re. I put a lot of it there
and Beard put the rest.

What publisher of mine in Hartford had an eye for the pennies, and he
saved them. He did not waste any on the illustrations. He had a
very good artist--Williams--who had never taken a lesson in drawing.
Everything he did was original. The publisher hired the cheapest
wood-engraver he could find, and in my early books you can see a trace
of that. You can see that if Williams had had a chance he would have
made some very good pictures. He had a good heart and good intentions.

I had a character in the first book he illustrated--The Innocents
Abroad. That was a boy seventeen or eighteen years old--Jack Van
Nostrand--a New York boy, who, to my mind, was a very remarkable
creature. He and I tried to get Williams to understand that boy, and
make a picture of Jack that would be worthy of Jack.

Jack was a most singular combination. He was born and reared in New York
here. He was as delicate in his feelings, as clean and pure and refined
in his feelings as any lovely girl that ever was, but whenever he
expressed a feeling he did it in Bowery slang, and it was a most curious
combination--that delicacy of his and that apparent coarseness. There
was no coarseness inside of Jack at all, and Jack, in the course of
seventeen or eighteen years, had acquired a capital of ignorance that
was marvellous--ignorance of various things, not of all things. For
instance, he did not know anything about the Bible. He had never been
in Sunday-school. Jack got more out of the Holy Land than anybody else,
because the others knew what they were expecting, but it was a land of
surprises to him.

I said in the book that we found him watching a turtle on a log, stoning
that turtle, and he was stoning that turtle because he had read that
"The song of the turtle was heard in the land," and this turtle wouldn't
sing. It sounded absurd, but it was charged on Jack as a fact, and as
he went along through that country he had a proper foil in an old
rebel colonel, who was superintendent and head engineer in a large
Sunday-school in Wheeling, West Virginia. That man was full of
enthusiasm wherever he went, and would stand and deliver himself of
speeches, and Jack would listen to those speeches of the colonel and
wonder.

Jack had made a trip as a child almost across this continent in the
first overland stage-coach. That man's name who ran that line of
stages--well, I declare that name is gone. Well, name