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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!




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