The reader may surmise that the finished story--the highly regarded
story--was 'The Prince and the Pauper'. The other tale--the unfinished
and less considered one was 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. Nobody
appears to have been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly,
the publisher.

The publisher was not the American Company. Elisha Bliss, after long ill
health, had died that fall, and this fact, in connection with a growing
dissatisfaction over the earlier contracts, had induced Clemens to
listen to offers from other makers of books. The revelation made by the
"half-profit" returns from A Tramp Abroad meant to him, simply that the
profits had not been fairly apportioned, and he was accordingly hostile.
To Orion he wrote that, had Bliss lived, he would have remained with the
company and made it reimburse him for his losses, but that as matters
stood he would sever the long connection. It seemed a pity, later, that
he did this, but the break was bound to come. Clemens was not a business
man, and Bliss was not a philanthropist. He was, in fact, a shrewd,
capable publisher, who made as good a contract as he could; yet he
was square in his dealings, and the contract which Clemens held most
bitterly against him--that of 'Roughing It'--had been made in good faith
and in accordance with the conditions, of that period. In most of the
later contracts Clemens himself had named his royalties, and it was not
in human nature--business human nature--for Bliss to encourage the size
of these percentages. If one wished to draw a strictly moral conclusion
from the situation, one might say that it would have been better for
the American Publishing Company, knowing Mark Twain, voluntarily to have
allowed him half profits, which was the spirit of his old understanding
even if not the letter of it, rather than to have waited till he
demanded it and then to lose him by the result. Perhaps that would be
also a proper business deduction; only, as a rule, business morals
are regulated by the contract, and the contract is regulated by the
necessities and the urgency of demand.

Never mind. Mark Twain revised 'The Prince and the Pauper', sent it to
Howells, who approved of it mightily (though with reservations as to
certain chapters), and gave it to James R. Osgood, who was grateful and
agreed to make it into a book upon which no expense for illustration
or manufacture should be spared. It was to be a sort of partnership
arrangeme