AFRAID OF MARK TWAIN.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 8793, 3 December 1906, Page 2

AFRAID OF MARK TWAIN.

"SUSPECTED 53 OF 'HUMOUR. Some amusing excerpts from the autobiography of Mark Twain are contained in the current number of the " North American Review." Mr Clemens, we are told, began 1 to write his autobiography many years ago, and ooatiaueß to add to it day by day. He has written a quarter 'of a million words, but only portions of the work are to be published during his lifetime. Mr Clemens recounts the circumstances of a well-known anecdote of the humorisfc. " Nine years, ago/ he says, "when we were living in Tedworth Square, London, a report was cabled to' the American journals that 1 was dying. I was not the one. It was another Clemens, a cousin, of mme — l>r J. Ross Clemens, now of *St Louis — who Avas due to die, but presently efecaped, by some chicanery or other characteristic of the tribe of Clemens. The London representatives of the American papers began to flock in, with American, cables in" their hands, to inquire into my condition. " There was nothing the matter with me, and each in his turn was astonished, and disappointed, to find me reading and smoking in my study, and worth next to nothing as a text for trans-Atlantic news. On© of these men was a gentle and kindly and grave and sympathetic Irishman, who hid his sorrow the best he could, and tried to look glad, and told me that hie paper, the ' Evening Sun,' had cabled him that it was reported in New York that I was d»ad. What should he cable in reply ? I said : ' Say the report is greatly exaggerated.' "He never smiled, but went solemnly away and sent the cable in those words. The remark hit the world pleasantly, and to this A day it keeps turning up now and then in the newspapers when people have occasion to disccunt exaggerations. " The next man was also an Irishman. He had his New York cablegram in his hand— from the New York ' World ' — and he was so evidently trying to get around that cable with invented softness and palliations that my curiosity was aroused and I wanted to see what it did really say. So when occasion offered I slipped it out ot his hand. It said : "■'lf Mark Twain dyinsr, esrsd 500 words. If dead, send 1000/" "THE INNOCENTS ABROAD." Mark; Twain wrote "The Innocents Abroad " to order for a firm of publishers j who, he tells us, were staid old fossils, and, after reading it, were afraid of it. The majority of them, indeed, he characteristically remarks, " were of opinion that there were places in it of a humorous character. Bliss, one of the partners, said the house had never published a book that had a suspicion like that attaching to it, and that the directors were afraid that a departure of this kind would seriously injure the house's reputation ; that he was tied hand and foot, and was hot allowed to carry out 'his contract." Finally Mr Clemens threatened legal proceedings, and tlie book was published. t ■ , "In nine months the book took the publishing house out of debt, and advanced its stock from twenty-five, to two hundred, and left seventy .thousand dollars profit to the good. lib was Bliss who told me this — in 1869 — but, if it was true, it was the first time that he had told the truth in. sixty-five years. He was born in 1804."