the printers are done with it. I "caught it" once more for
+    personating that drunken Colonel James. I "caught it" for
+    mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and
+    when, after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I
+    had privately suggested to you that we hadn't any frames, and that
+    if you wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the
+    madam was simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she
+    said:
+
+    "How could you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his
+    sensitive nature, upon such a repulsive er--"
+
+    "Oh, Howells won't mind it! You don't know Howells. Howells is a
+    man who--"
+
+    She was gone. But George was the first person she stumbled on in
+    the hall, so she took it out of George. I am glad of that, because
+    it saved the babies.
+
+Clemens used to admit, at a later day, that his education did not advance
+by leaps and bounds, but gradually, very gradually; and it used to give
+him a pathetic relief in those after-years, when that sweet presence had
+gone out of his life, to tell the way of it, to confess over-fully,
+perhaps, what a responsibility he had been to her.
+
+He used to tell how, for a long time, he concealed his profanity from
+her; how one morning, when he thought the door was shut between their
+bedroom and the bathroom, he was in there dressing and shaving,
+accompanying these trying things with language intended only for the
+strictest privacy; how presently, when he discovered a button off the
+shirt he intended to put on, he hurled it through the window into the
+yard with appropriate remarks, followed it with another shirt that was in
+the same condition, and added certain collars and neckties and bath-room
+requisites, decorating the shrubbery outside, where the people were going
+by to church; how in this extreme moment he heard a slight cough and
+turned to find that the door was open! There was only one door to the
+bath-room, and he knew he had to pass her. He felt pale and sick, and
+sat down for a few moments to consider. He decided to assume that she
+was asleep, and to walk out and through the room, head up, as if he had
+nothing on his conscience. He attempted it, but without success.
+Half-way across the room he heard a voice suddenly repeat his last
+terrific remark. He turned to see her sitting up in bed, regarding him
+with a look as withering as she could find in her gentle soul. The humor
+of it struck him.
+
+"Livy," he said, "did it sound like that?"
+
+"Of course it did," she said, "only worse. I wanted you to hear just how
+it sounded."
+
+"Livy," he said, "it would pain me to think that when I swear it sounds
+like that. You got the words right, Livy, but you don't know the tune."
+
+Yet he never willingly gave her pain, and he adored her and gloried in
+her dominion, his life long. Howells speaks of his beautiful and tender
+loyalty to her as the "most moving quality of his most faithful soul."
+
+It was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives,
+and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all
+the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character.
+
+She guarded his work sacredly; and reviewing the manuscripts which he was
+induced to discard, and certain edited manuscripts, one gets a partial
+idea of what the reading world owes to Olivia Clemens. Of the discarded.
+manuscripts (he seems seldom to have destroyed them) there are a
+multitude, and among them all scarcely one that is not a proof of her
+sanity and high regard for his literary honor. They are amusing--some of
+them; they are interesting--some of them; they are strong and virile
+--some of them; but they are unworthy--most of them, though a number
+remain unfinished because theme or interest failed.
+
+Mark Twain was likely to write not wisely but too much, piling up
+hundreds of manuscript pages only because his brain was thronging as with
+a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of darting, flashing ideas demanding
+release. As often as not he began writing with only a nebulous idea of
+what he proposed to do. He would start with a few characters and
+situations, trusting in Providence to supply material as needed. So he
+was likely to run ashore any time. As for those other attempts--stories
+"unavailable" for one reason or another--he was just as apt to begin
+those as the better sort, for somehow he could never tell the difference.
+That is one of the hall-marks of genius--the thing which sharply
+differentiates genius from talent. Genius is likely to rate a literary
+disaster as its best work. Talent rarely makes that mistake.
+
+Among the abandoned literary undertakings of these early years of
+authorship there is the beginning of what was doubtless intended to
+become a book, "The Second Advent," a story which opens with a very
+doubtful miraculous conception in Arkansas, and leads only to grotesquery
+and literary disorder. There is another, "The Autobiography of a Damn
+Fool," a burlesque on family history, hopelessly impossible; yet he began
+it with vast enthusiasm and, until he allowed her to see the manuscript,
+thought it especially good. "Livy wouldn't have it," he said, "so I gave
+it up." There is another, "The Mysterious Chamber," strong and fine in
+conception, vividly and intensely interesting; the story of a young lover
+who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old castle and
+cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down into subterranean
+passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation for twenty
+years. The question of sustenance was the weak point in the story.
+Clemens could invent no way of providing it, except by means of a waste
+or conduit from the kitchen into which scraps of meat, bread, and other
+items of garbage were thrown. This he thought sufficient, but Mrs.
+Clemens did not highly regard such a literary device. Clemens could
+think of no good way to improve upon it, so this effort too was consigned
+to the penal colony, a set of pigeonholes kept in his study. To Howells
+and others, when they came along, he would read the discarded yarns, and
+they were delightful enough for such a purpose, as delightful as the
+sketches which every artist has, turned face to the wall.
+
+"Captain Stormfield" lay under the ban for many a year, though never
+entirely abandoned. This manuscript was even recommended for publication
+by Howells, who has since admitted that it would not have done then; and
+indeed, in its original, primitive nakedness it would hardly have done
+even in this day of wider toleration.
+
+It should be said here that there is not the least evidence (and the
+manuscripts are full of evidence) that Mrs. Clemens was ever
+super-sensitive, or narrow, or unliterary in her restraints. She became
+his public, as it were, and no man ever had a more open-minded,
+clear-headed public than that. For Mark Twain's reputation it would have
+been better had she exercised her editorial prerogative even more
+actively--if, in her love for him and her jealousy of his reputation, she
+had been even more severe. She did all that lay in her strength, from
+the beginning to the end, and if we dwell upon this phase of their life
+together it is because it is so large a part of Mark Twain's literary
+story. On her birthday in the year we are now closing (1875) he wrote
+her a letter which conveys an acknowledgment of his debt.
+
+LIVY DARLING,--Six years have gone by since I made my first great success
+in life and won you, and thirty years have passed since Providence made
+preparation for that happy success by sending you into the world. Every
+day we live together adds to the security of my confidence that we can
+never any more wish to be separated than we can imagine a regret that we
+were ever joined. You are dearer to me to-day, my child, than you were
+upon the last anniversary of this birthday; you were dearer then than you
+were a year before; you have grown more and more dear from the first of
+those anniversaries, and I do not doubt that this precious progression
+will continue on to the end.
+
+Let us look forward to the coming anniversaries, with their age and their
+gray hairs, without fear and without depression, trusting and believing
+that the love we bear each other will be sufficient to make them blessed.
+
+So, with abounding affection for you and our babies I hail this day that
+brings you the matronly grace and dignity of three decades!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. 1, Part
+2, 1866-1875, by Albert Bigelow Paine
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Mark Twain, A Biography, 1866-1875
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+Title: Mark Twain, A Biography, 1866-1875
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+Author: Albert Bigelow Paine
+
+Release Date: December, 2001  [Etext #2983]
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+
+MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY
+By Albert Bigelow Paine
+
+
+
+
+VOLUME I, Part 2: 1866-1875
+
+
+
+LIV
+
+THE LECTURER
+
+It was not easy to take up the daily struggle again, but it was
+necessary.  --[Clemens once declared he had been so blue at this period
+that one morning he put a loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked
+courage to pull the trigger.]--  Out of the ruck of possibilities (his
+brain always thronged with plans) he constructed three or four resolves.
+The chief of these was the trip around the world; but that lay months
+ahead, and in the mean time ways and means must be provided.  Another
+intention was to finish the Hornet article, and forward it to Harper's
+Magazine--a purpose carried immediately into effect.  To his delight the
+article found acceptance, and he looked forward to the day of its
+publication as the beginning of a real career.  He intended to follow it
+up with a series on the islands, which in due time might result in a book
+and an income.  He had gone so far as to experiment with a dedication for
+the book--an inscription to his mother, modified later for use in 'The
+Innocents Abroad'.  A third plan of action was to take advantage of the
+popularity of the Hawaiian letters, and deliver a lecture on the same
+subject.  But this was a fearsome prospect--he trembled when he thought
+of it.  As Governor of the Third House he had been extravagantly received
+and applauded, but in that case the position of public entertainer had
+been thrust upon him.  To come forward now, offering himself in the same
+capacity, was a different matter.  He believed he could entertain, but he
+lacked the courage to declare himself; besides, it meant a risk of his
+slender capital.  He confided his situation to Col. John McComb, of the
+Alta California, and was startled by McComb's vigorous endorsement.
+
+"Do it, by all means!" urged McComb.  "It will be a grand success--I know
+it!  Take the largest house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket."
+
+Frightened but resolute, he went to the leading theater manager the same
+Tom Maguire of his verses--and was offered the new opera-house at half
+rates.  The next day this advertisement appeared:
+
+                       MAGUIRE'S ACADEMY OF MUSIC
+                      PINE STREET, NEAR MONTGOMERY
+
+                          THE SANDWICH ISLANDS
+
+                               MARK TWAIN
+
+            (HONOLULU CORRESPONDENT OF THE SACRAMENTO UNION)
+                             WILL DELIVER A
+                    LECTURE ON THE SANDWICH ISLANDS
+
+                        AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC
+                      ON TUESDAY EVENING, OCT. 2d
+                                 (1866)
+
+  In which passing mention will be made of Harris, Bishop Staley, the
+American missionaries, etc., and the absurd customs and characteristics
+   of the natives duly discussed and described.  The great volcano of
+              Kilauea will also receive proper attention.
+
+                          A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA
+                  is in town, but has not been engaged
+                                  ALSO
+                     A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS
+                will be on exhibition in the next block
+                         MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS
+were in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been abandoned
+                     A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION
+ may be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to expect whatever
+                              they please.
+
+                Dress Circle, $1.00   Family Circle, 50c
+      Doors open at 7 o'clock   The Trouble to begin at 8 o'clock
+
+
+The story of that first lecture, as told in Roughing It, is a faithful
+one, and need only be summarized here.
+
+Expecting to find the house empty, he found it packed from the footlights
+to the walls.  Sidling out from the wings--wobbly-kneed and dry of
+tongue--he was greeted by a murmur, a roar, a very crash of applause that
+frightened away his remaining vestiges of courage.  Then, came reaction--
+these were his friends, and he began to talk to them.  Fear melted away,
+and as tide after tide of applause rose and billowed and came breaking at
+his feet, he knew something of the exaltation of Monte Cristo when he
+declared "The world is mine!"
+
+It was a vast satisfaction to have succeeded.  It was particularly
+gratifying at this time, for he dreaded going back into newspaper
+harness.  Also; it softened later the disappointment resulting from
+another venture; for when the December Harper appeared, with his article,
+the printer and proof-reader had somehow converted Mark Twain into "Mark
+Swain," and his literary dream perished.
+
+As to the literary value of his lecture, it was much higher than had,
+been any portion of his letters, if we may judge from its few remaining
+fragments.  One of these--a part of the description of the great volcano
+Haleakala, on the island of Maui--is a fair example of his eloquence.
+
+It is somewhat more florid than his later description of the same scene
+in Roughing It, which it otherwise resembles; and we may imagine that its
+poetry, with the added charm of its delivery, held breathless his
+hearers, many of whom believed that no purer eloquence had ever been
+uttered or written.
+
+It is worth remembering, too, that in this lecture, delivered so long
+ago, he advocated the idea of American ownership of these islands,
+dwelling at considerable length on his reasons for this ideal.
+
+--[For fragmentary extracts from this first lecture of Mark Twain and
+news comment, see Appendix D, end of last volume.]--
+
+There was a gross return from his venture of more than $1,200, but with
+his usual business insight, which was never foresight, he had made an
+arrangement by which, after paying bills and dividing with his manager,
+he had only about one-third of, this sum left.  Still, even this was
+prosperity and triumph.  He had acquired a new and lucrative profession
+at a bound.  The papers lauded him as the "most piquant and humorous
+writer and lecturer on the Coast since the days of the lamented John
+Phoenix."  He felt that he was on the highroad at last.
+
+Denis McCarthy, late of the Enterprise, was in San Francisco, and was
+willing to become his manager.  Denis was capable and honest, and Clemens
+was fond of him.  They planned a tour of the near-by towns, beginning
+with Sacramento, extending it later even to the mining camps, such as Red
+Dog and Grass Valley; also across into Nevada, with engagements at Carson
+City, Virginia, and Gold Hill.  It was an exultant and hilarious
+excursion--that first lecture tour made by Denis McCarthy and Mark Twain.
+Success traveled with them everywhere, whether the lecturer looked across
+the footlights of some pretentious "opera - house" or between the two
+tallow candles of some camp "academy."  Whatever the building, it was
+packed, and the returns were maximum.
+
+Those who remember him as a lecturer in that long-ago time say that his
+delivery was more quaint, his drawl more exaggerated, even than in later
+life; that his appearance and movements on the stage were natural, rather
+than graceful; that his manuscript, which he carried under his arm,
+looked like a ruffled hen.  It was, in fact, originally written on sheets
+of manila paper, in large characters, so that it could be read easily by
+dim light, and it was doubtless often disordered.
+
+There was plenty of amusing experience on this tour.  At one place, when
+the lecture was over, an old man came to him and said:
+
+"Be them your natural tones of eloquence?"
+
+At Grass Valley there was a rival show, consisting of a lady tight-rope
+walker and her husband.  It was a small place, and the tight-rope
+attraction seemed likely to fail.  The lady's husband had formerly been a
+compositor on the Enterprise, so that he felt there was a bond of
+brotherhood between him and Mark Twain.
+
+"Look here," he said.  "Let's combine our shows.  I'll let my wife do the
+tight-rope act outside and draw a crowd, and you go inside and lecture."
+
+The arrangement was not made.
+
+Following custom, the lecturer at first thought it necessary to be
+introduced, and at each place McCarthy had to skirmish around and find
+the proper person.  At Red Dog, on the Stanislaus, the man selected
+failed to appear, and Denis had to provide another on short notice.
+He went down into the audience and captured an old fellow, who ducked and
+dodged but could not escape.  Denis led him to the stage, a good deal
+frightened.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "this is the celebrated Mark Twain from
+the celebrated city of San Francisco, with his celebrated lecture about
+the celebrated Sandwich Islands."
+
+That was as far as he could go; but it was far enough.  Mark Twain never
+had a better introduction.  The audience was in a shouting humor from the
+start.
+
+Clemens himself used to tell of an introduction at another camp, where
+his sponsor said:
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen, I know only two things about this man: the first
+is that he's never been in jail, and the second is I don't know why."
+
+But this is probably apocryphal; there is too much "Mark Twain" in it.
+
+When he reached Virginia, Goodman said to him:
+
+"Sam, you do not need anybody to introduce you.  There's a piano on the
+stage in the theater.  Have it brought out in sight, and when the curtain
+rises you be seated at the piano, playing and singing that song of yours,
+'I Had an Old Horse Whose Name Was Methusalem,' and don't seem to notice
+that the curtain is up at first; then be surprised when you suddenly find
+out that it is up, and begin talking, without any further preliminaries."
+
+This proved good advice, and the lecture, thus opened, started off with
+general hilarity and applause.
+
+
+
+
+LV
+
+HIGHWAY ROBBERY
+
+His Nevada, lectures were bound to be immensely successful.  The people
+regarded him as their property over there, and at Carson and Virginia the
+houses overflowed.  At Virginia especially his friends urged and begged
+him to repeat the entertainment, but he resolutely declined.
+
+"I have only one lecture yet," he said.  "I cannot bring myself to give
+it twice in the same town."
+
+But that irresponsible imp, Steve Gillis, who was again in Virginia,
+conceived a plan which would make it not only necessary for him to
+lecture again, but would supply him with a subject.  Steve's plan was
+very simple: it was to relieve the lecturer of his funds by a friendly
+highway robbery, and let an account of the adventure furnish the new
+lecture.
+
+In 'Roughing It' Mark Twain has given a version of this mock robbery
+which is correct enough as far as it goes; but important details are
+lacking.  Only a few years ago (it was April, 1907), in his cabin on
+jackass Hill, with Joseph Goodman and the writer of this history present,
+Steve Gillis made his "death-bed" confession as is here set down:
+
+"Mark's lecture was given in Piper's Opera House, October 30, 1866.  The
+Virginia City people had heard many famous lectures before, but they were
+mere sideshows compared with Mark's.  It could have been run to crowded
+houses for a week.  We begged him to give the common people a chance; but
+he refused to repeat himself.  He was going down to Carson, and was
+coming back to talk in Gold Hill about a week later, and his agent, Denis
+McCarthy, and I laid a plan to have him robbed on the Divide between Gold
+Hill and Virginia, after the Gold Hill lecture was over and he and Denis
+would be coming home with the money.  The Divide was a good lonely place,
+and was famous for its hold-ups.  We got City Marshal George Birdsall
+into it with us, and took in Leslie Blackburn, Pat Holland, Jimmy
+Eddington, and one or two more of Sam's old friends.  We all loved him,
+and would have fought for him in a moment.  That's the kind of friends
+Mark had in Nevada.  If he had any enemies I never heard of them.
+
+"We didn't take in Dan de Quille, or Joe here, because Sam was Joe's
+guest, and we were afraid he would tell him.  We didn't take in Dan
+because we wanted him to write it up as a genuine robbery and make a big
+sensation.  That would pack the opera-house at two dollars a seat to hear
+Mark tell the story.
+
+"Well, everything went off pretty well.  About the time Mark was
+finishing his lecture in Gold Hill the robbers all went up on the Divide
+to wait, but Mark's audience gave him a kind of reception after his
+lecture, and we nearly froze to death up there before he came along.
+By and by I went back to see what was the matter.  Sam and Denis were
+coming, and carrying a carpet-sack about half full of silver between
+them.  I shadowed them and blew a policeman's whistle as a signal to the
+boys when the lecturers were within about a hundred yards of the place.
+I heard Sam say to Denis:
+
+"'I'm glad they've got a policeman on the Divide.  They never had one in
+my day.'
+
+"Just about that time the boys, all with black masks on and silver
+dollars at the sides of their tongues to disguise their voices, stepped
+out and stuck six-shooters at Sam and Denis and told them to put up their
+hands.  The robbers called each other 'Beauregard' and 'Stonewall
+Jackson.'  Of course Denis's hands went up, and Mark's, too, though Mark
+wasn't a bit scared or excited.  He talked to the robbers in his regular
+fashion.  He said:
+
+"'Don't flourish those pistols so promiscuously.  They might go off by
+accident.'
+
+"They told him to hand over his watch and money; but when he started to
+take his hands down they made him put them up again.  Then he asked how
+they expected him to give them his valuables with his hands up in the
+sky.  He said his treasures didn't lie in heaven.  He told them not to
+take his watch, which was the one Sandy Baldwin and Theodore Winters had
+given him as Governor of the Third House, but we took it all the same.
+
+"Whenever he started to put his hands down we made him put them up again.
+Once he said:
+
+"'Don't you fellows be so rough.  I was tenderly reared.'
+
+"Then we told him and Denis to keep their hands up for fifteen minutes
+after we were gone--this was to give us time to get back to Virginia and
+be settled when they came along.  As we were going away Mark called:
+
+"'Say, you forgot something.'
+
+"'What is it?'
+
+"Why, the carpet-bag.'
+
+"He was cool all the time.  Senator Bill Stewart, in his Autobiography,
+tells a great story of how scared Mark was, and how he ran; but Stewart
+was three thousand miles from Virginia by that time, and later got mad at
+Mark because he made a joke about him in 'Roughing It'.
+
+"Denis wanted to take his hands down pretty soon after we were gone, but
+Mark said:
+
+"'No, Denis, I'm used to obeying orders when they are given in that
+convincing way; we'll just keep our hands up another fifteen minutes or
+so for good measure.'
+
+"We were waiting in a big saloon on C Street when Mark and Denis came
+along.  We knew they would come in, and we expected Mark would be
+excited; but he was as unruffled as a mountain lake.  He told us they had
+been robbed, and asked me if I had any money.  I gave him a hundred
+dollars of his own money, and he ordered refreshments for everybody.
+Then we adjourned to the Enterprise office, where he offered a reward,
+and Dan de Quille wrote up the story and telegraphed it to the other
+newspapers.  Then somebody suggested that Mark would have to give another
+lecture now, and that the robbery would make a great subject.  He entered
+right into the thing, and next day we engaged Piper's Opera House, and
+people were offering five dollars apiece for front seats.  It would have
+been the biggest thing that ever came to Virginia if it had come off.
+"But we made a mistake, then, by taking Sandy Baldwin into the joke.  We
+took in Joe here, too, and gave him the watch and money to keep, which
+made it hard for Joe afterward.  But it was Sandy Baldwin that ruined us.
+He had Mark out to dinner the night before the show was to come off, and
+after he got well warmed up with champagne he thought it would be a smart
+thing to let Mark into what was really going on.
+
+"Mark didn't see it our way.  He was mad clear through."
+
+At this point Joseph Goodman took up the story.  He said:
+
+"Those devils put Sam's money, watch, keys, pencils, and all his things
+into my hands.  I felt particularly mean at being made accessory to the
+crime, especially as Sam was my guest, and I had grave doubts as to how
+he would take it when he found out the robbery was not genuine.
+
+"I felt terribly guilty when he said:
+
+"'Joe, those d--n thieves took my keys, and I can't get into my trunk.
+Do you suppose you could get me a key that would fit my trunk?'
+
+"I said I thought I could during the day, and after Sam had gone I took
+his own key, put it in the fire and burnt it to make it look black.  Then
+I took a file and scratched it here and there, to make it look as if I
+had been fitting it to the lock, feeling guilty all the time, like a man
+who is trying to hide a murder.  Sam did not ask for his key that day,
+and that evening he was invited to judge Baldwin's to dinner.  I thought
+he looked pretty silent and solemn when he came home; but he only said:
+
+"'Joe, let's play cards; I don't feel sleepy.'
+
+"Steve here, and two or three of the other boys who had been active in
+the robbery, were present, and they did not like Sam's manner, so they
+excused themselves and left him alone with me.  We played a good while;
+then he said:
+
+"'Joe, these cards are greasy.  I have got some new ones in my trunk.
+Did you get that key to-day?'
+
+"I fished out that burnt, scratched-up key with fear and trembling.  But
+he didn't seem to notice it at all, and presently returned with the
+cards.  Then we played, and played, and played--till one o'clock--two
+o'clock--Sam hardly saying a word, and I wondering what was going to
+happen.  By and by he laid down his cards and looked at me, and said:
+
+"'Joe, Sandy Baldwin told me all about that robbery to-night.  Now, Joe,
+I have found out that the law doesn't recognize a joke, and I am going to
+send every one of those fellows to the penitentiary.'
+
+"He said it with such solemn gravity, and such vindictiveness, that I
+believed he was in dead earnest.
+
+"I know that I put in two hours of the hardest work I ever did, trying to
+talk him out of that resolution.  I used all the arguments about the boys
+being his oldest friends; how they all loved him, and how the joke had
+been entirely for his own good; I pleaded with him, begged him to
+reconsider; I went and got his money and his watch and laid them on the
+table; but for a time it seemed hopeless.  And I could imagine those
+fellows going behind the bars, and the sensation it would make in
+California; and just as I was about to give it up he said:
+
+"'Well, Joe, I'll let it pass--this time; I'll forgive them again; I've
+had to do it so many times; but if I should see Denis McCarthy and Steve
+Gillis mounting the scaffold to-morrow, and I could save them by turning
+over my hand, I wouldn't do it!'
+
+"He canceled the lecture engagement, however, next morning, and the day
+after left on the Pioneer Stage, by the way of Donner Lake, for
+California.  The boys came rather sheepishly to see him off; but he would
+make no show of relenting.  When they introduced themselves as
+Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, etc., he merely said:
+
+"'Yes, and you'll all be behind the bars some day.  There's been a good
+deal of robbery around here lately, and it's pretty clear now who did
+it.'  They handed him a package containing the masks which the robbers
+had worn.  He received it in gloomy silence; but as the stage drove away
+he put his head out of the window, and after some pretty vigorous
+admonition resumed his old smile, and called out: 'Good-by, friends;
+good-by, thieves; I bear you no malice.'  So the heaviest joke was on his
+tormentors after all."
+
+This is the story of the famous Mark Twain robbery direct from
+headquarters.  It has been garbled in so many ways that it seems worth
+setting down in full.  Denis McCarthy, who joined him presently in San
+Francisco, received a little more punishment there.
+
+"What kind of a trip did you boys have?" a friend asked of them.
+
+Clemens, just recovering from a cold which the exposure on the Divide had
+given him, smiled grimly:
+
+"Oh, pretty good, only Denis here mistook it for a spree."
+
+He lectured again in San Francisco, this time telling the story of his
+Overland trip in 1861, and he did the daring thing of repeating three
+times the worn-out story of Horace Greeley's ride with Hank Monk, as
+given later in 'Roughing It'.  People were deadly tired of that story out
+there, and when he told it the first time, with great seriousness, they
+thought he must be failing mentally.  They did not laugh--they only felt
+sorry.  He waited a little, as if expecting a laugh, and presently led
+around to it and told it again.  The audience was astonished still more,
+and pitied him thoroughly.  He seemed to be waiting pathetically in the
+dead silence for their applause, then went on with his lecture; but
+presently, with labored effort, struggled around to the old story again,
+and told it for the third time.  The audience suddenly saw the joke then,
+and became vociferous and hysterical in their applause; but it was a
+narrow escape.  He would have been hysterical himself if the relief had
+not came when it did.
+
+--[A side-light on the Horace Greeley story and on Mr. Greeley's
+eccentricities is furnished by Mr. Goodman:
+
+When I was going East in 1869 I happened to see Hank Monk just before I
+started.  "Mr. Goodman," he said, "you tell Horace Greeley that I want to
+come East, and ask him to send me a pass."  "All right, Hank," I said,
+"I will."  It happened that when I got to New York City one of the first
+men I met was Greeley.  "Mr. Greeley," said, "I have a message for you
+from Hank Monk."  Greeley bristled and glared at me.  "That--rascal?" he
+said "He has done me more injury than any other man in America."]
+
+
+
+
+LVI
+
+BACK TO THE STATES
+
+In the mean time Clemens had completed his plan for sailing, and had
+arranged with General McComb, of the Alta California, for letters during
+his proposed trip around the world.  However, he meant to visit his
+people first, and his old home.  He could go back with means now, and
+with the prestige of success.
+
+"I sail to-morrow per Opposition--telegraphed you to-day," he wrote on
+December 14th, and a day later his note-book entry says:
+
+     Sailed from San Francisco in Opposition (line) steamer America,
+     Capt.  Wakeman, at noon, 15th Dec., 1866.  Pleasant sunny day, hills
+     brightly clad with green grass and shrubbery.
+
+So he was really going home at last!  He had been gone five and a half
+years--eventful, adventurous years that had made him over completely, at
+least so far as ambitions and equipment were concerned.  He had came
+away, in his early manhood, a printer and a pilot, unknown outside of his
+class.  He was returning a man of thirty-one, with a fund of hard
+experience, three added professions--mining, journalism, and lecturing--
+also with a new name, already famous on the sunset slopes of its
+adoption, and beginning to be heard over the hills and far away.  In some
+degree, at least, he resembled the prince of a fairy tale who, starting
+out humble and unnoticed, wins his way through a hundred adventures and
+returns with gifts and honors.
+
+The homeward voyage was a notable one.  It began with a tempest a little
+way out of San Francisco--a storm terrible but brief, that brought the
+passengers from their berths to the deck, and for a time set them
+praying.  Then there was Captain Ned Wakeman, a big, burly, fearless
+sailor, who had visited the edges of all continents and archipelagos; who
+had been born at sea, and never had a day's schooling in his life, but
+knew the Bible by heart; who was full of human nature and profanity, and
+believed he was the only man on the globe who knew the secret of the
+Bible miracles.  He became a distinct personality in Mark Twain's work--
+the memory of him was an unfailing delight.  Captain "Ned Blakely," in
+'Roughing It', who with his own hands hanged Bill Noakes, after reading
+him promiscuous chapters from the Bible, was Captain Wakeman.  Captain
+"Stormfield," who had the marvelous visit to heaven, was likewise Captain
+Wakeman; and he appears in the "Idle Excursion" and elsewhere.
+
+Another event of the voyage was crossing the Nicaragua Isthmus--the trip
+across the lake and down the San Juan River--a, brand-new experience,
+between shores of splendid tropic tangle, gleaming with vivid life.  The
+luxuriance got into his note-book.
+
+Dark grottos, fairy festoons, tunnels, temples, columns, pillars, towers,
+pilasters, terraces, pyramids, mounds, domes, walls, in endless confusion
+of vine-work--no shape known to architecture unimitated--and all so
+webbed together that short distances within are only gained by glimpses.
+Monkeys here and there; birds warbling; gorgeous plumaged birds on the
+wing; Paradise itself, the imperial realm of beauty-nothing to wish for
+to make it perfect.
+
+But it was beyond the isthmus that the voyage loomed into proportions
+somber and terrible.  The vessel they took there, the San Francisco,
+sailed from Greytown January 1, 1867, the beginning of a memorable year
+in Mark Twain's life.  Next day two cases of Asiatic cholera were
+reported in the steerage.  There had been a rumor of it in Nicaragua, but
+no one expected it on the ship.
+
+The nature of the disease was not hinted at until evening, when one of
+the men died.  Soon after midnight, the other followed.  A minister
+making the voyage home, Rev. J. G. Fackler, read the burial service.  The
+gaiety of the passengers, who had become well acquainted during the
+Pacific voyage, was subdued.  When the word "cholera" went among them,
+faces grew grave and frightened.  On the morning of January 4th Reverend
+Fackler's services were again required.  The dead man was put overboard
+within half an hour after he had ceased to breathe.
+
+Gloom settled upon the ship.  All steam was made to put into Key West.
+Then some of the machinery gave way and the ship lay rolling, helplessly
+becalmed in the fierce heat of the Gulf, while repairs were being made.
+The work was done at a disadvantage, and the parts did not hold.  Time
+and again they were obliged to lie to, in the deadly tropic heat,
+listening to the hopeless hammering, wondering who would be the next to
+be sewed up hastily in a blanket and slipped over the ship's side.  On
+the 5th seven new cases of illness were reported.  One of the crew, a man
+called "Shape," was said to be dying.  A few hours later he was dead.  By
+this time the Reverend Fackler himself had been taken.
+
+"So they are burying poor 'Shape' without benefit of clergy," says the
+note-book.
+
+General consternation now began to prevail.  Then it was learned that the
+ship's doctor had run out of medicines.  The passengers became
+demoralized.  They believed their vessel was to become a charnel ship.
+Strict sanitary orders were issued, and a hospital was improvised.
+
+     Verily the ship is becoming a floating hospital herself--not an hour
+     passes but brings its fresh sensation, its new disaster, its
+     melancholy tidings.  When I think of poor "Shape" and the preacher,
+     both so well when I saw them yesterday evening, I realize that I
+     myself may be dead to-morrow.
+
+     Since the last two hours all laughter, all levity, has ceased on the
+     ship--a settled gloom is upon the faces of the passengers.
+
+By noon it was evident that the minister could not survive.  He died at
+two o'clock next morning; the fifth victim in less than five days.  The
+machinery continued to break and the vessel to drag.  The ship's doctor
+confessed to Clemens that he was helpless.  There were eight patients in
+the hospital.
+
+But on January 6th they managed to make Key West, and for some reason
+were not quarantined.  Twenty-one passengers immediately deserted the
+ship and were heard of no more.
+
+"I am glad they are gone.  D--n them," says the notebook.  Apparently he
+had never considered leaving, and a number of others remained.  The
+doctor restocked his medicine-locker, and the next day they put to sea
+again.  Certainly they were a daring lot of voyagers.  On the 8th another
+of the patients died.  Then the cooler weather seemed to check the
+contagion, and it was not until the night of the 11th, when the New York
+harbor lights were in view, that the final death occurred.  There were no
+new cases by this time, and the other patients were convalescent.  A
+certificate was made out that the last man had died of "dropsy."  There
+would seem to have been no serious difficulty in docking the vessel and
+landing the passengers.  The matter would probably be handled differently
+to-day.
+
+
+
+
+LVII
+
+OLD FRIENDS AND NEW PLANS
+
+It had been more than thirteen years since his first arrival in New York.
+Then he had been a youth, green, untraveled, eager to get away from home.
+Now a veteran, he was as eager to return.
+
+He stopped only long enough in New York to see Charles Henry Webb, late
+of California, who had put together a number of the Mark Twain sketches,
+including "The Jumping Frog," for book publication.  Clemens himself
+decided to take the book to Carleton, thinking that, having missed the
+fame of the "Frog" once, he might welcome a chance to stand sponsor for
+it now.  But Carleton was wary; the "Frog" had won favor, and even fame,
+in its fugitive, vagrant way, but a book was another matter.  Books were
+undertaken very seriously and with plenty of consideration in those days.
+Twenty-one years later, in Switzerland, Carleton said to Mark Twain:
+
+"My chief claim to immortality is the distinction of having declined your
+first book."
+
+Clemens was ready enough to give up the book when Carleton declined it,
+but Webb said he would publish it himself, and he set about it forthwith.
+The author waited no longer now, but started for St. Louis, and was soon
+with his mother and sister, whom he had not seen since that eventful
+first year of the war.  They thought he looked old, which was true
+enough, but they found him unchanged in his manner: buoyant, full of
+banter and gravely quaint remarks--he was always the same.  Jane Clemens
+had grown older, too.  She was nearly sixty-four, but as keen and
+vigorous as ever-proud (even if somewhat critical) of this handsome,
+brilliant man of new name and fame who had been her mischievous, wayward
+boy.  She petted him, joked with him, scolded him, and inquired
+searchingly into his morals and habits.  In turn he petted, comforted,
+and teased her.  She decided that he was the same Sam, and always would
+be--a true prophecy.
+
+He went up to Hannibal to see old friends.  Many were married; some had
+moved away; some were dead--the old story.  He delivered his lecture
+there, and was the center of interest and admiration--his welcome might
+have satisfied even Tom Sawyer.  From Hannibal he journeyed to Keokuk,
+where he lectured again to a crowd of old friends and new, then returned
+to St. Louis for a more extended visit.
+
+It was while he was in St. Louis that he first saw the announcement of
+the Quaker City Holy Land Excursion, and was promptly fascinated by what
+was then a brand-new idea in ocean travel--a splendid picnic--a choice
+and refined party that would sail away for a long summer's journeying to
+the most romantic of all lands and seas, the shores of the Mediterranean.
+No such argosy had ever set out before in pursuit of the golden fleece of
+happiness.
+
+His projected trip around the world lost its charm in the light of this
+idyllic dream.  Henry Ward Beecher was advertised as one of the party;
+General Sherman as another; also ministers, high-class journalists--the
+best minds of the nation.  Anson Burlingame had told him to associate
+with persons of refinement and intellect.  He lost no time in writing to
+the Alta, proposing that they send him in this select company.
+
+Noah Brooks, who was then on the Alta, states --[In an article published
+in the Century Magazine.]-- that the management was staggered by the
+proposition, but that Col. John McComb insisted that the investment in
+Mark Twain would be sound.  A letter was accordingly sent, stating that a
+check for his passage would be forwarded in due season, and that meantime
+he could contribute letters from New York City.  The rate for all letters
+was to be twenty dollars each.  The arrangement was a godsend, in the
+fullest sense of the word, to Mark Twain.
+
+It was now April, and he was eager to get back to New York to arrange his
+passage.  The Quaker City would not sail for two months yet (two eventful
+months), but the advertisement said that passages must be secured by the
+5th, and he was there on that day.  Almost the first man he met was the
+chief of the New York Alta bureau with a check for twelve hundred and
+fifty dollars (the amount of his ticket) and a telegram saying, "Ship
+Mark Twain in the Holy Land Excursion and pay his passage."
+
+     --[The following letter, which bears no date, was probably handed to
+     him later in the New York Alta office as a sort of credential:
+
+     ALTA CALIFORNIA OFFICE, 42 JOHN STREET, NEW YORK.
+
+     Sam'l Clemens, Esq., New York.
+
+     DEAR SIR,--I have the honor to inform you that Fred'k. MacCrellish
+     & Co., Proprietors of Alta California, San Francisco, Cal., desire
+     to engage your services as Special Correspondent on the pleasure
+     excursion now about to proceed from this City to the Holy Land.  In
+     obedience to their instructions I have secured a passage for you on
+     the vessel about to convey the excursion party referred to, and made
+     such arrangements as I hope will secure your comfort and
+     convenience.  Your only instructions are that you will continue to
+     write at such times and from such places as you deem proper, and in
+     the same style that heretofore secured you the favor of the readers
+     of the Alta California.  I have the honor to remain, with high
+     respect and esteem,
+
+     Your ob'dt.  Servant,
+
+     JOHN J.  MURPHY.]--
+
+
+The Alta, it appears, had already applied for his berth; but, not having
+been vouched for by Mr. Beecher or some other eminent divine, Clemens was
+fearful he might not be accepted.  Quite casually he was enlightened on
+this point.  While waiting for attention in the shipping-office, with the
+Alta agent, he heard a newspaper man inquire what notables were going.
+A clerk, with evident pride, rattled off the names:
+
+"Lieutenant-General Sherman, Henry Ward Beecher, and Mask Twain; also
+probably General Banks."
+
+So he was billed as an attraction.  It was his first surreptitious taste
+of fame on the Atlantic coast, and not without its delight.  The story
+often told of his being introduced by Ned House, of the Tribune, as a
+minister, though often repeated by Mark Twain himself, was in the nature
+of a joke, and mainly apocryphal.  Clemens was a good deal in House's
+company at the time, for he had made an arrangement to contribute
+occasional letters to the Tribune, and House no doubt introduced him
+jokingly as one of the Quaker City ministers.
+
+
+
+
+LVIII
+
+A NEW BOOK AND A LECTURE
+
+Webb, meantime, had pushed the Frog book along.  The proofs had been read
+and the volume was about ready for issue.  Clemens wrote to his mother
+April 15th:
+
+     My book will probably be in the bookseller's hands in about two
+     weeks.  After that I shall lecture.  Since I have been gone, the
+     boys have gotten up a "call" on me signed by two hundred
+     Californians.
+
+The lecture plan was the idea of Frank Fuller, who as acting Governor of
+Utah had known Mark Twain on the Comstock, and prophesied favorably of
+his future career.  Clemens had hunted up Fuller on landing in New York
+in January, and Fuller had encouraged the lecture then; but Clemens was
+doubtful.
+
+"I have no reputation with the general public here," he said.  "We
+couldn't get a baker's dozen to hear me."
+
+But Fuller was a sanguine person, with an energy and enthusiasm that were
+infectious.  He insisted that the idea was sound.  It would solidify Mark
+Twain's reputation on the Atlantic coast, he declared, insisting that the
+largest house in New York, Cooper Union, should be taken.  Clemens had
+partially consented, and Fuller had arranged with all the Pacific slope
+people who had come East, headed by ex-Governor James W. Nye (by this
+time Senator at Washington), to sign a call for the "Inimitable Mark
+Twain" to appear before a New York audience.  Fuller made Nye agree to be
+there and introduce the lecturer, and he was burningly busy and happy in
+the prospect.
+
+But Mark Twain was not happy.  He looked at that spacious hall and
+imagined the little crowd of faithful Californian stragglers that might
+gather in to hear him, and the ridicule of the papers next day.  He
+begged Fuller to take a smaller hall, the smallest he could get.  But
+only the biggest hall in New York would satisfy Fuller.  He would have
+taken a larger one if he could have found it.  The lecture was announced
+for May 6th.  Its subject was "Kanakadom, or the Sandwich Islands"--
+tickets fifty cents.  Fuller timed it to follow a few days after Webb's
+book should appear, so that one event might help the other.
+
+Mark Twain's first book, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveyas
+County, and Other Sketches', was scheduled for May 1st, and did, in fact,
+appear on that date; but to the author it was no longer an important
+event.  Jim Smiley's frog as standard-bearer of his literary procession
+was not an interesting object, so far as he was concerned--not with that
+vast, empty hall in the background and the insane undertaking of trying
+to fill it.  The San Francisco venture had been as nothing compared with
+this.  Fuller was working night and day with abounding joy, while the
+subject of his labor felt as if he were on the brink of a fearful
+precipice, preparing to try a pair of wings without first learning to
+fly.  At one instant he was cold with fright, the next glowing with an
+infection of Fuller's faith.  He devised a hundred schemes for the sale
+of seats.  Once he came rushing to Fuller, saying:
+
+"Send a lot of tickets down to the Chickering Piano Company.  I have
+promised to put on my programme, 'The piano used at this entertainment is
+manufactured by Chickering."'
+
+"But you don't want a piano, Mark," said Fuller, "do you?"
+
+"No, of course not; but they will distribute the tickets for the sake of
+the advertisement, whether we have the piano or not."
+
+Fuller got out a lot of handbills and hung bunches of them in the stages,
+omnibuses, and horse-cars.  Clemens at first haunted these vehicles to
+see if anybody noticed the bills.  The little dangling bunches seemed
+untouched.  Finally two men came in; one of them pulled off a bill and
+glanced at it.  His friend asked:
+
+"Who's Mark Twain?"
+
+"God knows; I don't!"
+
+The lecturer could not ride any more.  He was desperate.
+
+"Fuller," he groaned, "there isn't a sign--a ripple of interest."
+
+Fuller assured him that everything was working all right "working
+underneath," Fuller said--but the lecturer was hopeless.  He reported his
+impressions to the folks at home:
+
+     Everything looks shady, at least, if not dark; I have a good agent;
+     but now, after we have hired the Cooper Institute, and gone to an
+     expense in one way or another of $500, it comes out that I have got
+     to play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, Ristori, and also the
+     double troop of Japanese jugglers, the latter opening at the great
+     Academy of Music--and with all this against me I have taken the
+     largest house in New York and cannot back water.
+
+He might have added that there were other rival entertainments: "The
+Flying Scud" was at Wallack's, the "Black Crook" was at Niblo's, John
+Brougham at the Olympic; and there were at least a dozen lesser
+attractions.  New York was not the inexhaustible city in those days;
+these things could gather in the public to the last man.  When the day
+drew near, and only a few tickets had been sold, Clemens was desperate.
+
+"Fuller," he said, "there'll be nobody in the Cooper Union that night but
+you and me.  I am on the verge of suicide.  I would commit suicide if I
+had the pluck and the outfit.  You must paper the house, Fuller.  You
+must send out a flood of complementaries."
+
+"Very well," said Fuller; "what we want this time is reputation anyway--
+money is secondary.  I'll put you before the choicest, most intelligent
+audience that ever was gathered in New York City.  I will bring in the
+school-instructors--the finest body of men and women in the world."
+
+Fuller immediately sent out a deluge of complimentary tickets, inviting
+the school-teachers of New York and Brooklyn, and all the adjacent
+country, to come free and hear Mark Twain's great lecture on Kanakadom.
+This was within forty-eight hours of the time he was to appear.
+
+Senator Nye was to have joined Clemens and Fuller at the Westminster,
+where Clemens was stopping, and they waited for him there with a
+carriage, fuming and swearing, until it was evident that he was not
+coming.  At last Clemens said:
+
+"Fuller, you've got to introduce me."
+
+"No," suggested Fuller; "I've got a better scheme than that.  You get up
+and begin by bemeaning Nye for not being there.  That will be better
+anyway."
+
+Clemens said:
+
+"Well, Fuller, I can do that.  I feel that way.  I'll try to think up
+something fresh and happy to say about that horse-thief."
+
+They drove to Cooper Union with trepidation.  Suppose, after all, the
+school-teachers had declined to come?  They went half an hour before the
+lecture was to begin.  Forty years later Mark Twain said:
+
+"I couldn't keep away.  I wanted to see that vast Mammoth cave and die.
+But when we got near the building I saw that all the streets were blocked
+with people, and that traffic had stopped.  I couldn't believe that these
+people were trying to get into Cooper Institute; but they were, and when
+I got to the stage at last the house was jammed full-packed; there wasn't
+room enough left for a child.
+
+"I was happy and I was excited beyond expression.  I poured the Sandwich
+Islands out on those people, and they laughed and shouted to my entire
+content.  For an hour and fifteen minutes I was in paradise."
+
+And Fuller to-day, alive and young, when so many others of that ancient
+time and event have vanished, has added:
+
+"When Mark appeared the Californians gave a regular yell of welcome.
+When that was over he walked to the edge of the platform, looked
+carefully down in the pit, round the edges as if he were hunting for
+something.  Then he said:  'There was to have been a piano here, and a
+senator to introduce me.  I don't seem to discover them anywhere.  The
+piano was a good one, but we will have to get along with such music as I
+can make with your help.  As for the senator-- Then Mark let himself go
+and did as he promised about Senator Nye.  He said things that made men
+from the Pacific coast, who had known Nye, scream with delight.  After
+that came his lecture.  The first sentence captured the audience.  From
+that moment to the end it was either in a roar of laughter or half
+breathless by his beautiful descriptive passages.  People were positively
+ill for days, laughing at that lecture."
+
+So it was a success: everybody was glad to have been there; the papers
+were kind, congratulations numerous.
+
+--[Kind but not extravagant; those were burning political times, and the
+doings of mere literary people did not excite the press to the extent of
+headlines.  A jam around Cooper Union to-day, followed by such an
+artistic triumph, would be a news event.  On the other hand, Schuyler
+Colfax, then Speaker of the House, was reported to the extent of a
+column, nonpareil.  His lecture was of no literary importance, and no
+echo of it now remains.  But those were political, not artistic, days.
+
+Of Mark Twain's lecture the Times notice said:
+
+"Nearly every one present came prepared for considerable provocation for
+enjoyable laughter, and from the appearance of their mirthful faces
+leaving the hall at the conclusion of the lecture but few were
+disappointed, and it is not too much to say that seldom has so large an
+audience been so uniformly pleased as the one that listened to Mark
+Twain's quaint remarks last evening.  The large hall of the Union was
+filled to its utmost capacity by fully two thousand persons, which fact
+spoke well for the reputation of the lecturer and his future success.
+Mark Twain's style is a quaint one both in manner and method, and through
+his discourse he managed to keep on the right side of the audience, and
+frequently convulsed it with hearty laughter....  During a description of
+the topography of the Sandwich Islands the lecturer surprised his hearers
+by a graphic and eloquent description of the eruption of the great
+volcano, which occurred in 1840, and his language was loudly applauded.
+
+"Judging from the success achieved by the lecturer last evening, he
+should repeat his experiment at an early date."]--
+
+
+                            COOPER INSTITUTE
+     By Invitation of s large number of prominent Californians and
+                         Citizens of New York,
+
+                               MARK TWAIN
+
+                             WILL DELIVER A
+                         SERIO-HUMEROUS LECTURE
+                               CONERNING
+
+                                KANAKDOM
+                                   OR
+                         THE SANDWICH ISLANDS,
+
+                           COOPER INSTITUTE,
+                     On Monday Evening, May 6,1867.
+
+                          TICKETS FIFTY GENTS.
+  For Sale at Chickering and Sons, 852 Broadway, and at the Principal
+                                 Hotel
+
+     Doors open at 7 o'clock.   The Wisdom will begin to flow at 8.
+
+
+Mark Twain always felt grateful to the school-teachers for that night.
+Many years later, when they wanted him to read to them in Steinway Hall,
+he gladly gave his services without charge.
+
+Nor was the lecture a complete financial failure.  In spite of the flood
+of complementaries, there was a cash return of some three hundred dollars
+from the sale of tickets--a substantial aid in defraying the expenses
+which Fuller assumed and insisted on making good on his own account.
+That was Fuller's regal way; his return lay in the joy of the game, and
+in the winning of the larger stake for a friend.
+
+"Mark," he said, "it is all right.  The fortune didn't come, but it will.
+The fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book just out you are
+going to be the most talked-of man in the country.  Your letters for the
+Alta and the Tribune will get the widest reception of any letters of
+travel ever written."
+
+
+
+
+
+LIX
+
+THE FIRST BOOK
+
+With the shadow of the Cooper Institute so happily dispelled, The
+Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and his following of Other
+Sketches, became a matter of more interest.  The book was a neat blue-
+and-gold volume printed by John A.  Gray & Green, the old firm for which
+the boy, Sam Clemens, had set type thirteen years before.  The title-page
+bore Webb's name as publisher, with the American News Company as selling
+agents.  It further stated that the book was edited by "John Paul," that
+is to say by Webb himself.  The dedication was in keeping with the
+general irresponsible character of the venture.  It was as follows:
+
+                                   TO
+                               JOHN SMITH
+                 WHOM I HAVE KNOWN IN DIVERS AND SUNDRY
+                   PLACES ABOUT THE WORLD, AND WHOSE
+                     MANY AND MANIFOLD VIRTUES DID
+                       ALWAYS COMMAND MY ESTEEM,
+                          I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
+
+It is said that the man to whom a volume is dedicated always buys a copy.
+If this prove true in the present instance, a princely affluence is about
+to burst upon
+                                                  THE AUTHOR.
+
+
+The "advertisement"stated that the author had "scaled the heights of
+popularity at a single jump, and won for himself the sobriquet of the
+"Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope"; furthermore, that he was known to
+fame as the "Moralist of the Main," and that as such he would be likely
+to go down to posterity, adding that it was in his secondary character,
+as humorist, rather than in his primal one of moralist, that the volume
+aimed to present him. --[The advertisement complete, with extracts from
+the book, may be found under Appendix E, at the end of last volume.]
+
+Every little while, during the forty years or more that have elapsed
+since then, some one has come forward announcing Mark Twain to be as much
+a philosopher as a humorist, as if this were a new discovery.  But it was
+a discovery chiefly to the person making the announcement.  Every one who
+ever knew Mark Twain at any period of his life made the same discovery.
+Every one who ever took the trouble to familiarize himself with his work
+made it.  Those who did not make it have known his work only by hearsay
+and quotation, or they have read it very casually, or have been very
+dull.  It would be much more of a discovery to find a book in which he
+has not been serious--a philosopher, a moralist, and a poet.  Even in the
+Jumping Frog sketches, selected particularly for their inconsequence, the
+under-vein of reflection and purpose is not lacking.  The answer to Moral
+Statistician --[In "Answers to Correspondents," included now in Sketches
+New and Old.  An extract from it, and from "A Strange Dream, " will be
+found in Appendix E.]-- is fairly alive with human wisdom and righteous
+wrath.  The "Strange Dream," though ending in a joke, is aglow with
+poetry.  Webb's "advertisement" was playfully written, but it was
+earnestly intended, and he writes Mark Twain down a moralist--not as a
+discovery, but as a matter of course.  The discoveries came along later,
+when the author's fame as a humorist had dazzled the nations.
+
+It is as well to say it here as anywhere, perhaps, that one reason why
+Mark Twain found it difficult to be accepted seriously was the fact that
+his personality was in itself so essentially humorous.  His physiognomy,
+his manner of speech, this movement, his mental attitude toward events--
+all these were distinctly diverting.  When we add to this that his medium
+of expression was nearly always full of the quaint phrasing and those
+surprising appositions which we recognize as amusing, it is not so
+astonishing that his deeper, wiser, more serious purpose should be
+overlooked.  On the whole these unabated discoverers serve a purpose, if
+only to make the rest of their species look somewhat deeper than the
+comic phrase.
+
+The little blue-and-gold volume which presented the Frog story and
+twenty-six other sketches in covers is chiefly important to-day as being
+Mark Twain's first book.  The selections in it were made for a public
+that had been too busy with a great war to learn discrimination, and most
+of them have properly found oblivion.  Fewer than a dozen of them were
+included in his collected Sketches issued eight years later, and some
+even of those might have been spared; also some that were added, for that
+matter; but detailed literary criticism is not the province of this work.
+The reader may investigate and judge for himself.
+
+Clemens was pleased with the appearance of his book.  To Bret Harte he
+wrote:
+
+The book is out and it is handsome.  It is full of damnable errors of
+grammar and deadly inconsistencies of spelling in the Frog sketch,
+because I was away and did not read proofs; but be a friend and say
+nothing about these things.  When my hurry is over, I will send you a
+copy to pisen the children with.
+
+That he had no exaggerated opinion of the book's contents or prospects we
+may gather from his letter home:
+
+As for the Frog book, I don't believe it will ever pay anything worth a
+cent.  I published it simply to advertise myself, and not with the hope
+of making anything out of it.
+
+He had grown more lenient in his opinion of the merits of the Frog story
+itself since it had made friends in high places, especially since James
+Russell Lowell had pronounced it "the finest piece of humorous writing
+yet produced in America"; but compared with his lecture triumph, and his
+prospective journey to foreign seas, his book venture, at best, claimed
+no more than a casual regard.  A Sandwich Island book (he had collected
+his Union letters with the idea of a volume) he gave up altogether after
+one unsuccessful offer of it to Dick & Fitzgerald.
+
+Frank Fuller's statement, that the fame had arrived, had in it some
+measure of truth.  Lecture propositions came from various directions.
+Thomas Nast, then in the early day of his great popularity, proposed a
+joint tour, in which Clemens would lecture, while he, Nast, illustrated
+the remarks with lightning caricatures.  But the time was too short; the
+Quaker City would sail on the 8th of June, and in the mean time the Alta
+correspondent was far behind with his New York letters.  On May 29th he
+wrote:
+
+I am 18 Alta letters behind, and I must catch up or bust.  I have refused
+all invitations to lecture.  Don't know how my book is coming on.
+
+He worked like a slave for a week or so, almost night and day, to clean
+up matters before his departure.  Then came days of idleness and
+reaction-days of waiting, during which his natural restlessness and the
+old-time regret for things done and undone, beset him.
+
+     My passage is paid, and if the ship sails I sail on her; but I make
+     no calculations, have bought no cigars, no sea-going clothing--have
+     made no preparations whatever--shall not pack my trunk till the
+     morning we sail.
+
+     All I do know or feel is that I am wild with impatience to move--
+     move--move!  Curse the endless delays!  They always kill me--they
+     make me neglect every duty, and then I have a conscience that tears
+     me like a wild beast.  I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month.
+     I do more mean things the moment I get a chance to fold my hands and
+     sit down than ever I get forgiveness for.
+
+     Yes, we are to meet at Mr. Beach's next Thursday night, and I
+     suppose we shall have to be gotten up regardless of expense, in
+     swallow-tails, white kids and everything 'en regle'.
+
+     I am resigned to Rev.  Mr. Hutchinson's or anybody else's
+     supervision.  I don't mind it.  I am fixed.  I have got a splendid,
+     immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless roommate who is as
+     good and true and right-minded a man as ever lived--a man whose
+     blameless conduct and example will always be an eloquent sermon to
+     all who shall come within their influence.  But send on the
+     professional preachers--there are none I like better to converse
+     with; if they're not narrowminded and bigoted they make good
+     companions.
+
+The "splendid immoral room-mate" was Dan Slote--"Dan," of The Innocents,
+a lovable character--all as set down.  Samuel Clemens wrote one more
+letter to his mother and sister--a conscience-stricken, pessimistic
+letter of good-by written the night before sailing.  Referring to the
+Alta letters he says:
+
+     I think they are the stupidest letters ever written from New York.
+     Corresponding has been a perfect drag ever since I got to the
+     States.  If it continues abroad, I don't know what the Tribune and
+     Alta folk will think.
+
+He remembers Orion, who had been officially eliminated when Nevada had
+received statehood.
+
+     I often wonder if his law business is going satisfactorily.  I wish
+     I had gone to Washington in the winter instead of going West.  I
+     could have gouged an office out of Bill Stewart for him, and that
+     would have atoned for the loss of my home visit.  But I am so
+     worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish
+     anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory.  My mind is
+     stored full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and
+     an accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and
+     restless moving from place to place.  If I could only say I had done
+     one thing for any of you that entitled me to your good opinions (I
+     say nothing of your love, for I am sure of that, no matter how
+     unworthy of it I may make myself--from Orion down, you have always
+     given me that; all the days of my life, when God Almighty knows I
+     have seldom deserved it), I believe I could go home and stay there--
+     and I know I would care little for the world's praise or blame.
+     There is no satisfaction in the world's praise anyhow, and it has no
+     worth to me save in the way of business.  I tried to gather up its
+     compliments to send you, but the work was distasteful and I dropped
+     it.
+
+     You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that
+     is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt.  I can get away
+     from that at sea, and be tranquil and satisfied; and so, with my
+     parting love and benediction for Orion and all of you, I say good-by
+     and God bless you all-and welcome the wind that wafts a weary soul
+     to the sunny lands of the Mediterranean!
+
+                              Yrs.  forever,
+                                             SAM
+
+
+
+
+
+LX
+
+THE INNOCENTS AT SEA
+
+          HOLY LAND PLEASURE EXCURSION
+
+          Steamer: Quaker City.
+
+          Captain C. C. Duncan.
+
+          Left New York at 2 P.m., June 8, 1867.
+
+          Rough weather--anchored within the harbor to lay all night.
+
+That first note recorded an event momentous in Mark Twain's career--an
+event of supreme importance; if we concede that any link in a chain
+regardless of size is of more importance than any other link.
+Undoubtedly it remains the most conspicuous event, as the world views it
+now, in retrospect.
+
+The note further heads a new chapter of history in sea-voyaging.  No such
+thing as the sailing of an ocean steamship with a pleasure-party on a
+long transatlantic cruise had ever occurred before.  A similar project
+had been undertaken the previous year, but owing to a cholera scare in
+the East it had been abandoned.  Now the dream had become a fact--a
+stupendous fact when we consider it.  Such an important beginning as that
+now would in all likelihood furnish the chief news story of the day.
+
+But they had different ideas of news in those days.  There were no
+headlines announcing the departure of the Quaker City--only the barest
+mention of the ship's sailing, though a prominent position was given to
+an account of a senatorial excursion-party which set out that same
+morning over the Union Pacific Railway, then under construction.  Every
+name in that political party was set dawn, and not one of them except
+General Hancock will ever be heard of again.  The New York Times,
+however, had some one on its editorial staff who thought it worth while
+to comment a little on the history-making Quaker City excursion.  The
+writer was pleasantly complimentary to officers and passengers.  He
+referred to Moses S. Beach, of the Sun, who was taking with him type and
+press, whereby he would "skilfully utilize the brains of the company for
+their mutual edification."  Mr. Beecher and General Sherman would find
+talent enough aboard to make the hours go pleasantly (evidently the
+writer had not interested himself sufficiently to know that these
+gentlemen were not along), and the paragraph closed by prophesying other
+such excursions, and wishing the travelers "good speed, a happy voyage,
+and a safe return."
+
+That was handsome, especially for those days; only now, some fine day,
+when an airship shall start with a band of happy argonauts to land beyond
+the sunrise for the first time in history, we shall feature it and
+emblazon it with pictures in the Sunday papers, and weeklies, and in the
+magazines.  --[The Quaker City idea was so unheard-of that in some of the
+foreign ports visited, the officials could not believe that the vessel
+was simply a pleasure-craft, and were suspicious of some dark, ulterior
+purpose.]
+
+That Henry Ward Beecher and General Sherman had concluded not to go was a
+heavy disappointment at first; but it proved only a temporary disaster.
+The inevitable amalgamation of all ship companies took place.  The sixty-
+seven travelers fell into congenial groups, or they mingled and devised
+amusements, and gossiped and became a big family, as happy and as free
+from contention as families of that size are likely to be.
+
+The Quaker City was a good enough ship and sizable for her time.  She was
+registered eighteen hundred tons--about one-tenth the size of
+Mediterranean excursion-steamers today--and when conditions were
+favorable she could make ten knots an hour under steam--or, at least, she
+could do it with the help of her auxiliary sails.  Altogether she was a
+cozy, satisfactory ship, and they were a fortunate company who had her
+all to themselves and went out on her on that long-ago ocean gipsying.
+She has grown since then, even to the proportions of the Mayflower.  It
+was necessary for her to grow to hold all of those who in later times
+claimed to have sailed in her on that voyage with Mark Twain. --[The
+Quaker City passenger list will be found under Appendix F, at the end of
+last volume.]
+
+They were not all ministers and deacons aboard the Quaker City.  Clemens
+found other congenial spirits be sides his room-mate Dan Slote--among
+them the ship's surgeon, Dr. A. Reeve Jackson (the guide-destroying
+"Doctor" of The Innocents); Jack Van Nostrand, of New Jersey ("Jack");
+Julius Moulton, of St. Louis ("Moult"), and other care-free fellows, the
+smoking-room crowd which is likely to make comradeship its chief
+watchword.  There were companionable people in the cabin crowd also--
+fine, intelligent men and women, especially one of the latter, a middle-
+aged, intellectual, motherly soul--Mrs. A. W. Fairbanks, of Cleveland,
+Ohio.  Mrs. Fairbanks--herself a newspaper correspondent for her
+husband's paper, the Cleveland Herald had a large influence on the
+character and general tone of those Quaker City letters which established
+Mark Twain's larger fame.  She was an able writer herself; her judgment
+was thoughtful, refined, unbiased--altogether of a superior sort.  She
+understood Samuel Clemens, counseled him, encouraged him to read his
+letters aloud to her, became in reality "Mother Fairbanks," as they
+termed her, to him and to others of that ship who needed her kindly
+offices.
+
+In one of his home letters, later, he said of her:
+
+     She was the most refined, intelligent, cultivated lady in the ship,
+     and altogether the kindest and best.  She sewed my buttons on, kept
+     my clothing in presentable trim, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I
+     behaved), lectured me awfully on the quarter-deck on moonlit
+     promenading evenings, and cured me of several bad habits.  I am
+     under lasting obligations to her.  She looks young because she is so
+     good, but she has a grown son and daughter at home.
+
+In one of the early letters which Mrs. Fairbanks wrote to her paper she
+is scarcely less complimentary to him, even if in a different way.
+
+     We have D.D.'s and M.D.'s--we have men of wisdom and men of wit.
+     There is one table from which is sure to come a peal of laughter,
+     and all eyes are turned toward Mark Twain, whose face is, perfectly
+     mirth-provoking.  Sitting lazily at the table, scarcely genteel in
+     his appearance, there is something, I know not what, that interests
+     and attracts.  I saw to-day at dinner venerable divines and sage-
+     looking men convulsed with laughter at his drolleries and quaint,
+     odd manners.
+
+It requires only a few days on shipboard for acquaintances to form, and
+presently a little afternoon group was gathering to hear Mark Twain read
+his letters.  Mrs. Fairbanks was there, of course, also Mr. and Mrs. S.
+L. Severance, likewise of Cleveland, and Moses S. Beach, of the Sun, with
+his daughter Emma, a girl of seventeen.  Dan Slote was likely to be
+there, too, and Jack, and the Doctor, and Charles J. Langdon, of Elmira,
+New York, a boy of eighteen, who had conceived a deep admiration for the
+brilliant writer.  They were fortunate ones who first gathered to hear
+those daring, wonderful letters.
+
+But the benefit was a mutual one. He furnished a priceless entertainment,
+and he derived something equally priceless in return--the test of
+immediate audience and the boon of criticism.  Mrs. Fairbanks especially
+was frankly sincere.  Mr. Severance wrote afterward:
+
+     One afternoon I saw him tearing up a bunch of the soft, white paper-
+     copy paper, I guess the newspapers call it-on which he had written
+     something, and throwing the fragments into the Mediterranean.  I
+     inquired of him why he cast away the fruits of his labors in that
+     manner.
+
+"Well," he drawled, "Mrs. Fairbanks thinks it oughtn't to be printed,
+and, like as not, she is right."
+
+And Emma Beach (Mrs. Abbott Thayer) remembers hearing him say:
+
+"Well, Mrs. Fairbanks has just destroyed another four hours' work for
+me."
+
+Sometimes he played chess with Emma Beach, who thought him a great hero
+because, once when a crowd of men were tormenting a young lad, a
+passenger, Mark Twain took the boy's part and made them desist.
+
+"I am sure I was right, too," she declares; "heroism came natural to
+him."
+
+Mr. Severance recalls another incident which, as he says, was trivial
+enough, but not easy to forget:
+
+We were having a little celebration over the birthday anniversary of Mrs.
+Duncan, wife of our captain.  Mark Twain got up and made a little speech,
+in which he said Mrs. Duncan was really older than Methuselah because she
+knew a lot of things that Methuselah never heard of.  Then he mentioned a
+number of more or less modern inventions, and wound up by saying, "What
+did Methuselah know about a barbed-wire fence?"
+
+Except Following the Equator, The Innocents Abroad comes nearer to being
+history than any other of Mark Twain's travel-books.  The notes for it
+were made on the spot, and there was plenty of fact, plenty of fresh, new
+experience, plenty of incident to set down.  His idea of descriptive
+travel in those days was to tell the story as it happened; also, perhaps,
+he had not then acquired the courage of his inventions.  We may believe
+that the adventures with Jack, Dan, and the Doctor are elaborated here
+and there; but even those happened substantially as recorded.  There is
+little to add, then, to the story of that halcyon trip, and not much to
+elucidate.
+
+The old note-books give a light here and there that is interesting.  It
+is curious to be looking through them now, trying to realize that these
+penciled memoranda were the fresh, first impressions that would presently
+grow into the world's most delightful book of travel; that they were set
+down in the very midst of that care-free little company that frolicked
+through Italy, climbed wearily the arid Syrian hills.  They are all dead
+now; but to us they are as alive and young to-day as when they followed
+the footprints of the Son of Man through Palestine, and stood at last
+before the Sphinx, impressed and awed by its "five thousand slow-
+revolving years."
+
+Some of the items consist of no more than a few terse, suggestive words--
+serious, humorous, sometimes profane.  Others are statistical,
+descriptive, elaborated.  Also there are drawings--"not copied," he marks
+them, with a pride not always justified by the result.  The earlier notes
+are mainly comments on the "pilgrims," the freak pilgrims: "the Frenchy-
+looking woman who owns a dog and keeps up an interminable biography of
+him to the passengers"; the "long-legged, simple, wide-mouthed, horse-
+laughing young fellow who once made a sea voyage to Fortress Monroe, and
+quotes eternally from his experiences"; also, there is reference to
+another young man, "good, accommodating, pleasant but fearfully green."
+This young person would become the "Interrogation Point," in due time,
+and have his picture on page 71 (old edition), while opposite him, on
+page 70, would appear the "oracle," identified as one Doctor Andrews, who
+(the note-book says) had the habit of "smelling in guide-books for
+knowledge and then trying to play it for old information that has been
+festering in his brain."  Sometimes there are abstract notes such as:
+
+How lucky Adam was.  He knew when he said a good thing that no one had
+ever said it before.
+
+Of the "character" notes, the most important and elaborated is that which
+presents the "Poet Lariat."  This is the entry, somewhat epitomized:
+
+                         BLOODGOOD H.  CUTTER
+
+     He is fifty years old, and small of his age.  He dresses in
+     homespun, and is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer, with
+     a strange proclivity for writing rhymes.  He writes them on all
+     possible subjects, and gets them printed on slips of paper, with his
+     portrait at the head.  These he will give to any man who comes
+     along, whether he has anything against him or not .  .  .  .
+
+     Dan said:
+
+     "It must be a great happiness to you to sit down at the close of day
+     and put its events all down in rhymes and poetry, like Byron and
+     Shakespeare and those fellows."
+
+     "Oh yes, it is--it is--Why, many's the time I've had to get up in
+     the night when it comes on me:
+
+          Whether we're on the sea or the land
+          We've all got to go at the word of command--
+
+     Hey!  how's that?"
+
+A curious character was Cutter--a Long Island farmer with the obsession
+of rhyme.  In his old age, in an interview, he said:
+
+"Mark was generally writing and he was glum.  He would write what we were
+doing, and I would write poetry, and Mark would say:
+
+"'For Heaven's sake, Cutter, keep your poems to yourself.'
+
+"Yes, Mark was pretty glum, and he was generally writing."
+
+Poor old Poet Lariat--dead now with so many others of that happy crew.
+We may believe that Mark learned to be "glum" when he saw the Lariat
+approaching with his sheaf of rhymes.  We may believe, too, that he was
+"generally writing."  He contributed fifty-three letters to the Alta
+during that five months and six to the Tribune.  They would average about
+two columns nonpareil each, which is to say four thousand words, or
+something like two hundred and fifty thousand words in all.  To turn out
+an average of fifteen hundred words a day, with continuous sight-seeing
+besides, one must be generally writing during any odd intervals; those
+who are wont to regard Mark Twain as lazy may consider these statistics.
+That he detested manual labor is true enough, but at the work for which
+he was fitted and intended it may be set down here upon authority (and
+despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that to his last
+year he was the most industrious of men.
+
+
+
+
+LXI
+
+THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
+
+It was Dan, Jack, and the Doctor who with Mark Twain wandered down
+through Italy and left moral footprints that remain to this day.  The
+Italian guides are wary about showing pieces of the True Cross, fragments
+of the Crown of Thorns, and the bones of saints since then.  They show
+them, it is true, but with a smile; the name of Mark Twain is a touch-
+stone to test their statements.  Not a guide in Italy but has heard the
+tale of that iconoclastic crew, and of the book which turned their
+marvels into myths, their relics into bywords.
+
+It was Doctor Jackson, Colonel Denny, Doctor Birch, and Samuel Clemens
+who evaded the quarantine and made the perilous night trip to Athens and
+looked upon the Parthenon and the sleeping city by moonlight.  It is all
+set down in the notes, and the account varies little from that given in
+the book; only he does not tell us that Captain Duncan and the
+quartermaster, Pratt, connived at the escapade, or how the latter watched
+the shore in anxious suspense until he heard the whistle which was their
+signal to be taken aboard.  It would have meant six months' imprisonment
+if they had been captured, for there was no discretion in the Greek law.
+
+It was T. D. Crocker, A. N. Sanford, Col. Peter Kinney, and William
+Gibson who were delegated to draft the address to the Emperor of Russia
+at Yalta, with Samuel L.  Clemens as chairman of that committee.  The
+chairman wrote the address, the opening sentence of which he grew so
+weary of hearing:
+
+     We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply
+     for recreation, and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial
+     state.
+
+The address is all set down in the notes, and there also exists the first
+rough draft, with the emendations in his own hand.  He deplores the time
+it required:
+
+     That job is over.  Writing addresses to emperors is not my strong
+     suit.  However, if it is not as good as it might be it doesn't
+     signify--the other committeemen ought to have helped me write it;
+     they had nothing to do, and I had my hands full.  But for bothering
+     with this I would have caught up entirely with my New York Tribune
+     correspondence and nearly up with the San Francisco.
+
+They wanted him also to read the address to the Emperor, but he pointed
+out that the American consul was the proper person for that office.  He
+tells how the address was presented:
+
+August 26th.  The Imperial carriages were in waiting at eleven, and at
+twelve we were at the palace....
+
+The Consul for Odessa read the address and the Czar said frequently,
+"Good--very good; indeed"--and at the close, "I am very, very grateful."
+
+It was not improper for him to set down all this, and much more, in his
+own note-book--not then for publication.  It was in fact a very proper
+record--for today.
+
+One incident of the imperial audience Mark Twain omitted from his book,
+perhaps because the humor of it had not yet become sufficiently evident.
+"The humorous perception of a thing is a pretty slow growth sometimes,"
+he once remarked.  It was about seventeen years before he could laugh
+enjoyably at a slight mistake he made at the Emperor's reception.  He set
+down a memorandum of it, then, for fear it might be lost:
+
+     There were a number of great dignitaries of the Empire there, and
+     although, as a general thing, they were dressed in citizen's
+     clothing, I observed that the most of them wore a very small piece
+     of ribbon in the lapels of their coats.  That little touch of color
+     struck my fancy, and it seemed to me a good idea to add it to my own
+     attractions; not imagining that it had any special significance.  So
+     I stepped aside, hunted up a bit of red ribbon, and ornamented my
+     lapel with it.  Presently, Count Festetics, the Grand Master of
+     ceremonies, and the only man there who was gorgeously arrayed, in
+     full official costume, began to show me a great many attentions.  He
+     was particularly polite, and pleasant, and anxious to be of service
+     to me.  Presently, he asked me what order of nobility I belonged to?
+     I said, "I didn't belong to any."  Then he asked me what order of
+     knighthood I belonged to?  I said, "None."  Then he asked me what
+     the red ribbon in my buttonhole stood for?  I saw, at once, what an
+     ass I had been making of myself, and was accordingly confused and
+     embarrassed.  I said the first thing that came into my mind, and
+     that was that the ribbon was merely the symbol of a club of
+     journalists to which I belonged, and I was not pursued with any more
+     of Count Festetic's attentions.
+
+     Later, I got on very familiar terms with an old gentleman, whom I
+     took to be the head gardener, and walked him all about the gardens,
+     slipping my arm into his without invitation, yet without demur on
+     his part, and by and by was confused again when I found that he was
+     not a gardener at all, but the Lord High Admiral of Russia!  I
+     almost made up my mind that I would never call on an Emperor again.
+
+Like all Mediterranean excursionists, those first pilgrims were
+insatiable collectors of curios, costumes, and all manner of outlandish
+things.  Dan Slote had the stateroom hung and piled with such gleanings.
+At Constantinople his room-mate writes:
+
+     I thought Dan had got the state-room pretty full of rubbish at last,
+     but awhile ago his dragoman arrived with a brand-new ghastly
+     tombstone of the Oriental pattern, with his name handsomely carved
+     and gilted on it in Turkish characters.  That fellow will buy a
+     Circassian slave next.
+
+It was Church, Denny, Jack, Davis, Dan, Moult, and Mark Twain who made
+the "long trip" through Syria from Beirut to Jerusalem with their
+elaborate camping outfit and decrepit nags "Jericho," "Baalbec," and the
+rest.  It was better camping than that Humboldt journey of six years
+before, though the horses were not so dissimilar, and altogether it was a
+hard, nerve-racking experience, climbing the arid hills of Palestine in
+that torrid summer heat.  Nobody makes that trip in summer-time now.
+Tourists hurry out of Syria before the first of April, and they do not go
+back before November.  One brief quotation from Mark Twain's book gives
+us an idea of what that early party of pilgrims had to undergo:
+
+     We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple of
+     hours, and then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig-
+     trees to give me a chance to rest.  It was the hottest day we had
+     seen yet--the sun-flames shot down like the shafts of fire that
+     stream out before a blow-pipe; the rays seemed to fall in a deluge
+     on the head and pass downward like rain from a roof.  I imagined I
+     could distinguish between the floods of rays.  I thought I could
+     tell when each flood struck my head, when it reached my shoulders,
+     and when the next one came.  It was terrible.
+
+He had been ill with cholera at Damascus, a light attack; but any attack
+of that dread disease is serious enough.  He tells of this in the book,
+but he does not mention, either in the book or in his notes, the attack
+which Dan Slote had some days later.  It remained for William F. Church,
+of the party, to relate that incident, for it was the kind of thing that
+Mark Twain was not likely to record, or even to remember.  Doctor Church
+was a deacon with orthodox views and did not approve of Mark Twain; he
+thought him sinful, irreverent, profane.
+
+"He was the worst man I ever knew," Church said; then he added, "And the
+best."
+
+What happened was this: At the end of a terrible day of heat, when the
+party had camped on the edge of a squalid Syrian village, Dan was taken
+suddenly ill.  It was cholera, beyond doubt.  Dan could not go on--he
+might never go on.  The chances were that way.  It was a serious matter
+all around.  To wait with Dan meant to upset their travel schedule--it
+might mean to miss the ship.  Consultation was held and a resolution
+passed (the pilgrims were always passing resolutions) to provide for Dan
+as well as possible, and leave him behind.  Clemens, who had remained
+with Dan, suddenly appeared and said:
+
+"Gentlemen, I understand that you are going to leave Dan Slote here
+alone.  I'll be d---d if I do!"
+
+And he didn't.  He stayed there and brought Dan into Jerusalem, a few
+days late, but convalescent.
+
+Perhaps most of them were not always reverent during that Holy Land trip.
+It was a trying journey, and after fierce days of desert hills the
+reaction might not always spare even the holiest memories.  Jack was
+particularly sinful.  When they learned the price for a boat on Galilee,
+and the deacons who had traveled nearly half around the world to sail on
+that sacred water were confounded by the charge, Jack said:
+
+"Well, Denny, do you wonder now that Christ walked?"
+
+It was the irreverent Jack who one morning (they had camped the night
+before by the ruins of Jericho) refused to get up to see the sun rise
+across the Jordan.  Deacon Church went to his tent.
+
+"Jack, my boy, get up.  Here is the place where the Israelites crossed
+over into the Promised Land, and beyond are the mountains of Moab, where
+Moses lies buried."
+
+"Moses who!" said Jack.
+
+"Oh, Jack, my boy, Moses, the great lawgiver--who led the Israelites out
+of Egypt-forty years through the wilderness--to the Promised Land."
+
+"Forty years!" said Jack.  "How far was it?"
+
+"It was three hundred miles, Jack; a great wilderness, and he brought
+them through in safety."
+
+Jack regarded him with scorn.  "Huh, Moses--three hundred miles forty
+years--why, Ben Holiday would have brought them through in thirty-six
+hours!" --[Ben Holiday, owner of the Overland stages, and a man of great
+executive ability.  This incident, a true one, is more elaborately told
+in Roughing It, but it seems pertinent here.]
+
+Jack probably learned more about the Bible during that trip-its history
+and its heroes-than during all his former years.  Nor was Jack the only
+one of that group thus benefited.  The sacred landmarks of Palestine
+inspire a burning interest in the Scriptures, and Mark Twain probably did
+not now regret those early Sunday-school lessons; certainly he did not
+fail to review them exhaustively on that journey.  His note-books fairly
+overflow with Bible references; the Syrian chapters in The Innocents
+Abroad are permeated with the poetry and legendary beauty of the Bible
+story.  The little Bible he carried on that trip, bought in
+Constantinople, was well worn by the time they reached the ship again at
+Jaffa.  He must have read it with a large and persistent interest; also
+with a double benefit.  For, besides the knowledge acquired, he was
+harvesting a profit--probably unsuspected at the time---viz., the
+influence of the most direct and beautiful English--the English of the
+King James version--which could not fail to affect his own literary
+method at that impressionable age.  We have already noted his earlier
+admiration for that noble and simple poem, "The Burial of Moses," which
+in the Palestine note-book is copied in full.  All the tendency of his
+expression lay that way, and the intense consideration of stately Bible
+phrase and imagery could hardly fail to influence his mental processes.
+The very distinct difference of style, as shown in The Innocents Abroad
+and in his earlier writings, we may believe was in no small measure due
+to his study of the King James version during those weeks in Palestine.
+
+He bought another Bible at Jerusalem; but it was not for himself.  It was
+a little souvenir volume bound in olive and balsam wood, and on the fly-
+leaf is inscribed:
+
+     Mrs. Jane Clemens from her son.  Jerusalem, Sept.  24, 1867.
+
+There is one more circumstance of that long cruise-recorded neither in
+the book nor the notes--an incident brief, but of more importance in the
+life of Samuel Clemens than any heretofore set down.  It occurred in the
+beautiful Bay of Smyrna, on the fifth or sixth of September, while the
+vessel lay there for the Ephesus trip.
+
+Reference has been made to young Charles Langdon, of Elmira (the
+"Charley" once mentioned in the Innocents), as an admirer of Mark Twain.
+There was a good deal of difference in their ages, and they were seldom
+of the same party; but sometimes the boy invited the journalist to his
+cabin and, boy-like,, exhibited his treasures.  He had two sisters at
+home; and of Olivia, the youngest, he had brought a dainty miniature done
+on ivory in delicate tints--a sweet-pictured countenance, fine and
+spiritual.  On that fateful day in the day of Smyrna, Samuel Clemens,
+visiting in young Langdon's cabin, was shown this portrait.  He looked at
+it with long admiration, and spoke of it reverently, for the delicate
+face seemed to him to be something more than a mere human likeness.  Each
+time he came, after that, he asked to see the picture, and once even
+begged to be allowed to take it away with him.  The boy would not agree
+to this, and the elder man looked long and steadily at the miniature,
+resolving in his mind that some day he would meet the owner of that
+lovely face--a purpose for once in accord with that which the fates had
+arranged for him, in the day when all things were arranged, the day of
+the first beginning.
+
+
+
+
+LXII
+
+THE RETURN OF THE PILGRIMS
+
+The last note-book entry bears date of October 11th:
+
+     At sea, somewhere in the neighborhood of Malta.  Very stormy.
+
+     Terrible death to be talked to death.  The storm has blown two small
+     land birds and a hawk to sea and they came on board.  Sea full of
+     flying-fish.
+
+That is all.  There is no record of the week's travel in Spain, which a
+little group of four made under the picturesque Gibraltar guide, Benunes,
+still living and quite as picturesque at last accounts.  This side-trip
+is covered in a single brief paragraph in the Innocents, and the only
+account we have of it is in a home letter, from Cadiz, of October 24th:
+
+     We left Gibraltar at noon and rode to Algeciras (4 hours), thus
+     dodging the quarantine--took dinner, and then rode horseback all
+     night in a swinging trot, and at daylight took a caleche (a-wheeled
+     vehicle), and rode 5 hours--then took cars and traveled till twelve
+     at night.  That landed us at Seville, and we were over the hard part
+     of our trip and somewhat tired.  Since then we have taken things
+     comparatively easy, drifting around from one town to another and
+     attracting a good deal of attention--for I guess strangers do not
+     wander through Andalusia and the other southern provinces of Spain
+     often.  The country is precisely what it was when Don Quixote and
+     Sancho Panza were possible characters.
+
+     But I see now what the glory of Spain must have been when it was
+     under Moorish domination.  No, I will not say that--but then when
+     one is carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of the
+     Alhambra and the supernatural beauty of the Alcazar, he is apt to
+     overflow with admiration for the splendid intellects that created
+     them.
+
+We may wish that he had left us a chapter of that idyllic journey, but it
+will never be written now.  A night or two before the vessel reached New
+York there was the usual good-by assembly, and for this occasion, at Mrs.
+Severance's request, Mark Twain wrote some verses.  They were not
+especially notable, for meter and rhyme did not come easy to him, but one
+prophetic stanza is worth remembering.  In the opening lines the
+passengers are referred to as a fleet of vessels, then follows:
+
+          Lo! other ships of that parted fleet
+          Shall suffer this fate or that:
+          One shall be wrecked, another shall sink,
+          Or ground on treacherous flat.
+          Some shall be famed in many lands
+          As good ships, fast and fair,
+          And some shall strangely disappear,
+          Men know not when or where.
+
+The Quaker City returned to America on November 19, 1867, and Mark Twain
+found himself, if not famous, at least in very wide repute.  The fifty-
+three letters to the Alta and the half-dozen to the New York Tribune had
+carried his celebrity into every corner of the States and Territories.
+Vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry, they came as a
+revelation to a public weary of the driveling, tiresome travel-letters of
+that period.  They preached a new gospel in travel-literature: the gospel
+of seeing with an overflowing honesty; a gospel of sincerity in according
+praises to whatever seemed genuine, and ridicule to the things considered
+sham.  It was the gospel that Mark Twain would continue to preach during
+his whole career.  It became his chief literary message to the world-a
+world waiting for that message.
+
+Moreover, the letters were literature.  He had received, from whatever
+source, a large and very positive literary impulse, a loftier conception
+and expression.  It was at Tangier that he first struck the grander
+chord, the throbbing cadence of human story.
+
+Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered America;
+old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to
+arm for the first Crusade; old when Charlemagne and his paladins
+beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the
+fabled days of the olden time; old when Christ and his disciples walked
+the earth; stood where it stands to-day when the lips of Memnon were
+vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes.
+
+This is pure poetry.  He had never touched so high a strain before, but
+he reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing
+mastery and confidence.  In Venice, in Rome, in Athens, through the Holy
+Land, his retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional
+crescendo that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain,
+the ageless contemplation of the Sphinx.  We cannot forego a paragraph or
+two of that word-picture:
+
+     After years of waiting it was before me at last.  The great face was
+     so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient.  There was a dignity not
+     of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as
+     never anything human wore.  It was stone, but it seemed sentient.
+     If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking.  It was looking
+     toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing--nothing
+     but distance and vacancy.  It was looking over and beyond everything
+     of the present, and far into the past....  It was thinking of the
+     wars of the departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and
+     destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose
+     progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy
+     and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five
+     thousand slow-revolving years .  .  .  .
+
+     The Sphinx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its
+     magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its
+     story.  And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this
+     eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of
+     all ages, which reveals to one something of what we shall feel when
+     we shall stand at last in the awful presence of God.
+
+Then that closing word of Egypt.  He elaborated it for the book, and did
+not improve it.  Let us preserve here its original form.
+
+     We are glad to have seen Egypt.  We are glad to have seen that old
+     land which taught Greece her letters--and through Greece, Rome--and
+     through Rome, the world--that venerable cradle of culture and
+     refinement which could have humanized and civilized the Children of
+     Israel, but allowed them to depart out of her borders savages--those
+     Children whom we still revere, still love, and whose sad
+     shortcomings we still excuse--not because they were savages, but
+     because they were the chosen savages of God.
+
+The Holy Land letters alone would have brought him fame.  They presented
+the most graphic and sympathetic picture of Syrian travel ever written--
+one that will never become antiquated or obsolete so long as human nature
+remains unchanged.  From beginning to end the tale is rarely, reverently
+told.  Its closing paragraph has not been surpassed in the voluminous
+literature of that solemn land:
+
+     Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.  Over it broods the spell of
+     a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.
+     Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers that solemn
+     sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing
+     exists--over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs
+     motionless and dead--about whose borders nothing grows but weeds and
+     scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises
+     refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch.
+     Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of
+     Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing one finds
+     only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the
+     accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle left
+     it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in
+     their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to
+     remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour's
+     presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks
+     by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, goodwill to men,
+     is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature
+     that is pleasant to the eye.  Renowned Jerusalem itself, the
+     stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and
+     is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer
+     there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the
+     wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel is
+     gone, and the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on
+     that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the
+     Holy Cross.  The noted Sea of Galilee, where Roman fleets once rode
+     at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed in their ships,
+     was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and its
+     borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a shapeless ruin;
+     Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have
+     vanished from the earth, and the "desert places" round about them
+     where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's voice and ate
+     the miraculous bread sleep in the hush of a solitude that is
+     inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.
+
+     Palestine is desolate and unlovely.  And why should it be otherwise?
+     Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?
+
+It would be easy to quote pages here--a pictorial sequence from Gibraltar
+to Athens, from Athens to Egypt, a radiant panoramic march.  In time he
+would write technically better.  He would avoid solecism, he would become
+a greater master of vocabulary and phrase, but in all the years ahead he
+would never match the lambent bloom and spontaneity of those fresh, first
+impressions of Mediterranean lands and seas.  No need to mention the
+humor, the burlesque, the fearless, unrestrained ridicule of old masters
+and of sacred relics, so called.  These we have kept familiar with much
+repetition.  Only, the humor had grown more subtle, more restrained; the
+burlesque had become impersonal and harmless, the ridicule so frank and
+good-natured, that even the old masters themselves might have enjoyed it,
+while the most devoted churchman, unless blinded by bigotry, would find
+in it satisfaction, rather than sacrilege.
+
+The final letter was written for the New York Herald after the arrival,
+and was altogether unlike those that preceded it.  Gaily satirical and
+personal--inclusively so--it might better have been left unwritten, for
+it would seem to have given needless offense to a number of goodly
+people, whose chief sin was the sedateness of years. However, it is all
+past now, and those who were old then, and perhaps queer and pious and
+stingy, do not mind any more, and those who were young and frivolous have
+all grown old too, and most of them have set out on the still farther
+voyage.  Somewhere, it may be, they gather, now; and then, and lightly,
+tenderly recall their old-time journeying.
+
+
+
+
+LXIII
+
+IN WASHINGTON--A PUBLISHING PROPOSITION
+
+Clemens remained but one day in New York.  Senator Stewart had written,
+about the time of the departure of the Quaker City, offering him the
+position of private secretary--a position which was to give him leisure
+for literary work, with a supporting salary as well.  Stewart no doubt
+thought it would be considerably to his advantage to have the brilliant
+writer and lecturer attached to his political establishment, and Clemens
+likewise saw possibilities in the arrangement.  From Naples, in August,
+he had written accepting Stewart's offer; he lost no time now in
+discussing the matter in person. --[In a letter home, August 9th, he
+referred to the arrangement: "I wrote to Bill Stewart to-day accepting
+his private secretaryship in Washington, next winter."]
+
+There seems to have been little difficulty in concluding the arrangement.
+When Clemens had been in Washington a week we find him writing:
+
+     DEAR FOLKS, Tired and sleepy--been in Congress all day and making
+     newspaper acquaintances.  Stewart is to look up a clerkship in the
+     Patent Office for Orion.  Things necessarily move slowly where there
+     is so much business and such armies of office-seekers to be attended
+     to.  I guess it will be all right. I intend it shall be all right.
+
+     I have 18 invitations to lecture, at $100 each, in various parts
+     of the Union--have declined them all.  I am for business now.
+
+     Belong on the Tribune Staff, and shall write occasionally.  Am
+     offered the same berth to-day on the Herald by letter.  Shall write
+     Mr. Bennett and accept, as soon as I hear from Tribune that it will
+     not interfere.  Am pretty well known now--intend to be better known.
+     Am hobnobbing with these old Generals and Senators and other humbugs
+     for no good purpose.  Don't have any more trouble making friends
+     than I did in California.  All serene.  Good-by.  Shall continue on
+     the Alta.
+                              Yours affectionately,
+                                                  SAM.
+
+     P.S.--I room with Bill Stewart and board at Willard's Hotel.
+
+But the secretary arrangement was a brief matter.  It is impossible to
+conceive of Mark Twain as anybody's secretary, especially as the
+secretary of Senator Stewart.
+
+--[In Senator Stewart's memoirs he refers unpleasantly to Mark Twain, and
+after relating several incidents that bear only strained relations to the
+truth, states that when the writer returned from the Holy Land he
+(Stewart) offered him a secretaryship as a sort of charity.  He adds that
+Mark Twain's behavior on his premises was such that a threat of a
+thrashing was necessary.  The reason for such statements becomes
+apparent, however, when he adds that in 'Roughing It' the author accuses
+him of cheating, prints a picture of him with a hatch over his eye, and
+claims to have given him a sound thrashing, none of which statements,
+save only the one concerning the picture (an apparently unforgivable
+offense to his dignity), is true, as the reader may easily ascertain for
+himself.]
+
+Within a few weeks he was writing humorous accounts of "My Late
+Senatorial Secretaryship,"  "Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation,"
+etc., all good-natured burlesque, but inspired, we.  may believe, by the
+change: These articles appeared in the New York Tribune, the New York
+Citizen, and the Galaxy Magazine.
+
+There appears to have been no ill-feeling at this time between Clemens
+and Stewart.  If so, it is not discoverable in any of the former's
+personal or newspaper correspondence.  In fact, in his article relating
+to his "late senatorial secretaryship" he puts the joke, so far as it is
+a joke, on Senator James W. Nye, probably as an additional punishment for
+Nye's failure to appear on the night of his lecture.  He established
+headquarters with a brilliant newspaper correspondent named Riley.  "One
+of the best men in Washington--or elsewhere," he tells us in a brief
+sketch of that person.  --[See Riley, newspaper correspondent.  Sketches
+New and Old.]--  He had known Riley in San Francisco; the two were
+congenial, and settled down to their several undertakings.
+
+Clemens was chiefly concerned over two things: he wished to make money
+and he wished to secure a government appointment for Orion.  He had used
+up the most of his lecture accumulations, and was moderately in debt.
+His work was in demand at good rates, for those days, and with working
+opportunity he could presently dispose of his financial problem.  The
+Tribune was anxious for letters; the Enterprise and Alta were waiting for
+them; the Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the magazines--all had solicited
+contributions; the lecture bureaus pursued him.  Personally his outlook
+was bright.
+
+The appointment for Orion was a different matter.  The powers were not
+especially interested in a brother; there were too many brothers and
+assorted relatives on the official waiting-list already.  Clemens was
+offered appointments for himself--a consulship, a post-mastership; even
+that of San Francisco.  From the Cabinet down, the Washington political
+contingent had read his travel-letters, and was ready to recognize
+officially the author of them in his own person and personality.
+
+Also, socially: Mark Twain found himself all at once in the midst of
+receptions, dinners, and speech-making; all very exciting for a time at
+least, but not profitable, not conducive to work.  At a dinner of the
+Washington Correspondents Club his response to the toast, "Women," was
+pronounced by Schuyler Colfax to be "the best after dinner speech ever
+made."  Certainly it was a refreshing departure from the prosy or clumsy-
+witted efforts common to that period.  He was coming altogether into his
+own. --[This is the first of Mark Twain's after-dinner speeches to be
+preserved.  The reader will find it complete, as reported next day, in
+Appendix G, at the end of last volume.]
+
+He was not immediately interested in the matter of book publication.
+The Jumping Frog book was popular, and in England had been issued by
+Routledge; but the royalty returns were modest enough and slow in
+arrival.  His desire was for prompter results.  His interest in book
+publication had never been an eager one, and related mainly to the
+advertising it would furnish, which he did not now need; or to the money
+return, in which he had no great faith.  Yet at this very moment a letter
+for him was lying in the Tribune office in New York which would bring the
+book idea into first prominence and spell the beginning of his fortune.
+
+Among those who had read and found delight in the Tribune letters was
+Elisha Bliss, Jr., of the American Publishing Company, of Hartford.
+Bliss was a shrewd and energetic man, with a keen appreciation for humor
+and the American fondness for that literary quality.  He had recently
+undertaken the management of a Hartford concern, and had somewhat alarmed
+its conservative directorate by publishing books that furnished
+entertainment to the reader as well as moral instruction.  Only his
+success in paying dividends justified this heresy and averted his
+downfall.  Two days after the arrival of the Quaker City Bliss wrote the
+letter above mentioned.  It ran as follows:
+
+                         OFFICE OF THE AMERICAN PUBLISHING CO.
+                         HARTFORD, CONN., November 21, 1867.
+
+SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, ESQ.,
+Tribune Office, New York.
+
+DEAR SIR,--We take the liberty to address you this, in place of a letter
+which we had recently written and were about to forward to you, not
+knowing your arrival home was expected so soon.  We are desirous of
+obtaining from you a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your
+letters from the past, etc., with such interesting additions as may be
+proper.  We are the publishers of A. D. Richardson's works, and flatter
+ourselves that we can give an author a favorable term and do as full
+justice to his productions as any other house in the country.  We are
+perhaps the oldest subscription house in the country, and have never
+failed to give a book an immense circulation.  We sold about 100,000
+copies of Richardson's F. D. and E.  ('Field, Dungeon and Escape'), and
+are now printing 41,000 of 'Beyond the Mississippi', and large orders
+ahead.  If you have any thought of writing a book, or could be induced to
+do so, we should be pleased to see you, and will do so.  Will you do us
+the favor of reply at once, at your earliest convenience.
+
+                                   Very truly etc.,
+
+                                        E. BLISS, JR.,
+                                        Secretary.
+
+After ten days' delay this letter was forwarded to the Tribune bureau in
+Washington, where Clemens received it.  He replied promptly.
+
+
+                              WASHINGTON, December 2, 1867.
+
+E. BLISS, JR., ESQ.,
+Secretary American Publishing Co.
+
+DEAR SIR,--I only received your favor of November 21st last night, at the
+rooms of the Tribune Bureau here.  It was forwarded from the Tribune
+office, New York where it had lain eight or ten days.  This will be a
+sufficient apology for the seeming discourtesy of my silence.
+
+I wrote fifty-two letters for the San Francisco Alta California during
+the Quakes City excusion, about half of which number have been printed
+thus far.  The Alta has few exchanges in the East, and I suppose scarcely
+any of these letters have been copied on this side of the Rocky
+Mountains.  I could weed them of their chief faults of construction and
+inelegancies of expression, and make a volume that would be more
+acceptable in many respects than any I could now write.  When those
+letters were written my impressions were fresh, but now they have lost
+that freshness; they were warm then, they are cold now.  I could strike
+out certain letters, and write new ones wherewith to supply their places.
+If you think such a book would suit your purpose, please drop me a line,
+specifying the size and general style of the volume--when the matter
+ought to be ready; whether it should have pictures in it or not; and
+particularly what your terms with me would be, and what amount of money
+I might possibly make out of it.  The latter clause has a degree of
+importance for me which is almost beyond my own comprehension.  But you
+understand that, of course.
+
+I have other propositions for a book, but have doubted the propriety of
+interfering with good newspaper engagements, except my way as an author
+could be demonstrated to be plain before me.  But I know Richardson, and
+learned from him some months ago something of an idea of the subscription
+plan of publishing.  If that is your plan invariably it looks safe.
+
+I am on the New York Tribune staff here as an "occasional," among other
+things, and a note from you addressed to
+                    Very truly, etc.,
+                                   SAM. L. CLEMENS,
+                                   New York Tribune Bureau, Washington
+will find me, without fail.
+
+
+The exchange of those two letters marked the beginning of one of the most
+notable publishing connections in American literary history.
+
+Consummation, however, was somewhat delayed.  Bliss was ill when the
+reply came, and could not write again in detail until nearly a month
+later.  In this letter he recited the profits made by Richardson and
+others through subscription publication, and named the royalties paid.
+Richardson had received four per cent. of the sale price, a small enough
+rate for these later days; but the cost of manufacture was larger then,
+and the sale and delivery of books through agents has ever been an
+expensive process.  Even Horace Greeley had received but a fraction more
+on his Great American Conflict.  Bliss especially suggested and
+emphasized a "humorous work--that is to say, a work humorously inclined."
+He added that they had two arrangements for paying authors: outright
+purchase, and royalty.  He invited a meeting in New York to arrange
+terms.
+
+
+
+
+LXIV
+
+OLIVIA LANGDON
+
+Clemens did in fact go to New York that same evening, to spend Christmas
+with Dan Slote, and missed Bliss's second letter.  It was no matter.
+Fate had his affairs properly in hand, and had prepared an event of still
+larger moment than the publication even of Innocents Abroad.  There was a
+pleasant reunion at Dan Slote's.  He wrote home about it:
+
+     Charley Langdon, Jack Van Nostrand, Dan and I (all Quaker City
+     night-hawks) had a blow-out at Dan's house and a lively talk over
+     old times.  I just laughed till my sides ached at some of our
+     reminiscences.  It was the unholiest gang that ever cavorted through
+     Palestine, but those are the best boys in the world.
+
+This, however, was not the event; it was only preliminary to it.  We are
+coming to that now.  At the old St. Nicholas Hotel, which stood on the
+west of Broadway between Spring and Broome streets, there were stopping
+at this time Jervis Langdon, a wealty coal-dealer and mine-owner of
+Elmira, his son Charles and his daughter Olivia, whose pictured face
+Samuel Clemens had first seen in the Bay of Smyrna one September day.
+Young Langdon had been especially anxious to bring his distinguished
+Quaker City friend and his own people together, and two days before
+Christmas Samuel Clemens was invited to dine at the hotel.  He went very
+willingly. The lovely face of that miniature had been often a part of
+his waking dreams.  For the first time now he looked upon its reality.
+Long afterward he said:
+
+"It is forty years ago.  From that day to this she has never been out of
+my mind."
+
+Charles Dickens was in New York then, and gave a reading that night in
+Steinway Hall.  The Langdons went, and Samuel Clemens accompanied them.
+He remembered afterward that Dickens wore a black velvet coat with a
+fiery red flower in his buttonhole, and that he read the storm scene from
+Copperfield--the death of James Steerforth.  But he remembered still more
+clearly the face and dress of that slender girlish figure at his side.
+
+Olivia Langdon was twenty-two years old at this time, delicate as the
+miniature he had seen, fragile to look upon, though no longer with the
+shattered health of her girlhood.  At sixteen, through a fall upon the
+ice, she had become a complete invalid, confined to her bed for two
+years, unable to sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position
+except upon her back.  Great physicians and surgeons, one after another,
+had done their best for her but she had failed steadily until every hope
+had died.  Then, when nothing else was left to try, a certain Doctor
+Newton, of spectacular celebrity, who cured by "laying on of hands," was
+brought to Elmira to see her.  Doctor Newton came into the darkened room
+and said:
+
+"Open the windows--we must have light!"
+
+They protested that she could not bear the light, but the windows were
+opened.  Doctor Newton came to the bedside of the helpless girl,
+delivered a short, fervent prayer, put his arm under her shoulders, and
+bade her sit up.  She had not moved for two years, and the family were
+alarmed, but she obeyed, and he assisted her into a chair.  Sensation
+came back to her limbs.  With his assistance she even made a feeble
+attempt to walk.  He left then, saying that she would gradually improve,
+and in time be well, though probably never very strong.  On the same day
+he healed a boy, crippled and drawn with fever.
