FOREWORD

never wrote anything suggestive at all. What he said was
straight from the shoulder. He had been a printer, a pilot,
a California miner. He had fed on strong meat, he had a
robust imagination and a better command of Anglo-Saxon
English than any other man of his time, hut when he "let
himself go," as he did two or three times, it was for
strictly private consumption. The now famous "1601''
was written for the amusement of no other person than
the Reverend Joseph Twichcll, of Hartford. Twichell
sent it to John Hay, who had it put in type and a few
copies struck off. Other editions followed. Mark Twain's
statement that he once submitted it to an editor was
one of his jokes. He had not the least desire to present
publicly anything of the sort. He had a kind of chivalry
which prevented his offering to the readers of another
family that which he would not wish offered to his own,
A speech which he delivered to the Stomach Club in
Paris, another of his excursions into the foibidden land,
was never put into type and is not likely to be.. A few
squibs and verses complete the tale of his tiaiu.^ressinns,
if that is the word.

The manuscripts printed by Mark Twain after his
wife's death—What Is Man and (laplain StormjirhVs
Visit to Heaven—were neither very important nor veiy
offending to the orthodox mind, though they could have
been, say, twenty-five years earlier. The M \\lcr\tnn
Stranger, published by Mark Twain's literary executors—
his daughter and the writer of these lines.....was not com-
pleted in Mrs. Clemens' lifetime. That, she would have
recognized its great literary value is certain, but it con-
tained the sort of thing which in an earlier day ;*he. had
found objectionable.

A good while ago I wrote a biography of Maik Twain,
In that book I drew briefly here and there upon the set
of journals, diaries, or commonplace books which through
a period of nearly fifty years he had kept ami, what i:;