because it represents the wonders of Europe as seen by an unawed Philistine with no background; he has his limitations, but at any rate his opinions of things are formed after he sees them, and not before. He looks with his own eyes, not through the colored spectacles of convention. "Roughing It" is a still greater book, because in the writing of that no background was necessary, no limitations are felt; we know that his testimony is true. The humor of Mark Twain is American in its point of view, in its love of the incongruous, in its fondness for colossal exaggeration; but it is universal in that it deals not with passing phenomena, or with matters of temporary interest, but with essential and permanent aspects of human na

ture.

As an artist Mark Twain already seems great. The funniest man in the world, he was at the same time a profoundly serious artist, a faithful servant of his literary ideals. The environment, the characterization, and the humanity in "Tom Sawyer" remind us of the great novelists, whose characters re

main in our memory as sharply defined individuals simply because they have the touch of nature that makes the whole world kin. In other words, "Tom Sawyer" resembles. the masterpieces of fiction in being intensely local and at the same time universal. Tom Sawyer is a definite personality; but he is also eternal boyhood. In "Huckleberry Finn" we have three characters who are so different that they live in different worlds, and really speak different languages, Tom, Huck, and Jim; we have an amazingly clear presentation of life in the days of slavery; we have a marvelous moving picture of the Father of Waters; but, above all, we have a vital drama of humanity, in its nobility. and baseness, its strength and weakness, its love of truth and its love of fraud, its utter pathos and its side-splitting mirth. Like nearly all faithful pictures of the world, it is a vast tragi-comedy. What does it matter if our great American had his limitations and his excrescences? To borrow his own phrase, "There is that about the sun that makes us forget his spots.'

MA

ARK TWAIN should be doubly blessed for saving the center table from utter dullness. Do you remember that center table of the seventies? The marble top showed glossy in the subdued light that filtered through the lace curtains, and it was clammy cold even on hot days. The heavy mahogany legs were chiseled into writhing curves from which depended stern geometrical designs or possibly bunches of grapes. The Bible had the place of honor and was flanked by subscription books. In those days the house never became cluttered with the ephemeral six best sellers. The new books came a year apart, and each was meant for the center table, and it had to be so thick and heavy and emblazoned with gold that it could keep company with the bulky and high-priced Bible.

Books were bought by the pound. Sometimes the agent was a ministerial person in black clothes and a stove-pipe hat. Maiden ladies and widows, who supplemented their

specious arguments with private tales of woe, moved from one small town to another feeding upon prominent citizens. Occasionally the prospectus was unfurled by an undergraduate of a freshwater college working for the money to carry him another year.

The book-agents varied, but the book was always the same,-many pages, numerous steel engravings, curly-cue tail-pieces, platitudes, patriotism, poetry, sentimental mush. One of the most popular, still resting in many a dim sanctuary, was known as Mother, Home, and Heaven." A ponderous collection of "Poetical Gems" did not involve the publishers in any royalty entanglements. Even the "Lives of the Presidents" and

Noble Deeds of the Great and Brave" gave every evidence of having been turned out as piece-work by needy persons temporarily lacking employment on newspapers. Let us not forget the "Manual of Deportment and Social Usages," from which the wife of

any agriculturist could learn the meaning of R. S. V. P. and the form to be employed in acknowledging an invitation to a levee. Nobody really wanted these books. They were purchased because the agents knew how to sell them, and they seemed large for the price, and, besides, every well-furnished home had to keep something on the center table.

Subscription books were dry picking for boys. Also they were accessible only on the Sabbath after the weekly scouring. On week-days the boys favored an underground circulating library, named after Mr. Beadle, and the hay-mow was the chosen reading room. Let one glorious exception be made in the case of "Dr. Livingstone's Travels in Africa," a subscription book of forbidding size, but containing many pictures of darkies with rings in their noses.

Just when front-room literature seemed at its lowest ebb, so far as the American boy was concerned, along came Mark Twain. His books looked, at a distance, just like the other distended, diluted, and altogether tasteless volumes that had been used for several decades to balance the ends of the center table. The publisher knew his public, so he gave a pound of book for every fifty cents, and crowded in plenty of wood-cuts and stamped the outside with golden bouquets and put in a steel engraving of the author, with a tissue paper veil over it, and " sicked " his multitude of broken-down clergymen, maiden ladies, grass widows, and college students on to the great American public.