+
+It turned out as he had said.  Olivia Langdon improved steadily, and now
+at twenty-two, though not robust--she was never that--she was
+comparatively well.  Gentle, winning, lovable, she was the family idol,
+and Samuel Clemens joined in their worship from the moment of that first
+meeting.
+
+Olivia Langdon, on her part, was at first dazed and fascinated, rather
+than attracted, by this astonishing creature, so unlike any one she had
+ever known.  Her life had been circumscribed, her experiences of a simple
+sort.  She had never seen anything resembling him before.  Indeed, nobody
+had.  Somewhat carelessly, even if correctly, attired; eagerly, rather
+than observantly, attentive; brilliant and startling, rather than
+cultured, of speech--a blazing human solitaire, unfashioned, unset,
+tossed by the drift of fortune at her feet.  He disturbed rather than
+gratified her.  She sensed his heresy toward the conventions and forms
+which had been her gospel; his bantering, indifferent attitude toward
+life--to her always so serious and sacred; she suspected that he even
+might have unorthodox views on matters of religion.  When he had gone she
+somehow had the feeling that a great fiery meteor of unknown portent had
+swept across her sky.
+
+To her brother, who was eager for her approval of his celebrity, Miss
+Langdon conceded admiration.  As for her father, he did not qualify his
+opinion.  With hearty sense of humor, and a keen perception of verity and
+capability in men, Jervis Langdon accepted Samuel Clemens from the start,
+and remained his stanch admirer and friend.  Clemens left that night with
+an invitation to visit Elmira by and by, and with the full intention of
+going--soon.  Fate, however, had another plan.  He did not see Elmira for
+the better part of a year.
+
+He saw Miss Langdon again within the week.  On New-Year's Day he set
+forth to pay calls, after the fashion of the time--more lavish then than
+now.  Miss Langdon was receiving with Miss Alice Hooker, a niece of Henry
+Ward Beecher, at the home of a Mrs. Berry; he decided to go there first.
+With young Langdon he arrived at eleven o'clock in the morning, and they
+did not leave until midnight.  If his first impression upon Olivia
+Langdon had been meteoric, it would seem that he must now have become to
+her as a streaming comet that swept from zenith to horizon.  One thing is
+certain: she had become to him the single, unvarying beacon of his future
+years.  He visited Henry Ward Beecher on that trip and dined with him by
+invitation.  Harriet Beecher Stowe was present, and others of that
+eminent family.  Likewise his old Quaker City comrades, Moses S.  and
+Emma Beach.  It was a brilliant gathering, a conclave of intellectual
+gods--a triumph to be there for one who had been a printer-boy on the
+banks of the Mississippi, and only a little while before a miner with
+pick and shovel.  It was gratifying to be so honored; it would be
+pleasant to write home; but the occasion lacked something too--
+everything, in fact--for when he ran his eye around the board the face of
+the minature was not there.
+
+Still there were compensations; inadequate, of course, but pleasant
+enough to remember.  It was Sunday evening and the party adjourned to
+Plymouth Church.  After services Mr. Beecher invited him to return home
+with him for a quiet talk.  Evidently they had a good time, for in the
+letter telling of these things Samuel Clemens said: "Henry Ward Beecher
+is a brick."
+
+
+
+
+LXV
+
+A CONTRACT WITH ELISHA BLISS, JR.
+
+He returned to Washington without seeing Miss Langdon again, though he
+would seem to have had permission to write--friendly letters.  A little
+later (it was on the evening of January 9th) he lectured in Washington--
+on very brief notice indeed.  The arrangement for his appearance had been
+made by a friend during his absence--"a friend," Clemens declared
+afterward, "not entirely sober at the time."  To his mother he wrote:
+
+I scared up a doorkeeper and was ready at the proper time, and by pure
+good luck a tolerably good house assembled and I was saved.  I hardly
+knew what I was going to talk about, but it went off in splendid style.
+
+The title of the lecture delivered was "The Frozen Truth"--"more truth in
+the title than in the lecture," according to his own statement.  What it
+dealt with is not remembered now.  It had to do with the Quaker City
+trip, perhaps, and it seems to have brought a financial return which was
+welcome enough.  Subsequently he delivered it elsewhere; though just how
+far the tour extended cannot be learned from the letters, and he had but
+little memory of it in later years.
+
+There was some further correspondence with Bliss, then about the 21st of
+January (1868) Clemens made a trip to Hartford to settle the matter.
+Bliss had been particularly anxious to meet him, personally and was a
+trifle disappointed with his appearance.  Mark Twain's traveling costume
+was neither new nor neat, and he was smoking steadily a pipe of power.
+His general make-up was hardly impressive.
+
+Bliss's disturbance was momentary.  Once he began to talk the rest did
+not matter.  He was the author of those letters, and Bliss decided that
+personally he was even greater than they.  The publisher, confined to his
+home with illness, offered him the hospitality of his household.  Also,
+he made him two propositions: he would pay him ten thousand dollars cash
+for his copyright, or he would pay five per cent. royalty, which was a
+fourth more than Richardson had received.  He advised the latter
+arrangement.
+
+Clemens had already taken advice and had discussed the project a good
+deal with Richardson.  The ten thousand dollars was a heavy temptation,
+but he withstood it and closed on the royalty basis--"the best business
+judgment I ever displayed," he was wont to declare.  A letter written to
+his mother and sister near the end of this Hartford stay is worth quoting
+pretty fully here, for the information and "character" it contains.  It
+bears date of January 24th.
+
+     This is a good week for me.  I stopped in the Herald office, as I
+     came through New York, to see the boys on the staff, and young James
+     Gordon Bennett asked me to write twice a week, impersonally, for the
+     Herald, and said if I would I might have full swing, and about
+     anybody and everything I wanted to.  I said I must have the very
+     fullest possible swing, and he said, "All right."  I said, "It's a
+     contract--" and that settled that matter.
+
+     I'll make it a point to write one letter a week anyhow.  But the
+     best thing that has happened is here.  This great American
+     Publishing Company kept on trying to bargain with me for a book till
+     I thought I would cut the matter short by coming up for a talk.  I
+     met Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, and with his usual whole-souled
+     way of dropping his own work to give other people a lift when he
+     gets a chance, he said: "Now, here, you are one of the talented men
+     of the age--nobody is going to deny that--but in matters of business
+     I don't suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains.
+     I'll tell you what to do and how to do it."  And he did.
+
+     And I listened well, and then came up here and made a splendid
+     contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large pages, with
+     illustrations, the manuscript to be placed in the publisher's hands
+     by the middle of July.  --[The contract was not a formal one.  There
+     was an exchange of letters agreeing to the terms, but no joint
+     document was drawn until October 16 (1868).]--  My percentage is to
+     be a fourth more than they have ever paid any author except Greeley.
+     Beecher will be surprised, I guess, when he hears this.
+
+     These publishers get off the most tremendous editions of their books
+     you can imagine.  I shall write to the Enterprise and Alta every
+     week, as usual, I guess, and to the Herald twice a week,
+     occasionally to the Tribune and the magazines (I have a stupid
+     article in the Galaxy, just issued), but I am not going to write to
+     this and that and the other paper any more.
+
+     I have had a tiptop time here for a few days (guest of Mr. Jno.
+     Hooker's family--Beecher's relatives--in a general way of Mr. Bliss
+     also, who is head of the publishing firm).  Puritans are mighty
+     straight-laced, and they won't let me smoke in the parlor, but the
+     Almighty don't make any better people.
+
+     I have to make a speech at the annual Herald dinner on the 6th of
+     May.
+
+So the book, which would establish his claim to a peerage in the literary
+land, was arranged for, and it remained only to prepare the manuscript, a
+task which he regarded as not difficult.  He had only to collate the Alta
+and Tribune letters, edit them, and write such new matter as would be
+required for completeness.
+
+Returning to Washington, he plunged into work with his usual terrific
+energy, preparing the copy--in the mean time writing newspaper
+correspondence and sketches that would bring immediate return.  In
+addition to his regular contributions, he entered into a syndicate
+arrangement with John Swinton (brother of William Swinton, the historian)
+to supply letters to a list of newspapers.
+
+"I have written seven long newspaper letters and a short magazine article
+in less than two days," he wrote home, and by the end of January he had
+also prepared several chapters of his book.
+
+The San Francisco post-mastership was suggested to him again, but he put
+the temptation behind him.  He refers to this more than once in his home
+letters, and it is clear that he wavered.
+
+     Judge Field said if I wanted the place he could pledge me the
+     President's appointment, and Senator Corners said he would guarantee
+     me the Senate's confirmation.  It was a great temptation, but it
+     would render it impossible to fill my book contract, and I had to
+     drop the idea....
+
+     And besides I did not want the office.
+
+He made this final decision when he heard that the chief editor of the
+Alta wanted the place, and he now threw his influence in that quarter.
+"I would not take ten thousand dollars out of a friend's pocket," he
+said.
+
+But then suddenly came the news from Goodman that the Alta publishers had
+copyrighted his Quaker City letters and proposed getting them out in a
+book, to reimburse themselves still further on their investment.  This
+was sharper than a serpent's tooth.  Clemens got confirmation of the
+report by telegraph.  By the same medium he protested, but to no purpose.
+Then he wrote a letter and sat down to wait.  He reported his troubles to
+Orion:
+
+     I have made a superb contract for a book, and have prepared the
+     first ten chapters of the sixty or eighty, but I will bet it never
+     sees the light.  Don't you let the folks at home hear that.  That
+     thieving Alta copyrighted the letters, and now shows no disposition
+     to let me use them.  I have done all I can by telegraph, and now
+     await the final result by mail.  I only charged them for 50 letters
+     what (even in) greenbacks would amount to less than two thousand
+     dollars, intending to write a good deal for high-priced Eastern
+     papers, and now they want to publish my letters in book form
+     themselves to get back that pitiful sum.
+
+Orion was by this time back from Nevada, setting type in St. Louis.  He
+was full of schemes, as usual, and his brother counsels him freely.  Then
+he says:
+
+     We chase phantoms half the days of our lives.  It is well if we
+     learn wisdom even then, and save the other half.
+
+     I am in for it.  I must go on chasing them, until I marry, then I am
+     done with literature and all other bosh--that is, literature
+     wherewith to please the general public.
+
+     I shall write to please myself then.
+
+He closes by saying that he rather expects to go with Anson Burlingame on
+the Chinese embassy.  Clearly he was pretty hopeless as to his book
+prospects.
+
+His first meeting with General Grant occurred just at this time.  In one
+of his home letters he mentions, rather airily, that he will drop in
+someday on the General for an interview; and at last, through Mrs. Grant,
+an appointment was made for a Sunday evening when the General would be at
+home.  He was elated with the prospect of an interview; but when he
+looked into the imperturbable, square, smileless face of the soldier he
+found himself, for the first time in his life, without anything
+particular to say.  Grant nodded slightly and waited.  His caller wished
+something would happen.  It did.  His inspiration returned.
+
+"General," he said, "I seem to be a little embarrassed.  Are you?"
+
+That broke the ice.  There were no further difficulties.  --[Mark Twain
+has variously related this incident.  It is given here in accordance with
+the letters of the period.]
+
+
+
+
+LXVI
+
+BACK TO SAN FRANCISCO
+
+Reply came from the Alta, but it was not promising.  It spoke rather
+vaguely of prior arrangements and future possibilities.  Clemens gathered
+that under certain conditions he might share in the profits of the
+venture.  There was but one thing to do; he knew those people--some of
+them--Colonel McComb and a Mr. McCrellish intimately.  He must confer
+with them in person.
+
+He was weary of Washington, anyway.  The whole pitiful machinery of
+politics disgusted him.  In his notebook he wrote:
+
+     Whiskey is taken into the committee rooms in demijohns and carried
+     out in demagogues.
+
+And in a letter:
+
+     This is a place to get a poor opinion of everybody in.  There are
+     some pitiful intellects in this Congress!  There isn't one man in
+     Washington in civil office who has the brains of Anson Burlingame,
+     and I suppose if China had not seized and saved his great talents to
+     the world this government would have discarded him when his time was
+     up.  --[Anson Burlingame had by this time become China's special
+     ambassador to the nations.]
+
+Furthermore, he was down on the climate of Washington.  He decided to go
+to San Francisco and see "those Alta thieves face to face."  Then, if a
+book resulted, he could prepare it there among friends.  Also, he could
+lecture.
+
+He had been anxious to visit his people before sailing, but matters were
+too urgent to permit delay.  He obtained from Bliss an advance of royalty
+and took passage, by way of Aspinwall, on the sidewheel steamer Henry
+Chauncey, a fine vessel for those days.  The name of Mark Twain was
+already known on the isthmus, and when it was learned he had arrived on
+the Chauncey a delegation welcomed him on the wharf, and provided him
+with refreshments and entertainment.  Mr. Tracy Robinson, a poet, long a
+resident of that southern land, was one of the group.  Beyond the isthmus
+Clemens fell in again with his old captain, Ned Wakeman, who during the
+trip told him the amazing dream that in due time would become Captain
+Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.  He made the first draft of this story soon
+after his arrival in San Francisco, as a sort of travesty of Elizabeth
+Stuart Phelps's Gates Ajar, then very popular.  Clemens, then and later,
+had a high opinion of Capt. Ned Wakeman's dream, but his story of it
+would pass through several stages before finally reaching the light of
+publication.  --[Mr. John P.  Vollmer, now of Lewiston, Idaho, a
+companion of that voyage, writes of a card game which took place beyond
+the isthmus.  The notorious crippled gambler, "Smithy," figured in it,
+and it would seem to have furnished the inspiration for the exciting
+story in Chapter XXXVI of the Mississippi book.]
+
+In San Francisco matters turned out as he had hoped.  Colonel McComb was
+his stanch friend; McCrellish and Woodward, the proprietors, presently
+conceded that they had already received good value for the money paid.
+The author agreed to make proper acknowledgments to the Alta in his
+preface, and the matter was settled with friendliness all around.
+
+The way was now clear, the book assured.  First, however, he must provide
+himself with funds.  He delivered a lecture, with the Quaker City
+excursion as his subject.  On the 5th of May he wrote to Bliss:
+
+I lectured here on the trip the other night; over $1,600 in gold in the
+house; every seat taken and paid for before night.
+
+He reports that he is steadily at work, and expects to start East with
+the completed manuscript about the middle of June.
+
+But this was a miscalculation.  Clemens found that the letters needed
+more preparation than he had thought.  His literary vision and equipment
+had vastly altered since the beginning of that correspondence.  Some of
+the chapters he rewrote; others he eliminated entirely.  It required two
+months of fairly steady work to put the big manuscript together.
+
+Some of the new chapters he gave to Bret Harte for the Overland Monthly,
+then recently established.  Harte himself was becoming a celebrity about
+this time.  His "Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat,"
+published in early numbers of the Overland, were making a great stir in
+the East, arousing there a good deal more enthusiasm than in the magazine
+office or the city of their publication.  That these two friends, each
+supreme in his own field, should have entered into their heritage so
+nearly at the same moment, is one of the many seemingly curious
+coincidences of literary history.
+
+Clemens now concluded to cover his lecture circuit of two years before.
+He was assured that it would be throwing away a precious opportunity not
+to give his new lecture to his old friends.  The result justified that
+opinion.  At Virginia, at Carson, and elsewhere he was received like a
+returned conqueror.  He might have been accorded a Roman triumph had
+there been time and paraphernalia.  Even the robbers had reformed, and
+entire safety was guaranteed him on the Divide between Virginia and Gold
+Hill.  At Carson he called on Mrs. Curry, as in the old days, and among
+other things told her how snow from the Lebanon Mountains is brought to
+Damascus on the backs of camels.
+
+"Sam," she said, "that's just one of your yarns, and if you tell it in
+your lecture to-night I'll get right up and say so."
+
+But he did tell it, for it was a fact; and though Mrs. Curry did not rise
+to deny it she shook her finger at him in a way he knew.
+
+He returned to San Francisco and gave one more lecture, the last he would
+ever give in California.  His preparatory advertising for that occasion
+was wholly unique, characteristic of him to the last degree.  It assumed
+the form of a handbill of protest, supposed to have been issued by the
+foremost citizens of San Francisco, urging him to return to the States
+without inflicting himself further upon them.  As signatures he made free
+with the names of prominent individuals, followed by those of
+organizations, institutions, "Various Benevolent Societies, Citizens on
+Foot and Horseback, and fifteen hundred in the Steerage."
+
+Following this (on the same bill) was his reply, "To the fifteen hundred
+and others," in which he insisted on another hearing:
+
+     I will torment the people if I want to....  It only costs the people
+     $1 apiece, and if they can't stand it what do they stay here for?...
+     My last lecture was not as fine as I thought it was, but I have
+     submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have
+     pronounced it good.  Now, therefore, why should I withhold it?
+
+He promised positively to sail on the 6th of July if they would let him
+talk just this once.  Continuing, the handbill presented a second
+protest, signed by the various clubs and business firms; also others
+bearing variously the signatures of the newspapers, and the clergy,
+ending with the brief word:
+
+     You had better go.    Yours,    CHIEF OF POLICE.
+
+All of which drollery concluded with his announcement of place and date
+of his lecture, with still further gaiety at the end.  Nothing short of a
+seismic cataclysm--an earthquake, in fact--could deter a San Francisco
+audience after that.  Mark Twain's farewell address, given at the
+Mercantile Library July 2 (1868), doubtless remains today the leading
+literary event in San Francisco's history.  --[Copy of the lecture
+announcement, complete, will be found in Appendix H, at the end of last
+volume.]
+
+He sailed July 6th by the Pacific mail steamer Montana to Acapulco,
+caught the Henry Chauncey at Aspinwall, reached New York on the 28th, and
+a day or two later had delivered his manuscript at Hartford.
+
+But a further difficulty had arisen.  Bliss was having troubles himself,
+this time, with his directors.  Many reports of Mark Twain's new book had
+been traveling the rounds of the press, some of which declared it was to
+be irreverent, even blasphemous, in tone.  The title selected, The New
+Pilgrim's Progress, was in itself a sacrilege.  Hartford was a
+conservative place; the American Publishing Company directors were of
+orthodox persuasion.  They urged Bliss to relieve the company of this
+impending disaster of heresy.  When the author arrived one or more of
+them labored with him in person, without avail.  As for Bliss, he was
+stanch; he believed in the book thoroughly, from every standpoint.  He
+declared if the company refused to print it he would resign the
+management and publish the book himself.  This was an alarming suggestion
+to the stockholders.  Bliss had returned dividends--a boon altogether too
+rare in the company's former history.  The objectors retired and were
+heard of no more.  The manuscript was placed in the hands of Fay and Cox,
+illustrators, with an order for about two hundred and fifty pictures.
+
+Fay and Cox turned it over to True Williams, one of the well-known
+illustrators of that day.  Williams was a man of great talent--of fine
+imagination and sweetness of spirit--but it was necessary to lock him in
+a room when industry was required, with nothing more exciting than cold
+water as a beverage.  Clemens himself aided in the illustrating by
+obtaining of Moses S. Beach photographs from the large collection he had
+brought home.
+
+
+
+
+LXVII
+
+A VISIT TO ELMIRA
+
+Meantime he had skilfully obtained a renewal of the invitation to spend a
+week in the Langdon home.
+
+He meant to go by a fast train, but, with his natural gift for
+misunderstanding time-tables, of course took a slow one, telegraphing his
+approach from different stations along the road.  Young Langdon concluded
+to go down the line as far as Waverly to meet him.  When the New York
+train reached there the young man found his guest in the smoking-car,
+travel-stained and distressingly clad.  Mark Twain was always
+scrupulously neat and correct of dress in later years, but in that
+earlier day neatness and style had not become habitual and did not give
+him comfort.  Langdon greeted him warmly but with doubt.  Finally he
+summoned courage to say, hesitatingly--
+
+"You've got some other clothes, haven't you?"
+
+The arriving guest was not in the least disturbed.
+
+"Oh yes," he said with enthusiasm, " I've got a fine brand-new outfit in
+this bag, all but a hat.  It will be late when we get in, and I won't see
+any one to-night.  You won't know me in the morning.  We'll go out early
+and get a hat."
+
+This was a large relief to the younger man, and the rest of the journey
+was happy enough.  True to promise, the guest appeared at daylight
+correctly, even elegantly clad,, and an early trip to the shops secured
+the hat.  A gay and happy week followed--a week during which Samuel
+Clemens realized more fully than ever that in his heart there was room
+for only one woman in all the world: Olivia Langdon--"Livy," as they all
+called her--and as the day of departure drew near it may be that the
+gentle girl had made some discoveries, too.
+
+No word had passed between them.  Samuel Clemens had the old-fashioned
+Southern respect for courtship conventions, and for what, in that day at
+least, was regarded as honor.  On the morning of the final day he said to
+young Langdon:
+
+"Charley, my week is up, and I must go home."
+
+The young man expressed a regret which was genuine enough, though not
+wholly unqualified.  His older sister, Mrs. Crane, leaving just then for
+a trip to the White Mountains, had said:
+
+"Charley, I am sure Mr. Clemens is after our Livy.  You mustn't let him
+carry her off before our return."
+
+The idea was a disturbing one.  The young man did not urge his guest to
+prolong his-visit.  He said:
+
+"We'll have to stand it, I guess, but you mustn't leave before to-night."
+
+"I ought to go by the first train," Clemens said, gloomily.  "I am in
+love."
+
+"In what!"
+
+"In love-with your sister, and I ought to get away from here."
+
+The young man was now very genuinely alarmed.  To him Mark Twain was a
+highly gifted, fearless, robust man--a man's man--and as such altogether
+admirable--lovable.  But Olivia--Livy--she was to him little short of a
+saint.  No man was good enough for her, certainly not this adventurous
+soldier of letters from the West.  Delightful he was beyond doubt,
+adorable as a companion, but not a companion for Livy.
+
+"Look here, Clemens," he said, when he could get his voice.  "There's a
+train in half an hour.  I'll help you catch it.  Don't wait till to-
+night.  Go now."
+
+Clemens shook his head.
+
+"No, Charley," he said, in his gentle drawl, "I want to enjoy your
+hospitality a little longer.  I promise to be circumspect, and I'll go
+to-night."
+
+That night, after dinner, when it was time to take the New York train, a
+light two-seated wagon was at the gate.  The coachman was in front, and
+young Langdon and his guest took the back seat.  For some reason the seat
+had not been locked in its place, and when, after the good-bys, the
+coachman touched the horse it made a quick spring forward, and the back
+seat, with both passengers, described a half-circle and came down with
+force on the cobbled street.  Neither passenger was seriously hurt;
+Clemens not at all--only dazed a little for a moment.  Then came an
+inspiration; here was a chance to prolong his visit.  Evidently it was
+not intended that he should take that train.  When the Langdon household
+gathered around with restoratives he did not recover too quickly.  He
+allowed them to support or carry him into the house and place him in an
+arm-chair and apply remedies.  The young daughter of the house especially
+showed anxiety and attention.  This was pure happiness.  He was perjuring
+himself, of course, but they say Jove laughs at such things.
+
+He recovered in a day or two, but the wide hospitality of the handsome
+Langdon home was not only offered now; it was enforced.  He was still
+there two weeks later, after which he made a trip to Cleveland to confide
+in Mrs. Fairbanks how he intended to win Livy Langdon for his wife.
+
+
+
+
+LXVIII
+
+THE REV. "JOE" TWICHELL
+
+He returned to Hartford to look after the progress of his book.  Some of
+it was being put into type, and with his mechanical knowledge of such
+things he was naturally interested in the process.
+
+He made his headquarters with the Blisses, then living at 821 Asylum
+Avenue, and read proof in a little upper room, where the lamp was likely
+to be burning most of the time, where the atmosphere was nearly always
+blue with smoke, and the window-sill full of cigar butts.  Mrs. Bliss
+took him into the quiet social life of the neighborhood--to small church
+receptions, society gatherings and the like--all of which he seemed to
+enjoy.  Most of the dwellers in that neighborhood were members of the
+Asylum Hill Congregational Church, then recently completed; all but the
+spire.  It was a cultured circle, well-off in the world's goods, its male
+members, for the most part, concerned in various commercial ventures.
+
+The church stood almost across the way from the Bliss home, and Mark
+Twain, with his picturesque phrasing, referred to it as the "stub-tailed
+church," on account of its abbreviated spire; also, later, with a
+knowledge of its prosperous membership, as the "Church of the Holy
+Speculators."  He was at an evening reception in the home of one of its
+members when he noticed a photograph of the unfinished building framed
+and hanging on the wall.
+
+"Why, yes," he commented, in his slow fashion, "this is the ' Church of
+the Holy Speculators.'"
+
+"Sh," cautioned Mrs. Bliss.  "Its pastor is just behind you.  He knows
+your work and wants to meet you."  Turning, she said: "Mr. Twichell, this
+is Mr. Clemens.  Most people know him as Mark Twain."
+
+And so, in this casual fashion, he met the man who was presently to
+become his closest personal friend and counselor, and would remain so for
+more than forty years.
+
+Joseph Hopkins Twichell was a man about his own age, athletic and
+handsome, a student and a devout Christian, yet a man familiar with the
+world, fond of sports, with an exuberant sense of humor and a wide
+understanding of the frailties of humankind.  He had been "port waist
+oar" at Yale, and had left college to serve with General "Dan" Sickles as
+a chaplain who had followed his duties not only in the camp, but on the
+field.
+
+Mention has already been made of Mark Twain's natural leaning toward
+ministers of the gospel, and the explanation of it is easier to realize
+than to convey.  He was hopelessly unorthodox--rankly rebellious as to
+creeds.  Anything resembling cant or the curtailment of mental liberty
+roused only his resentment and irony.  Yet something in his heart always
+warmed toward any laborer in the vineyard, and if we could put the
+explanation into a single sentence, perhaps we might say it was because
+he could meet them on that wide, common ground sympathy with mankind.
+Mark Twain's creed, then and always, may be put into three words,
+"liberty, justice, humanity."  It may be put into one word, "humanity."
+
+Ministers always loved Mark Twain.  They did not always approve of him,
+but they adored him: The Rev. Mr. Rising, of the Comstock, was an early
+example of his ministerial friendships, and we have seen that Henry Ward
+Beecher cultivated his company.  In a San Francisco letter of two years
+before, Mark Twain wrote his mother, thinking it would please her:
+
+I am as thick as thieves with the Reverend Stebbins.  I am laying for the
+Reverend Scudder and the Reverend Doctor Stone.  I am running on
+preachers now altogether, and I find them gay.
+
+So it may be that his first impulse toward Joseph Twichell was due to the
+fact that he was a young member of that army whose mission is to comfort
+and uplift mankind.  But it was only a little time till the impulse had
+grown into a friendship that went beyond any profession or doctrine, a
+friendship that ripened into a permanent admiration and love for "Joe"
+Twichell himself, as one of the noblest specimens of his race.
+
+He was invited to the Twichell home, where he met the young wife and got
+a glimpse of the happiness of that sweet and peaceful household.  He had
+a neglected, lonely look, and he loved to gather with them at their
+fireside.  He expressed his envy of their happiness, and Mrs. Twichell
+asked him why, since his affairs were growing prosperous, he did not
+establish a household of his own.  Long afterward Mr. Twichell wrote:
+
+     Mark made no answer for a little, but, with his eyes bent on the
+     floor, appeared to be deeply pondering.  Then he looked up, and said
+     slowly, in a voice tremulous with earnestness (with what sympathy he
+     was heard may be imagined): "I am taking thought of it.  I am in
+     love beyond all telling with the dearest and best girl in the whole
+     world.  I don't suppose she will marry me.  I can't think it
+     possible.  She ought not to.  But if she doesn't I shall be sure
+     that the best thing I ever did was to fall in love with her, and
+     proud to have it known that I tried to win her!"
+
+It was only a brief time until the Twichell fireside was home to him.  He
+came and went, and presently it was "Mark" and "Joe," as by and by it
+would be "Livy" and "Harmony," and in a few years "Uncle Joe" and "Uncle
+Mark,"  "Aunt Livy" and "Aunt Harmony," and so would remain until the
+end.
+
+
+
+
+LXIX
+
+A LECTURE TOUR
+
+James Redpath, proprietor of the Boston Lyceum Bureau, was the leading
+lecture agent of those days, and controlled all, or nearly all, of the
+platform celebrities.  Mark Twain's success at the Cooper Union the year
+before had interested Redpath.  He had offered engagements then and
+later, but Clemens had not been free for the regular circuit.  Now there
+was no longer a reason for postponement of a contract.  Redpath was eager
+for the new celebrity, and Clemens closed with him for the season of
+1868-9.  With his new lecture, "The Vandal Abroad," he was presently
+earning a hundred dollars and more a night, and making most of the nights
+count.
+
+This was affluence indeed.  He had become suddenly a person of substance-
+an associate of men of consequence, with a commensurate income.  He could
+help his mother lavishly now, and he did.
+
+His new lecture was immensely popular.  It was a resume of the 'Quaker
+City' letters--a foretaste of the book which would presently follow.
+Wherever he went, he was hailed with eager greetings.  He caught such
+drifting exclamations as, "There he is!  There goes Mark Twain!"  People
+came out on the street to see him pass.  That marvelous miracle which we
+variously call "notoriety," "popularity," "fame," had come to him.  In
+his notebook he wrote, "Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the
+only, earthly certainty oblivion."
+
+The newspapers were filled with enthusiasm both as to his matter and
+method.  His delivery was described as a "long, monotonous drawl, with
+the fun invariably coming in at the end of a sentence--after a pause."
+His appearance at this time is thus set down:
+
+     Mark Twain is a man of medium height, about five feet ten, sparsely
+     built, with dark reddish-brown hair and mustache.  His features are
+     fair, his eyes keen and twinkling.  He dresses in scrupulous evening
+     attire.  In lecturing he hangs about the desk, leaning on it or
+     flirting around the corners of it, then marching and countermarching
+     in the rear of it.  He seldom casts a glance at his manuscript.
+
+No doubt this fairly presents Mark Twain, the lecturer of that day.  It
+was a new figure on the platform, a man with a new method.  As to his
+manuscript, the item might have said that he never consulted it at all.
+He learned his lecture; what he consulted was merely a series of
+hieroglyphics, a set of crude pictures drawn by himself, suggestive of
+the subject-matter underneath new head.  Certain columns represented the
+Parthenon; the Sphinx meant Egypt, and so on.  His manuscript lay there
+in case of accident, but the accident did not happen.
+
+A number of his engagements were in the central part of New York, at
+points not far distant from Elmira.  He had a standing invitation to
+visit the Langdon home, and he made it convenient to avail himself of
+that happiness.
+
+His was not an unruffled courtship.  When at last he reached the point of
+proposing for the daughter of the house, neither the daughter nor the
+household offered any noticeable encouragement to his suit.  Many absurd
+anecdotes have been told of his first interview with Mr. Langdon on the
+subject, but they are altogether without foundation.  It was a proper and
+dignified discussion of a very serious matter.  Mr. Langdon expressed
+deep regard for him and friendship but he was not inclined to add him to
+the family; the young lady herself, in a general way, accorded with these
+views.  The applicant for favor left sadly enough, but he could not
+remain discouraged or sad.  He lectured at Cleveland with vast success,
+and the news of it traveled quickly to Elmira.  He was referred to by
+Cleveland papers as a "lion" and "the coming man of the age."  Two days
+later, in Pittsburgh (November 19th), he "played" against Fanny Kemble,
+the favorite actress of that time, with the result that Miss Kemble had
+an audience of two hundred against nearly ten times the number who
+gathered to hear Mark Twain.  The news of this went to Elmira, too.  It
+was in the papers there next morning; surely this was a conquering hero--
+a gay Lochinvar from out of the West--and the daughter of the house must
+be guarded closely, that he did not bear her away.  It was on the second
+morning following the Pittsburgh triumph, when the Langdon family were
+gathered at breakfast, that a bushy auburn head poked fearfully in at the
+door, and a low, humble voice said:
+
+"The calf has returned; may the prodigal have some breakfast?"
+
+No one could be reserved or reprovingly distant, or any of those
+unfriendly things with a person like that; certainly not Jervis Langdon,
+who delighted in the humor and the tricks and turns and oddities of this
+eccentric visitor.  Giving his daughter to him was another matter, but
+even that thought was less disturbing than it had been at the start.  In
+truth, the Langdon household had somehow grown to feel that he belonged
+to them.  The elder sister's husband, Theodore Crane, endorsed him fully.
+He had long before read some of the Mark Twain sketches that had traveled
+eastward in advance of their author, and had recognized, even in the
+crudest of them, a classic charm.  As for Olivia Langdon's mother and
+sister, their happiness lay in hers.  Where her heart went theirs went
+also, and it would appear that her heart, in spite of herself, had found
+its rightful keeper.  Only young Langdon was irreconciled, and eventually
+set out for a voyage around the world to escape the situation.
+
+There was only a provisional engagement at first.  Jervis Langdon
+suggested, and Samuel Clemens agreed with him, that it was proper to know
+something of his past, as well as of his present, before the official
+parental sanction should be given.  When Mr. Langdon inquired as to the
+names of persons of standing to whom he might write for credentials,
+Clemens pretty confidently gave him the name of the Reverend Stebbins and
+others of San Francisco, adding that he might write also to Joe Goodman
+if he wanted to, but that he had lied for Goodman a hundred times and
+Goodman would lie for him if necessary, so his testimony would be of no
+value.  The letters to the clergy were written, and Mr. Langdon also
+wrote one on his own account.
+
+It was a long mail-trip to the Coast and back in those days.  It might be
+two months before replies would come from those ministers.  The lecturer
+set out again on his travels, and was radiantly and happily busy.  He
+went as far west as Illinois, had crowded houses in Chicago, visited
+friends and kindred in Hannibal, St. Louis, and Keokuk, carrying the
+great news, and lecturing in old familiar haunts.
+
+
+
+
+LXX
+
+INNOCENTS AT HOME--AND "THE INNOCENTS ABROAD"
+
+He was in Jacksonville, Illinois, at the end of January (1869), and in a
+letter to Bliss states that he will be in Elmira two days later, and asks
+that proofs of the book be sent there.  He arrived at the Langdon home,
+anxious to hear the reports that would make him, as the novels might say,
+"the happiest or the most miserable of men."  Jervis Langdon had a rather
+solemn look when they were alone together.  Clemens asked:
+
+"You've heard from those gentlemen out there?"
+
+"Yes, and from another gentleman I wrote concerning you."
+
+"They don't appear to have been very enthusiastic, from your manner."
+
+"Well, yes, some of them were."
+
+"I suppose I may ask what particular form their emotion took?"
+
+"Oh yes, yes; they agree unanimously that you are a brilliant, able man,
+a man with a future, and that you would make about the worst husband on
+record."
+
+The applicant for favor had a forlorn look.
+
+"There's nothing very evasive about that," he said:
+
+There was a period of reflective silence.  It was probably no more than a
+few seconds, but it seemed longer.
+
+"Haven't you any other friend that you could suggest?" Langdon said.
+
+"Apparently none whose testimony would be valuable."
+
+Jervis Langdon held out his hand.  "You have at least one," he said.
+"I believe in you.  I know you better than they do."
+
+And so came the crown of happiness.  The engagement of Samuel Langhorne
+Clemens and Olivia Lewis Langdon was ratified next day, February 4, 1869.
+
+But if the friends of Mark Twain viewed the idea of the carnage with
+scant favor, the friends of Miss Langdon regarded it with genuine alarm.
+Elmira was a conservative place--a place of pedigree and family
+tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, pilot, miner, wandering
+journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the daughter of one of the
+oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not to be lightly permitted.
+The fact that he had achieved a national fame did not count against other
+considerations.  The social protest amounted almost to insurrection, but
+it was not availing.  The Langdon family had their doubts too, though of
+a different sort.  Their doubts lay in the fear that one, reared as their
+daughter had been, might be unable to hold a place as the wife of this
+intellectual giant, whom they felt that the world was preparing to honor.
+That this delicate, sheltered girl could have the strength of mind and
+body for her position seemed hard to believe.  Their faith overbore such
+questionings, and the future years proved how fully it was justified.
+
+To his mother Samuel Clemens wrote:
+
+     She is only a little body, but she hasn't her peer in Christendom.
+     I gave her only a plain gold engagement ring, when fashion
+     imperatively demands a two-hundred-dollar diamond one, and told her
+     it was typical of her future life-namely, that she would have to
+     flourish on substance, rather than luxuries (but you see I know the
+     girl--she don't care anything about luxuries)....  She spends no
+     money but her astral year's allowance, and spends nearly every cent
+     of that on other people.  She will be a good, sensible little wife,
+     without any airs about her.  I don't make intercession for her
+     beforehand, and ask you to love her, for there isn't any use in
+     that--you couldn't help it if you were to try.  I warn you that
+     whoever comes within the fatal influence of her beautiful nature is
+     her willing slave forevermore.
+
+To Mrs. Crane, absent in March, her father wrote:
+
+     DEAR SUE,--I received your letter yesterday with a great deal of
+     pleasure, but the letter has gone in pursuit of one S. L. Clemens,
+     who has been giving us a great deal of trouble lately.  We cannot
+     have a joy in our family without a feeling, on the part of the
+     little incorrigible in our family, that this wanderer must share it,
+     so, as soon as read, into her pocket and off upstairs goes your
+     letter, and in the next two minutes into the mail, so it is
+     impossible for me now to refer to it, or by reading it over gain an
+     inspiration in writing you.  .  .
+
+Clemens closed his lecture tour in March, acid went immediately to
+Elmira.  He had lectured between fifty and sixty times, with a return of
+something more than $8,000, not a bad aggregate for a first season on the
+circuit.  He had planned to make a spring tour to California, but the
+attraction at Elmira was of a sort that discouraged distant travel.
+Furthermore, he disliked the platform, then and always.  It was always a
+temptation to him because of its quick and abundant return, but it was
+none the less distasteful.  In a letter of that spring he wrote:
+
+     I most cordially hate the lecture field.  And after all, I shudder
+     to think I may never get out of it.  In all conversation with Gough,
+     and Anna Dickinson, Nasby, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips,
+     and the other old stagers, I could not observe that they ever
+     expected or hoped to get out of the business.  I don't want to get
+     wedded to it as they are.
+
+He declined further engagements on the excuse that he must attend to
+getting out his book.  The revised proofs were coming now, and he and
+gentle Livy Langdon read them together.  He realized presently that with
+her sensitive nature she had also a keen literary perception.  What
+he lacked in delicacy--and his lack was likely to be large enough in that
+direction--she detected, and together they pruned it away.  She became
+his editor during those happy courtship days--a position which she held
+to her death.  The world owed a large debt of gratitude to Mark Twain's
+wife, who from the very beginning--and always, so far as in her strength
+she was able--inspired him to give only his worthiest to the world,
+whether in written or spoken word, in counsel or in deed.  Those early
+days of their close companionship, spiritual and mental, were full of
+revelation to Samuel Clemens, a revelation that continued from day to
+day, and from year to year, even to the very end.
+
+The letter to Bliss and the proofs were full of suggested changes that
+would refine and beautify the text.  In one of them he settles the
+question of title, which he says is to be:
+
+                          THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
+                                   or
+                       THE NEW PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
+
+and we may be sure that it was Olivia Langdon's voice that gave the
+deciding vote for the newly adopted chief title, which would take any
+suggestion of irreverence out of the remaining words.
+
+The book was to have been issued in the spring, but during his wanderings
+proofs had been delayed, and there was now considerable anxiety about it,
+as the agencies had become impatient for the canvass.  At the end of
+April Clemens wrote: "Your printers are doing well.  I will hurry the
+proofs"; but it was not until the early part of June that the last
+chapters were revised and returned.  Then the big book, at last
+completed, went to press on an edition of twenty thousand, a large number
+for any new book, even to-day.
+
+In later years, through some confusion of circumstance, Mark Twain was
+led to believe that the publication of The Innocents Abroad was long and
+unnecessarily delayed.  But this was manifestly a mistake.  The book went
+to press in June.  It was a big book and a large edition.  The first copy
+was delivered July 20 (1869), and four hundred and seventeen bound
+volumes were shipped that month.  Even with the quicker mechanical
+processes of to-day a month or more is allowed for a large book between
+the final return of proofs and the date of publication.  So it is only
+another instance of his remembering, as he once quaintly put it, "the
+thing that didn't happen." --[In an article in the North American Review
+(September 21, 1906) Mr. Clemens stated that he found it necessary to
+telegraph notice that he would bring suit if the book was not immediately
+issued.  In none of the letters covering this period is there any
+suggestion of delay on the part of the publishers, and the date of the
+final return of proofs, together with the date of publication, preclude
+the possibility of such a circumstance.  At some period of his life he
+doubtless sent, or contemplated sending, such a message, and this fact,
+through some curious psychology, became confused in his mind with the
+first edition of The Innocents Abroad.]
+
+
+
+
+LXXI
+
+THE GREAT BOOK OF TRAVEL
+
+'The Innocents Abroad' was a success from the start.  The machinery for
+its sale and delivery was in full swing by August 1, and five thousand
+one hundred and seventy copies were disposed of that month--a number that
+had increased to more than thirty-one thousand by the first of the year.
+It was a book of travel; its lowest price was three and a half dollars.
+No such record had been made by a book of that description; none has
+equaled it since. --[One must recall that this was the record only up to
+1910. D.W.]
+
+If Mark Twain was not already famous, he was unquestionably famous now.
+As the author of The New Pilgrim's Progress he was swept into the domain
+of letters as one riding at the head of a cavalcade--doors and windows
+wide with welcome and jubilant with applause.  Newspapers chorused their
+enthusiasm; the public voiced universal approval; only a few of the more
+cultured critics seemed hesitant and doubtful.
+
+They applauded--most of them--but with reservation.  Doctor Holland
+regarded Mark Twain as a mere fun maker of ephemeral popularity, and was
+not altogether pleasant in his dictum.  Doctor Holmes, in a letter to the
+author, speaks of the "frequently quaint and amusing conceits," but does
+not find it in his heart to refer to the book as literature.  It was
+naturally difficult for the East to concede a serious value to one who
+approached his subject with such militant aboriginality, and occasionally
+wrote "those kind."  William Dean Howells reviewed the book in the
+Atlantic, which was of itself a distinction, whether the review was
+favorable or otherwise.  It was favorable on the whole, favorable to the
+humor of the book, its "delicious impudence," the charm of its good-
+natured irony.  The review closed:
+
+     It is no business of ours to fix his rank among the humorists
+     California has given us, but we think he is, in an entirely
+     different way from all the others, quite worthy of the company of
+     the best.
+
+This is praise, but not of an intemperate sort, nor very inclusive.  The
+descriptive, the poetic, the more pretentious phases of the book did not
+receive attention.  Mr. Howells was perhaps the first critic of eminence
+to recognize in Mark Twain not only the humorist, but the supreme genius-
+the "Lincoln of our literature."  This was later.  The public--the silent
+public--with what Howells calls "the inspired knowledge of the simple-
+hearted multitude," reached a similar verdict forthwith.  And on
+sufficient evidence: let the average unprejudiced person of to-day take
+up the old volume and read a few chapters anywhere and decide whether it
+is the work of a mere humorist, or also of a philosopher, a poet, and a
+seer.  The writer well remembers a little group of "the simple-hearted
+multitude" who during the winter of '69 and '70 gathered each evening to
+hear the Innocents read aloud, and their unanimous verdict that it was
+the "best book of modern times."
+
+It was the most daring book of its day.  Passages of it were calculated
+to take the breath of the orthodox reader; only, somehow, it made him
+smile, too.  It was all so good-natured, so openly sincere.  Without
+doubt it preached heresy--the heresy of viewing revered landmarks and
+relics joyously, rather than lugubriously; reverentially, when they
+inspired reverence; satirically, when they invited ridicule, and with
+kindliness always.
+
+The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain's greatest book of travel.  The
+critical and the pure in speech may object to this verdict.  Brander
+Matthews regards it second to A Tramp Abroad, the natural viewpoint of
+the literary technician.  The 'Tramp' contains better usage without
+doubt, but it lacks the "color" which gives the Innocents its perennial
+charm.  In the Innocents there is a glow, a fragrance, a romance of
+touch, a subtle something which is idyllic, something which is not quite
+of reality, in the tale of that little company that so long ago sailed
+away to the harbors of their illusions beyond the sea, and, wandered
+together through old palaces and galleries, and among the tombs of the
+saints, and down through ancient lands.  There is an atmosphere about it
+all, a dream-like quality that lies somewhere in the telling, maybe, or
+in the tale; at all events it is there, and the world has felt it ever
+since.  Perhaps it could be defined in a single word, perhaps that word
+would be "youth."  That the artist, poor True Williams, felt its
+inspiration is certain.  We may believe that Williams was not a great
+draftsman, but no artist ever caught more perfectly the light and spirit
+of the author's text.  Crude some of the pictures are, no doubt, but they
+convey the very essence of the story; they belong to it, they are a part
+of it, and they ought never to perish.  'A Tramp Abroad' is a rare book,
+but it cannot rank with its great predecessor in human charm.  The
+public, which in the long run makes mistakes, has rendered that verdict.
+The Innocents by far outsells the Tramp, and, for that matter, any other
+book of travel.
+
+
+THE PURCHASE OF A PAPER
+
+It is curious to reflect that Mark Twain still did not regard himself as
+a literary man.  He had no literary plans for the future; he scarcely
+looked forward to the publication of another book.  He considered himself
+a journalist; his ambition lay in the direction of retirement in some
+prosperous newspaper enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a
+home.  During his travels he had already been casting about for a
+congenial and substantial association in newspaperdom, and had at one
+time considered the purchase of an interest in the Cleveland Herald.  But
+Buffalo was nearer Elmira, and when an opportunity offered, by which he
+could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo Express for $25,000, the
+purchase was decided upon.  His lack of funds prompted a new plan for a
+lecture tour to the Pacific coast, this time with D. R. Locke (Nasby),
+then immensely popular, in his lecture "Cussed Be Canaan."
+
+Clemens had met Nasby on the circuit, and was very fond of him.  The two
+had visited Boston together, and while there had called on Doctor Holmes;
+this by the way.  Nasby was fond of Clemens too, but doubtful about the
+trip-doubtful about his lecture:
+
+     Your proposition takes my breath away.  If I had my new lecture
+     completed I wouldn't hesitate a moment, but really isn't "Cussed Be
+     Canaan" too old?  You know that lemon, our African brother, juicy as
+     he was in his day, has been squeezed dry.  Why howl about his wrongs
+     after said wrongs have been redressed?  Why screech about the
+     "damnable spirit of Cahst" when the victim thereof sits at the first
+     table, and his oppressor mildly takes, in hash, what he leaves?  You
+     see, friend Twain, the Fifteenth Amendment busted "Cussed Be
+     Canaan."  I howled feelingly on the subject while it was a living
+     issue, for I felt all that I said and a great deal more; but now
+     that we have won our fight why dance frantically on the dead corpse
+     of our enemy?  The Reliable Contraband is contraband no more, but a
+     citizen of the United States, and I speak of him no more.
+
+     Give me a week to think of your proposition.  If I can jerk a
+     lecture in time I will go with you.  The Lord knows I would like to.
+     --[Nasby's lecture, "Cussed Be Canaan," opened, "We are all
+     descended from grandfathers!"  He had a powerful voice, and always
+     just on the stroke of eight he rose and vigorously delivered this
+     sentence.  Once, after lecturing an entire season--two hundred and
+     twenty-five nights--he went home to rest.  That evening he sat,
+     musingly drowsing by the fire, when the clock struck eight.  Without
+     a moment's thought Nasby sprang to his feet and thundered out, "We
+     are all descended from grandfathers!"]
+
+Nasby did not go, and Clemens's enthusiasm cooled at the prospect of
+setting out alone on that long tour.  Furthermore, Jervis Langdon
+promptly insisted on advancing the money required to complete the
+purchase of the Express, and the trade was closed. --[Mr. Langdon is just
+as good for $25,000 for me, and has already advanced half of it in cash.
+I wrote and asked whether I had better send him my note, or a due bill,
+or how he would prefer to have the indebtedness made of record, and he
+answered every other topic in the letter pleasantly, but never replied to
+that at all.  Still, I shall give my note into a hands of his business
+agent here, and pay him the interest as it falls due.--S. L. C. to his
+mother.]
+
+The Buffalo Express was at this time in the hands of three men--Col.
+George F. Selkirk, J. L. Lamed, and Thomas A. Kennett.  Colonel Selkirk
+was business manager, Lamed was political editor.  With the purchase of
+Kennett's share Clemens became a sort of general and contributing editor,
+with a more or less "roving commission"--his hours and duties not very
+clearly defined.  It was believed by his associates, and by Clemens
+himself, that his known connection with the paper would give it prestige
+and circulation, as Nasby's connection had popularized the Toledo Blade.
+The new editor entered upon his duties August 14 (1869).  The members of
+the Buffalo press gave him a dinner that evening, and after the manner of
+newspaper men the world over, were handsomely cordial to the "new enemy
+in their midst."
+
+There is an anecdote which relates that next morning, when Mark Twain
+arrived in the Express office (it was then at 14 Swan Street), there
+happened to be no one present who knew him.  A young man rose very
+bruskly and asked if there was any one he would like to see.  It is
+reported that he replied, with gentle deliberation:
+
+"Well, yes, I should like to see some young man offer the new editor a
+chair."
+
+It is so like Mark Twain that we are inclined to accept it, though it
+seems of doubtful circumstance.  In any case it deserves to be true.  His
+"Salutatory" (August 18th) is sufficiently genuine:
+
+     Being a stranger, it would be immodest for me to suddenly and
+     violently assume the associate editorship of the Buffalo Express
+     without a single word of comfort or encouragement to the unoffending
+     patrons of the paper, who are about to be exposed to constant
+     attacks of my wisdom and learning.  But the word shall be as brief
+     as possible.  I only want to assure parties having a friendly
+     interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going to
+     hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time.  I am not
+     going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to
+     make trouble....  I shall not make use of slang and vulgarity upon
+     any occasion or under any circumstances, and shall never use
+     profanity except when discussing house rent and taxes.  Indeed, upon
+     a second thought, I shall not use it even then, for it is
+     unchristian, inelegant, and degrading; though, to speak truly, I do
+     not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a
+     cent without it.  I shall not often meddle with politics, because we
+     have a political Editor who is already excellent and only needs to
+     serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect.  I shall not
+     write any poetry unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers.
+
+     Such is my platform.  I do not see any use in it, but custom is law
+     and must be obeyed.
+
+John Harrison Mills, who was connected with the Express in those days,
+has written:
+
+     I cannot remember that there was any delay in getting down to his
+     work.  I think within five minutes the new editor had assumed the
+     easy look of one entirely at home, pencil in hand and a clutch of
+     paper before him, with an air of preoccupation, as of one intent on
+     a task delayed.  It was impossible to be conscious of the man
+     sitting there, and not feel his identity with all that he had
+     enjoyed, and the reminiscence of it he that seemed to radiate; for
+     the personality was so absolutely in accord with all the record of
+     himself and his work.  I cannot say he seemed to be that vague thing
+     they call a type in race or blood, though the word, if used in his
+     case for temperament, would decidedly mean what they used to call
+     the "sanguine."
+
+     I thought that, pictorially, the noble costume of the Albanian would
+     have well become him.  Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the
+     horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors; or stood at the prow
+     of one of the swift craft of the Vikings.  His eyes, which have been
+     variously described, were, it seemed to me, of an indescribable
+     depth of the bluish moss-agate, with a capacity of pupil dilation
+     that in certain lights had the effect of a deep black....
+
+Mr. Mills adds that in dress he was now "well groomed," and that
+consequently they were obliged to revise their notions as to the careless
+negligee which gossip had reported.  --[From unpublished Reminiscences
+kindly lent to the author by Mr. Mills]
+
+
+
+
+LXXIII
+
+THE FIRST MEETING WITH HOWELLS
+
+Clemens' first period of editorial work was a brief one, though he made
+frequent contributions to the paper: sketches, squibs, travel-notes, and
+experiences, usually humorous in character.  His wedding-day had been set
+for early in the year, and it was necessary to accumulate a bank account
+for that occasion.  Before October he was out on the lecture circuit,
+billed now for the first time for New England, nervous and apprehensive
+in consequence, though with good hope.  To Pamela he wrote
+(November 9th):
+
+To-morrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience--
+4,000 critics--and on the success of this matter depends my future
+success in New England.  But I am not distressed.  Nasby is in the same
+boat.  Tonight decides the fate of his brand-new lecture.  He has just
+left my room--been reading his lecture to me--was greatly depressed.  I
+have convinced him that he has little to fear.
+
+Whatever alarm Mark Twain may have felt was not warranted.  His success
+with the New England public was immediate and complete.  He made his
+headquarters in Boston, at Redpath's office, where there was pretty sure
+to be a congenial company, of which he was presently the center.
+
+It was during one of these Boston sojourns that he first met William Dean
+Howells, his future friend and literary counselor.  Howells was assistant
+editor of the Atlantic at this time; James T. Fields, its editor.
+Clemens had been gratified by the Atlantic review, and had called to
+express his thanks for it.  He sat talking to Fields, when Howells
+entered the editorial rooms, and on being presented to the author of the
+review, delivered his appreciation in the form of a story, sufficiently
+appropriate, but not qualified for the larger types.  --[He said: "When I
+read that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was so glad her baby
+had come white."]
+
+His manner, his humor, his quaint colloquial forms all delighted Howells
+--more, in fact, than the opulent sealskin overcoat which he affected at
+this period--a garment astonishing rather than esthetic, as Mark Twain's
+clothes in those days of his first regeneration were likely to be
+startling enough, we may believe; in the conservative atmosphere of the
+Atlantic rooms.  And Howells--gentle, genial, sincere--filled with the
+early happiness of his calling, won the heart of Mark Twain and never
+lost it, and, what is still more notable, won his absolute and unvarying
+confidence in all literary affairs.  It was always Mark Twain's habit to
+rely on somebody, and in matters pertaining to literature and to literary
+people in general he laid his burden on William Dean Howells from that
+day.  Only a few weeks after that first visit we find him telegraphing to
+Howells, asking him to look after a Californian poet, then ill and
+friendless in Brooklyn.  Clemens states that he does not know the poet,
+but will contribute fifty dollars if Howells will petition the steamboat
+company for a pass; and no doubt Howells complied, and spent a good deal
+more than fifty dollars' worth of time to get the poet relieved and
+started; it would be like him.
+
+
+
+
+LXXIV
+
+THE WEDDING-DAY
+
+The wedding was planned, at first, either for Christmas or New-Year's
+Day; but as the lecture engagements continued into January it was decided
+to wait until these were filled.  February 2d, a date near the
+anniversary of the engagement, was agreed upon, also a quiet wedding with
+no "tour."  The young people would go immediately to Buffalo, and take up
+a modest residence, in a boardinghouse as comfortable, even as luxurious,
+as the husband's financial situation justified.  At least that was Samuel
+Clemens's understanding of the matter.  He felt that he was heavily in
+debt--that his first duty was to relieve himself of that obligation.
+
+There were other plans in Elmira, but in the daily and happy letters he
+received there was no inkling of any new purpose.
+
+He wrote to J. D. F. Slee, of Buffalo, who was associated in business
+with Mr. Langdon, and asked him to find a suitable boarding-place, one
+that would be sufficiently refined for the woman who was to be his wife,
+and sufficiently reasonable to insure prosperity.  In due time Slee
+replied that, while boarding was a "miserable business anyhow," he had
+been particularly fortunate in securing a place on one of the most
+pleasant streets--"the family a small one and choice spirits, with no
+predilection for taking boarders, and consenting to the present
+arrangement only because of the anticipated pleasure of your company."
+The price, Slee added, would be reasonable.  As a matter of fact a house
+on Delaware Avenue--still the fine residence street of Buffalo--had been
+bought and furnished throughout as a present to the bride and groom.  It
+stands to-day practically unchanged--brick and mansard without, Eastlake
+within, a type then much in vogue--spacious and handsome for that period.
+It was completely appointed.  Diagrams of the rooms had been sent to
+Elmira and Miss Langdon herself had selected the furnishings.  Everything
+was put in readiness, including linen, cutlery, and utensils.  Even the
+servants had been engaged and the pantry and cellar had been stocked.
+
+It must have been hard for Olivia Langdon to keep this wonderful surprise
+out of those daily letters.  A surprise like that is always watching a
+chance to slip out unawares, especially when one is eagerly impatient to
+reveal it.
+
+However, the traveler remained completely in the dark.  He may have
+wondered vaguely at the lack of enthusiasm in the boarding idea, and
+could he have been certain that the sales of the book would continue, or
+that his newspaper venture would yield an abundant harvest, he might have
+planned his domestic beginning on a more elaborate scale.  If only the
+Tennessee land would yield the long-expected fortune now!  But these were
+all incalculable things.  All that he could be sure of was the coming of
+his great happiness, in whatever environment, and of the dragging weeks
+between.
+
+At last the night of the final lecture came, and he was off for Elmira
+with the smallest possible delay.  Once there, the intervening days did
+not matter.  He could join in the busy preparations; he could write
+exuberantly to his friends.  To Laura Hawkins, long since Laura Frazer he
+sent a playful line; to Jim Gillis, still digging and washing on the
+slopes of the old Tuolumne hills, he wrote a letter which eminently
+belongs here:
+
+
+                              Elmira, N. Y., January 26, 1870.
+
+     DEAR Jim,--I remember that old night just as well!  And somewhere
+     among my relics I have your remembrance stored away.  It makes my
+     heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days.  Still it
+     shouldn't, for right in the depths of their poverty and their
+     pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune.
+     You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal
+     sojourn in the rain and mud of Angel's Camp--I mean that day we sat
+     around the tavern stove and heard that chap tell about the frog and
+     how they filled him with shot.  And you remember how we quoted from
+     the yarn and laughed over it out there on the hillside while you and
+     dear old Stoker panned and washed.  I jotted the story down in my
+     note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen
+     dollars for it--I was just that blind.  But then we were so hard up.
+     I published that story, and it became widely known in America,
+     India, China, England, and the reputation it made for me has paid me
+     thousands and thousands of dollars since.  Four or five months ago I
+     bought into the Express (I have ordered it sent to you as long as
+     you live, and if the bookkeeper sends you any bills you let me hear
+     of it).  I went heavily in debt--never could have dared to do that,
+     Jim, if we hadn't heard the jumping Frog story that day.
+
+     And wouldn't I love to take old Stoker by the hand, and wouldn't I
+     love to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of
+     Rinalds in the "Burning Shame!"  Where is Dick and what is he doing?
+     Give him my fervent love and warm old remembrances.
+
+     A week from to-day I shall be married-to a girl even better and
+     lovelier than the peerless "Chapparal Quails."  You can't come so
+     far, Jim, but still I cordially invite you to come anyhow, and I
+     invite Dick too.  And if you two boys were to land here on that
+     pleasant occasion we would make you right royally welcome.
+                              Truly your friend,
+                                             SAML. L. CLEMENS.
+
+     P.S.---California plums are good.  Jim, particularly when they are
+     stewed.
+
+It had been only five years before--that day in Angel's Camp--but how
+long ago and how far away it seemed to him now!  So much had happened
+since then, so much of which that was the beginning--so little compared
+with the marvel of the years ahead, whose threshold he was now about to
+cross, and not alone.
+
+A day or two before the wedding he was asked to lecture on the night of
+February 2d.  He replied that he was sorry to disappoint the applicant,
+but that he could not lecture on the night of February 2d, for the reason
+that he was going to marry a young lady on that evening, and that he
+would rather marry that young lady than deliver all the lectures in the
+world.
+
+And so came the wedding-day.  It began pleasantly; the postman brought a
+royalty check that morning of $4,000, the accumulation of three months'
+sales, and the Rev. Joseph Twichell and Harmony, his wife, came from
+Hartford--Twichell to join with the Rev. Thomas K.  Beecher in
+solemnizing the marriage.  Pamela Moffett, a widow now, with her daughter
+Annie, grown to a young lady, had come all the way from St. Louis, and
+Mrs. Fairbanks from Cleveland.
+
+Yet the guests were not numerous, not more than a hundred at most, so it
+was a quiet wedding there in the Langdon parlors, those dim, stately
+rooms that in the future would hold so much of his history--so much of
+the story of life and death that made its beginning there.
+
+The wedding-service was about seven o'clock, for Mr. Beecher had a
+meeting at the church soon after that hour.  Afterward followed the
+wedding-supper and dancing, and the bride's father danced with the bride.
+To the interested crowd awaiting him at the church Mr. Beecher reported
+that the bride was very beautiful, and had on the longest white gloves he
+had ever seen; he declared they reached to her shoulders. --[Perhaps for
+a younger generation it should be said that Thomas K. Beecher was a
+brother of Henry Ward Beecher.  He lived and died in Elmira, the almost
+worshiped pastor of the Park Congregational Church.  He was a noble,
+unorthodox teacher.  Samuel Clemens at the time of his marriage already
+strongly admired him, and had espoused his cause in an article signed
+"S'cat!" in the Elmira Advertiser, when he (Beecher) had been assailed by
+the more orthodox Elmira clergy.  For the "S'cat" article see Appendix I,
+at the end of last volume.]
+
+It was the next afternoon when they set out for Buffalo, accompanied by
+the bride's parents, the groom's relatives, the Beechers, and perhaps one
+or two others of that happy company.  It was nine o'clock at night when
+they arrived, and found Mr. Slee waiting at the station with sleighs to
+convey the party to the "boarding-house" he had selected.  They drove and
+drove, and the sleigh containing the bride and groom got behind and
+apparently was bound nowhere in particular, which disturbed the groom a
+good deal, for he thought it proper that they should arrive first, to
+receive their guests.  He commented on Slee's poor judgment in selecting
+a house that was so hard to find, and when at length they turned into
+fashionable Delaware Avenue, and stopped before one of the most
+attractive places in the neighborhood, he was beset with fear concerning
+the richness of the locality.
+
+They were on the steps when the doors opened, and a perfect fairyland of
+lights and decoration was revealed within.  The friends who had gone
+ahead came out with greetings, to lead in the bride and groom.  Servants
+hurried forward to take bags and wraps.  They were ushered inside; they
+were led through beautiful rooms, all newly appointed and garnished.  The
+bridegroom was dazed, unable to understand the meaning of things, the
+apparent ownership and completeness of possession.
+
+At last the young wife put her hand upon his arm:
+
+"Don't you understand, Youth," she said; that was always her name for
+him.  "Don't you understand?  It is ours, all ours--everything--a gift
+from father!"
+
+But even then he could not grasp it; not at first, not until Mr. Langdon
+brought a little box and, opening it, handed them the deeds.
+
+Nobody quite remembers what was the first remark that Samuel Clemens made
+then; but either then or a little later he said:
+
+"Mr. Langdon, whenever you are in Buffalo, if it's twice a year, come
+right here.  Bring your bag and stay overnight if you want to.  It
+sha'n't cost you a cent!"
+
+They went in to supper then, and by and by the guests were gone and the
+young wedded pair were alone.
+
+Patrick McAleer, the young coachman, who would grow old in their employ,
+and Ellen, the cook, came in for their morning orders, and were full of
+Irish delight at the inexperience and novelty of it all.  Then they were
+gone, and only the lovers in their new house and their new happiness
+remained.
+
+And so it was they entered the enchanted land.
+
+
+
+
+LXXV
+
+AS TO DESTINY
+
+If any reader has followed these chapters thus far, he may have wondered,
+even if vaguely, at the seeming fatality of events.  Mark Twain had but
+to review his own life for justification of his doctrine of inevitability
+--an unbroken and immutable sequence of cause and effect from the
+beginning.  Once he said:
+
+"When the first living atom found itself afloat on the great Laurentian
+sea the first act of that first atom led to the second act of that first
+atom, and so on down through the succeeding ages of all life, until, if
+the steps could be traced, it would be shown that the first act of that
+first atom has led inevitably to the act of my standing here in my
+dressing-gown at this instant talking to you."
+
+It seemed the clearest presentment ever offered in the matter of
+predestined circumstance--predestined from the instant when that primal
+atom felt the vital thrill.  Mark Twain's early life, however imperfectly
+recorded, exemplifies this postulate.  If through the years still ahead
+of us the course of destiny seems less clearly defined, it is only
+because thronging events make the threads less easy to trace.  The web
+becomes richer, the pattern more intricate and confusing, but the line of
+fate neither breaks nor falters, to the end.
+
+
+
+
+LXXVI
+
+ON THE BUFFALO "EXPRESS"
+
+With the beginning of life in Buffalo, Mark Twain had become already a
+world character--a man of large consequence and events.  He had no proper
+realization of this, no real sense of the size of his conquest; he still
+regarded himself merely as a lecturer and journalist, temporarily
+popular, but with no warrant to a permanent seat in the world's literary
+congress.  He thought his success something of an accident.  The fact
+that he was prepared to settle down as an editorial contributor to a
+newspaper in what was then only a big village is the best evidence of a
+modest estimate of his talents.
+
+He "worked like a horse," is the verdict of those who were closely
+associated with him on the Express.  His hours were not regular, but they
+were long.  Often he was at his desk at eight in the morning, and
+remained there until ten or eleven at night.
+
+His working costume was suited to comfort rather than show.  With coat,
+vest, collar, and tie usually removed (sometimes even his shoes), he
+lounged in his chair, in any attitude that afforded the larger ease,
+pulling over the exchanges; scribbling paragraphs, editorials, humorous
+skits, and what not, as the notion came upon him.  J. L. Lamed, his co-
+worker (he sat on the opposite side of the same table), remembers that
+Mark Twain enjoyed his work as he went along--the humor of it--and that
+he frequently laughed as some whimsicality or new absurdity came into his
+mind.
+
+"I doubt," writes Lamed, "if he ever enjoyed anything more than the
+jackknife engraving that he did on a piece of board of a military map of
+the siege of Paris, which was printed in the Express from his original
+plate, with accompanying explanations and comments.  His half-day of
+whittling and laughter that went with it are something that I find
+pleasant to remember.  Indeed, my whole experience of association with
+him is a happy memory, which I am fortunate in having....  What one saw
+of him was always the actual Mark Twain, acting out of his own nature
+simply, frankly, without pretense, and almost without reserve.  It was
+that simplicity and naturalness in the man which carried his greatest
+charm."
+
+Lamed, like many others, likens Mark Twain to Lincoln in various of his
+characteristics.  The two worked harmoniously together: Lamed attending
+to the political direction of the journal, Clemens to the literary, and
+what might be termed the sentimental side.  There was no friction in the
+division of labor, never anything but good feeling between them.  Clemens
+had a poor opinion of his own comprehension of politics, and perhaps as
+little regard for Lamed's conception of humor.  Once when the latter
+attempted something in the way of pleasantry his associate said:
+
+"Better leave the humor on this paper to me, Lamed"; and once when Lamed
+was away attending the Republican State Convention at Saratoga, and some
+editorial comment seemed necessary, Clemens thought it best to sign the
+utterance, and to make humor of his shortcomings.
+
+     I do not know much about politics, and am not sitting up nights to
+     learn .  .  .  .
+
+     I am satisfied that these nominations are all right and sound, and
+     that they are the only ones that can bring peace to our distracted
+     country (the only political phrase I am perfectly familiar with and
+     competent to hurl at the public with fearless confidence--the other
+     editor is full of them), but being merely satisfied is not enough.
+     I always like to know before I shout.  But I go for Mr. Curtis with
+     all my strength!  Being certain of him, I hereby shout all I know
+     how.  But the others may be a split ticket, or a scratched ticket,
+     or whatever you call it.
+
+     I will let it alone for the present.  It will keep.  The other young
+     man will be back to-morrow, and he will shout for it, split or no
+     split, rest assured of that.  He will prance into this political
+     ring with his tomahawk and his war-whoop, and then you will hear a
+     crash and see the scalps fly.  He has none of my diffidence.  He
+     knows all about these nominees, and if he don't he will let on to in
+     such a natural way as to deceive the most critical.  He knows
+     everything--he knows more than Webster's Unabridged and the American
+     Encyclopedia--but whether he knows anything about a subject or not
+     he is perfectly willing to discuss it.  When he gets back he will
+     tell you all about these candidates as serenely as if he had been
+     acquainted with them a hundred years, though, speaking
+     confidentially, I doubt if he ever heard of any of them till to-day.
+     I am right well satisfied it is a good, sound, sensible ticket, and
+     a ticket to win; but wait till he comes.
+
+     In the mean time I go for George William Curtis and take the
+     chances.
+                                             MARK TWAIN.
+
+He had become what Mr. Howells calls entirely "deSouthernized" by this
+time.  From having been of slaveholding stock, and a Confederate soldier,
+he had become a most positive Republican, a rampant abolitionist--had
+there been anything left to abolish.  His sympathy had been always with
+the oppressed, and he had now become their defender.  His work on the
+paper revealed this more and more.  He wrote fewer sketches and more
+editorials, and the editorials were likely to be either savage assaults
+upon some human abuse, or fierce espousals of the weak.  They were
+fearless, scathing, terrific.  Of some farmers of Cohocton, who had taken
+the law into their own hands to punish a couple whom they believed to be
+a detriment to the community, he wrote:
+
+"The men who did that deed are capable of doing any low, sneaking,
+cowardly villainy that could be invented in perdition.  They are the very
+bastards of the devil."
+
+He appended a full list of their names, and added:
+
+"If the farmers of Cohocton are of this complexion, what on earth must a
+Cohocton rough be like?"
+
+But all this happened a long time ago, and we need not detail those
+various old interests and labors here.  It is enough to say that Mark
+Twain on the Express was what he had been from the beginning, and would
+be to the end--the zealous champion of justice and liberty; violent and
+sometimes wrong in his viewpoint, but never less than fearless and
+sincere.  Invariably he was for the oppressed.  He had a natural instinct
+for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the under dog.
+
+Among the best of his editorial contributions is a tribute to Anson
+Burlingame, who died February 23, 1870, at St. Petersburg, on his trip
+around the world as special ambassador for the Chinese Empire.  In this
+editorial Clemens endeavored to pay something of his debt to the noble
+statesman.  He reviewed Burlingame's astonishing career--the career which
+had closed at forty-seven, and read like a fairy-tale-and he dwelt
+lovingly on his hero's nobility of character.  At the close he said:
+
+"He was a good man, and a very, very great man.  America, lost a son, and
+all the world a servant, when he died."
+
+Among those early contributions to the Express is a series called "Around
+the World," an attempt at collaboration with Prof. D. R. Ford, who did
+the actual traveling, while Mark Twain, writing in the first person, gave
+the letters his literary stamp.  At least some of the contributions were
+written in this way, such as "Adventures in Hayti,"  "The Pacific," and
+"Japan."  These letters exist to-day only in the old files of the
+Express, and indeed this is the case with most of Clemens's work for that
+paper.  It was mainly ephemeral or timely work, and its larger value has
+disappeared.  Here and there is a sentence worth remembering.  Of two
+practical jokers who sent in a marriage notice of persons not even
+contemplating matrimony, he said: "This deceit has been practised
+maliciously by a couple of men whose small souls will escape through
+their pores some day if they do not varnish their hides."
+
+Some of the sketches have been preserved.  "Journalism in Tennessee," one
+of the best of his wilder burlesques, is as enjoyable to-day as when
+written.  "A Curious Dream" made a lasting impression on his Buffalo
+readers, and you are pretty certain to hear of it when you mention Mark
+Twain in that city to-day.  It vividly called attention to the neglect of
+the old North Street graveyard.  The gruesome vision of the ancestors
+deserting with their coffins on their backs was even more humiliating
+than amusing, and inspired a movement for reform.  It has been effective
+elsewhere since then, and may still be read with profit--or satisfaction
+--for in a note at the end the reader is assured that if the cemeteries
+of his town are kept in good order the dream is not leveled at his town
+at all, but "particularly and venomously at the next town."
+
+
+
+
+LXXVII
+
+THE "GALAXY"
+
+Mark Twain's work on the Express represented only a portion of his
+literary activities during his Buffalo residence.  The Galaxy, an
+ambitious New York magazine of that day --[published by Sheldon & Co.  at
+498 and 500 Broadway]--, proposed to him that he conduct for them a
+humorous department.  They would pay $2,400 a year for the work, and
+allow him a free hand.  There was some discussion as to book rights, but
+the arrangement was concluded, and his first instalment, under the
+general title of "Memoranda," appeared in the May number, 1870.  In his
+Introductory he outlined what the reader might expect, such as
+"exhaustive statistical tables,"  "Patent Office reports," and "complete
+instructions about farming, even from the grafting of the seed to the
+harrowing of the matured crops."  He declared that he would throw a
+pathos into the subject of agriculture that would surprise and delight
+the world.  He added that the "Memoranda" was not necessarily a humorous
+department.
+
+     I would not conduct an exclusively and professedly humorous
+     department for any one.  I would always prefer to have the privilege
+     of printing a serious and sensible remark, in case one occurred to
+     me, without the reader's feeling obliged to consider himself
+     outraged....  Puns cannot be allowed a place in this department....
+     No circumstance, however dismal, will ever be considered a
+     sufficient excuse for the admission of that last and saddest
+     evidence of intellectual poverty, the pun.
+
+The Galaxy was really a fine magazine, with the best contributors
+obtainable; among them Justin McCarthy, S. M. B. Piatt, Richard Grant
+White, and many others well known in that day, with names that still
+flicker here and there in its literary twilight.  The new department
+appealed to Clemens, and very soon he was writing most of his sketches
+for it.  They were better literature, as a rule, than those published in
+his own paper.
+
+The first number of the "Memoranda" was fairly representative of those
+that followed it.  "The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract,"
+a manuscript which he had undertaken three years before and mislaid, was
+its initial contribution.  Besides the "Beef Contract," there was a
+tribute to George Wakeman, a well-known journalist of those days; a
+stricture on the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage, who had delivered from the
+pulpit an argument against workingmen occupying pews in fashionable
+churches; a presentment of the Chinese situation in San Francisco,
+depicting the cruel treatment of the Celestial immigrant; a burlesque of
+the Sunday-school "good little boy" story,  --["The Story of the Good
+Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper" and the "Beef Contract" are included in
+Sketches New and Old; also the Chinese sketch, under the title,
+"Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy."]--  and several shorter skits--and
+anecdotes, ten pages in all; a rather generous contract.
+
+Mark Twain's comment on Talmage was prompted by an article in which
+Talmage had assumed the premise that if workingmen attended the churches
+it would drive the better class of worshipers away.  Among other things
+he said:
+
+     I have a good Christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in
+     church, and a workingman should enter the door at the other end,
+     would smell him instantly.  My friend is not to blame for the
+     sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer
+     for being keener on the scent than a stupid watch-dog. The fact is,
+     if you had all the churches free, by reason of the mixing of the
+     common people with the uncommon, you would keep one-half of
+     Christendom sick at their stomach.  If you are going to kill the
+     church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to do with this work
+     of evangelization.
+
+Commenting on this Mark Twain said--well, he said a good deal more than
+we have room for here, but a portion of his closing paragraphs is worth
+preserving.  He compares the Reverend Mr. Talmage with the early
+disciples of Christ--Paul and Peter and the others; or, rather, he
+contrasts him with them.
+
+     They healed the very beggars, and held intercourse with people of a
+     villainous odor every day.  If the subject of these remarks had been
+     chosen among the original Twelve Apostles he would not have
+     associated with the rest, because he could not have stood the fishy
+     smell of some of his comrades who came from around the Sea of
+     Galilee.  He would have resigned his commission with some such
+     remark as he makes in the extract quoted above: "Master, if thou art
+     going to kill the church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to
+     do with this work of evangelization."  He is a disciple, and makes
+     that remark to the Master; the only difference is that he makes it
+     in the nineteenth instead of the first century.
+
+Talmage was immensely popular at this time, and Mark Twain's open attack
+on him must have shocked a good many Galaxy readers, as perhaps his
+article on the Chinese cruelties offended the citizens of San Francisco.
+It did not matter.  He was not likely to worry over the friends he would
+lose because of any stand taken for human justice.  Lamed said of him:
+"He was very far from being one who tried in any way to make himself
+popular."  Certainly he never made any such attempt at the expense of his
+convictions.
+
+The first Galaxy instalment was a sort of platform of principles for the
+campaign that was to follow.  Not that each month's contribution
+contained personal criticism, or a defense of the Chinese (of whom he was
+always the champion as long as he lived), but a good many of them did.
+In the October number he began a series of letters under the general
+title of "Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again," supposed to have been written
+by a Chinese immigrant in San Francisco, detailing his experience there.
+In a note the author says: "No experience is set down in the following
+letters which had to be invented.  Fancy is not needed to give variety to
+the history of the Chinaman's sojourn in America.  Plain fact is amply
+sufficient."  The letters show how the supposed Chinese writer of them
+had set out for America, believing it to be a land whose government was
+based on the principle that all men are created equal, and treated
+accordingly; how, upon arriving in San Francisco, he was kicked and
+bruised and beaten, and set upon by dogs, flung into jail, tried and
+condemned without witnesses, his own race not being allowed to testify
+against Americans--Irish-Americans--in the San Francisco court.  They are
+scathing, powerful letters, and one cannot read them, even in this day of
+improved conditions, without feeling the hot waves of resentment and
+indignation which Mark Twain must have felt when he penned them.
+
+Reverend Mr. Talmage was not the only divine to receive attention in the
+Memoranda."  The Reverend Mr. Sabine, of New York, who had declined to
+hold a church burial service for the old actor, George Holland, came in
+for the most caustic as well as the most artistic stricture of the entire
+series.  It deserves preservation to-day, not only for its literary
+value, but because no finer defense of the drama, no more searching
+sermon on self-righteousness, has ever been put into concrete form.
+--["The Indignity Put Upon the Remains of Gorge Holland by the Rev.  Mr.
+Sabine"; Galaxy for February, 1871.  The reader will find it complete
+under Appendix J, at the end of last volume.]
+
+The " Little Church Around the Corner" on Twenty-ninth Street received
+that happy title from this incident.
+
+"There is a little church around the corner that will, perhaps, permit
+the service," Mr. Sabine had said to Holland's friends.
+
+The little church did permit the service, and there was conferred upon it
+the new name, which it still bears.  It has sheltered a long line of
+actor folk and their friends since then, earning thereby reverence,
+gratitude, and immortal memory.  --[Church of the Transfiguration.
+Memorial services were held there for Joseph Jefferson; and a memorial
+window, by John La Farge, has been placed there in memory of Edwin
+Booth.]
+
+Of the Galaxy contributions a number are preserved in Sketches New and
+Old.  "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper" is one of the best of these--
+an excellent example of Mark Twain's more extravagant style of humor.  It
+is perennially delightful; in France it has been dramatized, and is still
+played.
+
+A successful Galaxy feature, also preserved in the Sketches, was the
+"Burlesque Map of Paris," reprinted from the Express.  The Franco-
+Prussian War was in progress, and this travesty was particularly timely.
+It creates only a smile of amusement to-day, but it was all fresh and
+delightful then.  Schuyler Colfax, by this time Vice-President, wrote to
+him: "I have had the heartiest possible laugh over it, and so have all my
+family.  You are a wicked, conscienceless wag, who ought to be punished
+severely."
+
+The "Official Commendations," which accompany the map, are its chief
+charm.  They are from Grant, Bismarck, Brigham Young, and others, the
+best one coming from one J. Smith, who says:
+
+     My wife was for years afflicted with freckles, and though everything
+     was done for her relief that could be done, all was in vain.  But,
+     sir, since her first glance at your map they have entirely left her.
+     She has nothing but convulsions now.
+
+It is said that the "Map of Paris" found its way to Berlin, where the
+American students in the beer-halls used to pretend to quarrel over it
+until they attracted the attention of the German soldiers that might be
+present.  Then they would wander away and leave it on the table and watch
+results.  The soldiers would pounce upon it and lose their tempers over
+it; then finally abuse it and revile its author, to the satisfaction of
+everybody.
+
+The larger number of "Memoranda" sketches have properly found oblivion
+to-day.  They were all, or nearly all, collected by a Canadian pirate,
+C. A. Backas, in a volume bearing the title of Memoranda, --[Also by a
+harpy named John Camden Hotten (of London), of whom we shall hear again.
+Hotten had already pirated The Innocents, and had it on the market before
+Routledge could bring out the authorized edition.  Routledge later
+published the "Memoranda" under the title of Sketches, including the
+contents of the Jumping Frog book.]-- a book long ago suppressed.  Only
+about twenty of the Galaxy contributions found place in Sketches New and
+Old, five years later, and some of these might have been spared as
+literature.  "To Raise Poultry,"  "John Chinaman in New York," and
+"History Repeats Itself" are valuable only as examples of his work at
+that period.  The reader may consult them for himself.
+
+
+
+
+
+LXXVIII
+
+THE PRIMROSE PATH
+
+But we are losing sight of more important things.  From the very
+beginning Mark Twain's home meant always more to him than his work.  The
+life at 472 Delaware Avenue had begun with as fair a promise as any
+matrimonial journey ever undertaken: There seemed nothing lacking: a
+beautiful home, sufficient income, bright prospects--these things, with
+health and love; constitute married happiness.  Mrs. Clemens wrote to her
+sister, Mrs. Crane, at the end of February: "Sue, we are two as happy
+people as you ever saw.  Our days seem to be made up of only bright
+sunlight, with no shadow in them."  In the same letter the husband added:
+"Livy pines and pines every day for you, and I pine and pine every day
+for you, and when we both of us are pining at once you would think it was
+a whole pine forest let loose."
+
+To Redpath, who was urging lecture engagements for the coming season, he
+wrote:
+
+     DEAR RED,--I am not going to lecture any more forever.  I have got
+     things ciphered down to a fraction now.  I know just about what it
+     will cost to live, and I can make the money without lecturing.
+     Therefore, old man, count me out.
+
+And still later, in May:
+
+     I guess I am out of the field permanently.  Have got a lovely wife,
+     a lovely house, bewitchingly furnished, a lovely carriage, and a
+     coachman whose style and dignity are simply awe-in-spiring, nothing
+     less; and I am making more money than necessary, by considerable,
+     and therefore why crucify myself nightly on the platform?  The
+     subscriber will have to be excused for the present season at least.
+
+So they were very happy during those early months, acquiring pleasantly
+the education which any matrimonial experience is sure to furnish,
+accustoming themselves to the uses of housekeeping, to life in
+partnership, with all the discoveries and mental and spiritual
+adaptations that belong to the close association of marriage.  They were
+far, very far, apart on many subjects.  He was unpolished, untrained,
+impulsive, sometimes violent.  Twichell remembers that in the earlier
+days of their acquaintance he wore a slouch hat pulled down in front, and
+smoked a cigar that sometimes tilted up and touched the brim of it.  The
+atmosphere and customs of frontier life, the Westernisms of that day,
+still clung to him.  Mrs. Clemens, on the other hand, was conservative,
+dainty, cultured, spiritual.  He adored her as little less than a saint,
+and she became, indeed, his saving grace.  She had all the personal
+refinement which he lacked, and she undertook the work of polishing and
+purifying her life companion.  She had no wish to destroy his
+personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and she set
+about it in the right way--gently, and with a tender gratitude in each
+achievement.
+
+She did not entirely approve of certain lines of his reading; or, rather,
+she did not understand them in those days.  That he should be fond of
+history and the sciences was natural enough, but when the Life of P. T.
+Barnum, Written by Himself, appeared, and he sat up nights to absorb it,
+and woke early and lighted the lamp to follow the career of the great
+showman, she was at a loss to comprehend this particular literary
+passion, and indeed was rather jealous of it.  She did not realize then
+his vast interest in the study of human nature, or that such a book
+contained what Mr. Howells calls "the root of the human matter," the
+inner revelation of the human being at first hand.
+
+Concerning his religious observances her task in the beginning was easy
+enough.  Clemens had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines
+of his own.  His natural kindness of heart, and especially his love for
+his wife, inclined him toward the teachings and customs of her Christian
+faith--unorthodox but sincere, as Christianity in the Langdon family was
+likely to be.  It took very little persuasion on his wife's part to
+establish family prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the
+morning reading of a Bible chapter.  Joe Goodman, who made a trip East,
+and visited them during the early days of their married life, was
+dumfounded to see Mark Twain ask a blessing and join in family worship.
+Just how long these forms continued cannot be known to-day; the time of
+their abandonment has perished from the recollection of any one now
+living.
+
+It would seem to have been the Bible-reading that wrought the change.
+The prayer and the blessing were to him sincere and gracious; but as the
+readings continued he realized that he had never before considered the
+Bible from a doctrinal point of view, as a guide to spiritual salvation.
+To his logical reasoning mind, a large portion of it seemed absurd: a
+mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology.  From such material
+humanity had built its mightiest edifice of hope, the doctrines of its
+faith.  After a little while he could stand it no longer.
+
+"Livy," he said one day, "you may keep this up if you want to, but I must
+ask you to excuse me from it.  It is making me a hypocrite.  I don't
+believe in this Bible.  It contradicts my reason.  I can't sit here and
+listen to it, letting you believe that I regard it, as you do, in the
+light of gospel, the word of God."
+
+He was moved to write an article on the human idea of God, ancient and
+modern.  It contained these paragraphs:
+
+     The difference in importance, between the God of the Bible and the
+     God of the present day, cannot be described, it can only be vaguely
+     and inadequately figured to the mind .  .  .  .  If you make figures
+     to represent the earth and moon, and allow a space of one inch
+     between them, to represent the four hundred thousand miles of
+     distance which lies between the two bodies, the map will have to be
+     eleven miles long in order to bring in the nearest fixed star. --
+     [His figures were far too small.  A map drawn on the scale of
+     400,000 miles to the inch would need to be 1,100 miles long to take
+     in both the earth and the nearest fixed star.  On such a map the
+     earth would be one-fiftieth of an inch in diameter--the size of a
+     small grain of sand.]--  So one cannot put the modern heavens on a
+     map, nor the modern God; but the Bible God and the Bible heavens can
+     be set down on a slate and yet not be discommoded .  .  .  .
+
+     The difference between that universe and the modern one revealed by
+     science is as the difference between a dust-flecked ray in a barn
+     and the sublime arch of the Milky Way in the skies.  Its God was
+     strictly proportioned to its dimensions.  His sole solicitude was
+     about a handful of truculent nomads.  He worried and fretted over
+     them in a peculiarly and distractingly human way.  One day he coaxed
+     and petted them beyond their due, the next he harried and lashed
+     them beyond their deserts.  He sulked, he cursed, he raged, he
+     grieved, according to his mood and the circumstances, but all to no
+     purpose; his efforts were all vain, he could not govern them.  When
+     the fury was on him he was blind to all reason--he not only
+     slaughtered the offender, but even his harmless little children and
+     dumb cattle....
+
+     To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive,
+     fierce and ever fickle and changeful master; to trust the true God
+     is to trust a Being who has uttered no promises, but whose
+     beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of his
+     colossal universe is proof that he is at least steadfast to his
+     purposes; whose unwritten laws, so far as they affect man, being
+     equal and impartial, show that he is just and fair; these things,
+     taken together, suggest that if he shall ordain us to live
+     hereafter, he will still be steadfast, just, and fair toward us.  We
+     shall not need to require anything more.
+
+It seems mild enough, obvious, even orthodox, now--so far have we
+traveled in forty years.  But such a declaration then would have shocked
+a great number of sincerely devout persons.  His wife prevailed upon him
+not to print it.  She respected his honesty--even his reasoning, but his
+doubts were a long grief to her, nevertheless.  In time she saw more
+clearly with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more
+with the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the
+proportions of created things.
+
+They did not mingle much or long with the social life of Buffalo.  They
+received and returned calls, attended an occasional reception; but
+neither of them found such things especially attractive in those days, so
+they remained more and more in their own environment.  There is an
+anecdote which seems to belong here.
+
+One Sunday morning Clemens noticed smoke pouring from the upper window of
+the house across the street.  The owner and his wife, comparatively
+newcomers, were seated upon the veranda, evidently not aware of impending
+danger.  The Clemens household thus far had delayed calling on them, but
+Clemens himself now stepped briskly across the street.  Bowing with
+leisurely politeness, he said:
+
+"My name is Clemens; we ought to have called on you before, and I beg
+your pardon for intruding now in this informal way, but your house is on
+fire."
+
+Almost the only intimate friends they had in Buffalo were in the family
+of David Gray, the poet-editor of the Courier.  Gray was a gentle,
+lovable man.  "The gentlest spirit and the loveliest that ever went
+clothed in clay, since Sir Galahad laid him to rest," Mark Twain once
+said of him.  Both Gray and Clemens were friends of John Hay, and their
+families soon became intimate.  Perhaps, in time, the Clemens household
+would have found other as good friends in the Buffalo circles; but heavy
+clouds that had lain unseen just beyond the horizon during those earlier
+months of marriage rose suddenly into view, and the social life, whatever
+it might have become, was no longer a consideration.
+
+
+
+
+LXXIX
+
+THE OLD HUMAN STORY
+
+Jervis Langdon was never able to accept his son-in-law's invitation to
+the new home.  His health began to fail that spring, and at the end of
+March, with his physician and Mrs. Langdon, he made a trip to the South.
+In a letter written at Richmond he said, "I have thrown off all care,"
+and named a list of the four great interests in which he was involved.
+Under "number 5," he included "everything," adding, "so you see how good
+I am to follow the counsel of my children."  He closed: "Samuel, I love
+your wife and she loves me.  I think it is only fair that you should know
+it, but you need not flare up.  I loved her before you did, and she loved
+me before she did you, and has not ceased since.  I see no way but for
+you to make the most of it."  He was already a very ill man, and this
+cheerful letter was among the last he ever wrote.
+
+He was absent six weeks and seemed to improve, but suffered an attack
+early in May; in June his condition became critical.  Clemens and his
+wife were summoned to Elmira, and joined in the nursing, day and night.
+Clemens surprised every one by his ability as a nurse.  His delicacy and
+thoughtfulness were unfailing; his original ways of doing things always
+amused and interested the patient.  In later years Mark Twain once said:
+
+     "How much of the nursing did I do?  My main watch was from midnight
+     to four in the morning, nearly four hours.  My other watch was a
+     midday watch, and I think it was nearly three hours.  The two
+     sisters divided the remaining seventeen hours of the twenty-four
+     hours between them, and each of them tried generously and
+     persistently to swindle the other out of a part of her watch.  I
+     went to bed early every night, and tried to get sleep enough by
+     midnight to fit me for my work, but it was always a failure.  I went
+     on watch sleepy and remained miserable, sleepy, and wretched,
+     straight along through the four hours.  I can still see myself
+     sitting by that bed in the melancholy stillness of the sweltering
+     night, mechanically waving a palm-leaf fan over the drawn, white
+     face of the patient.  I can still recall my noddings, my fleeting
+     unconsciousness, when the fan would come to a standstill in my hand,
+     and I woke up with a start and a hideous shock.  During all that
+     dreary time I began to watch for the dawn long before it came.  When
+     the first faint gray showed through the window-blinds I felt as no
+     doubt a castaway feels when the dim threads of the looked-for ship
+     appear against the sky.  I was well and strong, but I was a man,
+     afflicted with a man's infirmity--lack of endurance."
+
+He always dealt with himself in this unsparing way; but those who were
+about him then have left a different story.
+
+It was all without avail.  Mr. Langdon rallied, and early in July there
+was hope for his recovery.  He failed again, and on the afternoon of the
+6th of August he died.  To Mrs. Clemens, delicate and greatly worn with
+the anxiety and strain of watching, the blow was a crushing one.  It was
+the beginning of a series of disasters which would mark the entire
+remaining period of their Buffalo residence.
+
+There had been a partial plan for spending the summer in England, and a
+more definite one for joining the Twichells in the Adirondacks.  Both of
+these projects were now abandoned.  Mrs. Clemens concluded that she would
+be better at home than anywhere else, and invited an old school friend, a
+Miss Emma Nye, to visit her.
+
+But the shadow of death had not been lifted from the Clemens household.
+Miss Nye presently fell ill with typhoid fever.  There followed another
+long period of anxiety and nursing, ending with the death of the visitor
+in the new home, September 29th.  The young wife was now in very delicate
+health; genuinely ill, in fact.  The happy home had become a place of
+sorrow-of troubled nights and days.  Another friend came to cheer them,
+and on this friend's departure Mrs. Clemens drove to the railway station.
+It was a hurried trip over rough streets to catch the train.  She was
+prostrated on her return, and a little later, November 7, 1870, her first
+child, Langdon, was prematurely born.  A dangerous illness followed, and
+complete recovery was long delayed.  But on the l2th the crisis seemed
+passed, and the new father wrote a playful letter to the Twichells, as
+coming from the late arrival:
+
+     DEAR UNCLE AND AUNT,--I came into the world on the 7th inst., and
+     consequently am about five days old now.  I have had wretched health
+     ever since I made my appearance .  .  .  I am not corpulent, nor am
+     I robust in any way.  At birth I only weighed four and one-half
+     pounds with my clothes on--and the clothes were the chief feature of
+     the weight, too, I am obliged to confess, but I am doing finely, all
+     things considered .  .  .  .  My little mother is very bright and
+     cheery, and I guess she is pretty happy, but I don't know what
+     about.  She laughs a great deal, notwithstanding she is sick abed.
+
+     P. S.--Father says I had better write because you will be more
+     interested in me, just now, than in the rest of the family.
+
+A week later Clemens, as himself, wrote:
+
+     Livy is up and the prince keeps her busy and anxious these latter
+     days and nights, but I am a bachelor up-stairs and don't have to
+     jump up and get the soothing sirup, though I would as soon do it as
+     not, I assure you.  (Livy will be certain to read this letter.)
+
+     Tell Harmony that I do hold the baby, and do it pretty handily too,
+     though with occasional apprehensions that his loose head will fall
+     off.  I don't have to quiet him; he hardly ever utters a cry.  He is
+     always thinking about something.  He is a patient, good little baby.
+
+Further along he refers to one of his reforms:
+
+     Smoke?  I always smoke from three till five on Sunday afternoons,
+     and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week, day and night.  But
+     when Livy is well I smoke only those two hours on Sunday.  I'm boss
+     of the habit now, and shall never let it boss me any more.
+     Originally I quit solely on Livy's account (not that I believed
+     there was the faintest reason in the matter, but just as I would
+     deprive myself of sugar in my coffee if she wished it, or quit
+     wearing socks if she thought them immoral), and I stick to it yet on
+     Livy's account, and shall always continue to do so without a pang.
+     But somehow it seems a pity that you quit, for Mrs. T. didn't mind
+     it, if I remember rightly.  Ah, it is turning one's back upon a
+     kindly Providence to spurn away from us the good creature he sent to
+     make the breath of life a luxury as well as a necessity, enjoyable
+     as well as useful.  To go quit smoking, when there ain't any
+     sufficient excuse for it!--why, my old boy, when they used to tell
+     me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew
+     the devotee they were wasting their puerile words upon; they little
+     knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no
+     smoking in it!  But I won't persuade you, Twichell--I won't until I
+     see you again--but then we'll smoke for a week together, and then
+     shut off again.
+
+
+
+
+LXXX
+
+LITERARY PROJECTS
+
+The success of the Innocents naturally made a thrifty publisher like
+Bliss anxious for a second experiment.  He had begun early in the year to
+talk about another book, but nothing had come of it beyond a project or
+two, more or less hazy and unpursued.  Clemens at one time developed a
+plan for a Noah's Ark book, which was to detail the cruise of the Ark in
+diaries kept by various members of it-Shem, Ham, and the others.  He
+really wrote some of it at the time, and it was an idea he never entirely
+lost track of.  All along among his manuscripts appear fragments from
+those ancient voyagers.  One of the earlier entries will show the style
+and purpose of the undertaking.  It is from Shem's record:
+
+     Friday: Papa's birthday.  He is 600 years old.  We celebrated it in
+     a big, black tent.  Principal men of the tribe present.  Afterward
+     they were shown over the ark, which was looking desolate and empty
+     and dreary on account of a misunderstanding with the workmen about
+     wages.  Methuselah was as free with his criticisms as usual, and as
+     voluble and familiar, which I and my brothers do not like; for we
+     are past our one hundredth year and married.  He still calls me
+     Shemmy, just as he did when I was a child of sixty.  I am still but
+     a youth, it is true, but youth has its feelings, and I do not like
+     this .  .  .  .
+
+     Saturday: Keeping the Sabbath.
+
+     Sunday: Papa has yielded the advance and everybody is hard at work.
+     The shipyard is so crowded that the men hinder each other; everybody
+     hurrying or being hurried; the rush and confusion and shouting and
+     wrangling are astonishing to our family, who have always been used
+     to a quiet, country life.
+
+It was from this germ that in a later day grew the diaries of Adam and
+Eve, though nothing very satisfactory ever came of this preliminary
+attempt.  The author had faith in it, however.  To Bliss he wrote:
+
+     I mean to take plenty of time and pains with the Noah's Ark book;
+     maybe it will be several years before it is all written, but it will
+     be a perfect lightning striker when it is done.
+
+     You can have the first say (that is plain enough) on that or any
+     other book I may prepare for the press, as long as you deal in a
+     fair, open, and honorable way with me.  I do not think you will ever
+     find me doing otherwise with you.  I can get a book ready for you
+     any time you want it; but you can't want one before this time next
+     year, so I have plenty of time.
+
+Bliss was only temporarily appeased.  He realized that to get a book
+ready by the time he wanted it-a book of sufficient size and importance
+to maintain the pace set by the Innocents meant rather more immediate
+action than his author seemed to contemplate.  Futhermore, he knew that
+other publishers were besieging the author of the Innocents; a
+disquieting thought.  In early July, when Mr. Langdon's condition had
+temporarily improved, Bliss had come to Elmira and proposed a book which
+should relate the author's travels and experiences in the Far West.  It
+was an inviting subject, and Clemens, by this time more attracted by the
+idea of authorship and its rewards, readily enough agreed to undertake
+the volume.  He had been offered half profits, and suggested that the new
+contract be arranged upon these terms. Bliss, figuring on a sale of
+100,000 copies, proposed seven and one-half per cent. royalty as an
+equivalent, and the contract was so arranged.  In after-years, when the
+cost of manufacture and paper had become greatly reduced, Clemens, with
+but a confused notion of business details, believed he had been misled by
+Bliss in this contract, and was bitter and resentful accordingly.  The
+figures remain, however, to show that Bliss dealt fairly.  Seven and one-
+half per cent.  of a subscription book did represent half profits up to
+100,000 copies when the contract was drawn; but it required ten years to
+sell that quantity, and in that time conditions had changed.  Bliss could
+hardly foresee that these things would be so, and as he was dead when the
+book touched the 100,000 mark he could not explain or readjust matters,
+whatever might have been his inclination.
+
+Clemens was pleased enough with the contract when it was made.  To Orion
+he wrote July 15 (1870):
+
+     Per contract I must have another six-hundred-page book ready for my
+     publisher January 1st, and I only began it to-day.  The subject of
+     it is a secret, because I may possibly change it.  But as it stands
+     I propose to do up Nevada and California, beginning with the trip
+     across the country in the stage.  Have you a memorandum of the route
+     we took, or the names of any of the stations we stopped at?  Do you
+     remember any of the scenes, names, incidents, or adventures of the
+     coach trip?--for I remember next to nothing about the matter.  Jot
+     down a foolscap page of items for me.  I wish I could have two days'
+     talk with you.
+
+     I suppose I am to get the biggest copyright this time ever paid on a
+     subscription book in this country.
+
+The work so promptly begun made little progress.  Hard days of illness
+and sorrow followed, and it was not until September that it was really
+under way.  His natural enthusiasm over any new undertaking possessed
+him.  On the 4th he wrote Bliss:
+
+During the past week I have written the first four chapters of the book,
+and I tell you 'The Innocents Abroad' will have to get up early to beat
+it.  It will be a book that will jump straight into continental celebrity
+the first month it is issued.
+
+He prophesied a sale of 90,000 copies during the first twelve months and
+declared, "I see the capabilities of the subject."
+
+But further disasters, even then impending, made continued effort
+impossible; the prospect of the new book for a time became gloomy, the
+idea of it less inspiring.  Other plans presented themselves, and at one
+time he thought of letting the Galaxy publishers get out a volume of his
+sketches.  In October he wrote Bliss that he was "driveling along
+tolerably fair on the book, getting off from twelve to twenty pages of
+manuscript a day."  Bliss naturally discouraged the Galaxy idea, and
+realizing that the new book might be long delayed, agreed to get out a
+volume of miscellany sufficiently large and important for subscription
+sales.  He was doubtful of the wisdom of this plan, and when Clemens
+suddenly proposed a brand-new scheme his publisher very readily agreed to
+hold back the publication of Sketches indefinitely.
