he lack of that halo perhaps which caused the new book
never quite to rank with its great forerunner in public favor. There
could hardly be any other reason. It presented a fresher theme; it
abounded in humor; technically, it was better written; seemingly it
had all the elements of popularity and of permanence. It did, in fact,
possess these qualities, but its sales, except during the earlier months
of its canvass, never quite equaled those of The Innocents Abroad.

'Roughing It' was accepted by the public for just what it was and is,
a great picture of the Overland Pioneer days--a marvelous picture of
frontier aspects at a time when the frontier itself, even with its
hardships and its tragedies, was little more than a vast primal joke;
when all frontiersmen were obliged to be laughing philosophers in order
to survive the stress of its warfares.

A word here about this Western humor: It is a distinct product. It grew
out of a distinct condition--the battle with the frontier. The fight was
so desperate, to take it seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that
they might not weep; men, when they could no longer swear. "Western
humor" was the result. It is the freshest, wildest humor in the world,
but there is tragedy behind it.

'Roughing It' presented the picture of those early conditions with the
startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which, in effect, it
was. It was not accurate history, even of the author's own adventures.
It was true in its aspects, rather than in its details. The greater
artist disregards the truth of detail to render more strikingly a phase
or a condition, to produce an atmosphere, to reconstruct a vanished
time. This was what Mark Twain did in 'Roughing It'. He told the story
of overland travel and the frontier, for his own and future generations,
in what is essentially a picaresque novel, a work of unperishing
fiction, founded on fact.

The sales of 'Roughing It' during the first three months aggregated
nearly forty thousand copies, and the author was lavishly elate
accordingly. To Orion (who had already closed his career with Bliss, by
exercise of those hereditary eccentricities through which he so often
came to grief) he gave $1,000 out of the first royalty check, in
acknowledgment of the memorandum book and other data which Orion had
supplied. Clemens believed the new book would sell one hundred thousand
copies within the year; but the sale diminished presently, and at the
end of