audience.

It would seem to have been the winter after their return from Europe
that this custom was inaugurated, for 'The Prince and the Pauper'
manuscript was the first one so read, and it was just then he was
resuming work on this tale. Each afternoon or evening, when he had
finished his chapter, he assembled his little audience and read them the
result. The children were old enough to delight in that half real, half
fairy tale of the wandering prince and the royal pauper: and the charm
and simplicity of the story are measurably due to those two small
listeners, to whom it was adapted in that early day of its creation.

Clemens found the Prince a blessed relief from 'A Tramp Abroad', which
had become a veritable nightmare. He had thought it finished when he
left the farm, but discovered that he must add several hundred pages
to complete its bulk. It seemed to him that he had been given a
life-sentence. He wrote six hundred pages and tore up all but two
hundred and eighty-eight. He was about to destroy these and begin again,
when Mrs. Clemens's health became poor and he was advised to take her to
Elmira, though it was then midwinter. To Howells he wrote:

I said, "if there is one death that is painfuler than another, may I
get it if I don't do that thing."

So I took the 288 pages to Bliss and told him that was the very last
line I should ever write on this book (a book which required 600
pages of MS., and I have written nearly four thousand, first and
last).

I am as soary (and flighty) as a rocket to-day, with the unutterable
joy of getting that Old Man of the Sea off my back, where he has
been roosting more than a year and a half.

They remained a month at Elmira, and on their return Clemens renewed
work on 'The Prince and the Pauper'. He reported to Howells that if he
never sold a copy his jubilant delight in writing it would suffer no
diminution. A week later his enthusiasm had still further increased:

I take so much pleasure in my story that I am loath to hurry, not
wanting to get it done. Did I ever tell you the plot of it? It
begins at 9 A.M., January 27, 1547.

He follows with a detailed synopsis of his plot, which in this instance
he had worked out with unusual completeness--a fact which largely
accounts for the unity of the tale. Then he adds:

My idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of
the laws of that day by inflic