+
+The new book was to be adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa,
+then newly opened and of wide public interest.  Clemens did not propose
+to visit the mines himself, but to let another man do the traveling, make
+the notes, and write or tell him the story, after which Clemens would
+enlarge and elaborate it in his own fashion.  His adaptation of the
+letters of Professor Ford, a year earlier, had convinced him that his
+plan would work out successfully on a larger scale; he fixed upon his old
+friend, J. H. Riley, of Washington --[Riley-Newspaper Correspondent."
+See Sketches.]--  (earlier of San Francisco), as the proper person to do
+the traveling.  At the end of November he wrote Bliss:
+
+     I have put my greedy hands upon the best man in America for my
+     purpose, and shall start him to the diamond field in South Africa
+     within a fortnight at my expense .  .  .  that the book will have a
+     perfectly beautiful sale.
+
+He suggested that Bliss advance Riley's expense money, the amount to be
+deducted from the first royalty returns; also he proposed an increased
+royalty, probably in view of the startling splendor of the new idea.
+Bliss was duly impressed, and the agreement was finally made on a basis
+of eight and one-half per cent., with an advance of royalty sufficient to
+see Riley to South Africa and return.
+
+Clemens had not yet heard from Riley definitely when he wrote his glowing
+letter to Bliss.  He took it for granted that Riley, always an
+adventurous sort, would go.  When Riley wrote him that he felt morally
+bound to the Alta, of which he was then Washington correspondent, also in
+certain other directions till the end of the session, Clemens wrote him
+at great length, detailing his scheme in full and urging him to write
+instantly to the Alta and others, asking a release on the ground of being
+offered a rare opportunity to improve his fortunes.
+
+You know right well that I would not have you depart a hair from any
+obligation for any money.  The, boundless confidence that I have in you
+is born of a conviction of your integrity in small as well as in great
+things.  I know plenty of men whose integrity I would trust to here, but
+not off yonder in Africa.
+
+His proposal, in brief, to Riley was that the latter should make the trip
+to Africa without expense to himself, collect memoranda, and such diamond
+mines as might be found lying about handy.  Upon his return he was to
+take up temporary residence in the Clemens household until the book was
+finished, after which large benefits were to accrue to everybody
+concerned.  In the end Riley obtained a release from his obligations and
+was off for the diamond mines and fortune.
+
+Poor fellow!  He was faithful in his mission, and it is said that he
+really located a mining claim that would have made him and his
+independent for all time to come; but returning home with his precious
+memoranda and the news of good fortune, he accidentally wounded himself
+with a fork while eating; blood-poisoning set in (they called it cancer
+then), and he was only able to get home to die.  His memoranda were never
+used, his mining claim was never identified.  Certainly, death was
+closely associated with Mark Twain's fortunes during those earlier days
+of his married life.
+
+On the whole the Buffalo residence was mainly a gloomy one; its ventures
+were attended by ill-fortune.  For some reason Mark Twain's connection
+with the Express, while it had given the paper a wide reputation, had not
+largely increased its subscription.  Perhaps his work on it was too
+varied and erratic.  Nasby, who had popularized the Toledo Blade, kept
+steadily to one line.  His farmer public knew always just what to expect
+when their weekly edition arrived.
+
+Clemens and his wife dreamed of a new habitation, and new faces and
+surroundings.  They agreed to offer their home and his interests in the
+Express for sale.  They began to talk of Hartford, where Twichell lived,
+and where Orion Clemens and his wife had recently located.
+
+Mark Twain's new fortunes had wrought changes in the affairs of his
+relatives.  Already, before his marriage, he had prospected towns here
+and there with a view to finding an Eastern residence for his mother and
+sister, and he had kept Orion's welfare always in mind.  When Pamela and
+her daughter came to his wedding he told them of a little city by the
+name of Fredonia (New York), not far from Buffalo, where he thought they
+might find a pleasant home.
+
+"I went in there by night and out by night," he said, "so I saw none of
+it, but I had an intelligent, attractive audience.  Prospect Fredonia and
+let me know what it is like.  Try to select a place where a good many
+funerals pass.  Ma likes funerals.  If you can pick a good funeral corner
+she will be happy."
+
+It was in her later life that Jane Clemens had developed this particular
+passion.  She would consult the morning paper for any notice of obsequies
+and attend those that were easy of access.  Watching the processions go
+by gave her a peculiar joy.  Mrs. Moffett and her daughter did go to
+Fredonia immediately following the wedding.  They found it residentially
+attractive, and rented a house before returning to St. Louis, a
+promptness that somewhat alarmed the old lady, who did not altogether
+fancy the idea of being suddenly set down in a strange house, in a
+strange land, even though it would be within hailing distance of Sam and
+his new wife.  Perhaps the Fredonia funerals were sufficiently numerous
+and attractive, for she soon became attached to the place, and entered
+into the spirit of the life there, joining its temperance crusades, and
+the like, with zest and enjoyment.
+
+Onion remained in St. Louis, but when Bliss established a paper called
+The Publisher, and wanted an editor, he was chosen for the place,
+originally offered to his brother; the latter, writing to Onion, said:
+
+If you take the place with an air of perfect confidence in yourself,
+never once letting anything show in your bearing but a quiet, modest,
+entire, and perfect confidence in your ability to do pretty much anything
+in the world, Bliss will think you are the very man he needs; but don't
+show any shadow of timidity or unsoldierly diffidence, for that sort of
+thing is fatal to advancement.
+
+I warn you thus because you are naturally given to knocking your pot over
+in this way, when a little judicious conduct would make it boil.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXI
+
+SOME FURTHER LITERARY MATTERS
+
+Meantime The Innocents Abroad had continued to prosper.  Its author
+ranked mainly as a humorist, but of such colossal proportions that his
+contemporaries had seemed to dwindle; the mighty note of the "Frog of
+Calaveras" had dwarfed a score of smaller peepers.  At the end of a year
+from its date of publication the book had sold up to 67,000 and was
+continuing at the rate of several thousand monthly.
+
+"You are running it in staving, tiptop, first-class style," Clemens wrote
+to Bliss.  "On the average ten people a day come and hunt me up to tell
+me I am a benefactor!  I guess that is a part of the program we didn't
+expect, in the first place."
+
+Apparently the book appealed to readers of every grade.  One hundred and
+fifteen copies were in constant circulation at the Mercantile Library, in
+New York, while in the most remote cabins of America it was read and
+quoted.  Jack Van Nostrand, making a long horseback tour of Colorado,
+wrote:
+
+I stopped a week ago in a ranch but a hundred miles from nowhere.  The
+occupant had just two books: the Bible and The Innocents Abroad--the
+former in good repair.
+
+Across the ocean the book had found no less favor, and was being
+translated into many and strange tongues.  By what seems now some
+veritable magic its author's fame had become literally universal.  The
+consul at Hongkong, discussing English literature with a Chinese
+acquaintance, a mandarin, mentioned The Pilgrim's Progress.
+
+"Yes, indeed, I have read it!" the mandarin said, eagerly.  "We are
+enjoying it in China, and shall have it soon in our own language.  It is
+by Mark Twain."
+
+In England the book had an amazing vogue from the beginning, and English
+readers were endeavoring to outdo the Americans in appreciation.  Indeed,
+as a rule, English readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an
+understanding of Mark Twain's literary value with greater promptness than
+did the same class of readers at home.  There were exceptions, of course.
+There were English critics who did not take Mark Twain seriously, there
+were American critics who did.  Among the latter was a certain William
+Ward, an editor of a paper down in Macon, Georgia--The Beacon.  Ward did
+not hold a place with the great magazine arbiters of literary rank.  He
+was only an obscure country editor, but he wrote like a prophet.  His
+article--too long to quote in full--concerned American humorists in
+general, from Washington Irving, through John Phoenix, Philander
+Doesticks, Sut Lovingwood, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings and Petroleum V.
+Nasby, down to Mark Twain.  With the exception of the first and last
+named he says of them:
+
+     They have all had, or will have, their day.  Some of them are
+     resting beneath the sod, and others still live whose work will
+     scarcely survive them.  Since Irving no humorist in prose has held
+     the foundation of a permanent fame except it be Mark Twain, and
+     this, as in the case of Irving, is because he is a pure writer.
+     Aside from any subtle mirth that lurks through his composition, the
+     grace and finish of his more didactic and descriptive sentences
+     indicate more than mediocrity.
+
+The writer then refers to Mark Twain's description of the Sphinx,
+comparing it with Bulwer's, which he thinks may have influenced it.  He
+was mistaken in this, for Clemens had not read Bulwer--never could read
+him at any length.
+
+Of the English opinions, that of The Saturday Review was perhaps most
+doubtful.  It came along late in 1870, and would hardly be worth
+recalling if it were not for a resulting, or collateral, interest.
+Clemens saw notice of this review before he saw the review itself.  A
+paragraph in the Boston Advertiser spoke of The Saturday Review as
+treating the absurdities of the Innocents from a serious standpoint.  The
+paragraph closed:
+
+     We can imagine the delight of the humorist in reading this tribute
+     to his power; and indeed it is so amusing in itself that he can
+     hardly do better than reproduce the article in full in his next
+     monthly "Memoranda."
+
+The old temptation to hoax his readers prompted Mark Twain to "reproduce"
+in the Galaxy, not the Review article, which he had not yet seen, but an
+imaginary Review article, an article in which the imaginary reviewer
+would be utterly devoid of any sense of humor and treat the most absurd
+incidents of The New Pilgrim's Progress as if set down by the author in
+solemn and serious earnest.  The pretended review began:
+
+     Lord Macaulay died too soon.  We never felt this so deeply as when
+     we finished the last chapter of the above-named extravagant work.
+     Macaulay died too soon; for none but he could mete out complete and
+     comprehensive justice to the insolence, the impudence, the
+     presumption, the mendacity, and, above all, the majestic ignorance
+     of this author.
+
+The review goes on to cite cases of the author's gross deception.  It
+says:
+
+     Let the cultivated English student of human nature picture to
+     himself this Mark Twain as a person capable of doing the following
+     described things; and not only doing them, but, with incredible
+     innocence, printing them tranquilly and calmly in a book.  For
+     instance:
+
+     He states that he entered a hair-dresser's in Paris to get a shave,
+     and the first "rake" the barber gave him with his razor it loosened
+     his "hide," and lifted him out of the chair.
+
+     This is unquestionably extravagant.  In Florence he was so annoyed
+     by beggars that he pretends to have seized and eaten one in a
+     frantic spirit of revenge.  There is, of course, no truth in this.
+     He gives at full length the theatrical program, seventeen or
+     eighteen hundred years old, which he professes to have found in the
+     ruins of the Colosseum, among the dirt-and mold and rubbish.  It is
+     a sufficient comment upon this subject to remark that even a cast-
+     iron program would not have lasted so long under the circumstances.
+
+There were two and one-half pages of this really delightful burlesque
+which the author had written with huge-enjoyment, partly as a joke on the
+Review, partly to trick American editors, who he believed would accept it
+as a fresh and startling proof of the traditional English lack of humor.
+
+But, as in the early sage-brush hoaxes, he rather overdid the thing.
+Readers and editors readily enough accepted it as genuine, so far as
+having come from The Saturday Review; but most of them, regarded it as a
+delicious bit of humor which Mark Twain himself had taken seriously, and
+was therefore the one sold.  This was certainly startling, and by no
+means gratifying.  In the next issue he undertook that saddest of all
+performances with tongue or pen: he explained his joke, and insisted on
+the truth of the explanation.  Then he said:
+
+     If any man doubts my word now I will kill him.  No, I will not kill
+     him; I will win his money.  I will bet him twenty to one, and let
+     any New York publisher hold the stakes, that the statements I have
+     above made as to the authorship of the article in question are
+     entirely true.
+
+
+But the Cincinnati Enquirer persisted in continuing the joke--in "rubbing
+it in," as we say now.  The Enquirer declared that Mark Twain had been
+intensely mortified at having been so badly taken in; that his
+explanation in the Galaxy was "ingenious, but unfortunately not true."
+The Enquirer maintained that The Saturday Review of October 8, 1870, did
+contain the article exactly as printed in the "Memoranda," and advised
+Mark Twain to admit that he was sold, and say no more about it.
+
+This was enraging.  Mark Twain had his own ideas as to how far a joke
+might be carried without violence, and this was a good way beyond the
+limits.  He denounced the Enquirer's statement as a "pitiful, deliberate
+falsehood, " in his anger falling into the old-time phrasing of newspaper
+editorial abuse.  He offered to bet them a thousand dollars in cash that
+they could not prove their assertions, and asked pointedly, in
+conclusion: "Will they swallow that falsehood ignominiously, or will they
+send an agent to the Galaxy office?  I think the Cincinnati Enquirer must
+be edited by children."  He promised that if they did not accept his
+financial proposition he would expose them in the next issue.
+
+The incident closed there.  He was prevented, by illness in his
+household, from contributing to the next issue, and the second issue
+following was his final "Memoranda" installment.  So the matter perished
+and was forgotten.  It was his last editorial hoax.  Perhaps he concluded
+that hoaxes in any form were dangerous playthings; they were too likely
+to go off at the wrong end.
+
+It was with the April number (1871) that he concluded his relations with
+the Galaxy.  In a brief valedictory he gave his reasons:
+
+     I have now written for the Galaxy a year.  For the last eight
+     months, with hardly an interval, I have had for my fellows and
+     comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the sick!  During
+     these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle and
+     malignantly threatened two others.  All this I have experienced, yet
+     all the time have been under contract to furnish "humorous" matter,
+     once a month, for this magazine.  I am speaking the exact truth in
+     the above details.  Please to put yourself in my place and
+     contemplate the grisly grotesqueness of the situation.  I think that
+     some of the "humor" I have written during this period could have
+     been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the solemnity
+     of the occasion.
+
+     The "Memoranda" will cease permanently with this issue of the
+     magazine.  To be a pirate on a low salary, and with no share in the
+     profits of the business, used to be my idea of an uncomfortable
+     occupation, but I have other views now.  To be a monthly humorist in
+     a cheerless time is drearier.
+
+Without doubt he felt a glad relief in being rid of this recurrent,
+imperative demand.  He wrote to Orion that he had told the Galaxy people
+he would not write another article, long or short, for less than $500,
+and preferred not to do it at all.
+
+The Galaxy department and the work on the Express were Mark Twain's
+farewell to journalism; for the "Memoranda" was essentially journalistic,
+almost as much so, and as liberally, as his old-time Enterprise position.
+Apparently he wrote with absolute freedom, unhampered by editorial policy
+or restriction.  The result was not always pleasant, and it was not
+always refined.  We may be certain that it was because of Mrs. Clemens's
+heavy burdens that year, and her consequent inability to exert a
+beneficent censorship, that more than one--more than a dozen--of the
+"Memoranda" contributions were permitted to see the light of print.
+
+As a whole, the literary result of Mark Twain's Buffalo period does not
+reach the high standard of The Innocents Abroad.  It was a retrogression
+--in some measure a return to his earlier form.  It had been done under
+pressure, under heavy stress of mind, as he said.  Also there was another
+reason; neither the subject treated nor the environment of labor had
+afforded that lofty inspiration which glorified every step of the Quaker
+City journey.  Buffalo was a progressive city--a beautiful city, as
+American cities go--but it was hardly an inspiring city for literature,
+and a dull, dingy newspaper office was far, very far, from the pleasant
+decks of the Quaker City, the camp-fires of Syria, the blue sky and sea
+of the Medit&ranean.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXII
+
+THE WRITING OF "ROUGHING IT"
+
+The third book published by Mark Twain was not the Western book he was
+preparing for Bliss. It was a small volume, issued by Sheldon & Co.,
+entitled Mark Twain's Autobiography (Burlesque) and First Romance.  The
+Romance was the "Awful, Terrible Medieval Romance" which had appeared in
+the Express at the beginning of 1870.  The burlesque autobiography had
+not previously appeared.  The two made a thin little book, which, in
+addition to its literary features, had running through it a series of
+full-page, irrelevant pictures---cartoons of the Erie Railroad Ring,
+presented as illustrations of a slightly modified version of "The House
+That Jack Built."  The "House" was the Erie headquarters, the purpose
+being to illustrate the swindling methods of the Ring.  The faces of Jay
+Gould, James Fisk, Jr., John T. Hoffman, and others of the combination,
+are chiefly conspicuous.  The publication was not important, from any
+standpoint.  Literary burlesque is rarely important, and it was far from
+Mark Twain's best form of expression.  A year or two later he realized
+the mistake of this book, bought in the plates and destroyed them.
+
+Meantime the new Western book was at a standstill.  To Orion, in March,
+he wrote:
+
+     I am still nursing Livy night and day.  I am nearly worn out.  We
+     shall go to Elmira ten days hence (if Livy can travel on a mattress
+     then), and stay there until I finish the California book, say three
+     months.  But I can't begin work right away when I get there; must
+     have a week's rest, for I have been through thirty days' terrific
+     siege.
+
+He promised to forward some of the manuscript soon.
+
+     Hold on four or five days and I will see if I can get a few chapters
+     fixed to send to Bliss .  .  .  .
+
+     I have offered this house and the Express for sale, and when we go
+     to Elmira we leave here for good.  I shall not select a new home
+     till the book is finished, but we have little doubt that Hartford
+     will be the place.
+
+He disposed of his interest in the Express in April, at a sacrifice of
+$10,000 on the purchase price.  Mrs. Clemens and the baby were able to
+travel, and without further delay he took them to Elmira, to Quarry Farm.
+
+Quarry Farm, the home of Mrs. Clemens's sister, Mrs. Theodore Crane, is a
+beautiful hilltop, with a wide green slope, overlooking the hazy city and
+the Chemung River, beyond which are the distant hills.  It was bought
+quite incidentally by Mr. and Mrs. Langdon, who, driving by one evening,
+stopped to water the horses and decided that it would make a happy summer
+retreat, where the families could combine their housekeeping arrangements
+during vacation days.  When the place had first been purchased, they had
+debated on a name for it.  They had tried several, among them "Go-as-you-
+please Hall,"  "Crane's Nest," and had finally agreed upon "Rest and Be
+Thankful."  But this was only its official name.  There was an abandoned
+quarry up the hill, a little way from the house, and the title suggested
+by Thomas K. Beecher came more naturally to the tongue.  The place became
+Quarry Farm, and so remains.
+
+Clemens and his wife had fully made up their minds to live in Hartford.
+They had both conceived an affection for the place, Clemens mainly
+because of Twichell, while both of them yearned for the congenial
+literary and social atmosphere, and the welcome which they felt awaited
+them.  Hartford was precisely what Buffalo in that day was not--a home
+for the literary man.  It held a distinguished group of writers, most of
+whom the Clemenses already knew.  Furthermore, with Bliss as publisher of
+the Mark Twain books, it held their chief business interests.
+
+Their plans for going were not very definite as to time.  Clemens found
+that his work went better at the farm, and that Mrs. Clemens and the
+delicate baby daily improved.  They decided to remain at Quarry Farm for
+the summer, their first summer in that beautiful place which would mean
+so much to them in the years to come.
+
+It was really Joe Goodman, as much as anything, that stirred a fresh
+enthusiasm in the new book.  Goodman arrived just when the author's
+spirits were at low ebb.
+
+"Joe," he said, " I guess I'm done for.  I don't appear to be able to get
+along at all with my work, and what I do write does not seem valuable.
+I'm afraid I'll never be able to reach the standard of 'The Innocents
+Abroad' again.  Here is what I have written, Joe.  Read it, and see if
+that is your opinion."
+
+Goodman took the manuscript and seated himself in a chair, while Clemens
+went over to a table and pretended to work.  Goodman read page after
+page, critically, and was presently absorbed in it.  Clemens watched him
+furtively, till he could stand it no longer.  Then he threw down his pen,
+exclaiming:
+
+"I knew it!  I knew it!  I am writing nothing but rot.  You have sat
+there all this time reading without a smile, and pitying the ass I am
+making of myself.  But I am not wholly to blame.  I am not strong enough
+to fight against fate.  I have been trying to write a funny book, with
+dead people and sickness a verywhere.  Mr. Langdon died first, then a
+young lady in our house, and now Mrs. Clemens and the baby have been at
+the point of death all winter!  Oh, Joe, I wish to God I could die
+myself!"
+
+"Mark," said Joe, "I was reading critically, not for amusement, and so
+far as I have read, and can judge, this is one of the best things you
+have ever written.  I have found it perfectly absorbing.  You are doing a
+great book!"
+
+Clemens knew that Goodman never spoke except from conviction, and the
+verdict was to him like a message of life handed down by an archangel.
+He was a changed man instantly.  He was all enthusiasm, full of his
+subject, eager to go on.  He proposed to pay Goodman a salary to stay
+there and keep him company and furnish him with inspiration--the Pacific
+coast atmosphere and vernacular, which he feared had slipped away from
+him.  Goodman declined the salary, but extended his visit as long as his
+plans would permit, and the two had a happy time together, recalling old
+Comstock days.  Every morning, for a month or more, they used to tramp
+over the farm.  They fell into the habit of visiting the old quarry and
+pawing over the fragments in search of fossil specimens.  Both of them
+had a poetic interest in geology, its infinite remotenesses and its
+testimonies.  Without scientific knowledge, they took a deep pleasure in
+accumulating a collection, which they arranged on boards torn from an old
+fence, until they had enough specimens to fill a small museum.  They
+imagined they could distinguish certain geological relations and
+families, and would talk about trilobites, the Old Red Sandstone period,
+and the azoic age, or follow random speculation to far-lying conclusions,
+developing vague humors of phrase and fancy, having altogether a joyful
+good time.
+
+Another interest that developed during Goodman's stay was in one Ruloff,
+who was under death sentence for a particularly atrocious murder.  The
+papers were full of Ruloff's prodigious learning.  It was said that he
+had in preparation a work showing the unity of all languages.  Goodman
+and Clemens agreed that Ruloff's death would be a great loss to mankind,
+even though he was clearly a villain and deserved his sentence.  They
+decided that justice would be served just as well if some stupid person
+were hung in his place, and following out this fancy Clemens one morning
+put aside his regular work and wrote an article to the Tribune, offering
+to supply a substitute for Ruloff.  He signed it simply "Samuel
+Langhorne," and it was published as a serious communication, without
+comment, so far as the Tribune was concerned.  Other papers, however,
+took it up and it was widely copied and commented upon.  Apparently no
+one ever identified, Mark Twain with the authorship of the letter, which,
+by the way, does not appear to have prolonged Ruloff's earthly
+usefulness.  --[The reader will find the Ruloff letter in full under
+Appendix K, at the end of last volume.]
+
+Life at the farm may have furnished agricultural inspiration, for Clemens
+wrote something about Horace Greeley's farming, also a skit concerning
+Henry Ward Beecher's efforts in that direction.  Of Mr. Beecher's farming
+he said:
+
+"His strawberries would be a comfortable success if robins would eat
+turnips."
+
+The article amused Beecher, and perhaps Greeley was amused too, for he
+wrote:
+
+     MARK,-- You are mistaken as to my criticisms on your farming.  I
+     never publicly made any, while you have undertaken to tell the exact
+     cost per pint of my potatoes and cabbages, truly enough the
+     inspiration of genius.  If you will really betake yourself to
+     farming, or even to telling what you know about it, rather than what
+     you don't know about mine, I will not only refrain from disparaging
+     criticism, but will give you my blessing.
+
+                              Yours,   HORACE GREELEY.
+
+
+The letter is in Mr. Greeley's characteristic scrawl, and no doubt
+furnished inspiration for the turnip story in 'Roughing It', also the
+model for the pretended facsimile of Greeley's writing.
+
+Altogether that was a busy, enterprising summer at Quarry Farm.  By the
+middle of May, Clemens wrote to Bliss that he had twelve hundred
+manuscript pages of the new book already written, and that he was turning
+out the remainder at the rate of from thirty to sixty-five per day.  He
+was in high spirits by this time.  The family health had improved, and
+prospects were bright.
+
+I have enough manuscript on hand now to make (allowing for engravings)
+about four hundred pages of the book, consequently am two-thirds done.
+I intended to run up to Hartford about the middle of the week and take it
+along, but I find myself so thoroughly interested in my work now (a thing
+I have not experienced for months) that I can't bear to lose a single
+moment of the inspiration.  So I will stay here and peg away as long as
+it lasts.  My present idea is to write as much more as I have already
+written, and then collect from the mass the very best chapters and
+discard the rest.  When I get it done I want to see the man who will
+begin to read it and not finish it.  Nothing grieves me now; nothing
+troubles me, nothing bothers me or gets my attention.  I don't think of
+anything but the book, and don't have an hour's unhappiness about
+anything, and don't care two cents whether school keeps or not.  The book
+will be done soon now.  It will be a starchy book; the dedication will be
+worth the price of the volume.  Thus:
+
+                            TO THE LATE CAIN
+                         THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
+
+     not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little
+     respect; not on account of sympathy for him, for his bloody deed
+     places him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking, but out
+     of a mere humane commiseration for him, in that it was his
+     misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent
+     insanity plea.
+
+
+Probably Mrs. Clemens diverted this picturesque dedication in favor of
+the Higbie inscription, or perhaps the author never really intended the
+literary tribute to Cain.  The impulse that inspired it, however, was
+characteristic.
+
+In a postscript to this letter he adds:
+
+     My stock is looking up.  I am getting the bulliest offers for books
+     and almanacs; am flooded with lecture invitations, and one
+     periodical offers me $6,000 cash for twelve articles of any length,
+     and on any subject, treated humorously or otherwise.
+
+He set in to make hay while the sun was shining.  In addition to the
+California book, which was now fast nearing completion, he discussed a
+scheme with Goodman for a six-hundred-page work which they were to do
+jointly; he planned and wrote one or two scenes from a Western play, to
+be built from episodes in the new book (one of them was the "Arkansas"
+incident, related in Chapter XXXI); he perfected one of his several
+inventions--an automatically adjusting vest-strap; he wrote a number of
+sketches, made an occasional business trip to New York and Hartford;
+prospected the latter place for a new home.  The shadow which had hung
+over the sojourn in Buffalo seemed to have lifted.
+
+He had promised Bliss some contributions for his new paper, and in June
+he sent three sketches.  In an accompanying letter he says:
+
+     Here are three articles which you may have if you will pay $125 for
+     the lot.  If you don't want them I'll sell them to the Galaxy, but
+     not for a cent less than three times the money.... If you take them
+     pay one-tenth of the $125 in weekly instalments to Orion till he has
+     received it all.
+
+He reconsidered his resolution not to lecture again, and closed with
+Redpath for the coming season.  He found himself in a lecture-writing
+fever.  He wrote three of them in succession: one on Artemus Ward,
+another on "Reminiscences of Some Pleasant Characters I Have Met," and a
+third one based on chapters from the new book.  Of the "Reminiscence"
+lecture he wrote Redpath:
+
+"It covers my whole acquaintance; kings, lunatics, idiots, and all."
+Immediately afterward he wrote that he had prepared still another
+lecture, "title to be announced later."
+
+"During July I'll decide which one I like best," he said.  He instructed
+Redpath not to make engagements for him to lecture in churches.  "I never
+made a success of a lecture in a church yet.  People are afraid to laugh
+in a church."
+
+Redpath was having difficulties in arranging a circuit to suit him.
+Clemens had prejudices against certain towns and localities, prejudices
+that were likely to change overnight.  In August he wrote:
+
+     DEAR RED,--I am different from other women; my mind changes oftener.
+     People who have no mind can easily be stead fast and firm, but when
+     a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea
+     of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo.
+     See?  Therefore, if you will notice, one week I am likely to give
+     rigid instructions to confine me to New England; the next week send
+     me to Arizona; the next week withdraw my name; the next week give
+     you full, untrammeled swing; and the week following modify it.  You
+     must try to keep the run of my mind, Redpath that is your business,
+     being the agent, and it always was too many for me....  Now about
+     the West this week, I am willing that you shall retain all the
+     Western engagements.  But what I shall want next week is still with
+     God.
+                                   Yours,    MARK.
+
+He was in Hartford when this letter was written, arranging for residence
+there and the removal of his belongings.  He finally leased the fine
+Hooker house on Ford Street, in that pleasant seclusion known as Nook
+Farm--the literary part of Hartford, which included the residence of
+Charles Dudley Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe.  He arranged for
+possession of the premises October 1st.  So the new home was settled
+upon; then learning that Nasby was to be in Boston, he ran over to that
+city for a few days of recreation after his season's labors.
+
+Preparations for removal to Hartford were not delayed.  The Buffalo
+property was disposed of, the furnishings were packed and shipped away.
+The house which as bride and groom they had entered so happily was left
+empty and deserted, never to be entered by them again.  In the year and a
+half of their occupancy it had seen well-nigh all the human round, all
+that goes to make up the happiness and the sorrow of life.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXIII
+
+LECTURING DAYS
+
+Life in Hartford, in the autumn of 1871, began in the letter, rather than
+in the spirit.  The newcomers were received with a wide, neighborly
+welcome, but the disorder of establishment and the almost immediate
+departure of the head of the household on a protracted lecturing tour
+were disquieting things; the atmosphere of the Clemens home during those
+early Hartford days gave only a faint promise of its future loveliness.
+
+As in a far later period, Mark Twain had resorted to lecturing to pay off
+debt.  He still owed a portion of his share in the Express; also he had
+been obliged to obtain an advance from the lecture bureau.  He dreaded,
+as always, the tedium of travel, the clatter of hotel life, the monotony
+of entertainment, while, more than most men, he loved the tender luxury
+of home.  It was only that he could not afford to lose the profit offered
+on the platform.
+
+His season opened at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, October 16th, and his
+schedule carried him hither and thither, to and fro, over distances that
+lie between Boston and Chicago.  There were opportunities to run into
+Hartford now and then, when he was not too far away, and in November he
+lectured there on Artemus Ward.
+
+He changed his entertainment at least twice that season. He began with
+the"Reminiscences," the lecture which he said would treat of all those
+whom he had met, "idiots, lunatics, and kings," but he did not like it,
+or it did not go well.  He wrote Redpath of the Artemus Ward address:
+
+"It suits me, and I'll never deliver the nasty, nauseous 'Reminiscences'
+any more."
+
+But the Ward lecture was good for little more than a month, for on
+December 8th he wrote again:
+
+     Notify all hands that from this time I shall talk nothing but
+     selections from my forthcoming book, 'Roughing It'.  Tried it twice
+     last night; suits me tiptop.
+
+And somewhat later:
+
+     Had a splendid time with a splendid audience in Indianapolis last
+     night; a perfectly jammed house, just as I have all the time out
+     here....  I don't care now to have any appointments canceled.  I'll
+     even "fetch" those Dutch Pennsylvanians with this lecture.
+
+     Have paid up $4,000 indebtedness.  You are the last on my list.
+     Shall begin to pay you in a few days, and then I shall be a free man
+     again.
+
+Undoubtedly he reveled in the triumphs of a platform tour, though at no
+time did he regard it as a pleasure excursion.  During those early weeks
+the proofs of his new book, chasing him from place to place, did not add
+to his comfort.  Still, with large, substantial rewards in hand and in
+prospect, one could endure much.
+
+In the neighborhood of Boston there were other compensations.  He could
+spend a good part of his days at the Lyceum headquarters, in School
+Street, where there was always congenial fellowship--Nasby, Josh
+Billings, and the rest of the peripatetic group that about the end of the
+year collected there.  Their lectures were never tried immediately in
+Boston, but in the outlying towns; tried and perfected--or discarded.
+When the provincial audiences were finally satisfied, then the final.
+test in the Boston Music Hall was made, and if this proved successful the
+rest of the season was safe.  Redpath's lecturers put up at Young's
+Hotel, and spent their days at the bureau, smoking and spinning yarns, or
+talking shop.  Early in the evening they scattered to the outlying towns,
+Lowell, Lexington, Concord, New Bedford.  There is no such a condition
+to-day: lecturers are few, lecture bureaus obscure; there are no great
+reputations made on the platform.
+
+Neither is there any such distinct group of humorists as the one just
+mentioned.  Humor has become universal since then.  Few writers of this
+age would confess to taking their work so seriously as to be at all times
+unsmiling in it; only about as many, in fact, as in that day would
+confess to taking their work so lightly that they could regard life's
+sterner phases and philosophies with a smile.
+
+Josh Billings was one of the gentlest and loveliest of our pioneers of
+laughter.  The present generation is not overfamiliar even with his name,
+but both the name and sayings of that quaint soul were on everybody's
+lips at the time of which we are writing.  His true name was Henry W.
+Shaw, and he was a genuine, smiling philosopher, who might have built up
+a more permanent and serious reputation had he not been induced to
+disfigure his maxims with ridiculous spelling in order to popularize them
+and make them bring a living price.  It did not matter much with Nasby's
+work.  An assumed illiteracy belonged with the side of life which he
+presented; but it is pathetic now to consider some of the really masterly
+sayings of Josh Billings presented in that uncouth form which was
+regarded as a part of humor a generation ago.  Even the aphorisms that
+were essentially humorous lose value in that degraded spelling.
+
+"When a man starts down hill everything is greased for the occasion,"
+could hardly be improved upon by distorted orthography, and here are a
+few more gems which have survived that deadly blight.
+
+"Some folks mistake vivacity for wit; whereas the difference between
+vivacity and wit is the same as the difference between the lightning-bug
+and the lightning."
+
+"Don't take the bull by the horns-take him by the tail; then you can let
+go when you want to."
+
+"The difficulty is not that we know so much, but that we know so much
+that isn't so."
+
+Josh Billings, Nasby, and Mark Twain were close friends.  They had
+themselves photographed in a group, and there was always some pleasantry
+going on among them.  Josh Billings once wrote on "Lekturing," and under
+the head of "Rule Seven," which treated of unwisdom of inviting a
+lecturer to a private house, he said:
+
+     Think of asking Mark Twain home with yu, for instance.  Yure good
+     wife has put her house in apple-pie order for the ockashun;
+     everything is just in the right place.  Yu don't smoke in yure
+     house, never.  Yu don't put yure feet on the center-table, yu don't
+     skatter the nuzepapers all over the room, in utter confushion: order
+     and ekonemy governs yure premises.  But if yu expeckt Mark Twain to
+     be happy, or even kumfortable yu hav got to buy a box of cigars
+     worth at least seventeen dollars and yu hav got to move all the
+     tender things out ov yure parlor.  Yu hav got to skatter all the
+     latest papers around the room careless, you hav got to hav a pitcher
+     ov icewater handy, for Mark is a dry humorist.  Yu hav got to ketch
+     and tie all yure yung ones, hed and foot, for Mark luvs babys only
+     in theory; yu hav got to send yure favorite kat over to the nabors
+     and hide yure poodle.  These are things that hav to be done, or Mark
+     will pak hiz valise with hiz extry shirt collar and hiz lektur on
+     the Sandwich Islands, and travel around yure streets, smoking and
+     reading the sighns over the store doorways untill lektur time
+     begins.
+
+As we-are not likely to touch upon Mark Twain's lecturing, save only
+lightly, hereafter, it may be as well to say something of his method at
+this period.  At all places visited by lecturers there was a committee,
+and it was the place of the chairman to introduce the lecturer, a
+privilege which he valued, because it gave him a momentary association
+with distinction and fame.  Clemens was a great disappointment to these
+officials.  He had learned long ago that he could introduce himself more
+effectively than any one else.  His usual formula was to present himself
+as the chairman of the committee, introducing the lecturer of the
+evening; then, with what was in effect a complete change of personality,
+to begin his lecture.  It was always startling and amusing, always a
+success; but the papers finally printed this formula, which took the
+freshness out of it, so that he had to invent others.  Sometimes he got
+up with the frank statement that he was introducing himself because he
+had never met any one who could pay a proper tribute to his talents; but
+the newspapers printed that too, and he often rose and began with no
+introduction at all.
+
+Whatever his method of beginning, Mark Twain's procedure probably was the
+purest exemplification of the platform entertainer's art which this
+country has ever seen.  It was the art that makes you forget the
+artisanship, the art that made each hearer forget that he was not being
+personally entertained by a new and marvelous friend, who had traveled a
+long way for his particular benefit.  One listener has written that he
+sat "simmering with laughter" through what he supposed was the
+continuation of the introduction, waiting for the traditional lecture to
+begin, when presently the lecturer, with a bow, disappeared, and it was
+over.  The listener looked at his watch; he had been there more than an
+hour.  He thought it could be no more than ten minutes, at most.  Many
+have tried to set down something of the effect his art produced on them,
+but one may not clearly convey the story of a vanished presence and a
+silent voice.
+
+There were other pleasant associations in Boston.  Howells was there, and
+Aldrich; also Bret Harte, who had finished his triumphal progress across
+the continent to join the Atlantic group.  Clemens appears not to have
+met Aldrich before, though their acquaintance had begun a year earlier,
+when Aldrich, as editor of Every Saturday, had commented on a poem
+entitled, "The Three Aces," which had appeared in the Buffalo Express.
+Aldrich had assumed the poem to be the work of Mark Twain, and had
+characterized it as "a feeble imitation of Bret Harte's 'Heathen
+Chinee.'"  Clemens, in a letter, had mildly protested as to the charge of
+authorship, and Aldrich had promptly printed the letter with apologetic
+explanation.  A playful exchange of personal letters followed, and the
+beginning of a lifelong friendship.
+
+One of the letters has a special interest here.  Clemens had followed his
+protest with an apology for it, asking that no further notice be taken of
+the matter.  Aldrich replied that it was too late to prevent "doing him
+justice," as his explanation was already on the press, but that if
+Clemens insisted he would withdraw it in the next issue.  Clemens then
+wrote that he did not want it withdrawn, and explained that he hated to
+be accused of plagiarizing Bret Harte, to whom he was deeply indebted for
+literary schooling in the California days.  Continuing he said:
+
+     Do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot
+     through Harte's brain?  It was this.  When they were trying to
+     decide upon a vignette cover for the Overland a grizzly bear (of the
+     arms of the State of California) was chosen.  Nahl Bros. carved him
+     and the page was printed with him in it.
+
+     As a bear he was a success.  He was a good bear, but then, it was
+     objected, he was an objectless bear--a bear that meant nothing,
+     signified nothing, simply stood there, snarling over his shoulder at
+     nothing, and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured
+     intruder upon the fair page.  All hands said that none were
+     satisfied; they hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as
+     much to have him there when there was no point to him.  But
+     presently Harte took a pencil and drew two simple lines under his
+     feet, and behold he was a magnificent success!--the ancient symbol
+     of California savagery, snarling at the approaching type of high and
+     progressive civilization, the first Overland locomotive!  I just
+     think that was nothing less than an inspiration.   --[The "bear" was
+     that which has always appeared on the Overland cover; the "two
+     lines" formed a railway track under his feet.  Clemens's original
+     letter contained crude sketches illustrating these things.]
+
+Among the Boston group was another Californian, Ralph Keeler, an
+eccentric, gifted, and altogether charming fellow, whom Clemens had known
+on the Pacific slope.  Keeler had been adopted by the Boston writers, and
+was grateful and happy accordingly.  He was poor of purse, but
+inexhaustibly rich in the happier gifts of fortune.  He was unfailingly
+buoyant, light-hearted, and hopeful.  On an infinitesimal capital he had
+made a tour of many lands, and had written of it for the Atlantic.  In
+that charmed circle he was as overflowingly happy as if he had been
+admitted to the company of the gods.  Keeler was affectionately regarded
+by all who knew him, and he offered a sort of worship in return.  He
+often accompanied Mark Twain on his lecture engagements to the various
+outlying towns, and Clemens brought him back to his hotel for breakfast,
+where they had good, enjoyable talks together.  Once Keeler came eagerly
+to the hotel and made his way up to Clemens's room.
+
+"Come with me," he said.  "Quick!"
+
+"What is it?  What's happened?"
+
+"Don't wait to talk.  Come with me."
+
+They tramped briskly through the streets till they reached the public
+library, entered, Keeler leading the way, not stopping till he faced a
+row of shelves filled with books.  He pointed at one of them, his face
+radiant with joy.
+
+"Look," he said.  "Do you see it?"
+
+Clemens looked carefully now and identified one of the books as a still-
+born novel which Keeler had published.
+
+"This is a library," said Keeler, eagerly, "and they've got it!"
+
+His whole being was aglow with the wonder of it.  He had been
+investigating; the library records showed that in the two years the book
+had been there it had been taken out and read three times!  It never
+occurred to Clemens even to smile.  Knowing Mark Twain, one would guess
+that his eyes were likely to be filled with tears.
+
+In his book about Mark Twain, Howells tells of a luncheon which Keeler
+gave to his more famous associates--Aldrich, Fields, Harte, Clemens, and
+Howells himself--a merry informal occasion.  Says Howells:
+
+     Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and
+     aimless and joyful talk--play, beginning and ending nowhere, of
+     eager laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat-
+     lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional
+     concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it
+     gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full of
+     good-fellowship, Bret Harte's (leering dramatization of Clemens's
+     mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates.  "Why,
+     fellows," he spluttered, "this is the dream of Mark's life," and I
+     remember the glance from under Clemens's feathery eyebrows which
+     betrayed his enjoyment of the fun.
+
+Very likely Keeler gave that luncheon in celebration of his book's
+triumph; it would be like him.
+
+Keeler's end was a mystery.  The New York Tribune commissioned him to go
+to Cuba to report the facts of some Spanish outrages.  He sailed from New
+York in the steamer, and was last seen alive the night before the vessel
+reached Havana.  He had made no secret of his mission, but had discussed
+it in his frank, innocent way.  There were some Spanish military men on
+the ship.
+
+Clemens, commenting on the matter, once said:
+
+"It may be that he was not flung into the sea, still the belief was
+general that that was what had happened."
+
+In his book Howells refers to the doubt with which Mark Twain was then
+received by the polite culture of Boston; which, on the other hand,
+accepted Bret Harte as one of its own, forgiving even social
+shortcomings.
+
+The reason is not difficult to understand.  Harte had made his appeal
+with legitimate fiction of the kind which, however fresh in flavor and
+environment, was of a sort to be measured and classified.  Harte spoke a
+language they could understand; his humor, his pathos, his point of view
+were all recognizable.  It was an art already standardized by a master.
+It is no reflection on the genius of Bret Harte to liken his splendid
+achievements to those of Charles Dickens.  Much of Harte's work is in no
+way inferior to that of his great English prototype.  Dickens never wrote
+a better short story than "The Outcasts of Poker Flats."  He never wrote
+as good a short story as "The Luck of Roaring Camp."  Boston critics
+promptly realized these things and gave Harte his correct rating.  That
+they failed to do this with Mark Twain, lay chiefly in the fact that he
+spoke to them in new and startling tongues.  His gospels were likely to
+be heresies; his literary eccentricities were all unclassified.  Of the
+ultrafastidious set Howells tells us that Charles Eliot Norton and Prof.
+Francis J. Child were about the only ones who accorded him unqualified
+approval.  The others smiled and enjoyed him, but with that condescension
+which the courtier is likely to accord to motley and the cap and bells.
+Only the great, simple-hearted, unbiased multitude, the public, which had
+no standards but the direct appeal from one human heart to another, could
+recognize immediately his mightier heritage, could exalt and place him on
+the throne.
+
+
+
+LXXXIV
+
+"ROUGHING IT"
+
+Telegram to Redpath:
+
+     How in the name of God does a man find his way from here to Amherst,
+     and when must he start?  Give me full particulars, and send a man
+     with me.  If I had another engagement I would rot before I would
+     fill it.                       S.  L.  CLEMENS.
+
+This was at the end of February, and he believed that he was standing on
+the platform for the last time.  He loathed the drudgery of the work, and
+he considered there was no further need.  He was no longer in debt, and
+his income he accounted ample.  His new book, 'Roughing It',--[It was
+Bliss who had given the new book the tle of Roughing It.  Innocents at
+Home had been its provision title, certainly a misleading one, though it
+has been retained in England for the second volume; for what reason it
+would be difficult to explain.]--had had a large advance sale, and its
+earnings promised to rival those of the 'Innocents'.  He resolved in the
+future to confine himself to the trade and profits of authorship.
+
+The new book had advantages in its favor.  Issued early in the year, it
+was offered at the best canvassing season; particularly so, as the
+author's lectures had prepared the public for its reception.
+Furthermore, it dealt with the most picturesque phases of American life,
+scenes and episodes vastly interesting at that time, and peculiarly
+adapted to Mark Twain's literary expression.  In a different way
+'Roughing It' is quite as remarkable as 'The Innocents Abroad.'  If it
+has less charm, it has greater interest, and it is by no means without
+charm.  There is something delicious, for instance, in this bit of pure
+enjoyment of the first day's overland travel:
+
+     It was now just dawn, and as we stretched our cramped legs full
+     length on the mail-sacks, and gazed out through the windows across
+     the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist to where
+     there was an expectant look in the Eastern horizon, our perfect
+     enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy.  The
+     stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping the
+     curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle
+     swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses' hoofs,
+     the cracking of the driver's whip, and his "Hi-yi! g'lang!" were
+     music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared to give
+     us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after us
+     with interest and envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the
+     pipe of peace, and compared all this luxury with the years of
+     tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was
+     only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had
+     found it.
+
+Also, there is that lofty presentation of South Pass, and a picture of
+the alkali desert, so parching, so withering in its choking realism, that
+it makes the throat ache and the tongue dry to read it.  Just a bit of
+the desert in passing:
+
+     The sun beats down with a dead, blistering, relentless malignity;
+     the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but
+     scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface--it is absorbed
+     before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air
+     stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the
+     brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature visible in any
+     direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its
+     monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound, not a sigh,
+     not a whisper, not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of
+     bird; not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that
+     dead air.
+
+As for the humor of the book, it has been chiefly famous for that.  "Buck
+Fanshaw's Funeral" has become a classic, and the purchase of the "Mexican
+Plug."  But it is to no purpose to review the book here in detail.  We
+have already reviewed the life and environment out of which it grew.
+
+Without doubt the story would have contained more of the poetic and
+contemplative, in which he was always at his best, if the subject itself,
+as in the Innocents, had lent itself oftener to this form of writing.  It
+was the lack of that halo perhaps which caused the new book never quite
+to rank with its great forerunner in public favor.  There could hardly be
+any other reason.  It presented a fresher theme; it abounded in humor;
+technically, it was better written; seemingly it had all the elements of
+popularity and of permanence.  It did, in fact, possess these qualities,
+but its sales, except during the earlier months of its canvass, never
+quite equaled those of The Innocents Abroad.
+
+'Roughing It' was accepted by the public for just what it was and is, a
+great picture of the Overland Pioneer days--a marvelous picture of
+frontier aspects at a time when the frontier itself, even with its
+hardships and its tragedies, was little more than a vast primal joke;
+when all frontiersmen were obliged to be laughing philosophers in order
+to survive the stress of its warfares.
+
+A word here about this Western humor: It is a distinct product.  It grew
+out of a distinct condition--the battle with the frontier.  The fight was
+so desperate, to take it seriously was to surrender.  Women laughed that
+they might not weep; men, when they could no longer swear.  "Western
+humor" was the result.  It is the freshest, wildest humor in the world,
+but there is tragedy behind it.
+
+'Roughing It' presented the picture of those early conditions with the
+startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which, in effect, it was.
+It was not accurate history, even of the author's own adventures.  It was
+true in its aspects, rather than in its details.  The greater artist
+disregards the truth of detail to render more strikingly a phase or a
+condition, to produce an atmosphere, to reconstruct a vanished time.
+This was what Mark Twain did in 'Roughing It'.  He told the story of
+overland travel and the frontier, for his own and future generations, in
+what is essentially a picaresque novel, a work of unperishing fiction,
+founded on fact.
+
+The sales of 'Roughing It' during the first three months aggregated
+nearly forty thousand copies, and the author was lavishly elate
+accordingly.  To Orion (who had already closed his career with Bliss, by
+exercise of those hereditary eccentricities through which he so often
+came to grief) he gave $1,000 out of the first royalty check, in
+acknowledgment of the memorandum book and other data which Orion had
+supplied.  Clemens believed the new book would sell one hundred thousand
+copies within the year; but the sale diminished presently, and at the end
+of the first year it was considerably behind the Innocents for the same
+period.  As already stated, it required ten years for Roughing It to
+reach the one-hundred-thousand mark, which the Innocents reached in
+three.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXV
+
+A BIRTH, A DEATH, AND A VOYAGE
+
+The year 1872 was an eventful one in Mark Twain's life.  At Elmira, on
+March 19th, his second child, a little girl, whom they named Susan
+Olivia, was born.  On June 2d, in the new home in Hartford, to which they
+had recently moved, his first child, a little boy, Langdon, died.  He had
+never been strong, his wavering life had often been uncertain, always
+more of the spirit than the body, and in Elmira he contracted a heavy
+cold, or perhaps it was diphtheria from the beginning.  In later years,
+whenever Clemens spoke of the little fellow, he never failed to accuse
+himself of having been the cause of the child's death.  It was Mrs.
+Clemens's custom to drive out each morning with Langdon, and once when
+she was unable to go Clemens himself went instead.
+
+"I should not have been permitted to do it," he said, remembering.
+"I was not qualified for any such responsibility as that.  Some one
+should have gone who had at least the rudiments of a mind.  Necessarily
+I would lose myself dreaming.  After a while the coachman looked around
+and noticed that the carriage-robes had dropped away from the little
+fellow, and that he was exposed to the chilly air.  He called my
+attention to it, but it was too late.  Tonsilitis or something of the
+sort set in, and he did not get any better, so we took him to Hartford.
+There it was pronounced diphtheria, and of course he died."
+
+So, with or without reason, he added the blame of another tragedy to the
+heavy burden of remorse which he would go on piling up while he lived.
+
+The blow was a terrible one to Mrs. Clemens; even the comfort of the
+little new baby on her arm could not ease the ache in her breast.  It
+seemed to her that death was pursuing her.  In one of her letters she
+says:
+
+"I feel so often as if my path is to be lined with graves," and she
+expresses the wish that she may drop out of life herself before her
+sister and her husband--a wish which the years would grant.
+
+They did not return to Elmira, for it was thought that the air of the
+shore would be better for the little girl; so they spent the summer at
+Saybrook, Connecticut, at Fenwick Hall, leaving Orion and his wife in
+charge of the house at Hartford.
+
+Beyond a few sketches, Clemens did very little literary work that summer,
+but he planned a trip to Europe, and he invented what is still known and
+sold as the "Mark Twain Scrap-Book."
+
+He wrote to Orion of his proposed trip to England, and dilated upon his
+scrap-book with considerable enthusiasm.  The idea had grown out of the
+inconvenience of finding a paste-jar, and the general mussiness of scrap-
+book keeping.  His new plan was a self-pasting scrap-book with the gum
+laid on in narrow strips, requiring only to be dampened with a sponge or
+other moist substance to be ready for the clipping.  He states that he
+intends to put the invention into the hands of Slote, Woodman & Co., of
+whom Dan Slote, his old Quaker City room-mate, was the senior partner,
+and have it manufactured for the trade.
+
+About this time began Mark Twain's long and active interest in copyright.
+Previously he had not much considered the subject; he had taken it for
+granted there was no step that he could take, while international piracy
+was a recognized institution.  On both sides of the water books were
+appropriated, often without profit, sometimes even without credit, to the
+author.  To tell the truth, Clemens had at first regarded it rather in
+the nature of a compliment that his books should be thought worth
+pirating in England, but as time passed he realized that he was paying
+heavily for this recognition.  Furthermore, he decided that he was
+forfeiting a right; rather that he was being deprived of it: something
+which it was in his nature to resent.
+
+When 'Roughing It' had been ready for issue he agreed with Bliss that
+they should try the experiment of copyrighting it in England, and see how
+far the law would protect them against the voracious little publisher,
+who thus far had not only snapped up everything bearing Mark Twain's
+signature, but had included in a volume of Mark Twain sketches certain
+examples of very weak humor with which Mark Twain had been previously
+unfamiliar.
+
+Whatever the English pirate's opinion of the copyright protection of
+'Roughing It' may have been, he did not attempt to violate it.  This was
+gratifying.  Clemens came to regard England as a friendly power.  He
+decided to visit it and spy out the land.  He would make the acquaintance
+of its people and institutions and write a book, which would do these
+things justice.
+
+He gave out no word of his real purpose.  He merely said that he was
+going over to see his English publishers, and perhaps to arrange for a
+few lectures.  He provided himself with some stylographic note-books, by
+which he could produce two copies of his daily memoranda--one for himself
+and one to mail to Mrs. Clemens--and sailed on the Scotia August 21,
+1872.
+
+Arriving in Liverpool he took train for London, and presently the
+wonderful charm of that old, finished country broke upon him.  His "first
+hour in England was an hour of delight," he records; "of rapture and
+ecstasy.  These are the best words I can find, but they are not adequate;
+they are not strong enough to convey the feeling which this first vision
+of rural England brought me."  Then he noticed that the gentleman
+opposite in his compartment paid no attention to the scenery, but was
+absorbed in a green-covered volume.  He was so absorbed in it that, by
+and by, Clemens's curiosity was aroused.  He shifted his position a
+little and his eye caught the title.  It was the first volume of the
+English edition of The Innocents Abroad.  This was gratifying for a
+moment; then he remembered that the man had never laughed, never even
+smiled during the hour of his steady reading.  Clemens recalled what he
+had heard of the English lack of humor.  He wondered if this was a fair
+example of it, and if the man could be really taking seriously every word
+he was reading.  Clemens could not look at the scenery any more for
+watching his fellow-passenger, waiting with a fascinated interest for the
+paragraph that would break up that iron-clad solemnity.  It did not come.
+During all the rest of the trip to London the atmosphere of the
+compartment remained heavy with gloom.
+
+He drove to the Langham Hotel, always popular with Americans, established
+himself, and went to look up his publishers.  He found the Routledges
+about to sit down to luncheon in a private room, up-stairs, in their
+publishing house.  He joined them, and not a soul stirred from that table
+again until evening.  The Routledges had never heard Mark Twain talk
+before, never heard any one talk who in the least resembled him.  Various
+refreshments were served during the afternoon, came and went, while this
+marvelous creature talked on and they listened, reveling, and wondering
+if America had any more of that sort at home.  By and by dinner was
+served; then after a long time, when there was no further excuse for
+keeping him there, they took him to the Savage Club, where there were yet
+other refreshments and a gathering of the clans to welcome this new
+arrival as a being from some remote and unfamiliar star.
+
+Tom Hood, the younger, was there, and Harry Lee, and Stanley the
+explorer, who had but just returned from finding Livingstone, and Henry
+Irving, and many another whose name remains, though the owners of those
+names are all dead now, and their laughter and their good-fellowship are
+only a part of that intangible fabric which we call the past.' --[Clemens
+had first known Stanley as a newspaper man.  "I first met him when he
+reported a lecture of mine in St. Louis," he said once in a conversation
+where the name of Stanley was mentioned.]
+
+
+
+
+LXXXVI
+
+ENGLAND
+
+>From that night Mark Twain's stay in England could not properly be called
+a gloomy one.
+
+Routledge, Hood, Lee, and, in fact, all literary London, set themselves
+the task of giving him a good time.  Whatever place of interest they
+could think of he was taken there; whatever there was to see he saw it.
+Dinners, receptions, and assemblies were not complete without him.  The
+White Friars' Club and others gave banquets in his honor.  He was the
+sensation of the day.  When he rose to speak on these occasions he was
+greeted with wild cheers.  Whatever he said they eagerly applauded--too
+eagerly sometimes, in the fear that they might be regarded as insensible
+to American humor.  Other speakers delighted in chaffing him in order to
+provoke his retorts.  When a speaker humorously referred to his American
+habit of carrying a cotton umbrella, his reply that he followed this
+custom because a cotton umbrella was the only kind of an umbrella that an
+Englishman wouldn't steal, was all over England next day, and regarded as
+one of the finest examples of wit since the days of Swift.
+
+The suddenness and completeness of his acceptance by the great ones of
+London rather overwhelmed and frightened him made him timid.  Joaquin
+Miller writes:
+
+     He was shy as a girl, although time was already coyly flirting white
+     flowers at his temples, and could hardly be coaxed to meet the
+     learned and great who wanted to take him by the hand.
+
+Many came to call on him at his hotel, among them Charles Reade and Canon
+Kingsley.  Kingsley came twice without finding him; then wrote, asking
+for an appointment.  Reade invited his assistance on a novel.  Indeed, it
+was in England that Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come
+into his rightful heritage.  Whatever may have been the doubts concerning
+him in America, there was no question in England.  Howells says:
+
+     In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him.  Lord mayors,
+     lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he
+     was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the
+     favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation.
+
+After that first visit of Mark Twain's, when Americans in England,
+referring to their great statesmen, authors, and the like, naturally
+mentioned the names of Seward, Webster, Lowell, or Holmes, the English
+comment was likely to be: "Never mind those.  We can turn out academic
+Sewards by the dozen, and cultured humorists like Lowell and Holmes by
+the score.  Tell us of Lincoln, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain.  We cannot
+match these; they interest us."  And it was true.  History could not
+match them, for they were unique.
+
+Clemens would have been more than human if in time he had not realized
+the fuller meaning of this triumph, and exulted in it a little to the
+folks at home.  There never lived a more modest, less pretentious, less
+aggressive man than Mark Twain, but there never lived a man who took a
+more childlike delight in genuine appreciation; and, being childlike, it
+was only human that he should wish those nearest to him to share his
+happiness.  After one memorable affair he wrote:
+
+     I have been received in a sort of tremendous way to-night by the
+     brains of London, assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of
+     London; mine being (between you and me) a name which was received
+     with a thundering outburst of spontaneous applause when the long
+     list of guests was called.
+
+I might have perished on the spot but for the friendly support and
+assistance of my excellent friend, Sir John Bennett.
+
+This letter does not tell all of the incident or the real reason why he
+might have perished on the spot.  During the long roll-call of guests he
+had lost interest a little, and was conversing in whispers with his
+"excellent friend," Sir John Bennett, stopping to applaud now and then
+when the applause of the others indicated that some distinguished name
+had been pronounced.  All at once the applause broke out with great
+vehemence.  This must be some very distinguished person indeed.  He
+joined in it with great enthusiasm.  When it was over he whispered to Sir
+John:
+
+"Whose name was that we were just applauding?"
+
+"Mark Twain's."
+
+Whereupon the support was needed.
+
+Poor little pirate Hotten did not have a happy time during this visit.
+He had reveled in the prospect at first, for he anticipated a large
+increase to be derived from his purloined property; but suddenly, one
+morning, he was aghast to find in the Spectator a signed letter from Mark
+Twain, in which he was repudiated, referred to as "John Camden
+Hottentot," an unsavory person generally.  Hotten also sent a letter to
+the Spectator, in which he attempted to justify himself, but it was a
+feeble performance.  Clemens prepared two other communications, each
+worse than the other and both more destructive than the first one.  But
+these were only to relieve his mind.  He did not print them.  In one of
+them he pursued the fancy of John Camden Hottentot, whom he offers as a
+specimen to the Zoological Gardens.
+
+It is not a bird.  It is not a man.  It is not a fish.  It does not seem
+to be in all respects a reptile.  It has the body and features of a man,
+but scarcely any of the instincts that belong to such a structure....  I
+am sure that this singular little creature is the missing link between
+the man and the hyena.
+
+Hotten had preyed upon explorer Stanley and libeled him in a so-called.
+biography to a degree that had really aroused some feeling against
+Stanley in England.  Only for the moment--the Queen invited Stanley to
+luncheon, and newspaper criticism ceased.  Hotten was in general
+disrepute, therefore, so it was not worth while throwing a second brick
+at him.
+
+In fact, now that Clemens had expended his venom, on paper, Hotten seemed
+to him rather an amusing figure than otherwise.  An incident grew out of
+it all, however, that was not amusing.  E. P. Hingston, whom the reader
+may remember as having been with Artemus Ward in Virginia City, and one
+of that happy group that wined and dined the year away, had been engaged
+by Hotten to write the introductory to his edition of The Innocents
+Abroad.  It was a well-written, highly complimentary appreciation.
+Hingston did not dream that he was committing an offense, nor did Clemens
+himself regard it as such in the beginning.
+
+But Mark Twain's views had undergone a radical change, and with
+characteristic dismissal of previous conditions he had forgotten that he
+had ever had any other views than those he now held.  Hingston was in
+London, and one evening, at a gathering, approached Clemens with
+outstretched hand.  But Clemens failed to see Hingston's hand or to
+recognize him.  In after-years his conscience hurt him terribly for this.
+He remembered it only with remorse and shame.  Once, in his old age, he
+spoke of it with deep sorrow.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXVII
+
+THE BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+
+The book on England, which he had prepared for so carefully, was never
+written.  Hundreds of the stylographic pages were filled, and the
+duplicates sent home for the entertainment of Olivia Clemens, but the
+notes were not completed, and the actual writing was never begun.  There
+was too much sociability in London for one thing, and then he found that
+he could not write entertainingly of England without introducing too many
+personalities, and running the risk of offending those who had taken him
+into their hearts and homes.  In a word, he would have to write too
+seriously or not at all.
+
+He began his memoranda industriously enough, and the volume might have
+been as charming and as valuable as any he has left behind.  The reader
+will hardly fail to find a few of the entries interesting.  They are
+offered here as examples of his daily observation during those early
+weeks of his stay, and to show somewhat of his purpose:
+
+                             AN EXPATRIATE
+
+     There was once an American thief who fled his country and took
+     refuge in England.  He dressed himself after the fashion of the
+     Londoners, and taught his tongue the peculiarities of the London
+     pronunciation and did his best in all ways to pass himself for a
+     native.  But he did two fatal things: he stopped at the Langham
+     Hotel, and the first trip he took was to visit Stratford-on-Avon and
+     the grave of Shakespeare.  These things betrayed his nationality.
+
+
+                         STANLEY AND THE QUEEN
+
+     See the power a monarch wields!  When I arrived here, two weeks ago,
+     the papers and geographers were in a fair way to eat poor Stanley up
+     without salt or sauce.  The Queen says, "Come four hundred miles up
+     into Scotland and sit at my luncheon-table fifteen minutes"; which,
+     being translated, means, "Gentlemen, I believe in this man and take
+     him under my protection"; and not another yelp is heard.
+
+
+                         AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM
+
+     What a place it is!
+
+     Mention some very rare curiosity of a peculiar nature--a something
+     which you have read about somewhere but never seen--they show you a
+     dozen!  They show you all the possible varieties of that thing!
+     They show you curiously wrought jeweled necklaces of beaten gold,
+     worn by the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Etruscans, Greeks,
+     Britons--every people of the forgotten ages, indeed.  They show you
+     the ornaments of all the tribes and peoples that live or ever did
+     live.  Then they show you a cast taken from Cromwell's face in
+     death; then the venerable vase that once contained the ashes of
+     Xerxes.
+
+     I am wonderfully thankful for the British Museum.  Nobody comes
+     bothering around me--nobody elbows me--all the room and all the
+     light I want, under this huge dome--no disturbing noises--and people
+     standing ready to bring me a copy of pretty much any book that ever
+     was printed under the sun--and if I choose to go wandering about the
+     long corridors and galleries of the great building the secrets of
+     all the earth and all the ages axe laid open to me.  I am not
+     capable of expressing my gratitude for the British Museum--it seems
+     as if I do not know any but little words and weak ones.
+
+
+                       WESTMINSTER ABBEY BY NIGHT
+
+     It was past eleven o'clock and I was just going to bed.  But this
+     friend of mine was as reliable as he was eccentric, and so there was
+     not a doubt in my mind that his "expedition" had merit in it.  I put
+     on my coat and boots again, and we drove away.
+
+     "Where is it?  Where are we going?"
+
+     "Don't worry.  You'll see."
+
+     He was not inclined to talk.  So I thought this must be a weighty
+     matter.  My curiosity grew with the minutes, but I kept it manfully
+     under the surface.  I watched the lamps, the signs, the numbers as
+     we thundered down the long street.  I am always lost in London, day
+     or night.  It was very chilly, almost bleak.  People leaned against
+     the gusty blasts as if it were the dead of winter.  The crowds grew
+     thinner and thinner, and the noises waxed faint and seemed far away.
+     The sky was overcast and threatening.  We drove on, and still on,
+     till I wondered if we were ever going to stop.  At last we passed by
+     a spacious bridge and a vast building, and presently entered a
+     gateway, passed through a sort of tunnel, and stopped in a court
+     surrounded by the black outlines of a great edifice.  Then we
+     alighted, walked a dozen steps or so, and waited.  In a little while
+     footsteps were heard, a man emerged from the darkness, and we
+     dropped into his wake without saying anything.  He led us under an
+     archway of masonry, and from that into a roomy tunnel, through a
+     tall iron gate, which he locked behind us.  We followed him down
+     this tunnel, guided more by his footsteps on the stone flagging than
+     by anything we could very distinctly see.  At the end of it we came
+     to another iron gate, and our conductor stopped there and lit a
+     bull's-eye lantern.  Then he unlocked the gate; and I wished he had
+     oiled it first, it grated so dismally.  The gate swung open and we
+     stood on the threshold of what seemed a limitless domed and pillared
+     cavern, carved out of the solid darkness.  The conductor and my
+     friend took off their hats reverently, and I did likewise.  For the
+     moment that we stood thus there was not a sound, and the stillness
+     seemed to add to the solemnity of the gloom.  I looked my inquiry!
+
+     "It is the tomb of the great dead of England-Westminster Abbey."...
+
+     We were among the tombs; on every hand dull shapes of men, sitting,
+     standing, or stooping, inspected us curiously out of the darkness--
+     reached out their hands toward us--some appealing, some beckoning,
+     some warning us away.  Effigies they were--statues over the graves;
+     but they looked human and natural in the murky shadows.  Now a
+     little half-grown black and white cat squeezed herself through the
+     bars of the iron gate and came purring lovingly about us, unawed by
+     the time or the place, unimpressed by the marble pomp that
+     sepulchers a line of mighty dead that ends with a great author of
+     yesterday and began with a sceptered monarch away back in the dawn
+     of history, more than twelve hundred years ago .  .  .  .
+
+     Mr. Wright flashed his lantern first upon this object and then upon
+     that, and kept up a running commentary that showed there was nothing
+     about the venerable Abbey that was trivial in his eyes or void of
+     interest.  He is a man in authority, being superintendent, and his
+     daily business keeps him familiar with every nook and corner of the
+     great pile.  Casting a luminous ray now here, now yonder, he would
+     say:
+
+     "Observe the height of the Abbey--one hundred and three feet to the
+     base of the roof; I measured it myself the other day.  Notice the
+     base of this column--old, very old--hundreds and hundreds of years--
+     and how well they knew how to build in those old days!  Notice it--
+     every stone is laid horizontally; that is to say, just as nature
+     laid it originally in the quarry not set up edgewise; in our day
+     some people set them on edge, and then wonder why they split and
+     flake.  Architects cannot teach nature anything.  Let me remove this
+     matting--it is put here to preserve the pavement; now there is a bit
+     of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these
+     scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before
+     time and sacrilegious idlers marred it.  Now there, in the border,
+     was an inscription, once see, follow the circle-you can trace it by
+     the ornaments that have been pulled out--here is an A and there is
+     an O, and yonder another A--all beautiful Old English capitals;
+     there is no telling what the inscription was--no record left now.
+     Now move along in this direction, if you please.  Yonder is where
+     old King Sebert the Saxon lies his monument is the oldest one in the
+     Abbey; Sebert died in 616,--[Clemens probably misunderstood the
+     name.  It was Ethelbert who died in 616.  The name Sebert does not
+     appear in any Saxon annals accessible to the author.]-- and that's
+     as much, as twelve hundred and fifty years ago think of it!  Twelve
+     hundred and fifty years!  Now yonder is the last one--Charles
+     Dickens--there on the floor, with the brass letters on the slab--and
+     to this day the people come and put flowers on it....  There is
+     Garrick's monument; and Addison's, and Thackeray's bust--and
+     Macaulay lies there.  And close to Dickens and Garrick lie Sheridan
+     and Dr. Johnson--and here is old Parr....
+
+     "That stone there covers Campbell the poet.  Here are names you know
+     pretty well--Milton, and Gray who wrote the Elegy, and Butler who
+     wrote Hudibras; and Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson--there are three
+     tablets to him scattered about the Abbey, and all got 'O, Rare Ben
+     Jonson' cut on them.  You were standing on one of them just now he
+     is buried standing up.  There used to be a tradition here that
+     explains it.  The story goes that he did not dare ask to be buried
+     in the Abbey, so he asked King James if he would make him a present
+     of eighteen inches of English ground, and the King said 'yes,' and
+     asked him where he would have it, and he said in Westminster Abbey.
+     Well, the King wouldn't go back on his word, and so there he is,
+     sure enough-stood up on end."
+
+The reader may regret that there are not more of these entries, and that
+the book itself was never written.  Just when he gave up the project is
+not recorded.  He was urged to lecture in London, but declined.  To Mrs.
+Clemens, in September, he wrote:
+
+Everybody says lecture, lecture, lecture, but I have not the least idea
+of doing it; certainly not at present.  Mr. Dolby, who took Dickens to
+America, is coming to talk business tomorrow, though I have sent him word
+once before that I can't be hired to talk here; because I have no time to
+spare.  There is too much sociability; I do not get along fast enough
+with work.
+
+In October he declared that he was very homesick, and proposed that Mrs.
+Clemens and Susie join him at once in London, unless she would prefer to
+have him come home for the winter and all of them return to London in the
+spring.  So it is likely that the book was not then abandoned.  He felt
+that his visit was by no means ended; that it was, in fact, only just
+begun, but he wanted the ones he loved most to share it with him.  To his
+mother and sister, in November, he wrote:
+
+I came here to take notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend
+dinners and make speeches.  I have had a jolly good time, and I do hate
+to go away from these English folks; they make a stranger feel entirely
+at home, and they laugh so easily that it is a comfort to make after-
+dinner speeches here.  I have made hundreds of friends; and last night,
+in the crush at the opening of the new Guild Hall Library and Museum, I
+was surprised to meet a familiar face every other step.
+
+All his impressions of England had been happy ones.  He could deliver a
+gentle satire now and then at certain British institutions--certain
+London localities and features--as in his speech at the Savage Club,
+--[September 28, 1872.  This is probably the most characteristic speech
+made by Mark Twain during his first London visit; the reader will find it
+in full in Appendix L, at the end of last volume.]--but taking the snug
+island as a whole, its people, its institutions, its fair, rural aspects,
+he had found in it only delight.  To Mrs. Crane he wrote:
+
+     If you and Theodore will come over in the spring with Livy and me,
+     and spend the summer, you shall see a country that is so beautiful
+     that you will be obliged to believe in fairy-land.  There is nothing
+     like it elsewhere on the globe.  You should have a season ticket and
+     travel up and down every day between London and Oxford and worship
+     nature.
+
+     And Theodore can browse with me among dusty old dens that look now
+     as they looked five hundred years ago; and puzzle over books in the
+     British Museum that were made before Christ was born; and in the
+     customs of their public dinners, and the ceremonies of every
+     official act, and the dresses of a thousand dignitaries, trace the
+     speech and manners of all the centuries that have dragged their
+     lagging decades over England since the Heptarchy fell asunder.  I
+     would a good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you
+     over.
+
+He sailed November 12th, on the Batavia, loaded with Christmas presents
+for everybody; jewelry, furs, laces; also a practical steam-engine for
+his namesake, Sam Moffett.  Half-way across the Atlantic the Batavia ran
+into a hurricane and was badly damaged by heavy seas, and driven far out
+of her course.  It was a lucky event on the whole, for she fell in with a
+water-logged lumber bark, a complete wreck, with nine surviving sailors
+clinging to her rigging.  In the midst of the wild gale a lifeboat was
+launched and the perishing men were rescued.  Clemens prepared a graphic
+report of the matter for the Royal Humane Society, asking that medals be
+conferred upon the brave rescuers, a document that was signed by his
+fellow-passengers and obtained for the men complete recognition and wide
+celebrity.  Closing, the writer said:
+
+     As might have been anticipated, if I have been of any service toward
+     rescuing these nine shipwrecked human beings by standing around the
+     deck in a furious storm, without an umbrella, keeping an eye on
+     things and seeing that they were done right, and yelling whenever a
+     cheer seemed to be the important thing, I am glad and I am
+     satisfied.  I ask no reward.  I would do it again under the same
+     circumstances.  But what I do plead for, earnestly and sincerely, is
+     that the Royal Humane Society will remember our captain and our
+     life-boat crew, and in so remembering them increase the high honor
+     and esteem in which the society is held all over the civilized
+     world.
+
+The Batavia reached New York November 26, 1872.  Mark Twain had been
+absent three months, during which he had been brought to at least a
+partial realization of what his work meant to him and to mankind.
+
+An election had taken place during his absence--an election which
+gratified him deeply, for it had resulted in the second presidency of
+General Grant and in the defeat of Horace Greeley, whom he admired
+perhaps, but not as presidential material.  To Thomas Nast, who had aided
+very effectually in Mr. Greeley's overwhelming defeat, Clemens wrote:
+
+Nast, you more than any other man have won a prodigious victory for
+Grant--I mean, rather, for civilization and progress.  Those pictures
+were simply marvelous, and if any man in the land has a right to hold his
+head up and be honestly proud of his share in this year's vast events
+that man is unquestionably yourself.  We all do sincerely honor you, and
+are proud of you.
+
+Horace Greeley's peculiar abilities and eccentricities won celebrity for
+him, rather than voters.  Mark Twain once said of him:
+
+"He was a great man, an honest man, and served his, country well and was
+an honor to it.  Also, he was a good-natured man, but abrupt with
+strangers if they annoyed him when he was busy.  He was profane, but that
+is nothing; the best of us is that.  I did not know him well, but only
+just casually, and by accident.  I never met him but once.  I called on
+him in the Tribune office, but I was not intending to.  I was looking for
+Whitelaw Reid, and got into the wrong den.  He was alone at his desk,
+writing, and we conversed--not long, but just a little.  I asked him if
+he was well, and he said, 'What the hell do you want?'  Well, I couldn't
+remember what I wanted, so I said I would call again.  But I didn't."
+
+Clemens did not always tell the incident just in this way.  Sometimes it
+was John Hay he was looking for instead of Reid, and the conversation
+with Greeley varied; but perhaps there was a germ of history under it
+somewhere, and at any rate it could have happened well enough, and not
+have been out of character with either of the men.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXVIII
+
+THE GILDED AGE"
+
+Mark Twain did not go on the lecture circuit that winter.  Redpath had
+besought him as usual, and even in midsummer had written:
+
+"Will you?  Won't you?  We have seven thousand to eight thousand dollars
+in engagements recorded for you," and he named a list of towns ranging
+geographically from Boston to St. Paul.
+
+But Clemens had no intention then of ever lecturing any more, and again
+in November, from London, he announced (to Redpath):
+
+"When I yell again for less than $500 I'll be pretty hungry, but I
+haven't any intention of yelling at any price."
+
+Redpath pursued him, and in January proposed $400 for a single night in
+Philadelphia, but without result.  He did lecture two nights in Steinway
+Hall for the Mercantile Library Association, on the basis of half
+profits, netting $1,300 for the two nights as his share; and he lectured
+one night in Hartford, at a profit Of $1,500, for charity.  Father
+Hawley, of Hartford, had announced that his missionary work was suffering
+for lack of funds.  Some of his people were actually without food, he
+said, their children crying with hunger.  No one ever responded to an
+appeal like that quicker than Samuel Clemens.  He offered to deliver a
+lecture free, and to bear an equal proportion of whatever expenses were
+incurred by the committee of eight who agreed to join in forwarding the
+project.  He gave the Sandwich Island lecture, and at the close of it a
+large card was handed him with the figures of the receipts printed upon
+it.  It was held up to view, and the house broke into a storm of cheers.
+
+He did very little writing during the early weeks following his return.
+Early in the year (January 3 and 6, 1873) he contributed two Sandwich
+Island letters to the Tribune, in which, in his own peculiar fashion, he
+urged annexation.
+
+"We must annex those people," he declared, and proceeded to specify the
+blessings we could give them, such as " leather-headed juries, the
+insanity law, and the Tweed Ring."
+
+     We can confer Woodhull and Clafin on them, and George Francis Train.
+     We can give them lecturers!  I will go myself.
+
+     We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner
+     on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy
+     civilization.  Annexation is what the poor islanders need!
+
+     "Shall we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?"
+
+His success in England became an incentive to certain American
+institutions to recognize his gifts at home.  Early in the year he was
+dined as the guest of the Lotos Club of New York, and a week or two later
+elected to its membership.  This was but a beginning.  Some new
+membership or honor was offered every little while, and so many banquets
+that he finally invented a set form for declining them.  He was not yet
+recognized as the foremost American man of letters, but undoubtedly he
+had become the most popular; and Edwin Whipple, writing at this time, or
+but little later, said:
+
+"Mark Twain is regarded chiefly as a humorist, but the exercise of his
+real talents would rank him with the ablest of our authors in the past
+fifty years."  So he was beginning to be "discovered" in high places.
+
+It was during this winter that the Clemens household enjoyed its first
+real home life in Hartford, its first real home life anywhere since those
+earliest days of marriage.  The Hooker mansion was a comfortable place.
+The little family had comparatively good health.  Their old friends were
+stanch and lavishly warm-hearted, and they had added many new ones.
+Their fireside was a delightful nucleus around which gathered those they
+cared for most, the Twichells, the Warner families, the Trumbulls--all
+certain of a welcome there.  George Warner, only a little while ago,
+remembering, said:
+
+"The Clemens house was the only one I have ever known where there was
+never any preoccupation in the evenings, and where visitors were always
+welcome.  Clemens was the best kind of a host; his evenings after dinner
+were an unending flow of stories."
+
+Friends living near by usually came and went at will, often without the
+ceremony of knocking or formal leave-taking.  They were more like one
+great family in that neighborhood, with a community of interests, a unity
+of ideals.  The Warner families and the Clemenses were particularly
+intimate, and out of their association grew Mark Twain's next important
+literary undertaking, his collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner in
+'The Gilded Age'.
+
+A number of more or less absurd stories have been printed about the
+origin of this book.  It was a very simple matter, a perfectly natural
+development.
+
+At the dinner-table one night, with the Warners present, criticisms of
+recent novels were offered, with the usual freedom and severity of
+dinner-table talk.  The husbands were inclined to treat rather lightly
+the novels in which their wives were finding entertainment.  The wives
+naturally retorted that the proper thing for the husbands to do was to
+furnish the American people with better ones.  This was regarded in the
+nature of a challenge, and as such was accepted--mutually accepted: that
+is to say, in partnership.  On the spur of the moment Clemens and Warner
+agreed that they would do a novel together, that they would begin it
+immediately.  This is the whole story of the book's origin; so far, at
+least, as the collaboration is concerned.  Clemens, in fact, had the
+beginning of a story in his mind, but had been unwilling to undertake an
+extended work of fiction alone.  He welcomed only too eagerly, therefore,
+the proposition of joint authorship.  His purpose was to write a tale
+around that lovable character of his youth, his mother's cousin, James
+Lampton--to let that gentle visionary stand as the central figure against
+a proper background.  The idea appealed to Warner, and there was no delay
+in the beginning.  Clemens immediately set to work and completed 399
+pages of the manuscript, the first eleven chapters of the book, before
+the early flush of enthusiasm waned.
+
+Warner came over then, and Clemens read it aloud to him.  Warner had some
+plans for the story, and took it up at this point, and continued it
+through the next twelve chapters; and so they worked alternately, "in the
+superstition," as Mark Twain long afterward declared, "that we were
+writing one coherent yarn, when I suppose, as a matter of fact, we were
+writing two incoherent ones."  --[The reader may be interested in the
+division of labor.  Clemens wrote chapters I to XI; also chapters XXIV,
+XXV, XXVII, XXVIII, XXX, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XLII,
+XLIII, XLV, LI, LII, LIII, LVII, LIX, LX, LXI, LXII, and portions of
+chapters XXXV, XLIX, LVI.  Warner wrote chapters XII to XXIII; also
+chapters XXVI, XXIX, XXXI, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL, XLI, XLIV, XLVI, XLVII,
+XLVITT, L, LIV, LV, LVIII, LXIII, and portions of chapters XXXV, XLIX,
+and LVI.  The work was therefore very evenly divided.
+
+There was another co-worker on The Gilded Age before the book was finally
+completed.  This was J.  Hammond Trumbull, who prepared the variegated,
+marvelous cryptographic chapter headings: Trumbull was the most learned
+man that ever lived in Hartford.  He was familiar with all literary and
+scientific data, and according to Clemens could swear in twenty-seven
+languages.  It was thought to be a choice idea to get Trumbull to supply
+a lingual medley of quotations to precede the chapters in the new book,
+the purpose being to excite interest and possibly to amuse the reader--a
+purpose which to some extent appears to have miscarried.]
+
+The book was begun in February and finished in April, so the work did not
+lag.  The result, if not highly artistic, made astonishingly good
+reading.  Warner had the touch of romance, Clemens, the gift of creating,
+or at least of portraying, human realities.  Most of his characters
+reflected intimate personalities of his early life.  Besides the
+apotheosis of James Lampton into the immortal Sellers, Orion became
+Washington Hawkins, Squire Clemens the judge, while Mark Twain's own
+personality, in a greater or lesser degree, is reflected in most of his
+creations.  As for the Tennessee land, so long a will-o'the-wisp and a
+bugbear, it became tangible property at last.  Only a year or two before
+Clemens had written to Orion:
+
+     Oh, here!  I don't want to be consulted at all about Tennessee.  I
+     don't want it even mentioned to me.  When I make a suggestion it is
+     for you to act upon it or throw it aside, but I beseech you never to
+     ask my advice, opinion, or consent about that hated property.
+
+But it came in good play now.  It is the important theme of the story.
+
+Mark Twain was well qualified to construct his share of the tale.  He
+knew his characters, their lives, and their atmospheres perfectly.
+Senator Dilworthy (otherwise Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, then notorious
+for attempted vote-buying) was familiar enough.  That winter in
+Washington had acquainted Clemens with the life there, its political
+intrigues, and the disrepute of Congress.  Warner was equally well
+qualified for his share of the undertaking, and the chief criticism that
+one may offer is the one stated by Clemens himself--that the divisions of
+the tale remain divisions rather than unity.
+
+As for the story itself--the romance and tragedy of it--the character of
+Laura in the hands of either author is one not easy to forget.  Whether
+this means that the work is well done, or only strikingly done, the
+reader himself must judge.  Morally, the character is not justified.
+Laura was a victim of circumstance from the beginning.  There could be no
+poetic justice in her doom.  To drag her out of a steamer wreck, only to
+make her the victim of a scoundrel, later an adventuress, and finally a
+murderess, all may be good art, but of a very bad kind.  Laura is a sort
+of American Becky Sharp; but there is retributive justice in Becky's
+fate, whereas Laura's doom is warranted only by the author's whim.  As
+for her end, whatever the virtuous public of that day might have done, a
+present-day audience would not have pelted her from the stage, destroyed
+her future, taken away her life.
+
+The authors regarded their work highly when it was finished, but that is
+nothing.  Any author regards his work highly at the moment of its
+completion.  In later years neither of them thought very well of their
+production; but that also is nothing.  The author seldom cares very
+deeply for his offspring once it is turned over to the public charge.
+The fact that the story is still popular, still delights thousands of
+readers, when a myriad of novels that have been written since it was
+completed have lived their little day and died so utterly that even their
+names have passed out of memory, is the best verdict as to its worth.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXIX
+
+PLANNING A NEW HOME
+
+Clemens and his wife bought a lot for the new home that winter, a fine,
+sightly piece of land on Farmington Avenue--table-land, slopingdown to a
+pretty stream that wound through the willows and among the trees.  They
+were as delighted as children with their new purchase and the prospect of
+building.  To her sister Mrs. Clemens wrote:
+
+     Mr. Clemens seems to glory in his sense of possession; he goes daily
+     into the lot, has had several falls trying to lay off the land by
+     sliding around on his feet....
+
+     For three days the ice has covered the trees, and they have been
+     glorious.  We could do nothing but watch the beauty outside; if you
+     looked at the trees as the sun struck them, with your back toward
+     the sun, they were covered with jewels.  If you looked toward the
+     sun it was all crystal whiteness, a perfect fairy-land.  Then the
+     nights were moonlight, and that was a great beauty, the moon giving
+     us the same prismatic effect.
+
+This was the storm of which Mark Twain wrote his matchless description,
+given first in his speech on New England weather, and later preserved in
+'Following the Equator', in more extended form.  In that book he likens
+an ice-storm to his impressions derived from reading descriptions of the
+Taj Mahal, that wonderful tomb of a fair East Indian queen.  It is a
+marvelous bit of word-painting--his description of that majestic vision:
+"When every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and
+the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond
+plume."  It will pay any one to look up that description and read it all,
+though it has been said, by the fortunate one or two who heard him first
+give it utterance as an impromptu outburst, that in the subsequent
+process of writing the bloom of its original magnificence was lost.
+
+The plans for the new house were drawn forthwith by that gentle architect
+Edward Potter, whose art to-day may be considered open to criticism, but
+not because of any lack of originality.  Hartford houses of that period
+were mainly of the goods-box form of architecture, perfectly square,
+typifying the commercial pursuits of many of their owners.  Potter agreed
+to get away from this idea, and a radical and even frenzied departure was
+the result.  Certainly his plans presented beautiful pictures, and all
+who saw them were filled with wonder and delight.  Architecture has
+lavished itself in many florescent forms since then, but we may imagine
+that Potter's "English violet" order of design, as he himself designated
+it, startled, dazzled, and captivated in a day, when most houses were
+mere habitations, built with a view to economy and the largest possible
+amount of room.
+
+Workmen were put on the ground without delay, to prepare for the
+builders, and work was rapidly pushed along.  Then in May the whole
+matter was left in the hands of the architect and the carpenters (with
+Lawyer Charles E. Perkins to stand between Potter and the violent
+builder, who roared at Potter and frightened him when he wanted changes),
+while the Clemens household, with Clara Spaulding, a girlhood friend of
+Mrs. Clemens, sailed away to England for a half-year holiday.
+
+
+
+
+XC
+
+A LONG ENGLISH HOLIDAY
+
+They sailed on the Batavia, and with them went a young man named
+Thompson, a theological student whom Clemens had consented to take as an
+amanuensis.  There is a pathetic incident connected with this young man,
+and it may as well be set down here.  Clemens found, a few weeks after
+his arrival in England, that so great was the tax upon his time that he
+could make no use of Thompson's services.  He gave Thompson fifty
+dollars, and upon the possibility of the young man's desiring to return
+to America, advanced him another fifty dollars, saying that he could
+return it some day, and never thought of it again.  But the young man
+remembered it, and one day, thirty-six years later, after a life of
+hardship and struggle, such as the life of a country minister is apt to
+be, he wrote and inclosed a money-order, a payment on his debt.  That
+letter and its inclosure brought only sorrow to Mark Twain.  He felt that
+it laid upon him the accumulated burden of the weary thirty-six years'
+struggle with ill-fortune.  He returned the money, of course, and in a
+biographical note commented:
+
+     How pale painted heroisms of romance look beside it!  Thompson's
+     heroism, which is real, which is colossal, which is sublime, and
+     which is costly beyond all estimate, is achieved in profound
+     obscurity, and its hero walks in rags to the end of his days.  I had
+     forgotten Thompson completely, but he flashes before me as vividly
+     as lightning.  I can see him now.  It was on the deck of the
+     Batavia, in the dock.  The ship was casting off, with that hubbub
+     and confusion and rushing of sailors, and shouting of orders and
+     shrieking of boatswain whistles, which marked the departure
+     preparations in those days--an impressive contrast with the solemn
+     silence which marks the departure preparations of the giant ships of
+     the present day.  Mrs. Clemens, Clara Spaulding, little Susy, and
+     the nurse-maid were all properly garbed for the occasion.  We all
+     had on our storm-rig, heavy clothes of somber hue, but new and
+     designed and constructed for the purpose, strictly in accordance
+     with sea-going etiquette; anything wearable on land being distinctly
+     and odiously out of the question.
+
+     Very well.  On that deck, and gliding placidly among those honorable
+     and properly upholstered groups, appeared Thompson, young, grave,
+     long, slim, with an aged fuzzy plug hat towering high on the upper
+     end of him and followed by a gray duster, which flowed down, without
+     break or wrinkle, to his ankles.  He came straight to us, and shook
+     hands and compromised us.  Everybody could see that we knew him.  A
+     nigger in heaven could not have created a profounder astonishment.
+
+     However, Thompson didn't know that anything was happening.  He had
+     no prejudices about clothes.  I can still see him as he looked when
+     we passed Sandy Hook and the winds of the big ocean smote us.
+     Erect, lofty, and grand he stood facing the blast, holding his plug
+     on with both hands and his generous duster blowing out behind, level
+     with his neck.  There were scoffers observing, but he didn't know
+     it; he wasn't disturbed.
+
+     In my mind, I see him once afterward, clothed as before, taking me
+     down in shorthand.  The Shah of Persia had come to England and Dr.
+     Hosmer, of the Herald, had sent me to Ostend, to view his Majesty's
+     progress across the Channel and write an account of it.  I can't
+     recall Thompson after that, and I wish his memory had been as poor
+     as mine.
+
+They had been a month in London, when the final incident referred to took
+place--the arrival of the Shah of Persia--and were comfortably quartered
+at the Langham Hotel.  To Twichell Clemens wrote:
+
+     We have a luxuriously ample suite of apartments on the third floor,
+     our bedroom looking straight up Portland Place, our parlor having a
+     noble array of great windows looking out upon both streets (Portland
+     Place and the crook that joins it onto Regent Street).
+
+     Nine p.m.  full twilight, rich sunset tints lingering in the west.
+
+     I am not going to write anything; rather tell it when I get back.
+     I love you and Harmony, and that is all the fresh news I've got
+     anyway.  And I mean to keep that fresh all the time.
+
+Mrs. Clemens, in a letter to her sister, declared: "It is perfectly
+discouraging to try to write you.  There is so much to write about that
+it makes me feel as if it was no use to begin."
+
+It was a period of continuous honor and entertainment.  If Mark Twain had
+been a lion on his first visit, he was little less than royalty now.  His
+rooms at the Langham were like a court.  Miss Spaulding (now Mrs. John B.
+Stanchfield) remembers that Robert Browning, Turgenieff, Sir John
+Millais, Lord Houghton, and Sir Charles Dilke (then at the height of his
+fame) were among those that called to pay their respects.  In a recent
+letter she says:
+
+     I remember a delightful luncheon that Charles Kingsley gave for Mr.
+     Clemens; also an evening when Lord Dunraven brought Mr. Home, the
+     medium, Lord Dunraven telling many of the remarkable things he had
+     seen Mr. Home do.  I remember I wanted so much to see him float out
+     of a seven or eight story window, and enter another, which Lord
+     Dunraven said he had seen him do many times.  But Mr. Home had been
+     very ill, and said his power had left him.  My great regret was that
+     we did not see Carlyle, who was too sad and ill for visits.
+
+Among others they met Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland,
+and found him so shy that it was almost impossible to get him to say a
+word on any subject.
+
+"The shyest full-grown man, except Uncle Remus, I ever met," Clemens once
+wrote.  "Dr. MacDonald and several other lively talkers were present, and
+the talk went briskly on for a couple of hours, but Carroll sat still all
+the while, except now and then when he answered a question."
+
+At a dinner given by George Smalley they met Herbert Spencer, and at a
+luncheon-party at Lord Houghton's, Sir Arthur Helps, then a world-wide
+celebrity.
+
+     Lord Elcho, a large, vigorous man, sat at some distance down the
+     table.  He was talking earnestly about the town of Godalming.  It
+     was a deep, flowing, and inarticulate rumble, but I caught the
+     Godalming pretty nearly every time it broke free of the rumbling,
+     and as all the strength was on the first end of the word, it
+     startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing.  In the
+     middle of the luncheon Lady Houghton rose, remarked to the guests on
+     her right and on her left, in a matter-of-fact way, "Excuse me, I
+     have an engagement," and without further ceremony, she went off to
+     meet it.  This would have been doubtful etiquette in America.  Lord
+     Houghton told a number of delightful stories.  He told them in
+     French, and I lost nothing of them but the nubs.
+
+Little Susy and her father thrived on London life, but after a time it
+wore on Mrs. Clemens.  She delighted in the English cordiality and
+culture, but the demands were heavy, the social forms sometimes trying.
+Life in London was interesting, and in its way charming, but she did not
+enter into it with quite her husband's enthusiasm and heartiness.  In the
+end they canceled all London engagements and quietly set out for
+Scotland.  On the way they rested a few days in York, a venerable place
+such as Mark Twain always loved to describe.  In a letter to Mrs. Langdon
+he wrote:
+
+     For the present we shall remain in this queer old walled town, with
+     its crooked, narrow lanes, that tell us of their old day that knew
+     no wheeled vehicles; its plaster-and-timber dwellings, with upper
+     stories far overhanging the street,, and thus marking their date,
+     say three hundred years ago; the stately city walls, the castellated
+     gates, the ivy-grown, foliage-sheltered, most noble and picturesque
+     ruin of St. Mary's Abbey, suggesting their date, say five hundred
+     years ago, in the heart of Crusading times and the glory of English
+     chivalry and romance; the vast Cathedral of York, with its worn
+     carvings and quaintly pictured windows, preaching of still remoter
+     days; the outlandish names of streets and courts and byways that
+     stand as a record and a memorial, all these centuries, of Danish
+     dominion here in still earlier times; the hint here and there of
+     King Arthur and his knights and their bloody fights with Saxon
+     oppressors round about this old city more than thirteen hundred
+     years gone by; and, last of all, the melancholy old stone coffins
+     and sculptured inscriptions, a venerable arch and a hoary tower of
+     stone that still remain and are kissed by the sun and caressed by
+     the shadows every day, just as the sun and the shadows have kissed
+     and, caressed them every lagging day since the Roman Emperor's
+     soldiers placed them here in the times when Jesus the Son of Mary
+     walked the streets of Nazareth a youth, with no more name or fame
+     than the Yorkshire boy who is loitering down this street this
+     moment.
+
+They reached Edinburgh at the end of July and secluded themselves in
+Veitch's family hotel in George Street, intending to see no one.  But
+this plan was not a success; the social stress of London had been too
+much for Mrs. Clemens, and she collapsed immediately after their arrival.
+Clemens was unacquainted in Edinburgh, but remembered that Dr. John
+Brown, who had written Rab and His Friend, lived there.  He learned his
+address, and that he was still a practising physician.  He walked around
+to 23 Rutland Street, and made himself known.  Dr. Brown came forthwith,
+and Mrs. Clemens speedily recovered under his able and inspiring
+treatment.
+
+The association did not end there.  For nearly a month Dr. Brown was
+their daily companion, either at the hotel, or in his own home, or on
+protracted drives when he made his round of visits, taking these new
+friends along.  Dr. John was beloved by everybody in Edinburgh, everybody
+in Scotland, for that matter, and his story of Rab had won him a
+following throughout Christendom.  He was an unpretentious sovereign.
+Clemens once wrote of him:
+
+     His was a sweet and winning face, as beautiful a face as I have ever
+     known.  Reposeful, gentle, benignant; the face of a saint at peace
+     with all the world and placidly beaming upon it the sunshine of love
+     that filled his heart.
+
+He was the friend of all dogs, and of all people.  It has been told of
+him that once, when driving, he thrust his head suddenly out of the
+carriage window, then resumed his place with a disappointed look.
+
+"Who was it?" asked his companion.  "Some one you know?"
+
+"No," he said.  "A dog I don't know."
+
+He became the boon companion and playmate of little Susy, then not quite
+a year and a half old.  He called her Megalopis, a Greek term, suggested
+by her eyes; those deep, burning eyes that seemed always so full of
+life's sadder philosophies, and impending tragedy.  In a collection of
+Dr. Brown's letters he refers to this period.  In one place he says:
+
+     Had the author of The Innocents Abroad not come to Edinburgh at that
+     time we in all human probability might never have met, and what a
+     deprivation that would have been to me during the last quarter of a
+     century!
+
+And in another place:
+
+     I am attending the wife of Mark Twain.  His real name is Clemens.
+     She is a quite lovely little woman, modest and clever, and she has a
+     girlie eighteen months old, her ludicrous miniature--and such eyes!
+
+Those playmates, the good doctor and Megalopis, romped together through
+the hotel rooms with that complete abandon which few grown persons can
+assume in their play with children, and not all children can assume in
+their play with grown-ups.  They played "bear," and the "bear" (which was
+a very little one, so little that when it stood up behind the sofa you
+could just get a glimpse of yellow hair) would lie in wait for her
+victim, and spring out and surprise him and throw him into frenzies of
+fear.
+
+Almost every day they made his professional rounds with him.  He always
+carried a basket of grapes for his patients.  His guests brought along
+books to read while they waited.  When he stopped for a call he would
+say:
+
+"Entertain yourselves while I go in and reduce the population."
+
+There was much sight-seeing to do in Edinburgh, and they could not quite
+escape social affairs.  There were teas and luncheons and dinners with
+the Dunfermlines and the Abercrombies, and the MacDonalds, and with
+others of those brave clans that no longer slew one another among the
+grim northern crags and glens, but were as sociable and entertaining
+lords and ladies as ever the southland could produce.  They were very
+gentle folk indeed, and Mrs. Clemens, in future years, found her heart
+going back oftener to Edinburgh than to any other haven of those first
+wanderings.  August 24th she wrote to her sister:
+
+     We leave Edinburgh to-morrow with sincere regret; we have had such a
+     delightful stay here--we do so regret leaving Dr. Brown and his
+     sister, thinking that we shall probably never see them again [as
+     indeed they never did].
+
+They spent a day or two at Glasgow and sailed for Ireland, where they put
+in a fortnight, and early in September were back in England again, at
+Chester, that queer old city where; from a tower on the wall, Charles I.
+read the story of his doom.  Reginald Cholmondeley had invited them to
+visit his country seat, beautiful Condover Hall, near Shrewsbury, and in
+that lovely retreat they spent some happy, restful days.  Then they were
+in the whirl of London once more, but escaped for a fortnight to Paris,
+sight-seeing and making purchases for the new home.
+
+Mrs. Clemens was quite ready to return to America, by this time.
+
+     I am blue and cross and homesick [she wrote].  I suppose what makes
+     me feel the latter is because we are contemplating to stay in London
+     another month.  There has not one sheet of Mr. Clemens's proof come
+     yet, and if he goes home before the book is published here he will
+     lose his copyright.  And then his friends feel that it will be
+     better for him to lecture in London before his book is published,
+     not only that it will give him a larger but a more enviable
+     reputation.  I would not hesitate one moment if it were simply for
+     the money that his copyright will bring him, but if his reputation
+     will be better for his staying and lecturing, of course he ought to
+     stay....  The truth is, I can't bear the thought of postponing going
+     home.
+
+It is rather gratifying to find Olivia Clemens human, like that, now and
+then.  Otherwise, on general testimony, one might well be tempted to
+regard her as altogether of another race and kind.
+
+
+
+
+XCI
+
+A LONDON LECTURE
+
+Clemens concluded to hasten the homeward journey, but to lecture a few
+nights in London before starting.  He would then accompany his little
+family home, and return at once to continue the lecture series and
+protect his copyright.  This plan was carried out.  In a communication to
+the Standard, October 7th, he said:
+
+     SIR,--In view of the prevailing frenzy concerning the Sandwich
+     Islands, and the inflamed desire of the public to acquire
+     information concerning them, I have thought it well to tarry yet
+     another week in England and deliver a lecture upon this absorbing
+     subject.  And lest it should be thought unbecoming in me, a
+     stranger, to come to the public rescue at such a time, instead of
+     leaving to abler hands a matter of so much moment, I desire to
+     explain that I do it with the best motives and the most honorable
+     intentions.  I do it because I am convinced that no one can allay
+     this unwholesome excitement as effectually as I can, and to allay
+     it, and allay it as quickly as possible, is surely one thing that is
+     absolutely necessary at this juncture.  I feel and know that I am
+     equal to this task, for I can allay any kind of an excitement by
+     lecturing upon it.  I have saved many communities in this way.  I
+     have always been able to paralyze the public interest in any topic
+     that I chose to take hold of and elucidate with all my strength.
