asking if he would do Mark a great favor by
printing something he had written, which he did not care to entrust to
the ordinary printer. Wood replied that he would be glad to oblige.
On April 3, 1882, Mark sent the manuscript:

"I enclose the original of 1603 [sic] as you suggest. I am afraid there
are errors in it, also, heedlessness in antiquated spelling--e's stuck on
often at end of words where they are not strickly necessary, etc.....
I would go through the manuscript but I am too much driven just now, and
it is not important anyway. I wish you would do me the kindness to make
any and all corrections that suggest themselves to you.

"Sincerely yours,
"S. L. Clemens."

Charles Erskine Scott Wood recalled in a foreword, which he wrote for the
limited edition of 1601 issued by the Grabhorn Press, how he felt when he
first saw the original manuscript. "When I read it," writes Wood,
"I felt that the character of it would be carried a little better by a
printing which pretended to the eye that it was contemporaneous with the
pretended 'conversation.'

"I wrote Mark that for literary effect I thought there should be a
species of forgery, though of course there was no effort to actually
deceive a scholar. Mark answered that I might do as I liked;--that his
only object was to secure a number of copies, as the demand for it was
becoming burdensome, but he would be very grateful for any interest I
brought to the doing.

"Well, Tucker [foreman of the printing shop] and I soaked some handmade
linen paper in weak coffee, put it as a wet bundle into a warm room to
mildew, dried it to a dampness approved by Tucker and he printed the
'copy' on a hand press. I had special punches cut for such Elizabethan
abbreviations as the a, e, o and u, when followed by m or n--and for the
(commonly and stupidly pronounced ye).

"The only editing I did was as to the spelling and a few old English
words introduced. The spelling, if I remember correctly, is mine, but
the text is exactly as written by Mark. I wrote asking his view of
making the spelling of the period and he was enthusiastic--telling me to
do whatever I thought best and he was greatly pleased with the result."

Thus was printed in a de luxe edition of fifty copies the most curious
masterpiece of American humor, at one of America's most dignified
institutions, the United States Military