r system,
not to say the universe. He came first with "A True Story," one of
those noble pieces of humanity with which the South has atoned
chiefly, if not solely, through him for all its despite to the
negro.

Clemens had long aspired to appear in the Atlantic, but such was his own
rating of his literature that he hardly hoped to qualify for its pages.
Twichell remembers his "mingled astonishment and triumph" when he was
invited to send something to the magazine.

He was obliged to "send something" once or twice before the acceptance of
"A True Story," the narrative of Auntie Cord, and even this acceptance
brought with it the return of a fable which had accompanied it, with the
explanation that a fable like that would disqualify the magazine for
every denominational reader, though Howells hastened to express his own
joy in it, having been particularly touched by the author's reference to
Sisyphus and Atlas as ancestors of the tumble-bug. The "True Story," he
said, with its "realest king of black talk," won him, and a few days
later he wrote again: "This little story delights me more and more. I
wish you had about forty of 'em."

And so, modestly enough, as became him, for the story was of the
simplest, most unpretentious sort, Mark Twain entered into the school of
the elect.

In his letter to Howells, accompanying the MS., the author said:

I inclose also "A True Story," which has no humor in it. You can
pay as lightly as you choose for that if you want it, for it is
rather out of my line. I have not altered the old colored woman's
story, except to begin it at the beginning, instead of the middle,
as she did--and traveled both ways.

Howells in his Recollections tells of the business anxiety in the
Atlantic office in the effort to estimate the story's pecuniary value.
Clemens and Harte had raised literary rates enormously; the latter was
reputed to have received as much as five cents a word from affluent
newspapers! But the Atlantic was poor, and when sixty dollars was
finally decided upon for the three pages (about two and a half cents a
word) the rate was regarded as handsome--without precedent in Atlantic
history. Howells adds that as much as forty times this amount was
sometimes offered to Mark Twain in later years. Even in '74 he had
received a much higher rate than that offered by the Atlantic,--but no
acceptance, then, or later, ever made him happier, or seemed more ric