nion than that--none that has been more fully justified.

Clemens was delighted. He wrote concerning a point here and there, one
inquiry referring to the use of a certain strong word. Howells's reply
left no doubt:

I'd have that swearing out in an instant. I suppose I didn't notice
it because the location was so familiar to my Western sense, and so
exactly the thing Huck would say, but it won't do for children.

It was in the last chapter, where Huck relates to Tom the sorrows of
reform and tells how they comb him "all to thunder." In the original,
"They comb me all to hell," says Huck; which statement, one must agree,
is more effective, more the thing Huck would be likely to say.

Clemens's acknowledgment of the correction was characteristic:

Mrs. Clemens received the mail this morning, and the next minute she
lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her
tongue, "Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?" Then I had
to miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to
her. Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape
with my scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go
a little one-sided?

The Clemens family did not, go to Elmira that year. The children's
health seemed to require the sea-shore, and in August they went to
Bateman's Point, Rhode Island, where Clemens most of the time played
tenpins in an alley that had gone to ruin. The balls would not stay on
the track; the pins stood at inebriate angles. It reminded him of the
old billiard-tables of Western mining-camps, and furnished the same
uncertainty of play. It was his delight, after he had become accustomed
to the eccentricities of the alley, to invite in a stranger and watch
his suffering and his frantic effort to score.

CII. "SKETCHES NEW AND OLD"

The long-delayed book of Sketches, contracted for five years before, was
issued that autumn. "The Jumping Frog," which he had bought from Webb,
was included in the volume, also the French translation which Madame
Blanc (Th. Bentzon) had made for the Revue des deux mondes, with Mark
Twain's retranslation back into English, a most astonishing performance
in its literal rendition of the French idiom. One example will suffice
here. It is where the stranger says to Smiley, "I don't see no p'ints
about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."

Says the French, retranslated:

"Eh bien! I no