+
+     Hoping that this explanation will show that if I am seeming to
+     intrude I am at least doing it from a high impulse, I am, sir, your
+     obedient servant,
+                                   MARK TWAIN.
+
+
+A day later the following announcement appeared:
+
+                         QUEEN'S CONCERT ROOMS,
+                            HANOVER SQUARE.
+
+                 MR. GEORGE DOLBY begs to announce that
+
+                             MR. MARK TWAIN
+
+                             WILL DELIVER A
+                                LECTURE
+                                  OF A
+                          HUMOROUS CHARACTER,
+
+                              AS ABOVE, ON
+                MONDAY EVENING NEXT, OCTOBER 13th, 1873,
+                  AND REPEAT IT IN THE SAME PLACE, ON
+                     TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 14th,
+                     WEDNESDAY "         "    15th,
+                     THURSDAY  "         "    16th,
+                     FRIDAY    "         "    17th,
+
+                           At Eight o'Clock,
+                                  AND
+                   SATURDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER 18th,
+                           At Three o'Clock.
+
+                                SUBJECT:
+              Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands."
+
+     As Mr. TWAIN has spent several months in these Islands, and is well
+     acquainted with his subject, the Lecture may be expected to furnish
+     matter of interest.
+
+               STALLS, 5s.       UNRESERVED SEATS, 3s.
+
+
+The prospect of a lecture from Mark Twain interested the London public.
+Those who had not seen him were willing to pay even for that privilege.
+The papers were encouraging; Punch sounded a characteristic note:
+
+                          WELCOME TO A LECTURER
+
+    "'Tis time we Twain did show ourselves."  'Twas said
+     By Caesar, when one Mark had lost his head:
+     By Mark, whose head's quite bright, 'tis said again:
+     Therefore, "go with me, friends, to bless this Twain."
+
+                                             -Punch.
+
+
+Dolby had managed the Dickens lectures, and he proved his sound business
+judgment and experience by taking the largest available hall in London
+for Mark Twain.
+
+On the evening of October 13th, in the spacious Queen's Concert Rooms,
+Hanover Square, Mark Twain delivered his first public address in England.
+The subject was "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands," the old
+lecture with which he had made his first great successes.  He was not
+introduced.  He appeared on the platform in evening dress, assuming the
+character of a manager announcing a disappointment.
+
+Mr. Clemens, he said, had fully expected to be present.  He paused and
+loud murmurs arose from the audience.  He lifted his hand and they
+subsided.  Then he added, "I am happy to say that Mark Twain is present,
+and will now give his lecture."  Whereupon the audience roared its
+approval.
+
+It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that his triumph that week was
+a regal one.  For five successive nights and a Saturday matinee the
+culture and fashion of London thronged to hear him discourse of their
+"fellow savages."  It was a lecture event wholly without precedent.  The
+lectures of Artemus Ward, --["Artemus the delicious," as Charles Reade
+called him, came to London in June, 1866, and gave his "piece" in
+Egyptian Hall.  The refined, delicate, intellectual countenance, the
+sweet, gave, mouth, from which one might have expected philosophical
+lectures retained their seriousness while listeners were convulsed with
+laughter.  There was something magical about it.  Every sentence was a
+surprise.  He played on his audience as Liszt did on a piano most easily
+when most effectively.  Who can ever forget his attempt to stop his
+Italian pianist-" a count in his own country, but not much account in
+this "-who went on playing loudly while he was trying to tell us an
+"affecting incident" that occurred near a small clump of trees shown on
+his panorama of the Far West.  The music stormed on-we could see only
+lips and arms pathetically moving till the piano suddenly ceased, and we
+heard-it was all we heard "and, she fainted in Reginald's arms."  His
+tricks have been at tempted in many theaters, but Artemus Ward was
+inimitable.  And all the time the man was dying. (Moneure D. Conway,
+Autobiography.)]--who had quickly become a favorite in London, had
+prepared the public for American platform humor, while the daily doings
+of this new American product, as reported by the press, had aroused
+interest, or curiosity, to a high pitch.  On no occasion in his own
+country had he won such a complete triumph.  The papers for a week
+devoted columns of space to appreciation and editorial comment.  The
+Daily News of October 17th published a column-and-a-half editorial on
+American humor, with Mark Twain's public appearance as the general text.
+The Times referred to the continued popularity of the lectures:
+
+     They can't be said to have more than whetted the public appetite, if
+     we are to take the fact which has been imparted to us, that the
+     holding capacity of the Hanover Square Rooms has been inadequate to
+     the demand made upon it every night by Twain's lecturing, as a
+     criterion.  The last lecture of this too brief course was delivered
+     yesterday before an audience which crammed to discomfort every part
+     of the principal apartment of the Hanover Square Rooms....
+
+At the close of yesterday's lecture Mark Twain was so loudly applauded
+that he returned to the stage, and, as soon as the audience gave him a
+chance of being heard, he said, with much apparent emotion:
+
+     "Ladies and Gentlemen,--I won't keep you one single moment in this
+     suffocating atmosphere.  I simply wish to say that this is the last
+     lecture I shall have the honor to deliver in London until I return
+     from America, four weeks from now.  I only wish to say (here Mr.
+     Clemens faltered as if too much affected to proceed) I am very
+     grateful.  I do not wish to appear pathetic, but it is something
+     magnificent for a stranger to come to the metropolis of the world
+     and be received so handsomely as I have been.  I simply thank you."
+
+The Saturday Review devoted a page, and Once a Week, under the head of
+"Cracking jokes," gave three pages, to praise of the literary and lecture
+methods of the new American humorist.  With the promise of speedy return,
+he left London, gave the lecture once in Liverpool, and with his party
+(October 21st) set sail for home.
+
+In mid-Atlantic he remembered Dr. Brown, and wrote him:
+
+     We have plowed a long way over the sea, and there's twenty-two
+     hundred miles of restless water between us now, besides the railway
+     stretch.  And yet you are so present with us, so close to us, that a
+     span and a whisper would bridge the distance.
+
+So it would seem that of all the many memories of that eventful half-
+year, that of Dr.  Brown was the most present, the most tender.
+
+
+
+
+XCII
+
+FURTHER LONDON LECTURE TRIUMPHS
+
+Orion Clemens records that he met "Sam and Livy" on their arrival from
+England, November 2d, and that the president of the Mercantile Library
+Association sent up his card "four times," in the hope of getting a
+chance to propose a lecture engagement--an incident which impressed Orion
+deeply in its evidence of his brother's towering importance.  Orion
+himself was by this time engaged in various projects.  He was inventing a
+flying-machine, for one thing, writing a Jules Verne story, reading proof
+on a New York daily, and contemplating the lecture field.  This great
+blaze of international appreciation which had come to the little boy who
+used to set type for him in Hannibal, and wash up the forms and cry over
+the dirty proof, made him gasp.
+
+They went to see Booth in Hamlet [he says], and Booth sent for Sam to
+come behind the scenes, and when Sam proposed to add a part to Hamlet,
+the part of a bystander who makes humorous modern comment on the
+situations in the play, Booth laughed immoderately.
+
+Proposing a sacrilege like that to Booth!  To what heights had this
+printer-pilot, miner-brother not attained! --[This idea of introducing a
+new character in Hamlet was really attempted later by Mark Twain, with
+the connivance of Joe Goodman [of all men], sad to relate.  So far as is
+known it is the one stain on Goodman's literary record.]
+
+Clemens returned immediately to England--the following Saturday, in fact
+--and was back in London lecturing again after barely a month's absence.
+He gave the "Roughing It" address, this time under the title of "Roughing
+It on the Silver Frontier," and if his audiences were any less
+enthusiastic, or his houses less crowded than before, the newspapers of
+that day have left no record of it.  It was the height of the season now,
+and being free to do so, he threw himself into the whirl of it, and for
+two months, beyond doubt, was the most talked-of figure in London.  The
+Athenaeum Club made him a visiting member (an honor considered next to
+knighthood); Punch quoted him; societies banqueted him; his apartments,
+as before; were besieged by callers.  Afternoons one was likely to find
+him in "Poets' Corner" of the Langham smoking-room, with a group of
+London and American authors--Reade, Collins, Miller, and the others--
+frankly rioting in his bold fancies.  Charles Warren Stoddard was in
+London at the time, and acted as his secretary.  Stoddard was a gentle
+poet, a delightful fellow, and Clemens was very fond of him.  His only
+complaint of Stoddard was that he did not laugh enough at his humorous
+yarns.  Clemens once said:
+
+"Dolby and I used to come in after the lecture, or perhaps after being
+out to some dinner, and we liked to sit down and talk it over and tell
+yarns, and we expected Stoddard to laugh at them, but Stoddard would lie
+there on the couch and snore.  Otherwise, as a secretary, he was
+perfect."
+
+The great Tichborne trial was in progress then, and the spectacle of an
+illiterate impostor trying to establish his claim as the rightful heir to
+a great estate was highly diverting to Mark Twain. --[In a letter of this
+period he speaks of having attended one of the Claimant's "Evenings."]--
+He wanted to preserve the evidence as future literary material, and
+Stoddard day after day patiently collected the news reports and neatly
+pasted them into scrap-books, where they still rest, a complete record of
+that now forgotten farce.  The Tichborne trial recalled to Mark Twain the
+claimant in the Lampton family, who from time to time wrote him long
+letters, urging him to join in the effort to establish his rights to the
+earldom of Durham.  This American claimant was a distant cousin, who had
+"somehow gotten hold of, or had fabricated a full set of documents."
+
+Colonel Henry Watterson, just quoted (also a Lampton connection), adds:
+
+     During the Tichborne trial Mark and I were in London, and one day he
+     said to me: "I have investigated this Durham business down at the
+     Herald's office.  There is nothing to it.  The Lamptons passed out
+     of the earldom of Durham a hundred years ago.  There were never any
+     estates; the title lapsed; the present earldom is a new creation,
+     not in the same family at all.  But I'll tell you what: if you'll
+     put up $500, I'll put up $500 more; we'll bring our chap over here
+     and set him in as claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy's fat boy
+     won't be a marker to him."
+
+It was a characteristic Mark Twain project, one of the sort he never
+earned out in reality, but loved to follow in fancy, and with the pen
+sometimes.  The "Rightful Earl of Durham" continued to send letters for a
+long time after that (some of them still exist), but he did not establish
+his claim.  No one but Mark Twain ever really got anything out of it.
+Like the Tennessee land, it furnished material by and by for a book.
+Colonel Watterson goes on to say that Clemens was only joking about
+having looked up the matter in the peerage; that he hadn't really looked
+it up at all, and that the earldom lies still in the Lampton family.
+
+Another of Clemens's friends in London at this time was Prentice Mulford,
+of California.  In later years Mulford acquired a wide reputation for his
+optimistic and practical psychologies.  Through them he lifted himself
+out of the slough of despond, and he sought to extend a helping hand to
+others.  His "White Cross Library" had a wide reading and a wide
+influence; perhaps has to this day.  But in 1873 Mulford had not found
+the tangibility of thought, the secret of strength; he was only finding
+it, maybe, in his frank acknowledgment of shortcoming:
+
+     Now, Mark, I am down-very much down at present; you are up-where you
+     deserve to be.  I can't ask this on the score of any past favors,
+     for there have been none.  I have not always spoken of you in terms
+     of extravagant praise; have sometimes criticized you, which was due,
+     I suppose, in part to an envious spirit.  I am simply human.  Some
+     people in the same profession say they entertain no jealousy of
+     those more successful.  I can't.  They are divine; I am not.
+
+It was only that he wished Clemens to speak a word for him to Routledge,
+to get him a hearing for his work.  He adds:
+
+     I shall be up myself some day, although my line is far apart from
+     yours.  Whether you can do anything that I ask of you or not, I
+     shall be happy then, as I would be now, to do you any just and right
+     service....  Perhaps I have mistaken my vocation.  Certainly, if I
+     was back with my rocker on the Tuolumne, I'd make it rattle livelier
+     than ever I did before.  I have occasionally thought of London
+     Bridge, but the Thames is now so d---d cold and dirty, and besides I
+     can swim, and any attempt at drowning would, through the mere
+     instinct of self-preservation, only result in my swimming ashore and
+     ruining my best clothes; wherefore I should be worse off than ever.
+
+Of course Mark Twain granted the favor Mulford asked, and a great deal
+more, no doubt, for that was his way.  Mulford came up, as he had
+prophesied, but the sea in due time claimed him, though not in the way he
+had contemplated.  Years after he was one day found drifting off the
+shores of Long Island in an open boat, dead.
+
+Clemens made a number of notable dinner speeches during this second
+London lecture period.  His response to the toast of the "Ladies,"
+delivered at the annual dinner of the Scottish Corporation of London, was
+the sensational event of the evening.
+
+He was obliged to decline an invitation to the Lord Mayor's dinner,
+whereupon his Lordship wrote to urge him to be present at least at the
+finale, when the welcome would be "none the less hearty," and bespoke his
+attendance for any future dinners.
+
+Clemens lectured steadily at the Hanover Square Rooms during the two
+months of his stay in London, and it was only toward the end of this
+astonishing engagement that the audience began to show any sign of
+diminishing.  Early in January he wrote to Twichell:
+
+I am not going to the provinces because I cannot get halls that are large
+enough.  I always felt cramped in the Hanover Square Rooms, but I find
+that everybody here speaks with awe and respect of that prodigious hall
+and wonders that I could fill it so long.
+
+I am hoping to be back in twenty days, but I have so much to go home to
+and enjoy with a jubilant joy that it hardly seems possible that it can
+come to pass in so uncertain a world as this.
+
+In the same letter he speaks of attending an exhibition of Landseer's
+paintings at the Royal Academy:
+
+     Ah, they are wonderfully beautiful!  There are such rich moonlights
+     and dusks in the "Challenge" and the "Combat," and in that long
+     flight of birds across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or
+     sunrise, for no man can ever tell t'other from which in a picture,
+     except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the
+     water), and there is such a grave analytical profundity in the face
+     of the connoisseurs; and such pathos in the picture of a fawn
+     suckling its dead mother on a snowy waste, with only the blood in
+     the footprints to hint that she is not asleep.  And the way that he
+     makes animals' flesh and blood, insomuch that if the room were
+     darkened ever so little, and a motionless living animal placed
+     beside the painted one, no man could tell which was which.
+
+I interrupted myself here, to drop a line to Shirley Brooks and suggest a
+cartoon for Punch.  It was this: in one of the Academy saloons (in a
+suite where these pictures are) a fine bust of Landseer stands on a
+pedestal in the center of the room.  I suggested that some of Landseer's
+best known animals be represented as having come down out of their frames
+in the moonlight and grouped themselves about the bust in mourning
+attitudes.
+
+He sailed January 13 (1874.), on the Paythia, and two weeks later was at
+home, where all was going well.  The Gilded Age had been issued a day or
+two before Christmas, and was already in its third edition.  By the end
+of January 26,000 copies had been sold, a sale that had increased to
+40,000 a month later.  The new house was progressing, though it was by no
+means finished.  Mrs. Clemens was in good health.  Little Susy was full
+of such American activities as to earn the name of "The Modoc."  The
+promise of the year was bright.
+
+
+
+
+XCIII
+
+THE REAL COLONEL SELLERS-GOLDEN DAYS
+
+There are bound to be vexations, flies in the ointment, as we say.  It
+was Warner who conferred the name of Eschol Sellers on the chief figure
+of the collaborated novel.  Warner had known it as the name of an obscure
+person, or perhaps he had only heard of it.  At all events, it seemed a
+good one for the character and had been adopted.  But behold, the book
+had been issued but a little while when there rose "out of the vasty
+deeps" a genuine Eschol Sellers, who was a very respectable person.  He
+was a stout, prosperous-looking man, gray and about fifty-five years old.
+He came into the American Publishing Company offices and asked permission
+to look at the book.  Mr. Bliss was out at the moment, but presently
+arrived.  The visitor rose and introduced himself.
+
+"My name is Eschol Sellers," he said.  "You have used it in one of your
+publications.  It has brought upon me a lot of ridicule.  My people wish
+me to sue you for $10,000 damages."
+
+He had documents to prove his identity, and there was only one thing to
+be done; he must be satisfied.  Bliss agreed to recall as many of the
+offending volumes as possible and change the name on the plates.  He
+contacted the authors, and the name Beriah was substituted for the
+offending Eschol.  It turned out that the real Sellers family was a large
+one, and that the given name Eschol was not uncommon in its several
+branches.  This particular Eschol Sellers, curiously enough, was an
+inventor and a promoter, though of a much more substantial sort than his
+fiction namesake.  He was also a painter of considerable merit, a writer
+and an antiquarian.  He was said to have been a grandson of the famous
+painter, Rembrandt Peale.
+
+Clemens vowed that he would not lecture in America that winter.  The
+irrepressible Redpath besieged him as usual, and at the end of January
+Clemens telegraphed him, as he thought, finally.  Following it with a
+letter of explanation, he added:
+
+"I said to her, 'There isn't money enough in America to hire me to leave
+you for one day.'"
+
+But Redpath was a persistent devil.  He used arguments and held out
+inducements which even Mrs. Clemens thought should not be resisted, and
+Clemens yielded from time to time, and gave a lecture here and there
+during February.  Finally, on the 3d of March (187q.) he telegraphed his
+tormentor:
+
+"Why don't you congratulate me?  I never expect to stand on a lecture
+platform again after Thursday night."
+
+Howells tells delightfully of a visit which he and Aldrich paid to
+Hartford just at this period.  Aldrich went to visit Clemens and Howells
+to visit Charles Dudley Warner, Clemens coming as far as Springfield to
+welcome them.
+
+     In the good-fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such
+     days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round.  There was
+     constant running in and out of friendly houses where the lively
+     hosts and guests called one another by their Christian names or
+     nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at
+     doors.  Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he
+     satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another
+     sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which
+     enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance.
+
+Howells tells how Clemens dilated on the advantages of subscription sale
+over the usual methods of publication, and urged the two Boston authors
+to prepare something which canvassers could handle.
+
+"Why, any other means of bringing out a book is privately printing it,"
+he declared, and added that his subscription books in Bliss's hands sold
+right along, "just like the Bible."
+
+On the way back to Boston Howells and Aldrich planned a subscription book
+which would sell straight along, like the Bible.  It was to be called
+"Twelve Memorable Murders."  They had dreamed two or three fortunes by
+the time they had reached Boston, but the project ended there.
+
+"We never killed a single soul," Howells said once to the writer of this
+memoir.
+
+Clemens was always urging Howells to visit him after that.  He offered
+all sorts of inducements.
+
+     You will find us the most reasonable people in the world.  We had
+     thought of precipitating upon you, George Warner and his wife one
+     day, Twichell and his jewel of a wife another day, and Charles
+     Perkins and wife another.  Only those--simply members of our family
+     they are.  But I'll close the door against them all, which will
+     "fix" all of the lot except Twichell, who will no more hesitate to
+     climb in the back window than nothing.
+
+     And you shall go to bed when you please, get up when you please,
+     talk when you please, read when you please.
+
+A little later he was urging Howells or Aldrich, or both of them; to come
+to Hartford to live.
+
+     Mr. Hall, who lives in the house next to Mrs. Stowe's (just where we
+     drive in to go to our new house), will sell for $16,000 or $17,000.
+     You can do your work just as well here as in Cambridge, can't you?
+     Come!  Will one of you boys buy that house?  Now, say yes.
+
+Certainly those were golden, blessed days, and perhaps, as Howells says,
+the sun does not shine on their like any more--not in Hartford, at least,
+for the old group that made them no longer assembles there.  Hartford
+about this time became a sort of shrine for all literary visitors, and
+for other notables as well, whether of America or from overseas.  It was
+the half-way place between Boston and New York, and pilgrims going in
+either direction rested there.  It is said that travelers arriving in
+America, were apt to remember two things they wished to see: Niagara
+Falls and Mark Twain.  But the Falls had no such recent advertising
+advantage as that spectacular success in London.  Visitors were apt to
+begin in Hartford.
+
+Howells went with considerable frequency after that, or rather with
+regularity, twice a year, or oftener, and his coming was always hailed
+with great rejoicing.  They visited and ate around at one place and
+another among that pleasant circle of friends.  But they were happiest
+afterward together, Clemens smoking continually, "soothing his tense
+nerves with a mild hot Scotch," says Howells, "while we both talked, and
+talked, and tasked of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and the
+waters under the earth.  After two days of this talk I would come away
+hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust-shells
+which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer."
+Sometimes Clemens told the story of his early life, "the inexhaustible,
+the fairy, the Arabian Nights story, which I could never tire of even
+when it began to be told over again."
+
+
+
+
+XCIV
+
+BEGINNING "TOM SAWYER"
+
+The Clemens household went to Quarry Farm in April, leaving the new house
+once more in the hands of the architect and builders.  It was costing a
+vast sum of money, and there was a financial stress upon land.  Mrs.
+Clemens, always prudent, became a little uneasy at times, though without
+warrant in those days, for her business statement showed that her
+holdings were only a little less than a quarter of a million in her own
+right, while her husband's books and lectures had been highly
+remunerative, and would be more so.  They were justified in living in
+ample, even luxurious comfort, and how free from financial worries they
+could have lived for the rest of their days!
+
+Clemens, realizing his happiness, wrote Dr. Brown:
+
+Indeed I am thankful for the wifey and the child, and if there is one
+individual creature on all this footstool who is more thoroughly and
+uniformly and, unceasingly happy than I am I defy the world to produce
+him and prove him.  In my opinion he don't exist.  I was a mighty rough,
+coarse, unpromising subject when Livy took charge of me, four years ago,
+and I may still be to the rest of the world, but not to her.  She has
+made a very creditable job of me.
+
+Truly fortune not only smiled, but laughed.  Every mail brought great
+bundles of letters that sang his praises.  Robert Watt, who had
+translated his books into Danish, wrote of their wide popularity among
+his people.  Madame Blanc (Th. Bentzon), who as early as 1872 had
+translated The Jumping Frog into French, and published it, with extended
+comment on the author and his work, in the 'Revue des deux mondes', was
+said to be preparing a review of 'The Gilded Age'.  All the world seemed
+ready to do him honor.
+
+Of course, one must always pay the price, usually a vexatious one.  Bores
+stopped him on the street to repeat ancient and witless stories.
+Invented anecdotes, some of them exasperating ones, went the rounds of
+the press.  Impostors in distant localities personated him, or claimed to
+be near relatives, and obtained favors, sometimes money, in his name.
+Trivial letters, seeking benefactions of every kind, took the savor from
+his daily mail.  Letters from literary aspirants were so numerous that he
+prepared a "form" letter of reply:
+
+DEAR SIR OR MADAM,--Experience has not taught me very much, still it has
+taught me that it is not wise to criticize a piece of literature, except
+to an enemy of the person who wrote it; then if you praise it that enemy
+admires--you for your honest manliness, and if you dispraise it he
+admires you for your sound judgment.
+
+                              Yours truly,    S.  L.  C.
+
+Even Orion, now in Keokuk on a chicken farm, pursued him with manuscripts
+and proposals of schemes.  Clemens had bought this farm for Orion, who
+had counted on large and quick returns, but was planning new enterprises
+before the first eggs were hatched.  Orion Clemens was as delightful a
+character as was ever created in fiction, but he must have been a trial
+now and then to Mark Twain.  We may gather something of this from a
+letter written by the latter to his mother and sister at this period:
+
+     I can't "encourage" Orion.  Nobody can do that conscientiously, for
+     the reason that before one's letter has time to reach him he is off
+     on some new wild-goose chase.  Would you encourage in literature a
+     man who the older he grows the worse he writes?
+
+     I cannot encourage him to try the ministry, because he would change
+     his religion so fast that he would have to keep a traveling agent
+     under wages to go ahead of him to engage pulpits and board for him.
+
+     I cannot conscientiously encourage him to do anything but potter
+     around his little farm and put in his odd hours contriving new and
+     impossible projects at the rate of 365 a year which is his customary
+     average.  He says he did well in Hannibal!  Now there is a man who
+     ought to be entirely satisfied with the grandeurs, emoluments, and
+     activities of a hen farm.
+
+     If you ask me to pity Orion I can do that.  I can do it every day
+     and all day long.  But one can't "encourage" quicksilver; because
+     the instant you put your finger on it, it isn't there.  No, I am
+     saying too much.  He does stick to his literary and legal
+     aspirations, and he naturally would elect the very two things which
+     he is wholly and preposterously unfitted for.  If I ever become
+     able, I mean to put Orion on a regular pension without revealing the
+     fact that it is a pension.
+
+     He did presently allow the pension, a liberal one, which continued
+     until neither Orion Clemens nor his wife had further earthly need of
+     it.
+
+Mark Twain for some time had contemplated one of the books that will
+longest preserve his memory, 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'.  The success
+of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other autobiographical
+material, and he remembered those days along the river-front in Hannibal
+--his skylarking with Tom Blankenship, the Bowen boys, John Briggs, and
+the rest.  He had recognized these things as material--inviting material
+it was--and now in the cool luxury of Quarry Farm he set himself to spin
+the fabric of youth.
+
+He found summer-time always his best period for literary effort, and on a
+hillside just by the old quarry, Mrs. Crane had built for him that spring
+a study--a little room of windows, somewhat suggestive of a pilot-house--
+overlooking the long sweep of grass and the dreamlike city below.  Vines
+were planted that in the course of time would cover and embower it; there
+was a tiny fireplace for chilly days.  To Twichell, of his new retreat,
+Clemens wrote:
+
+It is the loveliest study you ever saw.  It is octagonal, with a peaked
+roof, each face filled with a spacious window, and it sits perched in
+complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of
+valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills.  It is a
+cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four
+chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the
+lightning flashes behind the hills beyond, and the rain beats upon the
+roof over my head, imagine the luxury of it.
+
+He worked steadily there that summer.  He would go up mornings, after
+breakfast, remaining until nearly dinner-time, say until five o'clock or
+after, for it was not his habit to eat luncheon.  Other members of the
+family did not venture near the place, and if he was urgently wanted they
+blew a horn.  Each evening he brought down his day's performance to read
+to the assembled family.  He felt the need of audience and approval.
+Usually he earned the latter, but not always.  Once, when for a day he
+put aside other matters to record a young undertaker's love-affair, and
+brought down the result in the evening, fairly bubbling with the joy of
+it, he met with a surprise.  The tale was a ghastly burlesque, its humor
+of the most disheartening, unsavory sort.  No one spoke during the
+reading, nobody laughed: The air was thick with disapproval.  His voice
+lagged and faltered toward the end.  When he finished there was heavy
+silence.  Mrs. Clemens was the only one who could speak:
+
+"Youth, let's walk a little," she said.
+
+The "Undertaker's Love Story" is still among the manuscripts of that
+period, but it is unlikely that it will ever see the light of print.
+--[This tale bears no relation to " The Undertaker's Story" in Sketches
+New and Old.]
+
+The Tom Sawyer tale progressed steadily and satisfactorily.  Clemens
+wrote Dr. Brown:
+
+     I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average,
+     for some time now, on a book (a story), and consequently  have been
+     so wrapped up in it, and dead to everything else, that I have fallen
+     mighty short in letter-writing....
+
+     On hot days I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with
+     brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the
+     same thin linen we make shirts of.
+
+He incloses some photographs in this letter.
+
+     The group [he says] represents the vine-clad carriageway in front of
+     the farm-house.  On the left is Megalopis sitting in the lap of her
+     German nurse-maid.  I am sitting behind them.  Mrs. Crane is in the
+     center.  Mr. Crane next to her.  Then Mrs. Clemens and the new baby.
+     Her Irish nurse stands at her back.  Then comes the table waitress,
+     a young negro girl, born free.  Next to her is Auntie Cord (a
+     fragment of whose history I have just sent to a magazine).  She is
+     the cook; was in slavery more than forty years; and the self-
+     satisfied wench, the last of the group, is the little baby's
+     American nurse-maid.  In the middle distance my mother-in-law's
+     coachman (up on errand) has taken a position unsolicited to help out
+     the picture.  No, that is not true.  He was waiting there a minute
+     or two before the photographer came.  In the extreme background,
+     under the archway, you glimpse my study.
+
+The "new baby," "Bay," as they came to call her, was another little
+daughter, born in June, a happy, healthy addition to the household.
+In a letter written to Twichell we get a sweet summer picture of this
+period, particularly of little sunny-haired, two-year-old Susy.
+
+     There is nothing selfish about the Modoc.  She is fascinated with
+     the new baby.  The Modoc rips and tears around outdoors most of the
+     time, and consequently is as hard as a pineknot and as brown as an
+     Indian.  She is bosom friend to all the chickens, ducks, turkeys,
+     and guinea-hens on the place.  Yesterday, as she marched along the
+     winding path that leads up the hill through the red-clover beds to
+     the summer-house, there was a long procession of these fowls
+     stringing contentedly after her, led by a stately rooster, who can
+     look over the Modoc's head.  The devotion of these vassals has been
+     purchased with daily largess of Indian meal, and so the Modoc,
+     attended by her body-guard, moves in state wherever she goes.
+
+There were days, mainly Sundays, when he did not work at all; peaceful
+days of lying fallow, dreaming in shady places, drowsily watching little
+Susy, or reading with Mrs. Clemens.  Howells's "Foregone Conclusion" was
+running in the Atlantic that year, and they delighted in it.  Clemens
+wrote the author:
+
+     I should think that this must be the daintiest, truest, most
+     admirable workmanship that was ever put on a story.  The creatures
+     of God do not act out their natures more unerringly than yours do.
+     If your genuine stories can die I wonder by what right old Walter
+     Scott's artificialities shall continue to live.
+
+At other times he found comfort in the society of Theodore Crane.  These
+two were always fond of each other, and often read together the books in
+which they were mutually interested.  They had portable-hammock
+arrangements, which they placed side by side on the lawn, and read and
+discussed through summer afternoons.  The 'Mutineers of the Bounty' was
+one of the books they liked best, and there was a story of an Iceland
+farmer, a human document, that had an unfading interest.  Also there were
+certain articles in old numbers of the Atlantic that they read and
+reread.  'Pepys' Diary', 'Two Years Before the Mast', and a book on the
+Andes were reliable favorites.  Mark Twain read not so many books, but
+read a few books often.  Those named were among the literature he asked
+for each year of his return to Quarry Farm.  Without them, the farm and
+the summer would not be the same.
+
+Then there was 'Lecky's History of European Morals'; there were periods
+when they read Lecky avidly and discussed it in original and unorthodox
+ways.  Mark Twain found an echo of his own philosophies in Lecky.  He
+made frequent marginal notes along the pages of the world's moral
+history--notes not always quotable in the family circle.  Mainly,
+however, they were short, crisp interjections of assent or disapproval.
+In one place Lecky refers to those who have undertaken to prove that all
+our morality is a product of experience, holding that a desire to obtain
+happiness and to avoid pain is the only possible motive to action; the
+reason, and the only reason, why we should perform virtuous actions being
+"that on the whole such a course will bring us the greatest amount of
+happiness."  Clemens has indorsed these philosophies by writing on the
+margin, " Sound and true."  It was the philosophy which he himself would
+always hold (though, apparently, never live by), and in the end would
+embody a volume of his own.--[What Is Man?  Privately printed in 1906.]--
+In another place Lecky, himself speaking, says:
+
+     Fortunately we are all dependent for many of our pleasures on
+     others.  Co-operation and organization are essential to our
+     happiness, and these are impossible without some restraint being
+     placed upon our appetites.  Laws are made to secure this restraint,
+     and being sustained by rewards, and punishments they make it the
+     interest of the individual to regard that of the community.
+
+"Correct!" comments Clemens.  "He has proceeded from unreasoned
+selfishness to reasoned selfishness.  All our acts, reasoned and
+unreasoned, are selfish."  It was a conclusion he logically never
+departed from; not the happiest one, it would seem, at first glance, but
+one easier to deny than to disprove.
+
+On the back of an old envelope Mark Twain set down his literary
+declaration of this period.
+
+"I like history, biography, travels, curious facts and strange
+happenings, and science.  And I detest novels, poetry, and theology."
+
+But of course the novels of Howells would be excepted; Lecky was not
+theology, but the history of it; his taste for poetry would develop
+later, though it would never become a fixed quantity, as was his devotion
+to history and science.  His interest in these amounted to a passion.
+
+
+
+
+XCV
+
+AN "ATLANTIC" STORY AND A PLAY
+
+The reference to "Auntie Cord" in the letter to Dr. Brown brings us to
+Mark Twain's first contribution to the Atlantic Monthly.  Howells in his
+Recollections of his Atlantic editorship, after referring to certain
+Western contributors, says:
+
+     Later came Mark Twain, originally of Missouri, but then
+     provisionally of Hartford, and now ultimately of the solar system,
+     not to say the universe.  He came first with "A True Story," one of
+     those noble pieces of humanity with which the South has atoned
+     chiefly, if not solely, through him for all its despite to the
+     negro.
+
+Clemens had long aspired to appear in the Atlantic, but such was his own
+rating of his literature that he hardly hoped to qualify for its pages.
+Twichell remembers his "mingled astonishment and triumph" when he was
+invited to send something to the magazine.
+
+He was obliged to "send something" once or twice before the acceptance of
+"A True Story," the narrative of Auntie Cord, and even this acceptance
+brought with it the return of a fable which had accompanied it, with the
+explanation that a fable like that would disqualify the magazine for
+every denominational reader, though Howells hastened to express his own
+joy in it, having been particularly touched by the author's reference to
+Sisyphus and Atlas as ancestors of the tumble-bug.  The "True Story," he
+said, with its "realest king of black talk," won him, and a few days
+later he wrote again: "This little story delights me more and more.  I
+wish you had about forty of 'em."
+
+And so, modestly enough, as became him, for the story was of the
+simplest, most unpretentious sort, Mark Twain entered into the school of
+the elect.
+
+In his letter to Howells, accompanying the MS., the author said:
+
+     I inclose also "A True Story," which has no humor in it.  You can
+     pay as lightly as you choose for that if you want it, for it is
+     rather out of my line.  I have not altered the old colored woman's
+     story, except to begin it at the beginning, instead of the middle,
+     as she did--and traveled both ways.
+
+Howells in his Recollections tells of the business anxiety in the
+Atlantic office in the effort to estimate the story's pecuniary value.
+Clemens and Harte had raised literary rates enormously; the latter was
+reputed to have received as much as five cents a word from affluent
+newspapers!  But the Atlantic was poor, and when sixty dollars was
+finally decided upon for the three pages (about two and a half cents a
+word) the rate was regarded as handsome--without precedent in Atlantic
+history.  Howells adds that as much as forty times this amount was
+sometimes offered to Mark Twain in later years.  Even in '74 he had
+received a much higher rate than that offered by the Atlantic,--but no
+acceptance, then, or later, ever made him happier, or seemed more richly
+rewarded.
+
+"A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It " was precisely what
+it claimed to be. --[Atlantic Monthly for November, 1874; also included
+in Sketches New and Old.]-- Auntie Cord, the Auntie Rachel of that tale,
+cook at Quarry Farm, was a Virginia negress who had been twice sold as a
+slave, and was proud of the fact; particularly proud that she had brought
+$1,000 on the block.  All her children had been sold away from her, but
+it was a long time ago, and now at sixty she was fat and seemingly
+without care.  She had told her story to Mrs. Crane, who had more than
+once tried to persuade her to tell it to Clemens; but Auntie Cord was
+reluctant.  One evening, however, when the family sat on the front
+veranda in the moonlight, looking down on the picture city, as was their
+habit, Auntie Cord came around to say good night, and Clemens engaged her
+in conversation.  He led up to her story, and almost before she knew it
+she was seated at his feet telling the strange tale in almost the exact
+words in which it was set down by him next morning.  It gave Mark Twain a
+chance to exercise two of his chief gifts--transcription and portrayal.
+He was always greater at these things than at invention.  Auntie Cord's
+story is a little masterpiece.
+
+He wished to do more with Auntie Cord and her associates of the farm, for
+they were extraordinarily interesting.  Two other negroes on the place,
+John Lewis and his wife (we shall hear notably of Lewis later), were not
+always on terms of amity with Auntie Cord.  They disagreed on religion,
+and there were frequent battles in the kitchen.  These depressed the
+mistress of the house, but they gave only joy to Mark Twain.  His
+Southern raising had given him an understanding of their humors, their
+native emotions which made these riots a spiritual gratification.  He
+would slip around among the shrubbery and listen to the noise and strife
+of battle, and hug himself with delight.  Sometimes they resorted to
+missiles --stones, tinware--even dressed poultry which Auntie Cord was
+preparing for the oven.  Lewis was very black, Auntie Cord was a bright
+mulatto, Lewis's' wife several shades lighter.  Wherever the discussion
+began it promptly shaded off toward the color-line and insult.  Auntie
+Cord was a Methodist; Lewis was a Dunkard.  Auntie Cord was ignorant and
+dogmatic; Lewis could read and was intelligent.  Theology invariably led
+to personality, and eventually to epithets, crockery, geology, and
+victuals.  How the greatest joker of the age did enjoy that summer
+warfare!
+
+The fun was not all one-sided.  An incident of that summer probably
+furnished more enjoyment for the colored members of the household than it
+did for Mark Twain.  Lewis had some fowls, and among them was a
+particularly pestiferous guinea-hen that used to get up at three in the
+morning and go around making the kind of a noise that a guinea-hen must
+like and is willing to get up early to hear.  Mark Twain did not care for
+it.  He stood it as long as he could one morning, then crept softly from
+the house to stop it.
+
+It was a clear, bright night; locating the guinea-hen, he slipped up
+stealthily with a stout stick.  The bird was pouring out its heart,
+tearing the moonlight to tatters.  Stealing up close, Clemens made a
+vicious swing with his bludgeon, but just then the guinea stepped forward
+a little, and he missed.  The stroke and his explosion frightened the
+fowl, and it started to run.  Clemens, with his mind now on the single
+purpose of revenge, started after it.  Around the trees, along the paths,
+up and down the lawn, through gates and across the garden, out over the
+fields, they raced, "pursuer and pursued."  The guinea nor longer sang,
+and Clemens was presently too exhausted to swear.  Hour after hour the
+silent, deadly hunt continued, both stopping to rest at intervals; then
+up again and away.  It was like something in a dream.  It was nearly
+breakfast-time when he dragged himself into the house at last, and the
+guinea was resting and panting under a currant-bush.  Later in the day
+Clemens gave orders to Lewis to "kill and eat that guinea-hen," which
+Lewis did.  Clemens himself had then never eaten a guinea, but some years
+later, in Paris, when the delicious breast of one of those fowls was
+served him, he remembered and said:
+
+"And to think, after chasing that creature all night, John Lewis got to
+eat him instead of me."
+
+The interest in Tom and Huck, or the inspiration for their adventures,
+gave out at last, or was superseded by a more immediate demand.  As early
+as May, Goodman, in San Francisco, had seen a play announced there,
+presenting the character of Colonel Sellers, dramatized by Gilbert S.
+Densmore and played by John T.  Raymond.  Goodman immediately wrote
+Clemens; also a letter came from Warner, in Hartford, who had noticed in
+San Francisco papers announcements of the play.  Of course Clemens would
+take action immediately; he telegraphed, enjoining the performance.  Then
+began a correspondence with the dramatist and actor.  This in time
+resulted in an amicable arrangement, by which the dramatist agreed to
+dispose of his version to Clemens.  Clemens did not wait for it to
+arrive, but began immediately a version of his own.  Just how much or how
+little of Densmore's work found its way into the completed play, as
+presented by Raymond later, cannot be known now.  Howells conveys the
+impression that Clemens had no hand in its authorship beyond the
+character of Sellers as taken from the book.  But in a letter still
+extant, which Clemens wrote to Howells at the time, he says:
+
+     I worked a month on my play, and launched it in New York last
+     Wednesday.  I believe it will go.  The newspapers have been
+     complimentary.  It is simply a setting for one character, Colonel
+     Sellers.  As a play I guess it will not bear critical assault in
+     force.
+
+The Warners are as charming as ever.  They go shortly to the devil for a
+year--that is, to Egypt.
+
+Raymond, in a letter which he wrote to the Sun, November 3, 1874,
+declared that "not one line" of Densmore's dramatization was used,
+"except that which was taken bodily from The Gilded Age.  During the
+newspaper discussion of the matter, Clemens himself prepared a letter for
+the Hartford Post.  This letter was suppressed, but it still exists.  In
+it he says:
+
+     I entirely rewrote the play three separate and distinct times.  I
+     had expected to use little of his [Densmore's] language and but
+     little of his plot.  I do not think there are now twenty sentences
+     of Mr. Densmore's in the play, but I used so much of his plot that I
+     wrote and told him that I should pay him about as much more as I had
+     already paid him in case the play proved a success.  I shall keep my
+     word.
+
+This letter, written while the matter was fresh in his mind, is
+undoubtedly in accordance with the facts.  That Densmore was fully
+satisfied may be gathered from an acknowledgment, in which he says: "Your
+letter reached me on the ad, with check.  In this place permit me to
+thank you for the very handsome manner in which you have acted in this
+matter."
+
+Warner, meantime, realizing that the play was constructed almost entirely
+of the Mark Twain chapters of the book, agreed that his collaborator
+should undertake the work and financial responsibilities of the dramatic
+venture and reap such rewards as might result.  Various stories have been
+told of this matter, most of them untrue.  There was no bitterness
+between the friends, no semblance of an estrangement of any sort.  Warner
+very generously and promptly admitted that he was not concerned with the
+play, its authorship, or its profits, whatever the latter might amount
+to.  Moreover, Warner was going to Egypt very soon, and his labors and
+responsibilities were doubly sufficient as they stood.
+
+Clemens's estimate of the play as a dramatic composition was correct
+enough, but the public liked it, and it was a financial success from the
+start.  He employed a representative to travel with Raymond, to assist in
+the management and in the division of spoil.  The agent had instructions
+to mail a card every day, stating the amount of his share in the profits.
+Howells once arrived in Hartford just when this postal tide of fortune
+was at its flood:
+
+One hundred and fifty dollars--two hundred dollars--three hundred dollars
+were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in the air,
+before he sat down at the table, or rose from it to brandish, and then,
+flinging his napkin in the chair, walked up and down to exult in.
+
+Once, in later years, referring to the matter, Howells said
+"He was never a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and
+he wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream."
+Which was a true word.  Mark Twain with money was like a child with a
+heap of bright pebbles, ready to pile up more and still more, then
+presently to throw them all away and begin gathering anew.
+
+
+
+
+XCVI
+
+THE NEW HOME
+
+The Clemenses returned to Hartford to find their new house "ready,"
+though still full of workmen, decorators, plumbers, and such other
+minions of labor as make life miserable to those with ambitions for new
+or improved habitations.  The carpenters were still on the lower floor,
+but the family moved in and camped about in rooms up-stairs that were
+more or less free from the invader.  They had stopped in New York ten
+days to buy carpets and furnishings, and these began to arrive, with no
+particular place to put them; but the owners were excited and happy with
+it all, for it was the pleasant season of the year, and all the new
+features of the house were fascinating, while the daily progress of the
+decorators furnished a fresh surprise when they roamed through the rooms
+at evening.  Mrs. Clemens wrote home:
+
+     We are perfectly delighted with everything here and do so want you
+     all to see it.
+
+Her husband, as he was likely to do, picked up the letter and finished
+it:
+
+     Livy appoints me to finish this; but how can a headless man perform
+     an intelligent function?  I have been bully-ragged all day by the
+     builder, by his foreman, by the architect, by the tapestry devil who
+     is to upholster the furniture, by the idiot who is putting down the
+     carpets, by the scoundrel who is setting up the billiard-table (and
+     has left the balls in New York), by the wildcat who is sodding the
+     ground and finishing the driveway (after the sun went down), by a
+     book agent, whose body is in the back yard and the coroner notified.
+     Just think of this thing going on the whole day long, and I a man
+     who loathes details with all his heart!  But I haven't lost my
+     temper, and I've made Livy lie down most of the time; could anybody
+     make her lie down all the time?
+
+Warner wrote from Egypt expressing sympathy for their unfurnished state
+of affairs, but added, "I would rather fit out three houses and fill them
+with furniture than to fit out one 'dahabiyeh'."  Warner was at that
+moment undertaking his charmingly remembered trip up the Nile.
+
+The new home was not entirely done for a long time.  One never knows when
+a big house like that--or a little house, for that matters done.  But
+they were settled at last, with all their beautiful things in place; and
+perhaps there have been richer homes, possibly more artistic ones, but
+there has never been a more charming home, within or without, than that
+one.
+
+So many frequenters have tried to express the charm of that household.
+None of them has quite succeeded, for it lay not so much in its
+arrangement of rooms or their decorations or their outlook, though these
+were all beautiful enough, but rather in the personality, the atmosphere;
+and these are elusive things to convey in words.  We can only see and
+feel and recognize; we cannot translate them.  Even Howells, with his
+subtle touch, can present only an aspect here and there; an essence, as
+it were, from a happy garden, rather than the fullness of its bloom.
+
+As Mark Twain was unlike any other man that ever lived, so his house was
+unlike any other house ever built.  People asked him why he built the
+kitchen toward the street, and he said:
+
+"So the servants can see the circus go by without running out into the
+front yard."
+
+But this was probably an after-thought.  The kitchen end of the house
+extended toward Farmington Avenue, but it was by no means unbeautiful.
+It was a pleasing detail of the general scheme.  The main entrance faced
+at right angles with the street and opened to a spacious hall.  In turn,
+the hall opened to a parlor, where there was a grand piano, and to the
+dining-room and library, and the library opened to a little conservatory,
+semicircular in form, of a design invented by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
+Says Howells:
+
+     The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed
+     up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of the
+     fountain companied by Callas and other waterloving lilies.  There,
+     while we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled
+     the pretty bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the
+     delicate accents of its varied blossoms.
+
+In the library was an old carved mantel which Clemens and his wife had
+bought in Scotland, salvage from a dismantled castle, and across the top
+of the fireplace a plate of brass with the motto, "The ornament of a
+house is the friends that frequent it," surely never more appropriately
+inscribed.
+
+There was the mahogany room, a large bedroom on the ground floor, and
+upstairs were other spacious bedrooms and many baths, while everywhere
+were Oriental rugs and draperies, and statuary and paintings.  There was
+a fireplace under a window, after the English pattern, so that in winter-
+time one could at the same moment watch the blaze and the falling snow.
+The library windows looked out over the valley with the little stream in
+it, and through and across the tree-tops.  At the top of the house was
+what became Clemens's favorite retreat, the billiard-room, and here and
+there were unexpected little balconies, which one could step out upon for
+the view.
+
+Below was a wide, covered veranda, the "ombra," as they called it,
+secluded from the public eye--a favorite family gathering-place on
+pleasant days.
+
+But a house might easily have all these things without being more than
+usually attractive, and a house with a great deal less might have been as
+full of charm; only it seemed just the proper setting for that particular
+household, and undoubtedly it acquired the personality of its occupants.
+
+Howells assures us that there never was another home like it, and we may
+accept his statement.  It was unique.  It was the home of one of the most
+unusual and unaccountable personalities in the world, yet was perfectly
+and serenely ordered.  Mark Twain was not responsible for this blissful
+condition.  He was its beacon-light; it was around Mrs. Clemens that its
+affairs steadily revolved.
+
+If in the four years and more of marriage Clemens had made advancement in
+culture and capabilities, Olivia Clemens also had become something more
+than the half-timid, inexperienced girl he had first known.  In a way her
+education had been no less notable than his.  She had worked and studied,
+and her half-year of travel and entertainment abroad had given her
+opportunity for acquiring knowledge and confidence.  Her vision of life
+had vastly enlarged; her intellect had flowered; her grasp of
+practicalities had become firm and sure.
+
+In spite of her delicate physical structure, her continued uncertainty of
+health, she capably undertook the management of their large new house,
+and supervised its economies.  Any one of her undertakings was sufficient
+for one woman, but she compassed them all.  No children had more careful
+direction than hers.  No husband had more devoted attendance and
+companionship.  No household was ever directed with a sweeter and gentler
+grace, or with greater perfection of detail.  When the great ones of the
+world came to visit America's most picturesque literary figure she gave
+welcome to them all, and filled her place at his side with such sweet and
+capable dignity that those who came to pay their duties to him often
+returned to pay even greater devotion to his companion.  Says Howells:
+
+     She was, in a way, the loveliest person I have ever seen--the
+     gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united
+     wonderful tact with wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted
+     her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried in it.
+
+And once, in an interview with the writer of these chapters, Howells
+declared: "She was not only a beautiful soul, but a woman of singular
+intellectual power.  I never knew any one quite like her."  Then he
+added: "Words cannot express Mrs. Clemens--her fineness, her delicate,
+her wonderful tact with a man who was in some respects, and wished to be,
+the most outrageous creature that ever breathed."
+
+Howells meant a good many things by that, no doubt: Clemens's violent
+methods, for one thing, his sudden, savage impulses, which sometimes
+worked injustice and hardship for others, though he was first to discover
+the wrong and to repair it only too fully.  Then, too, Howells may have
+meant his boyish teasing tendency to disturb Mrs. Clemens's exquisite
+sense of decorum.
+
+Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in a
+pair of white cowskin slippers with the hair out, and do a crippled
+colored uncle, to the joy of all beholders.  I must not say all, for I
+remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of
+"Oh, Youth!"
+
+He was continually doing such things as the "crippled colored uncle,";
+partly for the very joy of the performance, but partly, too, to disturb
+her serenity, to incur her reproof, to shiver her a little--"shock" would
+be too strong a word.  And he liked to fancy her in a spirit and attitude
+of belligerence, to present that fancy to those who knew the measure of
+her gentle nature.  Writing to Mrs. Howells of a picture of herself in a
+group, he said:
+
+     You look exactly as Mrs. Clemens does after she has said: "Indeed, I
+     do not wonder that you can frame no reply; for you know only too
+     well that your conduct admits of no excuse, palliation, or argument-
+     none!"
+
+Clemens would pretend to a visitor that she had been violently indignant
+over some offense of his; perhaps he would say:
+
+"Well I contradicted her just now, and the crockery will begin to fly
+pretty soon."
+
+She could never quite get used to this pleasantry, and a faint glow would
+steal over her face.  He liked to produce that glow.  Yet always his
+manner toward her was tenderness itself.  He regarded her as some dainty
+bit of porcelain, and it was said that he was always following her about
+with a chair.  Their union has been regarded as ideal.  That is
+Twichell's opinion and Howells's.  The latter sums up:
+
+     Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be,
+     but from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the
+     most perfect.
+
+
+
+
+XCVII
+
+THE WALK TO BOSTON
+
+The new home became more beautiful to them as things found their places,
+as the year deepened; and the wonder of autumn foliage lit up their
+landscape.  Sitting on one of the little upper balconies Mrs. Clemens
+wrote:
+
+     The atmosphere is very hazy, and it makes the autumn tints even more
+     soft and beautiful than usual.  Mr. Twichell came for Mr. Clemens to
+     go walking with him; they returned at dinner-time, heavily laden
+     with autumn leaves.
+
+And as usual Clemens, finding the letter unfinished, took up the story.
+
+     Twichell came up here with me to luncheon after services, and I went
+     back home with him and took Susy along in her little carriage.  We
+     have just got home again, middle of afternoon, and Livy has gone to
+     rest and left the west balcony to me.  There is a shining and most
+     marvelous miracle of cloud-effects mirrored in the brook; a picture
+     which began with perfection, and has momently surpassed it ever
+     since, until at last it is almost unendurably beautiful....
+
+     There is a cloud-picture in the stream now whose hues are as
+     manifold as those in an opal and as delicate as the tintings of a
+     sea-shell.  But now a muskrat is swimming through it and
+     obliterating it with the turmoil of wavelets he casts abroad from
+     his shoulders.
+
+     The customary Sunday assemblage of strangers is gathered together in
+     the grounds discussing the house.
+
+Twichell and Clemens took a good many walks these days; long walks, for
+Twichell was an athlete and Clemens had not then outgrown the Nevada
+habit of pedestrian wandering.  Talcott's Tower, a wooden structure about
+five miles from Hartford, was one of their favorite objective points; and
+often they walked out and back, talking so continuously, and so absorbed
+in the themes of their discussions, that time and distance slipped away
+almost unnoticed.  How many things they talked of in those long walks!
+They discussed philosophies and religions and creeds, and all the range
+of human possibility and shortcoming, and all the phases of literature
+and history and politics.  Unorthodox discussions they were,
+illuminating, marvelously enchanting, and vanished now forever.
+Sometimes they took the train as far as Bloomfield, a little station on
+the way, and walked the rest of the distance, or they took the train from
+Bloomfield home.  It seems a strange association, perhaps, the fellowship
+of that violent dissenter with that fervent soul dedicated to church and
+creed, but the root of their friendship lay in the frankness with which
+each man delivered his dogmas and respected those of his companion.
+
+It was during one of their walks to the tower that they planned a far
+more extraordinary undertaking--nothing less, in fact, than a walk from
+Hartford to Boston.  This was early in November.  They did not delay the
+matter, for the weather was getting too uncertain.
+
+Clemens wrote Redpath:
+
+DEAR REDPATH,-- Rev. J. H. Twichell and I expect to start at 8 o'clock
+Thursday morning to walk to Boston in twenty four hours--or more.  We
+shall telegraph Young's Hotel for rooms Saturday night, in order to allow
+for a low average of pedestrianism.
+
+It was half past eight on Thursday morning, November 12, 1874, that they
+left Twichell's house in a carriage, drove to the East Hartford bridge,
+and there took to the road, Twichell carrying a little bag and Clemens a
+basket of lunch.
+
+The papers had got hold of it by this time, and were watching the result.
+They did well enough that first day, following the old Boston stage road,
+arriving at Westford about seven o'clock in the evening, twenty-eight
+miles from the starting-point.  There was no real hotel at Westford, only
+a sort of tavern, but it afforded the luxury of rest.  "Also," says
+Twichell, in a memoranda of the trip, "a sublimely profane hostler whom
+you couldn't jostle with any sort of mild remark without bringing down
+upon yourself a perfect avalanche of oaths."
+
+This was a joy to Clemens, who sat behind the stove, rubbing his lame
+knees and fairly reveling in Twichell's discomfiture in his efforts to
+divert the hostler's blasphemy.  There was also a mellow inebriate there
+who recommended kerosene for Clemens's lameness, and offered as testimony
+the fact that he himself had frequently used it for stiffness in his
+joints after lying out all night in cold weather, drunk: altogether it
+was a notable evening.
+
+Westford was about as far as they continued the journey afoot.  Clemens
+was exceedingly lame next morning, and had had a rather bad night; but he
+swore and limped along six miles farther, to North Ashford, then gave it
+up.  They drove from North Ashford to the railway, where Clemens
+telegraphed Redpath and Howells of their approach.  To Redpath:
+
+     We have made thirty-five miles in less than five days.  This
+     demonstrates that the thing can be done.  Shall now finish by rail.
+     Did you have any bets on us?
+
+To Howells:
+
+     Arrive by rail at seven o'clock, the first of a series of grand
+     annual pedestrian tours from Hartford to Boston to be performed by
+     us.  The next will take place next year.
+
+Redpath read his despatch to a lecture audience, with effect.  Howells
+made immediate preparation for receiving two way-worn, hungry men.  He
+telegraphed to Young's Hotel: "You and Twichell come right up to 37
+Concord Avenue, Cambridge, near observatory.  Party waiting for you."
+
+They got to Howells's about nine o'clock, and the refreshments were
+waiting.  Miss Longfellow was there, Rose Hawthorne, John Fiske, Larkin
+G. Mead, the sculptor, and others of their kind.  Howells tells in his
+book how Clemens, with Twichell, "suddenly stormed in," and immediately
+began to eat and drink:
+
+     I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with
+     his head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped
+     oysters without which no party in Cambridge was really a party,
+     exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the
+     most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of
+     their progress.
+
+Clemens gave a dinner, next night, to Howells, Aldrich, Osgood, and the
+rest.  The papers were full of jokes concerning the Boston expedition;
+some even had illustrations, and it was all amusing enough at the time.
+
+Next morning, sitting in the writing-room of Young's Hotel, he wrote a
+curious letter to Mrs. Clemens, though intended as much for Howells and
+Aldrich as for her.  It was dated sixty-one years ahead, and was a sort
+of Looking Backwards, though that notable book had not yet been written.
+It presupposed a monarchy in which the name of Boston has been changed to
+"Limerick," and Hartford to "Dublin."  In it, Twichell has become the
+"Archbishop of Dublin," Howells "Duke of Cambridge," Aldrich "Marquis of
+Ponkapog," Clemens the "Earl of Hartford."  It was too whimsical and
+delightful a fancy to be forgotten. --[This remarkable and amusing
+document will be found under Appendix M, at the end of last volume.]
+
+A long time afterward, thirty-four year, he came across this letter.  He
+said:
+
+"It seems curious now that I should have been dreaming dreams of a future
+monarchy and never suspect that the monarchy was already present and the
+Republic a thing of the past."
+
+What he meant, was the political succession that had fostered those
+commercial trusts which, in turn, had established party dominion.
+
+To Howells, on his return, Clemens wrote his acknowledgments, and added:
+
+     Mrs. Clemens gets upon the verge of swearing, and goes tearing
+     around in an unseemly fury when I enlarge upon the delightful time
+     we had in Boston, and she not there to have her share.  I have tried
+     hard to reproduce Mrs. Howells to her, and have probably not made a
+     shining success of it.
+
+
+
+
+XCVIII
+
+"OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI"
+
+Howells had been urging Clemens to do something more for the Atlantic,
+specifically something for the January number.  Clemens cudgeled his
+brains, but finally declared he must give it up:
+
+     Mrs. Clemens has diligently persecuted me day by day with urgings to
+     go to work and do that something, but it's no use.  I find I can't.
+     We are in such a state of worry and endless confusion that my head
+     won't go.
+
+Two hours later he sent another hasty line:
+
+     I take back the remark that I can't write for the January number,
+     for Twichell and I have had a long walk in the woods, and I got to
+     telling him about old Mississippi days of steam-boating glory and
+     grandeur as I saw them (during four years) from the pilot-house.  He
+     said, "What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!" I hadn't
+     thought of that before.  Would you like a series of papers to run
+     through three months or six or nine--or about four months, say?
+
+Howells welcomed this offer as an echo of his own thought.  He had come
+from a piloting family himself, and knew the interest that Mark Twain
+could put into such a series.
+
+Acting promptly under the new inspiration, Clemens forthwith sent the
+first chapter of that monumental, that absolutely unique, series of
+papers on Mississippi River life, which to-day constitutes one of his
+chief claims to immortality.
+
+His first number was in the nature of an experiment.  Perhaps, after all,
+the idea would not suit the Atlantic readers.
+
+"Cut it, scarify it, reject it, handle it with entire freedom," he wrote,
+and awaited the result.
+
+The "result" was that Howells expressed his delight:
+
+     The piece about the Mississippi is capital.  It almost made the
+     water in our ice-pitcher muddy as I read it.  I don't think I shall
+     meddle much with it, even in the way of suggestion.  The sketch of
+     the low-lived little town was so good that I could have wished there
+     was more of it.  I want the sketches, if you can make them, every
+     month.
+
+Mark Twain was now really interested in this new literary venture.  He
+was fairly saturated with memories.  He was writing on the theme that lay
+nearest to his heart.  Within ten days he reported that he had finished
+three of the papers, and had begun the fourth.
+
+And yet I have spoken of nothing but piloting as a science so far, and I
+doubt if I ever get beyond that portion of my subject.  And I don't care
+to.  Any Muggins can write about old days on the Mississippi of five
+hundred different kinds, but I am the only man alive that can scribble
+about the piloting of that day, and no man has ever tried to scribble
+about it yet.  Its newness pleases me all the time, and it is about the
+only new subject I know of.
+
+He became so enthusiastic presently that he wanted to take Howells with
+him on a trip down the Mississippi, with their wives for company, to go
+over the old ground again and obtain added material enough for a book.
+Howells was willing enough--agreed to go, in fact--but found it hard to
+get away.  He began to temporize and finally backed out.  Clemens tried
+to inveigle Osgood into the trip, but without success; also John Hay, but
+Hay had a new baby at his house just then--"three days old, and with a
+voice beyond price," he said, offering it as an excuse for non-
+acceptance.  So the plan for revisiting the river and the conclusion of
+the book were held in abeyance for nearly seven years.
+
+Those early piloting chapters, as they appeared in the Atlantic,
+constituted Mark Twain's best literary exhibit up to that time.  In some
+respects they are his best literature of any time.  As pictures of an
+intensely interesting phase of life, they are so convincing, so real, and
+at the same time of such extraordinary charm and interest, that if the
+English language should survive a thousand years, or ten times as long,
+they would be as fresh and vivid at the end of that period as the day
+they were penned.  In them the atmosphere of, the river and its
+environment--its pictures, its thousand aspects of life--are reproduced
+with what is no less than literary necromancy.  Not only does he make you
+smell the river you can fairly hear it breathe.  On the appearance of the
+first number John Hay wrote:
+
+"It is perfect; no more nor less.  I don't see how you do it," and added,
+"you know what my opinion is of time not spent with you."
+
+Howells wrote:
+
+     You are doing the science of piloting splendidly.  Every word
+     interesting, and don't you drop the series till you've got every bit
+     of anecdote and reminiscence into it.
+
+He let Clemens write the articles to suit himself.  Once he said:
+
+     If I might put in my jaw at this point I should say, stick to actual
+     fact and character in the thing and give things in detail.  All that
+     belongs to the old river life is novel, and is now mostly
+     historical.  Don't write at any supposed Atlantic audience, but yarn
+     it off as if into my sympathetic ear.
+
+Clemens replied that he had no dread of the Atlantic audience; he
+declared it was the only audience that did not require a humorist to
+"paint himself striped and stand on his head to amuse it."
+
+The "Old Times" papers ran through seven numbers of the Atlantic.  They
+were reprinted everywhere by the newspapers, who in that day had little
+respect for magazine copyrights, and were promptly pirated in book form
+in Canada.  They added vastly to Mark Twain's literary capital, though
+Howells informs us that the Atlantic circulation did not thrive
+proportionately, for the reason that the newspapers gave the articles to
+their readers from advanced sheets of the magazine, even before the
+latter could be placed on sale.  It so happened that in the January
+Atlantic, which contained the first of the Mississippi papers, there
+appeared Robert Dale Owen's article on "Spiritualism," which brought such
+humility both to author and publisher because of the exposure of the
+medium Katie King, which came along while the magazine was in press.
+Clemens has written this marginal note on the opening page of the copy at
+Quarry Farm:
+
+While this number of the Atlantic was being printed the Katie King
+manifestations were discovered to be the cheapest, wretchedest shams and
+frauds, and were exposed in the newspapers.  The awful humiliation of it
+unseated Robert Dale Owen's reason, and he died in the madhouse.
+
+
+
+
+XCIX
+
+A TYPEWRITER, AND A JOKE ON ALDRICH
+
+It was during the trip to Boston with Twichell that Mark Twain saw for
+the first time what was then--a brand-new invention, a typewriter; or it
+may have been during a subsequent visit, a week or two later.  At all
+events, he had the machine and was practising on it December 9, 1874, for
+he wrote two letters on it that day, one to Howells and the other to
+Orion Clemens.  In the latter he says:
+
+     I am trying to get the hang of this new-fangled writing-machine, but
+     am not making a shining success of it.  However, this is the first
+     attempt I ever have made, and yet I perceive that I shall soon
+     easily acquire a fine facility in its use.  I saw the thing in
+     Boston the other day and was greatly taken with it.
+
+He goes on to explain the new wonder, and on the whole his first attempt
+is a very creditable performance.  With his usual enthusiasm over an
+innovation, he believes it is going to be a great help to him, and
+proclaims its advantages.
+
+This is the letter to Howells, with the errors preserved:
+
+     You needn't answer this; I am only practicing to get three; anothe
+     slip-up there; only practici?ng ti get the hang of the thing.  I
+     notice I miss fire & get in a good many unnecessary letters &
+     punctuation marks.  I am simply using you for a target to bang at.
+     Blame my cats, but this thing requires genius in order to work it
+     just right.
+
+In an article written long after he tells how he was with Nasby when he
+first saw the machine in Boston through a window, and how they went in to
+see it perform.  In the same article he states that he was the first
+person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature, and that he
+thinks the story of Tom Sawyer was the first type-copied manuscript.
+--[Tom Sawyer was not then complete, and had been laid aside.  The first
+type-copied manuscript was probably early chapters of the Mississippi
+story, two discarded typewritten pages of which still- exist]
+
+The new enthusiasm ran its course and died.  Three months later, when the
+Remington makers wrote him for a recommendation of the machine, he
+replied that he had entirely stopped using it.  The typewriter was not
+perfect in those days, and the keys did not always respond readily.
+He declared it was ruining his morals--that it made him "want to swear."
+He offered it to Howells because, he said, Howells had no morals anyway.
+Howells hesitated, so Clemens traded the machine to Bliss for a side-
+saddle.  But perhaps Bliss also became afraid of its influence, for in
+due time he brought it back.  Howells, again tempted, hesitated, and this
+time was lost.  What eventually became of the machine is not history.
+
+One of those, happy Atlantic dinners which Howells tells of came about
+the end of that year.  It was at the Parker House, and Emerson was there;
+and Aldrich, and the rest of that group.
+
+"Don't you dare to refuse the invitation," said Howells, and naturally
+Clemens didn't, and wrote back:
+
+     I want you to ask Mrs. Howells to let you stay all night at the
+     Parker House and tell lies and have an improving time, and take
+     breakfast with me in the morning.  I will have a good room for you
+     and a fire.  Can't you tell her it always makes you sick to go home
+     late at night or something like that?  That sort of thing arouses
+     Mrs. Clemens's sympathies easily.
+
+Two memories of that old dinner remain to-day.  Aldrich and Howells were
+not satisfied with the kind of neckties that Mark Twain wore (the old-
+fashioned black "string" tie, a Western survival), so they made him a
+present of two cravats when he set out on his return for Hartford.  Next
+day he wrote:
+
+     You and Aldrich have made one woman deeply and sincerely grateful--
+     Mrs. Clemens.  For months--I may even say years--she has shown an
+     unaccountable animosity toward my necktie, even getting up in the
+     night to take it with the tongs and blackguard it, sometimes also
+     getting so far as to threaten it.
+
+     When I said you and Aldrich had given me two new neckties, and that
+     they were in a paper in my overcoat pocket, she was in a fever of
+     happiness until she found I was going to frame them; then all the
+     venom in her nature gathered itself together; insomuch that I, being
+     near to a door, went without, perceiving danger.
+
+It is recorded that eventually he wore the neckties, and returned no more
+to the earlier mode.
+
+Another memory of that dinner is linked to a demand that Aldrich made of
+Clemens that night, for his photograph.  Clemens, returning to Hartford,
+put up fifty-two different specimens in as many envelopes, with the idea
+of sending one a week for a year.  Then he concluded that this was too
+slow a process, and for a week sent one every morning to "His Grace of
+Ponkapog."
+
+Aldrich stood it for a few days, then protested.  "The police," he said,
+"are in the habit of swooping down upon a publication of that sort."
+
+On New-Year's no less than twenty pictures came at once--photographs and
+prints of Mark Twain, his house, his family, his various belongings.
+Aldrich sent a warning then that the perpetrator of this outrage was
+known to the police as Mark Twain, alias "The Jumping Frog," a well-known
+California desperado, who would be speedily arrested and brought to
+Ponkapog to face his victim.  This letter was signed "T. Bayleigh, Chief
+of Police," and on the outside of the envelope there was a statement that
+it would be useless for that person to send any more mail-matter, as the
+post-office had been blown up.  The jolly farce closed there.  It was the
+sort of thing that both men enjoyed.
+
+Aldrich was writing a story at this time which contained some Western
+mining incident and environment.  He sent the manuscript to Clemens for
+"expert" consideration and advice.  Clemens wrote him at great length and
+in careful detail.  He was fond of Aldrich, regarding him as one of the
+most brilliant of men.  Once, to Robert Louis Stevenson, he said:
+
+     "Aldrich has never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and
+     humorous sayings.  None has equaled him, certainly none has
+     surpassed him, in the felicity of phrasing with which he clothed
+     these children of his fancy.  Aldrich is always brilliant; he can't
+     help it; he is a fire-opal set round with rose diamonds; when he is
+     not speaking you know that his dainty fancies are twinkling and
+     glimmering around in him; when he speaks the diamonds flash.  Yes,
+     he is always brilliant, he will always be brilliant; he will be
+     brilliant in hell-you will see."
+
+Stevenson, smiling a chuckly smile, said, " I hope not."
+
+"Well, you will, and he will dim even those ruddy fires and look like a
+transfigured Adonis backed against a pink sunset."  --[North American
+Review, September, 1906.]
+
+
+
+
+C
+
+RAYMOND, MENTAL TELEGRAPHY, ETC.
+
+The Sellers play was given in Hartford, in January (1875), to as many
+people as could crowd into the Opera House.  Raymond had reached the
+perfection of his art by that time, and the townsmen of Mark Twain saw
+the play and the actor at their best.  Kate Field played the part of
+Laura Hawkins, and there was a Hartford girl in the company; also a
+Hartford young man, who would one day be about as well known to playgoers
+as any playwright or actor that America has produced.  His name was
+William Gillette, and it was largely due to Mark Twain that the author of
+Secret Service and of the dramatic "Sherlock Holmes" got a fair public
+start.  Clemens and his wife loaned Gillette the three thousand dollars
+which tided him through his period of dramatic education.  Their faith in
+his ability was justified.
+
+Hartford would naturally be enthusiastic on a first "Sellers-Raymond"
+night.  At the end of the fourth act there was an urgent demand for the
+author of the play, who was supposed to be present.  He was not there in
+person, but had sent a letter, which Raymond read:
+
+MY DEAR RAYMOND,-- I am aware that you are going to be welcomed to our
+town by great audiences on both nights of your stay there, and I beg to
+add my hearty welcome also, through this note.  I cannot come to the
+theater on either evening, Raymond, because there is something so
+touching about your acting that I can't stand it.
+
+(I do not mention a couple of colds in my head, because I hardly mind
+them as much as I would the erysipelas, but between you and me I would
+prefer it if they were rights and lefts.)
+
+And then there is another thing.  I have always taken a pride in earning
+my living in outside places and spending it in Hartford; I have said that
+no good citizen would live on his own people, but go forth and make it
+sultry for other communities and fetch home the result; and now at this
+late day I find myself in the crushed and bleeding position of fattening
+myself upon the spoils of my brethren!  Can I support such grief as this?
+(This is literary emotion, you understand.  Take the money at the door
+just the same.)
+
+Once more I welcome you to Hartford, Raymond,  but as for me let me stay
+at home and blush.
+
+                                   Yours truly,    MARK.
+
+The play was equally successful wherever it went.  It made what in that
+day was regarded as a fortune.  One hundred thousand dollars is hardly
+too large an estimate of the amount divided between author and actor.
+Raymond was a great actor in that part, as he interpreted it, though he
+did not interpret it fully, or always in its best way.  The finer side,
+the subtle, tender side of Colonel Sellers, he was likely to overlook.
+Yet, with a natural human self-estimate, Raymond believed he had created
+a much greater part than Mark Twain had written.  Doubtless from the
+point of view of a number of people this was so, though the idea, was
+naturally obnoxious to Clemens.  In course of time their personal
+relations ceased.
+
+Clemens that winter gave another benefit for Father Hawley.  In reply to
+an invitation to appear in behalf of the poor, he wrote that he had quit
+the lecture field, and would not return to the platform unless driven
+there by lack of bread.  But he added:
+
+By the spirit of that remark I am debarred from delivering this proposed
+lecture, and so I fall back upon the letter of it, and emerge upon the
+platform for this last and final time because I am confronted by a lack
+of bread-among Father Hawley's flock.
+
+He made an introductory speech at an old-fashioned spelling-bee, given at
+the Asylum Hill Church; a breezy, charming talk of which the following is
+a sample:
+
+     I don't see any use in spelling a word right--and never did.  I mean
+     I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of
+     spelling words.  We might as well make all clothes alike and cook
+     all dishes alike.  Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing.  I
+     have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me;
+     there is such a breezy, unfettered originality about his
+     orthography.  He always spells "kow" with a large "K."  Now that is
+     just as good as to spell it with a small one.  It is better.  It
+     gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope.  It suggests
+     to the mind a grand, vague, impressive new kind of a cow.
+
+     He took part in the contest, and in spite of his early reputation,
+     was spelled down on the word "chaldron," which he spelled
+     "cauldron," as he had been taught, while the dictionary used as
+     authority gave that form as second choice.
+
+Another time that winter, Clemens read before the Monday Evening Club a
+paper on "Universal Suffrage," which is still remembered by the surviving
+members of that time.  A paragraph or two will convey its purport:
+
+     Our marvelous latter-day statesmanship has invented universal
+     suffrage.  That is the finest feather in our cap.  All that we
+     require of a voter is that he shall be forked, wear pantaloons
+     instead of petticoats, and bear a more or less humorous resemblance
+     to the reported image of God.  He need not know anything whatever;
+     he may be wholly useless and a cumberer of the earth; he may even be
+     known to be a consummate scoundrel.  No matter.  While he can steer
+     clear of the penitentiary his vote is as weighty as the vote of a
+     president, a bishop, a college professor, a merchant prince.  We
+     brag of our universal, unrestricted suffrage; but we are shams after
+     all, for we restrict when we come to the women.
+
+The Monday Evening Club was an organization which included the best minds
+of Hartford.  Dr. Horace Bushnell, Prof. Calvin E. Stowe, and J. Hammond
+Trumbull founded it back in the sixties, and it included such men as Rev.
+Dr. Parker, Rev. Dr. Burton, Charles H. Clark, of the Courant, Warner,
+and Twichell, with others of their kind.  Clemens had been elected after
+his first sojourn in England (February, 1873), and had then read a paper
+on the "License of the Press."  The club met alternate Mondays, from
+October to May.  There was one paper for each evening, and, after the
+usual fashion of such clubs, the reading was followed by discussion.
+Members of that time agree that Mark Twain's association with the club
+had a tendency to give it a life, or at least an exhilaration, which it
+had not previously known.  His papers were serious in their purpose he
+always preferred to be serious--but they evidenced the magic gift which
+made whatever he touched turn to literary jewelry.
+
+Psychic theories and phenomena always attracted Mark Twain.  In thought-
+transference, especially, he had a frank interest--an interest awakened
+and kept alive by certain phenomena--psychic manifestations we call them
+now.  In his association with Mrs. Clemens it not infrequently happened
+that one spoke the other's thought, or perhaps a long-procrastinated
+letter to a friend would bring an answer as quickly as mailed; but these
+are things familiar to us all.  A more startling example of thought-
+communication developed at the time of which we are writing, an example
+which raised to a fever-point whatever interest he may have had in the
+subject before.  (He was always having these vehement interests--rages we
+may call them, for it would be inadequate to speak of them as fads,
+inasmuch as they tended in the direction of human enlightenment, or
+progress, or reform.)
+
+Clemens one morning was lying in bed when, as he says, suddenly a red-hot
+new idea came whistling down into my camp."  The idea was that the time
+was ripe for a book that would tell the story of the Comstock-of the
+Nevada silver mines.  It seemed to him that the person best qualified for
+the work was his old friend William Wright--Dan de Quille.  He had not
+heard from Dan, or of him, for a long time, but decided to write and urge
+him to take up the idea.  He prepared the letter, going fully into the
+details of his plan, as was natural for him to do, then laid it aside
+until he could see Bliss and secure his approval of the scheme from a
+publishing standpoint.  Just a week later, it was the 9th of March, a
+letter came--a thick letter bearing a Nevada postmark, and addressed in a
+handwriting which he presently recognized as De Quille's.  To a visitor
+who was present he said:
+
+"Now I will do a miracle.  I will tell you everything this letter
+contains--date, signature, and all without breaking the seal."
+
+He stated what he believed was in the letter.  Then he opened it and
+showed that he had correctly given its contents, which were the same in
+all essential details as those of his own letter, not yet mailed.
+
+In an article on "Mental Telegraphy" (he invented the name) he relates
+this instance, with others, and in 'Following the Equator' and elsewhere
+he records other such happenings.  It was one of the "mysteries" in which
+he never lost interest, though his concern in it in time became a passive
+one.
+
+The result of the De Quille manifestation, however, he has not recorded.
+Clemens immediately wrote, urging Dan to come to Hartford for an extended
+visit.  De Quille came, and put in a happy spring in his old comrade's
+luxurious home, writing 'The Big Bonanza', which Bliss successfully
+published a year later.
+
+Mark Twain was continually inviting old friends to share his success with
+him.  Any comrade of former days found welcome in his home as often as he
+would come, and for as long as he would stay.  Clemens dropped his own
+affairs to advise in their undertakings; and if their undertakings were
+literary he found them a publisher.  He did this for Joaquin Miller and
+for Bret Harte, and he was always urging Goodman to make his house a
+home.
+
+The Beecher-Tilton trial was the sensation of the spring of 1875, and
+Clemens, in common with many others, was greatly worked up over it.  The
+printed testimony had left him decidedly in doubt as to Beecher's
+innocence, though his blame would seem to have been less for the possible
+offense than because of the great leader's attitude in the matter.  To
+Twichell he said:
+
+"His quibbling was fatal.  Innocent or guilty, he should have made an
+unqualified statement in the beginning."
+
+Together they attended one of the sessions, on a day when Beecher himself
+was on the witness-stand.  The tension was very great; the excitement was
+painful.  Twichell thought that Beecher appeared well under the stress of
+examination and was deeply sorry for him; Clemens was far from convinced.
+
+The feeling was especially strong in Hartford, where Henry Ward Beecher's
+relatives were prominent, and animosities grew out of it.  They are all
+forgotten now; most of those who cherished bitterness are dead.  Any
+feeling that Clemens had in the matter lasted but a little while.
+Howells tells us that when he met him some months after the trial ended,
+and was tempted to mention it, Clemens discouraged any discussion of the
+event.  Says Howells:
+
+     He would only say the man had suffered enough; as if the man had
+     expiated his wrong, and he was not going to do anything to renew his
+     penalty.  I found that very curious, very delicate.  His continued
+     blame could not come to the sufferer's knowledge, but he felt it his
+     duty to forbear it.
+
+It was one hundred years, that 19th of April, since the battles of
+Lexington and Concord, and there was to be a great celebration.  The
+Howellses had visited Hartford in March, and the Clemenses were invited
+to Cambridge for the celebration.  Only Clemens could go, which in the
+event proved a good thing perhaps; for when Clemens and Howells set out
+for Concord they did not go over to Boston to take the train, but decided
+to wait for it at Cambridge.  Apparently it did not occur to them that
+the train would be jammed the moment the doors were opened at the Boston
+station; but when it came along they saw how hopeless was their chance.
+They had special invitations and passage from Boston, but these were only
+mockeries now.  It yeas cold and chilly, and they forlornly set out in
+search of some sort of a conveyance.  They tramped around in the mud and
+raw wind, but vehicles were either filled or engaged, and drivers and
+occupants were inclined to jeer at them.  Clemens was taken with an acute
+attack of indigestion, which made him rather dismal and savage.  Their
+effort finally ended with his trying to run down a tally-ho which was
+empty inside and had a party of Harvard students riding atop.  The
+students, who did not recognize their would-be fare, enjoyed the race.
+They encouraged their pursuer, and perhaps their driver, with merriment
+and cheers.  Clemens was handicapped by having to run in the slippery
+mud, and soon "dropped by the wayside."
+
+"I am glad," says Howells, "I cannot recall what he said when he came
+back to me."
+
+They hung about a little longer, then dragged themselves home, slipped
+into the house, and built up a fine, cheerful fire on the hearth.  They
+proposed to practise a deception on Mrs. Howells by pretending they had
+been to Concord and returned.  But it was no use.  Their statements were
+flimsy, and guilt was plainly written on their faces.  Howells recalls
+this incident delightfully, and expresses the belief that the humor of
+the situation was finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than the actual
+visit to Concord would have been.
+
+Twichell did not have any such trouble in attending the celebration.  He
+had adventures (he was always having adventures), but they were of a more
+successful kind.  Clemens heard the tale of them when he returned to
+Hartford.  He wrote it to Howells:
+
+     Joe Twichell preached morning and evening here last Sunday; took
+     midnight train for Boston; got an early breakfast and started by
+     rail at 7.30 A.M.  for Concord; swelled around there until 1 P.M.,
+     seeing everything; then traveled on top of a train to Lexington; saw
+     everything there; traveled on top of a train to Boston (with
+     hundreds in company), deluged with dust, smoke, and cinders; yelled
+     and hurrahed all the way like a school-boy; lay flat down, to dodge
+     numerous bridges, and sailed into the depot howling with excitement
+     and as black as a chimneysweep; got to Young's Hotel at 7 P.M.; sat
+     down in the reading-room and immediately fell asleep; was promptly
+     awakened by a porter, who supposed he was drunk; wandered around an
+     hour and a half; then took 9 P.M.  train, sat down in a smoking-car,
+     and remembered nothing more until awakened by conductor as the train
+     came into Hartford at 1.30 A.M.  Thinks he had simply a glorious
+     time, and wouldn't have missed the Centennial for the world.  He
+     would have run out to see us a moment at Cambridge but he was too
+     dirty.  I wouldn't have wanted him there; his appalling energy would
+     have been an insufferable reproach to mild adventurers like you and
+     me.
+
+
+
+
+CI
+
+CONCLUDING "TOM SAWYER"--MARK TWAIN's "EDITORS"
+
+Meantime the "inspiration tank," as Clemens sometimes called it, had
+filled up again.  He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the
+story of Tom and Huck, and was working on it steadily.  The family
+remained in Hartford, and early in July, under full head of steam, he
+brought the story to a close.  On the 5th he wrote Howells:
+
+     I have finished the story and didn't take the chap beyond boyhood.
+     I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but
+     autobiographically, like Gil Blas.  I perhaps made a mistake in not
+     writing it in the first person.  If I went on now, and took him into
+     manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in
+     literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him.
+     It is not a boy's book at all.  It will only be read by adults.  It
+     is only written for adults.
+
+He would like to see the story in the Atlantic, he said, but doubted the
+wisdom of serialization.
+
+"By and by I shall take a boy of twelve and run him through life (in the
+first person), but not Tam Sawyer, he would not make a good character for
+it."  From which we get the first glimpse of Huck's later adventures.
+
+Of course he wanted Howells to look at the story.  It was a tremendous
+favor to ask, he said, and added, "But I know of no other person whose
+judgment I could venture to take, fully and entirely.  Don't hesitate to
+say no, for I know how your time is taxed, and I would have honest need
+to blush if you said yes."
+
+"Send on your MS.," wrote Howells.  "You've no idea what I may ask you to
+do for me some day."
+
+But Clemens, conscience-stricken, "blushed and weakened," as he said.
+When Howells insisted, he wrote:
+
+     But I will gladly send it to you if you will do as follows:
+     dramatize it, if you perceive that you can, and take, for your
+     remuneration, half of the first $6,000 which I receive for its
+     representation on the stage.  You could alter the plot entirely if
+     you chose.  I could help in the work most cheerfully after you had
+     arranged the plot.  I have my eye upon two young girls who can play
+     Tom and Huck.
+
+Howells in his reply urged.  Clemens to do the playwriting himself.  He
+could never find time, he said, and he doubted whether he could enter
+into the spirit of another man's story.  Clemens did begin a
+dramatization then or a little later, but it was not completed.  Mrs.
+Clemens, to whom he had read the story as it proceeded, was as anxious as
+her husband for Howells's opinion, for it was the first extended piece of
+fiction Mark Twain had undertaken alone.  He carried the manuscript over
+to Boston himself, and whatever their doubts may have been, Howells's
+subsequent letter set them at rest.  He wrote that he had sat up till one
+in the morning to get to the end of it, simply because it was impossible
+to leave off.
+
+It is altogether the best boy story I ever read.  It will be an immense
+success, but I think you ought to treat it explicitly as a boy's story;
+grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do, and if you should put it
+forth as a story of boys' character from the grown-up point of view you
+give the wrong key to it.
+
+Viewed in the light of later events, there has never been any better
+literary opinion than that--none that has been more fully justified.
+
+Clemens was delighted.  He wrote concerning a point here and there, one
+inquiry referring to the use of a certain strong word.  Howells's reply
+left no doubt:
+
+     I'd have that swearing out in an instant.  I suppose I didn't notice
+     it because the location was so familiar to my Western sense, and so
+     exactly the thing Huck would say, but it won't do for children.
+
+It was in the last chapter, where Huck relates to Tom the sorrows of
+reform and tells how they comb him "all to thunder."  In the original,
+"They comb me all to hell," says Huck; which statement, one must agree,
+is more effective, more the thing Huck would be likely to say.
+
+Clemens's acknowledgment of the correction was characteristic:
+
+     Mrs. Clemens received the mail this morning, and the next minute she
+     lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her
+     tongue, "Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?"  Then I had
+     to miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to
+     her.  Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape
+     with my scalp.  Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go
+     a little one-sided?
+
+The Clemens family did not, go to Elmira that year.  The children's
+health seemed to require the sea-shore, and in August they went to
+Bateman's Point, Rhode Island, where Clemens most of the time played
+tenpins in an alley that had gone to ruin.  The balls would not stay on
+the track; the pins stood at inebriate angles.  It reminded him of the
+old billiard-tables of Western mining-camps, and furnished the same
+uncertainty of play.  It was his delight, after he had become accustomed
+to the eccentricities of the alley, to invite in a stranger and watch his
+suffering and his frantic effort to score.
+
+
+
+
+CII
+
+SKETCHES NEW AND OLD"
+
+The long-delayed book of Sketches, contracted for five years before, was
+issued that autumn.  "The Jumping Frog," which he had bought from Webb,
+was included in the volume, also the French translation which Madame
+Blanc (Th.  Bentzon) had made for the Revue des deux mondes, with Mark
+Twain's retranslation back into English, a most astonishing performance
+in its literal rendition of the French idiom.  One example will suffice
+here.  It is where the stranger says to Smiley, "I don't see no p'ints
+about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."
+
+Says the French, retranslated:
+
+"Eh bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each
+frog" (Je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait mieux qu'aucune
+grenouille).  (If that isn't grammar gone to seed then I count myself no
+judge.--M. T.)
+
+"Possible that you not it saw not," said Smiley; "possible that you you
+comprehend frogs; possible that you not you there comprehend nothing;
+possible that you had of the experience, and possible that you not be but
+an amateur.  Of all manner (de toute maniere) I bet forty dollars that
+she batter in jumping, no matter which frog of the county of Calaveras."
+
+He included a number of sketches originally published with the Frog, also
+a selection from the "Memoranda" and Buffalo Express contributions, and
+he put in the story of Auntie Cord, with some matter which had never
+hitherto appeared.  True Williams illustrated the book, but either it
+furnished him no inspiration or he was allowed too much of another sort,
+for the pictures do not compare with his earlier work.
+
+Among the new matter in the book were-"Some Fables for Good Old Boys and
+Girls," in which certain wood creatures are supposed to make a scientific
+excursion into a place at some time occupied by men.  It is the most
+pretentious feature of the book, and in its way about as good as any.
+Like Gulliver's Travels, its object was satire, but its result is also
+interest.
+
+Clemens was very anxious that Howells should be first to review this
+volume.  He had a superstition that Howells's verdicts were echoed by the
+lesser reviewers, and that a book was made or damned accordingly; a
+belief hardly warranted, for the review has seldom been written that
+meant to any book the difference between success and failure.  Howells's
+review of Sketches may be offered as a case in point.  It was highly
+commendatory, much more so than the notice of the 'Innocents' had been,
+or even that of 'Roughing It', also more extensive than the latter.  Yet
+after the initial sale of some twenty thousand copies, mainly on the
+strength of the author's reputation, the book made a comparatively poor
+showing, and soon lagged far behind its predecessors.
+
+We cannot judge, of course, the taste of that day, but it appears now an
+unattractive, incoherent volume.  The pictures were absurdly bad, the
+sketches were of unequal merit.  Many of them are amusing, some of them
+delightful, but most of them seem ephemeral.  If we except "The Jumping
+Frog," and possibly "A True Story" (and the latter was altogether out of
+place in the collection), there is no reason to suppose that any of its
+contents will escape oblivion.  The greater number of the sketches, as
+Mark Twain himself presently realized and declared, would better have
+been allowed to die.
+
+Howells did, however, take occasion to point out in his review, or at
+least to suggest, the more serious side of Mark Twain.  He particularly
+called attention to "A True Story," which the reviewers, at the time of
+its publication in the Atlantic, had treated lightly, fearing a lurking
+joke in it; or it may be they had not read it, for reviewers are busy
+people.  Howells spoke of it as the choicest piece of work in the volume,
+and of its "perfect fidelity to the tragic fact."  He urged the reader to
+turn to it again, and to read it as a "simple dramatic report of
+reality," such as had been equaled by no other American writer.
+
+It was in this volume of sketches that Mark Twain first spoke in print
+concerning copyright, showing the absurd injustice of discriminating
+against literary ownership by statute of limitation.  He did this in the
+form of an open petition to Congress, asking that all property, real and
+personal, should be put on the copyright basis, its period of ownership
+limited to a "beneficent term of forty-two years."  Generally this was
+regarded as a joke, as in a sense it was; but like most of Mark Twain's
+jokes it was founded on reason and justice.
+
+The approval with which it was received by his literary associates led
+him to still further flights.  He began a determined crusade for
+international copyright laws.  It was a transcendental beginning, but it
+contained the germ of what, in the course of time, he would be largely
+instrumental in bringing to a ripe and magnificent conclusion.  In this
+first effort he framed a petition to enact laws by which the United
+States would declare itself to be for right and justice, regardless of
+other nations, and become a good example to the world by refusing to
+pirate the books of any foreign author.  He wrote to Howells, urging him
+to get Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and others to sign this
+petition.
+
+I will then put a gentlemanly chap under wages, and send him personally
+to every author of distinction in the country and corral the rest of the
+signatures.  Then I'll have the whole thing lithographed (about one
+thousand copies), and move upon the President and Congress in person, but
+in the subordinate capacity of the party who is merely the agent of
+better and wiser men, or men whom the country cannot venture to laugh at.
+I will ask the President to recommend the thing in his message (and if he
+should ask me to sit down and frame the paragraph for him I should blush,
+but still I would frame it).  And then if Europe chooses to go on
+stealing from us we would say, with noble enthusiasm, "American lawmakers
+do steal, but not from foreign authors--not from foreign authors,"....
+If we only had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a
+sweat to get Him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.
+
+The petition never reached Congress.  Holmes agreed to sign it with a
+smile, and the comment that governments were not in the habit of setting
+themselves up as high moral examples, except for revenue.  Longfellow
+also pledged himself, as did a few others; but if there was any general
+concurrence in the effort there is no memory of it now.  Clemens
+abandoned the original idea, but remained one of the most persistent and
+influential advocates of copyright betterment, and lived to see most of
+his dream fulfilled. --[For the petition concerning copyright term in the
+United States, see Sketches New and Old.  For the petition concerning
+international copyright and related matters, see Appendix N, at the end
+of last volume.]
+
+
+
+
+CIII
+
+"ATLANTIC" DAYS
+
+It was about this period that Mark Twain began to exhibit openly his more
+serious side; that is to say his advocacy of public reforms.  His paper
+on "Universal Suffrage" had sounded a first note, and his copyright
+petitions were of the same spirit.  In later years he used to say that he
+had always felt it was his mission to teach, to carry the banner of moral
+reconstruction, and here at forty we find him furnishing evidences of
+this inclination.  In the Atlantic for October, 1875, there was published
+an unsigned three-page article entitled, "The Curious Republic of
+Gondour."  In this article was developed the idea that the voting
+privilege should be estimated not by the individuals, but by their
+intellectual qualifications.  The republic of Gondour was a Utopia, where
+this plan had been established:
+
+     It was an odd idea and ingenious.  You must understand the
+     constitution gave every man a vote; therefore that vote was a vested
+     right, and could not be taken away.  But the constitution did not
+     say that certain individuals might not be given two votes or ten.
+     So an amendatory clause was inserted in a quiet way, a clause which
+     authorized the enlargement of the suffrage in certain cases to be
+     specified by statute....
+
+     The victory was complete.  The new law was framed and passed.  Under
+     it every citizen, howsoever poor or ignorant, possessed one vote, so
+     universal suffrage still reigned; but if a man possessed a good
+     common-school education and no money he had two votes, a high-school
+     education gave him four; if he had property, likewise, to the value
+     of three thousand sacos he wielded one more vote; for every fifty
+     thousand sacos a man added to his property, he was entitled to
+     another vote; a University education entitled a man to nine votes,
+     even though he owned no property.
+
+The author goes on to show the beneficent results of this enaction; how
+the country was benefited and glorified by this stimulus toward
+enlightenment and industry.  No one ever suspected that Mark Twain was
+the author of this fable.  It contained almost no trace of his usual
+literary manner.  Nevertheless he wrote it, and only withheld his name,
+as he did in a few other instances, in the fear that the world might
+refuse to take him seriously over his own signature or nom de plume.
+
+Howells urged him to follow up the "Gondour" paper; to send some more
+reports from that model land.  But Clemens was engaged in other things by
+that time, and was not pledged altogether to national reforms.
+
+He was writing a skit about a bit of doggerel which was then making
+nights and days unhappy for many undeserving persons who in an evil
+moment had fallen upon it in some stray newspaper corner.  A certain car
+line had recently adopted the "punch system," and posted in its cars, for
+the information of passengers and conductor, this placard:
+
+A Blue Trip Slip for an 8 Cents Fare,
+A Buff Trip Slip for a 6 Cents Fare,
+A Pink Trip Slip for a 3 Cents Fare,
+For Coupon And Transfer, Punch The Tickets.
+
+Noah Brooks and Isaac Bromley were riding down-town one evening on the
+Fourth Avenue line, when Bromley said:
+
+"Brooks, it's poetry.  By George, it's poetry!"
+
+Brooks followed the direction of Bromley's finger and read the card of
+instructions.  They began perfecting the poetic character of the notice,
+giving it still more of a rhythmic twist and jingle; arrived at the
+Tribune office, W. C. Wyckoff, scientific editor, and Moses P. Handy lent
+intellectual and poetic assistance, with this result:
+
+          Conductor, when you receive a fare,
+
+          Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
+          A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,
+          A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,
+          A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare.
+          Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
+
+     CHORUS
+          Punch, brothers!  Punch with care!
+          Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
+
+It was printed, and street-car poetry became popular.  Different papers
+had a turn at it, and each usually preceded its own effort with all other
+examples, as far as perpetrated.  Clemens discovered the lines, and on
+one of their walks recited them to Twichell.  "A Literary Nightmare" was
+written a few days later.  In it the author tells how the jingle took
+instant and entire possession of him and went waltzing through his brain;
+how, when he had finished his breakfast, he couldn't tell whether he had
+eaten anything or not; and how, when he went to finish the novel he was
+writing, and took up his pen, he could only get it to say:
+
+Punch in the presence of the passenjare.
+
+He found relief at last in telling it to his reverend friend, that is,
+Twichell, upon whom he unloaded it with sad results.
+
+It was an amusing and timely skit, and is worth reading to-day.  Its
+publication in the Atlantic had the effect of waking up horse-car poetry
+all over the world.  Howells, going to dine at Ernest Longfellow's the
+day following its appearance, heard his host and Tom Appleton urging each
+other to "Punch with care."  The Longfellow ladies had it by heart.
+Boston was devastated by it.  At home, Howells's children recited it to
+him in chorus.  The streets were full of it; in Harvard it became an
+epidemic.
+
+It was transformed into other tongues.  Even Swinburne, the musical, is
+said to have done a French version for the 'Revue des deux mondes'.*  A
+St. Louis magazine, The Western, found relief in a Latin anthem with this
+chorus:
+
+Pungite, fratres, pungite,
+Pungite cum amore,
+Pungite pro vectore,
+Diligentissime pungite.
+
+
+                    * LE CHANT DU CONDUCTEUR
+
+               Ayant ete paye, le conducteur
+               Percera en pleine vue du voyageur,
+               Quand il regoit trois sous un coupon vert,
+               Un coupon jaune pour six sous c'est 1'affaire,
+               Et pour huit sous c'est un coupon couleur
+               De rose, en pleine vue du voyageur.
+
+          CHOEUR
+               Donc, percez soigneusement, mes freres
+               Tout en pleine vue des voyageurs, etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+CIV
+
+MARK TWAIN AND HIS WIFE
+
+Clemens and his wife traveled to Boston for one of those happy fore-
+gatherings with the Howellses, which continued, at one end of the journey
+or another, for so many years.  There was a luncheon with Longfellow at
+Craigie House, and, on the return to Hartford, Clemens reported to
+Howells how Mrs. Clemens had thrived on the happiness of the visit.  Also
+he confesses his punishment for the usual crimes:
+
+     I "caught it" for letting Mrs. Howells bother and bother about her
+     coffee, when it was a "good deal better than we get at home."  I
+     "caught it" for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment and losing
+     her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that MS.
+     when the printers are done with it.  I "caught it" once more for
+     personating that drunken Colonel James.  I "caught it" for
+     mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and
+     when, after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I
+     had privately suggested to you that we hadn't any frames, and that
+     if you wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the
+     madam was simply speechless for the space of a minute.  Then she
+     said:
+
+     "How could you, Youth!  The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his
+     sensitive nature, upon such a repulsive er--"
+
+     "Oh, Howells won't mind it!  You don't know Howells.  Howells is a
+     man who--"
+
+     She was gone.  But George was the first person she stumbled on in
+     the hall, so she took it out of George.  I am glad of that, because
+     it saved the babies.
+
+Clemens used to admit, at a later day, that his education did not advance
+by leaps and bounds, but gradually, very gradually; and it used to give
+him a pathetic relief in those after-years, when that sweet presence had
+gone out of his life, to tell the way of it, to confess over-fully,
+perhaps, what a responsibility he had been to her.
+
+He used to tell how, for a long time, he concealed his profanity from
+her; how one morning, when he thought the door was shut between their
+bedroom and the bathroom, he was in there dressing and shaving,
+accompanying these trying things with language intended only for the
+strictest privacy; how presently, when he discovered a button off the
+shirt he intended to put on, he hurled it through the window into the
+yard with appropriate remarks, followed it with another shirt that was in
+the same condition, and added certain collars and neckties and bath-room
+requisites, decorating the shrubbery outside, where the people were going
+by to church; how in this extreme moment he heard a slight cough and
+turned to find that the door was open!  There was only one door to the
+bath-room, and he knew he had to pass her.  He felt pale and sick, and
+sat down for a few moments to consider.  He decided to assume that she
+was asleep, and to walk out and through the room, head up, as if he had
+nothing on his conscience.  He attempted it, but without success.  Half-
+way across the room he heard a voice suddenly repeat his last terrific
+remark.  He turned to see her sitting up in bed, regarding him with a
+look as withering as she could find in her gentle soul.  The humor of it
+struck him.
+
+"Livy," he said, "did it sound like that?"
+
+"Of course it did," she said, "only worse.  I wanted you to hear just how
+it sounded."
+
+"Livy," he said, "it would pain me to think that when I swear it sounds
+like that.  You got the words right, Livy, but you don't know the tune."
+
+Yet he never willingly gave her pain, and he adored her and gloried in
+her dominion, his life long.  Howells speaks of his beautiful and tender
+loyalty to her as the "most moving quality of his most faithful soul."
+
+It was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives,
+and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all
+the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character.
+
+She guarded his work sacredly; and reviewing the manuscripts which he was
+induced to discard, and certain edited manuscripts, one gets a partial
+idea of what the reading world owes to Olivia Clemens.  Of the discarded.
+manuscripts (he seems seldom to have destroyed them) there are a
+multitude, and among them all scarcely one that is not a proof of her
+sanity and high regard for his literary honor.  They are amusing--some of
+them; they are interesting--some of them; they are strong and virile--
+some of them; but they are unworthy--most of them, though a number remain
+unfinished because theme or interest failed.
+
+Mark Twain was likely to write not wisely but too much, piling up
+hundreds of manuscript pages only because his brain was thronging as with
+a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of darting, flashing ideas demanding
+release.  As often as not he began writing with only a nebulous idea of
+what he proposed to do.  He would start with a few characters and
+situations, trusting in Providence to supply material as needed.  So he
+was likely to run ashore any time.  As for those other attempts--stories
+"unavailable" for one reason or another--he was just as apt to begin
+those as the better sort, for somehow he could never tell the difference.
