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Twain's breezy, hail-fellow-well-met manner, combined with his dry humor, insured him a welcome at all the camps; he was a man who would "pass the time of day" and take a friendly drink with any man upon the road. Twain, he told me, and a man with whom he was traveling on one occasion, lost their mules.
He was one of the finest wits and remarkable humorists of his time. Wit and humor were with him spontaneous, and he bubbled over with them. Mark Twain's faculties in that line were more labored and had to be worked out. Doctor Twichell often furnished in the rough the jewels which afterwards in Mark Twain's workshop became perfect gems.
And if it does, Skinner why, the sooner I start the sooner I can get back." Mr. Skinner went out mystified. As Mark Twain's friend, Mr. Ballou, remarked about the coffee, Cappy Ricks was a little too "technical" for him.
The nautical accuracy of these tales of the sea could scarcely have been attained by a "landlubber". It has much practical significance, then, that Cooper chose material which he knew intimately and which gripped his own interest. His success came like Thackeray's and Stevenson's and Mark Twain's without his having to reach to the other side of the world after his material.
He was the author of many epigrams and curt aphorisms which have become stock phrases in conversation, quoted in all classes of society wherever the English language is spoken. His phrasing is unpretentious, even homely, wearing none of the polished brilliancy of La Rochefoucauld or Bernard Shaw; but Mark Twain's sayings "stick" because they are rooted in shrewdness and hard commonsense.
Howells, expressing itself as occasion demanded in the friendliest criticism, had a subduing influence upon Mark Twain's tendency, as a humorist, to extravagance and headlong exaggeration. In time he left the field of carpet-bag observation the humorous depicting of things seen from the rear of an observation car, so to speak and turned to fiction.
At first they talked a little of birds, and then were dumb, so dumb that the invisible creatures of the woods consulted together audibly. Lord Dennis broke that silence. "This place," he said, "always reminds me of Mark Twain's writings can't tell why, unless it's the ever-greenness. I like the evergreen philosophers, Twain and Meredith.
Clemens forthwith sent the first instalment of that marvelous series of river chapters which rank to-day among the very best of his work. As pictures of the vanished Mississippi life they are so real, so convincing, so full of charm that they can never grow old. As long as any one reads of the Mississippi they will look up those chapters of Mark Twain's piloting days.
In 'Le Figaro', at the time of Mark Twain's death, this fundamental difference in taste once more comes to light: "It is as difficult for a Frenchman to understand Mark Twain as for a North American to admire La Fontaine.
The cost of passage was $1.200, and the "Alta" hesitated, but Colonel McComb, already mentioned, assured his associates that the investment would be sound. The "Alta" wrote, accepting Mark Twain's proposal, and agreed to pay twenty dollars each for letters. Clemens hurried to New York to secure a berth, fearing the passenger-list might be full.
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