ture of it would suffer him. Then, when
he was through with the welcoming of this casual and unexpected guest, he
would go back to the company he was entertaining, and keep on with what
he had been talking about. He observed this manner in the construction
of his sentences, and the arrangement of his chapters, and the ordering
or disordering of his compilations.--[Nowhere is this characteristic
better found than in Twain's 'Autobiography,' it was not a "style" it was
unselfconscious thought D.W.]--I helped him with a Library of Humor,
which he once edited, and when I had done my work according to tradition,
with authors, times, and topics carefully studied in due sequence, he
tore it all apart, and "chucked" the pieces in wherever the fancy, for
them took him at the moment. He was right: we were not making a
text-book, but a book for the pleasure rather than the instruction of the
reader, and he did not see why the principle on which he built his
travels and reminiscences and tales and novels should not apply to it;
and I do not now see, either, though at the time it confounded me. On
minor points he was, beyond any author I have known, without favorite
phrases or pet words. He utterly despised the avoidance of repetitions
out of fear of tautology. If a word served his turn better than a
substitute, he would use it as many times in a page as he chose.

V.

At that time I had become editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I had
allegiances belonging to the conduct of what was and still remains the
most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals. When Clemens began to
write for it he came willingly under its rules, for with all his
wilfulness there never was a more biddable man in things you could show
him a reason for. He never made the least of that trouble which so
abounds for the hapless editor from narrower-minded contributors. If you
wanted a thing changed, very good, he changed it; if you suggested that a
word or a sentence or a paragraph had better be struck out, very good, he
struck it out. His proof-sheets came back each a veritable "mush of
concession," as Emerson says. Now and then he would try a little
stronger language than 'The Atlantic' had stomach for, and once when I
sent him a proof I made him observe that I had left out the profanity. He
wrote back: "Mrs. Clemens opened that proof, and lit into the room with
danger in her eye. What profanity? You see, when I read the manuscript
to her I skipped that