ting some of their penalties upon the
king himself, and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them
applied to others; all of which is to account for certain mildnesses
which distinguished Edward VI.'s reign from those that precede it
and follow it.

Imagine this fact: I have even fascinated Mrs. Clemens with this
yarn for youth. My stuff generally gets considerable damning with
faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other way. She
is become the horse-leech's daughter, and my mill doesn't grind fast
enough to suit her. This is no mean triumph, my dear sir.

He forgot, perhaps, to mention his smaller auditors, but we may believe
they were no less eager in their demands for the tale's continuance.

CXXVI. "A TRAMP ABROAD"

'A Tramp Abroad' came from the presses on the 13th of March, 1880. It
had been widely heralded, and there was an advance sale of twenty-five
thousand copies. It was of the same general size and outward character
as the Innocents, numerously illustrated, and was regarded by its
publishers as a satisfactory book.

It bore no very striking resemblance to the Innocents on close
examination. Its pictures-drawn, for the most part, by a young art
student named Brown, whom Clemens had met in Paris--were extraordinarily
bad, while the crude engraving process by which they had been
reproduced; tended to bring them still further into disrepute. A few
drawings by True Williams were better, and those drawn by Clemens
himself had a value of their own. The book would have profited had there
been more of what the author calls his "works of art."

Mark Twain himself had dubious anticipations as to the book's reception.

But Howells wrote:

Well, you are a blessing. You ought to believe in God's goodness,
since he has bestowed upon the world such a delightful genius as
yours to lighten its troubles.

Clemens replied:

Your praises have been the greatest uplift I ever had. When a body
is not even remotely expecting such things, how the surprise takes
the breath away! We had been interpreting your stillness to
melancholy and depression, caused by that book. This is honest.
Why, everything looks brighter now. A check for untold cash could
not have made our hearts sing as your letter has done.

A letter from Tauchnitz, proposing to issue an illustrated edition
in Germany, besides putting it into his regular series, was