f the St. Louis Mirror, had seen this famous tour
de force circulated in the early 80's in galley-proof form; he first
learned from Eugene Field that it was from the pen of Mark Twain.

"Many people," said Reedy, "thought the thing was done by Field and
attributed, as a joke, to Mark Twain. Field had a perfect genius for
that sort of thing, as many extant specimens attest, and for that sort
of practical joke; but to my thinking the humor of the piece is too
mellow--not hard and bright and bitter--to be Eugene Field's." Reedy's
opinion hits off the fundamental difference between these two great
humorists; one half suspects that Reedy was thinking of Field's French
Crisis.

But Twain first claimed his bantling from the fog of anonymity in 1906,
in a letter addressed to Mr. Charles Orr, librarian of Case Library,
Cleveland. Said Clemens, in the course of his letter, dated July 30,
1906, from Dublin, New Hampshire:

"The title of the piece is 1601. The piece is a supposititious
conversation which takes place in Queen Elizabeth's closet in that year,
between the Queen, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Duchess
of Bilgewater, and one or two others, and is not, as John Hay mistakenly
supposes, a serious effort to bring back our literature and philosophy
to the sober and chaste Elizabeth's time; if there is a decent word
findable in it, it is because I overlooked it. I hasten to assure you
that it is not printed in my published writings."

TWITTING THE REV. JOSEPH TWICHELL

The circumstances of how 1601 came to be written have since been
officially revealed by Albert Bigelow Paine in 'Mark Twain, A
Bibliography' (1912), and in the publication of Mark Twain's Notebook
(1935).

1601 was written during the summer of 1876 when the Clemens family had
retreated to Quarry Farm in Elmira County, New York. Here Mrs. Clemens
enjoyed relief from social obligations, the children romped over the
countryside, and Mark retired to his octagonal study, which, perched
high on the hill, looked out upon the valley below. It was in the famous
summer of 1876, too, that Mark was putting the finishing touches to Tom
Sawyer. Before the close of the same year he had already begun work
on 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', published in 1885. It is
interesting to note the use of the title, the "Duke of Bilgewater,"
in Huck Finn when the "Duchess of Bilgewater" had already made her
appearance in 1601. Sandwiched between his two grea