It is highly probable that when an author reveals the power of evoking views of places and of calling up portraits of people such as Mark Twain showed in _Life on the Mississippi_, and when he has the masculine grasp of reality Mark Twain made evident in _Roughing It_, he must needs sooner or later turn from mere fact to avowed fiction and become a story-teller. The long stories which Mark Twain has written fall into two divisions--first, those of which the scene is laid in the present, in reality, and mostly in the Mississippi Valley, and second, those of which the scene is laid in the past, in fantasy mostly, and in Europe. As my own liking is a little less for the latter group, there is no need for me now to linger over them. In writing these tales of the past Mark Twain was making up stories in his head; personally I prefer the tales of his in which he has his foot firm on reality. _The Prince and the Pauper_ has the essence of boyhood in it; it has variety and vigor; it has abundant humor and plentiful pathos; and yet I for one would give the whole of it for the single chapter in which Tom Sawyer lets the contract for whitewashing his aunt’s fence. Mr. Howells has declared that there are two kinds of fiction he likes almost equally well--“a real novel and a pure romance”; and he joyfully accepts _A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court_ as “one of the greatest romances ever imagined.” It is a humorous romance overflowing with stalwart fun; and it is not irreverent, but iconoclastic, in that it breaks not a few disestablished idols. It is intensely American and intensely nineteenth century and intensely democratic--in the best sense of that abused adjective. The British critics were greatly displeased with the book;--and we are reminded of the fact that the Spanish still somewhat resent _Don Quixote_ because it brings out too truthfully the fatal gap in the Spanish character between the ideal and the real. So much of the feudal still survives in British society that Mark Twain’s merry and elucidating assault on the past seemed to some almost an insult to the present.