Can you see the boy, a Sunday morning prisoner, approach the new book with a dull sense of foreboding, expecting a dose of Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy"? Can you see him a few minutes later when he finds himself linked arm-in-arm with Mulberry Sellers or Buck Fanshaw or the convulsing idiot who wanted to know if Christopher Columbus was sure-enough dead? No wonder he curled up on the hair-cloth sofa and hugged the thing to his bosom and lost all interest in Sunday-school. 'Innocents Abroad" was the most enthralling book ever printed until " Roughing It" appeared. Then along came "The Gilded Age," "Life on the Mississippi," and "Tom Sawyer," one cap sheaf after another. While waiting for a new one we read the old ones all over again.

The new uniform edition with the polite little pages, high-art bindings, and all the boisterous wood-cuts carefully expurgated can never take the place of those lumbering subscription books. They were the early friends and helped us to get acquainted with the most amazing story-teller that ever captivated the country boys and small-town boys all over America.

While we are honoring Mark Twain as a great literary artist, a philosopher, and at teacher, let the boys of the seventies add their tribute. They knew him for his miracle of making the subscription book something to be read and not merely looked at. He converted the Front Room from a Mausoleum into a Temple of Mirth.

WHEN I joined the colony at Redding Albert Bigelow Paine told me that Mark Twain would soon build on the hill facing Lonetown-Brook Farm, and shortly after that a new house began to appear above the treetops. But it was not until the following June that it was habitable, and in the latter part of that month the announcement was made that Mark Twain would arrive upon a certain day to occupy his new home. Up to that time he had not seen a sketch or plan of the house, nor had he read any description of it. He had expressed the desire not to be bothered with the details or anything else concerning his new home, stating that he did not wish to know anything about it until he could take an easy-chair in the billiard room and light his pipe there.

Outside of the colony of literary and artistic people from New York, the people of Redding are typical Connecticut Yankees, with good old-fashioned names, familiar in

the annals of the American Revolution and subsequent history of the country, and while they are farmers and tradesmen, they are all of them well-read and educated; consequently the announcement that Mark Twain was to arrive on the afternoon train was received with joyful anticipation, and from Gallows Hill to Umpawaug they turned out to meet him, with their carriages, buckboards, and surreys decorated with flowers, old-fashioned pink roses, and pink ribbons, and filled with neatly dressed children, for by that secret wireless which was in operation long before Marconi made his modern instruments the rumor had spread that Mark Twain was very fond of little children, and that pink was his favorite color. When the famous author alighted from the train, Underwood the photographer was there, and the children were gathered to make a group for a photograph, with the white humorist upon the railroad platform. After posing for the pic

ture Mr. Clemens got into the surrey, which the ladies had beautifully decorated with dainty maidenhair ferns and pink roses, and drove to his new home, escorted by his new neighbors.

Mr. Clemens owned no automobiles, no horses, and had only one coach. The latter was presented by Mr. Langdon to Mrs. Clemens on her wedding-day. It shows the signs of age and weather, and inside is profusely decorated by the humorist's own hand, where he has scratched innumerable matches on the varnish to light his cigars. When they tried to persuade him to have a stable or a garage of his own he replied that he intended to travel on his own hind-legs. But when his daughters arrived they brought with them their horses,-old Scott" and "Sami," for their own use, both of them being saddle-horses. Miss Jean Clemens later procured a farm-horse for work, but Mr. Clemens continued to use his own "hind-legs," except when he went on long drives, or to and from the station, then he used livery horses.

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The night of his arrival they had planned, at Stormfield, to have some fireworks. I had been busy all the afternoon painting the hen-coop, and still had on my paint-daubed clothes when I met my neighbor, Mr. Lounsbury, who asked me to come and help him with the fireworks. Jumping into his rig we

rattled up the hill, and were soon knocking open the boxes of pyrotechnics, consisting principally of rockets and red fire. We started the display down by the pergola in front of the Italian villa, where I thought no one would see us. The sticks from the rockets fell in the pastures and sent the cattle and horses tearing around the fields. Our attention was so occupied with the effect of the display that we did not realize that the illumination made us plainly visible from the house, until some one stepped out on the plaza and shouted through a megaphone that Mr. Clemens wanted us both to come up and join the company in the drawing-room. There was no escape, and our embarrassment can be imagined when we discovered that we must enter the brilliantly lighted rooms in our working clothes and mingle with the people who were arrayed in full evening dress. My face and hands were blackened with powder and my clothes stiffened with that peculiar shade of red paint only to be seen on farm buildings in rural districts. Thus arrayed, I stood in the middle of the floor while my genial old friend and new neighbor proposed a toast to me.

When the workmen at last put the finishing touches upon the house built on top of Birch Spray Hill (now known to history as Stormfield), Mark Twain served a collation to them, made one of his characteristic