d any author I have known, without favorite
phrases or pet words. He utterly despised the avoidance of repetitions
out of fear of tautology. If a word served his turn better than a
substitute, he would use it as many times in a page as he chose.

V.

At that time I had become editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I had
allegiances belonging to the conduct of what was and still remains the
most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals. When Clemens began to
write for it he came willingly under its rules, for with all his
wilfulness there never was a more biddable man in things you could show
him a reason for. He never made the least of that trouble which so
abounds for the hapless editor from narrower-minded contributors. If you
wanted a thing changed, very good, he changed it; if you suggested that a
word or a sentence or a paragraph had better be struck out, very good, he
struck it out. His proof-sheets came back each a veritable "mush of
concession," as Emerson says. Now and then he would try a little
stronger language than 'The Atlantic' had stomach for, and once when I
sent him a proof I made him observe that I had left out the profanity. He
wrote back: "Mrs. Clemens opened that proof, and lit into the room with
danger in her eye. What profanity? You see, when I read the manuscript
to her I skipped that." It was part of his joke to pretend a violence in
that gentlest creature which the more amusingly realized the situation to
their friends.

I was always very glad of him and proud of him as a contributor, but I
must not claim the whole merit, or the first merit of having him write
for us. It was the publisher, the late H. O. Houghton, who felt the
incongruity of his absence from the leading periodical of the country,
and was always urging me to get him to write. I will take the credit of
being eager for him, but it is to the publisher's credit that he tried,
so far as the modest traditions of 'The Atlantic' would permit, to meet
the expectations in pay which the colossal profits of Clemens's books
might naturally have bred in him. Whether he was really able to do this
he never knew from Clemens himself, but probably twenty dollars a page
did not surfeit the author of books that "sold right along just like the
Bible."

We had several short contributions from Clemens first, all of capital
quality, and then we had the series of papers which went mainly to the
making of his great book, 'Life on the Mississippi