lumn."

There was a general laugh. The bill was made out at that figure, and he
took it to the business office for payment.

"The cashier didn't faint," he wrote, many years later, "but he came
rather near it. He sent for the proprietors, and they only laughed in
their jolly fashion, and said it was a robbery, but 'no matter, pay it.
It's all right.' The best men that ever owned a newspaper."--["My Debut
as a Literary Person."--Collected works.]--Though inferior to the
descriptive writing which a year later would give him a world-wide fame,
the Sandwich Island letters added greatly to his prestige on the Pacific
coast. They were convincing, informing; tersely--even
eloquently--descriptive, with a vein of humor adapted to their audience.
Yet to read them now, in the fine nonpareil type in which they were set,
is such a wearying task that one can only marvel at their popularity.
They were not brilliant literature, by our standards to-day. Their humor
is usually of a muscular kind, varied with grotesque exaggerations; the
literary quality is pretty attenuated. Here and there are attempts at
verse. He had a fashion in those days of combining two or more poems
with distracting, sometimes amusing, effect. Examples of these
dislocations occur in the Union letters; a single stanza will present the
general idea:

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,

The turf with their bayonets turning,
And his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold,
And our lanterns dimly burning.

Only a trifling portion of the letters found their way into his Sandwich
Island chapters of 'Roughing It', five years later. They do, however,
reveal a sort of transition stage between the riotous florescence of the
Comstock and the mellowness of his later style. He was learning to see
things with better eyes, from a better point of view. It is not
difficult to believe that this literary change of heart was in no small
measure due to the influence of Anson Burlingame.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. 1, Part
1, 1835-1866, by Albert Bigelow Paine

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY, ***

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