+That is one of the hall-marks of genius--the thing which sharply
+differentiates genius from talent.  Genius is likely to rate a literary
+disaster as its best work.  Talent rarely makes that mistake.
+
+Among the abandoned literary undertakings of these early years of
+authorship there is the beginning of what was doubtless intended to
+become a book, "The Second Advent," a story which opens with a very
+doubtful miraculous conception in Arkansas, and leads only to grotesquery
+and literary disorder.  There is another, " The Autobiography of a Damn
+Fool," a burlesque on family history, hopelessly impossible; yet he began
+it with vast enthusiasm and, until he allowed her to see the manuscript,
+thought it especially good.  "Livy wouldn't have it," he said, "so I gave
+it up."  There is another, "The Mysterious Chamber," strong and fine in
+conception, vividly and intensely interesting; the story of a young lover
+who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old castle and
+cannot announce himself.  He wanders at last down into subterranean
+passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation for twenty
+years.  The question of sustenance was the weak point in the story.
+Clemens could invent no way of providing it, except by means of a waste
+or conduit from the kitchen into which scraps of meat, bread, and other
+items of garbage were thrown.  This he thought sufficient, but Mrs.
+Clemens did not highly regard such a literary device.  Clemens could
+think of no good way to improve upon it, so this effort too was consigned
+to the penal colony, a set of pigeonholes kept in his study.  To Howells
+and others, when they came along, he would read the discarded yarns, and
+they were delightful enough for such a purpose, as delightful as the
+sketches which every artist has, turned face to the wall.
+
+"Captain Stormfield" lay under the ban for many a year, though never
+entirely abandoned.  This manuscript was even recommended for publication
+by Howells, who has since admitted that it would not have done then; and
+indeed, in its original, primitive nakedness it would hardly have done
+even in this day of wider toleration.
+
+It should be said here that there is not the least evidence (and the
+manuscripts are full of evidence) that Mrs. Clemens was ever super-
+sensitive, or narrow, or unliterary in her restraints.  She became his
+public, as it were, and no man ever had a more open-minded, clear-headed
+public than that.  For Mark Twain's reputation it would have been better
+had she exercised her editorial prerogative even more actively--if, in
+her love for him and her jealousy of his reputation, she had been even
+more severe.  She did all that lay in her strength, from the beginning to
+the end, and if we dwell upon this phase of their life together it is
+because it is so large a part of Mark Twain's literary story.  On her
+birthday in the year we are now closing (1875) he wrote her a letter
+which conveys an acknowledgment of his debt.
+
+LIVY DARLING,--Six years have gone by since I made my first great success
+in life and won you, and thirty years have passed since Providence made
+preparation for that happy success by sending you into the world.  Every
+day we live together adds to the security of my confidence that we can
+never any more wish to be separated than we can imagine a regret that we
+were ever joined.  You are dearer to me to-day, my child, than you were
+upon the last anniversary of this birthday; you were dearer then than you
+were a year before; you have grown more and more dear from the first of
+those anniversaries, and I do not doubt that this precious progression
+will continue on to the end.
+
+Let us look forward to the coming anniversaries, with their age and their
+gray hairs, without fear and without depression, trusting and believing
+that the love we bear each other will be sufficient to make them blessed.
+
+So, with abounding affection for you and our babies I hail this day that
+brings you the matronly grace and dignity of three decades!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext Volume I, Part 2 of MARK TWAIN,
+A BIOGRAPHY, 1866-1875 by Albert Bigelow Paine
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Mark Twain, Biography, 1866-75, by Paine
+#2 in our series by Albert Bigelow Paine
+
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+Title: Mark Twain, A Biography, 1866-1875
+
+Author: Albert Bigelow Paine
+
+Release Date: December, 2001  [Etext #2983]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext Mark Twain, Biography, 1866-1875, by Paine
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+
+VOLUME I, Part 2: 1866-1875
+
+
+
+LIV
+
+THE LECTURER
+
+It was not easy to take up the daily struggle again, but it was
+necessary.--[Clemens once declared he had been so blue at this period
+that one morning he put a loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked
+courage to pull the trigger.]--Out of the ruck of possibilities (his
+brain always thronged with plans) he constructed three or four resolves.
+The chief of these was the trip around the world; but that lay months
+ahead, and in the mean time ways and means must be provided.  Another
+intention was to finish the Hornet article, and forward it to Harper's
+Magazine--a purpose carried immediately into effect.  To his delight the
+article found acceptance, and he looked forward to the day of its
+publication as the beginning of a real career.  He intended to follow it
+up with a series on the islands, which in due time might result in a book
+and an income.  He had gone so far as to experiment with a dedication for
+the book--an inscription to his mother, modified later for use in 'The
+Innocents Abroad'.  A third plan of action was to take advantage of the
+popularity of the Hawaiian letters, and deliver a lecture on the same
+subject.  But this was a fearsome prospect--he trembled when he thought
+of it.  As Governor of the Third House he had been extravagantly received
+and applauded, but in that case the position of public entertainer had
+been thrust upon him.  To come forward now, offering himself in the same
+capacity, was a different matter.  He believed he could entertain, but he
+lacked the courage to declare himself; besides, it meant a risk of his
+slender capital.  He confided his situation to Col. John McComb, of the
+Alta California, and was startled by McComb's vigorous endorsement.
+
+"Do it, by all means!" urged McComb.  "It will be a grand success--I know
+it!  Take the largest house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket."
+
+Frightened but resolute, he went to the leading theater manager the same
+Tom Maguire of his verses--and was offered the new opera-house at half
+rates.  The next day this advertisement appeared:
+
+                       MAGUIRE'S ACADEMY OF MUSIC
+                      PINE STREET, NEAR MONTGOMERY
+
+                          THE SANDWICH ISLANDS
+
+                               MARK TWAIN
+
+            (HONOLULU CORRESPONDENT OF THE SACRAMENTO UNION)
+                             WILL DELIVER A
+                    LECTURE ON THE SANDWICH ISLANDS
+
+                        AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC
+                      ON TUESDAY EVENING, OCT. 2d
+                                 (1866)
+
+  In which passing mention will be made of Harris, Bishop Staley, the
+American missionaries, etc., and the absurd customs and characteristics
+   of the natives duly discussed and described.  The great volcano of
+              Kilauea will also receive proper attention.
+
+                          A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA
+                  is in town, but has not been engaged
+                                  ALSO
+                     A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS
+                will be on exhibition in the next block
+                         MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS
+were in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been abandoned
+                     A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION
+ may be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to expect whatever
+                              they please.
+
+                Dress Circle, $1.00   Family Circle, 50c
+      Doors open at 7 o'clock   The Trouble to begin at 8 o'clock
+
+
+The story of that first lecture, as told in Roughing It, is a faithful
+one, and need only be summarized here.
+
+Expecting to find the house empty, he found it packed from the footlights
+to the walls.  Sidling out from the wings--wobbly-kneed and dry of
+tongue--he was greeted by a murmur, a roar, a very crash of applause that
+frightened away his remaining vestiges of courage.  Then, came reaction--
+these were his friends, and he began to talk to them.  Fear melted away,
+and as tide after tide of applause rose and billowed and came breaking at
+his feet, he knew something of the exaltation of Monte Cristo when he
+declared "The world is mine!"
+
+It was a vast satisfaction to have succeeded.  It was particularly
+gratifying at this time, for he dreaded going back into newspaper
+harness.  Also; it softened later the disappointment resulting from
+another venture; for when the December Harper appeared, with his article,
+the printer and proof-reader had somehow converted Mark Twain into "Mark
+Swain," and his literary dream perished.
+
+As to the literary value of his lecture, it was much higher than had,
+been any portion of his letters, if we may judge from its few remaining
+fragments.  One of these--a part of the description of the great volcano
+Haleakala, on the island of Maui--is a fair example of his eloquence.
+
+It is somewhat more florid than his later description of the same scene
+in Roughing It, which it otherwise resembles; and we may imagine that its
+poetry, with the added charm of its delivery, held breathless his
+hearers, many of whom believed that no purer eloquence had ever been
+uttered or written.
+
+It is worth remembering, too, that in this lecture, delivered so long
+ago, he advocated the idea of American ownership of these islands,
+dwelling at considerable length on his reasons for this ideal.
+
+--[For fragmentary extracts from this first lecture of Mark Twain and
+news comment, see Appendix D, end of last volume.]--
+
+There was a gross return from his venture of more than $1,200, but with
+his usual business insight, which was never foresight, he had made an
+arrangement by which, after paying bills and dividing with his manager,
+he had only about one-third of, this sum left.  Still, even this was
+prosperity and triumph.  He had acquired a new and lucrative profession
+at a bound.  The papers lauded him as the "most piquant and humorous
+writer and lecturer on the Coast since the days of the lamented John
+Phoenix."  He felt that he was on the highroad at last.
+
+Denis McCarthy, late of the Enterprise, was in San Francisco, and was
+willing to become his manager.  Denis was capable and honest, and Clemens
+was fond of him.  They planned a tour of the near-by towns, beginning
+with Sacramento, extending it later even to the mining camps, such as Red
+Dog and Grass Valley; also across into Nevada, with engagements at Carson
+City, Virginia, and Gold Hill.  It was an exultant and hilarious
+excursion--that first lecture tour made by Denis McCarthy and Mark Twain.
+Success traveled with them everywhere, whether the lecturer looked across
+the footlights of some pretentious "opera-house" or between the two
+tallow candles of some camp "academy."  Whatever the building, it was
+packed, and the returns were maximum.
+
+Those who remember him as a lecturer in that long-ago time say that his
+delivery was more quaint, his drawl more exaggerated, even than in later
+life; that his appearance and movements on the stage were natural, rather
+than graceful; that his manuscript, which he carried under his arm,
+looked like a ruffled hen.  It was, in fact, originally written on sheets
+of manila paper, in large characters, so that it could be read easily by
+dim light, and it was doubtless often disordered.
+
+There was plenty of amusing experience on this tour.  At one place, when
+the lecture was over, an old man came to him and said:
+
+"Be them your natural tones of eloquence?"
+
+At Grass Valley there was a rival show, consisting of a lady tight-rope
+walker and her husband.  It was a small place, and the tight-rope
+attraction seemed likely to fail.  The lady's husband had formerly been a
+compositor on the Enterprise, so that he felt there was a bond of
+brotherhood between him and Mark Twain.
+
+"Look here," he said.  "Let's combine our shows.  I'll let my wife do the
+tight-rope act outside and draw a crowd, and you go inside and lecture."
+
+The arrangement was not made.
+
+Following custom, the lecturer at first thought it necessary to be
+introduced, and at each place McCarthy had to skirmish around and find
+the proper person.  At Red Dog, on the Stanislaus, the man selected
+failed to appear, and Denis had to provide another on short notice.
+He went down into the audience and captured an old fellow, who ducked and
+dodged but could not escape.  Denis led him to the stage, a good deal
+frightened.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "this is the celebrated Mark Twain from
+the celebrated city of San Francisco, with his celebrated lecture about
+the celebrated Sandwich Islands."
+
+That was as far as he could go; but it was far enough.  Mark Twain never
+had a better introduction.  The audience was in a shouting humor from the
+start.
+
+Clemens himself used to tell of an introduction at another camp, where
+his sponsor said:
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen, I know only two things about this man: the first
+is that he's never been in jail, and the second is I don't know why."
+
+But this is probably apocryphal; there is too much "Mark Twain" in it.
+
+When he reached Virginia, Goodman said to him:
+
+"Sam, you do not need anybody to introduce you.  There's a piano on the
+stage in the theater.  Have it brought out in sight, and when the curtain
+rises you be seated at the piano, playing and singing that song of yours,
+'I Had an Old Horse Whose Name Was Methusalem,' and don't seem to notice
+that the curtain is up at first; then be surprised when you suddenly find
+out that it is up, and begin talking, without any further preliminaries."
+
+This proved good advice, and the lecture, thus opened, started off with
+general hilarity and applause.
+
+
+
+
+LV
+
+HIGHWAY ROBBERY
+
+His Nevada, lectures were bound to be immensely successful.  The people
+regarded him as their property over there, and at Carson and Virginia the
+houses overflowed.  At Virginia especially his friends urged and begged
+him to repeat the entertainment, but he resolutely declined.
+
+"I have only one lecture yet," he said.  "I cannot bring myself to give
+it twice in the same town."
+
+But that irresponsible imp, Steve Gillis, who was again in Virginia,
+conceived a plan which would make it not only necessary for him to
+lecture again, but would supply him with a subject.  Steve's plan was
+very simple: it was to relieve the lecturer of his funds by a friendly
+highway robbery, and let an account of the adventure furnish the new
+lecture.
+
+In 'Roughing It' Mark Twain has given a version of this mock robbery
+which is correct enough as far as it goes; but important details are
+lacking.  Only a few years ago (it was April, 1907), in his cabin on
+jackass Hill, with Joseph Goodman and the writer of this history present,
+Steve Gillis made his "death-bed" confession as is here set down:
+
+"Mark's lecture was given in Piper's Opera House, October 30, 1866.  The
+Virginia City people had heard many famous lectures before, but they were
+mere sideshows compared with Mark's.  It could have been run to crowded
+houses for a week.  We begged him to give the common people a chance; but
+he refused to repeat himself.  He was going down to Carson, and was
+coming back to talk in Gold Hill about a week later, and his agent, Denis
+McCarthy, and I laid a plan to have him robbed on the Divide between Gold
+Hill and Virginia, after the Gold Hill lecture was over and he and Denis
+would be coming home with the money.  The Divide was a good lonely place,
+and was famous for its hold-ups.  We got City Marshal George Birdsall
+into it with us, and took in Leslie Blackburn, Pat Holland, Jimmy
+Eddington, and one or two more of Sam's old friends.  We all loved him,
+and would have fought for him in a moment.  That's the kind of friends
+Mark had in Nevada.  If he had any enemies I never heard of them.
+
+"We didn't take in Dan de Quille, or Joe here, because Sam was Joe's
+guest, and we were afraid he would tell him.  We didn't take in Dan
+because we wanted him to write it up as a genuine robbery and make a big
+sensation.  That would pack the opera-house at two dollars a seat to hear
+Mark tell the story.
+
+"Well, everything went off pretty well.  About the time Mark was
+finishing his lecture in Gold Hill the robbers all went up on the Divide
+to wait, but Mark's audience gave him a kind of reception after his
+lecture, and we nearly froze to death up there before he came along.
+By and by I went back to see what was the matter.  Sam and Denis were
+coming, and carrying a carpet-sack about half full of silver between
+them.  I shadowed them and blew a policeman's whistle as a signal to the
+boys when the lecturers were within about a hundred yards of the place.
+I heard Sam say to Denis:
+
+"'I'm glad they've got a policeman on the Divide.  They never had one in
+my day.'
+
+"Just about that time the boys, all with black masks on and silver
+dollars at the sides of their tongues to disguise their voices, stepped
+out and stuck six-shooters at Sam and Denis and told them to put up their
+hands.  The robbers called each other 'Beauregard' and 'Stonewall
+Jackson.'  Of course Denis's hands went up, and Mark's, too, though Mark
+wasn't a bit scared or excited.  He talked to the robbers in his regular
+fashion.  He said:
+
+"'Don't flourish those pistols so promiscuously.  They might go off by
+accident.'
+
+"They told him to hand over his watch and money; but when he started to
+take his hands down they made him put them up again.  Then he asked how
+they expected him to give them his valuables with his hands up in the
+sky.  He said his treasures didn't lie in heaven.  He told them not to
+take his watch, which was the one Sandy Baldwin and Theodore Winters had
+given him as Governor of the Third House, but we took it all the same.
+
+"Whenever he started to put his hands down we made him put them up again.
+Once he said:
+
+"'Don't you fellows be so rough.  I was tenderly reared.'
+
+"Then we told him and Denis to keep their hands up for fifteen minutes
+after we were gone--this was to give us time to get back to Virginia and
+be settled when they came along.  As we were going away Mark called:
+
+"'Say, you forgot something.'
+
+"'What is it?'
+
+"Why, the carpet-bag.'
+
+"He was cool all the time.  Senator Bill Stewart, in his Autobiography,
+tells a great story of how scared Mark was, and how he ran; but Stewart
+was three thousand miles from Virginia by that time, and later got mad at
+Mark because he made a joke about him in 'Roughing It'.
+
+"Denis wanted to take his hands down pretty soon after we were gone, but
+Mark said:
+
+"'No, Denis, I'm used to obeying orders when they are given in that
+convincing way; we'll just keep our hands up another fifteen minutes or
+so for good measure.'
+
+"We were waiting in a big saloon on C Street when Mark and Denis came
+along.  We knew they would come in, and we expected Mark would be
+excited; but he was as unruffled as a mountain lake.  He told us they had
+been robbed, and asked me if I had any money.  I gave him a hundred
+dollars of his own money, and he ordered refreshments for everybody.
+Then we adjourned to the Enterprise office, where he offered a reward,
+and Dan de Quille wrote up the story and telegraphed it to the other
+newspapers.  Then somebody suggested that Mark would have to give another
+lecture now, and that the robbery would make a great subject.  He entered
+right into the thing, and next day we engaged Piper's Opera House, and
+people were offering five dollars apiece for front seats.  It would have
+been the biggest thing that ever came to Virginia if it had come off.
+"But we made a mistake, then, by taking Sandy Baldwin into the joke.  We
+took in Joe here, too, and gave him the watch and money to keep, which
+made it hard for Joe afterward.  But it was Sandy Baldwin that ruined us.
+He had Mark out to dinner the night before the show was to come off, and
+after he got well warmed up with champagne he thought it would be a smart
+thing to let Mark into what was really going on.
+
+"Mark didn't see it our way.  He was mad clear through."
+
+At this point Joseph Goodman took up the story.  He said:
+
+"Those devils put Sam's money, watch, keys, pencils, and all his things
+into my hands.  I felt particularly mean at being made accessory to the
+crime, especially as Sam was my guest, and I had grave doubts as to how
+he would take it when he found out the robbery was not genuine.
+
+"I felt terribly guilty when he said:
+
+"'Joe, those d--n thieves took my keys, and I can't get into my trunk.
+Do you suppose you could get me a key that would fit my trunk?'
+
+"I said I thought I could during the day, and after Sam had gone I took
+his own key, put it in the fire and burnt it to make it look black.  Then
+I took a file and scratched it here and there, to make it look as if I
+had been fitting it to the lock, feeling guilty all the time, like a man
+who is trying to hide a murder.  Sam did not ask for his key that day,
+and that evening he was invited to judge Baldwin's to dinner.  I thought
+he looked pretty silent and solemn when he came home; but he only said:
+
+"'Joe, let's play cards; I don't feel sleepy.'
+
+"Steve here, and two or three of the other boys who had been active in
+the robbery, were present, and they did not like Sam's manner, so they
+excused themselves and left him alone with me.  We played a good while;
+then he said:
+
+"'Joe, these cards are greasy.  I have got some new ones in my trunk.
+Did you get that key to-day?'
+
+"I fished out that burnt, scratched-up key with fear and trembling.  But
+he didn't seem to notice it at all, and presently returned with the
+cards.  Then we played, and played, and played--till one o'clock--two
+o'clock--Sam hardly saying a word, and I wondering what was going to
+happen.  By and by he laid down his cards and looked at me, and said:
+
+"'Joe, Sandy Baldwin told me all about that robbery to-night.  Now, Joe,
+I have found out that the law doesn't recognize a joke, and I am going to
+send every one of those fellows to the penitentiary.'
+
+"He said it with such solemn gravity, and such vindictiveness, that I
+believed he was in dead earnest.
+
+"I know that I put in two hours of the hardest work I ever did, trying to
+talk him out of that resolution.  I used all the arguments about the boys
+being his oldest friends; how they all loved him, and how the joke had
+been entirely for his own good; I pleaded with him, begged him to
+reconsider; I went and got his money and his watch and laid them on the
+table; but for a time it seemed hopeless.  And I could imagine those
+fellows going behind the bars, and the sensation it would make in
+California; and just as I was about to give it up he said:
+
+"'Well, Joe, I'll let it pass--this time; I'll forgive them again; I've
+had to do it so many times; but if I should see Denis McCarthy and Steve
+Gillis mounting the scaffold to-morrow, and I could save them by turning
+over my hand, I wouldn't do it!'
+
+"He canceled the lecture engagement, however, next morning, and the day
+after left on the Pioneer Stage, by the way of Donner Lake, for
+California.  The boys came rather sheepishly to see him off; but he would
+make no show of relenting.  When they introduced themselves as
+Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, etc., he merely said:
+
+"'Yes, and you'll all be behind the bars some day.  There's been a good
+deal of robbery around here lately, and it's pretty clear now who did
+it.'  They handed him a package containing the masks which the robbers
+had worn.  He received it in gloomy silence; but as the stage drove away
+he put his head out of the window, and after some pretty vigorous
+admonition resumed his old smile, and called out: 'Good-by, friends;
+good-by, thieves; I bear you no malice.'  So the heaviest joke was on his
+tormentors after all."
+
+This is the story of the famous Mark Twain robbery direct from
+headquarters.  It has been garbled in so many ways that it seems worth
+setting down in full.  Denis McCarthy, who joined him presently in San
+Francisco, received a little more punishment there.
+
+"What kind of a trip did you boys have?" a friend asked of them.
+
+Clemens, just recovering from a cold which the exposure on the Divide had
+given him, smiled grimly:
+
+"Oh, pretty good, only Denis here mistook it for a spree."
+
+He lectured again in San Francisco, this time telling the story of his
+Overland trip in 1861, and he did the daring thing of repeating three
+times the worn-out story of Horace Greeley's ride with Hank Monk, as
+given later in 'Roughing It'.  People were deadly tired of that story out
+there, and when he told it the first time, with great seriousness, they
+thought he must be failing mentally.  They did not laugh--they only felt
+sorry.  He waited a little, as if expecting a laugh, and presently led
+around to it and told it again.  The audience was astonished still more,
+and pitied him thoroughly.  He seemed to be waiting pathetically in the
+dead silence for their applause, then went on with his lecture; but
+presently, with labored effort, struggled around to the old story again,
+and told it for the third time.  The audience suddenly saw the joke then,
+and became vociferous and hysterical in their applause; but it was a
+narrow escape.  He would have been hysterical himself if the relief had
+not came when it did.
+
+--[A side-light on the Horace Greeley story and on Mr. Greeley's
+eccentricities is furnished by Mr. Goodman:
+
+When I was going East in 1869 I happened to see Hank Monk just before I
+started.  "Mr. Goodman," he said, "you tell Horace Greeley that I want to
+come East, and ask him to send me a pass."  "All right, Hank," I said,
+"I will."  It happened that when I got to New York City one of the first
+men I met was Greeley.  "Mr. Greeley," said, "I have a message for you
+from Hank Monk."  Greeley bristled and glared at me.  "That--rascal?" he
+said, "He has done me more injury than any other man in America."]
+
+
+
+
+LVI
+
+BACK TO THE STATES
+
+In the mean time Clemens had completed his plan for sailing, and had
+arranged with General McComb, of the Alta California, for letters during
+his proposed trip around the world.  However, he meant to visit his
+people first, and his old home.  He could go back with means now, and
+with the prestige of success.
+
+"I sail to-morrow per Opposition--telegraphed you to-day," he wrote on
+December 14th, and a day later his note-book entry says:
+
+     Sailed from San Francisco in Opposition (line) steamer America,
+     Capt.  Wakeman, at noon, 15th Dec., 1866.  Pleasant sunny day, hills
+     brightly clad with green grass and shrubbery.
+
+So he was really going home at last!  He had been gone five and a half
+years--eventful, adventurous years that had made him over completely, at
+least so far as ambitions and equipment were concerned.  He had came
+away, in his early manhood, a printer and a pilot, unknown outside of his
+class.  He was returning a man of thirty-one, with a fund of hard
+experience, three added professions--mining, journalism, and lecturing--
+also with a new name, already famous on the sunset slopes of its
+adoption, and beginning to be heard over the hills and far away.  In some
+degree, at least, he resembled the prince of a fairy tale who, starting
+out humble and unnoticed, wins his way through a hundred adventures and
+returns with gifts and honors.
+
+The homeward voyage was a notable one.  It began with a tempest a little
+way out of San Francisco--a storm terrible but brief, that brought the
+passengers from their berths to the deck, and for a time set them
+praying.  Then there was Captain Ned Wakeman, a big, burly, fearless
+sailor, who had visited the edges of all continents and archipelagos; who
+had been born at sea, and never had a day's schooling in his life, but
+knew the Bible by heart; who was full of human nature and profanity, and
+believed he was the only man on the globe who knew the secret of the
+Bible miracles.  He became a distinct personality in Mark Twain's work--
+the memory of him was an unfailing delight.  Captain "Ned Blakely," in
+'Roughing It', who with his own hands hanged Bill Noakes, after reading
+him promiscuous chapters from the Bible, was Captain Wakeman.  Captain
+"Stormfield," who had the marvelous visit to heaven, was likewise Captain
+Wakeman; and he appears in the "Idle Excursion" and elsewhere.
+
+Another event of the voyage was crossing the Nicaragua Isthmus--the trip
+across the lake and down the San Juan River--a, brand-new experience,
+between shores of splendid tropic tangle, gleaming with vivid life.  The
+luxuriance got into his note-book.
+
+Dark grottos, fairy festoons, tunnels, temples, columns, pillars, towers,
+pilasters, terraces, pyramids, mounds, domes, walls, in endless confusion
+of vine-work--no shape known to architecture unimitated--and all so
+webbed together that short distances within are only gained by glimpses.
+Monkeys here and there; birds warbling; gorgeous plumaged birds on the
+wing; Paradise itself, the imperial realm of beauty-nothing to wish for
+to make it perfect.
+
+But it was beyond the isthmus that the voyage loomed into proportions
+somber and terrible.  The vessel they took there, the San Francisco,
+sailed from Greytown January 1, 1867, the beginning of a memorable year
+in Mark Twain's life.  Next day two cases of Asiatic cholera were
+reported in the steerage.  There had been a rumor of it in Nicaragua, but
+no one expected it on the ship.
+
+The nature of the disease was not hinted at until evening, when one of
+the men died.  Soon after midnight, the other followed.  A minister
+making the voyage home, Rev. J. G. Fackler, read the burial service.  The
+gaiety of the passengers, who had become well acquainted during the
+Pacific voyage, was subdued.  When the word "cholera" went among them,
+faces grew grave and frightened.  On the morning of January 4th Reverend
+Fackler's services were again required.  The dead man was put overboard
+within half an hour after he had ceased to breathe.
+
+Gloom settled upon the ship.  All steam was made to put into Key West.
+Then some of the machinery gave way and the ship lay rolling, helplessly
+becalmed in the fierce heat of the Gulf, while repairs were being made.
+The work was done at a disadvantage, and the parts did not hold.  Time
+and again they were obliged to lie to, in the deadly tropic heat,
+listening to the hopeless hammering, wondering who would be the next to
+be sewed up hastily in a blanket and slipped over the ship's side.  On
+the 5th seven new cases of illness were reported.  One of the crew, a man
+called "Shape," was said to be dying.  A few hours later he was dead.  By
+this time the Reverend Fackler himself had been taken.
+
+"So they are burying poor 'Shape' without benefit of clergy," says the
+note-book.
+
+General consternation now began to prevail.  Then it was learned that the
+ship's doctor had run out of medicines.  The passengers became
+demoralized.  They believed their vessel was to become a charnel ship.
+Strict sanitary orders were issued, and a hospital was improvised.
+
+     Verily the ship is becoming a floating hospital herself--not an hour
+     passes but brings its fresh sensation, its new disaster, its
+     melancholy tidings.  When I think of poor "Shape" and the preacher,
+     both so well when I saw them yesterday evening, I realize that I
+     myself may be dead to-morrow.
+
+     Since the last two hours all laughter, all levity, has ceased on the
+     ship--a settled gloom is upon the faces of the passengers.
+
+By noon it was evident that the minister could not survive.  He died at
+two o'clock next morning; the fifth victim in less than five days.  The
+machinery continued to break and the vessel to drag.  The ship's doctor
+confessed to Clemens that he was helpless.  There were eight patients in
+the hospital.
+
+But on January 6th they managed to make Key West, and for some reason
+were not quarantined.  Twenty-one passengers immediately deserted the
+ship and were heard of no more.
+
+"I am glad they are gone.  D--n them," says the notebook.  Apparently he
+had never considered leaving, and a number of others remained.  The
+doctor restocked his medicine-locker, and the next day they put to sea
+again.  Certainly they were a daring lot of voyagers.  On the 8th another
+of the patients died.  Then the cooler weather seemed to check the
+contagion, and it was not until the night of the 11th, when the New York
+harbor lights were in view, that the final death occurred.  There were no
+new cases by this time, and the other patients were convalescent.  A
+certificate was made out that the last man had died of "dropsy."  There
+would seem to have been no serious difficulty in docking the vessel and
+landing the passengers.  The matter would probably be handled differently
+to-day.
+
+
+
+
+LVII
+
+OLD FRIENDS AND NEW PLANS
+
+It had been more than thirteen years since his first arrival in New York.
+Then he had been a youth, green, untraveled, eager to get away from home.
+Now a veteran, he was as eager to return.
+
+He stopped only long enough in New York to see Charles Henry Webb, late
+of California, who had put together a number of the Mark Twain sketches,
+including "The Jumping Frog," for book publication.  Clemens himself
+decided to take the book to Carleton, thinking that, having missed the
+fame of the "Frog" once, he might welcome a chance to stand sponsor for
+it now.  But Carleton was wary; the "Frog" had won favor, and even fame,
+in its fugitive, vagrant way, but a book was another matter.  Books were
+undertaken very seriously and with plenty of consideration in those days.
+Twenty-one years later, in Switzerland, Carleton said to Mark Twain:
+
+"My chief claim to immortality is the distinction of having declined your
+first book."
+
+Clemens was ready enough to give up the book when Carleton declined it,
+but Webb said he would publish it himself, and he set about it forthwith.
+The author waited no longer now, but started for St. Louis, and was soon
+with his mother and sister, whom he had not seen since that eventful
+first year of the war.  They thought he looked old, which was true
+enough, but they found him unchanged in his manner: buoyant, full of
+banter and gravely quaint remarks--he was always the same.  Jane Clemens
+had grown older, too.  She was nearly sixty-four, but as keen and
+vigorous as ever-proud (even if somewhat critical) of this handsome,
+brilliant man of new name and fame who had been her mischievous, wayward
+boy.  She petted him, joked with him, scolded him, and inquired
+searchingly into his morals and habits.  In turn he petted, comforted,
+and teased her.  She decided that he was the same Sam, and always would
+be--a true prophecy.
+
+He went up to Hannibal to see old friends.  Many were married; some had
+moved away; some were dead--the old story.  He delivered his lecture
+there, and was the center of interest and admiration--his welcome might
+have satisfied even Tom Sawyer.  From Hannibal he journeyed to Keokuk,
+where he lectured again to a crowd of old friends and new, then returned
+to St. Louis for a more extended visit.
+
+It was while he was in St. Louis that he first saw the announcement of
+the Quaker City Holy Land Excursion, and was promptly fascinated by what
+was then a brand-new idea in ocean travel--a splendid picnic--a choice
+and refined party that would sail away for a long summer's journeying to
+the most romantic of all lands and seas, the shores of the Mediterranean.
+No such argosy had ever set out before in pursuit of the golden fleece of
+happiness.
+
+His projected trip around the world lost its charm in the light of this
+idyllic dream.  Henry Ward Beecher was advertised as one of the party;
+General Sherman as another; also ministers, high-class journalists--the
+best minds of the nation.  Anson Burlingame had told him to associate
+with persons of refinement and intellect.  He lost no time in writing to
+the Alta, proposing that they send him in this select company.
+
+Noah Brooks, who was then on the Alta, states--[In an article published
+in the Century Magazine.]--that the management was staggered by the
+proposition, but that Col. John McComb insisted that the investment in
+Mark Twain would be sound.  A letter was accordingly sent, stating that a
+check for his passage would be forwarded in due season, and that meantime
+he could contribute letters from New York City.  The rate for all letters
+was to be twenty dollars each.  The arrangement was a godsend, in the
+fullest sense of the word, to Mark Twain.
+
+It was now April, and he was eager to get back to New York to arrange his
+passage.  The Quaker City would not sail for two months yet (two eventful
+months), but the advertisement said that passages must be secured by the
+5th, and he was there on that day.  Almost the first man he met was the
+chief of the New York Alta bureau with a check for twelve hundred and
+fifty dollars (the amount of his ticket) and a telegram saying, "Ship
+Mark Twain in the Holy Land Excursion and pay his passage."
+
+     --[The following letter, which bears no date, was probably handed to
+     him later in the New York Alta office as a sort of credential:
+
+     ALTA CALIFORNIA OFFICE, 42 JOHN STREET, NEW YORK.
+
+     Sam'l Clemens, Esq., New York.
+
+     DEAR SIR,--I have the honor to inform you that Fred'k. MacCrellish
+     & Co., Proprietors of Alta California, San Francisco, Cal., desire
+     to engage your services as Special Correspondent on the pleasure
+     excursion now about to proceed from this City to the Holy Land.  In
+     obedience to their instructions I have secured a passage for you on
+     the vessel about to convey the excursion party referred to, and made
+     such arrangements as I hope will secure your comfort and
+     convenience.  Your only instructions are that you will continue to
+     write at such times and from such places as you deem proper, and in
+     the same style that heretofore secured you the favor of the readers
+     of the Alta California.  I have the honor to remain, with high
+     respect and esteem,
+
+     Your ob'dt.  Servant,
+
+     JOHN J. MURPHY.]
+
+
+The Alta, it appears, had already applied for his berth; but, not having
+been vouched for by Mr. Beecher or some other eminent divine, Clemens was
+fearful he might not be accepted.  Quite casually he was enlightened on
+this point.  While waiting for attention in the shipping-office, with the
+Alta agent, he heard a newspaper man inquire what notables were going.
+A clerk, with evident pride, rattled off the names:
+
+"Lieutenant-General Sherman, Henry Ward Beecher, and Mask Twain; also
+probably General Banks."
+
+So he was billed as an attraction.  It was his first surreptitious taste
+of fame on the Atlantic coast, and not without its delight.  The story
+often told of his being introduced by Ned House, of the Tribune, as a
+minister, though often repeated by Mark Twain himself, was in the nature
+of a joke, and mainly apocryphal.  Clemens was a good deal in House's
+company at the time, for he had made an arrangement to contribute
+occasional letters to the Tribune, and House no doubt introduced him
+jokingly as one of the Quaker City ministers.
+
+
+
+
+LVIII
+
+A NEW BOOK AND A LECTURE
+
+Webb, meantime, had pushed the Frog book along.  The proofs had been read
+and the volume was about ready for issue.  Clemens wrote to his mother
+April 15th:
+
+     My book will probably be in the bookseller's hands in about two
+     weeks.  After that I shall lecture.  Since I have been gone, the
+     boys have gotten up a "call" on me signed by two hundred
+     Californians.
+
+The lecture plan was the idea of Frank Fuller, who as acting Governor of
+Utah had known Mark Twain on the Comstock, and prophesied favorably of
+his future career.  Clemens had hunted up Fuller on landing in New York
+in January, and Fuller had encouraged the lecture then; but Clemens was
+doubtful.
+
+"I have no reputation with the general public here," he said.  "We
+couldn't get a baker's dozen to hear me."
+
+But Fuller was a sanguine person, with an energy and enthusiasm that were
+infectious.  He insisted that the idea was sound.  It would solidify Mark
+Twain's reputation on the Atlantic coast, he declared, insisting that the
+largest house in New York, Cooper Union, should be taken.  Clemens had
+partially consented, and Fuller had arranged with all the Pacific slope
+people who had come East, headed by ex-Governor James W. Nye (by this
+time Senator at Washington), to sign a call for the "Inimitable Mark
+Twain" to appear before a New York audience.  Fuller made Nye agree to be
+there and introduce the lecturer, and he was burningly busy and happy in
+the prospect.
+
+But Mark Twain was not happy.  He looked at that spacious hall and
+imagined the little crowd of faithful Californian stragglers that might
+gather in to hear him, and the ridicule of the papers next day.  He
+begged Fuller to take a smaller hall, the smallest he could get.  But
+only the biggest hall in New York would satisfy Fuller.  He would have
+taken a larger one if he could have found it.  The lecture was announced
+for May 6th.  Its subject was "Kanakadom, or the Sandwich Islands"--
+tickets fifty cents.  Fuller timed it to follow a few days after Webb's
+book should appear, so that one event might help the other.
+
+Mark Twain's first book, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveyas
+County, and Other Sketches', was scheduled for May 1st, and did, in fact,
+appear on that date; but to the author it was no longer an important
+event.  Jim Smiley's frog as standard-bearer of his literary procession
+was not an interesting object, so far as he was concerned--not with that
+vast, empty hall in the background and the insane undertaking of trying
+to fill it.  The San Francisco venture had been as nothing compared with
+this.  Fuller was working night and day with abounding joy, while the
+subject of his labor felt as if he were on the brink of a fearful
+precipice, preparing to try a pair of wings without first learning to
+fly.  At one instant he was cold with fright, the next glowing with an
+infection of Fuller's faith.  He devised a hundred schemes for the sale
+of seats.  Once he came rushing to Fuller, saying:
+
+"Send a lot of tickets down to the Chickering Piano Company.  I have
+promised to put on my programme, 'The piano used at this entertainment is
+manufactured by Chickering."'
+
+"But you don't want a piano, Mark," said Fuller, "do you?"
+
+"No, of course not; but they will distribute the tickets for the sake of
+the advertisement, whether we have the piano or not."
+
+Fuller got out a lot of handbills and hung bunches of them in the stages,
+omnibuses, and horse-cars.  Clemens at first haunted these vehicles to
+see if anybody noticed the bills.  The little dangling bunches seemed
+untouched.  Finally two men came in; one of them pulled off a bill and
+glanced at it.  His friend asked:
+
+"Who's Mark Twain?"
+
+"God knows; I don't!"
+
+The lecturer could not ride any more.  He was desperate.
+
+"Fuller," he groaned, "there isn't a sign--a ripple of interest."
+
+Fuller assured him that everything was working all right "working
+underneath," Fuller said--but the lecturer was hopeless.  He reported his
+impressions to the folks at home:
+
+     Everything looks shady, at least, if not dark; I have a good agent;
+     but now, after we have hired the Cooper Institute, and gone to an
+     expense in one way or another of $500, it comes out that I have got
+     to play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, Ristori, and also the
+     double troop of Japanese jugglers, the latter opening at the great
+     Academy of Music--and with all this against me I have taken the
+     largest house in New York and cannot back water.
+
+He might have added that there were other rival entertainments: "The
+Flying Scud" was at Wallack's, the "Black Crook" was at Niblo's, John
+Brougham at the Olympic; and there were at least a dozen lesser
+attractions.  New York was not the inexhaustible city in those days;
+these things could gather in the public to the last man.  When the day
+drew near, and only a few tickets had been sold, Clemens was desperate.
+
+"Fuller," he said, "there'll be nobody in the Cooper Union that night but
+you and me.  I am on the verge of suicide.  I would commit suicide if I
+had the pluck and the outfit.  You must paper the house, Fuller.  You
+must send out a flood of complementaries."
+
+"Very well," said Fuller; "what we want this time is reputation anyway--
+money is secondary.  I'll put you before the choicest, most intelligent
+audience that ever was gathered in New York City.  I will bring in the
+school-instructors--the finest body of men and women in the world."
+
+Fuller immediately sent out a deluge of complimentary tickets, inviting
+the school-teachers of New York and Brooklyn, and all the adjacent
+country, to come free and hear Mark Twain's great lecture on Kanakadom.
+This was within forty-eight hours of the time he was to appear.
+
+Senator Nye was to have joined Clemens and Fuller at the Westminster,
+where Clemens was stopping, and they waited for him there with a
+carriage, fuming and swearing, until it was evident that he was not
+coming.  At last Clemens said:
+
+"Fuller, you've got to introduce me."
+
+"No," suggested Fuller; "I've got a better scheme than that.  You get up
+and begin by bemeaning Nye for not being there.  That will be better
+anyway."
+
+Clemens said:
+
+"Well, Fuller, I can do that.  I feel that way.  I'll try to think up
+something fresh and happy to say about that horse-thief."
+
+They drove to Cooper Union with trepidation.  Suppose, after all, the
+school-teachers had declined to come?  They went half an hour before the
+lecture was to begin.  Forty years later Mark Twain said:
+
+"I couldn't keep away.  I wanted to see that vast Mammoth cave and die.
+But when we got near the building I saw that all the streets were blocked
+with people, and that traffic had stopped.  I couldn't believe that these
+people were trying to get into Cooper Institute; but they were, and when
+I got to the stage at last the house was jammed full-packed; there wasn't
+room enough left for a child.
+
+"I was happy and I was excited beyond expression.  I poured the Sandwich
+Islands out on those people, and they laughed and shouted to my entire
+content.  For an hour and fifteen minutes I was in paradise."
+
+And Fuller to-day, alive and young, when so many others of that ancient
+time and event have vanished, has added:
+
+"When Mark appeared the Californians gave a regular yell of welcome.
+When that was over he walked to the edge of the platform, looked
+carefully down in the pit, round the edges as if he were hunting for
+something.  Then he said:  'There was to have been a piano here, and a
+senator to introduce me.  I don't seem to discover them anywhere.  The
+piano was a good one, but we will have to get along with such music as I
+can make with your help.  As for the senator--Then Mark let himself go
+and did as he promised about Senator Nye.  He said things that made men
+from the Pacific coast, who had known Nye, scream with delight.  After
+that came his lecture.  The first sentence captured the audience.  From
+that moment to the end it was either in a roar of laughter or half
+breathless by his beautiful descriptive passages.  People were positively
+ill for days, laughing at that lecture."
+
+So it was a success: everybody was glad to have been there; the papers
+were kind, congratulations numerous.
+
+--[Kind but not extravagant; those were burning political times, and the
+doings of mere literary people did not excite the press to the extent of
+headlines.  A jam around Cooper Union to-day, followed by such an
+artistic triumph, would be a news event.  On the other hand, Schuyler
+Colfax, then Speaker of the House, was reported to the extent of a
+column, nonpareil.  His lecture was of no literary importance, and no
+echo of it now remains.  But those were political, not artistic, days.
+
+Of Mark Twain's lecture the Times notice said:
+
+"Nearly every one present came prepared for considerable provocation for
+enjoyable laughter, and from the appearance of their mirthful faces
+leaving the hall at the conclusion of the lecture but few were
+disappointed, and it is not too much to say that seldom has so large an
+audience been so uniformly pleased as the one that listened to Mark
+Twain's quaint remarks last evening.  The large hall of the Union was
+filled to its utmost capacity by fully two thousand persons, which fact
+spoke well for the reputation of the lecturer and his future success.
+Mark Twain's style is a quaint one both in manner and method, and through
+his discourse he managed to keep on the right side of the audience, and
+frequently convulsed it with hearty laughter....  During a description of
+the topography of the Sandwich Islands the lecturer surprised his hearers
+by a graphic and eloquent description of the eruption of the great
+volcano, which occurred in 1840, and his language was loudly applauded.
+
+"Judging from the success achieved by the lecturer last evening, he
+should repeat his experiment at an early date."]
+
+
+                            COOPER INSTITUTE
+     By Invitation of s large number of prominent Californians and
+                         Citizens of New York,
+
+                               MARK TWAIN
+
+                             WILL DELIVER A
+                         SERIO-HUMEROUS LECTURE
+                               CONERNING
+
+                                KANAKDOM
+                                   OR
+                         THE SANDWICH ISLANDS,
+
+                           COOPER INSTITUTE,
+                     On Monday Evening, May 6,1867.
+
+                          TICKETS FIFTY GENTS.
+  For Sale at Chickering and Sons, 852 Broadway, and at the Principal
+                                 Hotel
+
+     Doors open at 7 o'clock.   The Wisdom will begin to flow at 8.
+
+
+Mark Twain always felt grateful to the school-teachers for that night.
+Many years later, when they wanted him to read to them in Steinway Hall,
+he gladly gave his services without charge.
+
+Nor was the lecture a complete financial failure.  In spite of the flood
+of complementaries, there was a cash return of some three hundred dollars
+from the sale of tickets--a substantial aid in defraying the expenses
+which Fuller assumed and insisted on making good on his own account.
+That was Fuller's regal way; his return lay in the joy of the game, and
+in the winning of the larger stake for a friend.
+
+"Mark," he said, "it is all right.  The fortune didn't come, but it will.
+The fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book just out you are
+going to be the most talked-of man in the country.  Your letters for the
+Alta and the Tribune will get the widest reception of any letters of
+travel ever written."
+
+
+
+
+
+LIX
+
+THE FIRST BOOK
+
+With the shadow of the Cooper Institute so happily dispelled, The
+Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and his following of Other
+Sketches, became a matter of more interest.  The book was a neat blue-
+and-gold volume printed by John A.  Gray & Green, the old firm for which
+the boy, Sam Clemens, had set type thirteen years before.  The title-page
+bore Webb's name as publisher, with the American News Company as selling
+agents.  It further stated that the book was edited by "John Paul," that
+is to say by Webb himself.  The dedication was in keeping with the
+general irresponsible character of the venture.  It was as follows:
+
+                                   TO
+                               JOHN SMITH
+                 WHOM I HAVE KNOWN IN DIVERS AND SUNDRY
+                   PLACES ABOUT THE WORLD, AND WHOSE
+                     MANY AND MANIFOLD VIRTUES DID
+                       ALWAYS COMMAND MY ESTEEM,
+                          I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
+
+It is said that the man to whom a volume is dedicated always buys a copy.
+If this prove true in the present instance, a princely affluence is about
+to burst upon
+                                                  THE AUTHOR.
+
+
+The "advertisement" stated that the author had "scaled the heights of
+popularity at a single jump, and won for himself the sobriquet of the
+'Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope'; furthermore, that he was known to
+fame as the 'Moralist of the Main,'" and that as such he would be likely
+to go down to posterity, adding that it was in his secondary character,
+as humorist, rather than in his primal one of moralist, that the volume
+aimed to present him.--[The advertisement complete, with extracts from
+the book, may be found under Appendix E, at the end of last volume.]
+
+Every little while, during the forty years or more that have elapsed
+since then, some one has come forward announcing Mark Twain to be as much
+a philosopher as a humorist, as if this were a new discovery.  But it was
+a discovery chiefly to the person making the announcement.  Every one who
+ever knew Mark Twain at any period of his life made the same discovery.
+Every one who ever took the trouble to familiarize himself with his work
+made it.  Those who did not make it have known his work only by hearsay
+and quotation, or they have read it very casually, or have been very
+dull.  It would be much more of a discovery to find a book in which he
+has not been serious--a philosopher, a moralist, and a poet.  Even in the
+Jumping Frog sketches, selected particularly for their inconsequence, the
+under-vein of reflection and purpose is not lacking.  The answer to Moral
+Statistician--[In "Answers to Correspondents," included now in Sketches
+New and Old.  An extract from it, and from "A Strange Dream," will be
+found in Appendix E.]--is fairly alive with human wisdom and righteous
+wrath.  The "Strange Dream," though ending in a joke, is aglow with
+poetry.  Webb's "advertisement" was playfully written, but it was
+earnestly intended, and he writes Mark Twain down a moralist--not as a
+discovery, but as a matter of course.  The discoveries came along later,
+when the author's fame as a humorist had dazzled the nations.
+
+It is as well to say it here as anywhere, perhaps, that one reason why
+Mark Twain found it difficult to be accepted seriously was the fact that
+his personality was in itself so essentially humorous.  His physiognomy,
+his manner of speech, this movement, his mental attitude toward events--
+all these were distinctly diverting.  When we add to this that his medium
+of expression was nearly always full of the quaint phrasing and those
+surprising appositions which we recognize as amusing, it is not so
+astonishing that his deeper, wiser, more serious purpose should be
+overlooked.  On the whole these unabated discoverers serve a purpose, if
+only to make the rest of their species look somewhat deeper than the
+comic phrase.
+
+The little blue-and-gold volume which presented the Frog story and
+twenty-six other sketches in covers is chiefly important to-day as being
+Mark Twain's first book.  The selections in it were made for a public
+that had been too busy with a great war to learn discrimination, and most
+of them have properly found oblivion.  Fewer than a dozen of them were
+included in his collected Sketches issued eight years later, and some
+even of those might have been spared; also some that were added, for that
+matter; but detailed literary criticism is not the province of this work.
+The reader may investigate and judge for himself.
+
+Clemens was pleased with the appearance of his book.  To Bret Harte he
+wrote:
+
+The book is out and it is handsome.  It is full of damnable errors of
+grammar and deadly inconsistencies of spelling in the Frog sketch,
+because I was away and did not read proofs; but be a friend and say
+nothing about these things.  When my hurry is over, I will send you a
+copy to pisen the children with.
+
+That he had no exaggerated opinion of the book's contents or prospects we
+may gather from his letter home:
+
+As for the Frog book, I don't believe it will ever pay anything worth a
+cent.  I published it simply to advertise myself, and not with the hope
+of making anything out of it.
+
+He had grown more lenient in his opinion of the merits of the Frog story
+itself since it had made friends in high places, especially since James
+Russell Lowell had pronounced it "the finest piece of humorous writing
+yet produced in America"; but compared with his lecture triumph, and his
+prospective journey to foreign seas, his book venture, at best, claimed
+no more than a casual regard.  A Sandwich Island book (he had collected
+his Union letters with the idea of a volume) he gave up altogether after
+one unsuccessful offer of it to Dick & Fitzgerald.
+
+Frank Fuller's statement, that the fame had arrived, had in it some
+measure of truth.  Lecture propositions came from various directions.
+Thomas Nast, then in the early day of his great popularity, proposed a
+joint tour, in which Clemens would lecture, while he, Nast, illustrated
+the remarks with lightning caricatures.  But the time was too short; the
+Quaker City would sail on the 8th of June, and in the mean time the Alta
+correspondent was far behind with his New York letters.  On May 29th he
+wrote:
+
+I am 18 Alta letters behind, and I must catch up or bust.  I have refused
+all invitations to lecture.  Don't know how my book is coming on.
+
+He worked like a slave for a week or so, almost night and day, to clean
+up matters before his departure.  Then came days of idleness and
+reaction-days of waiting, during which his natural restlessness and the
+old-time regret for things done and undone, beset him.
+
+     My passage is paid, and if the ship sails I sail on her; but I make
+     no calculations, have bought no cigars, no sea-going clothing--have
+     made no preparations whatever--shall not pack my trunk till the
+     morning we sail.
+
+     All I do know or feel is that I am wild with impatience to move--
+     move--move!  Curse the endless delays!  They always kill me--they
+     make me neglect every duty, and then I have a conscience that tears
+     me like a wild beast.  I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month.
+     I do more mean things the moment I get a chance to fold my hands and
+     sit down than ever I get forgiveness for.
+
+     Yes, we are to meet at Mr. Beach's next Thursday night, and I
+     suppose we shall have to be gotten up regardless of expense, in
+     swallow-tails, white kids and everything 'en regle'.
+
+     I am resigned to Rev.  Mr. Hutchinson's or anybody else's
+     supervision.  I don't mind it.  I am fixed.  I have got a splendid,
+     immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless roommate who is as
+     good and true and right-minded a man as ever lived--a man whose
+     blameless conduct and example will always be an eloquent sermon to
+     all who shall come within their influence.  But send on the
+     professional preachers--there are none I like better to converse
+     with; if they're not narrowminded and bigoted they make good
+     companions.
+
+The "splendid immoral room-mate" was Dan Slote--"Dan," of The Innocents,
+a lovable character--all as set down.  Samuel Clemens wrote one more
+letter to his mother and sister--a conscience-stricken, pessimistic
+letter of good-by written the night before sailing.  Referring to the
+Alta letters he says:
+
+     I think they are the stupidest letters ever written from New York.
+     Corresponding has been a perfect drag ever since I got to the
+     States.  If it continues abroad, I don't know what the Tribune and
+     Alta folk will think.
+
+He remembers Orion, who had been officially eliminated when Nevada had
+received statehood.
+
+     I often wonder if his law business is going satisfactorily.  I wish
+     I had gone to Washington in the winter instead of going West.  I
+     could have gouged an office out of Bill Stewart for him, and that
+     would have atoned for the loss of my home visit.  But I am so
+     worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish
+     anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory.  My mind is
+     stored full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and
+     an accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and
+     restless moving from place to place.  If I could only say I had done
+     one thing for any of you that entitled me to your good opinions (I
+     say nothing of your love, for I am sure of that, no matter how
+     unworthy of it I may make myself--from Orion down, you have always
+     given me that; all the days of my life, when God Almighty knows I
+     have seldom deserved it), I believe I could go home and stay there--
+     and I know I would care little for the world's praise or blame.
+     There is no satisfaction in the world's praise anyhow, and it has no
+     worth to me save in the way of business.  I tried to gather up its
+     compliments to send you, but the work was distasteful and I dropped
+     it.
+
+     You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that
+     is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt.  I can get away
+     from that at sea, and be tranquil and satisfied; and so, with my
+     parting love and benediction for Orion and all of you, I say good-by
+     and God bless you all-and welcome the wind that wafts a weary soul
+     to the sunny lands of the Mediterranean!
+
+                              Yrs.  forever,
+                                             SAM
+
+
+
+
+
+LX
+
+THE INNOCENTS AT SEA
+
+          HOLY LAND PLEASURE EXCURSION
+
+          Steamer: Quaker City.
+
+          Captain C. C. Duncan.
+
+          Left New York at 2 P.m., June 8, 1867.
+
+          Rough weather--anchored within the harbor to lay all night.
+
+That first note recorded an event momentous in Mark Twain's career--an
+event of supreme importance; if we concede that any link in a chain
+regardless of size is of more importance than any other link.
+Undoubtedly it remains the most conspicuous event, as the world views it
+now, in retrospect.
+
+The note further heads a new chapter of history in sea-voyaging.  No such
+thing as the sailing of an ocean steamship with a pleasure-party on a
+long transatlantic cruise had ever occurred before.  A similar project
+had been undertaken the previous year, but owing to a cholera scare in
+the East it had been abandoned.  Now the dream had become a fact--a
+stupendous fact when we consider it.  Such an important beginning as that
+now would in all likelihood furnish the chief news story of the day.
+
+But they had different ideas of news in those days.  There were no
+headlines announcing the departure of the Quaker City--only the barest
+mention of the ship's sailing, though a prominent position was given to
+an account of a senatorial excursion-party which set out that same
+morning over the Union Pacific Railway, then under construction.  Every
+name in that political party was set dawn, and not one of them except
+General Hancock will ever be heard of again.  The New York Times,
+however, had some one on its editorial staff who thought it worth while
+to comment a little on the history-making Quaker City excursion.  The
+writer was pleasantly complimentary to officers and passengers.  He
+referred to Moses S. Beach, of the Sun, who was taking with him type and
+press, whereby he would "skilfully utilize the brains of the company for
+their mutual edification."  Mr. Beecher and General Sherman would find
+talent enough aboard to make the hours go pleasantly (evidently the
+writer had not interested himself sufficiently to know that these
+gentlemen were not along), and the paragraph closed by prophesying other
+such excursions, and wishing the travelers "good speed, a happy voyage,
+and a safe return."
+
+That was handsome, especially for those days; only now, some fine day,
+when an airship shall start with a band of happy argonauts to land beyond
+the sunrise for the first time in history, we shall feature it and
+emblazon it with pictures in the Sunday papers, and weeklies, and in the
+magazines.--[The Quaker City idea was so unheard-of that in some of the
+foreign ports visited, the officials could not believe that the vessel
+was simply a pleasure-craft, and were suspicious of some dark, ulterior
+purpose.]
+
+That Henry Ward Beecher and General Sherman had concluded not to go was a
+heavy disappointment at first; but it proved only a temporary disaster.
+The inevitable amalgamation of all ship companies took place.  The sixty-
+seven travelers fell into congenial groups, or they mingled and devised
+amusements, and gossiped and became a big family, as happy and as free
+from contention as families of that size are likely to be.
+
+The Quaker City was a good enough ship and sizable for her time.  She was
+registered eighteen hundred tons--about one-tenth the size of
+Mediterranean excursion-steamers today--and when conditions were
+favorable she could make ten knots an hour under steam--or, at least, she
+could do it with the help of her auxiliary sails.  Altogether she was a
+cozy, satisfactory ship, and they were a fortunate company who had her
+all to themselves and went out on her on that long-ago ocean gipsying.
+She has grown since then, even to the proportions of the Mayflower.  It
+was necessary for her to grow to hold all of those who in later times
+claimed to have sailed in her on that voyage with Mark Twain.--[The
+Quaker City passenger list will be found under Appendix F, at the end of
+last volume.]
+
+They were not all ministers and deacons aboard the Quaker City.  Clemens
+found other congenial spirits be sides his room-mate Dan Slote--among
+them the ship's surgeon, Dr. A. Reeve Jackson (the guide-destroying
+"Doctor" of The Innocents); Jack Van Nostrand, of New Jersey ("Jack");
+Julius Moulton, of St. Louis ("Moult"), and other care-free fellows, the
+smoking-room crowd which is likely to make comradeship its chief
+watchword.  There were companionable people in the cabin crowd also--
+fine, intelligent men and women, especially one of the latter, a middle-
+aged, intellectual, motherly soul--Mrs. A. W. Fairbanks, of Cleveland,
+Ohio.  Mrs. Fairbanks--herself a newspaper correspondent for her
+husband's paper, the Cleveland Herald had a large influence on the
+character and general tone of those Quaker City letters which established
+Mark Twain's larger fame.  She was an able writer herself; her judgment
+was thoughtful, refined, unbiased--altogether of a superior sort.  She
+understood Samuel Clemens, counseled him, encouraged him to read his
+letters aloud to her, became in reality "Mother Fairbanks," as they
+termed her, to him and to others of that ship who needed her kindly
+offices.
+
+In one of his home letters, later, he said of her:
+
+     She was the most refined, intelligent, cultivated lady in the ship,
+     and altogether the kindest and best.  She sewed my buttons on, kept
+     my clothing in presentable trim, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I
+     behaved), lectured me awfully on the quarter-deck on moonlit
+     promenading evenings, and cured me of several bad habits.  I am
+     under lasting obligations to her.  She looks young because she is so
+     good, but she has a grown son and daughter at home.
+
+In one of the early letters which Mrs. Fairbanks wrote to her paper she
+is scarcely less complimentary to him, even if in a different way.
+
+     We have D.D.'s and M.D.'s--we have men of wisdom and men of wit.
+     There is one table from which is sure to come a peal of laughter,
+     and all eyes are turned toward Mark Twain, whose face is, perfectly
+     mirth-provoking.  Sitting lazily at the table, scarcely genteel in
+     his appearance, there is something, I know not what, that interests
+     and attracts.  I saw to-day at dinner venerable divines and sage-
+     looking men convulsed with laughter at his drolleries and quaint,
+     odd manners.
+
+It requires only a few days on shipboard for acquaintances to form, and
+presently a little afternoon group was gathering to hear Mark Twain read
+his letters.  Mrs. Fairbanks was there, of course, also Mr. and Mrs. S.
+L. Severance, likewise of Cleveland, and Moses S. Beach, of the Sun, with
+his daughter Emma, a girl of seventeen.  Dan Slote was likely to be
+there, too, and Jack, and the Doctor, and Charles J. Langdon, of Elmira,
+New York, a boy of eighteen, who had conceived a deep admiration for the
+brilliant writer.  They were fortunate ones who first gathered to hear
+those daring, wonderful letters.
+
+But the benefit was a mutual one. He furnished a priceless entertainment,
+and he derived something equally priceless in return--the test of
+immediate audience and the boon of criticism.  Mrs. Fairbanks especially
+was frankly sincere.  Mr. Severance wrote afterward:
+
+     One afternoon I saw him tearing up a bunch of the soft, white paper-
+     copy paper, I guess the newspapers call it-on which he had written
+     something, and throwing the fragments into the Mediterranean.  I
+     inquired of him why he cast away the fruits of his labors in that
+     manner.
+
+"Well," he drawled, "Mrs. Fairbanks thinks it oughtn't to be printed,
+and, like as not, she is right."
+
+And Emma Beach (Mrs. Abbott Thayer) remembers hearing him say:
+
+"Well, Mrs. Fairbanks has just destroyed another four hours' work for
+me."
+
+Sometimes he played chess with Emma Beach, who thought him a great hero
+because, once when a crowd of men were tormenting a young lad, a
+passenger, Mark Twain took the boy's part and made them desist.
+
+"I am sure I was right, too," she declares; "heroism came natural to
+him."
+
+Mr. Severance recalls another incident which, as he says, was trivial
+enough, but not easy to forget:
+
+We were having a little celebration over the birthday anniversary of Mrs.
+Duncan, wife of our captain.  Mark Twain got up and made a little speech,
+in which he said Mrs. Duncan was really older than Methuselah because she
+knew a lot of things that Methuselah never heard of.  Then he mentioned a
+number of more or less modern inventions, and wound up by saying, "What
+did Methuselah know about a barbed-wire fence?"
+
+Except Following the Equator, The Innocents Abroad comes nearer to being
+history than any other of Mark Twain's travel-books.  The notes for it
+were made on the spot, and there was plenty of fact, plenty of fresh, new
+experience, plenty of incident to set down.  His idea of descriptive
+travel in those days was to tell the story as it happened; also, perhaps,
+he had not then acquired the courage of his inventions.  We may believe
+that the adventures with Jack, Dan, and the Doctor are elaborated here
+and there; but even those happened substantially as recorded.  There is
+little to add, then, to the story of that halcyon trip, and not much to
+elucidate.
+
+The old note-books give a light here and there that is interesting.  It
+is curious to be looking through them now, trying to realize that these
+penciled memoranda were the fresh, first impressions that would presently
+grow into the world's most delightful book of travel; that they were set
+down in the very midst of that care-free little company that frolicked
+through Italy, climbed wearily the arid Syrian hills.  They are all dead
+now; but to us they are as alive and young to-day as when they followed
+the footprints of the Son of Man through Palestine, and stood at last
+before the Sphinx, impressed and awed by its "five thousand slow-
+revolving years."
+
+Some of the items consist of no more than a few terse, suggestive words--
+serious, humorous, sometimes profane.  Others are statistical,
+descriptive, elaborated.  Also there are drawings--"not copied," he marks
+them, with a pride not always justified by the result.  The earlier notes
+are mainly comments on the "pilgrims," the freak pilgrims: "the Frenchy-
+looking woman who owns a dog and keeps up an interminable biography of
+him to the passengers"; the "long-legged, simple, wide-mouthed, horse-
+laughing young fellow who once made a sea voyage to Fortress Monroe, and
+quotes eternally from his experiences"; also, there is reference to
+another young man, "good, accommodating, pleasant but fearfully green."
+This young person would become the "Interrogation Point," in due time,
+and have his picture on page 71 (old edition), while opposite him, on
+page 70, would appear the "oracle," identified as one Doctor Andrews, who
+(the note-book says) had the habit of "smelling in guide-books for
+knowledge and then trying to play it for old information that has been
+festering in his brain."  Sometimes there are abstract notes such as:
+
+How lucky Adam was.  He knew when he said a good thing that no one had
+ever said it before.
+
+Of the "character" notes, the most important and elaborated is that which
+presents the "Poet Lariat."  This is the entry, somewhat epitomized:
+
+                         BLOODGOOD H.  CUTTER
+
+     He is fifty years old, and small of his age.  He dresses in
+     homespun, and is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer, with
+     a strange proclivity for writing rhymes.  He writes them on all
+     possible subjects, and gets them printed on slips of paper, with his
+     portrait at the head.  These he will give to any man who comes
+     along, whether he has anything against him or not .  .  .  .
+
+     Dan said:
+
+     "It must be a great happiness to you to sit down at the close of day
+     and put its events all down in rhymes and poetry, like Byron and
+     Shakespeare and those fellows."
+
+     "Oh yes, it is--it is--Why, many's the time I've had to get up in
+     the night when it comes on me:
+
+          Whether we're on the sea or the land
+          We've all got to go at the word of command--
+
+     "Hey!  how's that?"
+
+A curious character was Cutter--a Long Island farmer with the obsession
+of rhyme.  In his old age, in an interview, he said:
+
+"Mark was generally writing and he was glum.  He would write what we were
+doing, and I would write poetry, and Mark would say:
+
+"'For Heaven's sake, Cutter, keep your poems to yourself.'
+
+"Yes, Mark was pretty glum, and he was generally writing."
+
+Poor old Poet Lariat--dead now with so many others of that happy crew.
+We may believe that Mark learned to be "glum" when he saw the Lariat
+approaching with his sheaf of rhymes.  We may believe, too, that he was
+"generally writing."  He contributed fifty-three letters to the Alta
+during that five months and six to the Tribune.  They would average about
+two columns nonpareil each, which is to say four thousand words, or
+something like two hundred and fifty thousand words in all.  To turn out
+an average of fifteen hundred words a day, with continuous sight-seeing
+besides, one must be generally writing during any odd intervals; those
+who are wont to regard Mark Twain as lazy may consider these statistics.
+That he detested manual labor is true enough, but at the work for which
+he was fitted and intended it may be set down here upon authority (and
+despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that to his last
+year he was the most industrious of men.
+
+
+
+
+LXI
+
+THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
+
+It was Dan, Jack, and the Doctor who with Mark Twain wandered down
+through Italy and left moral footprints that remain to this day.  The
+Italian guides are wary about showing pieces of the True Cross, fragments
+of the Crown of Thorns, and the bones of saints since then.  They show
+them, it is true, but with a smile; the name of Mark Twain is a touch-
+stone to test their statements.  Not a guide in Italy but has heard the
+tale of that iconoclastic crew, and of the book which turned their
+marvels into myths, their relics into bywords.
+
+It was Doctor Jackson, Colonel Denny, Doctor Birch, and Samuel Clemens
+who evaded the quarantine and made the perilous night trip to Athens and
+looked upon the Parthenon and the sleeping city by moonlight.  It is all
+set down in the notes, and the account varies little from that given in
+the book; only he does not tell us that Captain Duncan and the
+quartermaster, Pratt, connived at the escapade, or how the latter watched
+the shore in anxious suspense until he heard the whistle which was their
+signal to be taken aboard.  It would have meant six months' imprisonment
+if they had been captured, for there was no discretion in the Greek law.
+
+It was T. D. Crocker, A. N. Sanford, Col. Peter Kinney, and William
+Gibson who were delegated to draft the address to the Emperor of Russia
+at Yalta, with Samuel L.  Clemens as chairman of that committee.  The
+chairman wrote the address, the opening sentence of which he grew so
+weary of hearing:
+
+     We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply
+     for recreation, and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial
+     state.
+
+The address is all set down in the notes, and there also exists the first
+rough draft, with the emendations in his own hand.  He deplores the time
+it required:
+
+     That job is over.  Writing addresses to emperors is not my strong
+     suit.  However, if it is not as good as it might be it doesn't
+     signify--the other committeemen ought to have helped me write it;
+     they had nothing to do, and I had my hands full.  But for bothering
+     with this I would have caught up entirely with my New York Tribune
+     correspondence and nearly up with the San Francisco.
+
+They wanted him also to read the address to the Emperor, but he pointed
+out that the American consul was the proper person for that office.  He
+tells how the address was presented:
+
+August 26th.  The Imperial carriages were in waiting at eleven, and at
+twelve we were at the palace....
+
+The Consul for Odessa read the address and the Czar said frequently,
+"Good--very good; indeed"--and at the close, "I am very, very grateful."
+
+It was not improper for him to set down all this, and much more, in his
+own note-book--not then for publication.  It was in fact a very proper
+record--for today.
+
+One incident of the imperial audience Mark Twain omitted from his book,
+perhaps because the humor of it had not yet become sufficiently evident.
+"The humorous perception of a thing is a pretty slow growth sometimes,"
+he once remarked.  It was about seventeen years before he could laugh
+enjoyably at a slight mistake he made at the Emperor's reception.  He set
+down a memorandum of it, then, for fear it might be lost:
+
+     There were a number of great dignitaries of the Empire there, and
+     although, as a general thing, they were dressed in citizen's
+     clothing, I observed that the most of them wore a very small piece
+     of ribbon in the lapels of their coats.  That little touch of color
+     struck my fancy, and it seemed to me a good idea to add it to my own
+     attractions; not imagining that it had any special significance.  So
+     I stepped aside, hunted up a bit of red ribbon, and ornamented my
+     lapel with it.  Presently, Count Festetics, the Grand Master of
+     ceremonies, and the only man there who was gorgeously arrayed, in
+     full official costume, began to show me a great many attentions.  He
+     was particularly polite, and pleasant, and anxious to be of service
+     to me.  Presently, he asked me what order of nobility I belonged to?
+     I said, "I didn't belong to any."  Then he asked me what order of
+     knighthood I belonged to?  I said, "None."  Then he asked me what
+     the red ribbon in my buttonhole stood for?  I saw, at once, what an
+     ass I had been making of myself, and was accordingly confused and
+     embarrassed.  I said the first thing that came into my mind, and
+     that was that the ribbon was merely the symbol of a club of
+     journalists to which I belonged, and I was not pursued with any more
+     of Count Festetic's attentions.
+
+     Later, I got on very familiar terms with an old gentleman, whom I
+     took to be the head gardener, and walked him all about the gardens,
+     slipping my arm into his without invitation, yet without demur on
+     his part, and by and by was confused again when I found that he was
+     not a gardener at all, but the Lord High Admiral of Russia!  I
+     almost made up my mind that I would never call on an Emperor again.
+
+Like all Mediterranean excursionists, those first pilgrims were
+insatiable collectors of curios, costumes, and all manner of outlandish
+things.  Dan Slote had the stateroom hung and piled with such gleanings.
+At Constantinople his room-mate writes:
+
+     I thought Dan had got the state-room pretty full of rubbish at last,
+     but awhile ago his dragoman arrived with a brand-new ghastly
+     tombstone of the Oriental pattern, with his name handsomely carved
+     and gilted on it in Turkish characters.  That fellow will buy a
+     Circassian slave next.
+
+It was Church, Denny, Jack, Davis, Dan, Moult, and Mark Twain who made
+the "long trip" through Syria from Beirut to Jerusalem with their
+elaborate camping outfit and decrepit nags "Jericho," "Baalbec," and the
+rest.  It was better camping than that Humboldt journey of six years
+before, though the horses were not so dissimilar, and altogether it was a
+hard, nerve-racking experience, climbing the arid hills of Palestine in
+that torrid summer heat.  Nobody makes that trip in summer-time now.
+Tourists hurry out of Syria before the first of April, and they do not go
+back before November.  One brief quotation from Mark Twain's book gives
+us an idea of what that early party of pilgrims had to undergo:
+
+     We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple of
+     hours, and then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig-
+     trees to give me a chance to rest.  It was the hottest day we had
+     seen yet--the sun-flames shot down like the shafts of fire that
+     stream out before a blow-pipe; the rays seemed to fall in a deluge
+     on the head and pass downward like rain from a roof.  I imagined I
+     could distinguish between the floods of rays.  I thought I could
+     tell when each flood struck my head, when it reached my shoulders,
+     and when the next one came.  It was terrible.
+
+He had been ill with cholera at Damascus, a light attack; but any attack
+of that dread disease is serious enough.  He tells of this in the book,
+but he does not mention, either in the book or in his notes, the attack
+which Dan Slote had some days later.  It remained for William F. Church,
+of the party, to relate that incident, for it was the kind of thing that
+Mark Twain was not likely to record, or even to remember.  Doctor Church
+was a deacon with orthodox views and did not approve of Mark Twain; he
+thought him sinful, irreverent, profane.
+
+"He was the worst man I ever knew," Church said; then he added, "And the
+best."
+
+What happened was this: At the end of a terrible day of heat, when the
+party had camped on the edge of a squalid Syrian village, Dan was taken
+suddenly ill.  It was cholera, beyond doubt.  Dan could not go on--he
+might never go on.  The chances were that way.  It was a serious matter
+all around.  To wait with Dan meant to upset their travel schedule--it
+might mean to miss the ship.  Consultation was held and a resolution
+passed (the pilgrims were always passing resolutions) to provide for Dan
+as well as possible, and leave him behind.  Clemens, who had remained
+with Dan, suddenly appeared and said:
+
+"Gentlemen, I understand that you are going to leave Dan Slote here
+alone.  I'll be d---d if I do!"
+
+And he didn't.  He stayed there and brought Dan into Jerusalem, a few
+days late, but convalescent.
+
+Perhaps most of them were not always reverent during that Holy Land trip.
+It was a trying journey, and after fierce days of desert hills the
+reaction might not always spare even the holiest memories.  Jack was
+particularly sinful.  When they learned the price for a boat on Galilee,
+and the deacons who had traveled nearly half around the world to sail on
+that sacred water were confounded by the charge, Jack said:
+
+"Well, Denny, do you wonder now that Christ walked?"
+
+It was the irreverent Jack who one morning (they had camped the night
+before by the ruins of Jericho) refused to get up to see the sun rise
+across the Jordan.  Deacon Church went to his tent.
+
+"Jack, my boy, get up.  Here is the place where the Israelites crossed
+over into the Promised Land, and beyond are the mountains of Moab, where
+Moses lies buried."
+
+"Moses who!" said Jack.
+
+"Oh, Jack, my boy, Moses, the great lawgiver--who led the Israelites out
+of Egypt-forty years through the wilderness--to the Promised Land."
+
+"Forty years!" said Jack.  "How far was it?"
+
+"It was three hundred miles, Jack; a great wilderness, and he brought
+them through in safety."
+
+Jack regarded him with scorn.  "Huh, Moses--three hundred miles forty
+years--why, Ben Holiday would have brought them through in thirty-six
+hours!"--[Ben Holiday, owner of the Overland stages, and a man of great
+executive ability.  This incident, a true one, is more elaborately told
+in Roughing It, but it seems pertinent here.]
+
+Jack probably learned more about the Bible during that trip-its history
+and its heroes-than during all his former years.  Nor was Jack the only
+one of that group thus benefited.  The sacred landmarks of Palestine
+inspire a burning interest in the Scriptures, and Mark Twain probably did
+not now regret those early Sunday-school lessons; certainly he did not
+fail to review them exhaustively on that journey.  His note-books fairly
+overflow with Bible references; the Syrian chapters in The Innocents
+Abroad are permeated with the poetry and legendary beauty of the Bible
+story.  The little Bible he carried on that trip, bought in
+Constantinople, was well worn by the time they reached the ship again at
+Jaffa.  He must have read it with a large and persistent interest; also
+with a double benefit.  For, besides the knowledge acquired, he was
+harvesting a profit--probably unsuspected at the time---viz., the
+influence of the most direct and beautiful English--the English of the
+King James version--which could not fail to affect his own literary
+method at that impressionable age.  We have already noted his earlier
+admiration for that noble and simple poem, "The Burial of Moses," which
+in the Palestine note-book is copied in full.  All the tendency of his
+expression lay that way, and the intense consideration of stately Bible
+phrase and imagery could hardly fail to influence his mental processes.
+The very distinct difference of style, as shown in The Innocents Abroad
+and in his earlier writings, we may believe was in no small measure due
+to his study of the King James version during those weeks in Palestine.
+
+He bought another Bible at Jerusalem; but it was not for himself.  It was
+a little souvenir volume bound in olive and balsam wood, and on the fly-
+leaf is inscribed:
+
+     Mrs. Jane Clemens from her son.  Jerusalem, Sept.  24, 1867.
+
+There is one more circumstance of that long cruise-recorded neither in
+the book nor the notes--an incident brief, but of more importance in the
+life of Samuel Clemens than any heretofore set down.  It occurred in the
+beautiful Bay of Smyrna, on the fifth or sixth of September, while the
+vessel lay there for the Ephesus trip.
+
+Reference has been made to young Charles Langdon, of Elmira (the
+"Charley" once mentioned in the Innocents), as an admirer of Mark Twain.
+There was a good deal of difference in their ages, and they were seldom
+of the same party; but sometimes the boy invited the journalist to his
+cabin and, boy-like, exhibited his treasures.  He had two sisters at
+home; and of Olivia, the youngest, he had brought a dainty miniature done
+on ivory in delicate tints--a sweet-pictured countenance, fine and
+spiritual.  On that fateful day in the day of Smyrna, Samuel Clemens,
+visiting in young Langdon's cabin, was shown this portrait.  He looked at
+it with long admiration, and spoke of it reverently, for the delicate
+face seemed to him to be something more than a mere human likeness.  Each
+time he came, after that, he asked to see the picture, and once even
+begged to be allowed to take it away with him.  The boy would not agree
+to this, and the elder man looked long and steadily at the miniature,
+resolving in his mind that some day he would meet the owner of that
+lovely face--a purpose for once in accord with that which the fates had
+arranged for him, in the day when all things were arranged, the day of
+the first beginning.
+
+
+
+
+LXII
+
+THE RETURN OF THE PILGRIMS
+
+The last note-book entry bears date of October 11th:
+
+     At sea, somewhere in the neighborhood of Malta.  Very stormy.
+
+     Terrible death to be talked to death.  The storm has blown two small
+     land birds and a hawk to sea and they came on board.  Sea full of
+     flying-fish.
+
+That is all.  There is no record of the week's travel in Spain, which a
+little group of four made under the picturesque Gibraltar guide, Benunes,
+still living and quite as picturesque at last accounts.  This side-trip
+is covered in a single brief paragraph in the Innocents, and the only
+account we have of it is in a home letter, from Cadiz, of October 24th:
+
+     We left Gibraltar at noon and rode to Algeciras (4 hours), thus
+     dodging the quarantine--took dinner, and then rode horseback all
+     night in a swinging trot, and at daylight took a caleche (a-wheeled
+     vehicle), and rode 5 hours--then took cars and traveled till twelve
+     at night.  That landed us at Seville, and we were over the hard part
+     of our trip and somewhat tired.  Since then we have taken things
+     comparatively easy, drifting around from one town to another and
+     attracting a good deal of attention--for I guess strangers do not
+     wander through Andalusia and the other southern provinces of Spain
+     often.  The country is precisely what it was when Don Quixote and
+     Sancho Panza were possible characters.
+
+     But I see now what the glory of Spain must have been when it was
+     under Moorish domination.  No, I will not say that--but then when
+     one is carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of the
+     Alhambra and the supernatural beauty of the Alcazar, he is apt to
+     overflow with admiration for the splendid intellects that created
+     them.
+
+We may wish that he had left us a chapter of that idyllic journey, but it
+will never be written now.  A night or two before the vessel reached New
+York there was the usual good-by assembly, and for this occasion, at Mrs.
+Severance's request, Mark Twain wrote some verses.  They were not
+especially notable, for meter and rhyme did not come easy to him, but one
+prophetic stanza is worth remembering.  In the opening lines the
+passengers are referred to as a fleet of vessels, then follows:
+
+          Lo! other ships of that parted fleet
+          Shall suffer this fate or that:
+          One shall be wrecked, another shall sink,
+          Or ground on treacherous flat.
+          Some shall be famed in many lands
+          As good ships, fast and fair,
+          And some shall strangely disappear,
+          Men know not when or where.
+
+The Quaker City returned to America on November 19, 1867, and Mark Twain
+found himself, if not famous, at least in very wide repute.  The fifty-
+three letters to the Alta and the half-dozen to the New York Tribune had
+carried his celebrity into every corner of the States and Territories.
+Vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry, they came as a
+revelation to a public weary of the driveling, tiresome travel-letters of
+that period.  They preached a new gospel in travel-literature: the gospel
+of seeing with an overflowing honesty; a gospel of sincerity in according
+praises to whatever seemed genuine, and ridicule to the things considered
+sham.  It was the gospel that Mark Twain would continue to preach during
+his whole career.  It became his chief literary message to the world-a
+world waiting for that message.
+
+Moreover, the letters were literature.  He had received, from whatever
+source, a large and very positive literary impulse, a loftier conception
+and expression.  It was at Tangier that he first struck the grander
+chord, the throbbing cadence of human story.
+
+Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered America;
+old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to
+arm for the first Crusade; old when Charlemagne and his paladins
+beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the
+fabled days of the olden time; old when Christ and his disciples walked
+the earth; stood where it stands to-day when the lips of Memnon were
+vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes.
+
+This is pure poetry.  He had never touched so high a strain before, but
+he reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing
+mastery and confidence.  In Venice, in Rome, in Athens, through the Holy
+Land, his retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional
+crescendo that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain,
+the ageless contemplation of the Sphinx.  We cannot forego a paragraph or
+two of that word-picture:
+
+     After years of waiting it was before me at last.  The great face was
+     so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient.  There was a dignity not
+     of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as
+     never anything human wore.  It was stone, but it seemed sentient.
+     If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking.  It was looking
+     toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing--nothing
+     but distance and vacancy.  It was looking over and beyond everything
+     of the present, and far into the past....  It was thinking of the
+     wars of the departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and
+     destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose
+     progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy
+     and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five
+     thousand slow-revolving years .  .  .  .
+
+     The Sphinx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its
+     magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its
+     story.  And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this
+     eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of
+     all ages, which reveals to one something of what we shall feel when
+     we shall stand at last in the awful presence of God.
+
+Then that closing word of Egypt.  He elaborated it for the book, and did
+not improve it.  Let us preserve here its original form.
+
+     We are glad to have seen Egypt.  We are glad to have seen that old
+     land which taught Greece her letters--and through Greece, Rome--and
+     through Rome, the world--that venerable cradle of culture and
+     refinement which could have humanized and civilized the Children of
+     Israel, but allowed them to depart out of her borders savages--those
+     Children whom we still revere, still love, and whose sad
+     shortcomings we still excuse--not because they were savages, but
+     because they were the chosen savages of God.
+
+The Holy Land letters alone would have brought him fame.  They presented
+the most graphic and sympathetic picture of Syrian travel ever written--
+one that will never become antiquated or obsolete so long as human nature
+remains unchanged.  From beginning to end the tale is rarely, reverently
+told.  Its closing paragraph has not been surpassed in the voluminous
+literature of that solemn land:
+
+     Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.  Over it broods the spell of
+     a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.
+     Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers that solemn
+     sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing
+     exists--over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs
+     motionless and dead--about whose borders nothing grows but weeds and
+     scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises
+     refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch.
+     Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of
+     Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing one finds
+     only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the
+     accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle left
+     it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in
+     their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to
+     remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour's
+     presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks
+     by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, goodwill to men,
+     is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature
+     that is pleasant to the eye.  Renowned Jerusalem itself, the
+     stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and
+     is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer
+     there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the
+     wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel is
+     gone, and the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on
+     that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the
+     Holy Cross.  The noted Sea of Galilee, where Roman fleets once rode
+     at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed in their ships,
+     was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and its
+     borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a shapeless ruin;
+     Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have
+     vanished from the earth, and the "desert places" round about them
+     where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's voice and ate
+     the miraculous bread sleep in the hush of a solitude that is
+     inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.
+
+     Palestine is desolate and unlovely.  And why should it be otherwise?
+     Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?
+
+It would be easy to quote pages here--a pictorial sequence from Gibraltar
+to Athens, from Athens to Egypt, a radiant panoramic march.  In time he
+would write technically better.  He would avoid solecism, he would become
+a greater master of vocabulary and phrase, but in all the years ahead he
+would never match the lambent bloom and spontaneity of those fresh, first
+impressions of Mediterranean lands and seas.  No need to mention the
+humor, the burlesque, the fearless, unrestrained ridicule of old masters
+and of sacred relics, so called.  These we have kept familiar with much
+repetition.  Only, the humor had grown more subtle, more restrained; the
+burlesque had become impersonal and harmless, the ridicule so frank and
+good-natured, that even the old masters themselves might have enjoyed it,
+while the most devoted churchman, unless blinded by bigotry, would find
+in it satisfaction, rather than sacrilege.
+
+The final letter was written for the New York Herald after the arrival,
+and was altogether unlike those that preceded it.  Gaily satirical and
+personal--inclusively so--it might better have been left unwritten, for
+it would seem to have given needless offense to a number of goodly
+people, whose chief sin was the sedateness of years. However, it is all
+past now, and those who were old then, and perhaps queer and pious and
+stingy, do not mind any more, and those who were young and frivolous have
+all grown old too, and most of them have set out on the still farther
+voyage.  Somewhere, it may be, they gather, now; and then, and lightly,
+tenderly recall their old-time journeying.
+
+
+
+
+LXIII
+
+IN WASHINGTON--A PUBLISHING PROPOSITION
+
+Clemens remained but one day in New York.  Senator Stewart had written,
+about the time of the departure of the Quaker City, offering him the
+position of private secretary--a position which was to give him leisure
+for literary work, with a supporting salary as well.  Stewart no doubt
+thought it would be considerably to his advantage to have the brilliant
+writer and lecturer attached to his political establishment, and Clemens
+likewise saw possibilities in the arrangement.  From Naples, in August,
+he had written accepting Stewart's offer; he lost no time now in
+discussing the matter in person.--[In a letter home, August 9th, he
+referred to the arrangement: "I wrote to Bill Stewart to-day accepting
+his private secretaryship in Washington, next winter."]
+
+There seems to have been little difficulty in concluding the arrangement.
+When Clemens had been in Washington a week we find him writing:
+
+     DEAR FOLKS, Tired and sleepy--been in Congress all day and making
+     newspaper acquaintances.  Stewart is to look up a clerkship in the
+     Patent Office for Orion.  Things necessarily move slowly where there
+     is so much business and such armies of office-seekers to be attended
+     to.  I guess it will be all right. I intend it shall be all right.
+
+     I have 18 invitations to lecture, at $100 each, in various parts
+     of the Union--have declined them all.  I am for business now.
+
+     Belong on the Tribune Staff, and shall write occasionally.  Am
+     offered the same berth to-day on the Herald by letter.  Shall write
+     Mr. Bennett and accept, as soon as I hear from Tribune that it will
+     not interfere.  Am pretty well known now--intend to be better known.
+     Am hobnobbing with these old Generals and Senators and other humbugs
+     for no good purpose.  Don't have any more trouble making friends
+     than I did in California.  All serene.  Good-by.  Shall continue on
+     the Alta.
+                              Yours affectionately,
+                                                  SAM.
+
+     P.S.--I room with Bill Stewart and board at Willard's Hotel.
+
+But the secretary arrangement was a brief matter.  It is impossible to
+conceive of Mark Twain as anybody's secretary, especially as the
+secretary of Senator Stewart.
+
+--[In Senator Stewart's memoirs he refers unpleasantly to Mark Twain, and
+after relating several incidents that bear only strained relations to the
+truth, states that when the writer returned from the Holy Land he
+(Stewart) offered him a secretaryship as a sort of charity.  He adds that
+Mark Twain's behavior on his premises was such that a threat of a
+thrashing was necessary.  The reason for such statements becomes
+apparent, however, when he adds that in 'Roughing It' the author accuses
+him of cheating, prints a picture of him with a hatch over his eye, and
+claims to have given him a sound thrashing, none of which statements,
+save only the one concerning the picture (an apparently unforgivable
+offense to his dignity), is true, as the reader may easily ascertain for
+himself.]
+
+Within a few weeks he was writing humorous accounts of "My Late
+Senatorial Secretaryship,"  "Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation,"
+etc., all good-natured burlesque, but inspired, we.  may believe, by the
+change: These articles appeared in the New York Tribune, the New York
+Citizen, and the Galaxy Magazine.
+
+There appears to have been no ill-feeling at this time between Clemens
+and Stewart.  If so, it is not discoverable in any of the former's
+personal or newspaper correspondence.  In fact, in his article relating
+to his "late senatorial secretaryship" he puts the joke, so far as it is
+a joke, on Senator James W. Nye, probably as an additional punishment for
+Nye's failure to appear on the night of his lecture.  He established
+headquarters with a brilliant newspaper correspondent named Riley.  "One
+of the best men in Washington--or elsewhere," he tells us in a brief
+sketch of that person.--[See Riley, newspaper correspondent.  Sketches
+New and Old.]--He had known Riley in San Francisco; the two were
+congenial, and settled down to their several undertakings.
+
+Clemens was chiefly concerned over two things: he wished to make money
+and he wished to secure a government appointment for Orion.  He had used
+up the most of his lecture accumulations, and was moderately in debt.
+His work was in demand at good rates, for those days, and with working
+opportunity he could presently dispose of his financial problem.  The
+Tribune was anxious for letters; the Enterprise and Alta were waiting for
+them; the Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the magazines--all had solicited
+contributions; the lecture bureaus pursued him.  Personally his outlook
+was bright.
+
+The appointment for Orion was a different matter.  The powers were not
+especially interested in a brother; there were too many brothers and
+assorted relatives on the official waiting-list already.  Clemens was
+offered appointments for himself--a consulship, a post-mastership; even
+that of San Francisco.  From the Cabinet down, the Washington political
+contingent had read his travel-letters, and was ready to recognize
+officially the author of them in his own person and personality.
+
+Also, socially: Mark Twain found himself all at once in the midst of
+receptions, dinners, and speech-making; all very exciting for a time at
+least, but not profitable, not conducive to work.  At a dinner of the
+Washington Correspondents Club his response to the toast, "Women," was
+pronounced by Schuyler Colfax to be "the best after dinner speech ever
+made."  Certainly it was a refreshing departure from the prosy or clumsy-
+witted efforts common to that period.  He was coming altogether into his
+own.--[This is the first of Mark Twain's after-dinner speeches to be
+preserved.  The reader will find it complete, as reported next day, in
+Appendix G, at the end of last volume.]
+
+He was not immediately interested in the matter of book publication.
+The Jumping Frog book was popular, and in England had been issued by
+Routledge; but the royalty returns were modest enough and slow in
+arrival.  His desire was for prompter results.  His interest in book
+publication had never been an eager one, and related mainly to the
+advertising it would furnish, which he did not now need; or to the money
+return, in which he had no great faith.  Yet at this very moment a letter
+for him was lying in the Tribune office in New York which would bring the
+book idea into first prominence and spell the beginning of his fortune.
+
+Among those who had read and found delight in the Tribune letters was
+Elisha Bliss, Jr., of the American Publishing Company, of Hartford.
+Bliss was a shrewd and energetic man, with a keen appreciation for humor
+and the American fondness for that literary quality.  He had recently
+undertaken the management of a Hartford concern, and had somewhat alarmed
+its conservative directorate by publishing books that furnished
+entertainment to the reader as well as moral instruction.  Only his
+success in paying dividends justified this heresy and averted his
+downfall.  Two days after the arrival of the Quaker City Bliss wrote the
+letter above mentioned.  It ran as follows:
+
+                         OFFICE OF THE AMERICAN PUBLISHING CO.
+                         HARTFORD, CONN., November 21, 1867.
+
+SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, ESQ.,
+Tribune Office, New York.
+
+DEAR SIR,--We take the liberty to address you this, in place of a letter
+which we had recently written and were about to forward to you, not
+knowing your arrival home was expected so soon.  We are desirous of
+obtaining from you a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your
+letters from the past, etc., with such interesting additions as may be
+proper.  We are the publishers of A. D. Richardson's works, and flatter
+ourselves that we can give an author a favorable term and do as full
+justice to his productions as any other house in the country.  We are
+perhaps the oldest subscription house in the country, and have never
+failed to give a book an immense circulation.  We sold about 100,000
+copies of Richardson's F. D. and E.  ('Field, Dungeon and Escape'), and
+are now printing 41,000 of 'Beyond the Mississippi', and large orders
+ahead.  If you have any thought of writing a book, or could be induced to
+do so, we should be pleased to see you, and will do so.  Will you do us
+the favor of reply at once, at your earliest convenience.
+
+                                   Very truly etc.,
+
+                                        E. BLISS, JR.,
+                                        Secretary.
+
+After ten days' delay this letter was forwarded to the Tribune bureau in
+Washington, where Clemens received it.  He replied promptly.
+
+
+                              WASHINGTON, December 2, 1867.
+
+E. BLISS, JR., ESQ.,
+Secretary American Publishing Co.
+
+DEAR SIR,--I only received your favor of November 21st last night, at the
+rooms of the Tribune Bureau here.  It was forwarded from the Tribune
+office, New York where it had lain eight or ten days.  This will be a
+sufficient apology for the seeming discourtesy of my silence.
+
+I wrote fifty-two letters for the San Francisco Alta California during
+the Quakes City excusion, about half of which number have been printed
+thus far.  The Alta has few exchanges in the East, and I suppose scarcely
+any of these letters have been copied on this side of the Rocky
+Mountains.  I could weed them of their chief faults of construction and
+inelegancies of expression, and make a volume that would be more
+acceptable in many respects than any I could now write.  When those
+letters were written my impressions were fresh, but now they have lost
+that freshness; they were warm then, they are cold now.  I could strike
+out certain letters, and write new ones wherewith to supply their places.
+If you think such a book would suit your purpose, please drop me a line,
+specifying the size and general style of the volume--when the matter
+ought to be ready; whether it should have pictures in it or not; and
+particularly what your terms with me would be, and what amount of money
+I might possibly make out of it.  The latter clause has a degree of
+importance for me which is almost beyond my own comprehension.  But you
+understand that, of course.
+
+I have other propositions for a book, but have doubted the propriety of
+interfering with good newspaper engagements, except my way as an author
+could be demonstrated to be plain before me.  But I know Richardson, and
+learned from him some months ago something of an idea of the subscription
+plan of publishing.  If that is your plan invariably it looks safe.
+
+I am on the New York Tribune staff here as an "occasional," among other
+things, and a note from you addressed to
+                    Very truly, etc.,
+                                   SAM. L. CLEMENS,
+                                   New York Tribune Bureau, Washington
+will find me, without fail.
+
+
+The exchange of those two letters marked the beginning of one of the most
+notable publishing connections in American literary history.
+
+Consummation, however, was somewhat delayed.  Bliss was ill when the
+reply came, and could not write again in detail until nearly a month
+later.  In this letter he recited the profits made by Richardson and
+others through subscription publication, and named the royalties paid.
+Richardson had received four per cent. of the sale price, a small enough
+rate for these later days; but the cost of manufacture was larger then,
+and the sale and delivery of books through agents has ever been an
+expensive process.  Even Horace Greeley had received but a fraction more
+on his Great American Conflict.  Bliss especially suggested and
+emphasized a "humorous work--that is to say, a work humorously inclined."
+He added that they had two arrangements for paying authors: outright
+purchase, and royalty.  He invited a meeting in New York to arrange
+terms.
+
+
+
+
+LXIV
+
+OLIVIA LANGDON
+
+Clemens did in fact go to New York that same evening, to spend Christmas
+with Dan Slote, and missed Bliss's second letter.  It was no matter.
+Fate had his affairs properly in hand, and had prepared an event of still
+larger moment than the publication even of Innocents Abroad.  There was a
+pleasant reunion at Dan Slote's.  He wrote home about it:
+
+     Charley Langdon, Jack Van Nostrand, Dan and I (all Quaker City
+     night-hawks) had a blow-out at Dan's house and a lively talk over
+     old times.  I just laughed till my sides ached at some of our
+     reminiscences.  It was the unholiest gang that ever cavorted through
+     Palestine, but those are the best boys in the world.
+
+This, however, was not the event; it was only preliminary to it.  We are
+coming to that now.  At the old St. Nicholas Hotel, which stood on the
+west of Broadway between Spring and Broome streets, there were stopping
+at this time Jervis Langdon, a wealty coal-dealer and mine-owner of
+Elmira, his son Charles and his daughter Olivia, whose pictured face
+Samuel Clemens had first seen in the Bay of Smyrna one September day.
+Young Langdon had been especially anxious to bring his distinguished
+Quaker City friend and his own people together, and two days before
+Christmas Samuel Clemens was invited to dine at the hotel.  He went very
+willingly. The lovely face of that miniature had been often a part of
+his waking dreams.  For the first time now he looked upon its reality.
+Long afterward he said:
+
+"It is forty years ago.  From that day to this she has never been out of
+my mind."
+
+Charles Dickens was in New York then, and gave a reading that night in
+Steinway Hall.  The Langdons went, and Samuel Clemens accompanied them.
+He remembered afterward that Dickens wore a black velvet coat with a
+fiery red flower in his buttonhole, and that he read the storm scene from
+Copperfield--the death of James Steerforth.  But he remembered still more
+clearly the face and dress of that slender girlish figure at his side.
+
+Olivia Langdon was twenty-two years old at this time, delicate as the
+miniature he had seen, fragile to look upon, though no longer with the
+shattered health of her girlhood.  At sixteen, through a fall upon the
+ice, she had become a complete invalid, confined to her bed for two
+years, unable to sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position
+except upon her back.  Great physicians and surgeons, one after another,
+had done their best for her but she had failed steadily until every hope
+had died.  Then, when nothing else was left to try, a certain Doctor
+Newton, of spectacular celebrity, who cured by "laying on of hands," was
+brought to Elmira to see her.  Doctor Newton came into the darkened room
+and said:
+
+"Open the windows--we must have light!"
+
+They protested that she could not bear the light, but the windows were
+opened.  Doctor Newton came to the bedside of the helpless girl,
+delivered a short, fervent prayer, put his arm under her shoulders, and
+bade her sit up.  She had not moved for two years, and the family were
+alarmed, but she obeyed, and he assisted her into a chair.  Sensation
+came back to her limbs.  With his assistance she even made a feeble
+attempt to walk.  He left then, saying that she would gradually improve,
+and in time be well, though probably never very strong.  On the same day
+he healed a boy, crippled and drawn with fever.
+
+It turned out as he had said.  Olivia Langdon improved steadily, and now
+at twenty-two, though not robust--she was never that--she was
+comparatively well.  Gentle, winning, lovable, she was the family idol,
+and Samuel Clemens joined in their worship from the moment of that first
+meeting.
+
+Olivia Langdon, on her part, was at first dazed and fascinated, rather
+than attracted, by this astonishing creature, so unlike any one she had
+ever known.  Her life had been circumscribed, her experiences of a simple
+sort.  She had never seen anything resembling him before.  Indeed, nobody
+had.  Somewhat carelessly, even if correctly, attired; eagerly, rather
+than observantly, attentive; brilliant and startling, rather than
+cultured, of speech--a blazing human solitaire, unfashioned, unset,
+tossed by the drift of fortune at her feet.  He disturbed rather than
+gratified her.  She sensed his heresy toward the conventions and forms
+which had been her gospel; his bantering, indifferent attitude toward
+life--to her always so serious and sacred; she suspected that he even
+might have unorthodox views on matters of religion.  When he had gone she
+somehow had the feeling that a great fiery meteor of unknown portent had
+swept across her sky.
+
+To her brother, who was eager for her approval of his celebrity, Miss
+Langdon conceded admiration.  As for her father, he did not qualify his
+opinion.  With hearty sense of humor, and a keen perception of verity and
+capability in men, Jervis Langdon accepted Samuel Clemens from the start,
+and remained his stanch admirer and friend.  Clemens left that night with
+an invitation to visit Elmira by and by, and with the full intention of
+going--soon.  Fate, however, had another plan.  He did not see Elmira for
+the better part of a year.
+
+He saw Miss Langdon again within the week.  On New-Year's Day he set
+forth to pay calls, after the fashion of the time--more lavish then than
+now.  Miss Langdon was receiving with Miss Alice Hooker, a niece of Henry
+Ward Beecher, at the home of a Mrs. Berry; he decided to go there first.
+With young Langdon he arrived at eleven o'clock in the morning, and they
+did not leave until midnight.  If his first impression upon Olivia
+Langdon had been meteoric, it would seem that he must now have become to
+her as a streaming comet that swept from zenith to horizon.  One thing is
+certain: she had become to him the single, unvarying beacon of his future
+years.  He visited Henry Ward Beecher on that trip and dined with him by
+invitation.  Harriet Beecher Stowe was present, and others of that
+eminent family.  Likewise his old Quaker City comrades, Moses S.  and
+Emma Beach.  It was a brilliant gathering, a conclave of intellectual
+gods--a triumph to be there for one who had been a printer-boy on the
+banks of the Mississippi, and only a little while before a miner with
+pick and shovel.  It was gratifying to be so honored; it would be
+pleasant to write home; but the occasion lacked something too--
+everything, in fact--for when he ran his eye around the board the face of
+the minature was not there.
+
+Still there were compensations; inadequate, of course, but pleasant
+enough to remember.  It was Sunday evening and the party adjourned to
+Plymouth Church.  After services Mr. Beecher invited him to return home
+with him for a quiet talk.  Evidently they had a good time, for in the
+letter telling of these things Samuel Clemens said: "Henry Ward Beecher
+is a brick."
