ck
of humor.

But, as in the early sage-brush hoaxes, he rather overdid the thing.
Readers and editors readily enough accepted it as genuine, so far as
having come from The Saturday Review; but most of them, regarded it as a
delicious bit of humor which Mark Twain himself had taken seriously,
and was therefore the one sold. This was certainly startling, and by
no means gratifying. In the next issue he undertook that saddest of all
performances with tongue or pen: he explained his joke, and insisted on
the truth of the explanation. Then he said:

If any man doubts my word now I will kill him. No, I will not kill
him; I will win his money. I will bet him twenty to one, and let
any New York publisher hold the stakes, that the statements I have
above made as to the authorship of the article in question are
entirely true.

But the Cincinnati Enquirer persisted in continuing the joke--in
"rubbing it in," as we say now. The Enquirer declared that Mark Twain
had been intensely mortified at having been so badly taken in; that his
explanation in the Galaxy was "ingenious, but unfortunately not true."
The Enquirer maintained that The Saturday Review of October 8, 1870, did
contain the article exactly as printed in the "Memoranda," and advised
Mark Twain to admit that he was sold, and say no more about it.

This was enraging. Mark Twain had his own ideas as to how far a joke
might be carried without violence, and this was a good way beyond the
limits. He denounced the Enquirer's statement as a "pitiful, deliberate
falsehood," in his anger falling into the old-time phrasing of newspaper
editorial abuse. He offered to bet them a thousand dollars in cash
that they could not prove their assertions, and asked pointedly, in
conclusion: "Will they swallow that falsehood ignominiously, or will
they send an agent to the Galaxy office? I think the Cincinnati Enquirer
must be edited by children." He promised that if they did not accept his
financial proposition he would expose them in the next issue.

The incident closed there. He was prevented, by illness in his
household, from contributing to the next issue, and the second issue
following was his final "Memoranda" installment. So the matter perished
and was forgotten. It was his last editorial hoax. Perhaps he concluded
that hoaxes in any form were dangerous playthings; they were too likely
to go off at the wrong end.

It was with the April number (1871) that he c