ot altogether
fancy the idea of being suddenly set down in a strange house, in a
strange land, even though it would be within hailing distance of Sam and
his new wife. Perhaps the Fredonia funerals were sufficiently numerous
and attractive, for she soon became attached to the place, and entered
into the spirit of the life there, joining its temperance crusades, and
the like, with zest and enjoyment.

Onion remained in St. Louis, but when Bliss established a paper called
The Publisher, and wanted an editor, he was chosen for the place,
originally offered to his brother; the latter, writing to Onion, said:

If you take the place with an air of perfect confidence in yourself,
never once letting anything show in your bearing but a quiet, modest,
entire, and perfect confidence in your ability to do pretty much
anything in the world, Bliss will think you are the very man he needs;
but don't show any shadow of timidity or unsoldierly diffidence, for
that sort of thing is fatal to advancement.

I warn you thus because you are naturally given to knocking your pot
over in this way, when a little judicious conduct would make it boil.

LXXXI. SOME FURTHER LITERARY MATTERS

Meantime The Innocents Abroad had continued to prosper. Its author
ranked mainly as a humorist, but of such colossal proportions that his
contemporaries had seemed to dwindle; the mighty note of the "Frog of
Calaveras" had dwarfed a score of smaller peepers. At the end of a year
from its date of publication the book had sold up to 67,000 and was
continuing at the rate of several thousand monthly.

"You are running it in staving, tiptop, first-class style," Clemens
wrote to Bliss. "On the average ten people a day come and hunt me up
to tell me I am a benefactor! I guess that is a part of the program we
didn't expect, in the first place."

Apparently the book appealed to readers of every grade. One hundred and
fifteen copies were in constant circulation at the Mercantile Library,
in New York, while in the most remote cabins of America it was read and
quoted. Jack Van Nostrand, making a long horseback tour of Colorado,
wrote:

I stopped a week ago in a ranch but a hundred miles from nowhere. The
occupant had just two books: the Bible and The Innocents Abroad--the
former in good repair.

Across the ocean the book had found no less favor, and was being
translated into many and strange tongues. By what seems now some
veritable magic its author's fame h