+
+
+
+
+LXV
+
+A CONTRACT WITH ELISHA BLISS, JR.
+
+He returned to Washington without seeing Miss Langdon again, though he
+would seem to have had permission to write--friendly letters.  A little
+later (it was on the evening of January 9th) he lectured in Washington--
+on very brief notice indeed.  The arrangement for his appearance had been
+made by a friend during his absence--"a friend," Clemens declared
+afterward, "not entirely sober at the time."  To his mother he wrote:
+
+I scared up a doorkeeper and was ready at the proper time, and by pure
+good luck a tolerably good house assembled and I was saved.  I hardly
+knew what I was going to talk about, but it went off in splendid style.
+
+The title of the lecture delivered was "The Frozen Truth"--"more truth in
+the title than in the lecture," according to his own statement.  What it
+dealt with is not remembered now.  It had to do with the Quaker City
+trip, perhaps, and it seems to have brought a financial return which was
+welcome enough.  Subsequently he delivered it elsewhere; though just how
+far the tour extended cannot be learned from the letters, and he had but
+little memory of it in later years.
+
+There was some further correspondence with Bliss, then about the 21st of
+January (1868) Clemens made a trip to Hartford to settle the matter.
+Bliss had been particularly anxious to meet him, personally and was a
+trifle disappointed with his appearance.  Mark Twain's traveling costume
+was neither new nor neat, and he was smoking steadily a pipe of power.
+His general make-up was hardly impressive.
+
+Bliss's disturbance was momentary.  Once he began to talk the rest did
+not matter.  He was the author of those letters, and Bliss decided that
+personally he was even greater than they.  The publisher, confined to his
+home with illness, offered him the hospitality of his household.  Also,
+he made him two propositions: he would pay him ten thousand dollars cash
+for his copyright, or he would pay five per cent. royalty, which was a
+fourth more than Richardson had received.  He advised the latter
+arrangement.
+
+Clemens had already taken advice and had discussed the project a good
+deal with Richardson.  The ten thousand dollars was a heavy temptation,
+but he withstood it and closed on the royalty basis--"the best business
+judgment I ever displayed," he was wont to declare.  A letter written to
+his mother and sister near the end of this Hartford stay is worth quoting
+pretty fully here, for the information and "character" it contains.  It
+bears date of January 24th.
+
+     This is a good week for me.  I stopped in the Herald office, as I
+     came through New York, to see the boys on the staff, and young James
+     Gordon Bennett asked me to write twice a week, impersonally, for the
+     Herald, and said if I would I might have full swing, and about
+     anybody and everything I wanted to.  I said I must have the very
+     fullest possible swing, and he said, "All right."  I said, "It's a
+     contract--" and that settled that matter.
+
+     I'll make it a point to write one letter a week anyhow.  But the
+     best thing that has happened is here.  This great American
+     Publishing Company kept on trying to bargain with me for a book till
+     I thought I would cut the matter short by coming up for a talk.  I
+     met Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, and with his usual whole-souled
+     way of dropping his own work to give other people a lift when he
+     gets a chance, he said: "Now, here, you are one of the talented men
+     of the age--nobody is going to deny that--but in matters of business
+     I don't suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains.
+     I'll tell you what to do and how to do it."  And he did.
+
+     And I listened well, and then came up here and made a splendid
+     contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large pages, with
+     illustrations, the manuscript to be placed in the publisher's hands
+     by the middle of July.--[The contract was not a formal one.  There
+     was an exchange of letters agreeing to the terms, but no joint
+     document was drawn until October 16 (1868).]--My percentage is to
+     be a fourth more than they have ever paid any author except Greeley.
+     Beecher will be surprised, I guess, when he hears this.
+
+     These publishers get off the most tremendous editions of their books
+     you can imagine.  I shall write to the Enterprise and Alta every
+     week, as usual, I guess, and to the Herald twice a week,
+     occasionally to the Tribune and the magazines (I have a stupid
+     article in the Galaxy, just issued), but I am not going to write to
+     this and that and the other paper any more.
+
+     I have had a tiptop time here for a few days (guest of Mr. Jno.
+     Hooker's family--Beecher's relatives--in a general way of Mr. Bliss
+     also, who is head of the publishing firm).  Puritans are mighty
+     straight-laced, and they won't let me smoke in the parlor, but the
+     Almighty don't make any better people.
+
+     I have to make a speech at the annual Herald dinner on the 6th of
+     May.
+
+So the book, which would establish his claim to a peerage in the literary
+land, was arranged for, and it remained only to prepare the manuscript, a
+task which he regarded as not difficult.  He had only to collate the Alta
+and Tribune letters, edit them, and write such new matter as would be
+required for completeness.
+
+Returning to Washington, he plunged into work with his usual terrific
+energy, preparing the copy--in the mean time writing newspaper
+correspondence and sketches that would bring immediate return.  In
+addition to his regular contributions, he entered into a syndicate
+arrangement with John Swinton (brother of William Swinton, the historian)
+to supply letters to a list of newspapers.
+
+"I have written seven long newspaper letters and a short magazine article
+in less than two days," he wrote home, and by the end of January he had
+also prepared several chapters of his book.
+
+The San Francisco post-mastership was suggested to him again, but he put
+the temptation behind him.  He refers to this more than once in his home
+letters, and it is clear that he wavered.
+
+     Judge Field said if I wanted the place he could pledge me the
+     President's appointment, and Senator Corners said he would guarantee
+     me the Senate's confirmation.  It was a great temptation, but it
+     would render it impossible to fill my book contract, and I had to
+     drop the idea....
+
+     And besides I did not want the office.
+
+He made this final decision when he heard that the chief editor of the
+Alta wanted the place, and he now threw his influence in that quarter.
+"I would not take ten thousand dollars out of a friend's pocket," he
+said.
+
+But then suddenly came the news from Goodman that the Alta publishers had
+copyrighted his Quaker City letters and proposed getting them out in a
+book, to reimburse themselves still further on their investment.  This
+was sharper than a serpent's tooth.  Clemens got confirmation of the
+report by telegraph.  By the same medium he protested, but to no purpose.
+Then he wrote a letter and sat down to wait.  He reported his troubles to
+Orion:
+
+     I have made a superb contract for a book, and have prepared the
+     first ten chapters of the sixty or eighty, but I will bet it never
+     sees the light.  Don't you let the folks at home hear that.  That
+     thieving Alta copyrighted the letters, and now shows no disposition
+     to let me use them.  I have done all I can by telegraph, and now
+     await the final result by mail.  I only charged them for 50 letters
+     what (even in) greenbacks would amount to less than two thousand
+     dollars, intending to write a good deal for high-priced Eastern
+     papers, and now they want to publish my letters in book form
+     themselves to get back that pitiful sum.
+
+Orion was by this time back from Nevada, setting type in St. Louis.  He
+was full of schemes, as usual, and his brother counsels him freely.  Then
+he says:
+
+     We chase phantoms half the days of our lives.  It is well if we
+     learn wisdom even then, and save the other half.
+
+     I am in for it.  I must go on chasing them, until I marry, then I am
+     done with literature and all other bosh--that is, literature
+     wherewith to please the general public.
+
+     I shall write to please myself then.
+
+He closes by saying that he rather expects to go with Anson Burlingame on
+the Chinese embassy.  Clearly he was pretty hopeless as to his book
+prospects.
+
+His first meeting with General Grant occurred just at this time.  In one
+of his home letters he mentions, rather airily, that he will drop in
+someday on the General for an interview; and at last, through Mrs. Grant,
+an appointment was made for a Sunday evening when the General would be at
+home.  He was elated with the prospect of an interview; but when he
+looked into the imperturbable, square, smileless face of the soldier he
+found himself, for the first time in his life, without anything
+particular to say.  Grant nodded slightly and waited.  His caller wished
+something would happen.  It did.  His inspiration returned.
+
+"General," he said, "I seem to be a little embarrassed.  Are you?"
+
+That broke the ice.  There were no further difficulties.--[Mark Twain
+has variously related this incident.  It is given here in accordance with
+the letters of the period.]
+
+
+
+
+LXVI
+
+BACK TO SAN FRANCISCO
+
+Reply came from the Alta, but it was not promising.  It spoke rather
+vaguely of prior arrangements and future possibilities.  Clemens gathered
+that under certain conditions he might share in the profits of the
+venture.  There was but one thing to do; he knew those people--some of
+them--Colonel McComb and a Mr. McCrellish intimately.  He must confer
+with them in person.
+
+He was weary of Washington, anyway.  The whole pitiful machinery of
+politics disgusted him.  In his notebook he wrote:
+
+     Whiskey is taken into the committee rooms in demijohns and carried
+     out in demagogues.
+
+And in a letter:
+
+     This is a place to get a poor opinion of everybody in.  There are
+     some pitiful intellects in this Congress!  There isn't one man in
+     Washington in civil office who has the brains of Anson Burlingame,
+     and I suppose if China had not seized and saved his great talents to
+     the world this government would have discarded him when his time was
+     up.--[Anson Burlingame had by this time become China's special
+     ambassador to the nations.]
+
+Furthermore, he was down on the climate of Washington.  He decided to go
+to San Francisco and see "those Alta thieves face to face."  Then, if a
+book resulted, he could prepare it there among friends.  Also, he could
+lecture.
+
+He had been anxious to visit his people before sailing, but matters were
+too urgent to permit delay.  He obtained from Bliss an advance of royalty
+and took passage, by way of Aspinwall, on the sidewheel steamer Henry
+Chauncey, a fine vessel for those days.  The name of Mark Twain was
+already known on the isthmus, and when it was learned he had arrived on
+the Chauncey a delegation welcomed him on the wharf, and provided him
+with refreshments and entertainment.  Mr. Tracy Robinson, a poet, long a
+resident of that southern land, was one of the group.  Beyond the isthmus
+Clemens fell in again with his old captain, Ned Wakeman, who during the
+trip told him the amazing dream that in due time would become Captain
+Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.  He made the first draft of this story soon
+after his arrival in San Francisco, as a sort of travesty of Elizabeth
+Stuart Phelps's Gates Ajar, then very popular.  Clemens, then and later,
+had a high opinion of Capt. Ned Wakeman's dream, but his story of it
+would pass through several stages before finally reaching the light of
+publication.--[Mr. John P.  Vollmer, now of Lewiston, Idaho, a
+companion of that voyage, writes of a card game which took place beyond
+the isthmus.  The notorious crippled gambler, "Smithy," figured in it,
+and it would seem to have furnished the inspiration for the exciting
+story in Chapter XXXVI of the Mississippi book.]
+
+In San Francisco matters turned out as he had hoped.  Colonel McComb was
+his stanch friend; McCrellish and Woodward, the proprietors, presently
+conceded that they had already received good value for the money paid.
+The author agreed to make proper acknowledgments to the Alta in his
+preface, and the matter was settled with friendliness all around.
+
+The way was now clear, the book assured.  First, however, he must provide
+himself with funds.  He delivered a lecture, with the Quaker City
+excursion as his subject.  On the 5th of May he wrote to Bliss:
+
+I lectured here on the trip the other night; over $1,600 in gold in the
+house; every seat taken and paid for before night.
+
+He reports that he is steadily at work, and expects to start East with
+the completed manuscript about the middle of June.
+
+But this was a miscalculation.  Clemens found that the letters needed
+more preparation than he had thought.  His literary vision and equipment
+had vastly altered since the beginning of that correspondence.  Some of
+the chapters he rewrote; others he eliminated entirely.  It required two
+months of fairly steady work to put the big manuscript together.
+
+Some of the new chapters he gave to Bret Harte for the Overland Monthly,
+then recently established.  Harte himself was becoming a celebrity about
+this time.  His "Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat,"
+published in early numbers of the Overland, were making a great stir in
+the East, arousing there a good deal more enthusiasm than in the magazine
+office or the city of their publication.  That these two friends, each
+supreme in his own field, should have entered into their heritage so
+nearly at the same moment, is one of the many seemingly curious
+coincidences of literary history.
+
+Clemens now concluded to cover his lecture circuit of two years before.
+He was assured that it would be throwing away a precious opportunity not
+to give his new lecture to his old friends.  The result justified that
+opinion.  At Virginia, at Carson, and elsewhere he was received like a
+returned conqueror.  He might have been accorded a Roman triumph had
+there been time and paraphernalia.  Even the robbers had reformed, and
+entire safety was guaranteed him on the Divide between Virginia and Gold
+Hill.  At Carson he called on Mrs. Curry, as in the old days, and among
+other things told her how snow from the Lebanon Mountains is brought to
+Damascus on the backs of camels.
+
+"Sam," she said, "that's just one of your yarns, and if you tell it in
+your lecture to-night I'll get right up and say so."
+
+But he did tell it, for it was a fact; and though Mrs. Curry did not rise
+to deny it she shook her finger at him in a way he knew.
+
+He returned to San Francisco and gave one more lecture, the last he would
+ever give in California.  His preparatory advertising for that occasion
+was wholly unique, characteristic of him to the last degree.  It assumed
+the form of a handbill of protest, supposed to have been issued by the
+foremost citizens of San Francisco, urging him to return to the States
+without inflicting himself further upon them.  As signatures he made free
+with the names of prominent individuals, followed by those of
+organizations, institutions, "Various Benevolent Societies, Citizens on
+Foot and Horseback, and fifteen hundred in the Steerage."
+
+Following this (on the same bill) was his reply, "To the fifteen hundred
+and others," in which he insisted on another hearing:
+
+     I will torment the people if I want to....  It only costs the people
+     $1 apiece, and if they can't stand it what do they stay here for?...
+     My last lecture was not as fine as I thought it was, but I have
+     submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have
+     pronounced it good.  Now, therefore, why should I withhold it?
+
+He promised positively to sail on the 6th of July if they would let him
+talk just this once.  Continuing, the handbill presented a second
+protest, signed by the various clubs and business firms; also others
+bearing variously the signatures of the newspapers, and the clergy,
+ending with the brief word:
+
+     You had better go.    Yours,    CHIEF OF POLICE.
+
+All of which drollery concluded with his announcement of place and date
+of his lecture, with still further gaiety at the end.  Nothing short of a
+seismic cataclysm--an earthquake, in fact--could deter a San Francisco
+audience after that.  Mark Twain's farewell address, given at the
+Mercantile Library July 2 (1868), doubtless remains today the leading
+literary event in San Francisco's history.--[Copy of the lecture
+announcement, complete, will be found in Appendix H, at the end of last
+volume.]
+
+He sailed July 6th by the Pacific mail steamer Montana to Acapulco,
+caught the Henry Chauncey at Aspinwall, reached New York on the 28th, and
+a day or two later had delivered his manuscript at Hartford.
+
+But a further difficulty had arisen.  Bliss was having troubles himself,
+this time, with his directors.  Many reports of Mark Twain's new book had
+been traveling the rounds of the press, some of which declared it was to
+be irreverent, even blasphemous, in tone.  The title selected, The New
+Pilgrim's Progress, was in itself a sacrilege.  Hartford was a
+conservative place; the American Publishing Company directors were of
+orthodox persuasion.  They urged Bliss to relieve the company of this
+impending disaster of heresy.  When the author arrived one or more of
+them labored with him in person, without avail.  As for Bliss, he was
+stanch; he believed in the book thoroughly, from every standpoint.  He
+declared if the company refused to print it he would resign the
+management and publish the book himself.  This was an alarming suggestion
+to the stockholders.  Bliss had returned dividends--a boon altogether too
+rare in the company's former history.  The objectors retired and were
+heard of no more.  The manuscript was placed in the hands of Fay and Cox,
+illustrators, with an order for about two hundred and fifty pictures.
+
+Fay and Cox turned it over to True Williams, one of the well-known
+illustrators of that day.  Williams was a man of great talent--of fine
+imagination and sweetness of spirit--but it was necessary to lock him in
+a room when industry was required, with nothing more exciting than cold
+water as a beverage.  Clemens himself aided in the illustrating by
+obtaining of Moses S. Beach photographs from the large collection he had
+brought home.
+
+
+
+
+LXVII
+
+A VISIT TO ELMIRA
+
+Meantime he had skilfully obtained a renewal of the invitation to spend a
+week in the Langdon home.
+
+He meant to go by a fast train, but, with his natural gift for
+misunderstanding time-tables, of course took a slow one, telegraphing his
+approach from different stations along the road.  Young Langdon concluded
+to go down the line as far as Waverly to meet him.  When the New York
+train reached there the young man found his guest in the smoking-car,
+travel-stained and distressingly clad.  Mark Twain was always
+scrupulously neat and correct of dress in later years, but in that
+earlier day neatness and style had not become habitual and did not give
+him comfort.  Langdon greeted him warmly but with doubt.  Finally he
+summoned courage to say, hesitatingly--
+
+"You've got some other clothes, haven't you?"
+
+The arriving guest was not in the least disturbed.
+
+"Oh yes," he said with enthusiasm, "I've got a fine brand-new outfit in
+this bag, all but a hat.  It will be late when we get in, and I won't see
+any one to-night.  You won't know me in the morning.  We'll go out early
+and get a hat."
+
+This was a large relief to the younger man, and the rest of the journey
+was happy enough.  True to promise, the guest appeared at daylight
+correctly, even elegantly clad, and an early trip to the shops secured
+the hat.  A gay and happy week followed--a week during which Samuel
+Clemens realized more fully than ever that in his heart there was room
+for only one woman in all the world: Olivia Langdon--"Livy," as they all
+called her--and as the day of departure drew near it may be that the
+gentle girl had made some discoveries, too.
+
+No word had passed between them.  Samuel Clemens had the old-fashioned
+Southern respect for courtship conventions, and for what, in that day at
+least, was regarded as honor.  On the morning of the final day he said to
+young Langdon:
+
+"Charley, my week is up, and I must go home."
+
+The young man expressed a regret which was genuine enough, though not
+wholly unqualified.  His older sister, Mrs. Crane, leaving just then for
+a trip to the White Mountains, had said:
+
+"Charley, I am sure Mr. Clemens is after our Livy.  You mustn't let him
+carry her off before our return."
+
+The idea was a disturbing one.  The young man did not urge his guest to
+prolong his-visit.  He said:
+
+"We'll have to stand it, I guess, but you mustn't leave before to-night."
+
+"I ought to go by the first train," Clemens said, gloomily.  "I am in
+love."
+
+"In what!"
+
+"In love-with your sister, and I ought to get away from here."
+
+The young man was now very genuinely alarmed.  To him Mark Twain was a
+highly gifted, fearless, robust man--a man's man--and as such altogether
+admirable--lovable.  But Olivia--Livy--she was to him little short of a
+saint.  No man was good enough for her, certainly not this adventurous
+soldier of letters from the West.  Delightful he was beyond doubt,
+adorable as a companion, but not a companion for Livy.
+
+"Look here, Clemens," he said, when he could get his voice.  "There's a
+train in half an hour.  I'll help you catch it.  Don't wait till to-
+night.  Go now."
+
+Clemens shook his head.
+
+"No, Charley," he said, in his gentle drawl, "I want to enjoy your
+hospitality a little longer.  I promise to be circumspect, and I'll go
+to-night."
+
+That night, after dinner, when it was time to take the New York train, a
+light two-seated wagon was at the gate.  The coachman was in front, and
+young Langdon and his guest took the back seat.  For some reason the seat
+had not been locked in its place, and when, after the good-bys, the
+coachman touched the horse it made a quick spring forward, and the back
+seat, with both passengers, described a half-circle and came down with
+force on the cobbled street.  Neither passenger was seriously hurt;
+Clemens not at all--only dazed a little for a moment.  Then came an
+inspiration; here was a chance to prolong his visit.  Evidently it was
+not intended that he should take that train.  When the Langdon household
+gathered around with restoratives he did not recover too quickly.  He
+allowed them to support or carry him into the house and place him in an
+arm-chair and apply remedies.  The young daughter of the house especially
+showed anxiety and attention.  This was pure happiness.  He was perjuring
+himself, of course, but they say Jove laughs at such things.
+
+He recovered in a day or two, but the wide hospitality of the handsome
+Langdon home was not only offered now; it was enforced.  He was still
+there two weeks later, after which he made a trip to Cleveland to confide
+in Mrs. Fairbanks how he intended to win Livy Langdon for his wife.
+
+
+
+
+LXVIII
+
+THE REV. "JOE" TWICHELL
+
+He returned to Hartford to look after the progress of his book.  Some of
+it was being put into type, and with his mechanical knowledge of such
+things he was naturally interested in the process.
+
+He made his headquarters with the Blisses, then living at 821 Asylum
+Avenue, and read proof in a little upper room, where the lamp was likely
+to be burning most of the time, where the atmosphere was nearly always
+blue with smoke, and the window-sill full of cigar butts.  Mrs. Bliss
+took him into the quiet social life of the neighborhood--to small church
+receptions, society gatherings and the like--all of which he seemed to
+enjoy.  Most of the dwellers in that neighborhood were members of the
+Asylum Hill Congregational Church, then recently completed; all but the
+spire.  It was a cultured circle, well-off in the world's goods, its male
+members, for the most part, concerned in various commercial ventures.
+
+The church stood almost across the way from the Bliss home, and Mark
+Twain, with his picturesque phrasing, referred to it as the "stub-tailed
+church," on account of its abbreviated spire; also, later, with a
+knowledge of its prosperous membership, as the "Church of the Holy
+Speculators."  He was at an evening reception in the home of one of its
+members when he noticed a photograph of the unfinished building framed
+and hanging on the wall.
+
+"Why, yes," he commented, in his slow fashion, "this is the 'Church of
+the Holy Speculators.'"
+
+"Sh," cautioned Mrs. Bliss.  "Its pastor is just behind you.  He knows
+your work and wants to meet you."  Turning, she said: "Mr. Twichell, this
+is Mr. Clemens.  Most people know him as Mark Twain."
+
+And so, in this casual fashion, he met the man who was presently to
+become his closest personal friend and counselor, and would remain so for
+more than forty years.
+
+Joseph Hopkins Twichell was a man about his own age, athletic and
+handsome, a student and a devout Christian, yet a man familiar with the
+world, fond of sports, with an exuberant sense of humor and a wide
+understanding of the frailties of humankind.  He had been "port waist
+oar" at Yale, and had left college to serve with General "Dan" Sickles as
+a chaplain who had followed his duties not only in the camp, but on the
+field.
+
+Mention has already been made of Mark Twain's natural leaning toward
+ministers of the gospel, and the explanation of it is easier to realize
+than to convey.  He was hopelessly unorthodox--rankly rebellious as to
+creeds.  Anything resembling cant or the curtailment of mental liberty
+roused only his resentment and irony.  Yet something in his heart always
+warmed toward any laborer in the vineyard, and if we could put the
+explanation into a single sentence, perhaps we might say it was because
+he could meet them on that wide, common ground sympathy with mankind.
+Mark Twain's creed, then and always, may be put into three words,
+"liberty, justice, humanity."  It may be put into one word, "humanity."
+
+Ministers always loved Mark Twain.  They did not always approve of him,
+but they adored him: The Rev. Mr. Rising, of the Comstock, was an early
+example of his ministerial friendships, and we have seen that Henry Ward
+Beecher cultivated his company.  In a San Francisco letter of two years
+before, Mark Twain wrote his mother, thinking it would please her:
+
+I am as thick as thieves with the Reverend Stebbins.  I am laying for the
+Reverend Scudder and the Reverend Doctor Stone.  I am running on
+preachers now altogether, and I find them gay.
+
+So it may be that his first impulse toward Joseph Twichell was due to the
+fact that he was a young member of that army whose mission is to comfort
+and uplift mankind.  But it was only a little time till the impulse had
+grown into a friendship that went beyond any profession or doctrine, a
+friendship that ripened into a permanent admiration and love for "Joe"
+Twichell himself, as one of the noblest specimens of his race.
+
+He was invited to the Twichell home, where he met the young wife and got
+a glimpse of the happiness of that sweet and peaceful household.  He had
+a neglected, lonely look, and he loved to gather with them at their
+fireside.  He expressed his envy of their happiness, and Mrs. Twichell
+asked him why, since his affairs were growing prosperous, he did not
+establish a household of his own.  Long afterward Mr. Twichell wrote:
+
+     Mark made no answer for a little, but, with his eyes bent on the
+     floor, appeared to be deeply pondering.  Then he looked up, and said
+     slowly, in a voice tremulous with earnestness (with what sympathy he
+     was heard may be imagined): "I am taking thought of it.  I am in
+     love beyond all telling with the dearest and best girl in the whole
+     world.  I don't suppose she will marry me.  I can't think it
+     possible.  She ought not to.  But if she doesn't I shall be sure
+     that the best thing I ever did was to fall in love with her, and
+     proud to have it known that I tried to win her!"
+
+It was only a brief time until the Twichell fireside was home to him.  He
+came and went, and presently it was "Mark" and "Joe," as by and by it
+would be "Livy" and "Harmony," and in a few years "Uncle Joe" and "Uncle
+Mark,"  "Aunt Livy" and "Aunt Harmony," and so would remain until the
+end.
+
+
+
+
+LXIX
+
+A LECTURE TOUR
+
+James Redpath, proprietor of the Boston Lyceum Bureau, was the leading
+lecture agent of those days, and controlled all, or nearly all, of the
+platform celebrities.  Mark Twain's success at the Cooper Union the year
+before had interested Redpath.  He had offered engagements then and
+later, but Clemens had not been free for the regular circuit.  Now there
+was no longer a reason for postponement of a contract.  Redpath was eager
+for the new celebrity, and Clemens closed with him for the season of
+1868-9.  With his new lecture, "The Vandal Abroad," he was presently
+earning a hundred dollars and more a night, and making most of the nights
+count.
+
+This was affluence indeed.  He had become suddenly a person of substance-
+an associate of men of consequence, with a commensurate income.  He could
+help his mother lavishly now, and he did.
+
+His new lecture was immensely popular.  It was a resume of the 'Quaker
+City' letters--a foretaste of the book which would presently follow.
+Wherever he went, he was hailed with eager greetings.  He caught such
+drifting exclamations as, "There he is!  There goes Mark Twain!"  People
+came out on the street to see him pass.  That marvelous miracle which we
+variously call "notoriety," "popularity," "fame," had come to him.  In
+his notebook he wrote, "Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the
+only, earthly certainty oblivion."
+
+The newspapers were filled with enthusiasm both as to his matter and
+method.  His delivery was described as a "long, monotonous drawl, with
+the fun invariably coming in at the end of a sentence--after a pause."
+His appearance at this time is thus set down:
+
+     Mark Twain is a man of medium height, about five feet ten, sparsely
+     built, with dark reddish-brown hair and mustache.  His features are
+     fair, his eyes keen and twinkling.  He dresses in scrupulous evening
+     attire.  In lecturing he hangs about the desk, leaning on it or
+     flirting around the corners of it, then marching and countermarching
+     in the rear of it.  He seldom casts a glance at his manuscript.
+
+No doubt this fairly presents Mark Twain, the lecturer of that day.  It
+was a new figure on the platform, a man with a new method.  As to his
+manuscript, the item might have said that he never consulted it at all.
+He learned his lecture; what he consulted was merely a series of
+hieroglyphics, a set of crude pictures drawn by himself, suggestive of
+the subject-matter underneath new head.  Certain columns represented the
+Parthenon; the Sphinx meant Egypt, and so on.  His manuscript lay there
+in case of accident, but the accident did not happen.
+
+A number of his engagements were in the central part of New York, at
+points not far distant from Elmira.  He had a standing invitation to
+visit the Langdon home, and he made it convenient to avail himself of
+that happiness.
+
+His was not an unruffled courtship.  When at last he reached the point of
+proposing for the daughter of the house, neither the daughter nor the
+household offered any noticeable encouragement to his suit.  Many absurd
+anecdotes have been told of his first interview with Mr. Langdon on the
+subject, but they are altogether without foundation.  It was a proper and
+dignified discussion of a very serious matter.  Mr. Langdon expressed
+deep regard for him and friendship but he was not inclined to add him to
+the family; the young lady herself, in a general way, accorded with these
+views.  The applicant for favor left sadly enough, but he could not
+remain discouraged or sad.  He lectured at Cleveland with vast success,
+and the news of it traveled quickly to Elmira.  He was referred to by
+Cleveland papers as a "lion" and "the coming man of the age."  Two days
+later, in Pittsburgh (November 19th), he "played" against Fanny Kemble,
+the favorite actress of that time, with the result that Miss Kemble had
+an audience of two hundred against nearly ten times the number who
+gathered to hear Mark Twain.  The news of this went to Elmira, too.  It
+was in the papers there next morning; surely this was a conquering hero--
+a gay Lochinvar from out of the West--and the daughter of the house must
+be guarded closely, that he did not bear her away.  It was on the second
+morning following the Pittsburgh triumph, when the Langdon family were
+gathered at breakfast, that a bushy auburn head poked fearfully in at the
+door, and a low, humble voice said:
+
+"The calf has returned; may the prodigal have some breakfast?"
+
+No one could be reserved or reprovingly distant, or any of those
+unfriendly things with a person like that; certainly not Jervis Langdon,
+who delighted in the humor and the tricks and turns and oddities of this
+eccentric visitor.  Giving his daughter to him was another matter, but
+even that thought was less disturbing than it had been at the start.  In
+truth, the Langdon household had somehow grown to feel that he belonged
+to them.  The elder sister's husband, Theodore Crane, endorsed him fully.
+He had long before read some of the Mark Twain sketches that had traveled
+eastward in advance of their author, and had recognized, even in the
+crudest of them, a classic charm.  As for Olivia Langdon's mother and
+sister, their happiness lay in hers.  Where her heart went theirs went
+also, and it would appear that her heart, in spite of herself, had found
+its rightful keeper.  Only young Langdon was irreconciled, and eventually
+set out for a voyage around the world to escape the situation.
+
+There was only a provisional engagement at first.  Jervis Langdon
+suggested, and Samuel Clemens agreed with him, that it was proper to know
+something of his past, as well as of his present, before the official
+parental sanction should be given.  When Mr. Langdon inquired as to the
+names of persons of standing to whom he might write for credentials,
+Clemens pretty confidently gave him the name of the Reverend Stebbins and
+others of San Francisco, adding that he might write also to Joe Goodman
+if he wanted to, but that he had lied for Goodman a hundred times and
+Goodman would lie for him if necessary, so his testimony would be of no
+value.  The letters to the clergy were written, and Mr. Langdon also
+wrote one on his own account.
+
+It was a long mail-trip to the Coast and back in those days.  It might be
+two months before replies would come from those ministers.  The lecturer
+set out again on his travels, and was radiantly and happily busy.  He
+went as far west as Illinois, had crowded houses in Chicago, visited
+friends and kindred in Hannibal, St. Louis, and Keokuk, carrying the
+great news, and lecturing in old familiar haunts.
+
+
+
+
+LXX
+
+INNOCENTS AT HOME--AND "THE INNOCENTS ABROAD"
+
+He was in Jacksonville, Illinois, at the end of January (1869), and in a
+letter to Bliss states that he will be in Elmira two days later, and asks
+that proofs of the book be sent there.  He arrived at the Langdon home,
+anxious to hear the reports that would make him, as the novels might say,
+"the happiest or the most miserable of men."  Jervis Langdon had a rather
+solemn look when they were alone together.  Clemens asked:
+
+"You've heard from those gentlemen out there?"
+
+"Yes, and from another gentleman I wrote concerning you."
+
+"They don't appear to have been very enthusiastic, from your manner."
+
+"Well, yes, some of them were."
+
+"I suppose I may ask what particular form their emotion took?"
+
+"Oh yes, yes; they agree unanimously that you are a brilliant, able man,
+a man with a future, and that you would make about the worst husband on
+record."
+
+The applicant for favor had a forlorn look.
+
+"There's nothing very evasive about that," he said:
+
+There was a period of reflective silence.  It was probably no more than a
+few seconds, but it seemed longer.
+
+"Haven't you any other friend that you could suggest?" Langdon said.
+
+"Apparently none whose testimony would be valuable."
+
+Jervis Langdon held out his hand.  "You have at least one," he said.
+"I believe in you.  I know you better than they do."
+
+And so came the crown of happiness.  The engagement of Samuel Langhorne
+Clemens and Olivia Lewis Langdon was ratified next day, February 4, 1869.
+
+But if the friends of Mark Twain viewed the idea of the carnage with
+scant favor, the friends of Miss Langdon regarded it with genuine alarm.
+Elmira was a conservative place--a place of pedigree and family
+tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, pilot, miner, wandering
+journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the daughter of one of the
+oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not to be lightly permitted.
+The fact that he had achieved a national fame did not count against other
+considerations.  The social protest amounted almost to insurrection, but
+it was not availing.  The Langdon family had their doubts too, though of
+a different sort.  Their doubts lay in the fear that one, reared as their
+daughter had been, might be unable to hold a place as the wife of this
+intellectual giant, whom they felt that the world was preparing to honor.
+That this delicate, sheltered girl could have the strength of mind and
+body for her position seemed hard to believe.  Their faith overbore such
+questionings, and the future years proved how fully it was justified.
+
+To his mother Samuel Clemens wrote:
+
+     She is only a little body, but she hasn't her peer in Christendom.
+     I gave her only a plain gold engagement ring, when fashion
+     imperatively demands a two-hundred-dollar diamond one, and told her
+     it was typical of her future life-namely, that she would have to
+     flourish on substance, rather than luxuries (but you see I know the
+     girl--she don't care anything about luxuries)....  She spends no
+     money but her astral year's allowance, and spends nearly every cent
+     of that on other people.  She will be a good, sensible little wife,
+     without any airs about her.  I don't make intercession for her
+     beforehand, and ask you to love her, for there isn't any use in
+     that--you couldn't help it if you were to try.  I warn you that
+     whoever comes within the fatal influence of her beautiful nature is
+     her willing slave forevermore.
+
+To Mrs. Crane, absent in March, her father wrote:
+
+     DEAR SUE,--I received your letter yesterday with a great deal of
+     pleasure, but the letter has gone in pursuit of one S. L. Clemens,
+     who has been giving us a great deal of trouble lately.  We cannot
+     have a joy in our family without a feeling, on the part of the
+     little incorrigible in our family, that this wanderer must share it,
+     so, as soon as read, into her pocket and off upstairs goes your
+     letter, and in the next two minutes into the mail, so it is
+     impossible for me now to refer to it, or by reading it over gain an
+     inspiration in writing you.  .  .
+
+Clemens closed his lecture tour in March, acid went immediately to
+Elmira.  He had lectured between fifty and sixty times, with a return of
+something more than $8,000, not a bad aggregate for a first season on the
+circuit.  He had planned to make a spring tour to California, but the
+attraction at Elmira was of a sort that discouraged distant travel.
+Furthermore, he disliked the platform, then and always.  It was always a
+temptation to him because of its quick and abundant return, but it was
+none the less distasteful.  In a letter of that spring he wrote:
+
+     I most cordially hate the lecture field.  And after all, I shudder
+     to think I may never get out of it.  In all conversation with Gough,
+     and Anna Dickinson, Nasby, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips,
+     and the other old stagers, I could not observe that they ever
+     expected or hoped to get out of the business.  I don't want to get
+     wedded to it as they are.
+
+He declined further engagements on the excuse that he must attend to
+getting out his book.  The revised proofs were coming now, and he and
+gentle Livy Langdon read them together.  He realized presently that with
+her sensitive nature she had also a keen literary perception.  What
+he lacked in delicacy--and his lack was likely to be large enough in that
+direction--she detected, and together they pruned it away.  She became
+his editor during those happy courtship days--a position which she held
+to her death.  The world owed a large debt of gratitude to Mark Twain's
+wife, who from the very beginning--and always, so far as in her strength
+she was able--inspired him to give only his worthiest to the world,
+whether in written or spoken word, in counsel or in deed.  Those early
+days of their close companionship, spiritual and mental, were full of
+revelation to Samuel Clemens, a revelation that continued from day to
+day, and from year to year, even to the very end.
+
+The letter to Bliss and the proofs were full of suggested changes that
+would refine and beautify the text.  In one of them he settles the
+question of title, which he says is to be:
+
+                          THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
+                                   or
+                       THE NEW PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
+
+and we may be sure that it was Olivia Langdon's voice that gave the
+deciding vote for the newly adopted chief title, which would take any
+suggestion of irreverence out of the remaining words.
+
+The book was to have been issued in the spring, but during his wanderings
+proofs had been delayed, and there was now considerable anxiety about it,
+as the agencies had become impatient for the canvass.  At the end of
+April Clemens wrote: "Your printers are doing well.  I will hurry the
+proofs"; but it was not until the early part of June that the last
+chapters were revised and returned.  Then the big book, at last
+completed, went to press on an edition of twenty thousand, a large number
+for any new book, even to-day.
+
+In later years, through some confusion of circumstance, Mark Twain was
+led to believe that the publication of The Innocents Abroad was long and
+unnecessarily delayed.  But this was manifestly a mistake.  The book went
+to press in June.  It was a big book and a large edition.  The first copy
+was delivered July 20 (1869), and four hundred and seventeen bound
+volumes were shipped that month.  Even with the quicker mechanical
+processes of to-day a month or more is allowed for a large book between
+the final return of proofs and the date of publication.  So it is only
+another instance of his remembering, as he once quaintly put it, "the
+thing that didn't happen."--[In an article in the North American Review
+(September 21, 1906) Mr. Clemens stated that he found it necessary to
+telegraph notice that he would bring suit if the book was not immediately
+issued.  In none of the letters covering this period is there any
+suggestion of delay on the part of the publishers, and the date of the
+final return of proofs, together with the date of publication, preclude
+the possibility of such a circumstance.  At some period of his life he
+doubtless sent, or contemplated sending, such a message, and this fact,
+through some curious psychology, became confused in his mind with the
+first edition of The Innocents Abroad.]
+
+
+
+
+LXXI
+
+THE GREAT BOOK OF TRAVEL
+
+'The Innocents Abroad' was a success from the start.  The machinery for
+its sale and delivery was in full swing by August 1, and five thousand
+one hundred and seventy copies were disposed of that month--a number that
+had increased to more than thirty-one thousand by the first of the year.
+It was a book of travel; its lowest price was three and a half dollars.
+No such record had been made by a book of that description; none has
+equaled it since.--[One must recall that this was the record only up to
+1910. D.W.]
+
+If Mark Twain was not already famous, he was unquestionably famous now.
+As the author of The New Pilgrim's Progress he was swept into the domain
+of letters as one riding at the head of a cavalcade--doors and windows
+wide with welcome and jubilant with applause.  Newspapers chorused their
+enthusiasm; the public voiced universal approval; only a few of the more
+cultured critics seemed hesitant and doubtful.
+
+They applauded--most of them--but with reservation.  Doctor Holland
+regarded Mark Twain as a mere fun maker of ephemeral popularity, and was
+not altogether pleasant in his dictum.  Doctor Holmes, in a letter to the
+author, speaks of the "frequently quaint and amusing conceits," but does
+not find it in his heart to refer to the book as literature.  It was
+naturally difficult for the East to concede a serious value to one who
+approached his subject with such militant aboriginality, and occasionally
+wrote "those kind."  William Dean Howells reviewed the book in the
+Atlantic, which was of itself a distinction, whether the review was
+favorable or otherwise.  It was favorable on the whole, favorable to the
+humor of the book, its "delicious impudence," the charm of its good-
+natured irony.  The review closed:
+
+     It is no business of ours to fix his rank among the humorists
+     California has given us, but we think he is, in an entirely
+     different way from all the others, quite worthy of the company of
+     the best.
+
+This is praise, but not of an intemperate sort, nor very inclusive.  The
+descriptive, the poetic, the more pretentious phases of the book did not
+receive attention.  Mr. Howells was perhaps the first critic of eminence
+to recognize in Mark Twain not only the humorist, but the supreme genius-
+the "Lincoln of our literature."  This was later.  The public--the silent
+public--with what Howells calls "the inspired knowledge of the simple-
+hearted multitude," reached a similar verdict forthwith.  And on
+sufficient evidence: let the average unprejudiced person of to-day take
+up the old volume and read a few chapters anywhere and decide whether it
+is the work of a mere humorist, or also of a philosopher, a poet, and a
+seer.  The writer well remembers a little group of "the simple-hearted
+multitude" who during the winter of '69 and '70 gathered each evening to
+hear the Innocents read aloud, and their unanimous verdict that it was
+the "best book of modern times."
+
+It was the most daring book of its day.  Passages of it were calculated
+to take the breath of the orthodox reader; only, somehow, it made him
+smile, too.  It was all so good-natured, so openly sincere.  Without
+doubt it preached heresy--the heresy of viewing revered landmarks and
+relics joyously, rather than lugubriously; reverentially, when they
+inspired reverence; satirically, when they invited ridicule, and with
+kindliness always.
+
+The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain's greatest book of travel.  The
+critical and the pure in speech may object to this verdict.  Brander
+Matthews regards it second to A Tramp Abroad, the natural viewpoint of
+the literary technician.  The 'Tramp' contains better usage without
+doubt, but it lacks the "color" which gives the Innocents its perennial
+charm.  In the Innocents there is a glow, a fragrance, a romance of
+touch, a subtle something which is idyllic, something which is not quite
+of reality, in the tale of that little company that so long ago sailed
+away to the harbors of their illusions beyond the sea, and, wandered
+together through old palaces and galleries, and among the tombs of the
+saints, and down through ancient lands.  There is an atmosphere about it
+all, a dream-like quality that lies somewhere in the telling, maybe, or
+in the tale; at all events it is there, and the world has felt it ever
+since.  Perhaps it could be defined in a single word, perhaps that word
+would be "youth."  That the artist, poor True Williams, felt its
+inspiration is certain.  We may believe that Williams was not a great
+draftsman, but no artist ever caught more perfectly the light and spirit
+of the author's text.  Crude some of the pictures are, no doubt, but they
+convey the very essence of the story; they belong to it, they are a part
+of it, and they ought never to perish.  'A Tramp Abroad' is a rare book,
+but it cannot rank with its great predecessor in human charm.  The
+public, which in the long run makes mistakes, has rendered that verdict.
+The Innocents by far outsells the Tramp, and, for that matter, any other
+book of travel.
+
+
+THE PURCHASE OF A PAPER
+
+It is curious to reflect that Mark Twain still did not regard himself as
+a literary man.  He had no literary plans for the future; he scarcely
+looked forward to the publication of another book.  He considered himself
+a journalist; his ambition lay in the direction of retirement in some
+prosperous newspaper enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a
+home.  During his travels he had already been casting about for a
+congenial and substantial association in newspaperdom, and had at one
+time considered the purchase of an interest in the Cleveland Herald.  But
+Buffalo was nearer Elmira, and when an opportunity offered, by which he
+could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo Express for $25,000, the
+purchase was decided upon.  His lack of funds prompted a new plan for a
+lecture tour to the Pacific coast, this time with D. R. Locke (Nasby),
+then immensely popular, in his lecture "Cussed Be Canaan."
+
+Clemens had met Nasby on the circuit, and was very fond of him.  The two
+had visited Boston together, and while there had called on Doctor Holmes;
+this by the way.  Nasby was fond of Clemens too, but doubtful about the
+trip-doubtful about his lecture:
+
+     Your proposition takes my breath away.  If I had my new lecture
+     completed I wouldn't hesitate a moment, but really isn't "Cussed Be
+     Canaan" too old?  You know that lemon, our African brother, juicy as
+     he was in his day, has been squeezed dry.  Why howl about his wrongs
+     after said wrongs have been redressed?  Why screech about the
+     "damnable spirit of Cahst" when the victim thereof sits at the first
+     table, and his oppressor mildly takes, in hash, what he leaves?  You
+     see, friend Twain, the Fifteenth Amendment busted "Cussed Be
+     Canaan."  I howled feelingly on the subject while it was a living
+     issue, for I felt all that I said and a great deal more; but now
+     that we have won our fight why dance frantically on the dead corpse
+     of our enemy?  The Reliable Contraband is contraband no more, but a
+     citizen of the United States, and I speak of him no more.
+
+     Give me a week to think of your proposition.  If I can jerk a
+     lecture in time I will go with you.  The Lord knows I would like to.
+     --[Nasby's lecture, "Cussed Be Canaan," opened, "We are all
+     descended from grandfathers!"  He had a powerful voice, and always
+     just on the stroke of eight he rose and vigorously delivered this
+     sentence.  Once, after lecturing an entire season--two hundred and
+     twenty-five nights--he went home to rest.  That evening he sat,
+     musingly drowsing by the fire, when the clock struck eight.  Without
+     a moment's thought Nasby sprang to his feet and thundered out, "We
+     are all descended from grandfathers!"]
+
+Nasby did not go, and Clemens's enthusiasm cooled at the prospect of
+setting out alone on that long tour.  Furthermore, Jervis Langdon
+promptly insisted on advancing the money required to complete the
+purchase of the Express, and the trade was closed.--[Mr. Langdon is just
+as good for $25,000 for me, and has already advanced half of it in cash.
+I wrote and asked whether I had better send him my note, or a due bill,
+or how he would prefer to have the indebtedness made of record, and he
+answered every other topic in the letter pleasantly, but never replied to
+that at all.  Still, I shall give my note into a hands of his business
+agent here, and pay him the interest as it falls due.--S. L. C. to his
+mother.]
+
+The Buffalo Express was at this time in the hands of three men--Col.
+George F. Selkirk, J. L. Lamed, and Thomas A. Kennett.  Colonel Selkirk
+was business manager, Lamed was political editor.  With the purchase of
+Kennett's share Clemens became a sort of general and contributing editor,
+with a more or less "roving commission"--his hours and duties not very
+clearly defined.  It was believed by his associates, and by Clemens
+himself, that his known connection with the paper would give it prestige
+and circulation, as Nasby's connection had popularized the Toledo Blade.
+The new editor entered upon his duties August 14 (1869).  The members of
+the Buffalo press gave him a dinner that evening, and after the manner of
+newspaper men the world over, were handsomely cordial to the "new enemy
+in their midst."
+
+There is an anecdote which relates that next morning, when Mark Twain
+arrived in the Express office (it was then at 14 Swan Street), there
+happened to be no one present who knew him.  A young man rose very
+bruskly and asked if there was any one he would like to see.  It is
+reported that he replied, with gentle deliberation:
+
+"Well, yes, I should like to see some young man offer the new editor a
+chair."
+
+It is so like Mark Twain that we are inclined to accept it, though it
+seems of doubtful circumstance.  In any case it deserves to be true.  His
+"Salutatory" (August 18th) is sufficiently genuine:
+
+     Being a stranger, it would be immodest for me to suddenly and
+     violently assume the associate editorship of the Buffalo Express
+     without a single word of comfort or encouragement to the unoffending
+     patrons of the paper, who are about to be exposed to constant
+     attacks of my wisdom and learning.  But the word shall be as brief
+     as possible.  I only want to assure parties having a friendly
+     interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going to
+     hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time.  I am not
+     going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to
+     make trouble....  I shall not make use of slang and vulgarity upon
+     any occasion or under any circumstances, and shall never use
+     profanity except when discussing house rent and taxes.  Indeed, upon
+     a second thought, I shall not use it even then, for it is
+     unchristian, inelegant, and degrading; though, to speak truly, I do
+     not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a
+     cent without it.  I shall not often meddle with politics, because we
+     have a political Editor who is already excellent and only needs to
+     serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect.  I shall not
+     write any poetry unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers.
+
+     Such is my platform.  I do not see any use in it, but custom is law
+     and must be obeyed.
+
+John Harrison Mills, who was connected with the Express in those days,
+has written:
+
+     I cannot remember that there was any delay in getting down to his
+     work.  I think within five minutes the new editor had assumed the
+     easy look of one entirely at home, pencil in hand and a clutch of
+     paper before him, with an air of preoccupation, as of one intent on
+     a task delayed.  It was impossible to be conscious of the man
+     sitting there, and not feel his identity with all that he had
+     enjoyed, and the reminiscence of it he that seemed to radiate; for
+     the personality was so absolutely in accord with all the record of
+     himself and his work.  I cannot say he seemed to be that vague thing
+     they call a type in race or blood, though the word, if used in his
+     case for temperament, would decidedly mean what they used to call
+     the "sanguine."
+
+     I thought that, pictorially, the noble costume of the Albanian would
+     have well become him.  Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the
+     horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors; or stood at the prow
+     of one of the swift craft of the Vikings.  His eyes, which have been
+     variously described, were, it seemed to me, of an indescribable
+     depth of the bluish moss-agate, with a capacity of pupil dilation
+     that in certain lights had the effect of a deep black....
+
+Mr. Mills adds that in dress he was now "well groomed," and that
+consequently they were obliged to revise their notions as to the careless
+negligee which gossip had reported.--[From unpublished Reminiscences
+kindly lent to the author by Mr. Mills]
+
+
+
+
+LXXIII
+
+THE FIRST MEETING WITH HOWELLS
+
+Clemens' first period of editorial work was a brief one, though he made
+frequent contributions to the paper: sketches, squibs, travel-notes, and
+experiences, usually humorous in character.  His wedding-day had been set
+for early in the year, and it was necessary to accumulate a bank account
+for that occasion.  Before October he was out on the lecture circuit,
+billed now for the first time for New England, nervous and apprehensive
+in consequence, though with good hope.  To Pamela he wrote
+(November 9th):
+
+To-morrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience--
+4,000 critics--and on the success of this matter depends my future
+success in New England.  But I am not distressed.  Nasby is in the same
+boat.  Tonight decides the fate of his brand-new lecture.  He has just
+left my room--been reading his lecture to me--was greatly depressed.  I
+have convinced him that he has little to fear.
+
+Whatever alarm Mark Twain may have felt was not warranted.  His success
+with the New England public was immediate and complete.  He made his
+headquarters in Boston, at Redpath's office, where there was pretty sure
+to be a congenial company, of which he was presently the center.
+
+It was during one of these Boston sojourns that he first met William Dean
+Howells, his future friend and literary counselor.  Howells was assistant
+editor of the Atlantic at this time; James T. Fields, its editor.
+Clemens had been gratified by the Atlantic review, and had called to
+express his thanks for it.  He sat talking to Fields, when Howells
+entered the editorial rooms, and on being presented to the author of the
+review, delivered his appreciation in the form of a story, sufficiently
+appropriate, but not qualified for the larger types.--[He said: "When I
+read that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was so glad her baby
+had come white."]
+
+His manner, his humor, his quaint colloquial forms all delighted Howells
+--more, in fact, than the opulent sealskin overcoat which he affected at
+this period--a garment astonishing rather than esthetic, as Mark Twain's
+clothes in those days of his first regeneration were likely to be
+startling enough, we may believe; in the conservative atmosphere of the
+Atlantic rooms.  And Howells--gentle, genial, sincere--filled with the
+early happiness of his calling, won the heart of Mark Twain and never
+lost it, and, what is still more notable, won his absolute and unvarying
+confidence in all literary affairs.  It was always Mark Twain's habit to
+rely on somebody, and in matters pertaining to literature and to literary
+people in general he laid his burden on William Dean Howells from that
+day.  Only a few weeks after that first visit we find him telegraphing to
+Howells, asking him to look after a Californian poet, then ill and
+friendless in Brooklyn.  Clemens states that he does not know the poet,
+but will contribute fifty dollars if Howells will petition the steamboat
+company for a pass; and no doubt Howells complied, and spent a good deal
+more than fifty dollars' worth of time to get the poet relieved and
+started; it would be like him.
+
+
+
+
+LXXIV
+
+THE WEDDING-DAY
+
+The wedding was planned, at first, either for Christmas or New-Year's
+Day; but as the lecture engagements continued into January it was decided
+to wait until these were filled.  February 2d, a date near the
+anniversary of the engagement, was agreed upon, also a quiet wedding with
+no "tour."  The young people would go immediately to Buffalo, and take up
+a modest residence, in a boardinghouse as comfortable, even as luxurious,
+as the husband's financial situation justified.  At least that was Samuel
+Clemens's understanding of the matter.  He felt that he was heavily in
+debt--that his first duty was to relieve himself of that obligation.
+
+There were other plans in Elmira, but in the daily and happy letters he
+received there was no inkling of any new purpose.
+
+He wrote to J. D. F. Slee, of Buffalo, who was associated in business
+with Mr. Langdon, and asked him to find a suitable boarding-place, one
+that would be sufficiently refined for the woman who was to be his wife,
+and sufficiently reasonable to insure prosperity.  In due time Slee
+replied that, while boarding was a "miserable business anyhow," he had
+been particularly fortunate in securing a place on one of the most
+pleasant streets--"the family a small one and choice spirits, with no
+predilection for taking boarders, and consenting to the present
+arrangement only because of the anticipated pleasure of your company."
+The price, Slee added, would be reasonable.  As a matter of fact a house
+on Delaware Avenue--still the fine residence street of Buffalo--had been
+bought and furnished throughout as a present to the bride and groom.  It
+stands to-day practically unchanged--brick and mansard without, Eastlake
+within, a type then much in vogue--spacious and handsome for that period.
+It was completely appointed.  Diagrams of the rooms had been sent to
+Elmira and Miss Langdon herself had selected the furnishings.  Everything
+was put in readiness, including linen, cutlery, and utensils.  Even the
+servants had been engaged and the pantry and cellar had been stocked.
+
+It must have been hard for Olivia Langdon to keep this wonderful surprise
+out of those daily letters.  A surprise like that is always watching a
+chance to slip out unawares, especially when one is eagerly impatient to
+reveal it.
+
+However, the traveler remained completely in the dark.  He may have
+wondered vaguely at the lack of enthusiasm in the boarding idea, and
+could he have been certain that the sales of the book would continue, or
+that his newspaper venture would yield an abundant harvest, he might have
+planned his domestic beginning on a more elaborate scale.  If only the
+Tennessee land would yield the long-expected fortune now!  But these were
+all incalculable things.  All that he could be sure of was the coming of
+his great happiness, in whatever environment, and of the dragging weeks
+between.
+
+At last the night of the final lecture came, and he was off for Elmira
+with the smallest possible delay.  Once there, the intervening days did
+not matter.  He could join in the busy preparations; he could write
+exuberantly to his friends.  To Laura Hawkins, long since Laura Frazer he
+sent a playful line; to Jim Gillis, still digging and washing on the
+slopes of the old Tuolumne hills, he wrote a letter which eminently
+belongs here:
+
+
+                              Elmira, N. Y., January 26, 1870.
+
+     DEAR Jim,--I remember that old night just as well!  And somewhere
+     among my relics I have your remembrance stored away.  It makes my
+     heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days.  Still it
+     shouldn't, for right in the depths of their poverty and their
+     pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune.
+     You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal
+     sojourn in the rain and mud of Angel's Camp--I mean that day we sat
+     around the tavern stove and heard that chap tell about the frog and
+     how they filled him with shot.  And you remember how we quoted from
+     the yarn and laughed over it out there on the hillside while you and
+     dear old Stoker panned and washed.  I jotted the story down in my
+     note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen
+     dollars for it--I was just that blind.  But then we were so hard up.
+     I published that story, and it became widely known in America,
+     India, China, England, and the reputation it made for me has paid me
+     thousands and thousands of dollars since.  Four or five months ago I
+     bought into the Express (I have ordered it sent to you as long as
+     you live, and if the bookkeeper sends you any bills you let me hear
+     of it).  I went heavily in debt--never could have dared to do that,
+     Jim, if we hadn't heard the jumping Frog story that day.
+
+     And wouldn't I love to take old Stoker by the hand, and wouldn't I
+     love to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of
+     Rinalds in the "Burning Shame!"  Where is Dick and what is he doing?
+     Give him my fervent love and warm old remembrances.
+
+     A week from to-day I shall be married-to a girl even better and
+     lovelier than the peerless "Chapparal Quails."  You can't come so
+     far, Jim, but still I cordially invite you to come anyhow, and I
+     invite Dick too.  And if you two boys were to land here on that
+     pleasant occasion we would make you right royally welcome.
+                              Truly your friend,
+                                             SAML. L. CLEMENS.
+
+     P.S.---California plums are good.  Jim, particularly when they are
+     stewed.
+
+It had been only five years before--that day in Angel's Camp--but how
+long ago and how far away it seemed to him now!  So much had happened
+since then, so much of which that was the beginning--so little compared
+with the marvel of the years ahead, whose threshold he was now about to
+cross, and not alone.
+
+A day or two before the wedding he was asked to lecture on the night of
+February 2d.  He replied that he was sorry to disappoint the applicant,
+but that he could not lecture on the night of February 2d, for the reason
+that he was going to marry a young lady on that evening, and that he
+would rather marry that young lady than deliver all the lectures in the
+world.
+
+And so came the wedding-day.  It began pleasantly; the postman brought a
+royalty check that morning of $4,000, the accumulation of three months'
+sales, and the Rev. Joseph Twichell and Harmony, his wife, came from
+Hartford--Twichell to join with the Rev. Thomas K.  Beecher in
+solemnizing the marriage.  Pamela Moffett, a widow now, with her daughter
+Annie, grown to a young lady, had come all the way from St. Louis, and
+Mrs. Fairbanks from Cleveland.
+
+Yet the guests were not numerous, not more than a hundred at most, so it
+was a quiet wedding there in the Langdon parlors, those dim, stately
+rooms that in the future would hold so much of his history--so much of
+the story of life and death that made its beginning there.
+
+The wedding-service was about seven o'clock, for Mr. Beecher had a
+meeting at the church soon after that hour.  Afterward followed the
+wedding-supper and dancing, and the bride's father danced with the bride.
+To the interested crowd awaiting him at the church Mr. Beecher reported
+that the bride was very beautiful, and had on the longest white gloves he
+had ever seen; he declared they reached to her shoulders.--[Perhaps for
+a younger generation it should be said that Thomas K. Beecher was a
+brother of Henry Ward Beecher.  He lived and died in Elmira, the almost
+worshiped pastor of the Park Congregational Church.  He was a noble,
+unorthodox teacher.  Samuel Clemens at the time of his marriage already
+strongly admired him, and had espoused his cause in an article signed
+"S'cat!" in the Elmira Advertiser, when he (Beecher) had been assailed by
+the more orthodox Elmira clergy.  For the "S'cat" article see Appendix I,
+at the end of last volume.]
+
+It was the next afternoon when they set out for Buffalo, accompanied by
+the bride's parents, the groom's relatives, the Beechers, and perhaps one
+or two others of that happy company.  It was nine o'clock at night when
+they arrived, and found Mr. Slee waiting at the station with sleighs to
+convey the party to the "boarding-house" he had selected.  They drove and
+drove, and the sleigh containing the bride and groom got behind and
+apparently was bound nowhere in particular, which disturbed the groom a
+good deal, for he thought it proper that they should arrive first, to
+receive their guests.  He commented on Slee's poor judgment in selecting
+a house that was so hard to find, and when at length they turned into
+fashionable Delaware Avenue, and stopped before one of the most
+attractive places in the neighborhood, he was beset with fear concerning
+the richness of the locality.
+
+They were on the steps when the doors opened, and a perfect fairyland of
+lights and decoration was revealed within.  The friends who had gone
+ahead came out with greetings, to lead in the bride and groom.  Servants
+hurried forward to take bags and wraps.  They were ushered inside; they
+were led through beautiful rooms, all newly appointed and garnished.  The
+bridegroom was dazed, unable to understand the meaning of things, the
+apparent ownership and completeness of possession.
+
+At last the young wife put her hand upon his arm:
+
+"Don't you understand, Youth," she said; that was always her name for
+him.  "Don't you understand?  It is ours, all ours--everything--a gift
+from father!"
+
+But even then he could not grasp it; not at first, not until Mr. Langdon
+brought a little box and, opening it, handed them the deeds.
+
+Nobody quite remembers what was the first remark that Samuel Clemens made
+then; but either then or a little later he said:
+
+"Mr. Langdon, whenever you are in Buffalo, if it's twice a year, come
+right here.  Bring your bag and stay overnight if you want to.  It
+sha'n't cost you a cent!"
+
+They went in to supper then, and by and by the guests were gone and the
+young wedded pair were alone.
+
+Patrick McAleer, the young coachman, who would grow old in their employ,
+and Ellen, the cook, came in for their morning orders, and were full of
+Irish delight at the inexperience and novelty of it all.  Then they were
+gone, and only the lovers in their new house and their new happiness
+remained.
+
+And so it was they entered the enchanted land.
+
+
+
+
+LXXV
+
+AS TO DESTINY
+
+If any reader has followed these chapters thus far, he may have wondered,
+even if vaguely, at the seeming fatality of events.  Mark Twain had but
+to review his own life for justification of his doctrine of inevitability
+--an unbroken and immutable sequence of cause and effect from the
+beginning.  Once he said:
+
+"When the first living atom found itself afloat on the great Laurentian
+sea the first act of that first atom led to the second act of that first
+atom, and so on down through the succeeding ages of all life, until, if
+the steps could be traced, it would be shown that the first act of that
+first atom has led inevitably to the act of my standing here in my
+dressing-gown at this instant talking to you."
+
+It seemed the clearest presentment ever offered in the matter of
+predestined circumstance--predestined from the instant when that primal
+atom felt the vital thrill.  Mark Twain's early life, however imperfectly
+recorded, exemplifies this postulate.  If through the years still ahead
+of us the course of destiny seems less clearly defined, it is only
+because thronging events make the threads less easy to trace.  The web
+becomes richer, the pattern more intricate and confusing, but the line of
+fate neither breaks nor falters, to the end.
+
+
+
+
+LXXVI
+
+ON THE BUFFALO "EXPRESS"
+
+With the beginning of life in Buffalo, Mark Twain had become already a
+world character--a man of large consequence and events.  He had no proper
+realization of this, no real sense of the size of his conquest; he still
+regarded himself merely as a lecturer and journalist, temporarily
+popular, but with no warrant to a permanent seat in the world's literary
+congress.  He thought his success something of an accident.  The fact
+that he was prepared to settle down as an editorial contributor to a
+newspaper in what was then only a big village is the best evidence of a
+modest estimate of his talents.
+
+He "worked like a horse," is the verdict of those who were closely
+associated with him on the Express.  His hours were not regular, but they
+were long.  Often he was at his desk at eight in the morning, and
+remained there until ten or eleven at night.
+
+His working costume was suited to comfort rather than show.  With coat,
+vest, collar, and tie usually removed (sometimes even his shoes), he
+lounged in his chair, in any attitude that afforded the larger ease,
+pulling over the exchanges; scribbling paragraphs, editorials, humorous
+skits, and what not, as the notion came upon him.  J. L. Lamed, his co-
+worker (he sat on the opposite side of the same table), remembers that
+Mark Twain enjoyed his work as he went along--the humor of it--and that
+he frequently laughed as some whimsicality or new absurdity came into his
+mind.
+
+"I doubt," writes Lamed, "if he ever enjoyed anything more than the
+jackknife engraving that he did on a piece of board of a military map of
+the siege of Paris, which was printed in the Express from his original
+plate, with accompanying explanations and comments.  His half-day of
+whittling and laughter that went with it are something that I find
+pleasant to remember.  Indeed, my whole experience of association with
+him is a happy memory, which I am fortunate in having....  What one saw
+of him was always the actual Mark Twain, acting out of his own nature
+simply, frankly, without pretense, and almost without reserve.  It was
+that simplicity and naturalness in the man which carried his greatest
+charm."
+
+Lamed, like many others, likens Mark Twain to Lincoln in various of his
+characteristics.  The two worked harmoniously together: Lamed attending
+to the political direction of the journal, Clemens to the literary, and
+what might be termed the sentimental side.  There was no friction in the
+division of labor, never anything but good feeling between them.  Clemens
+had a poor opinion of his own comprehension of politics, and perhaps as
+little regard for Lamed's conception of humor.  Once when the latter
+attempted something in the way of pleasantry his associate said:
+
+"Better leave the humor on this paper to me, Lamed"; and once when Lamed
+was away attending the Republican State Convention at Saratoga, and some
+editorial comment seemed necessary, Clemens thought it best to sign the
+utterance, and to make humor of his shortcomings.
+
+     I do not know much about politics, and am not sitting up nights to
+     learn .  .  .  .
+
+     I am satisfied that these nominations are all right and sound, and
+     that they are the only ones that can bring peace to our distracted
+     country (the only political phrase I am perfectly familiar with and
+     competent to hurl at the public with fearless confidence--the other
+     editor is full of them), but being merely satisfied is not enough.
+     I always like to know before I shout.  But I go for Mr. Curtis with
+     all my strength!  Being certain of him, I hereby shout all I know
+     how.  But the others may be a split ticket, or a scratched ticket,
+     or whatever you call it.
+
+     I will let it alone for the present.  It will keep.  The other young
+     man will be back to-morrow, and he will shout for it, split or no
+     split, rest assured of that.  He will prance into this political
+     ring with his tomahawk and his war-whoop, and then you will hear a
+     crash and see the scalps fly.  He has none of my diffidence.  He
+     knows all about these nominees, and if he don't he will let on to in
+     such a natural way as to deceive the most critical.  He knows
+     everything--he knows more than Webster's Unabridged and the American
+     Encyclopedia--but whether he knows anything about a subject or not
+     he is perfectly willing to discuss it.  When he gets back he will
+     tell you all about these candidates as serenely as if he had been
+     acquainted with them a hundred years, though, speaking
+     confidentially, I doubt if he ever heard of any of them till to-day.
+     I am right well satisfied it is a good, sound, sensible ticket, and
+     a ticket to win; but wait till he comes.
+
+     In the mean time I go for George William Curtis and take the
+     chances.
+                                             MARK TWAIN.
+
+He had become what Mr. Howells calls entirely "desouthernized" by this
+time.  From having been of slaveholding stock, and a Confederate soldier,
+he had become a most positive Republican, a rampant abolitionist--had
+there been anything left to abolish.  His sympathy had been always with
+the oppressed, and he had now become their defender.  His work on the
+paper revealed this more and more.  He wrote fewer sketches and more
+editorials, and the editorials were likely to be either savage assaults
+upon some human abuse, or fierce espousals of the weak.  They were
+fearless, scathing, terrific.  Of some farmers of Cohocton, who had taken
+the law into their own hands to punish a couple whom they believed to be
+a detriment to the community, he wrote:
+
+"The men who did that deed are capable of doing any low, sneaking,
+cowardly villainy that could be invented in perdition.  They are the very
+bastards of the devil."
+
+He appended a full list of their names, and added:
+
+"If the farmers of Cohocton are of this complexion, what on earth must a
+Cohocton rough be like?"
+
+But all this happened a long time ago, and we need not detail those
+various old interests and labors here.  It is enough to say that Mark
+Twain on the Express was what he had been from the beginning, and would
+be to the end--the zealous champion of justice and liberty; violent and
+sometimes wrong in his viewpoint, but never less than fearless and
+sincere.  Invariably he was for the oppressed.  He had a natural instinct
+for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the under dog.
+
+Among the best of his editorial contributions is a tribute to Anson
+Burlingame, who died February 23, 1870, at St. Petersburg, on his trip
+around the world as special ambassador for the Chinese Empire.  In this
+editorial Clemens endeavored to pay something of his debt to the noble
+statesman.  He reviewed Burlingame's astonishing career--the career which
+had closed at forty-seven, and read like a fairy-tale-and he dwelt
+lovingly on his hero's nobility of character.  At the close he said:
+
+"He was a good man, and a very, very great man.  America, lost a son, and
+all the world a servant, when he died."
+
+Among those early contributions to the Express is a series called "Around
+the World," an attempt at collaboration with Prof. D. R. Ford, who did
+the actual traveling, while Mark Twain, writing in the first person, gave
+the letters his literary stamp.  At least some of the contributions were
+written in this way, such as "Adventures in Hayti,"  "The Pacific," and
+"Japan."  These letters exist to-day only in the old files of the
+Express, and indeed this is the case with most of Clemens's work for that
+paper.  It was mainly ephemeral or timely work, and its larger value has
+disappeared.  Here and there is a sentence worth remembering.  Of two
+practical jokers who sent in a marriage notice of persons not even
+contemplating matrimony, he said: "This deceit has been practised
+maliciously by a couple of men whose small souls will escape through
+their pores some day if they do not varnish their hides."
+
+Some of the sketches have been preserved.  "Journalism in Tennessee," one
+of the best of his wilder burlesques, is as enjoyable to-day as when
+written.  "A Curious Dream" made a lasting impression on his Buffalo
+readers, and you are pretty certain to hear of it when you mention Mark
+Twain in that city to-day.  It vividly called attention to the neglect of
+the old North Street graveyard.  The gruesome vision of the ancestors
+deserting with their coffins on their backs was even more humiliating
+than amusing, and inspired a movement for reform.  It has been effective
+elsewhere since then, and may still be read with profit--or satisfaction
+--for in a note at the end the reader is assured that if the cemeteries
+of his town are kept in good order the dream is not leveled at his town
+at all, but "particularly and venomously at the next town."
+
+
+
+
+LXXVII
+
+THE "GALAXY"
+
+Mark Twain's work on the Express represented only a portion of his
+literary activities during his Buffalo residence.  The Galaxy, an
+ambitious New York magazine of that day--[published by Sheldon & Co.  at
+498 and 500 Broadway]--, proposed to him that he conduct for them a
+humorous department.  They would pay $2,400 a year for the work, and
+allow him a free hand.  There was some discussion as to book rights, but
+the arrangement was concluded, and his first instalment, under the
+general title of "Memoranda," appeared in the May number, 1870.  In his
+Introductory he outlined what the reader might expect, such as
+"exhaustive statistical tables,"  "Patent Office reports," and "complete
+instructions about farming, even from the grafting of the seed to the
+harrowing of the matured crops."  He declared that he would throw a
+pathos into the subject of agriculture that would surprise and delight
+the world.  He added that the "Memoranda" was not necessarily a humorous
+department.
+
+     I would not conduct an exclusively and professedly humorous
+     department for any one.  I would always prefer to have the privilege
+     of printing a serious and sensible remark, in case one occurred to
+     me, without the reader's feeling obliged to consider himself
+     outraged....  Puns cannot be allowed a place in this department....
+     No circumstance, however dismal, will ever be considered a
+     sufficient excuse for the admission of that last and saddest
+     evidence of intellectual poverty, the pun.
+
+The Galaxy was really a fine magazine, with the best contributors
+obtainable; among them Justin McCarthy, S. M. B. Piatt, Richard Grant
+White, and many others well known in that day, with names that still
+flicker here and there in its literary twilight.  The new department
+appealed to Clemens, and very soon he was writing most of his sketches
+for it.  They were better literature, as a rule, than those published in
+his own paper.
+
+The first number of the "Memoranda" was fairly representative of those
+that followed it.  "The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract,"
+a manuscript which he had undertaken three years before and mislaid, was
+its initial contribution.  Besides the "Beef Contract," there was a
+tribute to George Wakeman, a well-known journalist of those days; a
+stricture on the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage, who had delivered from the
+pulpit an argument against workingmen occupying pews in fashionable
+churches; a presentment of the Chinese situation in San Francisco,
+depicting the cruel treatment of the Celestial immigrant; a burlesque of
+the Sunday-school "good little boy" story,--["The Story of the Good
+Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper" and the "Beef Contract" are included in
+Sketches New and Old; also the Chinese sketch, under the title,
+"Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy."]--and several shorter skits--and
+anecdotes, ten pages in all; a rather generous contract.
+
+Mark Twain's comment on Talmage was prompted by an article in which
+Talmage had assumed the premise that if workingmen attended the churches
+it would drive the better class of worshipers away.  Among other things
+he said:
+
+     I have a good Christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in
+     church, and a workingman should enter the door at the other end,
+     would smell him instantly.  My friend is not to blame for the
+     sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer
+     for being keener on the scent than a stupid watch-dog. The fact is,
+     if you had all the churches free, by reason of the mixing of the
+     common people with the uncommon, you would keep one-half of
+     Christendom sick at their stomach.  If you are going to kill the
+     church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to do with this work
+     of evangelization.
+
+Commenting on this Mark Twain said--well, he said a good deal more than
+we have room for here, but a portion of his closing paragraphs is worth
+preserving.  He compares the Reverend Mr. Talmage with the early
+disciples of Christ--Paul and Peter and the others; or, rather, he
+contrasts him with them.
+
+     They healed the very beggars, and held intercourse with people of a
+     villainous odor every day.  If the subject of these remarks had been
+     chosen among the original Twelve Apostles he would not have
+     associated with the rest, because he could not have stood the fishy
+     smell of some of his comrades who came from around the Sea of
+     Galilee.  He would have resigned his commission with some such
+     remark as he makes in the extract quoted above: "Master, if thou art
+     going to kill the church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to
+     do with this work of evangelization."  He is a disciple, and makes
+     that remark to the Master; the only difference is that he makes it
+     in the nineteenth instead of the first century.
+
+Talmage was immensely popular at this time, and Mark Twain's open attack
+on him must have shocked a good many Galaxy readers, as perhaps his
+article on the Chinese cruelties offended the citizens of San Francisco.
+It did not matter.  He was not likely to worry over the friends he would
+lose because of any stand taken for human justice.  Lamed said of him:
+"He was very far from being one who tried in any way to make himself
+popular."  Certainly he never made any such attempt at the expense of his
+convictions.
+
+The first Galaxy instalment was a sort of platform of principles for the
+campaign that was to follow.  Not that each month's contribution
+contained personal criticism, or a defense of the Chinese (of whom he was
+always the champion as long as he lived), but a good many of them did.
+In the October number he began a series of letters under the general
+title of "Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again," supposed to have been written
+by a Chinese immigrant in San Francisco, detailing his experience there.
+In a note the author says: "No experience is set down in the following
+letters which had to be invented.  Fancy is not needed to give variety to
+the history of the Chinaman's sojourn in America.  Plain fact is amply
+sufficient."  The letters show how the supposed Chinese writer of them
+had set out for America, believing it to be a land whose government was
+based on the principle that all men are created equal, and treated
+accordingly; how, upon arriving in San Francisco, he was kicked and
+bruised and beaten, and set upon by dogs, flung into jail, tried and
+condemned without witnesses, his own race not being allowed to testify
+against Americans--Irish-Americans--in the San Francisco court.  They are
+scathing, powerful letters, and one cannot read them, even in this day of
+improved conditions, without feeling the hot waves of resentment and
+indignation which Mark Twain must have felt when he penned them.
+
+Reverend Mr. Talmage was not the only divine to receive attention in the
+"Memoranda."  The Reverend Mr. Sabine, of New York, who had declined to
+hold a church burial service for the old actor, George Holland, came in
+for the most caustic as well as the most artistic stricture of the entire
+series.  It deserves preservation to-day, not only for its literary
+value, but because no finer defense of the drama, no more searching
+sermon on self-righteousness, has ever been put into concrete form.
+--["The Indignity Put Upon the Remains of Gorge Holland by the Rev. Mr.
+Sabine"; Galaxy for February, 1871.  The reader will find it complete
+under Appendix J, at the end of last volume.]
+
+The "Little Church Around the Corner" on Twenty-ninth Street received
+that happy title from this incident.
+
+"There is a little church around the corner that will, perhaps, permit
+the service," Mr. Sabine had said to Holland's friends.
+
+The little church did permit the service, and there was conferred upon it
+the new name, which it still bears.  It has sheltered a long line of
+actor folk and their friends since then, earning thereby reverence,
+gratitude, and immortal memory.--[Church of the Transfiguration.
+Memorial services were held there for Joseph Jefferson; and a memorial
+window, by John La Farge, has been placed there in memory of Edwin
+Booth.]
+
+Of the Galaxy contributions a number are preserved in Sketches New and
+Old.  "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper" is one of the best of these--
+an excellent example of Mark Twain's more extravagant style of humor.  It
+is perennially delightful; in France it has been dramatized, and is still
+played.
+
+A successful Galaxy feature, also preserved in the Sketches, was the
+"Burlesque Map of Paris," reprinted from the Express.  The Franco-
+Prussian War was in progress, and this travesty was particularly timely.
+It creates only a smile of amusement to-day, but it was all fresh and
+delightful then.  Schuyler Colfax, by this time Vice-President, wrote to
+him: "I have had the heartiest possible laugh over it, and so have all my
+family.  You are a wicked, conscienceless wag, who ought to be punished
+severely."
+
+The "Official Commendations," which accompany the map, are its chief
+charm.  They are from Grant, Bismarck, Brigham Young, and others, the
+best one coming from one J. Smith, who says:
+
+     My wife was for years afflicted with freckles, and though everything
+     was done for her relief that could be done, all was in vain.  But,
+     sir, since her first glance at your map they have entirely left her.
+     She has nothing but convulsions now.
+
+It is said that the "Map of Paris" found its way to Berlin, where the
+American students in the beer-halls used to pretend to quarrel over it
+until they attracted the attention of the German soldiers that might be
+present.  Then they would wander away and leave it on the table and watch
+results.  The soldiers would pounce upon it and lose their tempers over
+it; then finally abuse it and revile its author, to the satisfaction of
+everybody.
+
+The larger number of "Memoranda" sketches have properly found oblivion
+to-day.  They were all, or nearly all, collected by a Canadian pirate,
+C. A. Backas, in a volume bearing the title of Memoranda,--[Also by a
+harpy named John Camden Hotten (of London), of whom we shall hear again.
+Hotten had already pirated The Innocents, and had it on the market before
+Routledge could bring out the authorized edition.  Routledge later
+published the "Memoranda" under the title of Sketches, including the
+contents of the Jumping Frog book.]--a book long ago suppressed.  Only
+about twenty of the Galaxy contributions found place in Sketches New and
+Old, five years later, and some of these might have been spared as
+literature.  "To Raise Poultry,"  "John Chinaman in New York," and
+"History Repeats Itself" are valuable only as examples of his work at
+that period.  The reader may consult them for himself.
+
+
+
+
+
+LXXVIII
+
+THE PRIMROSE PATH
+
+But we are losing sight of more important things.  From the very
+beginning Mark Twain's home meant always more to him than his work.  The
+life at 472 Delaware Avenue had begun with as fair a promise as any
+matrimonial journey ever undertaken: There seemed nothing lacking: a
+beautiful home, sufficient income, bright prospects--these things, with
+health and love; constitute married happiness.  Mrs. Clemens wrote to her
+sister, Mrs. Crane, at the end of February: "Sue, we are two as happy
+people as you ever saw.  Our days seem to be made up of only bright
+sunlight, with no shadow in them."  In the same letter the husband added:
+"Livy pines and pines every day for you, and I pine and pine every day
+for you, and when we both of us are pining at once you would think it was
+a whole pine forest let loose."
+
+To Redpath, who was urging lecture engagements for the coming season, he
+wrote:
+
+     DEAR RED,--I am not going to lecture any more forever.  I have got
+     things ciphered down to a fraction now.  I know just about what it
+     will cost to live, and I can make the money without lecturing.
+     Therefore, old man, count me out.
+
+And still later, in May:
+
+     I guess I am out of the field permanently.  Have got a lovely wife,
+     a lovely house, bewitchingly furnished, a lovely carriage, and a
+     coachman whose style and dignity are simply awe-in-spiring, nothing
+     less; and I am making more money than necessary, by considerable,
+     and therefore why crucify myself nightly on the platform?  The
+     subscriber will have to be excused for the present season at least.
+
+So they were very happy during those early months, acquiring pleasantly
+the education which any matrimonial experience is sure to furnish,
+accustoming themselves to the uses of housekeeping, to life in
+partnership, with all the discoveries and mental and spiritual
+adaptations that belong to the close association of marriage.  They were
+far, very far, apart on many subjects.  He was unpolished, untrained,
+impulsive, sometimes violent.  Twichell remembers that in the earlier
+days of their acquaintance he wore a slouch hat pulled down in front, and
+smoked a cigar that sometimes tilted up and touched the brim of it.  The
+atmosphere and customs of frontier life, the Westernisms of that day,
+still clung to him.  Mrs. Clemens, on the other hand, was conservative,
+dainty, cultured, spiritual.  He adored her as little less than a saint,
+and she became, indeed, his saving grace.  She had all the personal
+refinement which he lacked, and she undertook the work of polishing and
+purifying her life companion.  She had no wish to destroy his
+personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and she set
+about it in the right way--gently, and with a tender gratitude in each
+achievement.
+
+She did not entirely approve of certain lines of his reading; or, rather,
+she did not understand them in those days.  That he should be fond of
+history and the sciences was natural enough, but when the Life of P. T.
+Barnum, Written by Himself, appeared, and he sat up nights to absorb it,
+and woke early and lighted the lamp to follow the career of the great
+showman, she was at a loss to comprehend this particular literary
+passion, and indeed was rather jealous of it.  She did not realize then
+his vast interest in the study of human nature, or that such a book
+contained what Mr. Howells calls "the root of the human matter," the
+inner revelation of the human being at first hand.
+
+Concerning his religious observances her task in the beginning was easy
+enough.  Clemens had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines
+of his own.  His natural kindness of heart, and especially his love for
+his wife, inclined him toward the teachings and customs of her Christian
+faith--unorthodox but sincere, as Christianity in the Langdon family was
+likely to be.  It took very little persuasion on his wife's part to
+establish family prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the
+morning reading of a Bible chapter.  Joe Goodman, who made a trip East,
+and visited them during the early days of their married life, was
+dumfounded to see Mark Twain ask a blessing and join in family worship.
+Just how long these forms continued cannot be known to-day; the time of
+their abandonment has perished from the recollection of any one now
+living.
+
+It would seem to have been the Bible-reading that wrought the change.
+The prayer and the blessing were to him sincere and gracious; but as the
+readings continued he realized that he had never before considered the
+Bible from a doctrinal point of view, as a guide to spiritual salvation.
+To his logical reasoning mind, a large portion of it seemed absurd: a
+mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology.  From such material
+humanity had built its mightiest edifice of hope, the doctrines of its
+faith.  After a little while he could stand it no longer.
+
+"Livy," he said one day, "you may keep this up if you want to, but I must
+ask you to excuse me from it.  It is making me a hypocrite.  I don't
+believe in this Bible.  It contradicts my reason.  I can't sit here and
+listen to it, letting you believe that I regard it, as you do, in the
+light of gospel, the word of God."
+
+He was moved to write an article on the human idea of God, ancient and
+modern.  It contained these paragraphs:
+
+     The difference in importance, between the God of the Bible and the
+     God of the present day, cannot be described, it can only be vaguely
+     and inadequately figured to the mind .  .  .  .  If you make figures
+     to represent the earth and moon, and allow a space of one inch
+     between them, to represent the four hundred thousand miles of
+     distance which lies between the two bodies, the map will have to be
+     eleven miles long in order to bring in the nearest fixed star.--
+     [His figures were far too small.  A map drawn on the scale of
+     400,000 miles to the inch would need to be 1,100 miles long to take
+     in both the earth and the nearest fixed star.  On such a map the
+     earth would be one-fiftieth of an inch in diameter--the size of a
+     small grain of sand.]--So one cannot put the modern heavens on a
+     map, nor the modern God; but the Bible God and the Bible heavens can
+     be set down on a slate and yet not be discommoded .  .  .  .
+
+     The difference between that universe and the modern one revealed by
+     science is as the difference between a dust-flecked ray in a barn
+     and the sublime arch of the Milky Way in the skies.  Its God was
+     strictly proportioned to its dimensions.  His sole solicitude was
+     about a handful of truculent nomads.  He worried and fretted over
+     them in a peculiarly and distractingly human way.  One day he coaxed
+     and petted them beyond their due, the next he harried and lashed
+     them beyond their deserts.  He sulked, he cursed, he raged, he
+     grieved, according to his mood and the circumstances, but all to no
+     purpose; his efforts were all vain, he could not govern them.  When
+     the fury was on him he was blind to all reason--he not only
+     slaughtered the offender, but even his harmless little children and
+     dumb cattle....
+
+     To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive,
+     fierce and ever fickle and changeful master; to trust the true God
+     is to trust a Being who has uttered no promises, but whose
+     beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of his
+     colossal universe is proof that he is at least steadfast to his
+     purposes; whose unwritten laws, so far as they affect man, being
+     equal and impartial, show that he is just and fair; these things,
+     taken together, suggest that if he shall ordain us to live
+     hereafter, he will still be steadfast, just, and fair toward us.  We
+     shall not need to require anything more.
+
+It seems mild enough, obvious, even orthodox, now--so far have we
+traveled in forty years.  But such a declaration then would have shocked
+a great number of sincerely devout persons.  His wife prevailed upon him
+not to print it.  She respected his honesty--even his reasoning, but his
+doubts were a long grief to her, nevertheless.  In time she saw more
+clearly with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more
+with the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the
+proportions of created things.
+
+They did not mingle much or long with the social life of Buffalo.  They
+received and returned calls, attended an occasional reception; but
+neither of them found such things especially attractive in those days, so
+they remained more and more in their own environment.  There is an
+anecdote which seems to belong here.
+
+One Sunday morning Clemens noticed smoke pouring from the upper window of
+the house across the street.  The owner and his wife, comparatively
+newcomers, were seated upon the veranda, evidently not aware of impending
+danger.  The Clemens household thus far had delayed calling on them, but
+Clemens himself now stepped briskly across the street.  Bowing with
+leisurely politeness, he said:
+
+"My name is Clemens; we ought to have called on you before, and I beg
+your pardon for intruding now in this informal way, but your house is on
+fire."
+
+Almost the only intimate friends they had in Buffalo were in the family
+of David Gray, the poet-editor of the Courier.  Gray was a gentle,
+lovable man.  "The gentlest spirit and the loveliest that ever went
+clothed in clay, since Sir Galahad laid him to rest," Mark Twain once
+said of him.  Both Gray and Clemens were friends of John Hay, and their
+families soon became intimate.  Perhaps, in time, the Clemens household
+would have found other as good friends in the Buffalo circles; but heavy
+clouds that had lain unseen just beyond the horizon during those earlier
+months of marriage rose suddenly into view, and the social life, whatever
+it might have become, was no longer a consideration.
+
+
+
+
+LXXIX
+
+THE OLD HUMAN STORY
+
+Jervis Langdon was never able to accept his son-in-law's invitation to
+the new home.  His health began to fail that spring, and at the end of
+March, with his physician and Mrs. Langdon, he made a trip to the South.
+In a letter written at Richmond he said, "I have thrown off all care,"
+and named a list of the four great interests in which he was involved.
+Under "number 5," he included "everything," adding, "so you see how good
+I am to follow the counsel of my children."  He closed: "Samuel, I love
+your wife and she loves me.  I think it is only fair that you should know
+it, but you need not flare up.  I loved her before you did, and she loved
+me before she did you, and has not ceased since.  I see no way but for
+you to make the most of it."  He was already a very ill man, and this
+cheerful letter was among the last he ever wrote.
+
+He was absent six weeks and seemed to improve, but suffered an attack
+early in May; in June his condition became critical.  Clemens and his
+wife were summoned to Elmira, and joined in the nursing, day and night.
+Clemens surprised every one by his ability as a nurse.  His delicacy and
+thoughtfulness were unfailing; his original ways of doing things always
+amused and interested the patient.  In later years Mark Twain once said:
+
+     "How much of the nursing did I do?  My main watch was from midnight
+     to four in the morning, nearly four hours.  My other watch was a
+     midday watch, and I think it was nearly three hours.  The two
+     sisters divided the remaining seventeen hours of the twenty-four
+     hours between them, and each of them tried generously and
+     persistently to swindle the other out of a part of her watch.  I
+     went to bed early every night, and tried to get sleep enough by
+     midnight to fit me for my work, but it was always a failure.  I went
+     on watch sleepy and remained miserable, sleepy, and wretched,
+     straight along through the four hours.  I can still see myself
+     sitting by that bed in the melancholy stillness of the sweltering
+     night, mechanically waving a palm-leaf fan over the drawn, white
+     face of the patient.  I can still recall my noddings, my fleeting
+     unconsciousness, when the fan would come to a standstill in my hand,
+     and I woke up with a start and a hideous shock.  During all that
+     dreary time I began to watch for the dawn long before it came.  When
+     the first faint gray showed through the window-blinds I felt as no
+     doubt a castaway feels when the dim threads of the looked-for ship
+     appear against the sky.  I was well and strong, but I was a man,
+     afflicted with a man's infirmity--lack of endurance."
+
+He always dealt with himself in this unsparing way; but those who were
+about him then have left a different story.
+
+It was all without avail.  Mr. Langdon rallied, and early in July there
+was hope for his recovery.  He failed again, and on the afternoon of the
+6th of August he died.  To Mrs. Clemens, delicate and greatly worn with
+the anxiety and strain of watching, the blow was a crushing one.  It was
+the beginning of a series of disasters which would mark the entire
+remaining period of their Buffalo residence.
+
+There had been a partial plan for spending the summer in England, and a
+more definite one for joining the Twichells in the Adirondacks.  Both of
+these projects were now abandoned.  Mrs. Clemens concluded that she would
+be better at home than anywhere else, and invited an old school friend, a
+Miss Emma Nye, to visit her.
+
+But the shadow of death had not been lifted from the Clemens household.
+Miss Nye presently fell ill with typhoid fever.  There followed another
+long period of anxiety and nursing, ending with the death of the visitor
+in the new home, September 29th.  The young wife was now in very delicate
+health; genuinely ill, in fact.  The happy home had become a place of
+sorrow-of troubled nights and days.  Another friend came to cheer them,
+and on this friend's departure Mrs. Clemens drove to the railway station.
+It was a hurried trip over rough streets to catch the train.  She was
+prostrated on her return, and a little later, November 7, 1870, her first
+child, Langdon, was prematurely born.  A dangerous illness followed, and
+complete recovery was long delayed.  But on the 12th the crisis seemed
+passed, and the new father wrote a playful letter to the Twichells, as
+coming from the late arrival:
+
+     DEAR UNCLE AND AUNT,--I came into the world on the 7th inst., and
+     consequently am about five days old now.  I have had wretched health
+     ever since I made my appearance .  .  .  I am not corpulent, nor am
+     I robust in any way.  At birth I only weighed four and one-half
+     pounds with my clothes on--and the clothes were the chief feature of
+     the weight, too, I am obliged to confess, but I am doing finely, all
+     things considered .  .  .  .  My little mother is very bright and
+     cheery, and I guess she is pretty happy, but I don't know what
+     about.  She laughs a great deal, notwithstanding she is sick abed.
+
+     P. S.--Father says I had better write because you will be more
+     interested in me, just now, than in the rest of the family.
+
+A week later Clemens, as himself, wrote:
+
+     Livy is up and the prince keeps her busy and anxious these latter
+     days and nights, but I am a bachelor up-stairs and don't have to
+     jump up and get the soothing sirup, though I would as soon do it as
+     not, I assure you.  (Livy will be certain to read this letter.)
+
+     Tell Harmony that I do hold the baby, and do it pretty handily too,
+     though with occasional apprehensions that his loose head will fall
+     off.  I don't have to quiet him; he hardly ever utters a cry.  He is
+     always thinking about something.  He is a patient, good little baby.
+
+Further along he refers to one of his reforms:
+
+     Smoke?  I always smoke from three till five on Sunday afternoons,
+     and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week, day and night.  But
+     when Livy is well I smoke only those two hours on Sunday.  I'm boss
+     of the habit now, and shall never let it boss me any more.
+     Originally I quit solely on Livy's account (not that I believed
+     there was the faintest reason in the matter, but just as I would
+     deprive myself of sugar in my coffee if she wished it, or quit
+     wearing socks if she thought them immoral), and I stick to it yet on
+     Livy's account, and shall always continue to do so without a pang.
+     But somehow it seems a pity that you quit, for Mrs. T. didn't mind
+     it, if I remember rightly.  Ah, it is turning one's back upon a
+     kindly Providence to spurn away from us the good creature he sent to
+     make the breath of life a luxury as well as a necessity, enjoyable
+     as well as useful.  To go quit smoking, when there ain't any
+     sufficient excuse for it!--why, my old boy, when they used to tell
+     me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew
+     the devotee they were wasting their puerile words upon; they little
+     knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no
+     smoking in it!  But I won't persuade you, Twichell--I won't until I
+     see you again--but then we'll smoke for a week together, and then
+     shut off again.
+
+
+
+
+LXXX
+
+LITERARY PROJECTS
+
+The success of the Innocents naturally made a thrifty publisher like
+Bliss anxious for a second experiment.  He had begun early in the year to
+talk about another book, but nothing had come of it beyond a project or
+two, more or less hazy and unpursued.  Clemens at one time developed a
+plan for a Noah's Ark book, which was to detail the cruise of the Ark in
+diaries kept by various members of it-Shem, Ham, and the others.  He
+really wrote some of it at the time, and it was an idea he never entirely
+lost track of.  All along among his manuscripts appear fragments from
+those ancient voyagers.  One of the earlier entries will show the style
+and purpose of the undertaking.  It is from Shem's record:
+
+     Friday: Papa's birthday.  He is 600 years old.  We celebrated it in
+     a big, black tent.  Principal men of the tribe present.  Afterward
+     they were shown over the ark, which was looking desolate and empty
+     and dreary on account of a misunderstanding with the workmen about
+     wages.  Methuselah was as free with his criticisms as usual, and as
+     voluble and familiar, which I and my brothers do not like; for we
+     are past our one hundredth year and married.  He still calls me
+     Shemmy, just as he did when I was a child of sixty.  I am still but
+     a youth, it is true, but youth has its feelings, and I do not like
+     this .  .  .  .
+
+     Saturday: Keeping the Sabbath.
+
+     Sunday: Papa has yielded the advance and everybody is hard at work.
+     The shipyard is so crowded that the men hinder each other; everybody
+     hurrying or being hurried; the rush and confusion and shouting and
+     wrangling are astonishing to our family, who have always been used
+     to a quiet, country life.
+
+It was from this germ that in a later day grew the diaries of Adam and
+Eve, though nothing very satisfactory ever came of this preliminary
+attempt.  The author had faith in it, however.  To Bliss he wrote:
+
+     I mean to take plenty of time and pains with the Noah's Ark book;
+     maybe it will be several years before it is all written, but it will
+     be a perfect lightning striker when it is done.
+
+     You can have the first say (that is plain enough) on that or any
+     other book I may prepare for the press, as long as you deal in a
+     fair, open, and honorable way with me.  I do not think you will ever
+     find me doing otherwise with you.  I can get a book ready for you
+     any time you want it; but you can't want one before this time next
+     year, so I have plenty of time.
+
+Bliss was only temporarily appeased.  He realized that to get a book
+ready by the time he wanted it-a book of sufficient size and importance
+to maintain the pace set by the Innocents meant rather more immediate
+action than his author seemed to contemplate.  Futhermore, he knew that
+other publishers were besieging the author of the Innocents; a
+disquieting thought.  In early July, when Mr. Langdon's condition had
+temporarily improved, Bliss had come to Elmira and proposed a book which
+should relate the author's travels and experiences in the Far West.  It
+was an inviting subject, and Clemens, by this time more attracted by the
+idea of authorship and its rewards, readily enough agreed to undertake
+the volume.  He had been offered half profits, and suggested that the new
+contract be arranged upon these terms. Bliss, figuring on a sale of
+100,000 copies, proposed seven and one-half per cent. royalty as an
+equivalent, and the contract was so arranged.  In after-years, when the
+cost of manufacture and paper had become greatly reduced, Clemens, with
+but a confused notion of business details, believed he had been misled by
+Bliss in this contract, and was bitter and resentful accordingly.  The
+figures remain, however, to show that Bliss dealt fairly.  Seven and one-
+half per cent.  of a subscription book did represent half profits up to
+100,000 copies when the contract was drawn; but it required ten years to
+sell that quantity, and in that time conditions had changed.  Bliss could
+hardly foresee that these things would be so, and as he was dead when the
+book touched the 100,000 mark he could not explain or readjust matters,
+whatever might have been his inclination.
+
+Clemens was pleased enough with the contract when it was made.  To Orion
+he wrote July 15 (1870):
+
+     Per contract I must have another six-hundred-page book ready for my
+     publisher January 1st, and I only began it to-day.  The subject of
+     it is a secret, because I may possibly change it.  But as it stands
+     I propose to do up Nevada and California, beginning with the trip
+     across the country in the stage.  Have you a memorandum of the route
+     we took, or the names of any of the stations we stopped at?  Do you
+     remember any of the scenes, names, incidents, or adventures of the
+     coach trip?--for I remember next to nothing about the matter.  Jot
+     down a foolscap page of items for me.  I wish I could have two days'
+     talk with you.
+
+     I suppose I am to get the biggest copyright this time ever paid on a
+     subscription book in this country.
+
+The work so promptly begun made little progress.  Hard days of illness
+and sorrow followed, and it was not until September that it was really
+under way.  His natural enthusiasm over any new undertaking possessed
+him.  On the 4th he wrote Bliss:
+
+During the past week I have written the first four chapters of the book,
+and I tell you 'The Innocents Abroad' will have to get up early to beat
+it.  It will be a book that will jump straight into continental celebrity
+the first month it is issued.
+
+He prophesied a sale of 90,000 copies during the first twelve months and
+declared, "I see the capabilities of the subject."
+
+But further disasters, even then impending, made continued effort
+impossible; the prospect of the new book for a time became gloomy, the
+idea of it less inspiring.  Other plans presented themselves, and at one
+time he thought of letting the Galaxy publishers get out a volume of his
+sketches.  In October he wrote Bliss that he was "driveling along
+tolerably fair on the book, getting off from twelve to twenty pages of
+manuscript a day."  Bliss naturally discouraged the Galaxy idea, and
+realizing that the new book might be long delayed, agreed to get out a
+volume of miscellany sufficiently large and important for subscription
+sales.  He was doubtful of the wisdom of this plan, and when Clemens
+suddenly proposed a brand-new scheme his publisher very readily agreed to
+hold back the publication of Sketches indefinitely.
+
+The new book was to be adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa,
+then newly opened and of wide public interest.  Clemens did not propose
+to visit the mines himself, but to let another man do the traveling, make
+the notes, and write or tell him the story, after which Clemens would
+enlarge and elaborate it in his own fashion.  His adaptation of the
+letters of Professor Ford, a year earlier, had convinced him that his
+plan would work out successfully on a larger scale; he fixed upon his old
+friend, J. H. Riley, of Washington--["Riley-Newspaper Correspondent."
+See Sketches.]--(earlier of San Francisco), as the proper person to do
+the traveling.  At the end of November he wrote Bliss:
+
+     I have put my greedy hands upon the best man in America for my
+     purpose, and shall start him to the diamond field in South Africa
+     within a fortnight at my expense .  .  .  that the book will have a
+     perfectly beautiful sale.
+
+He suggested that Bliss advance Riley's expense money, the amount to be
+deducted from the first royalty returns; also he proposed an increased
+royalty, probably in view of the startling splendor of the new idea.
+Bliss was duly impressed, and the agreement was finally made on a basis
+of eight and one-half per cent., with an advance of royalty sufficient to
+see Riley to South Africa and return.
+
+Clemens had not yet heard from Riley definitely when he wrote his glowing
+letter to Bliss.  He took it for granted that Riley, always an
+adventurous sort, would go.  When Riley wrote him that he felt morally
+bound to the Alta, of which he was then Washington correspondent, also in
+certain other directions till the end of the session, Clemens wrote him
+at great length, detailing his scheme in full and urging him to write
+instantly to the Alta and others, asking a release on the ground of being
+offered a rare opportunity to improve his fortunes.
+
+You know right well that I would not have you depart a hair from any
+obligation for any money.  The, boundless confidence that I have in you
+is born of a conviction of your integrity in small as well as in great
+things.  I know plenty of men whose integrity I would trust to here, but
+not off yonder in Africa.
+
+His proposal, in brief, to Riley was that the latter should make the trip
+to Africa without expense to himself, collect memoranda, and such diamond
+mines as might be found lying about handy.  Upon his return he was to
+take up temporary residence in the Clemens household until the book was
+finished, after which large benefits were to accrue to everybody
+concerned.  In the end Riley obtained a release from his obligations and
+was off for the diamond mines and fortune.
+
+Poor fellow!  He was faithful in his mission, and it is said that he
+really located a mining claim that would have made him and his
+independent for all time to come; but returning home with his precious
+memoranda and the news of good fortune, he accidentally wounded himself
+with a fork while eating; blood-poisoning set in (they called it cancer
+then), and he was only able to get home to die.  His memoranda were never
+used, his mining claim was never identified.  Certainly, death was
+closely associated with Mark Twain's fortunes during those earlier days
+of his married life.
+
+On the whole the Buffalo residence was mainly a gloomy one; its ventures
+were attended by ill-fortune.  For some reason Mark Twain's connection
+with the Express, while it had given the paper a wide reputation, had not
+largely increased its subscription.  Perhaps his work on it was too
+varied and erratic.  Nasby, who had popularized the Toledo Blade, kept
+steadily to one line.  His farmer public knew always just what to expect
+when their weekly edition arrived.
