the use of medicines."

Clemens was willing to admit that Mrs. Eddy and her book had benefited
humanity, but he could not resist the fun-making which certain of
her formulas and her phrasing invited. The delightful humor of the
Cosmopolitan article awoke a general laugh, in which even devout
Christian Scientists were inclined to join.--[It was so popular that
John Brisben Walker voluntarily added a check for two hundred dollars
to the eight hundred dollars already paid.]--Nothing that he ever did
exhibits more happily that peculiar literary gift upon which his fame
rests.

But there is another story of this period that will live when most of
those others mentioned are but little remembered. It is the story of
"The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg." This is a tale that in its own way
takes its place with the half-dozen great English short stories of the
world-with such stories as "The Fall of the House of Usher," by Poe;
"The Luck of Roaring Camp," by Harte; "The Man Who Would be King," by
Kipling; and "The Man Without a Country," by Hale. As a study of
the human soul, its flimsy pretensions and its pitiful frailties,
it outranks all the rest. In it Mark Twain's pessimistic philosophy
concerning the "human animal" found a free and moral vent. Whatever his
contempt for a thing, he was always amused at it; and in this tale we
can imagine him a gigantic Pantagruel dangling a ridiculous manikin,
throwing himself back and roaring out his great bursting guffaws at its
pitiful antics. The temptation and the downfall of a whole town was a
colossal idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally and sardonically
worked out.

Human weakness and rotten moral force were never stripped so bare or so
mercilessly jeered at in the marketplace. For once Mark Twain could hug
himself with glee in derision of self-righteousness, knowing that the
world would laugh with him, and that none would be so bold as to gainsay
his mockery. Probably no one but Mark Twain ever conceived the idea
of demoralizing a whole community--of making its "nineteen leading
citizens" ridiculous by leading them into a cheap, glittering
temptation, and having them yield and openly perjure themselves at the
very moment when their boasted incorruptibility was to amaze the world.
And it is all wonderfully done. The mechanism of the story is perfect,
the drama of it is complete. The exposure of the nineteen citizens
in the very sanctity of the church itself, and by the man t