the
initial canvass.]

CL

FARM PICTURES

Gerhardt returned from Paris that summer, after three years of study, a
qualified sculptor. He was prepared to take commissions, and came to
Elmira to model a bust of his benefactor. The work was finished after
four or five weeks of hard effort and pronounced admirable; but Gerhardt,
attempting to make a cast one morning, ruined it completely. The family
gathered round the disaster, which to them seemed final, but the sculptor
went immediately to work, and in an amazingly brief time executed a new
bust even better than the first, an excellent piece of modeling and a
fine likeness. It was decided that a cut of it should be used as a
frontispiece for the new book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Clemens was at this time giving the final readings to the Huck Finn
pages, a labor in which Mrs. Clemens and the children materially
assisted. In the childish biography which Susy began of her father, a
year later, she says:

Ever since papa and mama were married papa has written his books and
then taken them to mama in manuscript, and she has expurgated
--[Susy's spelling is preserved]--them. Papa read Huckleberry Finn to
us in manuscript,--[Probably meaning proof.]--just before it came
out, and then he would leave parts of it with mama to expurgate,
while he went off to the study to work, and sometimes Clara and I
would be sitting with mama while she was looking the manuscript
over, and I remember so well, with what pangs of regret we used to
see her turn down the leaves of the pages, which meant that some
delightfully terrible part must be scratched out. And I remember
one part pertickularly which was perfectly fascinating it was so
terrible, that Clara and I used to delight in and oh, with what
despair we saw mama turn down the leaf on which it was written, we
thought the book would almost be ruined without it. But we
gradually came to think as mama did.

Commenting on this phase of Huck's evolution Mark Twain has since
written:

I remember the special case mentioned by Susy, and can see the group
yet--two-thirds of it pleading for the life of the culprit sentence
that was so fascinatingly dreadful, and the other third of it
patiently explaining why the court could not grant the prayer of the
pleaders; but I do not remember what the condemned phrase was. It
had much company, and