+
+Clemens and his wife dreamed of a new habitation, and new faces and
+surroundings.  They agreed to offer their home and his interests in the
+Express for sale.  They began to talk of Hartford, where Twichell lived,
+and where Orion Clemens and his wife had recently located.
+
+Mark Twain's new fortunes had wrought changes in the affairs of his
+relatives.  Already, before his marriage, he had prospected towns here
+and there with a view to finding an Eastern residence for his mother and
+sister, and he had kept Orion's welfare always in mind.  When Pamela and
+her daughter came to his wedding he told them of a little city by the
+name of Fredonia (New York), not far from Buffalo, where he thought they
+might find a pleasant home.
+
+"I went in there by night and out by night," he said, "so I saw none of
+it, but I had an intelligent, attractive audience.  Prospect Fredonia and
+let me know what it is like.  Try to select a place where a good many
+funerals pass.  Ma likes funerals.  If you can pick a good funeral corner
+she will be happy."
+
+It was in her later life that Jane Clemens had developed this particular
+passion.  She would consult the morning paper for any notice of obsequies
+and attend those that were easy of access.  Watching the processions go
+by gave her a peculiar joy.  Mrs. Moffett and her daughter did go to
+Fredonia immediately following the wedding.  They found it residentially
+attractive, and rented a house before returning to St. Louis, a
+promptness that somewhat alarmed the old lady, who did not altogether
+fancy the idea of being suddenly set down in a strange house, in a
+strange land, even though it would be within hailing distance of Sam and
+his new wife.  Perhaps the Fredonia funerals were sufficiently numerous
+and attractive, for she soon became attached to the place, and entered
+into the spirit of the life there, joining its temperance crusades, and
+the like, with zest and enjoyment.
+
+Onion remained in St. Louis, but when Bliss established a paper called
+The Publisher, and wanted an editor, he was chosen for the place,
+originally offered to his brother; the latter, writing to Onion, said:
+
+If you take the place with an air of perfect confidence in yourself,
+never once letting anything show in your bearing but a quiet, modest,
+entire, and perfect confidence in your ability to do pretty much anything
+in the world, Bliss will think you are the very man he needs; but don't
+show any shadow of timidity or unsoldierly diffidence, for that sort of
+thing is fatal to advancement.
+
+I warn you thus because you are naturally given to knocking your pot over
+in this way, when a little judicious conduct would make it boil.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXI
+
+SOME FURTHER LITERARY MATTERS
+
+Meantime The Innocents Abroad had continued to prosper.  Its author
+ranked mainly as a humorist, but of such colossal proportions that his
+contemporaries had seemed to dwindle; the mighty note of the "Frog of
+Calaveras" had dwarfed a score of smaller peepers.  At the end of a year
+from its date of publication the book had sold up to 67,000 and was
+continuing at the rate of several thousand monthly.
+
+"You are running it in staving, tiptop, first-class style," Clemens wrote
+to Bliss.  "On the average ten people a day come and hunt me up to tell
+me I am a benefactor!  I guess that is a part of the program we didn't
+expect, in the first place."
+
+Apparently the book appealed to readers of every grade.  One hundred and
+fifteen copies were in constant circulation at the Mercantile Library, in
+New York, while in the most remote cabins of America it was read and
+quoted.  Jack Van Nostrand, making a long horseback tour of Colorado,
+wrote:
+
+I stopped a week ago in a ranch but a hundred miles from nowhere.  The
+occupant had just two books: the Bible and The Innocents Abroad--the
+former in good repair.
+
+Across the ocean the book had found no less favor, and was being
+translated into many and strange tongues.  By what seems now some
+veritable magic its author's fame had become literally universal.  The
+consul at Hongkong, discussing English literature with a Chinese
+acquaintance, a mandarin, mentioned The Pilgrim's Progress.
+
+"Yes, indeed, I have read it!" the mandarin said, eagerly.  "We are
+enjoying it in China, and shall have it soon in our own language.  It is
+by Mark Twain."
+
+In England the book had an amazing vogue from the beginning, and English
+readers were endeavoring to outdo the Americans in appreciation.  Indeed,
+as a rule, English readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an
+understanding of Mark Twain's literary value with greater promptness than
+did the same class of readers at home.  There were exceptions, of course.
+There were English critics who did not take Mark Twain seriously, there
+were American critics who did.  Among the latter was a certain William
+Ward, an editor of a paper down in Macon, Georgia--The Beacon.  Ward did
+not hold a place with the great magazine arbiters of literary rank.  He
+was only an obscure country editor, but he wrote like a prophet.  His
+article--too long to quote in full--concerned American humorists in
+general, from Washington Irving, through John Phoenix, Philander
+Doesticks, Sut Lovingwood, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings and Petroleum V.
+Nasby, down to Mark Twain.  With the exception of the first and last
+named he says of them:
+
+     They have all had, or will have, their day.  Some of them are
+     resting beneath the sod, and others still live whose work will
+     scarcely survive them.  Since Irving no humorist in prose has held
+     the foundation of a permanent fame except it be Mark Twain, and
+     this, as in the case of Irving, is because he is a pure writer.
+     Aside from any subtle mirth that lurks through his composition, the
+     grace and finish of his more didactic and descriptive sentences
+     indicate more than mediocrity.
+
+The writer then refers to Mark Twain's description of the Sphinx,
+comparing it with Bulwer's, which he thinks may have influenced it.  He
+was mistaken in this, for Clemens had not read Bulwer--never could read
+him at any length.
+
+Of the English opinions, that of The Saturday Review was perhaps most
+doubtful.  It came along late in 1870, and would hardly be worth
+recalling if it were not for a resulting, or collateral, interest.
+Clemens saw notice of this review before he saw the review itself.  A
+paragraph in the Boston Advertiser spoke of The Saturday Review as
+treating the absurdities of the Innocents from a serious standpoint.  The
+paragraph closed:
+
+     We can imagine the delight of the humorist in reading this tribute
+     to his power; and indeed it is so amusing in itself that he can
+     hardly do better than reproduce the article in full in his next
+     monthly "Memoranda."
+
+The old temptation to hoax his readers prompted Mark Twain to "reproduce"
+in the Galaxy, not the Review article, which he had not yet seen, but an
+imaginary Review article, an article in which the imaginary reviewer
+would be utterly devoid of any sense of humor and treat the most absurd
+incidents of The New Pilgrim's Progress as if set down by the author in
+solemn and serious earnest.  The pretended review began:
+
+     Lord Macaulay died too soon.  We never felt this so deeply as when
+     we finished the last chapter of the above-named extravagant work.
+     Macaulay died too soon; for none but he could mete out complete and
+     comprehensive justice to the insolence, the impudence, the
+     presumption, the mendacity, and, above all, the majestic ignorance
+     of this author.
+
+The review goes on to cite cases of the author's gross deception.  It
+says:
+
+     Let the cultivated English student of human nature picture to
+     himself this Mark Twain as a person capable of doing the following
+     described things; and not only doing them, but, with incredible
+     innocence, printing them tranquilly and calmly in a book.  For
+     instance:
+
+     He states that he entered a hair-dresser's in Paris to get a shave,
+     and the first "rake" the barber gave him with his razor it loosened
+     his "hide," and lifted him out of the chair.
+
+     This is unquestionably extravagant.  In Florence he was so annoyed
+     by beggars that he pretends to have seized and eaten one in a
+     frantic spirit of revenge.  There is, of course, no truth in this.
+     He gives at full length the theatrical program, seventeen or
+     eighteen hundred years old, which he professes to have found in the
+     ruins of the Colosseum, among the dirt-and mold and rubbish.  It is
+     a sufficient comment upon this subject to remark that even a cast-
+     iron program would not have lasted so long under the circumstances.
+
+There were two and one-half pages of this really delightful burlesque
+which the author had written with huge-enjoyment, partly as a joke on the
+Review, partly to trick American editors, who he believed would accept it
+as a fresh and startling proof of the traditional English lack of humor.
+
+But, as in the early sage-brush hoaxes, he rather overdid the thing.
+Readers and editors readily enough accepted it as genuine, so far as
+having come from The Saturday Review; but most of them, regarded it as a
+delicious bit of humor which Mark Twain himself had taken seriously, and
+was therefore the one sold.  This was certainly startling, and by no
+means gratifying.  In the next issue he undertook that saddest of all
+performances with tongue or pen: he explained his joke, and insisted on
+the truth of the explanation.  Then he said:
+
+     If any man doubts my word now I will kill him.  No, I will not kill
+     him; I will win his money.  I will bet him twenty to one, and let
+     any New York publisher hold the stakes, that the statements I have
+     above made as to the authorship of the article in question are
+     entirely true.
+
+
+But the Cincinnati Enquirer persisted in continuing the joke--in "rubbing
+it in," as we say now.  The Enquirer declared that Mark Twain had been
+intensely mortified at having been so badly taken in; that his
+explanation in the Galaxy was "ingenious, but unfortunately not true."
+The Enquirer maintained that The Saturday Review of October 8, 1870, did
+contain the article exactly as printed in the "Memoranda," and advised
+Mark Twain to admit that he was sold, and say no more about it.
+
+This was enraging.  Mark Twain had his own ideas as to how far a joke
+might be carried without violence, and this was a good way beyond the
+limits.  He denounced the Enquirer's statement as a "pitiful, deliberate
+falsehood," in his anger falling into the old-time phrasing of newspaper
+editorial abuse.  He offered to bet them a thousand dollars in cash 
+that they could not prove their assertions, and asked pointedly, in
+conclusion: "Will they swallow that falsehood ignominiously, or will they
+send an agent to the Galaxy office?  I think the Cincinnati Enquirer must
+be edited by children."  He promised that if they did not accept his
+financial proposition he would expose them in the next issue.
+
+The incident closed there.  He was prevented, by illness in his
+household, from contributing to the next issue, and the second issue
+following was his final "Memoranda" installment.  So the matter perished
+and was forgotten.  It was his last editorial hoax.  Perhaps he concluded
+that hoaxes in any form were dangerous playthings; they were too likely
+to go off at the wrong end.
+
+It was with the April number (1871) that he concluded his relations with
+the Galaxy.  In a brief valedictory he gave his reasons:
+
+     I have now written for the Galaxy a year.  For the last eight
+     months, with hardly an interval, I have had for my fellows and
+     comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the sick!  During
+     these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle and
+     malignantly threatened two others.  All this I have experienced, yet
+     all the time have been under contract to furnish "humorous" matter,
+     once a month, for this magazine.  I am speaking the exact truth in
+     the above details.  Please to put yourself in my place and
+     contemplate the grisly grotesqueness of the situation.  I think that
+     some of the "humor" I have written during this period could have
+     been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the solemnity
+     of the occasion.
+
+     The "Memoranda" will cease permanently with this issue of the
+     magazine.  To be a pirate on a low salary, and with no share in the
+     profits of the business, used to be my idea of an uncomfortable
+     occupation, but I have other views now.  To be a monthly humorist in
+     a cheerless time is drearier.
+
+Without doubt he felt a glad relief in being rid of this recurrent,
+imperative demand.  He wrote to Orion that he had told the Galaxy people
+he would not write another article, long or short, for less than $500,
+and preferred not to do it at all.
+
+The Galaxy department and the work on the Express were Mark Twain's
+farewell to journalism; for the "Memoranda" was essentially journalistic,
+almost as much so, and as liberally, as his old-time Enterprise position.
+Apparently he wrote with absolute freedom, unhampered by editorial policy
+or restriction.  The result was not always pleasant, and it was not
+always refined.  We may be certain that it was because of Mrs. Clemens's
+heavy burdens that year, and her consequent inability to exert a
+beneficent censorship, that more than one--more than a dozen--of the
+"Memoranda" contributions were permitted to see the light of print.
+
+As a whole, the literary result of Mark Twain's Buffalo period does not
+reach the high standard of The Innocents Abroad.  It was a retrogression
+--in some measure a return to his earlier form.  It had been done under
+pressure, under heavy stress of mind, as he said.  Also there was another
+reason; neither the subject treated nor the environment of labor had
+afforded that lofty inspiration which glorified every step of the Quaker
+City journey.  Buffalo was a progressive city--a beautiful city, as
+American cities go--but it was hardly an inspiring city for literature,
+and a dull, dingy newspaper office was far, very far, from the pleasant
+decks of the Quaker City, the camp-fires of Syria, the blue sky and sea
+of the Medit&ranean.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXII
+
+THE WRITING OF "ROUGHING IT"
+
+The third book published by Mark Twain was not the Western book he was
+preparing for Bliss. It was a small volume, issued by Sheldon & Co.,
+entitled Mark Twain's Autobiography (Burlesque) and First Romance.  The
+Romance was the "Awful, Terrible Medieval Romance" which had appeared in
+the Express at the beginning of 1870.  The burlesque autobiography had
+not previously appeared.  The two made a thin little book, which, in
+addition to its literary features, had running through it a series of
+full-page, irrelevant pictures---cartoons of the Erie Railroad Ring,
+presented as illustrations of a slightly modified version of "The House
+That Jack Built."  The "House" was the Erie headquarters, the purpose
+being to illustrate the swindling methods of the Ring.  The faces of Jay
+Gould, James Fisk, Jr., John T. Hoffman, and others of the combination,
+are chiefly conspicuous.  The publication was not important, from any
+standpoint.  Literary burlesque is rarely important, and it was far from
+Mark Twain's best form of expression.  A year or two later he realized
+the mistake of this book, bought in the plates and destroyed them.
+
+Meantime the new Western book was at a standstill.  To Orion, in March,
+he wrote:
+
+     I am still nursing Livy night and day.  I am nearly worn out.  We
+     shall go to Elmira ten days hence (if Livy can travel on a mattress
+     then), and stay there until I finish the California book, say three
+     months.  But I can't begin work right away when I get there; must
+     have a week's rest, for I have been through thirty days' terrific
+     siege.
+
+He promised to forward some of the manuscript soon.
+
+     Hold on four or five days and I will see if I can get a few chapters
+     fixed to send to Bliss .  .  .  .
+
+     I have offered this house and the Express for sale, and when we go
+     to Elmira we leave here for good.  I shall not select a new home
+     till the book is finished, but we have little doubt that Hartford
+     will be the place.
+
+He disposed of his interest in the Express in April, at a sacrifice of
+$10,000 on the purchase price.  Mrs. Clemens and the baby were able to
+travel, and without further delay he took them to Elmira, to Quarry Farm.
+
+Quarry Farm, the home of Mrs. Clemens's sister, Mrs. Theodore Crane, is a
+beautiful hilltop, with a wide green slope, overlooking the hazy city and
+the Chemung River, beyond which are the distant hills.  It was bought
+quite incidentally by Mr. and Mrs. Langdon, who, driving by one evening,
+stopped to water the horses and decided that it would make a happy summer
+retreat, where the families could combine their housekeeping arrangements
+during vacation days.  When the place had first been purchased, they had
+debated on a name for it.  They had tried several, among them "Go-as-you-
+please Hall,"  "Crane's Nest," and had finally agreed upon "Rest and Be
+Thankful."  But this was only its official name.  There was an abandoned
+quarry up the hill, a little way from the house, and the title suggested
+by Thomas K. Beecher came more naturally to the tongue.  The place became
+Quarry Farm, and so remains.
+
+Clemens and his wife had fully made up their minds to live in Hartford.
+They had both conceived an affection for the place, Clemens mainly
+because of Twichell, while both of them yearned for the congenial
+literary and social atmosphere, and the welcome which they felt awaited
+them.  Hartford was precisely what Buffalo in that day was not--a home
+for the literary man.  It held a distinguished group of writers, most of
+whom the Clemenses already knew.  Furthermore, with Bliss as publisher of
+the Mark Twain books, it held their chief business interests.
+
+Their plans for going were not very definite as to time.  Clemens found
+that his work went better at the farm, and that Mrs. Clemens and the
+delicate baby daily improved.  They decided to remain at Quarry Farm for
+the summer, their first summer in that beautiful place which would mean
+so much to them in the years to come.
+
+It was really Joe Goodman, as much as anything, that stirred a fresh
+enthusiasm in the new book.  Goodman arrived just when the author's
+spirits were at low ebb.
+
+"Joe," he said, "I guess I'm done for.  I don't appear to be able to get
+along at all with my work, and what I do write does not seem valuable.
+I'm afraid I'll never be able to reach the standard of 'The Innocents
+Abroad' again.  Here is what I have written, Joe.  Read it, and see if
+that is your opinion."
+
+Goodman took the manuscript and seated himself in a chair, while Clemens
+went over to a table and pretended to work.  Goodman read page after
+page, critically, and was presently absorbed in it.  Clemens watched him
+furtively, till he could stand it no longer.  Then he threw down his pen,
+exclaiming:
+
+"I knew it!  I knew it!  I am writing nothing but rot.  You have sat
+there all this time reading without a smile, and pitying the ass I am
+making of myself.  But I am not wholly to blame.  I am not strong enough
+to fight against fate.  I have been trying to write a funny book, with
+dead people and sickness a verywhere.  Mr. Langdon died first, then a
+young lady in our house, and now Mrs. Clemens and the baby have been at
+the point of death all winter!  Oh, Joe, I wish to God I could die
+myself!"
+
+"Mark," said Joe, "I was reading critically, not for amusement, and so
+far as I have read, and can judge, this is one of the best things you
+have ever written.  I have found it perfectly absorbing.  You are doing a
+great book!"
+
+Clemens knew that Goodman never spoke except from conviction, and the
+verdict was to him like a message of life handed down by an archangel.
+He was a changed man instantly.  He was all enthusiasm, full of his
+subject, eager to go on.  He proposed to pay Goodman a salary to stay
+there and keep him company and furnish him with inspiration--the Pacific
+coast atmosphere and vernacular, which he feared had slipped away from
+him.  Goodman declined the salary, but extended his visit as long as his
+plans would permit, and the two had a happy time together, recalling old
+Comstock days.  Every morning, for a month or more, they used to tramp
+over the farm.  They fell into the habit of visiting the old quarry and
+pawing over the fragments in search of fossil specimens.  Both of them
+had a poetic interest in geology, its infinite remotenesses and its
+testimonies.  Without scientific knowledge, they took a deep pleasure in
+accumulating a collection, which they arranged on boards torn from an old
+fence, until they had enough specimens to fill a small museum.  They
+imagined they could distinguish certain geological relations and
+families, and would talk about trilobites, the Old Red Sandstone period,
+and the azoic age, or follow random speculation to far-lying conclusions,
+developing vague humors of phrase and fancy, having altogether a joyful
+good time.
+
+Another interest that developed during Goodman's stay was in one Ruloff,
+who was under death sentence for a particularly atrocious murder.  The
+papers were full of Ruloff's prodigious learning.  It was said that he
+had in preparation a work showing the unity of all languages.  Goodman
+and Clemens agreed that Ruloff's death would be a great loss to mankind,
+even though he was clearly a villain and deserved his sentence.  They
+decided that justice would be served just as well if some stupid person
+were hung in his place, and following out this fancy Clemens one morning
+put aside his regular work and wrote an article to the Tribune, offering
+to supply a substitute for Ruloff.  He signed it simply "Samuel
+Langhorne," and it was published as a serious communication, without
+comment, so far as the Tribune was concerned.  Other papers, however,
+took it up and it was widely copied and commented upon.  Apparently no
+one ever identified, Mark Twain with the authorship of the letter, which,
+by the way, does not appear to have prolonged Ruloff's earthly
+usefulness.--[The reader will find the Ruloff letter in full under
+Appendix K, at the end of last volume.]
+
+Life at the farm may have furnished agricultural inspiration, for Clemens
+wrote something about Horace Greeley's farming, also a skit concerning
+Henry Ward Beecher's efforts in that direction.  Of Mr. Beecher's farming
+he said:
+
+"His strawberries would be a comfortable success if robins would eat
+turnips."
+
+The article amused Beecher, and perhaps Greeley was amused too, for he
+wrote:
+
+     MARK,--You are mistaken as to my criticisms on your farming.  I
+     never publicly made any, while you have undertaken to tell the exact
+     cost per pint of my potatoes and cabbages, truly enough the
+     inspiration of genius.  If you will really betake yourself to
+     farming, or even to telling what you know about it, rather than what
+     you don't know about mine, I will not only refrain from disparaging
+     criticism, but will give you my blessing.
+
+                              Yours,   HORACE GREELEY.
+
+
+The letter is in Mr. Greeley's characteristic scrawl, and no doubt
+furnished inspiration for the turnip story in 'Roughing It', also the
+model for the pretended facsimile of Greeley's writing.
+
+Altogether that was a busy, enterprising summer at Quarry Farm.  By the
+middle of May, Clemens wrote to Bliss that he had twelve hundred
+manuscript pages of the new book already written, and that he was turning
+out the remainder at the rate of from thirty to sixty-five per day.  He
+was in high spirits by this time.  The family health had improved, and
+prospects were bright.
+
+I have enough manuscript on hand now to make (allowing for engravings)
+about four hundred pages of the book, consequently am two-thirds done.
+I intended to run up to Hartford about the middle of the week and take it
+along, but I find myself so thoroughly interested in my work now (a thing
+I have not experienced for months) that I can't bear to lose a single
+moment of the inspiration.  So I will stay here and peg away as long as
+it lasts.  My present idea is to write as much more as I have already
+written, and then collect from the mass the very best chapters and
+discard the rest.  When I get it done I want to see the man who will
+begin to read it and not finish it.  Nothing grieves me now; nothing
+troubles me, nothing bothers me or gets my attention.  I don't think of
+anything but the book, and don't have an hour's unhappiness about
+anything, and don't care two cents whether school keeps or not.  The book
+will be done soon now.  It will be a starchy book; the dedication will be
+worth the price of the volume.  Thus:
+
+                            TO THE LATE CAIN
+                         THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
+
+     not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little
+     respect; not on account of sympathy for him, for his bloody deed
+     places him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking, but
+     out of a mere humane commiseration for him, in that it was his
+     misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent
+     insanity plea.
+
+
+Probably Mrs. Clemens diverted this picturesque dedication in favor of
+the Higbie inscription, or perhaps the author never really intended the
+literary tribute to Cain.  The impulse that inspired it, however, was
+characteristic.
+
+In a postscript to this letter he adds:
+
+     My stock is looking up.  I am getting the bulliest offers for books
+     and almanacs; am flooded with lecture invitations, and one
+     periodical offers me $6,000 cash for twelve articles of any length,
+     and on any subject, treated humorously or otherwise.
+
+He set in to make hay while the sun was shining.  In addition to the
+California book, which was now fast nearing completion, he discussed a
+scheme with Goodman for a six-hundred-page work which they were to do
+jointly; he planned and wrote one or two scenes from a Western play, to
+be built from episodes in the new book (one of them was the "Arkansas"
+incident, related in Chapter XXXI); he perfected one of his several
+inventions--an automatically adjusting vest-strap; he wrote a number of
+sketches, made an occasional business trip to New York and Hartford;
+prospected the latter place for a new home.  The shadow which had hung
+over the sojourn in Buffalo seemed to have lifted.
+
+He had promised Bliss some contributions for his new paper, and in June
+he sent three sketches.  In an accompanying letter he says:
+
+     Here are three articles which you may have if you will pay $125 for
+     the lot.  If you don't want them I'll sell them to the Galaxy, but
+     not for a cent less than three times the money.... If you take them
+     pay one-tenth of the $125 in weekly instalments to Orion till he has
+     received it all.
+
+He reconsidered his resolution not to lecture again, and closed with
+Redpath for the coming season.  He found himself in a lecture-writing
+fever.  He wrote three of them in succession: one on Artemus Ward,
+another on "Reminiscences of Some Pleasant Characters I Have Met," and a
+third one based on chapters from the new book.  Of the "Reminiscence"
+lecture he wrote Redpath:
+
+"It covers my whole acquaintance; kings, lunatics, idiots, and all."
+Immediately afterward he wrote that he had prepared still another
+lecture, "title to be announced later."
+
+"During July I'll decide which one I like best," he said.  He instructed
+Redpath not to make engagements for him to lecture in churches.  "I never
+made a success of a lecture in a church yet.  People are afraid to laugh
+in a church."
+
+Redpath was having difficulties in arranging a circuit to suit him.
+Clemens had prejudices against certain towns and localities, prejudices
+that were likely to change overnight.  In August he wrote:
+
+     DEAR RED,--I am different from other women; my mind changes oftener.
+     People who have no mind can easily be stead fast and firm, but when
+     a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea
+     of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo.
+     See?  Therefore, if you will notice, one week I am likely to give
+     rigid instructions to confine me to New England; the next week send
+     me to Arizona; the next week withdraw my name; the next week give
+     you full, untrammeled swing; and the week following modify it.  You
+     must try to keep the run of my mind, Redpath that is your business,
+     being the agent, and it always was too many for me....  Now about
+     the West this week, I am willing that you shall retain all the
+     Western engagements.  But what I shall want next week is still with
+     God.
+                                   Yours,    MARK.
+
+He was in Hartford when this letter was written, arranging for residence
+there and the removal of his belongings.  He finally leased the fine
+Hooker house on Ford Street, in that pleasant seclusion known as Nook
+Farm--the literary part of Hartford, which included the residence of
+Charles Dudley Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe.  He arranged for
+possession of the premises October 1st.  So the new home was settled
+upon; then learning that Nasby was to be in Boston, he ran over to that
+city for a few days of recreation after his season's labors.
+
+Preparations for removal to Hartford were not delayed.  The Buffalo
+property was disposed of, the furnishings were packed and shipped away.
+The house which as bride and groom they had entered so happily was left
+empty and deserted, never to be entered by them again.  In the year and a
+half of their occupancy it had seen well-nigh all the human round, all
+that goes to make up the happiness and the sorrow of life.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXIII
+
+LECTURING DAYS
+
+Life in Hartford, in the autumn of 1871, began in the letter, rather than
+in the spirit.  The newcomers were received with a wide, neighborly
+welcome, but the disorder of establishment and the almost immediate
+departure of the head of the household on a protracted lecturing tour
+were disquieting things; the atmosphere of the Clemens home during those
+early Hartford days gave only a faint promise of its future loveliness.
+
+As in a far later period, Mark Twain had resorted to lecturing to pay off
+debt.  He still owed a portion of his share in the Express; also he had
+been obliged to obtain an advance from the lecture bureau.  He dreaded,
+as always, the tedium of travel, the clatter of hotel life, the monotony
+of entertainment, while, more than most men, he loved the tender luxury
+of home.  It was only that he could not afford to lose the profit offered
+on the platform.
+
+His season opened at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, October 16th, and his
+schedule carried him hither and thither, to and fro, over distances that
+lie between Boston and Chicago.  There were opportunities to run into
+Hartford now and then, when he was not too far away, and in November he
+lectured there on Artemus Ward.
+
+He changed his entertainment at least twice that season. He began with
+the "Reminiscences," the lecture which he said would treat of all those
+whom he had met, "idiots, lunatics, and kings," but he did not like it,
+or it did not go well.  He wrote Redpath of the Artemus Ward address:
+
+"It suits me, and I'll never deliver the nasty, nauseous 'Reminiscences'
+any more."
+
+But the Ward lecture was good for little more than a month, for on
+December 8th he wrote again:
+
+     Notify all hands that from this time I shall talk nothing but
+     selections from my forthcoming book, 'Roughing It'.  Tried it twice
+     last night; suits me tiptop.
+
+And somewhat later:
+
+     Had a splendid time with a splendid audience in Indianapolis last
+     night; a perfectly jammed house, just as I have all the time out
+     here....  I don't care now to have any appointments canceled.  I'll
+     even "fetch" those Dutch Pennsylvanians with this lecture.
+
+     Have paid up $4,000 indebtedness.  You are the last on my list.
+     Shall begin to pay you in a few days, and then I shall be a free man
+     again.
+
+Undoubtedly he reveled in the triumphs of a platform tour, though at no
+time did he regard it as a pleasure excursion.  During those early weeks
+the proofs of his new book, chasing him from place to place, did not add
+to his comfort.  Still, with large, substantial rewards in hand and in
+prospect, one could endure much.
+
+In the neighborhood of Boston there were other compensations.  He could
+spend a good part of his days at the Lyceum headquarters, in School
+Street, where there was always congenial fellowship--Nasby, Josh
+Billings, and the rest of the peripatetic group that about the end of the
+year collected there.  Their lectures were never tried immediately in
+Boston, but in the outlying towns; tried and perfected--or discarded.
+When the provincial audiences were finally satisfied, then the final.
+test in the Boston Music Hall was made, and if this proved successful the
+rest of the season was safe.  Redpath's lecturers put up at Young's
+Hotel, and spent their days at the bureau, smoking and spinning yarns, or
+talking shop.  Early in the evening they scattered to the outlying towns,
+Lowell, Lexington, Concord, New Bedford.  There is no such a condition
+to-day: lecturers are few, lecture bureaus obscure; there are no great
+reputations made on the platform.
+
+Neither is there any such distinct group of humorists as the one just
+mentioned.  Humor has become universal since then.  Few writers of this
+age would confess to taking their work so seriously as to be at all times
+unsmiling in it; only about as many, in fact, as in that day would
+confess to taking their work so lightly that they could regard life's
+sterner phases and philosophies with a smile.
+
+Josh Billings was one of the gentlest and loveliest of our pioneers of
+laughter.  The present generation is not overfamiliar even with his name,
+but both the name and sayings of that quaint soul were on everybody's
+lips at the time of which we are writing.  His true name was Henry W.
+Shaw, and he was a genuine, smiling philosopher, who might have built up
+a more permanent and serious reputation had he not been induced to
+disfigure his maxims with ridiculous spelling in order to popularize them
+and make them bring a living price.  It did not matter much with Nasby's
+work.  An assumed illiteracy belonged with the side of life which he
+presented; but it is pathetic now to consider some of the really masterly
+sayings of Josh Billings presented in that uncouth form which was
+regarded as a part of humor a generation ago.  Even the aphorisms that
+were essentially humorous lose value in that degraded spelling.
+
+"When a man starts down hill everything is greased for the occasion,"
+could hardly be improved upon by distorted orthography, and here are a
+few more gems which have survived that deadly blight.
+
+"Some folks mistake vivacity for wit; whereas the difference between
+vivacity and wit is the same as the difference between the lightning-bug
+and the lightning."
+
+"Don't take the bull by the horns-take him by the tail; then you can let
+go when you want to."
+
+"The difficulty is not that we know so much, but that we know so much
+that isn't so."
+
+Josh Billings, Nasby, and Mark Twain were close friends.  They had
+themselves photographed in a group, and there was always some pleasantry
+going on among them.  Josh Billings once wrote on "Lekturing," and under
+the head of "Rule Seven," which treated of unwisdom of inviting a
+lecturer to a private house, he said:
+
+     Think of asking Mark Twain home with yu, for instance.  Yure good
+     wife has put her house in apple-pie order for the ockashun;
+     everything is just in the right place.  Yu don't smoke in yure
+     house, never.  Yu don't put yure feet on the center-table, yu don't
+     skatter the nuzepapers all over the room, in utter confushion: order
+     and ekonemy governs yure premises.  But if yu expeckt Mark Twain to
+     be happy, or even kumfortable yu hav got to buy a box of cigars
+     worth at least seventeen dollars and yu hav got to move all the
+     tender things out ov yure parlor.  Yu hav got to skatter all the
+     latest papers around the room careless, you hav got to hav a pitcher
+     ov icewater handy, for Mark is a dry humorist.  Yu hav got to ketch
+     and tie all yure yung ones, hed and foot, for Mark luvs babys only
+     in theory; yu hav got to send yure favorite kat over to the nabors
+     and hide yure poodle.  These are things that hav to be done, or Mark
+     will pak hiz valise with hiz extry shirt collar and hiz lektur on
+     the Sandwich Islands, and travel around yure streets, smoking and
+     reading the sighns over the store doorways untill lektur time
+     begins.
+
+As we-are not likely to touch upon Mark Twain's lecturing, save only
+lightly, hereafter, it may be as well to say something of his method at
+this period.  At all places visited by lecturers there was a committee,
+and it was the place of the chairman to introduce the lecturer, a
+privilege which he valued, because it gave him a momentary association
+with distinction and fame.  Clemens was a great disappointment to these
+officials.  He had learned long ago that he could introduce himself more
+effectively than any one else.  His usual formula was to present himself
+as the chairman of the committee, introducing the lecturer of the
+evening; then, with what was in effect a complete change of personality,
+to begin his lecture.  It was always startling and amusing, always a
+success; but the papers finally printed this formula, which took the
+freshness out of it, so that he had to invent others.  Sometimes he got
+up with the frank statement that he was introducing himself because he
+had never met any one who could pay a proper tribute to his talents; but
+the newspapers printed that too, and he often rose and began with no
+introduction at all.
+
+Whatever his method of beginning, Mark Twain's procedure probably was the
+purest exemplification of the platform entertainer's art which this
+country has ever seen.  It was the art that makes you forget the
+artisanship, the art that made each hearer forget that he was not being
+personally entertained by a new and marvelous friend, who had traveled a
+long way for his particular benefit.  One listener has written that he
+sat "simmering with laughter" through what he supposed was the
+continuation of the introduction, waiting for the traditional lecture to
+begin, when presently the lecturer, with a bow, disappeared, and it was
+over.  The listener looked at his watch; he had been there more than an
+hour.  He thought it could be no more than ten minutes, at most.  Many
+have tried to set down something of the effect his art produced on them,
+but one may not clearly convey the story of a vanished presence and a
+silent voice.
+
+There were other pleasant associations in Boston.  Howells was there, and
+Aldrich; also Bret Harte, who had finished his triumphal progress across
+the continent to join the Atlantic group.  Clemens appears not to have
+met Aldrich before, though their acquaintance had begun a year earlier,
+when Aldrich, as editor of Every Saturday, had commented on a poem
+entitled, "The Three Aces," which had appeared in the Buffalo Express.
+Aldrich had assumed the poem to be the work of Mark Twain, and had
+characterized it as "a feeble imitation of Bret Harte's 'Heathen
+Chinee.'"  Clemens, in a letter, had mildly protested as to the charge of
+authorship, and Aldrich had promptly printed the letter with apologetic
+explanation.  A playful exchange of personal letters followed, and the
+beginning of a lifelong friendship.
+
+One of the letters has a special interest here.  Clemens had followed his
+protest with an apology for it, asking that no further notice be taken of
+the matter.  Aldrich replied that it was too late to prevent "doing him
+justice," as his explanation was already on the press, but that if
+Clemens insisted he would withdraw it in the next issue.  Clemens then
+wrote that he did not want it withdrawn, and explained that he hated to
+be accused of plagiarizing Bret Harte, to whom he was deeply indebted for
+literary schooling in the California days.  Continuing he said:
+
+     Do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot
+     through Harte's brain?  It was this.  When they were trying to
+     decide upon a vignette cover for the Overland a grizzly bear (of the
+     arms of the State of California) was chosen.  Nahl Bros. carved him
+     and the page was printed with him in it.
+
+     As a bear he was a success.  He was a good bear, but then, it was
+     objected, he was an objectless bear--a bear that meant nothing,
+     signified nothing, simply stood there, snarling over his shoulder at
+     nothing, and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured
+     intruder upon the fair page.  All hands said that none were
+     satisfied; they hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as
+     much to have him there when there was no point to him.  But
+     presently Harte took a pencil and drew two simple lines under his
+     feet, and behold he was a magnificent success!--the ancient symbol
+     of California savagery, snarling at the approaching type of high and
+     progressive civilization, the first Overland locomotive!  I just
+     think that was nothing less than an inspiration.--[The "bear" was
+     that which has always appeared on the Overland cover; the "two
+     lines" formed a railway track under his feet.  Clemens's original
+     letter contained crude sketches illustrating these things.]
+
+Among the Boston group was another Californian, Ralph Keeler, an
+eccentric, gifted, and altogether charming fellow, whom Clemens had known
+on the Pacific slope.  Keeler had been adopted by the Boston writers, and
+was grateful and happy accordingly.  He was poor of purse, but
+inexhaustibly rich in the happier gifts of fortune.  He was unfailingly
+buoyant, light-hearted, and hopeful.  On an infinitesimal capital he had
+made a tour of many lands, and had written of it for the Atlantic.  In
+that charmed circle he was as overflowingly happy as if he had been
+admitted to the company of the gods.  Keeler was affectionately regarded
+by all who knew him, and he offered a sort of worship in return.  He
+often accompanied Mark Twain on his lecture engagements to the various
+outlying towns, and Clemens brought him back to his hotel for breakfast,
+where they had good, enjoyable talks together.  Once Keeler came eagerly
+to the hotel and made his way up to Clemens's room.
+
+"Come with me," he said.  "Quick!"
+
+"What is it?  What's happened?"
+
+"Don't wait to talk.  Come with me."
+
+They tramped briskly through the streets till they reached the public
+library, entered, Keeler leading the way, not stopping till he faced a
+row of shelves filled with books.  He pointed at one of them, his face
+radiant with joy.
+
+"Look," he said.  "Do you see it?"
+
+Clemens looked carefully now and identified one of the books as a still-
+born novel which Keeler had published.
+
+"This is a library," said Keeler, eagerly, "and they've got it!"
+
+His whole being was aglow with the wonder of it.  He had been
+investigating; the library records showed that in the two years the book
+had been there it had been taken out and read three times!  It never
+occurred to Clemens even to smile.  Knowing Mark Twain, one would guess
+that his eyes were likely to be filled with tears.
+
+In his book about Mark Twain, Howells tells of a luncheon which Keeler
+gave to his more famous associates--Aldrich, Fields, Harte, Clemens, and
+Howells himself--a merry informal occasion.  Says Howells:
+
+     Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and
+     aimless and joyful talk--play, beginning and ending nowhere, of
+     eager laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat-
+     lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional
+     concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it
+     gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full of
+     good-fellowship, Bret Harte's leering dramatization of Clemens's
+     mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates.  "Why,
+     fellows," he spluttered, "this is the dream of Mark's life," and I
+     remember the glance from under Clemens's feathery eyebrows which
+     betrayed his enjoyment of the fun.
+
+Very likely Keeler gave that luncheon in celebration of his book's
+triumph; it would be like him.
+
+Keeler's end was a mystery.  The New York Tribune commissioned him to go
+to Cuba to report the facts of some Spanish outrages.  He sailed from New
+York in the steamer, and was last seen alive the night before the vessel
+reached Havana.  He had made no secret of his mission, but had discussed
+it in his frank, innocent way.  There were some Spanish military men on
+the ship.
+
+Clemens, commenting on the matter, once said:
+
+"It may be that he was not flung into the sea, still the belief was
+general that that was what had happened."
+
+In his book Howells refers to the doubt with which Mark Twain was then
+received by the polite culture of Boston; which, on the other hand,
+accepted Bret Harte as one of its own, forgiving even social
+shortcomings.
+
+The reason is not difficult to understand.  Harte had made his appeal
+with legitimate fiction of the kind which, however fresh in flavor and
+environment, was of a sort to be measured and classified.  Harte spoke a
+language they could understand; his humor, his pathos, his point of view
+were all recognizable.  It was an art already standardized by a master.
+It is no reflection on the genius of Bret Harte to liken his splendid
+achievements to those of Charles Dickens.  Much of Harte's work is in no
+way inferior to that of his great English prototype.  Dickens never wrote
+a better short story than "The Outcasts of Poker Flats."  He never wrote
+as good a short story as "The Luck of Roaring Camp."  Boston critics
+promptly realized these things and gave Harte his correct rating.  That
+they failed to do this with Mark Twain, lay chiefly in the fact that he
+spoke to them in new and startling tongues.  His gospels were likely to
+be heresies; his literary eccentricities were all unclassified.  Of the
+ultrafastidious set Howells tells us that Charles Eliot Norton and Prof.
+Francis J. Child were about the only ones who accorded him unqualified
+approval.  The others smiled and enjoyed him, but with that condescension
+which the courtier is likely to accord to motley and the cap and bells.
+Only the great, simple-hearted, unbiased multitude, the public, which had
+no standards but the direct appeal from one human heart to another, could
+recognize immediately his mightier heritage, could exalt and place him on
+the throne.
+
+
+
+LXXXIV
+
+"ROUGHING IT"
+
+Telegram to Redpath:
+
+     How in the name of God does a man find his way from here to Amherst,
+     and when must he start?  Give me full particulars, and send a man
+     with me.  If I had another engagement I would rot before I would
+     fill it.                       S.  L.  CLEMENS.
+
+This was at the end of February, and he believed that he was standing on
+the platform for the last time.  He loathed the drudgery of the work, and
+he considered there was no further need.  He was no longer in debt, and
+his income he accounted ample.  His new book, 'Roughing It',--[It was
+Bliss who had given the new book the title of Roughing It.  Innocents at
+Home had been its provision title, certainly a misleading one, though it
+has been retained in England for the second volume; for what reason it
+would be difficult to explain.]--had had a large advance sale, and its
+earnings promised to rival those of the 'Innocents'.  He resolved in the
+future to confine himself to the trade and profits of authorship.
+
+The new book had advantages in its favor.  Issued early in the year, it
+was offered at the best canvassing season; particularly so, as the
+author's lectures had prepared the public for its reception.
+Furthermore, it dealt with the most picturesque phases of American life,
+scenes and episodes vastly interesting at that time, and peculiarly
+adapted to Mark Twain's literary expression.  In a different way
+'Roughing It' is quite as remarkable as 'The Innocents Abroad.'  If it
+has less charm, it has greater interest, and it is by no means without
+charm.  There is something delicious, for instance, in this bit of pure
+enjoyment of the first day's overland travel:
+
+     It was now just dawn, and as we stretched our cramped legs full
+     length on the mail-sacks, and gazed out through the windows across
+     the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist to where
+     there was an expectant look in the Eastern horizon, our perfect
+     enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy.  The
+     stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping the
+     curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle
+     swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses' hoofs,
+     the cracking of the driver's whip, and his "Hi-yi! g'lang!" were
+     music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared to give
+     us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after us
+     with interest and envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the
+     pipe of peace, and compared all this luxury with the years of
+     tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was
+     only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had
+     found it.
+
+Also, there is that lofty presentation of South Pass, and a picture of
+the alkali desert, so parching, so withering in its choking realism, that
+it makes the throat ache and the tongue dry to read it.  Just a bit of
+the desert in passing:
+
+     The sun beats down with a dead, blistering, relentless malignity;
+     the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but
+     scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface--it is absorbed
+     before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air
+     stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the
+     brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature visible in any
+     direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its
+     monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound, not a sigh,
+     not a whisper, not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of
+     bird; not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that
+     dead air.
+
+As for the humor of the book, it has been chiefly famous for that.  "Buck
+Fanshaw's Funeral" has become a classic, and the purchase of the "Mexican
+Plug."  But it is to no purpose to review the book here in detail.  We
+have already reviewed the life and environment out of which it grew.
+
+Without doubt the story would have contained more of the poetic and
+contemplative, in which he was always at his best, if the subject itself,
+as in the Innocents, had lent itself oftener to this form of writing.  It
+was the lack of that halo perhaps which caused the new book never quite
+to rank with its great forerunner in public favor.  There could hardly be
+any other reason.  It presented a fresher theme; it abounded in humor;
+technically, it was better written; seemingly it had all the elements of
+popularity and of permanence.  It did, in fact, possess these qualities,
+but its sales, except during the earlier months of its canvass, never
+quite equaled those of The Innocents Abroad.
+
+'Roughing It' was accepted by the public for just what it was and is, a
+great picture of the Overland Pioneer days--a marvelous picture of
+frontier aspects at a time when the frontier itself, even with its
+hardships and its tragedies, was little more than a vast primal joke;
+when all frontiersmen were obliged to be laughing philosophers in order
+to survive the stress of its warfares.
+
+A word here about this Western humor: It is a distinct product.  It grew
+out of a distinct condition--the battle with the frontier.  The fight was
+so desperate, to take it seriously was to surrender.  Women laughed that
+they might not weep; men, when they could no longer swear.  "Western
+humor" was the result.  It is the freshest, wildest humor in the world,
+but there is tragedy behind it.
+
+'Roughing It' presented the picture of those early conditions with the
+startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which, in effect, it was.
+It was not accurate history, even of the author's own adventures.  It was
+true in its aspects, rather than in its details.  The greater artist
+disregards the truth of detail to render more strikingly a phase or a
+condition, to produce an atmosphere, to reconstruct a vanished time.
+This was what Mark Twain did in 'Roughing It'.  He told the story of
+overland travel and the frontier, for his own and future generations, in
+what is essentially a picaresque novel, a work of unperishing fiction,
+founded on fact.
+
+The sales of 'Roughing It' during the first three months aggregated
+nearly forty thousand copies, and the author was lavishly elate
+accordingly.  To Orion (who had already closed his career with Bliss, by
+exercise of those hereditary eccentricities through which he so often
+came to grief) he gave $1,000 out of the first royalty check, in
+acknowledgment of the memorandum book and other data which Orion had
+supplied.  Clemens believed the new book would sell one hundred thousand
+copies within the year; but the sale diminished presently, and at the end
+of the first year it was considerably behind the Innocents for the same
+period.  As already stated, it required ten years for Roughing It to
+reach the one-hundred-thousand mark, which the Innocents reached in
+three.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXV
+
+A BIRTH, A DEATH, AND A VOYAGE
+
+The year 1872 was an eventful one in Mark Twain's life.  At Elmira, on
+March 19th, his second child, a little girl, whom they named Susan
+Olivia, was born.  On June 2d, in the new home in Hartford, to which they
+had recently moved, his first child, a little boy, Langdon, died.  He had
+never been strong, his wavering life had often been uncertain, always
+more of the spirit than the body, and in Elmira he contracted a heavy
+cold, or perhaps it was diphtheria from the beginning.  In later years,
+whenever Clemens spoke of the little fellow, he never failed to accuse
+himself of having been the cause of the child's death.  It was Mrs.
+Clemens's custom to drive out each morning with Langdon, and once when
+she was unable to go Clemens himself went instead.
+
+"I should not have been permitted to do it," he said, remembering.
+"I was not qualified for any such responsibility as that.  Some one
+should have gone who had at least the rudiments of a mind.  Necessarily
+I would lose myself dreaming.  After a while the coachman looked around
+and noticed that the carriage-robes had dropped away from the little
+fellow, and that he was exposed to the chilly air.  He called my
+attention to it, but it was too late.  Tonsilitis or something of the
+sort set in, and he did not get any better, so we took him to Hartford.
+There it was pronounced diphtheria, and of course he died."
+
+So, with or without reason, he added the blame of another tragedy to the
+heavy burden of remorse which he would go on piling up while he lived.
+
+The blow was a terrible one to Mrs. Clemens; even the comfort of the
+little new baby on her arm could not ease the ache in her breast.  It
+seemed to her that death was pursuing her.  In one of her letters she
+says:
+
+"I feel so often as if my path is to be lined with graves," and she
+expresses the wish that she may drop out of life herself before her
+sister and her husband--a wish which the years would grant.
+
+They did not return to Elmira, for it was thought that the air of the
+shore would be better for the little girl; so they spent the summer at
+Saybrook, Connecticut, at Fenwick Hall, leaving Orion and his wife in
+charge of the house at Hartford.
+
+Beyond a few sketches, Clemens did very little literary work that summer,
+but he planned a trip to Europe, and he invented what is still known and
+sold as the "Mark Twain Scrap-Book."
+
+He wrote to Orion of his proposed trip to England, and dilated upon his
+scrap-book with considerable enthusiasm.  The idea had grown out of the
+inconvenience of finding a paste-jar, and the general mussiness of scrap-
+book keeping.  His new plan was a self-pasting scrap-book with the gum
+laid on in narrow strips, requiring only to be dampened with a sponge or
+other moist substance to be ready for the clipping.  He states that he
+intends to put the invention into the hands of Slote, Woodman & Co., of
+whom Dan Slote, his old Quaker City room-mate, was the senior partner,
+and have it manufactured for the trade.
+
+About this time began Mark Twain's long and active interest in copyright.
+Previously he had not much considered the subject; he had taken it for
+granted there was no step that he could take, while international piracy
+was a recognized institution.  On both sides of the water books were
+appropriated, often without profit, sometimes even without credit, to the
+author.  To tell the truth, Clemens had at first regarded it rather in
+the nature of a compliment that his books should be thought worth
+pirating in England, but as time passed he realized that he was paying
+heavily for this recognition.  Furthermore, he decided that he was
+forfeiting a right; rather that he was being deprived of it: something
+which it was in his nature to resent.
+
+When 'Roughing It' had been ready for issue he agreed with Bliss that
+they should try the experiment of copyrighting it in England, and see how
+far the law would protect them against the voracious little publisher,
+who thus far had not only snapped up everything bearing Mark Twain's
+signature, but had included in a volume of Mark Twain sketches certain
+examples of very weak humor with which Mark Twain had been previously
+unfamiliar.
+
+Whatever the English pirate's opinion of the copyright protection of
+'Roughing It' may have been, he did not attempt to violate it.  This was
+gratifying.  Clemens came to regard England as a friendly power.  He
+decided to visit it and spy out the land.  He would make the acquaintance
+of its people and institutions and write a book, which would do these
+things justice.
+
+He gave out no word of his real purpose.  He merely said that he was
+going over to see his English publishers, and perhaps to arrange for a
+few lectures.  He provided himself with some stylographic note-books, by
+which he could produce two copies of his daily memoranda--one for himself
+and one to mail to Mrs. Clemens--and sailed on the Scotia August 21,
+1872.
+
+Arriving in Liverpool he took train for London, and presently the
+wonderful charm of that old, finished country broke upon him.  His "first
+hour in England was an hour of delight," he records; "of rapture and
+ecstasy.  These are the best words I can find, but they are not adequate;
+they are not strong enough to convey the feeling which this first vision
+of rural England brought me."  Then he noticed that the gentleman
+opposite in his compartment paid no attention to the scenery, but was
+absorbed in a green-covered volume.  He was so absorbed in it that, by
+and by, Clemens's curiosity was aroused.  He shifted his position a
+little and his eye caught the title.  It was the first volume of the
+English edition of The Innocents Abroad.  This was gratifying for a
+moment; then he remembered that the man had never laughed, never even
+smiled during the hour of his steady reading.  Clemens recalled what he
+had heard of the English lack of humor.  He wondered if this was a fair
+example of it, and if the man could be really taking seriously every word
+he was reading.  Clemens could not look at the scenery any more for
+watching his fellow-passenger, waiting with a fascinated interest for the
+paragraph that would break up that iron-clad solemnity.  It did not come.
+During all the rest of the trip to London the atmosphere of the
+compartment remained heavy with gloom.
+
+He drove to the Langham Hotel, always popular with Americans, established
+himself, and went to look up his publishers.  He found the Routledges
+about to sit down to luncheon in a private room, up-stairs, in their
+publishing house.  He joined them, and not a soul stirred from that table
+again until evening.  The Routledges had never heard Mark Twain talk
+before, never heard any one talk who in the least resembled him.  Various
+refreshments were served during the afternoon, came and went, while this
+marvelous creature talked on and they listened, reveling, and wondering
+if America had any more of that sort at home.  By and by dinner was
+served; then after a long time, when there was no further excuse for
+keeping him there, they took him to the Savage Club, where there were yet
+other refreshments and a gathering of the clans to welcome this new
+arrival as a being from some remote and unfamiliar star.
+
+Tom Hood, the younger, was there, and Harry Lee, and Stanley the
+explorer, who had but just returned from finding Livingstone, and Henry
+Irving, and many another whose name remains, though the owners of those
+names are all dead now, and their laughter and their good-fellowship are
+only a part of that intangible fabric which we call the past.'--[Clemens
+had first known Stanley as a newspaper man.  "I first met him when he
+reported a lecture of mine in St. Louis," he said once in a conversation
+where the name of Stanley was mentioned.]
+
+
+
+
+LXXXVI
+
+ENGLAND
+
+From that night Mark Twain's stay in England could not properly be called
+a gloomy one.
+
+Routledge, Hood, Lee, and, in fact, all literary London, set themselves
+the task of giving him a good time.  Whatever place of interest they
+could think of he was taken there; whatever there was to see he saw it.
+Dinners, receptions, and assemblies were not complete without him.  The
+White Friars' Club and others gave banquets in his honor.  He was the
+sensation of the day.  When he rose to speak on these occasions he was
+greeted with wild cheers.  Whatever he said they eagerly applauded--too
+eagerly sometimes, in the fear that they might be regarded as insensible
+to American humor.  Other speakers delighted in chaffing him in order to
+provoke his retorts.  When a speaker humorously referred to his American
+habit of carrying a cotton umbrella, his reply that he followed this
+custom because a cotton umbrella was the only kind of an umbrella that an
+Englishman wouldn't steal, was all over England next day, and regarded as
+one of the finest examples of wit since the days of Swift.
+
+The suddenness and completeness of his acceptance by the great ones of
+London rather overwhelmed and frightened him made him timid.  Joaquin
+Miller writes:
+
+     He was shy as a girl, although time was already coyly flirting white
+     flowers at his temples, and could hardly be coaxed to meet the
+     learned and great who wanted to take him by the hand.
+
+Many came to call on him at his hotel, among them Charles Reade and Canon
+Kingsley.  Kingsley came twice without finding him; then wrote, asking
+for an appointment.  Reade invited his assistance on a novel.  Indeed, it
+was in England that Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come
+into his rightful heritage.  Whatever may have been the doubts concerning
+him in America, there was no question in England.  Howells says:
+
+     In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him.  Lord mayors,
+     lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he
+     was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the
+     favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation.
+
+After that first visit of Mark Twain's, when Americans in England,
+referring to their great statesmen, authors, and the like, naturally
+mentioned the names of Seward, Webster, Lowell, or Holmes, the English
+comment was likely to be: "Never mind those.  We can turn out academic
+Sewards by the dozen, and cultured humorists like Lowell and Holmes by
+the score.  Tell us of Lincoln, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain.  We cannot
+match these; they interest us."  And it was true.  History could not
+match them, for they were unique.
+
+Clemens would have been more than human if in time he had not realized
+the fuller meaning of this triumph, and exulted in it a little to the
+folks at home.  There never lived a more modest, less pretentious, less
+aggressive man than Mark Twain, but there never lived a man who took a
+more childlike delight in genuine appreciation; and, being childlike, it
+was only human that he should wish those nearest to him to share his
+happiness.  After one memorable affair he wrote:
+
+     I have been received in a sort of tremendous way to-night by the
+     brains of London, assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of
+     London; mine being (between you and me) a name which was received
+     with a thundering outburst of spontaneous applause when the long
+     list of guests was called.
+
+I might have perished on the spot but for the friendly support and
+assistance of my excellent friend, Sir John Bennett.
+
+This letter does not tell all of the incident or the real reason why he
+might have perished on the spot.  During the long roll-call of guests he
+had lost interest a little, and was conversing in whispers with his
+"excellent friend," Sir John Bennett, stopping to applaud now and then
+when the applause of the others indicated that some distinguished name
+had been pronounced.  All at once the applause broke out with great
+vehemence.  This must be some very distinguished person indeed.  He
+joined in it with great enthusiasm.  When it was over he whispered to Sir
+John:
+
+"Whose name was that we were just applauding?"
+
+"Mark Twain's."
+
+Whereupon the support was needed.
+
+Poor little pirate Hotten did not have a happy time during this visit.
+He had reveled in the prospect at first, for he anticipated a large
+increase to be derived from his purloined property; but suddenly, one
+morning, he was aghast to find in the Spectator a signed letter from Mark
+Twain, in which he was repudiated, referred to as "John Camden
+Hottentot," an unsavory person generally.  Hotten also sent a letter to
+the Spectator, in which he attempted to justify himself, but it was a
+feeble performance.  Clemens prepared two other communications, each
+worse than the other and both more destructive than the first one.  But
+these were only to relieve his mind.  He did not print them.  In one of
+them he pursued the fancy of John Camden Hottentot, whom he offers as a
+specimen to the Zoological Gardens.
+
+It is not a bird.  It is not a man.  It is not a fish.  It does not seem
+to be in all respects a reptile.  It has the body and features of a man,
+but scarcely any of the instincts that belong to such a structure....  I
+am sure that this singular little creature is the missing link between
+the man and the hyena.
+
+Hotten had preyed upon explorer Stanley and libeled him in a so-called.
+biography to a degree that had really aroused some feeling against
+Stanley in England.  Only for the moment--the Queen invited Stanley to
+luncheon, and newspaper criticism ceased.  Hotten was in general
+disrepute, therefore, so it was not worth while throwing a second brick
+at him.
+
+In fact, now that Clemens had expended his venom, on paper, Hotten seemed
+to him rather an amusing figure than otherwise.  An incident grew out of
+it all, however, that was not amusing.  E. P. Hingston, whom the reader
+may remember as having been with Artemus Ward in Virginia City, and one
+of that happy group that wined and dined the year away, had been engaged
+by Hotten to write the introductory to his edition of The Innocents
+Abroad.  It was a well-written, highly complimentary appreciation.
+Hingston did not dream that he was committing an offense, nor did Clemens
+himself regard it as such in the beginning.
+
+But Mark Twain's views had undergone a radical change, and with
+characteristic dismissal of previous conditions he had forgotten that he
+had ever had any other views than those he now held.  Hingston was in
+London, and one evening, at a gathering, approached Clemens with
+outstretched hand.  But Clemens failed to see Hingston's hand or to
+recognize him.  In after-years his conscience hurt him terribly for this.
+He remembered it only with remorse and shame.  Once, in his old age, he
+spoke of it with deep sorrow.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXVII
+
+THE BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+
+The book on England, which he had prepared for so carefully, was never
+written.  Hundreds of the stylographic pages were filled, and the
+duplicates sent home for the entertainment of Olivia Clemens, but the
+notes were not completed, and the actual writing was never begun.  There
+was too much sociability in London for one thing, and then he found that
+he could not write entertainingly of England without introducing too many
+personalities, and running the risk of offending those who had taken him
+into their hearts and homes.  In a word, he would have to write too
+seriously or not at all.
+
+He began his memoranda industriously enough, and the volume might have
+been as charming and as valuable as any he has left behind.  The reader
+will hardly fail to find a few of the entries interesting.  They are
+offered here as examples of his daily observation during those early
+weeks of his stay, and to show somewhat of his purpose:
+
+                             AN EXPATRIATE
+
+     There was once an American thief who fled his country and took
+     refuge in England.  He dressed himself after the fashion of the
+     Londoners, and taught his tongue the peculiarities of the London
+     pronunciation and did his best in all ways to pass himself for a
+     native.  But he did two fatal things: he stopped at the Langham
+     Hotel, and the first trip he took was to visit Stratford-on-Avon and
+     the grave of Shakespeare.  These things betrayed his nationality.
+
+
+                         STANLEY AND THE QUEEN
+
+     See the power a monarch wields!  When I arrived here, two weeks ago,
+     the papers and geographers were in a fair way to eat poor Stanley up
+     without salt or sauce.  The Queen says, "Come four hundred miles up
+     into Scotland and sit at my luncheon-table fifteen minutes"; which,
+     being translated, means, "Gentlemen, I believe in this man and take
+     him under my protection"; and not another yelp is heard.
+
+
+                         AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM
+
+     What a place it is!
+
+     Mention some very rare curiosity of a peculiar nature--a something
+     which you have read about somewhere but never seen--they show you a
+     dozen!  They show you all the possible varieties of that thing!
+     They show you curiously wrought jeweled necklaces of beaten gold,
+     worn by the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Etruscans, Greeks,
+     Britons--every people of the forgotten ages, indeed.  They show you
+     the ornaments of all the tribes and peoples that live or ever did
+     live.  Then they show you a cast taken from Cromwell's face in
+     death; then the venerable vase that once contained the ashes of
+     Xerxes.
+
+     I am wonderfully thankful for the British Museum.  Nobody comes
+     bothering around me--nobody elbows me--all the room and all the
+     light I want, under this huge dome--no disturbing noises--and people
+     standing ready to bring me a copy of pretty much any book that ever
+     was printed under the sun--and if I choose to go wandering about the
+     long corridors and galleries of the great building the secrets of
+     all the earth and all the ages axe laid open to me.  I am not
+     capable of expressing my gratitude for the British Museum--it seems
+     as if I do not know any but little words and weak ones.
+
+
+                       WESTMINSTER ABBEY BY NIGHT
+
+     It was past eleven o'clock and I was just going to bed.  But this
+     friend of mine was as reliable as he was eccentric, and so there was
+     not a doubt in my mind that his "expedition" had merit in it.  I put
+     on my coat and boots again, and we drove away.
+
+     "Where is it?  Where are we going?"
+
+     "Don't worry.  You'll see."
+
+     He was not inclined to talk.  So I thought this must be a weighty
+     matter.  My curiosity grew with the minutes, but I kept it manfully
+     under the surface.  I watched the lamps, the signs, the numbers as
+     we thundered down the long street.  I am always lost in London, day
+     or night.  It was very chilly, almost bleak.  People leaned against
+     the gusty blasts as if it were the dead of winter.  The crowds grew
+     thinner and thinner, and the noises waxed faint and seemed far away.
+     The sky was overcast and threatening.  We drove on, and still on,
+     till I wondered if we were ever going to stop.  At last we passed by
+     a spacious bridge and a vast building, and presently entered a
+     gateway, passed through a sort of tunnel, and stopped in a court
+     surrounded by the black outlines of a great edifice.  Then we
+     alighted, walked a dozen steps or so, and waited.  In a little while
+     footsteps were heard, a man emerged from the darkness, and we
+     dropped into his wake without saying anything.  He led us under an
+     archway of masonry, and from that into a roomy tunnel, through a
+     tall iron gate, which he locked behind us.  We followed him down
+     this tunnel, guided more by his footsteps on the stone flagging than
+     by anything we could very distinctly see.  At the end of it we came
+     to another iron gate, and our conductor stopped there and lit a
+     bull's-eye lantern.  Then he unlocked the gate; and I wished he had
+     oiled it first, it grated so dismally.  The gate swung open and we
+     stood on the threshold of what seemed a limitless domed and pillared
+     cavern, carved out of the solid darkness.  The conductor and my
+     friend took off their hats reverently, and I did likewise.  For the
+     moment that we stood thus there was not a sound, and the stillness
+     seemed to add to the solemnity of the gloom.  I looked my inquiry!
+
+     "It is the tomb of the great dead of England-Westminster Abbey."...
+
+     We were among the tombs; on every hand dull shapes of men, sitting,
+     standing, or stooping, inspected us curiously out of the darkness--
+     reached out their hands toward us--some appealing, some beckoning,
+     some warning us away.  Effigies they were--statues over the graves;
+     but they looked human and natural in the murky shadows.  Now a
+     little half-grown black and white cat squeezed herself through the
+     bars of the iron gate and came purring lovingly about us, unawed by
+     the time or the place, unimpressed by the marble pomp that
+     sepulchers a line of mighty dead that ends with a great author of
+     yesterday and began with a sceptered monarch away back in the dawn
+     of history, more than twelve hundred years ago .  .  .  .
+
+     Mr. Wright flashed his lantern first upon this object and then upon
+     that, and kept up a running commentary that showed there was nothing
+     about the venerable Abbey that was trivial in his eyes or void of
+     interest.  He is a man in authority, being superintendent, and his
+     daily business keeps him familiar with every nook and corner of the
+     great pile.  Casting a luminous ray now here, now yonder, he would
+     say:
+
+     "Observe the height of the Abbey--one hundred and three feet to the
+     base of the roof; I measured it myself the other day.  Notice the
+     base of this column--old, very old--hundreds and hundreds of years--
+     and how well they knew how to build in those old days!  Notice it--
+     every stone is laid horizontally; that is to say, just as nature
+     laid it originally in the quarry not set up edgewise; in our day
+     some people set them on edge, and then wonder why they split and
+     flake.  Architects cannot teach nature anything.  Let me remove this
+     matting--it is put here to preserve the pavement; now there is a bit
+     of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these
+     scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before
+     time and sacrilegious idlers marred it.  Now there, in the border,
+     was an inscription, once see, follow the circle-you can trace it by
+     the ornaments that have been pulled out--here is an A and there is
+     an O, and yonder another A--all beautiful Old English capitals;
+     there is no telling what the inscription was--no record left now.
+     Now move along in this direction, if you please.  Yonder is where
+     old King Sebert the Saxon lies his monument is the oldest one in the
+     Abbey; Sebert died in 616,--[Clemens probably misunderstood the
+     name.  It was Ethelbert who died in 616.  The name Sebert does not
+     appear in any Saxon annals accessible to the author.]--and that's
+     as much, as twelve hundred and fifty years ago think of it!  Twelve
+     hundred and fifty years!  Now yonder is the last one--Charles
+     Dickens--there on the floor, with the brass letters on the slab--and
+     to this day the people come and put flowers on it....  There is
+     Garrick's monument; and Addison's, and Thackeray's bust--and
+     Macaulay lies there.  And close to Dickens and Garrick lie Sheridan
+     and Dr. Johnson--and here is old Parr....
+
+     "That stone there covers Campbell the poet.  Here are names you know
+     pretty well--Milton, and Gray who wrote the Elegy, and Butler who
+     wrote Hudibras; and Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson--there are three
+     tablets to him scattered about the Abbey, and all got 'O, Rare Ben
+     Jonson' cut on them.  You were standing on one of them just now he
+     is buried standing up.  There used to be a tradition here that
+     explains it.  The story goes that he did not dare ask to be buried
+     in the Abbey, so he asked King James if he would make him a present
+     of eighteen inches of English ground, and the King said 'yes,' and
+     asked him where he would have it, and he said in Westminster Abbey.
+     Well, the King wouldn't go back on his word, and so there he is,
+     sure enough-stood up on end."
+
+The reader may regret that there are not more of these entries, and that
+the book itself was never written.  Just when he gave up the project is
+not recorded.  He was urged to lecture in London, but declined.  To Mrs.
+Clemens, in September, he wrote:
+
+Everybody says lecture, lecture, lecture, but I have not the least idea
+of doing it; certainly not at present.  Mr. Dolby, who took Dickens to
+America, is coming to talk business tomorrow, though I have sent him word
+once before that I can't be hired to talk here; because I have no time to
+spare.  There is too much sociability; I do not get along fast enough
+with work.
+
+In October he declared that he was very homesick, and proposed that Mrs.
+Clemens and Susie join him at once in London, unless she would prefer to
+have him come home for the winter and all of them return to London in the
+spring.  So it is likely that the book was not then abandoned.  He felt
+that his visit was by no means ended; that it was, in fact, only just
+begun, but he wanted the ones he loved most to share it with him.  To his
+mother and sister, in November, he wrote:
+
+I came here to take notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend
+dinners and make speeches.  I have had a jolly good time, and I do hate
+to go away from these English folks; they make a stranger feel entirely
+at home, and they laugh so easily that it is a comfort to make after-
+dinner speeches here.  I have made hundreds of friends; and last night,
+in the crush at the opening of the new Guild Hall Library and Museum, I
+was surprised to meet a familiar face every other step.
+
+All his impressions of England had been happy ones.  He could deliver a
+gentle satire now and then at certain British institutions--certain
+London localities and features--as in his speech at the Savage Club,
+--[September 28, 1872.  This is probably the most characteristic speech
+made by Mark Twain during his first London visit; the reader will find it
+in full in Appendix L, at the end of last volume.]--but taking the snug
+island as a whole, its people, its institutions, its fair, rural aspects,
+he had found in it only delight.  To Mrs. Crane he wrote:
+
+     If you and Theodore will come over in the spring with Livy and me,
+     and spend the summer, you shall see a country that is so beautiful
+     that you will be obliged to believe in fairy-land.  There is nothing
+     like it elsewhere on the globe.  You should have a season ticket and
+     travel up and down every day between London and Oxford and worship
+     nature.
+
+     And Theodore can browse with me among dusty old dens that look now
+     as they looked five hundred years ago; and puzzle over books in the
+     British Museum that were made before Christ was born; and in the
+     customs of their public dinners, and the ceremonies of every
+     official act, and the dresses of a thousand dignitaries, trace the
+     speech and manners of all the centuries that have dragged their
+     lagging decades over England since the Heptarchy fell asunder.  I
+     would a good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you
+     over.
+
+He sailed November 12th, on the Batavia, loaded with Christmas presents
+for everybody; jewelry, furs, laces; also a practical steam-engine for
+his namesake, Sam Moffett.  Half-way across the Atlantic the Batavia ran
+into a hurricane and was badly damaged by heavy seas, and driven far out
+of her course.  It was a lucky event on the whole, for she fell in with a
+water-logged lumber bark, a complete wreck, with nine surviving sailors
+clinging to her rigging.  In the midst of the wild gale a lifeboat was
+launched and the perishing men were rescued.  Clemens prepared a graphic
+report of the matter for the Royal Humane Society, asking that medals be
+conferred upon the brave rescuers, a document that was signed by his
+fellow-passengers and obtained for the men complete recognition and wide
+celebrity.  Closing, the writer said:
+
+     As might have been anticipated, if I have been of any service toward
+     rescuing these nine shipwrecked human beings by standing around the
+     deck in a furious storm, without an umbrella, keeping an eye on
+     things and seeing that they were done right, and yelling whenever a
+     cheer seemed to be the important thing, I am glad and I am
+     satisfied.  I ask no reward.  I would do it again under the same
+     circumstances.  But what I do plead for, earnestly and sincerely, is
+     that the Royal Humane Society will remember our captain and our
+     life-boat crew, and in so remembering them increase the high honor
+     and esteem in which the society is held all over the civilized
+     world.
+
+The Batavia reached New York November 26, 1872.  Mark Twain had been
+absent three months, during which he had been brought to at least a
+partial realization of what his work meant to him and to mankind.
+
+An election had taken place during his absence--an election which
+gratified him deeply, for it had resulted in the second presidency of
+General Grant and in the defeat of Horace Greeley, whom he admired
+perhaps, but not as presidential material.  To Thomas Nast, who had aided
+very effectually in Mr. Greeley's overwhelming defeat, Clemens wrote:
+
+Nast, you more than any other man have won a prodigious victory for
+Grant--I mean, rather, for civilization and progress.  Those pictures
+were simply marvelous, and if any man in the land has a right to hold his
+head up and be honestly proud of his share in this year's vast events
+that man is unquestionably yourself.  We all do sincerely honor you, and
+are proud of you.
+
+Horace Greeley's peculiar abilities and eccentricities won celebrity for
+him, rather than voters.  Mark Twain once said of him:
+
+"He was a great man, an honest man, and served his, country well and was
+an honor to it.  Also, he was a good-natured man, but abrupt with
+strangers if they annoyed him when he was busy.  He was profane, but that
+is nothing; the best of us is that.  I did not know him well, but only
+just casually, and by accident.  I never met him but once.  I called on
+him in the Tribune office, but I was not intending to.  I was looking for
+Whitelaw Reid, and got into the wrong den.  He was alone at his desk,
+writing, and we conversed--not long, but just a little.  I asked him if
+he was well, and he said, 'What the hell do you want?'  Well, I couldn't
+remember what I wanted, so I said I would call again.  But I didn't."
+
+Clemens did not always tell the incident just in this way.  Sometimes it
+was John Hay he was looking for instead of Reid, and the conversation
+with Greeley varied; but perhaps there was a germ of history under it
+somewhere, and at any rate it could have happened well enough, and not
+have been out of character with either of the men.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXVIII
+
+"THE GILDED AGE"
+
+Mark Twain did not go on the lecture circuit that winter.  Redpath had
+besought him as usual, and even in midsummer had written:
+
+"Will you?  Won't you?  We have seven thousand to eight thousand dollars
+in engagements recorded for you," and he named a list of towns ranging
+geographically from Boston to St. Paul.
+
+But Clemens had no intention then of ever lecturing any more, and again
+in November, from London, he announced (to Redpath):
+
+"When I yell again for less than $500 I'll be pretty hungry, but I
+haven't any intention of yelling at any price."
+
+Redpath pursued him, and in January proposed $400 for a single night in
+Philadelphia, but without result.  He did lecture two nights in Steinway
+Hall for the Mercantile Library Association, on the basis of half
+profits, netting $1,300 for the two nights as his share; and he lectured
+one night in Hartford, at a profit Of $1,500, for charity.  Father
+Hawley, of Hartford, had announced that his missionary work was suffering
+for lack of funds.  Some of his people were actually without food, he
+said, their children crying with hunger.  No one ever responded to an
+appeal like that quicker than Samuel Clemens.  He offered to deliver a
+lecture free, and to bear an equal proportion of whatever expenses were
+incurred by the committee of eight who agreed to join in forwarding the
+project.  He gave the Sandwich Island lecture, and at the close of it a
+large card was handed him with the figures of the receipts printed upon
+it.  It was held up to view, and the house broke into a storm of cheers.
+
+He did very little writing during the early weeks following his return.
+Early in the year (January 3 and 6, 1873) he contributed two Sandwich
+Island letters to the Tribune, in which, in his own peculiar fashion, he
+urged annexation.
+
+"We must annex those people," he declared, and proceeded to specify the
+blessings we could give them, such as "leather-headed juries, the
+insanity law, and the Tweed Ring."
+
+     We can confer Woodhull and Clafin on them, and George Francis Train.
+     We can give them lecturers!  I will go myself.
+
+     We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner
+     on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy
+     civilization.  Annexation is what the poor islanders need!
+
+     "Shall we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?"
+
+His success in England became an incentive to certain American
+institutions to recognize his gifts at home.  Early in the year he was
+dined as the guest of the Lotos Club of New York, and a week or two later
+elected to its membership.  This was but a beginning.  Some new
+membership or honor was offered every little while, and so many banquets
+that he finally invented a set form for declining them.  He was not yet
+recognized as the foremost American man of letters, but undoubtedly he
+had become the most popular; and Edwin Whipple, writing at this time, or
+but little later, said:
+
+"Mark Twain is regarded chiefly as a humorist, but the exercise of his
+real talents would rank him with the ablest of our authors in the past
+fifty years."  So he was beginning to be "discovered" in high places.
+
+It was during this winter that the Clemens household enjoyed its first
+real home life in Hartford, its first real home life anywhere since those
+earliest days of marriage.  The Hooker mansion was a comfortable place.
+The little family had comparatively good health.  Their old friends were
+stanch and lavishly warm-hearted, and they had added many new ones.
+Their fireside was a delightful nucleus around which gathered those they
+cared for most, the Twichells, the Warner families, the Trumbulls--all
+certain of a welcome there.  George Warner, only a little while ago,
+remembering, said:
+
+"The Clemens house was the only one I have ever known where there was
+never any preoccupation in the evenings, and where visitors were always
+welcome.  Clemens was the best kind of a host; his evenings after dinner
+were an unending flow of stories."
+
+Friends living near by usually came and went at will, often without the
+ceremony of knocking or formal leave-taking.  They were more like one
+great family in that neighborhood, with a community of interests, a unity
+of ideals.  The Warner families and the Clemenses were particularly
+intimate, and out of their association grew Mark Twain's next important
+literary undertaking, his collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner in
+'The Gilded Age'.
+
+A number of more or less absurd stories have been printed about the
+origin of this book.  It was a very simple matter, a perfectly natural
+development.
+
+At the dinner-table one night, with the Warners present, criticisms of
+recent novels were offered, with the usual freedom and severity of
+dinner-table talk.  The husbands were inclined to treat rather lightly
+the novels in which their wives were finding entertainment.  The wives
+naturally retorted that the proper thing for the husbands to do was to
+furnish the American people with better ones.  This was regarded in the
+nature of a challenge, and as such was accepted--mutually accepted: that
+is to say, in partnership.  On the spur of the moment Clemens and Warner
+agreed that they would do a novel together, that they would begin it
+immediately.  This is the whole story of the book's origin; so far, at
+least, as the collaboration is concerned.  Clemens, in fact, had the
+beginning of a story in his mind, but had been unwilling to undertake an
+extended work of fiction alone.  He welcomed only too eagerly, therefore,
+the proposition of joint authorship.  His purpose was to write a tale
+around that lovable character of his youth, his mother's cousin, James
+Lampton--to let that gentle visionary stand as the central figure against
+a proper background.  The idea appealed to Warner, and there was no delay
+in the beginning.  Clemens immediately set to work and completed 399
+pages of the manuscript, the first eleven chapters of the book, before
+the early flush of enthusiasm waned.
+
+Warner came over then, and Clemens read it aloud to him.  Warner had some
+plans for the story, and took it up at this point, and continued it
+through the next twelve chapters; and so they worked alternately, "in the
+superstition," as Mark Twain long afterward declared, "that we were
+writing one coherent yarn, when I suppose, as a matter of fact, we were
+writing two incoherent ones."--[The reader may be interested in the
+division of labor.  Clemens wrote chapters I to XI; also chapters XXIV,
+XXV, XXVII, XXVIII, XXX, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XLII,
+XLIII, XLV, LI, LII, LIII, LVII, LIX, LX, LXI, LXII, and portions of
+chapters XXXV, XLIX, LVI.  Warner wrote chapters XII to XXIII; also
+chapters XXVI, XXIX, XXXI, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL, XLI, XLIV, XLVI, XLVII,
+XLVITT, L, LIV, LV, LVIII, LXIII, and portions of chapters XXXV, XLIX,
+and LVI.  The work was therefore very evenly divided.
+
+There was another co-worker on The Gilded Age before the book was finally
+completed.  This was J. Hammond Trumbull, who prepared the variegated,
+marvelous cryptographic chapter headings: Trumbull was the most learned
+man that ever lived in Hartford.  He was familiar with all literary and
+scientific data, and according to Clemens could swear in twenty-seven
+languages.  It was thought to be a choice idea to get Trumbull to supply
+a lingual medley of quotations to precede the chapters in the new book,
+the purpose being to excite interest and possibly to amuse the reader--a
+purpose which to some extent appears to have miscarried.]
+
+The book was begun in February and finished in April, so the work did not
+lag.  The result, if not highly artistic, made astonishingly good
+reading.  Warner had the touch of romance, Clemens, the gift of creating,
+or at least of portraying, human realities.  Most of his characters
+reflected intimate personalities of his early life.  Besides the
+apotheosis of James Lampton into the immortal Sellers, Orion became
+Washington Hawkins, Squire Clemens the judge, while Mark Twain's own
+personality, in a greater or lesser degree, is reflected in most of his
+creations.  As for the Tennessee land, so long a will-o'the-wisp and a
+bugbear, it became tangible property at last.  Only a year or two before
+Clemens had written to Orion:
+
+     Oh, here!  I don't want to be consulted at all about Tennessee.  I
+     don't want it even mentioned to me.  When I make a suggestion it is
+     for you to act upon it or throw it aside, but I beseech you never to
+     ask my advice, opinion, or consent about that hated property.
+
+But it came in good play now.  It is the important theme of the story.
+
+Mark Twain was well qualified to construct his share of the tale.  He
+knew his characters, their lives, and their atmospheres perfectly.
+Senator Dilworthy (otherwise Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, then notorious
+for attempted vote-buying) was familiar enough.  That winter in
+Washington had acquainted Clemens with the life there, its political
+intrigues, and the disrepute of Congress.  Warner was equally well
+qualified for his share of the undertaking, and the chief criticism that
+one may offer is the one stated by Clemens himself--that the divisions of
+the tale remain divisions rather than unity.
+
+As for the story itself--the romance and tragedy of it--the character of
+Laura in the hands of either author is one not easy to forget.  Whether
+this means that the work is well done, or only strikingly done, the
+reader himself must judge.  Morally, the character is not justified.
+Laura was a victim of circumstance from the beginning.  There could be no
+poetic justice in her doom.  To drag her out of a steamer wreck, only to
+make her the victim of a scoundrel, later an adventuress, and finally a
+murderess, all may be good art, but of a very bad kind.  Laura is a sort
+of American Becky Sharp; but there is retributive justice in Becky's
+fate, whereas Laura's doom is warranted only by the author's whim.  As
+for her end, whatever the virtuous public of that day might have done, a
+present-day audience would not have pelted her from the stage, destroyed
+her future, taken away her life.
+
+The authors regarded their work highly when it was finished, but that is
+nothing.  Any author regards his work highly at the moment of its
+completion.  In later years neither of them thought very well of their
+production; but that also is nothing.  The author seldom cares very
+deeply for his offspring once it is turned over to the public charge.
+The fact that the story is still popular, still delights thousands of
+readers, when a myriad of novels that have been written since it was
+completed have lived their little day and died so utterly that even their
+names have passed out of memory, is the best verdict as to its worth.
+
+
+
+
+LXXXIX
+
+PLANNING A NEW HOME
+
+Clemens and his wife bought a lot for the new home that winter, a fine,
+sightly piece of land on Farmington Avenue--table-land, slopingdown to a
+pretty stream that wound through the willows and among the trees.  They
+were as delighted as children with their new purchase and the prospect of
+building.  To her sister Mrs. Clemens wrote:
+
+     Mr. Clemens seems to glory in his sense of possession; he goes daily
+     into the lot, has had several falls trying to lay off the land by
+     sliding around on his feet....
+
+     For three days the ice has covered the trees, and they have been
+     glorious.  We could do nothing but watch the beauty outside; if you
+     looked at the trees as the sun struck them, with your back toward
+     the sun, they were covered with jewels.  If you looked toward the
+     sun it was all crystal whiteness, a perfect fairy-land.  Then the
+     nights were moonlight, and that was a great beauty, the moon giving
+     us the same prismatic effect.
+
+This was the storm of which Mark Twain wrote his matchless description,
+given first in his speech on New England weather, and later preserved in
+'Following the Equator', in more extended form.  In that book he likens
+an ice-storm to his impressions derived from reading descriptions of the
+Taj Mahal, that wonderful tomb of a fair East Indian queen.  It is a
+marvelous bit of word-painting--his description of that majestic vision:
+"When every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and
+the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond
+plume."  It will pay any one to look up that description and read it all,
+though it has been said, by the fortunate one or two who heard him first
+give it utterance as an impromptu outburst, that in the subsequent
+process of writing the bloom of its original magnificence was lost.
+
+The plans for the new house were drawn forthwith by that gentle architect
+Edward Potter, whose art to-day may be considered open to criticism, but
+not because of any lack of originality.  Hartford houses of that period
+were mainly of the goods-box form of architecture, perfectly square,
+typifying the commercial pursuits of many of their owners.  Potter agreed
+to get away from this idea, and a radical and even frenzied departure was
+the result.  Certainly his plans presented beautiful pictures, and all
+who saw them were filled with wonder and delight.  Architecture has
+lavished itself in many florescent forms since then, but we may imagine
+that Potter's "English violet" order of design, as he himself designated
+it, startled, dazzled, and captivated in a day, when most houses were
+mere habitations, built with a view to economy and the largest possible
+amount of room.
+
+Workmen were put on the ground without delay, to prepare for the
+builders, and work was rapidly pushed along.  Then in May the whole
+matter was left in the hands of the architect and the carpenters (with
+Lawyer Charles E. Perkins to stand between Potter and the violent
+builder, who roared at Potter and frightened him when he wanted changes),
+while the Clemens household, with Clara Spaulding, a girlhood friend of
+Mrs. Clemens, sailed away to England for a half-year holiday.
+
+
+
+
+XC
+
+A LONG ENGLISH HOLIDAY
+
+They sailed on the Batavia, and with them went a young man named
+Thompson, a theological student whom Clemens had consented to take as an
+amanuensis.  There is a pathetic incident connected with this young man,
+and it may as well be set down here.  Clemens found, a few weeks after
+his arrival in England, that so great was the tax upon his time that he
+could make no use of Thompson's services.  He gave Thompson fifty
+dollars, and upon the possibility of the young man's desiring to return
+to America, advanced him another fifty dollars, saying that he could
+return it some day, and never thought of it again.  But the young man
+remembered it, and one day, thirty-six years later, after a life of
+hardship and struggle, such as the life of a country minister is apt to
+be, he wrote and inclosed a money-order, a payment on his debt.  That
+letter and its inclosure brought only sorrow to Mark Twain.  He felt that
+it laid upon him the accumulated burden of the weary thirty-six years'
+struggle with ill-fortune.  He returned the money, of course, and in a
+biographical note commented:
+
+     How pale painted heroisms of romance look beside it!  Thompson's
+     heroism, which is real, which is colossal, which is sublime, and
+     which is costly beyond all estimate, is achieved in profound
+     obscurity, and its hero walks in rags to the end of his days.  I had
+     forgotten Thompson completely, but he flashes before me as vividly
+     as lightning.  I can see him now.  It was on the deck of the
+     Batavia, in the dock.  The ship was casting off, with that hubbub
+     and confusion and rushing of sailors, and shouting of orders and
+     shrieking of boatswain whistles, which marked the departure
+     preparations in those days--an impressive contrast with the solemn
+     silence which marks the departure preparations of the giant ships of
+     the present day.  Mrs. Clemens, Clara Spaulding, little Susy, and
+     the nurse-maid were all properly garbed for the occasion.  We all
+     had on our storm-rig, heavy clothes of somber hue, but new and
+     designed and constructed for the purpose, strictly in accordance
+     with sea-going etiquette; anything wearable on land being distinctly
+     and odiously out of the question.
+
+     Very well.  On that deck, and gliding placidly among those honorable
+     and properly upholstered groups, appeared Thompson, young, grave,
+     long, slim, with an aged fuzzy plug hat towering high on the upper
+     end of him and followed by a gray duster, which flowed down, without
+     break or wrinkle, to his ankles.  He came straight to us, and shook
+     hands and compromised us.  Everybody could see that we knew him.  A
+     nigger in heaven could not have created a profounder astonishment.
+
+     However, Thompson didn't know that anything was happening.  He had
+     no prejudices about clothes.  I can still see him as he looked when
+     we passed Sandy Hook and the winds of the big ocean smote us.
+     Erect, lofty, and grand he stood facing the blast, holding his plug
+     on with both hands and his generous duster blowing out behind, level
+     with his neck.  There were scoffers observing, but he didn't know
+     it; he wasn't disturbed.
+
+     In my mind, I see him once afterward, clothed as before, taking me
+     down in shorthand.  The Shah of Persia had come to England and Dr.
+     Hosmer, of the Herald, had sent me to Ostend, to view his Majesty's
+     progress across the Channel and write an account of it.  I can't
+     recall Thompson after that, and I wish his memory had been as poor
+     as mine.
+
+They had been a month in London, when the final incident referred to took
+place--the arrival of the Shah of Persia--and were comfortably quartered
+at the Langham Hotel.  To Twichell Clemens wrote:
+
+     We have a luxuriously ample suite of apartments on the third floor,
+     our bedroom looking straight up Portland Place, our parlor having a
+     noble array of great windows looking out upon both streets (Portland
+     Place and the crook that joins it onto Regent Street).
+
+     Nine p.m.  full twilight, rich sunset tints lingering in the west.
+
+     I am not going to write anything; rather tell it when I get back.
+     I love you and Harmony, and that is all the fresh news I've got
+     anyway.  And I mean to keep that fresh all the time.
+
+Mrs. Clemens, in a letter to her sister, declared: "It is perfectly
+discouraging to try to write you.  There is so much to write about that
+it makes me feel as if it was no use to begin."
+
+It was a period of continuous honor and entertainment.  If Mark Twain had
+been a lion on his first visit, he was little less than royalty now.  His
+rooms at the Langham were like a court.  Miss Spaulding (now Mrs. John B.
+Stanchfield) remembers that Robert Browning, Turgenieff, Sir John
+Millais, Lord Houghton, and Sir Charles Dilke (then at the height of his
+fame) were among those that called to pay their respects.  In a recent
+letter she says:
+
+     I remember a delightful luncheon that Charles Kingsley gave for Mr.
+     Clemens; also an evening when Lord Dunraven brought Mr. Home, the
+     medium, Lord Dunraven telling many of the remarkable things he had
+     seen Mr. Home do.  I remember I wanted so much to see him float out
+     of a seven or eight story window, and enter another, which Lord
+     Dunraven said he had seen him do many times.  But Mr. Home had been
+     very ill, and said his power had left him.  My great regret was that
+     we did not see Carlyle, who was too sad and ill for visits.
+
+Among others they met Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland,
+and found him so shy that it was almost impossible to get him to say a
+word on any subject.
+
+"The shyest full-grown man, except Uncle Remus, I ever met," Clemens once
+wrote.  "Dr. MacDonald and several other lively talkers were present, and
+the talk went briskly on for a couple of hours, but Carroll sat still all
+the while, except now and then when he answered a question."
+
+At a dinner given by George Smalley they met Herbert Spencer, and at a
+luncheon-party at Lord Houghton's, Sir Arthur Helps, then a world-wide
+celebrity.
+
+     Lord Elcho, a large, vigorous man, sat at some distance down the
+     table.  He was talking earnestly about the town of Godalming.  It
+     was a deep, flowing, and inarticulate rumble, but I caught the
+     Godalming pretty nearly every time it broke free of the rumbling,
+     and as all the strength was on the first end of the word, it
+     startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing.  In the
+     middle of the luncheon Lady Houghton rose, remarked to the guests on
+     her right and on her left, in a matter-of-fact way, "Excuse me, I
+     have an engagement," and without further ceremony, she went off to
+     meet it.  This would have been doubtful etiquette in America.  Lord
+     Houghton told a number of delightful stories.  He told them in
+     French, and I lost nothing of them but the nubs.
+
+Little Susy and her father thrived on London life, but after a time it
+wore on Mrs. Clemens.  She delighted in the English cordiality and
+culture, but the demands were heavy, the social forms sometimes trying.
+Life in London was interesting, and in its way charming, but she did not
+enter into it with quite her husband's enthusiasm and heartiness.  In the
+end they canceled all London engagements and quietly set out for
+Scotland.  On the way they rested a few days in York, a venerable place
+such as Mark Twain always loved to describe.  In a letter to Mrs. Langdon
+he wrote:
+
+     For the present we shall remain in this queer old walled town, with
+     its crooked, narrow lanes, that tell us of their old day that knew
+     no wheeled vehicles; its plaster-and-timber dwellings, with upper
+     stories far overhanging the street, and thus marking their date,
+     say three hundred years ago; the stately city walls, the castellated
+     gates, the ivy-grown, foliage-sheltered, most noble and picturesque
+     ruin of St. Mary's Abbey, suggesting their date, say five hundred
+     years ago, in the heart of Crusading times and the glory of English
+     chivalry and romance; the vast Cathedral of York, with its worn
+     carvings and quaintly pictured windows, preaching of still remoter
+     days; the outlandish names of streets and courts and byways that
+     stand as a record and a memorial, all these centuries, of Danish
+     dominion here in still earlier times; the hint here and there of
+     King Arthur and his knights and their bloody fights with Saxon
+     oppressors round about this old city more than thirteen hundred
+     years gone by; and, last of all, the melancholy old stone coffins
+     and sculptured inscriptions, a venerable arch and a hoary tower of
+     stone that still remain and are kissed by the sun and caressed by
+     the shadows every day, just as the sun and the shadows have kissed
+     and, caressed them every lagging day since the Roman Emperor's
+     soldiers placed them here in the times when Jesus the Son of Mary
+     walked the streets of Nazareth a youth, with no more name or fame
+     than the Yorkshire boy who is loitering down this street this
+     moment.
+
+They reached Edinburgh at the end of July and secluded themselves in
+Veitch's family hotel in George Street, intending to see no one.  But
+this plan was not a success; the social stress of London had been too
+much for Mrs. Clemens, and she collapsed immediately after their arrival.
+Clemens was unacquainted in Edinburgh, but remembered that Dr. John
+Brown, who had written Rab and His Friend, lived there.  He learned his
+address, and that he was still a practising physician.  He walked around
+to 23 Rutland Street, and made himself known.  Dr. Brown came forthwith,
+and Mrs. Clemens speedily recovered under his able and inspiring
+treatment.
+
+The association did not end there.  For nearly a month Dr. Brown was
+their daily companion, either at the hotel, or in his own home, or on
+protracted drives when he made his round of visits, taking these new
+friends along.  Dr. John was beloved by everybody in Edinburgh, everybody
+in Scotland, for that matter, and his story of Rab had won him a
+following throughout Christendom.  He was an unpretentious sovereign.
+Clemens once wrote of him:
+
+     His was a sweet and winning face, as beautiful a face as I have ever
+     known.  Reposeful, gentle, benignant; the face of a saint at peace
+     with all the world and placidly beaming upon it the sunshine of love
+     that filled his heart.
+
+He was the friend of all dogs, and of all people.  It has been told of
+him that once, when driving, he thrust his head suddenly out of the
+carriage window, then resumed his place with a disappointed look.
+
+"Who was it?" asked his companion.  "Some one you know?"
+
+"No," he said.  "A dog I don't know."
+
+He became the boon companion and playmate of little Susy, then not quite
+a year and a half old.  He called her Megalopis, a Greek term, suggested
+by her eyes; those deep, burning eyes that seemed always so full of
+life's sadder philosophies, and impending tragedy.  In a collection of
+Dr. Brown's letters he refers to this period.  In one place he says:
+
+     Had the author of The Innocents Abroad not come to Edinburgh at that
+     time we in all human probability might never have met, and what a
+     deprivation that would have been to me during the last quarter of a
+     century!
+
+And in another place:
+
+     I am attending the wife of Mark Twain.  His real name is Clemens.
+     She is a quite lovely little woman, modest and clever, and she has a
+     girlie eighteen months old, her ludicrous miniature--and such eyes!
+
+Those playmates, the good doctor and Megalopis, romped together through
+the hotel rooms with that complete abandon which few grown persons can
+assume in their play with children, and not all children can assume in
+their play with grown-ups.  They played "bear," and the "bear" (which was
+a very little one, so little that when it stood up behind the sofa you
+could just get a glimpse of yellow hair) would lie in wait for her
+victim, and spring out and surprise him and throw him into frenzies of
+fear.
+
+Almost every day they made his professional rounds with him.  He always
+carried a basket of grapes for his patients.  His guests brought along
+books to read while they waited.  When he stopped for a call he would
+say:
+
+"Entertain yourselves while I go in and reduce the population."
+
+There was much sight-seeing to do in Edinburgh, and they could not quite
+escape social affairs.  There were teas and luncheons and dinners with
+the Dunfermlines and the Abercrombies, and the MacDonalds, and with
+others of those brave clans that no longer slew one another among the
+grim northern crags and glens, but were as sociable and entertaining
+lords and ladies as ever the southland could produce.  They were very
+gentle folk indeed, and Mrs. Clemens, in future years, found her heart
+going back oftener to Edinburgh than to any other haven of those first
+wanderings.  August 24th she wrote to her sister:
+
+     We leave Edinburgh to-morrow with sincere regret; we have had such a
+     delightful stay here--we do so regret leaving Dr. Brown and his
+     sister, thinking that we shall probably never see them again [as
+     indeed they never did].
+
+They spent a day or two at Glasgow and sailed for Ireland, where they put
+in a fortnight, and early in September were back in England again, at
+Chester, that queer old city where; from a tower on the wall, Charles I.
+read the story of his doom.  Reginald Cholmondeley had invited them to
+visit his country seat, beautiful Condover Hall, near Shrewsbury, and in
+that lovely retreat they spent some happy, restful days.  Then they were
+in the whirl of London once more, but escaped for a fortnight to Paris,
+sight-seeing and making purchases for the new home.
+
+Mrs. Clemens was quite ready to return to America, by this time.
+
+     I am blue and cross and homesick [she wrote].  I suppose what makes
+     me feel the latter is because we are contemplating to stay in London
+     another month.  There has not one sheet of Mr. Clemens's proof come
+     yet, and if he goes home before the book is published here he will
+     lose his copyright.  And then his friends feel that it will be
+     better for him to lecture in London before his book is published,
+     not only that it will give him a larger but a more enviable
+     reputation.  I would not hesitate one moment if it were simply for
+     the money that his copyright will bring him, but if his reputation
+     will be better for his staying and lecturing, of course he ought to
+     stay....  The truth is, I can't bear the thought of postponing going
+     home.
+
+It is rather gratifying to find Olivia Clemens human, like that, now and
+then.  Otherwise, on general testimony, one might well be tempted to
+regard her as altogether of another race and kind.
+
+
+
+
+XCI
+
+A LONDON LECTURE
+
+Clemens concluded to hasten the homeward journey, but to lecture a few
+nights in London before starting.  He would then accompany his little
+family home, and return at once to continue the lecture series and
+protect his copyright.  This plan was carried out.  In a communication to
+the Standard, October 7th, he said:
+
+     SIR,--In view of the prevailing frenzy concerning the Sandwich
+     Islands, and the inflamed desire of the public to acquire
+     information concerning them, I have thought it well to tarry yet
+     another week in England and deliver a lecture upon this absorbing
+     subject.  And lest it should be thought unbecoming in me, a
+     stranger, to come to the public rescue at such a time, instead of
+     leaving to abler hands a matter of so much moment, I desire to
+     explain that I do it with the best motives and the most honorable
+     intentions.  I do it because I am convinced that no one can allay
+     this unwholesome excitement as effectually as I can, and to allay
+     it, and allay it as quickly as possible, is surely one thing that is
+     absolutely necessary at this juncture.  I feel and know that I am
+     equal to this task, for I can allay any kind of an excitement by
+     lecturing upon it.  I have saved many communities in this way.  I
+     have always been able to paralyze the public interest in any topic
+     that I chose to take hold of and elucidate with all my strength.
+
+     Hoping that this explanation will show that if I am seeming to
+     intrude I am at least doing it from a high impulse, I am, sir, your
+     obedient servant,
+                                   MARK TWAIN.
+
+
+A day later the following announcement appeared:
+
+                         QUEEN'S CONCERT ROOMS,
+                            HANOVER SQUARE.
+
+                 MR. GEORGE DOLBY begs to announce that
+
+                             MR. MARK TWAIN
+
+                             WILL DELIVER A
+                                LECTURE
+                                  OF A
+                          HUMOROUS CHARACTER,
+
+                              AS ABOVE, ON
+                MONDAY EVENING NEXT, OCTOBER 13th, 1873,
+                  AND REPEAT IT IN THE SAME PLACE, ON
+                     TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 14th,
+                     WEDNESDAY "         "    15th,
+                     THURSDAY  "         "    16th,
+                     FRIDAY    "         "    17th,
+
+                           At Eight o'Clock,
+                                  AND
+                   SATURDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER 18th,
+                           At Three o'Clock.
+
+                                SUBJECT:
+              "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands."
+
+     As Mr. TWAIN has spent several months in these Islands, and is well
+     acquainted with his subject, the Lecture may be expected to furnish
+     matter of interest.
+
+               STALLS, 5s.       UNRESERVED SEATS, 3s.
+
+
+The prospect of a lecture from Mark Twain interested the London public.
+Those who had not seen him were willing to pay even for that privilege.
+The papers were encouraging; Punch sounded a characteristic note:
+
+                    WELCOME TO A LECTURER
+
+    "'Tis time we Twain did show ourselves."  'Twas said
+     By Caesar, when one Mark had lost his head:
+     By Mark, whose head's quite bright, 'tis said again:
+     Therefore, "go with me, friends, to bless this Twain."
+
+                                             --Punch.
+
+
+Dolby had managed the Dickens lectures, and he proved his sound business
+judgment and experience by taking the largest available hall in London
+for Mark Twain.
+
+On the evening of October 13th, in the spacious Queen's Concert Rooms,
+Hanover Square, Mark Twain delivered his first public address in England.
+The subject was "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands," the old
+lecture with which he had made his first great successes.  He was not
+introduced.  He appeared on the platform in evening dress, assuming the
+character of a manager announcing a disappointment.
+
+Mr. Clemens, he said, had fully expected to be present.  He paused and
+loud murmurs arose from the audience.  He lifted his hand and they
+subsided.  Then he added, "I am happy to say that Mark Twain is present,
+and will now give his lecture."  Whereupon the audience roared its
+approval.
