ct product. It grew
out of a distinct condition--the battle with the frontier. The fight was
so desperate, to take it seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that
they might not weep; men, when they could no longer swear. "Western
humor" was the result. It is the freshest, wildest humor in the world,
but there is tragedy behind it.

'Roughing It' presented the picture of those early conditions with the
startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which, in effect, it was.
It was not accurate history, even of the author's own adventures. It was
true in its aspects, rather than in its details. The greater artist
disregards the truth of detail to render more strikingly a phase or a
condition, to produce an atmosphere, to reconstruct a vanished time. This
was what Mark Twain did in 'Roughing It'. He told the story of overland
travel and the frontier, for his own and future generations, in what is
essentially a picaresque novel, a work of unperishing fiction, founded on
fact.

The sales of 'Roughing It' during the first three months aggregated
nearly forty thousand copies, and the author was lavishly elate
accordingly. To Orion (who had already closed his career with Bliss, by
exercise of those hereditary eccentricities through which he so often
came to grief) he gave $1,000 out of the first royalty check, in
acknowledgment of the memorandum book and other data which Orion had
supplied. Clemens believed the new book would sell one hundred thousand
copies within the year; but the sale diminished presently, and at the end
of the first year it was considerably behind the Innocents for the same
period. As already stated, it required ten years for Roughing It to
reach the one-hundred-thousand mark, which the Innocents reached in
three.

LXXXV

A BIRTH, A DEATH, AND A VOYAGE

The year 1872 was an eventful one in Mark Twain's life. At Elmira, on
March 19th, his second child, a little girl, whom they named Susan
Olivia, was born. On June 2d, in the new home in Hartford, to which they
had recently moved, his first child, a little boy, Langdon, died. He had
never been strong, his wavering life had often been uncertain, always
more of the spirit than the body, and in Elmira he contracted a heavy
cold, or perhaps it was diphtheria from the beginning. In later years,
whenever Clemens spoke of the little fellow, he never failed to accuse
himself of having been the cause of the child's death. It was Mrs.
Clemens's custom