The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, by
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
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Title: The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
Last Updated: December 23, 2008
Posting Date: August 20, 2006 [EBook #102]
Release Date: January, 1994
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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THE TRAGEDY OF PUDD'NHEAD WILSON
by Mark Twain

A WHISPER TO THE READER
_There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can
be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless.
Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about
perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler
animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead
of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are
left in doubt._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
A person who is ignorant of legal matters is always liable to make
mistakes when he tries to photograph a court scene with his pen; and so I
was not willing to let the law chapters in this book go to press without
first subjecting them to rigid and exhausting revision and correction by
a trained barrister--if that is what they are called. These chapters are
right, now, in every detail, for they were rewritten under the immediate
eye of William Hicks, who studied law part of a while in southwest
Missouri thirty-five years ago and then came over here to Florence for
his health and is still helping for exercise and board in Macaroni
Vermicelli's horse-feed shed, which is up the back alley as you turn
around the corner out of the Piazza del Duomo just beyond the house where
that stone that Dante used to sit on six hundred years ago is let into
the wall when he let on to be watching them build Giotto's campanile and
yet always got tired looking as Beatrice passed along on her way to get a
chunk of chestnut cake to defend herself with in case of a Ghibelline
outbreak before she got to school, at the same old stand where they sell
the same old cake to this day and it is just as light and good as it was
then, too, and this is not flattery, far from it. He was a little rusty
on his