+
+It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that his triumph that week was
+a regal one.  For five successive nights and a Saturday matinee the
+culture and fashion of London thronged to hear him discourse of their
+"fellow savages."  It was a lecture event wholly without precedent.  The
+lectures of Artemus Ward,--["Artemus the delicious," as Charles Reade
+called him, came to London in June, 1866, and gave his "piece" in
+Egyptian Hall.  The refined, delicate, intellectual countenance, the
+sweet, gave, mouth, from which one might have expected philosophical
+lectures retained their seriousness while listeners were convulsed with
+laughter.  There was something magical about it.  Every sentence was a
+surprise.  He played on his audience as Liszt did on a piano most easily
+when most effectively.  Who can ever forget his attempt to stop his
+Italian pianist-" a count in his own country, but not much account in
+this "-who went on playing loudly while he was trying to tell us an
+"affecting incident" that occurred near a small clump of trees shown on
+his panorama of the Far West.  The music stormed on-we could see only
+lips and arms pathetically moving till the piano suddenly ceased, and we
+heard-it was all we heard "and, she fainted in Reginald's arms."  His
+tricks have been at tempted in many theaters, but Artemus Ward was
+inimitable.  And all the time the man was dying. (Moneure D. Conway,
+Autobiography.)]--who had quickly become a favorite in London, had
+prepared the public for American platform humor, while the daily doings
+of this new American product, as reported by the press, had aroused
+interest, or curiosity, to a high pitch.  On no occasion in his own
+country had he won such a complete triumph.  The papers for a week
+devoted columns of space to appreciation and editorial comment.  The
+Daily News of October 17th published a column-and-a-half editorial on
+American humor, with Mark Twain's public appearance as the general text.
+The Times referred to the continued popularity of the lectures:
+
+     They can't be said to have more than whetted the public appetite, if
+     we are to take the fact which has been imparted to us, that the
+     holding capacity of the Hanover Square Rooms has been inadequate to
+     the demand made upon it every night by Twain's lecturing, as a
+     criterion.  The last lecture of this too brief course was delivered
+     yesterday before an audience which crammed to discomfort every part
+     of the principal apartment of the Hanover Square Rooms....
+
+At the close of yesterday's lecture Mark Twain was so loudly applauded
+that he returned to the stage, and, as soon as the audience gave him a
+chance of being heard, he said, with much apparent emotion:
+
+     "Ladies and Gentlemen,--I won't keep you one single moment in this
+     suffocating atmosphere.  I simply wish to say that this is the last
+     lecture I shall have the honor to deliver in London until I return
+     from America, four weeks from now.  I only wish to say (here Mr.
+     Clemens faltered as if too much affected to proceed) I am very
+     grateful.  I do not wish to appear pathetic, but it is something
+     magnificent for a stranger to come to the metropolis of the world
+     and be received so handsomely as I have been.  I simply thank you."
+
+The Saturday Review devoted a page, and Once a Week, under the head of
+"Cracking jokes," gave three pages, to praise of the literary and lecture
+methods of the new American humorist.  With the promise of speedy return,
+he left London, gave the lecture once in Liverpool, and with his party
+(October 21st) set sail for home.
+
+In mid-Atlantic he remembered Dr. Brown, and wrote him:
+
+     We have plowed a long way over the sea, and there's twenty-two
+     hundred miles of restless water between us now, besides the railway
+     stretch.  And yet you are so present with us, so close to us, that a
+     span and a whisper would bridge the distance.
+
+So it would seem that of all the many memories of that eventful half-
+year, that of Dr.  Brown was the most present, the most tender.
+
+
+
+
+XCII
+
+FURTHER LONDON LECTURE TRIUMPHS
+
+Orion Clemens records that he met "Sam and Livy" on their arrival from
+England, November 2d, and that the president of the Mercantile Library
+Association sent up his card "four times," in the hope of getting a
+chance to propose a lecture engagement--an incident which impressed Orion
+deeply in its evidence of his brother's towering importance.  Orion
+himself was by this time engaged in various projects.  He was inventing a
+flying-machine, for one thing, writing a Jules Verne story, reading proof
+on a New York daily, and contemplating the lecture field.  This great
+blaze of international appreciation which had come to the little boy who
+used to set type for him in Hannibal, and wash up the forms and cry over
+the dirty proof, made him gasp.
+
+They went to see Booth in Hamlet [he says], and Booth sent for Sam to
+come behind the scenes, and when Sam proposed to add a part to Hamlet,
+the part of a bystander who makes humorous modern comment on the
+situations in the play, Booth laughed immoderately.
+
+Proposing a sacrilege like that to Booth!  To what heights had this
+printer-pilot, miner-brother not attained!--[This idea of introducing a
+new character in Hamlet was really attempted later by Mark Twain, with
+the connivance of Joe Goodman [of all men], sad to relate.  So far as is
+known it is the one stain on Goodman's literary record.]
+
+Clemens returned immediately to England--the following Saturday, in fact
+--and was back in London lecturing again after barely a month's absence.
+He gave the "Roughing It" address, this time under the title of "Roughing
+It on the Silver Frontier," and if his audiences were any less
+enthusiastic, or his houses less crowded than before, the newspapers of
+that day have left no record of it.  It was the height of the season now,
+and being free to do so, he threw himself into the whirl of it, and for
+two months, beyond doubt, was the most talked-of figure in London.  The
+Athenaeum Club made him a visiting member (an honor considered next to
+knighthood); Punch quoted him; societies banqueted him; his apartments,
+as before; were besieged by callers.  Afternoons one was likely to find
+him in "Poets' Corner" of the Langham smoking-room, with a group of
+London and American authors--Reade, Collins, Miller, and the others--
+frankly rioting in his bold fancies.  Charles Warren Stoddard was in
+London at the time, and acted as his secretary.  Stoddard was a gentle
+poet, a delightful fellow, and Clemens was very fond of him.  His only
+complaint of Stoddard was that he did not laugh enough at his humorous
+yarns.  Clemens once said:
+
+"Dolby and I used to come in after the lecture, or perhaps after being
+out to some dinner, and we liked to sit down and talk it over and tell
+yarns, and we expected Stoddard to laugh at them, but Stoddard would lie
+there on the couch and snore.  Otherwise, as a secretary, he was
+perfect."
+
+The great Tichborne trial was in progress then, and the spectacle of an
+illiterate impostor trying to establish his claim as the rightful heir to
+a great estate was highly diverting to Mark Twain.--[In a letter of this
+period he speaks of having attended one of the Claimant's "Evenings."]--
+He wanted to preserve the evidence as future literary material, and
+Stoddard day after day patiently collected the news reports and neatly
+pasted them into scrap-books, where they still rest, a complete record of
+that now forgotten farce.  The Tichborne trial recalled to Mark Twain the
+claimant in the Lampton family, who from time to time wrote him long
+letters, urging him to join in the effort to establish his rights to the
+earldom of Durham.  This American claimant was a distant cousin, who had
+"somehow gotten hold of, or had fabricated a full set of documents."
+
+Colonel Henry Watterson, just quoted (also a Lampton connection), adds:
+
+     During the Tichborne trial Mark and I were in London, and one day he
+     said to me: "I have investigated this Durham business down at the
+     Herald's office.  There is nothing to it.  The Lamptons passed out
+     of the earldom of Durham a hundred years ago.  There were never any
+     estates; the title lapsed; the present earldom is a new creation,
+     not in the same family at all.  But I'll tell you what: if you'll
+     put up $500, I'll put up $500 more; we'll bring our chap over here
+     and set him in as claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy's fat boy
+     won't be a marker to him."
+
+It was a characteristic Mark Twain project, one of the sort he never
+earned out in reality, but loved to follow in fancy, and with the pen
+sometimes.  The "Rightful Earl of Durham" continued to send letters for a
+long time after that (some of them still exist), but he did not establish
+his claim.  No one but Mark Twain ever really got anything out of it.
+Like the Tennessee land, it furnished material by and by for a book.
+Colonel Watterson goes on to say that Clemens was only joking about
+having looked up the matter in the peerage; that he hadn't really looked
+it up at all, and that the earldom lies still in the Lampton family.
+
+Another of Clemens's friends in London at this time was Prentice Mulford,
+of California.  In later years Mulford acquired a wide reputation for his
+optimistic and practical psychologies.  Through them he lifted himself
+out of the slough of despond, and he sought to extend a helping hand to
+others.  His "White Cross Library" had a wide reading and a wide
+influence; perhaps has to this day.  But in 1873 Mulford had not found
+the tangibility of thought, the secret of strength; he was only finding
+it, maybe, in his frank acknowledgment of shortcoming:
+
+     Now, Mark, I am down-very much down at present; you are up-where you
+     deserve to be.  I can't ask this on the score of any past favors,
+     for there have been none.  I have not always spoken of you in terms
+     of extravagant praise; have sometimes criticized you, which was due,
+     I suppose, in part to an envious spirit.  I am simply human.  Some
+     people in the same profession say they entertain no jealousy of
+     those more successful.  I can't.  They are divine; I am not.
+
+It was only that he wished Clemens to speak a word for him to Routledge,
+to get him a hearing for his work.  He adds:
+
+     I shall be up myself some day, although my line is far apart from
+     yours.  Whether you can do anything that I ask of you or not, I
+     shall be happy then, as I would be now, to do you any just and right
+     service....  Perhaps I have mistaken my vocation.  Certainly, if I
+     was back with my rocker on the Tuolumne, I'd make it rattle livelier
+     than ever I did before.  I have occasionally thought of London
+     Bridge, but the Thames is now so d---d cold and dirty, and besides I
+     can swim, and any attempt at drowning would, through the mere
+     instinct of self-preservation, only result in my swimming ashore and
+     ruining my best clothes; wherefore I should be worse off than ever.
+
+Of course Mark Twain granted the favor Mulford asked, and a great deal
+more, no doubt, for that was his way.  Mulford came up, as he had
+prophesied, but the sea in due time claimed him, though not in the way he
+had contemplated.  Years after he was one day found drifting off the
+shores of Long Island in an open boat, dead.
+
+Clemens made a number of notable dinner speeches during this second
+London lecture period.  His response to the toast of the "Ladies,"
+delivered at the annual dinner of the Scottish Corporation of London, was
+the sensational event of the evening.
+
+He was obliged to decline an invitation to the Lord Mayor's dinner,
+whereupon his Lordship wrote to urge him to be present at least at the
+finale, when the welcome would be "none the less hearty," and bespoke his
+attendance for any future dinners.
+
+Clemens lectured steadily at the Hanover Square Rooms during the two
+months of his stay in London, and it was only toward the end of this
+astonishing engagement that the audience began to show any sign of
+diminishing.  Early in January he wrote to Twichell:
+
+I am not going to the provinces because I cannot get halls that are large
+enough.  I always felt cramped in the Hanover Square Rooms, but I find
+that everybody here speaks with awe and respect of that prodigious hall
+and wonders that I could fill it so long.
+
+I am hoping to be back in twenty days, but I have so much to go home to
+and enjoy with a jubilant joy that it hardly seems possible that it can
+come to pass in so uncertain a world as this.
+
+In the same letter he speaks of attending an exhibition of Landseer's
+paintings at the Royal Academy:
+
+     Ah, they are wonderfully beautiful!  There are such rich moonlights
+     and dusks in the "Challenge" and the "Combat," and in that long
+     flight of birds across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or
+     sunrise, for no man can ever tell t'other from which in a picture,
+     except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the
+     water), and there is such a grave analytical profundity in the face
+     of the connoisseurs; and such pathos in the picture of a fawn
+     suckling its dead mother on a snowy waste, with only the blood in
+     the footprints to hint that she is not asleep.  And the way that he
+     makes animals' flesh and blood, insomuch that if the room were
+     darkened ever so little, and a motionless living animal placed
+     beside the painted one, no man could tell which was which.
+
+I interrupted myself here, to drop a line to Shirley Brooks and suggest a
+cartoon for Punch.  It was this: in one of the Academy saloons (in a
+suite where these pictures are) a fine bust of Landseer stands on a
+pedestal in the center of the room.  I suggested that some of Landseer's
+best known animals be represented as having come down out of their frames
+in the moonlight and grouped themselves about the bust in mourning
+attitudes.
+
+He sailed January 13 (1874.), on the Paythia, and two weeks later was at
+home, where all was going well.  The Gilded Age had been issued a day or
+two before Christmas, and was already in its third edition.  By the end
+of January 26,000 copies had been sold, a sale that had increased to
+40,000 a month later.  The new house was progressing, though it was by no
+means finished.  Mrs. Clemens was in good health.  Little Susy was full
+of such American activities as to earn the name of "The Modoc."  The
+promise of the year was bright.
+
+
+
+
+XCIII
+
+THE REAL COLONEL SELLERS-GOLDEN DAYS
+
+There are bound to be vexations, flies in the ointment, as we say.  It
+was Warner who conferred the name of Eschol Sellers on the chief figure
+of the collaborated novel.  Warner had known it as the name of an obscure
+person, or perhaps he had only heard of it.  At all events, it seemed a
+good one for the character and had been adopted.  But behold, the book
+had been issued but a little while when there rose "out of the vasty
+deeps" a genuine Eschol Sellers, who was a very respectable person.  He
+was a stout, prosperous-looking man, gray and about fifty-five years old.
+He came into the American Publishing Company offices and asked permission
+to look at the book.  Mr. Bliss was out at the moment, but presently
+arrived.  The visitor rose and introduced himself.
+
+"My name is Eschol Sellers," he said.  "You have used it in one of your
+publications.  It has brought upon me a lot of ridicule.  My people wish
+me to sue you for $10,000 damages."
+
+He had documents to prove his identity, and there was only one thing to
+be done; he must be satisfied.  Bliss agreed to recall as many of the
+offending volumes as possible and change the name on the plates.  He
+contacted the authors, and the name Beriah was substituted for the
+offending Eschol.  It turned out that the real Sellers family was a large
+one, and that the given name Eschol was not uncommon in its several
+branches.  This particular Eschol Sellers, curiously enough, was an
+inventor and a promoter, though of a much more substantial sort than his
+fiction namesake.  He was also a painter of considerable merit, a writer
+and an antiquarian.  He was said to have been a grandson of the famous
+painter, Rembrandt Peale.
+
+Clemens vowed that he would not lecture in America that winter.  The
+irrepressible Redpath besieged him as usual, and at the end of January
+Clemens telegraphed him, as he thought, finally.  Following it with a
+letter of explanation, he added:
+
+"I said to her, 'There isn't money enough in America to hire me to leave
+you for one day.'"
+
+But Redpath was a persistent devil.  He used arguments and held out
+inducements which even Mrs. Clemens thought should not be resisted, and
+Clemens yielded from time to time, and gave a lecture here and there
+during February.  Finally, on the 3d of March (1879.) he telegraphed his
+tormentor:
+
+"Why don't you congratulate me?  I never expect to stand on a lecture
+platform again after Thursday night."
+
+Howells tells delightfully of a visit which he and Aldrich paid to
+Hartford just at this period.  Aldrich went to visit Clemens and Howells
+to visit Charles Dudley Warner, Clemens coming as far as Springfield to
+welcome them.
+
+     In the good-fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such
+     days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round.  There was
+     constant running in and out of friendly houses where the lively
+     hosts and guests called one another by their Christian names or
+     nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at
+     doors.  Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he
+     satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another
+     sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which
+     enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance.
+
+Howells tells how Clemens dilated on the advantages of subscription sale
+over the usual methods of publication, and urged the two Boston authors
+to prepare something which canvassers could handle.
+
+"Why, any other means of bringing out a book is privately printing it,"
+he declared, and added that his subscription books in Bliss's hands sold
+right along, "just like the Bible."
+
+On the way back to Boston Howells and Aldrich planned a subscription book
+which would sell straight along, like the Bible.  It was to be called
+"Twelve Memorable Murders."  They had dreamed two or three fortunes by
+the time they had reached Boston, but the project ended there.
+
+"We never killed a single soul," Howells said once to the writer of this
+memoir.
+
+Clemens was always urging Howells to visit him after that.  He offered
+all sorts of inducements.
+
+     You will find us the most reasonable people in the world.  We had
+     thought of precipitating upon you, George Warner and his wife one
+     day, Twichell and his jewel of a wife another day, and Charles
+     Perkins and wife another.  Only those--simply members of our family
+     they are.  But I'll close the door against them all, which will
+     "fix" all of the lot except Twichell, who will no more hesitate to
+     climb in the back window than nothing.
+
+     And you shall go to bed when you please, get up when you please,
+     talk when you please, read when you please.
+
+A little later he was urging Howells or Aldrich, or both of them; to come
+to Hartford to live.
+
+     Mr. Hall, who lives in the house next to Mrs. Stowe's (just where we
+     drive in to go to our new house), will sell for $16,000 or $17,000.
+     You can do your work just as well here as in Cambridge, can't you?
+     Come!  Will one of you boys buy that house?  Now, say yes.
+
+Certainly those were golden, blessed days, and perhaps, as Howells says,
+the sun does not shine on their like any more--not in Hartford, at least,
+for the old group that made them no longer assembles there.  Hartford
+about this time became a sort of shrine for all literary visitors, and
+for other notables as well, whether of America or from overseas.  It was
+the half-way place between Boston and New York, and pilgrims going in
+either direction rested there.  It is said that travelers arriving in
+America, were apt to remember two things they wished to see: Niagara
+Falls and Mark Twain.  But the Falls had no such recent advertising
+advantage as that spectacular success in London.  Visitors were apt to
+begin in Hartford.
+
+Howells went with considerable frequency after that, or rather with
+regularity, twice a year, or oftener, and his coming was always hailed
+with great rejoicing.  They visited and ate around at one place and
+another among that pleasant circle of friends.  But they were happiest
+afterward together, Clemens smoking continually, "soothing his tense
+nerves with a mild hot Scotch," says Howells, "while we both talked, and
+talked, and tasked of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and the
+waters under the earth.  After two days of this talk I would come away
+hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust-shells
+which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer."
+Sometimes Clemens told the story of his early life, "the inexhaustible,
+the fairy, the Arabian Nights story, which I could never tire of even
+when it began to be told over again."
+
+
+
+
+XCIV
+
+BEGINNING "TOM SAWYER"
+
+The Clemens household went to Quarry Farm in April, leaving the new house
+once more in the hands of the architect and builders.  It was costing a
+vast sum of money, and there was a financial stress upon land.  Mrs.
+Clemens, always prudent, became a little uneasy at times, though without
+warrant in those days, for her business statement showed that her
+holdings were only a little less than a quarter of a million in her own
+right, while her husband's books and lectures had been highly
+remunerative, and would be more so.  They were justified in living in
+ample, even luxurious comfort, and how free from financial worries they
+could have lived for the rest of their days!
+
+Clemens, realizing his happiness, wrote Dr. Brown:
+
+Indeed I am thankful for the wifey and the child, and if there is one
+individual creature on all this footstool who is more thoroughly and
+uniformly and, unceasingly happy than I am I defy the world to produce
+him and prove him.  In my opinion he don't exist.  I was a mighty rough,
+coarse, unpromising subject when Livy took charge of me, four years ago,
+and I may still be to the rest of the world, but not to her.  She has
+made a very creditable job of me.
+
+Truly fortune not only smiled, but laughed.  Every mail brought great
+bundles of letters that sang his praises.  Robert Watt, who had
+translated his books into Danish, wrote of their wide popularity among
+his people.  Madame Blanc (Th. Bentzon), who as early as 1872 had
+translated The Jumping Frog into French, and published it, with extended
+comment on the author and his work, in the 'Revue des deux mondes', was
+said to be preparing a review of 'The Gilded Age'.  All the world seemed
+ready to do him honor.
+
+Of course, one must always pay the price, usually a vexatious one.  Bores
+stopped him on the street to repeat ancient and witless stories.
+Invented anecdotes, some of them exasperating ones, went the rounds of
+the press.  Impostors in distant localities personated him, or claimed to
+be near relatives, and obtained favors, sometimes money, in his name.
+Trivial letters, seeking benefactions of every kind, took the savor from
+his daily mail.  Letters from literary aspirants were so numerous that he
+prepared a "form" letter of reply:
+
+DEAR SIR OR MADAM,--Experience has not taught me very much, still it has
+taught me that it is not wise to criticize a piece of literature, except
+to an enemy of the person who wrote it; then if you praise it that enemy
+admires--you for your honest manliness, and if you dispraise it he
+admires you for your sound judgment.
+
+                              Yours truly,    S.  L.  C.
+
+Even Orion, now in Keokuk on a chicken farm, pursued him with manuscripts
+and proposals of schemes.  Clemens had bought this farm for Orion, who
+had counted on large and quick returns, but was planning new enterprises
+before the first eggs were hatched.  Orion Clemens was as delightful a
+character as was ever created in fiction, but he must have been a trial
+now and then to Mark Twain.  We may gather something of this from a
+letter written by the latter to his mother and sister at this period:
+
+     I can't "encourage" Orion.  Nobody can do that conscientiously, for
+     the reason that before one's letter has time to reach him he is off
+     on some new wild-goose chase.  Would you encourage in literature a
+     man who the older he grows the worse he writes?
+
+     I cannot encourage him to try the ministry, because he would change
+     his religion so fast that he would have to keep a traveling agent
+     under wages to go ahead of him to engage pulpits and board for him.
+
+     I cannot conscientiously encourage him to do anything but potter
+     around his little farm and put in his odd hours contriving new and
+     impossible projects at the rate of 365 a year which is his customary
+     average.  He says he did well in Hannibal!  Now there is a man who
+     ought to be entirely satisfied with the grandeurs, emoluments, and
+     activities of a hen farm.
+
+     If you ask me to pity Orion I can do that.  I can do it every day
+     and all day long.  But one can't "encourage" quicksilver; because
+     the instant you put your finger on it, it isn't there.  No, I am
+     saying too much.  He does stick to his literary and legal
+     aspirations, and he naturally would elect the very two things which
+     he is wholly and preposterously unfitted for.  If I ever become
+     able, I mean to put Orion on a regular pension without revealing the
+     fact that it is a pension.
+
+     He did presently allow the pension, a liberal one, which continued
+     until neither Orion Clemens nor his wife had further earthly need of
+     it.
+
+Mark Twain for some time had contemplated one of the books that will
+longest preserve his memory, 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'.  The success
+of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other autobiographical
+material, and he remembered those days along the river-front in Hannibal
+--his skylarking with Tom Blankenship, the Bowen boys, John Briggs, and
+the rest.  He had recognized these things as material--inviting material
+it was--and now in the cool luxury of Quarry Farm he set himself to spin
+the fabric of youth.
+
+He found summer-time always his best period for literary effort, and on a
+hillside just by the old quarry, Mrs. Crane had built for him that spring
+a study--a little room of windows, somewhat suggestive of a pilot-house--
+overlooking the long sweep of grass and the dreamlike city below.  Vines
+were planted that in the course of time would cover and embower it; there
+was a tiny fireplace for chilly days.  To Twichell, of his new retreat,
+Clemens wrote:
+
+It is the loveliest study you ever saw.  It is octagonal, with a peaked
+roof, each face filled with a spacious window, and it sits perched in
+complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of
+valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills.  It is a
+cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four
+chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the
+lightning flashes behind the hills beyond, and the rain beats upon the
+roof over my head, imagine the luxury of it.
+
+He worked steadily there that summer.  He would go up mornings, after
+breakfast, remaining until nearly dinner-time, say until five o'clock or
+after, for it was not his habit to eat luncheon.  Other members of the
+family did not venture near the place, and if he was urgently wanted they
+blew a horn.  Each evening he brought down his day's performance to read
+to the assembled family.  He felt the need of audience and approval.
+Usually he earned the latter, but not always.  Once, when for a day he
+put aside other matters to record a young undertaker's love-affair, and
+brought down the result in the evening, fairly bubbling with the joy of
+it, he met with a surprise.  The tale was a ghastly burlesque, its humor
+of the most disheartening, unsavory sort.  No one spoke during the
+reading, nobody laughed: The air was thick with disapproval.  His voice
+lagged and faltered toward the end.  When he finished there was heavy
+silence.  Mrs. Clemens was the only one who could speak:
+
+"Youth, let's walk a little," she said.
+
+The "Undertaker's Love Story" is still among the manuscripts of that
+period, but it is unlikely that it will ever see the light of print.
+--[This tale bears no relation to "The Undertaker's Story" in Sketches
+New and Old.]
+
+The Tom Sawyer tale progressed steadily and satisfactorily.  Clemens
+wrote Dr. Brown:
+
+     I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average,
+     for some time now, on a book (a story), and consequently  have been
+     so wrapped up in it, and dead to everything else, that I have fallen
+     mighty short in letter-writing....
+
+     On hot days I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with
+     brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the
+     same thin linen we make shirts of.
+
+He incloses some photographs in this letter.
+
+     The group [he says] represents the vine-clad carriageway in front of
+     the farm-house.  On the left is Megalopis sitting in the lap of her
+     German nurse-maid.  I am sitting behind them.  Mrs. Crane is in the
+     center.  Mr. Crane next to her.  Then Mrs. Clemens and the new baby.
+     Her Irish nurse stands at her back.  Then comes the table waitress,
+     a young negro girl, born free.  Next to her is Auntie Cord (a
+     fragment of whose history I have just sent to a magazine).  She is
+     the cook; was in slavery more than forty years; and the self-
+     satisfied wench, the last of the group, is the little baby's
+     American nurse-maid.  In the middle distance my mother-in-law's
+     coachman (up on errand) has taken a position unsolicited to help out
+     the picture.  No, that is not true.  He was waiting there a minute
+     or two before the photographer came.  In the extreme background,
+     under the archway, you glimpse my study.
+
+The "new baby," "Bay," as they came to call her, was another little
+daughter, born in June, a happy, healthy addition to the household.
+In a letter written to Twichell we get a sweet summer picture of this
+period, particularly of little sunny-haired, two-year-old Susy.
+
+     There is nothing selfish about the Modoc.  She is fascinated with
+     the new baby.  The Modoc rips and tears around outdoors most of the
+     time, and consequently is as hard as a pineknot and as brown as an
+     Indian.  She is bosom friend to all the chickens, ducks, turkeys,
+     and guinea-hens on the place.  Yesterday, as she marched along the
+     winding path that leads up the hill through the red-clover beds to
+     the summer-house, there was a long procession of these fowls
+     stringing contentedly after her, led by a stately rooster, who can
+     look over the Modoc's head.  The devotion of these vassals has been
+     purchased with daily largess of Indian meal, and so the Modoc,
+     attended by her body-guard, moves in state wherever she goes.
+
+There were days, mainly Sundays, when he did not work at all; peaceful
+days of lying fallow, dreaming in shady places, drowsily watching little
+Susy, or reading with Mrs. Clemens.  Howells's "Foregone Conclusion" was
+running in the Atlantic that year, and they delighted in it.  Clemens
+wrote the author:
+
+     I should think that this must be the daintiest, truest, most
+     admirable workmanship that was ever put on a story.  The creatures
+     of God do not act out their natures more unerringly than yours do.
+     If your genuine stories can die I wonder by what right old Walter
+     Scott's artificialities shall continue to live.
+
+At other times he found comfort in the society of Theodore Crane.  These
+two were always fond of each other, and often read together the books in
+which they were mutually interested.  They had portable-hammock
+arrangements, which they placed side by side on the lawn, and read and
+discussed through summer afternoons.  The 'Mutineers of the Bounty' was
+one of the books they liked best, and there was a story of an Iceland
+farmer, a human document, that had an unfading interest.  Also there were
+certain articles in old numbers of the Atlantic that they read and
+reread.  'Pepys' Diary', 'Two Years Before the Mast', and a book on the
+Andes were reliable favorites.  Mark Twain read not so many books, but
+read a few books often.  Those named were among the literature he asked
+for each year of his return to Quarry Farm.  Without them, the farm and
+the summer would not be the same.
+
+Then there was 'Lecky's History of European Morals'; there were periods
+when they read Lecky avidly and discussed it in original and unorthodox
+ways.  Mark Twain found an echo of his own philosophies in Lecky.  He
+made frequent marginal notes along the pages of the world's moral
+history--notes not always quotable in the family circle.  Mainly,
+however, they were short, crisp interjections of assent or disapproval.
+In one place Lecky refers to those who have undertaken to prove that all
+our morality is a product of experience, holding that a desire to obtain
+happiness and to avoid pain is the only possible motive to action; the
+reason, and the only reason, why we should perform virtuous actions being
+"that on the whole such a course will bring us the greatest amount of
+happiness."  Clemens has indorsed these philosophies by writing on the
+margin, "Sound and true."  It was the philosophy which he himself would
+always hold (though, apparently, never live by), and in the end would
+embody a volume of his own.--[What Is Man?  Privately printed in 1906.]--
+In another place Lecky, himself speaking, says:
+
+     Fortunately we are all dependent for many of our pleasures on
+     others.  Co-operation and organization are essential to our
+     happiness, and these are impossible without some restraint being
+     placed upon our appetites.  Laws are made to secure this restraint,
+     and being sustained by rewards, and punishments they make it the
+     interest of the individual to regard that of the community.
+
+"Correct!" comments Clemens.  "He has proceeded from unreasoned
+selfishness to reasoned selfishness.  All our acts, reasoned and
+unreasoned, are selfish."  It was a conclusion he logically never
+departed from; not the happiest one, it would seem, at first glance, but
+one easier to deny than to disprove.
+
+On the back of an old envelope Mark Twain set down his literary
+declaration of this period.
+
+"I like history, biography, travels, curious facts and strange
+happenings, and science.  And I detest novels, poetry, and theology."
+
+But of course the novels of Howells would be excepted; Lecky was not
+theology, but the history of it; his taste for poetry would develop
+later, though it would never become a fixed quantity, as was his devotion
+to history and science.  His interest in these amounted to a passion.
+
+
+
+
+XCV
+
+AN "ATLANTIC" STORY AND A PLAY
+
+The reference to "Auntie Cord" in the letter to Dr. Brown brings us to
+Mark Twain's first contribution to the Atlantic Monthly.  Howells in his
+Recollections of his Atlantic editorship, after referring to certain
+Western contributors, says:
+
+     Later came Mark Twain, originally of Missouri, but then
+     provisionally of Hartford, and now ultimately of the solar system,
+     not to say the universe.  He came first with "A True Story," one of
+     those noble pieces of humanity with which the South has atoned
+     chiefly, if not solely, through him for all its despite to the
+     negro.
+
+Clemens had long aspired to appear in the Atlantic, but such was his own
+rating of his literature that he hardly hoped to qualify for its pages.
+Twichell remembers his "mingled astonishment and triumph" when he was
+invited to send something to the magazine.
+
+He was obliged to "send something" once or twice before the acceptance of
+"A True Story," the narrative of Auntie Cord, and even this acceptance
+brought with it the return of a fable which had accompanied it, with the
+explanation that a fable like that would disqualify the magazine for
+every denominational reader, though Howells hastened to express his own
+joy in it, having been particularly touched by the author's reference to
+Sisyphus and Atlas as ancestors of the tumble-bug.  The "True Story," he
+said, with its "realest king of black talk," won him, and a few days
+later he wrote again: "This little story delights me more and more.  I
+wish you had about forty of 'em."
+
+And so, modestly enough, as became him, for the story was of the
+simplest, most unpretentious sort, Mark Twain entered into the school of
+the elect.
+
+In his letter to Howells, accompanying the MS., the author said:
+
+     I inclose also "A True Story," which has no humor in it.  You can
+     pay as lightly as you choose for that if you want it, for it is
+     rather out of my line.  I have not altered the old colored woman's
+     story, except to begin it at the beginning, instead of the middle,
+     as she did--and traveled both ways.
+
+Howells in his Recollections tells of the business anxiety in the
+Atlantic office in the effort to estimate the story's pecuniary value.
+Clemens and Harte had raised literary rates enormously; the latter was
+reputed to have received as much as five cents a word from affluent
+newspapers!  But the Atlantic was poor, and when sixty dollars was
+finally decided upon for the three pages (about two and a half cents a
+word) the rate was regarded as handsome--without precedent in Atlantic
+history.  Howells adds that as much as forty times this amount was
+sometimes offered to Mark Twain in later years.  Even in '74 he had
+received a much higher rate than that offered by the Atlantic,--but no
+acceptance, then, or later, ever made him happier, or seemed more richly
+rewarded.
+
+"A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It" was precisely what
+it claimed to be.--[Atlantic Monthly for November, 1874; also included
+in Sketches New and Old.]--Auntie Cord, the Auntie Rachel of that tale,
+cook at Quarry Farm, was a Virginia negress who had been twice sold as a
+slave, and was proud of the fact; particularly proud that she had brought
+$1,000 on the block.  All her children had been sold away from her, but
+it was a long time ago, and now at sixty she was fat and seemingly
+without care.  She had told her story to Mrs. Crane, who had more than
+once tried to persuade her to tell it to Clemens; but Auntie Cord was
+reluctant.  One evening, however, when the family sat on the front
+veranda in the moonlight, looking down on the picture city, as was their
+habit, Auntie Cord came around to say good night, and Clemens engaged her
+in conversation.  He led up to her story, and almost before she knew it
+she was seated at his feet telling the strange tale in almost the exact
+words in which it was set down by him next morning.  It gave Mark Twain a
+chance to exercise two of his chief gifts--transcription and portrayal.
+He was always greater at these things than at invention.  Auntie Cord's
+story is a little masterpiece.
+
+He wished to do more with Auntie Cord and her associates of the farm, for
+they were extraordinarily interesting.  Two other negroes on the place,
+John Lewis and his wife (we shall hear notably of Lewis later), were not
+always on terms of amity with Auntie Cord.  They disagreed on religion,
+and there were frequent battles in the kitchen.  These depressed the
+mistress of the house, but they gave only joy to Mark Twain.  His
+Southern raising had given him an understanding of their humors, their
+native emotions which made these riots a spiritual gratification.  He
+would slip around among the shrubbery and listen to the noise and strife
+of battle, and hug himself with delight.  Sometimes they resorted to
+missiles--stones, tinware--even dressed poultry which Auntie Cord was
+preparing for the oven.  Lewis was very black, Auntie Cord was a bright
+mulatto, Lewis's' wife several shades lighter.  Wherever the discussion
+began it promptly shaded off toward the color-line and insult.  Auntie
+Cord was a Methodist; Lewis was a Dunkard.  Auntie Cord was ignorant and
+dogmatic; Lewis could read and was intelligent.  Theology invariably led
+to personality, and eventually to epithets, crockery, geology, and
+victuals.  How the greatest joker of the age did enjoy that summer
+warfare!
+
+The fun was not all one-sided.  An incident of that summer probably
+furnished more enjoyment for the colored members of the household than it
+did for Mark Twain.  Lewis had some fowls, and among them was a
+particularly pestiferous guinea-hen that used to get up at three in the
+morning and go around making the kind of a noise that a guinea-hen must
+like and is willing to get up early to hear.  Mark Twain did not care for
+it.  He stood it as long as he could one morning, then crept softly from
+the house to stop it.
+
+It was a clear, bright night; locating the guinea-hen, he slipped up
+stealthily with a stout stick.  The bird was pouring out its heart,
+tearing the moonlight to tatters.  Stealing up close, Clemens made a
+vicious swing with his bludgeon, but just then the guinea stepped forward
+a little, and he missed.  The stroke and his explosion frightened the
+fowl, and it started to run.  Clemens, with his mind now on the single
+purpose of revenge, started after it.  Around the trees, along the paths,
+up and down the lawn, through gates and across the garden, out over the
+fields, they raced, "pursuer and pursued."  The guinea nor longer sang,
+and Clemens was presently too exhausted to swear.  Hour after hour the
+silent, deadly hunt continued, both stopping to rest at intervals; then
+up again and away.  It was like something in a dream.  It was nearly
+breakfast-time when he dragged himself into the house at last, and the
+guinea was resting and panting under a currant-bush.  Later in the day
+Clemens gave orders to Lewis to "kill and eat that guinea-hen," which
+Lewis did.  Clemens himself had then never eaten a guinea, but some years
+later, in Paris, when the delicious breast of one of those fowls was
+served him, he remembered and said:
+
+"And to think, after chasing that creature all night, John Lewis got to
+eat him instead of me."
+
+The interest in Tom and Huck, or the inspiration for their adventures,
+gave out at last, or was superseded by a more immediate demand.  As early
+as May, Goodman, in San Francisco, had seen a play announced there,
+presenting the character of Colonel Sellers, dramatized by Gilbert S.
+Densmore and played by John T.  Raymond.  Goodman immediately wrote
+Clemens; also a letter came from Warner, in Hartford, who had noticed in
+San Francisco papers announcements of the play.  Of course Clemens would
+take action immediately; he telegraphed, enjoining the performance.  Then
+began a correspondence with the dramatist and actor.  This in time
+resulted in an amicable arrangement, by which the dramatist agreed to
+dispose of his version to Clemens.  Clemens did not wait for it to
+arrive, but began immediately a version of his own.  Just how much or how
+little of Densmore's work found its way into the completed play, as
+presented by Raymond later, cannot be known now.  Howells conveys the
+impression that Clemens had no hand in its authorship beyond the
+character of Sellers as taken from the book.  But in a letter still
+extant, which Clemens wrote to Howells at the time, he says:
+
+     I worked a month on my play, and launched it in New York last
+     Wednesday.  I believe it will go.  The newspapers have been
+     complimentary.  It is simply a setting for one character, Colonel
+     Sellers.  As a play I guess it will not bear critical assault in
+     force.
+
+The Warners are as charming as ever.  They go shortly to the devil for a
+year--that is, to Egypt.
+
+Raymond, in a letter which he wrote to the Sun, November 3, 1874,
+declared that "not one line" of Densmore's dramatization was used,
+"except that which was taken bodily from The Gilded Age."  During the
+newspaper discussion of the matter, Clemens himself prepared a letter for
+the Hartford Post.  This letter was suppressed, but it still exists.  In
+it he says:
+
+     I entirely rewrote the play three separate and distinct times.  I
+     had expected to use little of his [Densmore's] language and but
+     little of his plot.  I do not think there are now twenty sentences
+     of Mr. Densmore's in the play, but I used so much of his plot that I
+     wrote and told him that I should pay him about as much more as I had
+     already paid him in case the play proved a success.  I shall keep my
+     word.
+
+This letter, written while the matter was fresh in his mind, is
+undoubtedly in accordance with the facts.  That Densmore was fully
+satisfied may be gathered from an acknowledgment, in which he says:
+"Your letter reached me on the ad, with check.  In this place permit me
+to thank you for the very handsome manner in which you have acted in this
+matter."
+
+Warner, meantime, realizing that the play was constructed almost entirely
+of the Mark Twain chapters of the book, agreed that his collaborator
+should undertake the work and financial responsibilities of the dramatic
+venture and reap such rewards as might result.  Various stories have been
+told of this matter, most of them untrue.  There was no bitterness
+between the friends, no semblance of an estrangement of any sort.  Warner
+very generously and promptly admitted that he was not concerned with the
+play, its authorship, or its profits, whatever the latter might amount
+to.  Moreover, Warner was going to Egypt very soon, and his labors and
+responsibilities were doubly sufficient as they stood.
+
+Clemens's estimate of the play as a dramatic composition was correct
+enough, but the public liked it, and it was a financial success from the
+start.  He employed a representative to travel with Raymond, to assist in
+the management and in the division of spoil.  The agent had instructions
+to mail a card every day, stating the amount of his share in the profits.
+Howells once arrived in Hartford just when this postal tide of fortune
+was at its flood:
+
+One hundred and fifty dollars--two hundred dollars--three hundred dollars
+were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in the air,
+before he sat down at the table, or rose from it to brandish, and then,
+flinging his napkin in the chair, walked up and down to exult in.
+
+Once, in later years, referring to the matter, Howells said
+"He was never a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and
+he wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream."
+Which was a true word.  Mark Twain with money was like a child with a
+heap of bright pebbles, ready to pile up more and still more, then
+presently to throw them all away and begin gathering anew.
+
+
+
+
+XCVI
+
+THE NEW HOME
+
+The Clemenses returned to Hartford to find their new house "ready,"
+though still full of workmen, decorators, plumbers, and such other
+minions of labor as make life miserable to those with ambitions for new
+or improved habitations.  The carpenters were still on the lower floor,
+but the family moved in and camped about in rooms up-stairs that were
+more or less free from the invader.  They had stopped in New York ten
+days to buy carpets and furnishings, and these began to arrive, with no
+particular place to put them; but the owners were excited and happy with
+it all, for it was the pleasant season of the year, and all the new
+features of the house were fascinating, while the daily progress of the
+decorators furnished a fresh surprise when they roamed through the rooms
+at evening.  Mrs. Clemens wrote home:
+
+     We are perfectly delighted with everything here and do so want you
+     all to see it.
+
+Her husband, as he was likely to do, picked up the letter and finished
+it:
+
+     Livy appoints me to finish this; but how can a headless man perform
+     an intelligent function?  I have been bully-ragged all day by the
+     builder, by his foreman, by the architect, by the tapestry devil who
+     is to upholster the furniture, by the idiot who is putting down the
+     carpets, by the scoundrel who is setting up the billiard-table (and
+     has left the balls in New York), by the wildcat who is sodding the
+     ground and finishing the driveway (after the sun went down), by a
+     book agent, whose body is in the back yard and the coroner notified.
+     Just think of this thing going on the whole day long, and I a man
+     who loathes details with all his heart!  But I haven't lost my
+     temper, and I've made Livy lie down most of the time; could anybody
+     make her lie down all the time?
+
+Warner wrote from Egypt expressing sympathy for their unfurnished state
+of affairs, but added, "I would rather fit out three houses and fill them
+with furniture than to fit out one 'dahabiyeh'."  Warner was at that
+moment undertaking his charmingly remembered trip up the Nile.
+
+The new home was not entirely done for a long time.  One never knows when
+a big house like that--or a little house, for that matters done.  But
+they were settled at last, with all their beautiful things in place; and
+perhaps there have been richer homes, possibly more artistic ones, but
+there has never been a more charming home, within or without, than that
+one.
+
+So many frequenters have tried to express the charm of that household.
+None of them has quite succeeded, for it lay not so much in its
+arrangement of rooms or their decorations or their outlook, though these
+were all beautiful enough, but rather in the personality, the atmosphere;
+and these are elusive things to convey in words.  We can only see and
+feel and recognize; we cannot translate them.  Even Howells, with his
+subtle touch, can present only an aspect here and there; an essence, as
+it were, from a happy garden, rather than the fullness of its bloom.
+
+As Mark Twain was unlike any other man that ever lived, so his house was
+unlike any other house ever built.  People asked him why he built the
+kitchen toward the street, and he said:
+
+"So the servants can see the circus go by without running out into the
+front yard."
+
+But this was probably an after-thought.  The kitchen end of the house
+extended toward Farmington Avenue, but it was by no means unbeautiful.
+It was a pleasing detail of the general scheme.  The main entrance faced
+at right angles with the street and opened to a spacious hall.  In turn,
+the hall opened to a parlor, where there was a grand piano, and to the
+dining-room and library, and the library opened to a little conservatory,
+semicircular in form, of a design invented by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
+Says Howells:
+
+     The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed
+     up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of the
+     fountain companied by Callas and other waterloving lilies.  There,
+     while we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled
+     the pretty bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the
+     delicate accents of its varied blossoms.
+
+In the library was an old carved mantel which Clemens and his wife had
+bought in Scotland, salvage from a dismantled castle, and across the top
+of the fireplace a plate of brass with the motto, "The ornament of a
+house is the friends that frequent it," surely never more appropriately
+inscribed.
+
+There was the mahogany room, a large bedroom on the ground floor, and
+upstairs were other spacious bedrooms and many baths, while everywhere
+were Oriental rugs and draperies, and statuary and paintings.  There was
+a fireplace under a window, after the English pattern, so that in winter-
+time one could at the same moment watch the blaze and the falling snow.
+The library windows looked out over the valley with the little stream in
+it, and through and across the tree-tops.  At the top of the house was
+what became Clemens's favorite retreat, the billiard-room, and here and
+there were unexpected little balconies, which one could step out upon for
+the view.
+
+Below was a wide, covered veranda, the "ombra," as they called it,
+secluded from the public eye--a favorite family gathering-place on
+pleasant days.
+
+But a house might easily have all these things without being more than
+usually attractive, and a house with a great deal less might have been as
+full of charm; only it seemed just the proper setting for that particular
+household, and undoubtedly it acquired the personality of its occupants.
+
+Howells assures us that there never was another home like it, and we may
+accept his statement.  It was unique.  It was the home of one of the most
+unusual and unaccountable personalities in the world, yet was perfectly
+and serenely ordered.  Mark Twain was not responsible for this blissful
+condition.  He was its beacon-light; it was around Mrs. Clemens that its
+affairs steadily revolved.
+
+If in the four years and more of marriage Clemens had made advancement in
+culture and capabilities, Olivia Clemens also had become something more
+than the half-timid, inexperienced girl he had first known.  In a way her
+education had been no less notable than his.  She had worked and studied,
+and her half-year of travel and entertainment abroad had given her
+opportunity for acquiring knowledge and confidence.  Her vision of life
+had vastly enlarged; her intellect had flowered; her grasp of
+practicalities had become firm and sure.
+
+In spite of her delicate physical structure, her continued uncertainty of
+health, she capably undertook the management of their large new house,
+and supervised its economies.  Any one of her undertakings was sufficient
+for one woman, but she compassed them all.  No children had more careful
+direction than hers.  No husband had more devoted attendance and
+companionship.  No household was ever directed with a sweeter and gentler
+grace, or with greater perfection of detail.  When the great ones of the
+world came to visit America's most picturesque literary figure she gave
+welcome to them all, and filled her place at his side with such sweet and
+capable dignity that those who came to pay their duties to him often
+returned to pay even greater devotion to his companion.  Says Howells:
+
+     She was, in a way, the loveliest person I have ever seen--the
+     gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united
+     wonderful tact with wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted
+     her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried in it.
+
+And once, in an interview with the writer of these chapters, Howells
+declared: "She was not only a beautiful soul, but a woman of singular
+intellectual power.  I never knew any one quite like her."  Then he
+added: "Words cannot express Mrs. Clemens--her fineness, her delicate,
+her wonderful tact with a man who was in some respects, and wished to be,
+the most outrageous creature that ever breathed."
+
+Howells meant a good many things by that, no doubt: Clemens's violent
+methods, for one thing, his sudden, savage impulses, which sometimes
+worked injustice and hardship for others, though he was first to discover
+the wrong and to repair it only too fully.  Then, too, Howells may have
+meant his boyish teasing tendency to disturb Mrs. Clemens's exquisite
+sense of decorum.
+
+Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in a
+pair of white cowskin slippers with the hair out, and do a crippled
+colored uncle, to the joy of all beholders.  I must not say all, for I
+remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of
+"Oh, Youth!"
+
+He was continually doing such things as the "crippled colored uncle,";
+partly for the very joy of the performance, but partly, too, to disturb
+her serenity, to incur her reproof, to shiver her a little--"shock" would
+be too strong a word.  And he liked to fancy her in a spirit and attitude
+of belligerence, to present that fancy to those who knew the measure of
+her gentle nature.  Writing to Mrs. Howells of a picture of herself in a
+group, he said:
+
+     You look exactly as Mrs. Clemens does after she has said: "Indeed, I
+     do not wonder that you can frame no reply; for you know only too
+     well that your conduct admits of no excuse, palliation, or argument-
+     none!"
+
+Clemens would pretend to a visitor that she had been violently indignant
+over some offense of his; perhaps he would say:
+
+"Well I contradicted her just now, and the crockery will begin to fly
+pretty soon."
+
+She could never quite get used to this pleasantry, and a faint glow would
+steal over her face.  He liked to produce that glow.  Yet always his
+manner toward her was tenderness itself.  He regarded her as some dainty
+bit of porcelain, and it was said that he was always following her about
+with a chair.  Their union has been regarded as ideal.  That is
+Twichell's opinion and Howells's.  The latter sums up:
+
+     Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be,
+     but from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the
+     most perfect.
+
+
+
+
+XCVII
+
+THE WALK TO BOSTON
+
+The new home became more beautiful to them as things found their places,
+as the year deepened; and the wonder of autumn foliage lit up their
+landscape.  Sitting on one of the little upper balconies Mrs. Clemens
+wrote:
+
+     The atmosphere is very hazy, and it makes the autumn tints even more
+     soft and beautiful than usual.  Mr. Twichell came for Mr. Clemens to
+     go walking with him; they returned at dinner-time, heavily laden
+     with autumn leaves.
+
+And as usual Clemens, finding the letter unfinished, took up the story.
+
+     Twichell came up here with me to luncheon after services, and I went
+     back home with him and took Susy along in her little carriage.  We
+     have just got home again, middle of afternoon, and Livy has gone to
+     rest and left the west balcony to me.  There is a shining and most
+     marvelous miracle of cloud-effects mirrored in the brook; a picture
+     which began with perfection, and has momently surpassed it ever
+     since, until at last it is almost unendurably beautiful....
+
+     There is a cloud-picture in the stream now whose hues are as
+     manifold as those in an opal and as delicate as the tintings of a
+     sea-shell.  But now a muskrat is swimming through it and
+     obliterating it with the turmoil of wavelets he casts abroad from
+     his shoulders.
+
+     The customary Sunday assemblage of strangers is gathered together in
+     the grounds discussing the house.
+
+Twichell and Clemens took a good many walks these days; long walks, for
+Twichell was an athlete and Clemens had not then outgrown the Nevada
+habit of pedestrian wandering.  Talcott's Tower, a wooden structure about
+five miles from Hartford, was one of their favorite objective points; and
+often they walked out and back, talking so continuously, and so absorbed
+in the themes of their discussions, that time and distance slipped away
+almost unnoticed.  How many things they talked of in those long walks!
+They discussed philosophies and religions and creeds, and all the range
+of human possibility and shortcoming, and all the phases of literature
+and history and politics.  Unorthodox discussions they were,
+illuminating, marvelously enchanting, and vanished now forever.
+Sometimes they took the train as far as Bloomfield, a little station on
+the way, and walked the rest of the distance, or they took the train from
+Bloomfield home.  It seems a strange association, perhaps, the fellowship
+of that violent dissenter with that fervent soul dedicated to church and
+creed, but the root of their friendship lay in the frankness with which
+each man delivered his dogmas and respected those of his companion.
+
+It was during one of their walks to the tower that they planned a far
+more extraordinary undertaking--nothing less, in fact, than a walk from
+Hartford to Boston.  This was early in November.  They did not delay the
+matter, for the weather was getting too uncertain.
+
+Clemens wrote Redpath:
+
+DEAR REDPATH,--Rev. J. H. Twichell and I expect to start at 8 o'clock
+Thursday morning to walk to Boston in twenty four hours--or more.  We
+shall telegraph Young's Hotel for rooms Saturday night, in order to allow
+for a low average of pedestrianism.
+
+It was half past eight on Thursday morning, November 12, 1874, that they
+left Twichell's house in a carriage, drove to the East Hartford bridge,
+and there took to the road, Twichell carrying a little bag and Clemens a
+basket of lunch.
+
+The papers had got hold of it by this time, and were watching the result.
+They did well enough that first day, following the old Boston stage road,
+arriving at Westford about seven o'clock in the evening, twenty-eight
+miles from the starting-point.  There was no real hotel at Westford, only
+a sort of tavern, but it afforded the luxury of rest.  "Also," says
+Twichell, in a memoranda of the trip, "a sublimely profane hostler whom
+you couldn't jostle with any sort of mild remark without bringing down
+upon yourself a perfect avalanche of oaths."
+
+This was a joy to Clemens, who sat behind the stove, rubbing his lame
+knees and fairly reveling in Twichell's discomfiture in his efforts to
+divert the hostler's blasphemy.  There was also a mellow inebriate there
+who recommended kerosene for Clemens's lameness, and offered as testimony
+the fact that he himself had frequently used it for stiffness in his
+joints after lying out all night in cold weather, drunk: altogether it
+was a notable evening.
+
+Westford was about as far as they continued the journey afoot.  Clemens
+was exceedingly lame next morning, and had had a rather bad night; but he
+swore and limped along six miles farther, to North Ashford, then gave it
+up.  They drove from North Ashford to the railway, where Clemens
+telegraphed Redpath and Howells of their approach.  To Redpath:
+
+     We have made thirty-five miles in less than five days.  This
+     demonstrates that the thing can be done.  Shall now finish by rail.
+     Did you have any bets on us?
+
+To Howells:
+
+     Arrive by rail at seven o'clock, the first of a series of grand
+     annual pedestrian tours from Hartford to Boston to be performed by
+     us.  The next will take place next year.
+
+Redpath read his despatch to a lecture audience, with effect.  Howells
+made immediate preparation for receiving two way-worn, hungry men.  He
+telegraphed to Young's Hotel: "You and Twichell come right up to 37
+Concord Avenue, Cambridge, near observatory.  Party waiting for you."
+
+They got to Howells's about nine o'clock, and the refreshments were
+waiting.  Miss Longfellow was there, Rose Hawthorne, John Fiske, Larkin
+G. Mead, the sculptor, and others of their kind.  Howells tells in his
+book how Clemens, with Twichell, "suddenly stormed in," and immediately
+began to eat and drink:
+
+     I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with
+     his head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped
+     oysters without which no party in Cambridge was really a party,
+     exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the
+     most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of
+     their progress.
+
+Clemens gave a dinner, next night, to Howells, Aldrich, Osgood, and the
+rest.  The papers were full of jokes concerning the Boston expedition;
+some even had illustrations, and it was all amusing enough at the time.
+
+Next morning, sitting in the writing-room of Young's Hotel, he wrote a
+curious letter to Mrs. Clemens, though intended as much for Howells and
+Aldrich as for her.  It was dated sixty-one years ahead, and was a sort
+of Looking Backwards, though that notable book had not yet been written.
+It presupposed a monarchy in which the name of Boston has been changed to
+"Limerick," and Hartford to "Dublin."  In it, Twichell has become the
+"Archbishop of Dublin," Howells "Duke of Cambridge," Aldrich "Marquis of
+Ponkapog," Clemens the "Earl of Hartford."  It was too whimsical and
+delightful a fancy to be forgotten.--[This remarkable and amusing
+document will be found under Appendix M, at the end of last volume.]
+
+A long time afterward, thirty-four year, he came across this letter.  He
+said:
+
+"It seems curious now that I should have been dreaming dreams of a future
+monarchy and never suspect that the monarchy was already present and the
+Republic a thing of the past."
+
+What he meant, was the political succession that had fostered those
+commercial trusts which, in turn, had established party dominion.
+
+To Howells, on his return, Clemens wrote his acknowledgments, and added:
+
+     Mrs. Clemens gets upon the verge of swearing, and goes tearing
+     around in an unseemly fury when I enlarge upon the delightful time
+     we had in Boston, and she not there to have her share.  I have tried
+     hard to reproduce Mrs. Howells to her, and have probably not made a
+     shining success of it.
+
+
+
+
+XCVIII
+
+"OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI"
+
+Howells had been urging Clemens to do something more for the Atlantic,
+specifically something for the January number.  Clemens cudgeled his
+brains, but finally declared he must give it up:
+
+     Mrs. Clemens has diligently persecuted me day by day with urgings to
+     go to work and do that something, but it's no use.  I find I can't.
+     We are in such a state of worry and endless confusion that my head
+     won't go.
+
+Two hours later he sent another hasty line:
+
+     I take back the remark that I can't write for the January number,
+     for Twichell and I have had a long walk in the woods, and I got to
+     telling him about old Mississippi days of steam-boating glory and
+     grandeur as I saw them (during four years) from the pilot-house.  He
+     said, "What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!" I hadn't
+     thought of that before.  Would you like a series of papers to run
+     through three months or six or nine--or about four months, say?
+
+Howells welcomed this offer as an echo of his own thought.  He had come
+from a piloting family himself, and knew the interest that Mark Twain
+could put into such a series.
+
+Acting promptly under the new inspiration, Clemens forthwith sent the
+first chapter of that monumental, that absolutely unique, series of
+papers on Mississippi River life, which to-day constitutes one of his
+chief claims to immortality.
+
+His first number was in the nature of an experiment.  Perhaps, after all,
+the idea would not suit the Atlantic readers.
+
+"Cut it, scarify it, reject it, handle it with entire freedom," he wrote,
+and awaited the result.
+
+The "result" was that Howells expressed his delight:
+
+     The piece about the Mississippi is capital.  It almost made the
+     water in our ice-pitcher muddy as I read it.  I don't think I shall
+     meddle much with it, even in the way of suggestion.  The sketch of
+     the low-lived little town was so good that I could have wished there
+     was more of it.  I want the sketches, if you can make them, every
+     month.
+
+Mark Twain was now really interested in this new literary venture.  He
+was fairly saturated with memories.  He was writing on the theme that lay
+nearest to his heart.  Within ten days he reported that he had finished
+three of the papers, and had begun the fourth.
+
+And yet I have spoken of nothing but piloting as a science so far, and I
+doubt if I ever get beyond that portion of my subject.  And I don't care
+to.  Any Muggins can write about old days on the Mississippi of five
+hundred different kinds, but I am the only man alive that can scribble
+about the piloting of that day, and no man has ever tried to scribble
+about it yet.  Its newness pleases me all the time, and it is about the
+only new subject I know of.
+
+He became so enthusiastic presently that he wanted to take Howells with
+him on a trip down the Mississippi, with their wives for company, to go
+over the old ground again and obtain added material enough for a book.
+Howells was willing enough--agreed to go, in fact--but found it hard to
+get away.  He began to temporize and finally backed out.  Clemens tried
+to inveigle Osgood into the trip, but without success; also John Hay, but
+Hay had a new baby at his house just then--"three days old, and with a
+voice beyond price," he said, offering it as an excuse for non-
+acceptance.  So the plan for revisiting the river and the conclusion of
+the book were held in abeyance for nearly seven years.
+
+Those early piloting chapters, as they appeared in the Atlantic,
+constituted Mark Twain's best literary exhibit up to that time.  In some
+respects they are his best literature of any time.  As pictures of an
+intensely interesting phase of life, they are so convincing, so real, and
+at the same time of such extraordinary charm and interest, that if the
+English language should survive a thousand years, or ten times as long,
+they would be as fresh and vivid at the end of that period as the day
+they were penned.  In them the atmosphere of, the river and its
+environment--its pictures, its thousand aspects of life--are reproduced
+with what is no less than literary necromancy.  Not only does he make you
+smell the river you can fairly hear it breathe.  On the appearance of the
+first number John Hay wrote:
+
+"It is perfect; no more nor less.  I don't see how you do it," and added,
+"you know what my opinion is of time not spent with you."
+
+Howells wrote:
+
+     You are doing the science of piloting splendidly.  Every word
+     interesting, and don't you drop the series till you've got every bit
+     of anecdote and reminiscence into it.
+
+He let Clemens write the articles to suit himself.  Once he said:
+
+     If I might put in my jaw at this point I should say, stick to actual
+     fact and character in the thing and give things in detail.  All that
+     belongs to the old river life is novel, and is now mostly
+     historical.  Don't write at any supposed Atlantic audience, but yarn
+     it off as if into my sympathetic ear.
+
+Clemens replied that he had no dread of the Atlantic audience; he
+declared it was the only audience that did not require a humorist to
+"paint himself striped and stand on his head to amuse it."
+
+The "Old Times" papers ran through seven numbers of the Atlantic.  They
+were reprinted everywhere by the newspapers, who in that day had little
+respect for magazine copyrights, and were promptly pirated in book form
+in Canada.  They added vastly to Mark Twain's literary capital, though
+Howells informs us that the Atlantic circulation did not thrive
+proportionately, for the reason that the newspapers gave the articles to
+their readers from advanced sheets of the magazine, even before the
+latter could be placed on sale.  It so happened that in the January
+Atlantic, which contained the first of the Mississippi papers, there
+appeared Robert Dale Owen's article on "Spiritualism," which brought such
+humility both to author and publisher because of the exposure of the
+medium Katie King, which came along while the magazine was in press.
+Clemens has written this marginal note on the opening page of the copy at
+Quarry Farm:
+
+While this number of the Atlantic was being printed the Katie King
+manifestations were discovered to be the cheapest, wretchedest shams and
+frauds, and were exposed in the newspapers.  The awful humiliation of it
+unseated Robert Dale Owen's reason, and he died in the madhouse.
+
+
+
+
+XCIX
+
+A TYPEWRITER, AND A JOKE ON ALDRICH
+
+It was during the trip to Boston with Twichell that Mark Twain saw for
+the first time what was then--a brand-new invention, a typewriter; or it
+may have been during a subsequent visit, a week or two later.  At all
+events, he had the machine and was practising on it December 9, 1874, for
+he wrote two letters on it that day, one to Howells and the other to
+Orion Clemens.  In the latter he says:
+
+     I am trying to get the hang of this new-fangled writing-machine, but
+     am not making a shining success of it.  However, this is the first
+     attempt I ever have made, and yet I perceive that I shall soon
+     easily acquire a fine facility in its use.  I saw the thing in
+     Boston the other day and was greatly taken with it.
+
+He goes on to explain the new wonder, and on the whole his first attempt
+is a very creditable performance.  With his usual enthusiasm over an
+innovation, he believes it is going to be a great help to him, and
+proclaims its advantages.
+
+This is the letter to Howells, with the errors preserved:
+
+     You needn't answer this; I am only practicing to get three; anothe
+     slip-up there; only practici?ng ti get the hang of the thing.  I
+     notice I miss fire & get in a good many unnecessary letters &
+     punctuation marks.  I am simply using you for a target to bang at.
+     Blame my cats, but this thing requires genius in order to work it
+     just right.
+
+In an article written long after he tells how he was with Nasby when he
+first saw the machine in Boston through a window, and how they went in to
+see it perform.  In the same article he states that he was the first
+person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature, and that he
+thinks the story of Tom Sawyer was the first type-copied manuscript.
+--[Tom Sawyer was not then complete, and had been laid aside.  The first
+type-copied manuscript was probably early chapters of the Mississippi
+story, two discarded typewritten pages of which still exist.]
+
+The new enthusiasm ran its course and died.  Three months later, when the
+Remington makers wrote him for a recommendation of the machine, he
+replied that he had entirely stopped using it.  The typewriter was not
+perfect in those days, and the keys did not always respond readily.
+He declared it was ruining his morals--that it made him "want to swear."
+He offered it to Howells because, he said, Howells had no morals anyway.
+Howells hesitated, so Clemens traded the machine to Bliss for a side-
+saddle.  But perhaps Bliss also became afraid of its influence, for in
+due time he brought it back.  Howells, again tempted, hesitated, and this
+time was lost.  What eventually became of the machine is not history.
+
+One of those, happy Atlantic dinners which Howells tells of came about
+the end of that year.  It was at the Parker House, and Emerson was there;
+and Aldrich, and the rest of that group.
+
+"Don't you dare to refuse the invitation," said Howells, and naturally
+Clemens didn't, and wrote back:
+
+     I want you to ask Mrs. Howells to let you stay all night at the
+     Parker House and tell lies and have an improving time, and take
+     breakfast with me in the morning.  I will have a good room for you
+     and a fire.  Can't you tell her it always makes you sick to go home
+     late at night or something like that?  That sort of thing arouses
+     Mrs. Clemens's sympathies easily.
+
+Two memories of that old dinner remain to-day.  Aldrich and Howells were
+not satisfied with the kind of neckties that Mark Twain wore (the old-
+fashioned black "string" tie, a Western survival), so they made him a
+present of two cravats when he set out on his return for Hartford.  Next
+day he wrote:
+
+     You and Aldrich have made one woman deeply and sincerely grateful--
+     Mrs. Clemens.  For months--I may even say years--she has shown an
+     unaccountable animosity toward my necktie, even getting up in the
+     night to take it with the tongs and blackguard it, sometimes also
+     getting so far as to threaten it.
+
+     When I said you and Aldrich had given me two new neckties, and that
+     they were in a paper in my overcoat pocket, she was in a fever of
+     happiness until she found I was going to frame them; then all the
+     venom in her nature gathered itself together; insomuch that I, being
+     near to a door, went without, perceiving danger.
+
+It is recorded that eventually he wore the neckties, and returned no more
+to the earlier mode.
+
+Another memory of that dinner is linked to a demand that Aldrich made of
+Clemens that night, for his photograph.  Clemens, returning to Hartford,
+put up fifty-two different specimens in as many envelopes, with the idea
+of sending one a week for a year.  Then he concluded that this was too
+slow a process, and for a week sent one every morning to "His Grace of
+Ponkapog."
+
+Aldrich stood it for a few days, then protested.  "The police," he said,
+"are in the habit of swooping down upon a publication of that sort."
+
+On New-Year's no less than twenty pictures came at once--photographs and
+prints of Mark Twain, his house, his family, his various belongings.
+Aldrich sent a warning then that the perpetrator of this outrage was
+known to the police as Mark Twain, alias "The Jumping Frog," a well-known
+California desperado, who would be speedily arrested and brought to
+Ponkapog to face his victim.  This letter was signed "T. Bayleigh, Chief
+of Police," and on the outside of the envelope there was a statement that
+it would be useless for that person to send any more mail-matter, as the
+post-office had been blown up.  The jolly farce closed there.  It was the
+sort of thing that both men enjoyed.
+
+Aldrich was writing a story at this time which contained some Western
+mining incident and environment.  He sent the manuscript to Clemens for
+"expert" consideration and advice.  Clemens wrote him at great length and
+in careful detail.  He was fond of Aldrich, regarding him as one of the
+most brilliant of men.  Once, to Robert Louis Stevenson, he said:
+
+     "Aldrich has never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and
+     humorous sayings.  None has equaled him, certainly none has
+     surpassed him, in the felicity of phrasing with which he clothed
+     these children of his fancy.  Aldrich is always brilliant; he can't
+     help it; he is a fire-opal set round with rose diamonds; when he is
+     not speaking you know that his dainty fancies are twinkling and
+     glimmering around in him; when he speaks the diamonds flash.  Yes,
+     he is always brilliant, he will always be brilliant; he will be
+     brilliant in hell-you will see."
+
+Stevenson, smiling a chuckly smile, said, "I hope not."
+
+"Well, you will, and he will dim even those ruddy fires and look like a
+transfigured Adonis backed against a pink sunset."--[North American
+Review, September, 1906.]
+
+
+
+
+C
+
+RAYMOND, MENTAL TELEGRAPHY, ETC.
+
+The Sellers play was given in Hartford, in January (1875), to as many
+people as could crowd into the Opera House.  Raymond had reached the
+perfection of his art by that time, and the townsmen of Mark Twain saw
+the play and the actor at their best.  Kate Field played the part of
+Laura Hawkins, and there was a Hartford girl in the company; also a
+Hartford young man, who would one day be about as well known to playgoers
+as any playwright or actor that America has produced.  His name was
+William Gillette, and it was largely due to Mark Twain that the author of
+Secret Service and of the dramatic "Sherlock Holmes" got a fair public
+start.  Clemens and his wife loaned Gillette the three thousand dollars
+which tided him through his period of dramatic education.  Their faith in
+his ability was justified.
+
+Hartford would naturally be enthusiastic on a first "Sellers-Raymond"
+night.  At the end of the fourth act there was an urgent demand for the
+author of the play, who was supposed to be present.  He was not there in
+person, but had sent a letter, which Raymond read:
+
+MY DEAR RAYMOND,--I am aware that you are going to be welcomed to our
+town by great audiences on both nights of your stay there, and I beg to
+add my hearty welcome also, through this note.  I cannot come to the
+theater on either evening, Raymond, because there is something so
+touching about your acting that I can't stand it.
+
+(I do not mention a couple of colds in my head, because I hardly mind
+them as much as I would the erysipelas, but between you and me I would
+prefer it if they were rights and lefts.)
+
+And then there is another thing.  I have always taken a pride in earning
+my living in outside places and spending it in Hartford; I have said that
+no good citizen would live on his own people, but go forth and make it
+sultry for other communities and fetch home the result; and now at this
+late day I find myself in the crushed and bleeding position of fattening
+myself upon the spoils of my brethren!  Can I support such grief as this?
+(This is literary emotion, you understand.  Take the money at the door
+just the same.)
+
+Once more I welcome you to Hartford, Raymond,  but as for me let me stay
+at home and blush.
+
+                                   Yours truly,    MARK.
+
+The play was equally successful wherever it went.  It made what in that
+day was regarded as a fortune.  One hundred thousand dollars is hardly
+too large an estimate of the amount divided between author and actor.
+Raymond was a great actor in that part, as he interpreted it, though he
+did not interpret it fully, or always in its best way.  The finer side,
+the subtle, tender side of Colonel Sellers, he was likely to overlook.
+Yet, with a natural human self-estimate, Raymond believed he had created
+a much greater part than Mark Twain had written.  Doubtless from the
+point of view of a number of people this was so, though the idea, was
+naturally obnoxious to Clemens.  In course of time their personal
+relations ceased.
+
+Clemens that winter gave another benefit for Father Hawley.  In reply to
+an invitation to appear in behalf of the poor, he wrote that he had quit
+the lecture field, and would not return to the platform unless driven
+there by lack of bread.  But he added:
+
+By the spirit of that remark I am debarred from delivering this proposed
+lecture, and so I fall back upon the letter of it, and emerge upon the
+platform for this last and final time because I am confronted by a lack
+of bread-among Father Hawley's flock.
+
+He made an introductory speech at an old-fashioned spelling-bee, given at
+the Asylum Hill Church; a breezy, charming talk of which the following is
+a sample:
+
+     I don't see any use in spelling a word right--and never did.  I mean
+     I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of
+     spelling words.  We might as well make all clothes alike and cook
+     all dishes alike.  Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing.  I
+     have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me;
+     there is such a breezy, unfettered originality about his
+     orthography.  He always spells "kow" with a large "K."  Now that is
+     just as good as to spell it with a small one.  It is better.  It
+     gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope.  It suggests
+     to the mind a grand, vague, impressive new kind of a cow.
+
+     He took part in the contest, and in spite of his early reputation,
+     was spelled down on the word "chaldron," which he spelled
+     "cauldron," as he had been taught, while the dictionary used as
+     authority gave that form as second choice.
+
+Another time that winter, Clemens read before the Monday Evening Club a
+paper on "Universal Suffrage," which is still remembered by the surviving
+members of that time.  A paragraph or two will convey its purport:
+
+     Our marvelous latter-day statesmanship has invented universal
+     suffrage.  That is the finest feather in our cap.  All that we
+     require of a voter is that he shall be forked, wear pantaloons
+     instead of petticoats, and bear a more or less humorous resemblance
+     to the reported image of God.  He need not know anything whatever;
+     he may be wholly useless and a cumberer of the earth; he may even be
+     known to be a consummate scoundrel.  No matter.  While he can steer
+     clear of the penitentiary his vote is as weighty as the vote of a
+     president, a bishop, a college professor, a merchant prince.  We
+     brag of our universal, unrestricted suffrage; but we are shams after
+     all, for we restrict when we come to the women.
+
+The Monday Evening Club was an organization which included the best minds
+of Hartford.  Dr. Horace Bushnell, Prof. Calvin E. Stowe, and J. Hammond
+Trumbull founded it back in the sixties, and it included such men as Rev.
+Dr. Parker, Rev. Dr. Burton, Charles H. Clark, of the Courant, Warner,
+and Twichell, with others of their kind.  Clemens had been elected after
+his first sojourn in England (February, 1873), and had then read a paper
+on the "License of the Press."  The club met alternate Mondays, from
+October to May.  There was one paper for each evening, and, after the
+usual fashion of such clubs, the reading was followed by discussion.
+Members of that time agree that Mark Twain's association with the club
+had a tendency to give it a life, or at least an exhilaration, which it
+had not previously known.  His papers were serious in their purpose he
+always preferred to be serious--but they evidenced the magic gift which
+made whatever he touched turn to literary jewelry.
+
+Psychic theories and phenomena always attracted Mark Twain.  In thought-
+transference, especially, he had a frank interest--an interest awakened
+and kept alive by certain phenomena--psychic manifestations we call them
+now.  In his association with Mrs. Clemens it not infrequently happened
+that one spoke the other's thought, or perhaps a long-procrastinated
+letter to a friend would bring an answer as quickly as mailed; but these
+are things familiar to us all.  A more startling example of thought-
+communication developed at the time of which we are writing, an example
+which raised to a fever-point whatever interest he may have had in the
+subject before.  (He was always having these vehement interests--rages we
+may call them, for it would be inadequate to speak of them as fads,
+inasmuch as they tended in the direction of human enlightenment, or
+progress, or reform.)
+
+Clemens one morning was lying in bed when, as he says, suddenly a red-hot
+new idea came whistling down into my camp."  The idea was that the time
+was ripe for a book that would tell the story of the Comstock-of the
+Nevada silver mines.  It seemed to him that the person best qualified for
+the work was his old friend William Wright--Dan de Quille.  He had not
+heard from Dan, or of him, for a long time, but decided to write and urge
+him to take up the idea.  He prepared the letter, going fully into the
+details of his plan, as was natural for him to do, then laid it aside
+until he could see Bliss and secure his approval of the scheme from a
+publishing standpoint.  Just a week later, it was the 9th of March, a
+letter came--a thick letter bearing a Nevada postmark, and addressed in a
+handwriting which he presently recognized as De Quille's.  To a visitor
+who was present he said:
+
+"Now I will do a miracle.  I will tell you everything this letter
+contains--date, signature, and all without breaking the seal."
+
+He stated what he believed was in the letter.  Then he opened it and
+showed that he had correctly given its contents, which were the same in
+all essential details as those of his own letter, not yet mailed.
+
+In an article on "Mental Telegraphy" (he invented the name) he relates
+this instance, with others, and in 'Following the Equator' and elsewhere
+he records other such happenings.  It was one of the "mysteries" in which
+he never lost interest, though his concern in it in time became a passive
+one.
+
+The result of the De Quille manifestation, however, he has not recorded.
+Clemens immediately wrote, urging Dan to come to Hartford for an extended
+visit.  De Quille came, and put in a happy spring in his old comrade's
+luxurious home, writing 'The Big Bonanza', which Bliss successfully
+published a year later.
+
+Mark Twain was continually inviting old friends to share his success with
+him.  Any comrade of former days found welcome in his home as often as he
+would come, and for as long as he would stay.  Clemens dropped his own
+affairs to advise in their undertakings; and if their undertakings were
+literary he found them a publisher.  He did this for Joaquin Miller and
+for Bret Harte, and he was always urging Goodman to make his house a
+home.
+
+The Beecher-Tilton trial was the sensation of the spring of 1875, and
+Clemens, in common with many others, was greatly worked up over it.  The
+printed testimony had left him decidedly in doubt as to Beecher's
+innocence, though his blame would seem to have been less for the possible
+offense than because of the great leader's attitude in the matter.  To
+Twichell he said:
+
+"His quibbling was fatal.  Innocent or guilty, he should have made an
+unqualified statement in the beginning."
+
+Together they attended one of the sessions, on a day when Beecher himself
+was on the witness-stand.  The tension was very great; the excitement was
+painful.  Twichell thought that Beecher appeared well under the stress of
+examination and was deeply sorry for him; Clemens was far from convinced.
+
+The feeling was especially strong in Hartford, where Henry Ward Beecher's
+relatives were prominent, and animosities grew out of it.  They are all
+forgotten now; most of those who cherished bitterness are dead.  Any
+feeling that Clemens had in the matter lasted but a little while.
+Howells tells us that when he met him some months after the trial ended,
+and was tempted to mention it, Clemens discouraged any discussion of the
+event.  Says Howells:
+
+     He would only say the man had suffered enough; as if the man had
+     expiated his wrong, and he was not going to do anything to renew his
+     penalty.  I found that very curious, very delicate.  His continued
+     blame could not come to the sufferer's knowledge, but he felt it his
+     duty to forbear it.
+
+It was one hundred years, that 19th of April, since the battles of
+Lexington and Concord, and there was to be a great celebration.  The
+Howellses had visited Hartford in March, and the Clemenses were invited
+to Cambridge for the celebration.  Only Clemens could go, which in the
+event proved a good thing perhaps; for when Clemens and Howells set out
+for Concord they did not go over to Boston to take the train, but decided
+to wait for it at Cambridge.  Apparently it did not occur to them that
+the train would be jammed the moment the doors were opened at the Boston
+station; but when it came along they saw how hopeless was their chance.
+They had special invitations and passage from Boston, but these were only
+mockeries now.  It yeas cold and chilly, and they forlornly set out in
+search of some sort of a conveyance.  They tramped around in the mud and
+raw wind, but vehicles were either filled or engaged, and drivers and
+occupants were inclined to jeer at them.  Clemens was taken with an acute
+attack of indigestion, which made him rather dismal and savage.  Their
+effort finally ended with his trying to run down a tally-ho which was
+empty inside and had a party of Harvard students riding atop.  The
+students, who did not recognize their would-be fare, enjoyed the race.
+They encouraged their pursuer, and perhaps their driver, with merriment
+and cheers.  Clemens was handicapped by having to run in the slippery
+mud, and soon "dropped by the wayside."
+
+"I am glad," says Howells, "I cannot recall what he said when he came
+back to me."
+
+They hung about a little longer, then dragged themselves home, slipped
+into the house, and built up a fine, cheerful fire on the hearth.  They
+proposed to practise a deception on Mrs. Howells by pretending they had
+been to Concord and returned.  But it was no use.  Their statements were
+flimsy, and guilt was plainly written on their faces.  Howells recalls
+this incident delightfully, and expresses the belief that the humor of
+the situation was finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than the actual
+visit to Concord would have been.
+
+Twichell did not have any such trouble in attending the celebration.  He
+had adventures (he was always having adventures), but they were of a more
+successful kind.  Clemens heard the tale of them when he returned to
+Hartford.  He wrote it to Howells:
+
+     Joe Twichell preached morning and evening here last Sunday; took
+     midnight train for Boston; got an early breakfast and started by
+     rail at 7.30 A.M.  for Concord; swelled around there until 1 P.M.,
+     seeing everything; then traveled on top of a train to Lexington; saw
+     everything there; traveled on top of a train to Boston (with
+     hundreds in company), deluged with dust, smoke, and cinders; yelled
+     and hurrahed all the way like a school-boy; lay flat down, to dodge
+     numerous bridges, and sailed into the depot howling with excitement
+     and as black as a chimneysweep; got to Young's Hotel at 7 P.M.; sat
+     down in the reading-room and immediately fell asleep; was promptly
+     awakened by a porter, who supposed he was drunk; wandered around an
+     hour and a half; then took 9 P.M.  train, sat down in a smoking-car,
+     and remembered nothing more until awakened by conductor as the train
+     came into Hartford at 1.30 A.M.  Thinks he had simply a glorious
+     time, and wouldn't have missed the Centennial for the world.  He
+     would have run out to see us a moment at Cambridge but he was too
+     dirty.  I wouldn't have wanted him there; his appalling energy would
+     have been an insufferable reproach to mild adventurers like you and
+     me.
+
+
+
+
+CI
+
+CONCLUDING "TOM SAWYER"--MARK TWAIN's "EDITORS"
+
+Meantime the "inspiration tank," as Clemens sometimes called it, had
+filled up again.  He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the
+story of Tom and Huck, and was working on it steadily.  The family
+remained in Hartford, and early in July, under full head of steam, he
+brought the story to a close.  On the 5th he wrote Howells:
+
+     I have finished the story and didn't take the chap beyond boyhood.
+     I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but
+     autobiographically, like Gil Blas.  I perhaps made a mistake in not
+     writing it in the first person.  If I went on now, and took him into
+     manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in
+     literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him.
+     It is not a boy's book at all.  It will only be read by adults.  It
+     is only written for adults.
+
+He would like to see the story in the Atlantic, he said, but doubted the
+wisdom of serialization.
+
+"By and by I shall take a boy of twelve and run him through life (in the
+first person), but not Tam Sawyer, he would not make a good character for
+it."  From which we get the first glimpse of Huck's later adventures.
+
+Of course he wanted Howells to look at the story.  It was a tremendous
+favor to ask, he said, and added, "But I know of no other person whose
+judgment I could venture to take, fully and entirely.  Don't hesitate to
+say no, for I know how your time is taxed, and I would have honest need
+to blush if you said yes."
+
+"Send on your MS.," wrote Howells.  "You've no idea what I may ask you to
+do for me some day."
+
+But Clemens, conscience-stricken, "blushed and weakened," as he said.
+When Howells insisted, he wrote:
+
+     But I will gladly send it to you if you will do as follows:
+     dramatize it, if you perceive that you can, and take, for your
+     remuneration, half of the first $6,000 which I receive for its
+     representation on the stage.  You could alter the plot entirely if
+     you chose.  I could help in the work most cheerfully after you had
+     arranged the plot.  I have my eye upon two young girls who can play
+     Tom and Huck.
+
+Howells in his reply urged.  Clemens to do the playwriting himself.  He
+could never find time, he said, and he doubted whether he could enter
+into the spirit of another man's story.  Clemens did begin a
+dramatization then or a little later, but it was not completed.  Mrs.
+Clemens, to whom he had read the story as it proceeded, was as anxious as
+her husband for Howells's opinion, for it was the first extended piece of
+fiction Mark Twain had undertaken alone.  He carried the manuscript over
+to Boston himself, and whatever their doubts may have been, Howells's
+subsequent letter set them at rest.  He wrote that he had sat up till one
+in the morning to get to the end of it, simply because it was impossible
+to leave off.
+
+It is altogether the best boy story I ever read.  It will be an immense
+success, but I think you ought to treat it explicitly as a boy's story;
+grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do, and if you should put it
+forth as a story of boys' character from the grown-up point of view you
+give the wrong key to it.
+
+Viewed in the light of later events, there has never been any better
+literary opinion than that--none that has been more fully justified.
+
+Clemens was delighted.  He wrote concerning a point here and there, one
+inquiry referring to the use of a certain strong word.  Howells's reply
+left no doubt:
+
+     I'd have that swearing out in an instant.  I suppose I didn't notice
+     it because the location was so familiar to my Western sense, and so
+     exactly the thing Huck would say, but it won't do for children.
+
+It was in the last chapter, where Huck relates to Tom the sorrows of
+reform and tells how they comb him "all to thunder."  In the original,
+"They comb me all to hell," says Huck; which statement, one must agree,
+is more effective, more the thing Huck would be likely to say.
+
+Clemens's acknowledgment of the correction was characteristic:
+
+     Mrs. Clemens received the mail this morning, and the next minute she
+     lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her
+     tongue, "Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?"  Then I had
+     to miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to
+     her.  Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape
+     with my scalp.  Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go
+     a little one-sided?
+
+The Clemens family did not, go to Elmira that year.  The children's
+health seemed to require the sea-shore, and in August they went to
+Bateman's Point, Rhode Island, where Clemens most of the time played
+tenpins in an alley that had gone to ruin.  The balls would not stay on
+the track; the pins stood at inebriate angles.  It reminded him of the
+old billiard-tables of Western mining-camps, and furnished the same
+uncertainty of play.  It was his delight, after he had become accustomed
+to the eccentricities of the alley, to invite in a stranger and watch his
+suffering and his frantic effort to score.
+
+
+
+
+CII
+
+"SKETCHES NEW AND OLD"
+
+The long-delayed book of Sketches, contracted for five years before, was
+issued that autumn.  "The Jumping Frog," which he had bought from Webb,
+was included in the volume, also the French translation which Madame
+Blanc (Th. Bentzon) had made for the Revue des deux mondes, with Mark
+Twain's retranslation back into English, a most astonishing performance
+in its literal rendition of the French idiom.  One example will suffice
+here.  It is where the stranger says to Smiley, "I don't see no p'ints
+about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."
+
+Says the French, retranslated:
+
+"Eh bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each
+frog" (Je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait mieux qu'aucune
+grenouille).  (If that isn't grammar gone to seed then I count myself no
+judge.--M. T.)
+
+"Possible that you not it saw not," said Smiley; "possible that you you
+comprehend frogs; possible that you not you there comprehend nothing;
+possible that you had of the experience, and possible that you not be but
+an amateur.  Of all manner (de toute maniere) I bet forty dollars that
+she batter in jumping, no matter which frog of the county of Calaveras."
+
+He included a number of sketches originally published with the Frog, also
+a selection from the "Memoranda" and Buffalo Express contributions, and
+he put in the story of Auntie Cord, with some matter which had never
+hitherto appeared.  True Williams illustrated the book, but either it
+furnished him no inspiration or he was allowed too much of another sort,
+for the pictures do not compare with his earlier work.
+
+Among the new matter in the book were-"Some Fables for Good Old Boys and
+Girls," in which certain wood creatures are supposed to make a scientific
+excursion into a place at some time occupied by men.  It is the most
+pretentious feature of the book, and in its way about as good as any.
+Like Gulliver's Travels, its object was satire, but its result is also
+interest.
+
+Clemens was very anxious that Howells should be first to review this
+volume.  He had a superstition that Howells's verdicts were echoed by the
+lesser reviewers, and that a book was made or damned accordingly; a
+belief hardly warranted, for the review has seldom been written that
+meant to any book the difference between success and failure.  Howells's
+review of Sketches may be offered as a case in point.  It was highly
+commendatory, much more so than the notice of the 'Innocents' had been,
+or even that of 'Roughing It', also more extensive than the latter.  Yet
+after the initial sale of some twenty thousand copies, mainly on the
+strength of the author's reputation, the book made a comparatively poor
+showing, and soon lagged far behind its predecessors.
+
+We cannot judge, of course, the taste of that day, but it appears now an
+unattractive, incoherent volume.  The pictures were absurdly bad, the
+sketches were of unequal merit.  Many of them are amusing, some of them
+delightful, but most of them seem ephemeral.  If we except "The Jumping
+Frog," and possibly "A True Story" (and the latter was altogether out of
+place in the collection), there is no reason to suppose that any of its
+contents will escape oblivion.  The greater number of the sketches, as
+Mark Twain himself presently realized and declared, would better have
+been allowed to die.
+
+Howells did, however, take occasion to point out in his review, or at
+least to suggest, the more serious side of Mark Twain.  He particularly
+called attention to "A True Story," which the reviewers, at the time of
+its publication in the Atlantic, had treated lightly, fearing a lurking
+joke in it; or it may be they had not read it, for reviewers are busy
+people.  Howells spoke of it as the choicest piece of work in the volume,
+and of its "perfect fidelity to the tragic fact."  He urged the reader to
+turn to it again, and to read it as a "simple dramatic report of
+reality," such as had been equaled by no other American writer.
+
+It was in this volume of sketches that Mark Twain first spoke in print
+concerning copyright, showing the absurd injustice of discriminating
+against literary ownership by statute of limitation.  He did this in the
+form of an open petition to Congress, asking that all property, real and
+personal, should be put on the copyright basis, its period of ownership
+limited to a "beneficent term of forty-two years."  Generally this was
+regarded as a joke, as in a sense it was; but like most of Mark Twain's
+jokes it was founded on reason and justice.
+
+The approval with which it was received by his literary associates led
+him to still further flights.  He began a determined crusade for
+international copyright laws.  It was a transcendental beginning, but it
+contained the germ of what, in the course of time, he would be largely
+instrumental in bringing to a ripe and magnificent conclusion.  In this
+first effort he framed a petition to enact laws by which the United
+States would declare itself to be for right and justice, regardless of
+other nations, and become a good example to the world by refusing to
+pirate the books of any foreign author.  He wrote to Howells, urging him
+to get Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and others to sign this
+petition.
+
+I will then put a gentlemanly chap under wages, and send him personally
+to every author of distinction in the country and corral the rest of the
+signatures.  Then I'll have the whole thing lithographed (about one
+thousand copies), and move upon the President and Congress in person, but
+in the subordinate capacity of the party who is merely the agent of
+better and wiser men, or men whom the country cannot venture to laugh at.
+I will ask the President to recommend the thing in his message (and if he
+should ask me to sit down and frame the paragraph for him I should blush,
+but still I would frame it).  And then if Europe chooses to go on
+stealing from us we would say, with noble enthusiasm, "American lawmakers
+do steal, but not from foreign authors--not from foreign authors,"....
+If we only had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a
+sweat to get Him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.
+
+The petition never reached Congress.  Holmes agreed to sign it with a
+smile, and the comment that governments were not in the habit of setting
+themselves up as high moral examples, except for revenue.  Longfellow
+also pledged himself, as did a few others; but if there was any general
+concurrence in the effort there is no memory of it now.  Clemens
+abandoned the original idea, but remained one of the most persistent and
+influential advocates of copyright betterment, and lived to see most of
+his dream fulfilled.--[For the petition concerning copyright term in the
+United States, see Sketches New and Old.  For the petition concerning
+international copyright and related matters, see Appendix N, at the end
+of last volume.]
+
+
+
+
+CIII
+
+"ATLANTIC" DAYS
+
+It was about this period that Mark Twain began to exhibit openly his more
+serious side; that is to say his advocacy of public reforms.  His paper
+on "Universal Suffrage" had sounded a first note, and his copyright
+petitions were of the same spirit.  In later years he used to say that he
+had always felt it was his mission to teach, to carry the banner of moral
+reconstruction, and here at forty we find him furnishing evidences of
+this inclination.  In the Atlantic for October, 1875, there was published
+an unsigned three-page article entitled, "The Curious Republic of
+Gondour."  In this article was developed the idea that the voting
+privilege should be estimated not by the individuals, but by their
+intellectual qualifications.  The republic of Gondour was a Utopia, where
+this plan had been established:
+
+     It was an odd idea and ingenious.  You must understand the
+     constitution gave every man a vote; therefore that vote was a vested
+     right, and could not be taken away.  But the constitution did not
+     say that certain individuals might not be given two votes or ten.
+     So an amendatory clause was inserted in a quiet way, a clause which
+     authorized the enlargement of the suffrage in certain cases to be
+     specified by statute....
+
+     The victory was complete.  The new law was framed and passed.  Under
+     it every citizen, howsoever poor or ignorant, possessed one vote, so
+     universal suffrage still reigned; but if a man possessed a good
+     common-school education and no money he had two votes, a high-school
+     education gave him four; if he had property, likewise, to the value
+     of three thousand sacos he wielded one more vote; for every fifty
+     thousand sacos a man added to his property, he was entitled to
+     another vote; a University education entitled a man to nine votes,
+     even though he owned no property.
+
+The author goes on to show the beneficent results of this enaction; how
+the country was benefited and glorified by this stimulus toward
+enlightenment and industry.  No one ever suspected that Mark Twain was
+the author of this fable.  It contained almost no trace of his usual
+literary manner.  Nevertheless he wrote it, and only withheld his name,
+as he did in a few other instances, in the fear that the world might
+refuse to take him seriously over his own signature or nom de plume.
+
+Howells urged him to follow up the "Gondour" paper; to send some more
+reports from that model land.  But Clemens was engaged in other things by
+that time, and was not pledged altogether to national reforms.
+
+He was writing a skit about a bit of doggerel which was then making
+nights and days unhappy for many undeserving persons who in an evil
+moment had fallen upon it in some stray newspaper corner.  A certain car
+line had recently adopted the "punch system," and posted in its cars, for
+the information of passengers and conductor, this placard:
+
+A Blue Trip Slip for an 8 Cents Fare,
+A Buff Trip Slip for a 6 Cents Fare,
+A Pink Trip Slip for a 3 Cents Fare,
+For Coupon And Transfer, Punch The Tickets.
+
+Noah Brooks and Isaac Bromley were riding down-town one evening on the
+Fourth Avenue line, when Bromley said:
+
+"Brooks, it's poetry.  By George, it's poetry!"
+
+Brooks followed the direction of Bromley's finger and read the card of
+instructions.  They began perfecting the poetic character of the notice,
+giving it still more of a rhythmic twist and jingle; arrived at the
+Tribune office, W. C. Wyckoff, scientific editor, and Moses P. Handy lent
+intellectual and poetic assistance, with this result:
+
+          Conductor, when you receive a fare,
+
+          Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
+          A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,
+          A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,
+          A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare.
+          Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
+
+     CHORUS
+          Punch, brothers!  Punch with care!
+          Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
+
+It was printed, and street-car poetry became popular.  Different papers
+had a turn at it, and each usually preceded its own effort with all other
+examples, as far as perpetrated.  Clemens discovered the lines, and on
+one of their walks recited them to Twichell.  "A Literary Nightmare" was
+written a few days later.  In it the author tells how the jingle took
+instant and entire possession of him and went waltzing through his brain;
+how, when he had finished his breakfast, he couldn't tell whether he had
+eaten anything or not; and how, when he went to finish the novel he was
+writing, and took up his pen, he could only get it to say:
+
+Punch in the presence of the passenjare.
+
+He found relief at last in telling it to his reverend friend, that is,
+Twichell, upon whom he unloaded it with sad results.
+
+It was an amusing and timely skit, and is worth reading to-day.  Its
+publication in the Atlantic had the effect of waking up horse-car poetry
+all over the world.  Howells, going to dine at Ernest Longfellow's the
+day following its appearance, heard his host and Tom Appleton urging each
+other to "Punch with care."  The Longfellow ladies had it by heart.
+Boston was devastated by it.  At home, Howells's children recited it to
+him in chorus.  The streets were full of it; in Harvard it became an
+epidemic.
+
+It was transformed into other tongues.  Even Swinburne, the musical, is
+said to have done a French version for the 'Revue des deux mondes'*.  A
+St. Louis magazine, The Western, found relief in a Latin anthem with this
+chorus:
+
+Pungite, fratres, pungite,
+Pungite cum amore,
+Pungite pro vectore,
+Diligentissime pungite.
+
+
+                    * LE CHANT DU CONDUCTEUR
+
+               Ayant ete paye, le conducteur
+               Percera en pleine vue du voyageur,
+               Quand il regoit trois sous un coupon vert,
+               Un coupon jaune pour six sous c'est l'affaire,
+               Et pour huit sous c'est un coupon couleur
+               De rose, en pleine vue du voyageur.
+
+          CHOEUR
+               Donc, percez soigneusement, mes freres
+               Tout en pleine vue des voyageurs, etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+CIV
+
+MARK TWAIN AND HIS WIFE
+
+Clemens and his wife traveled to Boston for one of those happy fore-
+gatherings with the Howellses, which continued, at one end of the journey
+or another, for so many years.  There was a luncheon with Longfellow at
+Craigie House, and, on the return to Hartford, Clemens reported to
+Howells how Mrs. Clemens had thrived on the happiness of the visit.  Also
+he confesses his punishment for the usual crimes:
+
+     I "caught it" for letting Mrs. Howells bother and bother about her
+     coffee, when it was a "good deal better than we get at home."  I
+     "caught it" for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment and losing
+     her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that MS.
+     when the printers are done with it.  I "caught it" once more for
+     personating that drunken Colonel James.  I "caught it" for
+     mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and
+     when, after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I
+     had privately suggested to you that we hadn't any frames, and that
+     if you wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the
+     madam was simply speechless for the space of a minute.  Then she
+     said:
+
+     "How could you, Youth!  The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his
+     sensitive nature, upon such a repulsive er--"
+
+     "Oh, Howells won't mind it!  You don't know Howells.  Howells is a
+     man who--"
+
+     She was gone.  But George was the first person she stumbled on in
+     the hall, so she took it out of George.  I am glad of that, because
+     it saved the babies.
+
+Clemens used to admit, at a later day, that his education did not advance
+by leaps and bounds, but gradually, very gradually; and it used to give
+him a pathetic relief in those after-years, when that sweet presence had
+gone out of his life, to tell the way of it, to confess over-fully,
+perhaps, what a responsibility he had been to her.
+
+He used to tell how, for a long time, he concealed his profanity from
+her; how one morning, when he thought the door was shut between their
+bedroom and the bathroom, he was in there dressing and shaving,
+accompanying these trying things with language intended only for the
+strictest privacy; how presently, when he discovered a button off the
+shirt he intended to put on, he hurled it through the window into the
+yard with appropriate remarks, followed it with another shirt that was in
+the same condition, and added certain collars and neckties and bath-room
+requisites, decorating the shrubbery outside, where the people were going
+by to church; how in this extreme moment he heard a slight cough and
+turned to find that the door was open!  There was only one door to the
+bath-room, and he knew he had to pass her.  He felt pale and sick, and
+sat down for a few moments to consider.  He decided to assume that she
+was asleep, and to walk out and through the room, head up, as if he had
+nothing on his conscience.  He attempted it, but without success.  Half-
+way across the room he heard a voice suddenly repeat his last terrific
+remark.  He turned to see her sitting up in bed, regarding him with a
+look as withering as she could find in her gentle soul.  The humor of it
+struck him.
+
+"Livy," he said, "did it sound like that?"
+
+"Of course it did," she said, "only worse.  I wanted you to hear just how
+it sounded."
+
+"Livy," he said, "it would pain me to think that when I swear it sounds
+like that.  You got the words right, Livy, but you don't know the tune."
+
+Yet he never willingly gave her pain, and he adored her and gloried in
+her dominion, his life long.  Howells speaks of his beautiful and tender
+loyalty to her as the "most moving quality of his most faithful soul."
+
+It was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives,
+and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all
+the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character.
+
+She guarded his work sacredly; and reviewing the manuscripts which he was
+induced to discard, and certain edited manuscripts, one gets a partial
+idea of what the reading world owes to Olivia Clemens.  Of the discarded.
+manuscripts (he seems seldom to have destroyed them) there are a
+multitude, and among them all scarcely one that is not a proof of her
+sanity and high regard for his literary honor.  They are amusing--some of
+them; they are interesting--some of them; they are strong and virile--
+some of them; but they are unworthy--most of them, though a number remain
+unfinished because theme or interest failed.
+
+Mark Twain was likely to write not wisely but too much, piling up
+hundreds of manuscript pages only because his brain was thronging as with
+a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of darting, flashing ideas demanding
+release.  As often as not he began writing with only a nebulous idea of
+what he proposed to do.  He would start with a few characters and
+situations, trusting in Providence to supply material as needed.  So he
+was likely to run ashore any time.  As for those other attempts--stories
+"unavailable" for one reason or another--he was just as apt to begin
+those as the better sort, for somehow he could never tell the difference.
+That is one of the hall-marks of genius--the thing which sharply
+differentiates genius from talent.  Genius is likely to rate a literary
+disaster as its best work.  Talent rarely makes that mistake.
+
+Among the abandoned literary undertakings of these early years of
+authorship there is the beginning of what was doubtless intended to
+become a book, "The Second Advent," a story which opens with a very
+doubtful miraculous conception in Arkansas, and leads only to grotesquery
+and literary disorder.  There is another, "The Autobiography of a Damn
+Fool," a burlesque on family history, hopelessly impossible; yet he began
+it with vast enthusiasm and, until he allowed her to see the manuscript,
+thought it especially good.  "Livy wouldn't have it," he said, "so I gave
+it up."  There is another, "The Mysterious Chamber," strong and fine in
+conception, vividly and intensely interesting; the story of a young lover
+who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old castle and
+cannot announce himself.  He wanders at last down into subterranean
+passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation for twenty
+years.  The question of sustenance was the weak point in the story.
+Clemens could invent no way of providing it, except by means of a waste
+or conduit from the kitchen into which scraps of meat, bread, and other
+items of garbage were thrown.  This he thought sufficient, but Mrs.
+Clemens did not highly regard such a literary device.  Clemens could
+think of no good way to improve upon it, so this effort too was consigned
+to the penal colony, a set of pigeonholes kept in his study.  To Howells
+and others, when they came along, he would read the discarded yarns, and
+they were delightful enough for such a purpose, as delightful as the
+sketches which every artist has, turned face to the wall.
+
+"Captain Stormfield" lay under the ban for many a year, though never
+entirely abandoned.  This manuscript was even recommended for publication
+by Howells, who has since admitted that it would not have done then; and
+indeed, in its original, primitive nakedness it would hardly have done
+even in this day of wider toleration.
+
+It should be said here that there is not the least evidence (and the
+manuscripts are full of evidence) that Mrs. Clemens was ever super-
+sensitive, or narrow, or unliterary in her restraints.  She became his
+public, as it were, and no man ever had a more open-minded, clear-headed
+public than that.  For Mark Twain's reputation it would have been better
+had she exercised her editorial prerogative even more actively--if, in
+her love for him and her jealousy of his reputation, she had been even
+more severe.  She did all that lay in her strength, from the beginning to
+the end, and if we dwell upon this phase of their life together it is
+because it is so large a part of Mark Twain's literary story.  On her
+birthday in the year we are now closing (1875) he wrote her a letter
+which conveys an acknowledgment of his debt.
+
+LIVY DARLING,--Six years have gone by since I made my first great success
+in life and won you, and thirty years have passed since Providence made
+preparation for that happy success by sending you into the world.  Every
+day we live together adds to the security of my confidence that we can
+never any more wish to be separated than we can imagine a regret that we
+were ever joined.  You are dearer to me to-day, my child, than you were
+upon the last anniversary of this birthday; you were dearer then than you
+were a year before; you have grown more and more dear from the first of
+those anniversaries, and I do not doubt that this precious progression
+will continue on to the end.
+
+Let us look forward to the coming anniversaries, with their age and their
+gray hairs, without fear and without depression, trusting and believing
+that the love we bear each other will be sufficient to make them blessed.
+
+So, with abounding affection for you and our babies I hail this day that
+brings you the matronly grace and dignity of three decades!
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY,1866-75, v2
+by Albert Bigelow Paine
+
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