e loath to let him go. Once
they took him tobogganing--an exciting experience.

It happened that during his stay with them the opening of the Canadian
Parliament took place. Lord Lorne and the principal dignitaries of state
entered one carriage, and in a carriage behind them followed Princess
Louise with Mark Twain. As they approached the Parliament House
the customary salute was fired. Clemens pretended to the Princess
considerable gratification. The temptation was too strong to resist:

"Your Highness," he said, "I have had other compliments paid to me,
but none equal to this one. I have never before had a salute fired
in my honor."

Returning to Hartford, he sent copies of his books to Lord Lorne, and to
the Princess a special copy of that absurd manual, The New Guide of
the Conversation in Portuguese and English, for which he had written
an introduction.--[A serious work, in Portugal, though issued by Osgood
('83) as a joke. Clemens in the introduction says: "Its delicious,
unconscious ridiculousness and its enchanting naivety are as supreme and
unapproachable in their way as Shakespeare's sublimities." An extract,
the closing paragraph from the book's preface, will illustrate his
meaning:

"We expect then, who the little book (for the care that we wrote him,
and for her typographical correction), that maybe worth the acceptation
of the studious persons, and especially of the Youth, at which we
dedicate him particularly."]

CXLIV. A SUMMER LITERARY HARVEST

Arriving at the farm in June, Clemens had a fresh crop of ideas for
stories of many lengths and varieties. His note-book of that time
is full of motifs and plots, most of them of that improbable and
extravagant kind which tended to defeat any literary purpose, whether
humorous or otherwise. It seems worth while setting down one or more of
these here, for they are characteristic of the myriad conceptions that
came and went, and beyond these written memoranda left no trace behind.
Here is a fair example of many:

Two men starving on a raft. The pauper has a Boston cracker,
resolves to keep it till the multimillionaire is beginning to
starve, then make him pay $50,000 for it. Millionaire agrees.
Pauper's cupidity rises, resolves to wait and get more; twenty-four
hours later asks him a million for the cracker. Millionaire agrees.
Pauper has a wild dream of becoming enormously rich off his cracker;
backs down; lie