wn
tramp, amid the crowds and confusion of Broadway. In Elsie Leslie, he
said, he had found the embodiment of his dream, and to her he offered
homage as the only prince clothed in a divine right which was not rags
and sham--the divine right of an inborn supremacy in art.

It seems incredible to-day that, realizing the play's possibilities as
Mark Twain did, and as Belasco and Daniel Frohman must have done, they
did not complete their partial triumph by finding another child actress
to take the part of Tom Canty. Clemens urged and pleaded with them, but
perhaps the undertaking seemed too difficult--at all events they did not
find the little beggar king. Then legal complications developed.
Edward House, to whom Clemens had once given a permission to attempt
a dramatization of the play, suddenly appeared with a demand for
recognition, backed by a lawsuit against all those who had a proprietary
interest in the production. House, with his adopted Japanese daughter
Koto, during a period of rheumatism and financial depression, had made
a prolonged visit in the Clemens home and originally undertook the
dramatization as a sort of return for hospitality. He appears not to
have completed it and to have made no arrangement for its production
or to have taken any definite step until Mrs. Richardson's play was
profitably put on; whereupon his suit and injunction.

By the time a settlement of this claim had been reached the play had run
its course, and it was not revived in that form. It was brought out in
England, where it was fairly prosperous, though it seems not to have
been long continued. Variously reconstructed, it has occasionally been
played since, and always, when the parts of Tom Canty and the Prince
were separate, with great success. Why this beautiful drama should ever
be absent from the boards is one of the unexplainable things. It is a
play for all times and seasons, the difficulty of obtaining suitable
"twin" interpreters for the characters of the Prince and the Pauper
being its only drawback.

CLXXI. "A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT"

From every point of view it seemed necessary to make the 'Yankee in King
Arthur's Court' an important and pretentious publication. It was Mark
Twain's first book after a silence of five years; it was a book badly
needed by his publishing business with which to maintain its prestige
and profit; it was a book which was to come out of his maturity and
present his deduc