iser to dine with him, his young
daughter exclaimed that if it kept on like this, there soon wouldn't be
anybody left for him to become acquainted with but God! Mark said that
it seemed uncomplimentary to regard him as unacquainted in that quarter;
but of course his daughter was young, and the young always jump to
conclusions without reflection. After hearing the Kaiser's eulogy on
'Life on the Mississippi', he was astounded and touched to receive a
similar tribute, the same evening, from the portier of his
lodging-house. He loved to dwell upon this, in later years--declaring it
the most extraordinary coincidence of his life that a crowned head and a
portier, the very top of an empire and the very bottom of it, should have
expressed the very same criticism, and delivered the very same verdict,
upon one of his books, almost in the same hour and the same breath.

The German edition of his works, in six volumes, published by Lutz of
Stuttgart, in 1898, I believe, contained an introduction in which he was
hailed as the greatest humorist in the world. Among German critics he
was regarded as second only to Dickens in drastic comic situation and
depth of feeling. Robinson Crusoe was held to exhibit a limited power
of imagination in comparison with the ingenuity and inventiveness of Tom
Sawyer. At times the German critics confessed their inability to
discover the dividing line between astounding actuality and fantastic
exaggeration. The descriptions of the barbaric state of Western America
possessed an indescribable fascination for the sedate Europeans. At
times Mark Twain's bloody jests froze the laughter on their lips; and
his "revolver-humour" made their hair stand on end. Though realizing
that the scenes and events described in 'Tom Sawyer', 'Huckleberry
Finn', 'Roughing It', and 'Life on the Mississippi' could not have been
duplicated in Europe, the German critics revelled in them none the less
that "such adventures were possible only in America--perhaps only in the
fancy of an American!" "Mark Twain's greatest strength," says Von
Thaler, "lies in the little sketches, the literary snap-shots. The
shorter his work, the more striking it is. He draws directly from life.
No other writer has learned to know so many different varieties of men
and of circumstances, so many strange examples of the Genus Homo, as he;
no other has taken so strange a course of development." The deeper
elements of Mark Twain's humour did n