cover its pristine glory--now that Mark Twain has poured over
Abelard the vials of his wrath.

Those who know only the Mark Twain of the latter years, with his deep,
underlying seriousness, his grim irony, and his passion for justice and
truth, find difficulty in realizing that, in his earlier days, the joker
and the buffoon were almost solely in evidence. In answer to a query of
mine as to the reason for the serious spirit that crept into and gave
carrying power to his humour, Mr. Clemens frankly replied: "I never
wrote a serious word until after I married Mrs. Clemens. She is solely
responsible--to her should go the credit--for any deeply serious or
moral influence my subsequent work may exert. After my marriage, she
edited everything I wrote. And what is more--she not only edited my
works, she edited ME! After I had written some side-splitting story,
something beginning seriously and ending in preposterous anti-climax,
she would say to me: 'You have a true lesson, a serious meaning to
impart here. Don't give way to your invincible temptation to destroy
the good effect of your story by some extravagantly comic absurdity.
Be yourself! Speak out your real thoughts as humorously as you please,
but--without farcical commentary. Don't destroy your purpose with an
ill-timed joke.' I learned from her that the only right thing was to
get in my serious meaning always, to treat my audience fairly, to let
them really feel the underlying moral that gave body and essence to my
jest."

The quality with which Mark Twain invests his disquisitions upon morals,
upon conscience, upon human foibles and failings, is the charm of the
humorist always--never the grimness of the moralist or the coldness of
the philosopher. He observes all human traits, whether of moral
sophistry or ethical casuistry, with the genial sympathy of a lover of
his kind irradiated with the riant comprehension of the humorist. And
yet at times there creeps into his tone a note of sincere and manly
pathos, unmistakable, irresistible. One has only to read the beautiful,
tender tale of the blue jay in 'A Tramp Abroad' to know the beauty and
the depth of his feeling for nature and her creatures, his sense of
kinship with his brothers of the animal kingdom.

In our first joyous and headlong interest in the narrative of
'Huckleberry Finn', its rapid succession of continuously arresting
incidents, its omnipresent yet never intrusive humour, the deeper
signif