elebration over the birthday anniversary of
Mrs. Duncan, wife of our captain. Mark Twain got up and made a little
speech, in which he said Mrs. Duncan was really older than Methuselah
because she knew a lot of things that Methuselah never heard of. Then
he mentioned a number of more or less modern inventions, and wound up by
saying, "What did Methuselah know about a barbed-wire fence?"

Except Following the Equator, The Innocents Abroad comes nearer to being
history than any other of Mark Twain's travel-books. The notes for it
were made on the spot, and there was plenty of fact, plenty of fresh,
new experience, plenty of incident to set down. His idea of descriptive
travel in those days was to tell the story as it happened; also,
perhaps, he had not then acquired the courage of his inventions. We
may believe that the adventures with Jack, Dan, and the Doctor are
elaborated here and there; but even those happened substantially as
recorded. There is little to add, then, to the story of that halcyon
trip, and not much to elucidate.

The old note-books give a light here and there that is interesting. It
is curious to be looking through them now, trying to realize that
these penciled memoranda were the fresh, first impressions that would
presently grow into the world's most delightful book of travel; that
they were set down in the very midst of that care-free little company
that frolicked through Italy, climbed wearily the arid Syrian hills.
They are all dead now; but to us they are as alive and young to-day as
when they followed the footprints of the Son of Man through Palestine,
and stood at last before the Sphinx, impressed and awed by its "five
thousand slow-revolving years."

Some of the items consist of no more than a few terse, suggestive
words--serious, humorous, sometimes profane. Others are statistical,
descriptive, elaborated. Also there are drawings--"not copied," he marks
them, with a pride not always justified by the result. The earlier
notes are mainly comments on the "pilgrims," the freak pilgrims: "the
Frenchy-looking woman who owns a dog and keeps up an interminable
biography of him to the passengers"; the "long-legged, simple,
wide-mouthed, horse-laughing young fellow who once made a sea voyage to
Fortress Monroe, and quotes eternally from his experiences"; also, there
is reference to another young man, "good, accommodating, pleasant but
fearfully green." This young person would become the "Interrogation