took it as an intentional joke,
and applauded it with unparalleled enthusiasm. Mark wisely let it go at
that!

Reading through 'The Innocents Abroad' after many years, I find that it
has not lost its power to provoke the most side-splitting laughter; and
the same may be said of 'A Tramp Abroad' and 'Following the Equator',
which, whilst not so boisterously comical, exhibit greater mastery and
restraint. His own luck, as Mark Twain observed on one occasion, had
been curious all his literary life. He never could tell a lie that
anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe. Could
there be a more accurate or more concise definition of the effect of his
writings, in especial of his travel notes? Like his mother, he too
never used large words, but he had a natural gift for making small ones
do effective work. How delightfully human is his comment on the
vagaries of woman's shopping! Human nature he found very much the same
all over the world; and he felt that it was so much like his dear native
home to see a Venetian lady go into a store, buy ten cents' worth of
blue ribbon, and then have it sent home in a scow. It was such little
touches of nature as this which, as he said, moved him to tears in those
far-off lands. In speaking of Palestine, he says that its holy places
are not as deliriously beautiful as the books paint them. Indeed, he
asserts that if one be calm and resolute, he can look on their beauty
and live! He bequeathed his rheumatism to Baden-Baden. It was little,
but it was all he had to give. His only regret was that he could not
leave something more catching.

There is nothing better in all of 'The Innocents Abroad' than his
analysis of the theological hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.
Disclaiming all intention to be frivolous, irreverent or blasphemous, he
solemnly declared that his observations had taught him the real way the
Holy Personages were ranked in Rome. "The Mother of God," otherwise the
Virgin Mary, comes first, followed in order by the Deity, Peter, and
some twelve or fifteen canonized Popes and Martyrs. Last of all came
Jesus Christ the Saviour--but even then, always as an infant in arms!

Who can ever forget the Mark Twain who kissed the Hawaiian stranger for
his mother's sake, the while robbing him of his small change; who was so
struck by the fine points of his Honolulan horse that he hung his hat on
one of them; who rode glaciers as gaily as he rode Mexica