ppening on a trip of that kind, and Mark Twain's old note-books are
full of the real incidents that we find changed but little in the book.
If the adventures of Jack, Dan, and the Doctor are embroidered here and
there, the truth is always there, too.

Yet the old note-books have a very intimate interest of their own. It is
curious to be looking through them to-day, trying to realize that those
penciled memoranda were the fresh first impressions that would presently
grow into the world's most delightful book of travel; that they were set
down in the very midst of that historic little company that frolicked
through Italy and climbed wearily the arid Syrian hills.

It required five months for the "Quaker City" to make the circuit of the
Mediterranean and return to New York. Mark Twain in that time
contributed fifty two or three letters to the "Alta California" and six
to the "New York Tribune," or an average of nearly three a week--a vast
amount of labor to be done in the midst of sight-seeing. And what
letters of travel they were! The most remarkable that had been written
up to that time. Vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry,
they came as a revelation to a public weary of the tiresome descriptive
drivel of that day. They preached a new gospel in travel literature--the
gospel of seeing honestly and speaking frankly--a gospel that Mark Twain
would continue to preach during the rest of his career.

Furthermore, the letters showed a great literary growth in their author.
No doubt the cultivated associations of the ship, the afternoon reading
aloud of his work, and Mrs. Fairbanks's advice had much to do with this.
But we may believe, also, that the author's close study of the King James
version of the Old Testament during the weeks of travel through Palestine
exerted a powerful influence upon his style. The man who had recited
"The Burial of Moses" to Joe Goodman, with so much feeling, could not
fail to be mastered by the simple yet stately Bible phrase and imagery.
Many of the fine descriptive passages in "The Innocents Abroad" have
something almost Biblical in their phrasing. The writer of this memoir
heard in childhood "The Innocents Abroad" read aloud, and has never
forgotten the poetic spell that fell upon him as he listened to a
paragraph written of Tangier:

"Here is a crumbled wall that was old when Columbus discovered
America; old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the
Middle A