ts arguments against
international copyright delivered ready made, and--Congress isn't very
strong. I put the real-estate view of the case before one of the
Senators.

"He said: 'Suppose a man has written a book that will live for ever?'

"I said: 'Neither you nor I will ever live to see that man, but we'll
assume it. What then?'

"He said: 'I want to protect the world against that man's heirs and
assigns, working under your theory.'

"I said: 'You think that all the world has no commercial sense. The book
that will live for ever can't be artificially kept up at inflated
prices. There will always be very expensive editions of it and cheap
ones issuing side by side.'

"Take the case of Sir Walter Scott's novels," Mark Twain continued,
turning to me. "When the copyright notes protected them, I bought
editions as expensive as I could afford, because I liked them. At the
same time the same firm were selling editions that a cat might buy. They
had their real estate, and not being fools, recognised that one portion
of the plot could be worked as a gold mine, another as a vegetable
garden, and another as a marble quarry. Do you see?"

What I saw with the greatest clearness was Mark Twain being forced to
fight for the simple proposition that a man has as much right to the
work of his brains (think of the heresy of it!) as to the labour of his
hands. When the old lion roars, the young whelps growl. I growled
assentingly, and the talk ran on from books in general to his own in
particular.

Growing bold, and feeling that I had a few hundred thousand folk at my
back, I demanded whether Tom Sawyer married Judge Thatcher's daughter
and whether we were ever going to hear of Tom Sawyer as a man.

"I haven't decided," quoth Mark Twain, getting up, filling his pipe, and
walking up and down the room in his slippers. "I have a notion of
writing the sequel to _Tom Sawyer_ in two ways. In one I would make him
rise to great honour and go to Congress, and in the other I should hang
him. Then the friends and enemies of the book could take their choice."

Here I lost my reverence completely, and protested against any theory of
the sort, because, to me at least, Tom Sawyer was real.

"Oh, he _is_ real," said Mark Twain. "He's all the boy that I have known
or recollect; but that would be a good way of ending the book"; then,
turning round, "because, when you come to think of it, neither
religion, training, nor education avails anything