range from fifteen to twenty-seven years old, and
the oldest reaching back to thirty-five and forty.

By the terms of my contract my publishers had to account to me for,
50,000 volumes per year for five years, and pay me for them whether they
sold them or not. It is at this point that you gentlemen come in, for
it was your business to unload 250,000 volumes upon the public in five
years if you possibly could. Have you succeeded? Yes, you have--and
more. For in four years, with a year still to spare, you have sold the
250,000 volumes, and 240,000 besides.

Your sales have increased each year. In the first year you sold 90,328;
in the second year, 104,851; in the third, 133,975; in the fourth
year--which was last year--you sold 160,000. The aggregate for the four
years is 500,000 volumes, lacking 11,000.

Of the oldest book, The Innocents Abroad,--now forty years old--you
sold upward of 46,000 copies in the four years; of Roughing It--now
thirty-eight years old; I think--you sold 40,334; of Tom Sawyer, 41,000.
And so on.

And there is one thing that is peculiarly gratifying to me: the Personal
Recollections of Joan of Arc is a serious book; I wrote it for love, and
never expected it to sell, but you have pleasantly disappointed me in
that matter. In your hands its sale has increased each year. In 1904 you
sold 1726 copies; in 1905, 2445; in 1906, 5381; and last year, 6574.

"MARK TWAIN'S FIRST APPEARANCE"

On October 5, 1906, Mr. Clemens, following a musical recital by
his daughter in Norfolk, Conn., addressed her audience on the
subject of stage-fright. He thanked the people for making
things as easy as possible for his daughter's American debut as
a contralto, and then told of his first experience before the
public.

My heart goes out in sympathy to any one who is making his first
appearance before an audience of human beings. By a direct process of
memory I go back forty years, less one month--for I'm older than I look.

I recall the occasion of my first appearance. San Francisco knew me
then only as a reporter, and I was to make my bow to San Francisco as
a lecturer. I knew that nothing short of compulsion would get me to the
theatre. So I bound myself by a hard-and-fast contract so that I could
not escape. I got to the theatre forty-five minutes before the hour set
for the lecture. My knees were shaking so that I didn't know whether I
cou