have written at least honestly, whether wisely or not." The books are six chapters of autobiography. _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_ are recollections of that boyhood by the river after so long a time had elapsed that the day-dreams and boyish imaginings were recorded as real happenings; _Life on the Mississippi_ records that romantic adventure of his young manhood as he recalled it in later days when the old piloting era had vanished like a dream of boyhood; _The Gilded Age_, a book of glorious fragments, has in it his uncle James Lampton drawn from life and renamed Colonel Sellers; _Roughing It_ bubbles over with the joy and the high spirits and the excitement of those marvelous days when the author and the West were young together; and _Pudd'nhead Wilson_ gives the tragedy of slavery as it passed before his boyish eyes. These books and _The Innocents Abroad_ are Mark Twain's contribution to the library of American classics. The rest of his enormously large output, despite brilliant passages here and there, does not greatly matter. They are not artistic books. The author had little skill in construction. He excelled in brilliant dashes, not in long-continued effort. He was his own Colonel Sellers, restless, idealistic, Quixotic. What he did he did with his whole soul without restraint or sense of proportion. There is in all he wrote a lack of refinement, kept at a minimum, to be sure, by his wife, who for years was his editor and severest critic, but likely at any moment to crop out. His books, all of them, are monotones, a running series of episodes and descriptions all of the same value, never reaching dramatic climax. The episodes themselves, however, are told with graphic intensity; some of them are gems well-nigh perfect. Here is a picture of the famous pony express of the Plains: The pony-rider was usually a little bit of a man, brimful of spirit and endurance. No matter what time of the day or night his watch came on, and no matter whether it was winter or summer, raining, snowing, hailing, or sleeting, or whether his "beat" was a level straight road or a crazy trail over mountain crags and precipices, or whether it led through peaceful regions that swarmed with hostile Indians, he must be always ready to leap into the saddle and be off like the wind. He rode fifty miles without stopping, by daylight, moonlight, starlight, or through the blackness of darkness--just as it happened. He rode a splendid horse that was born for a racer and fed and lodged like a gentleman; kept him at his utmost speed for ten miles, and then, as he came crashing up to the station where stood two men holding fast a fresh, impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mailbag was made in the twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair and were out of sight before the spectator could hardly get the ghost of a look.