time. She
was registered eighteen hundred tons--about one-tenth the size of
Mediterranean excursion-steamers today--and when conditions were
favorable she could make ten knots an hour under steam--or, at least,
she could do it with the help of her auxiliary sails. Altogether she was
a cozy, satisfactory ship, and they were a fortunate company who had her
all to themselves and went out on her on that long-ago ocean gipsying.
She has grown since then, even to the proportions of the Mayflower. It
was necessary for her to grow to hold all of those who in later times
claimed to have sailed in her on that voyage with Mark Twain.--[The
Quaker City passenger list will be found under Appendix F, at the end of
last volume.]

They were not all ministers and deacons aboard the Quaker City. Clemens
found other congenial spirits be sides his room-mate Dan Slote--among
them the ship's surgeon, Dr. A. Reeve Jackson (the guide-destroying
"Doctor" of The Innocents); Jack Van Nostrand, of New Jersey ("Jack");
Julius Moulton, of St. Louis ("Moult"), and other care-free fellows,
the smoking-room crowd which is likely to make comradeship its
chief watchword. There were companionable people in the cabin crowd
also--fine, intelligent men and women, especially one of the latter,
a middle-aged, intellectual, motherly soul--Mrs. A. W. Fairbanks, of
Cleveland, Ohio. Mrs. Fairbanks--herself a newspaper correspondent for
her husband's paper, the Cleveland Herald had a large influence on
the character and general tone of those Quaker City letters which
established Mark Twain's larger fame. She was an able writer herself;
her judgment was thoughtful, refined, unbiased--altogether of a superior
sort. She understood Samuel Clemens, counseled him, encouraged him to
read his letters aloud to her, became in reality "Mother Fairbanks," as
they termed her, to him and to others of that ship who needed her kindly
offices.

In one of his home letters, later, he said of her:

She was the most refined, intelligent, cultivated lady in the ship,
and altogether the kindest and best. She sewed my buttons on, kept
my clothing in presentable trim, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I
behaved), lectured me awfully on the quarter-deck on moonlit
promenading evenings, and cured me of several bad habits. I am
under lasting obligations to her. She looks young because she is so
good, but she has a grown son and daughter at home.

In one of the earl