Although he succeeded abundantly as a lecturer, and although he was the author of the most widely circulated book of the decade, Mark Twain still thought of himself only as a journalist; and when he gave up the West for the East he became an editor of the Buffalo _Express_, in which he had bought an interest. In 1870 he married; and it is perhaps not indiscreet to remark that his was another of those happy unions of which there have been so many in the annals of American authorship. In 1871 he removed to Hartford, where his home has been ever since; and at the same time he gave up newspaper work. In 1872 he wrote _Roughing It_, and in the following year came his first sustained attempt at fiction, _The Gilded Age_, written in collaboration with Mr. Charles Dudley Warner. The character of “Colonel Mulberry Sellers” Mark Twain soon took out of this book to make it the central figure of a play which the late John T. Raymond acted hundreds of times throughout the United States, the playgoing public pardoning the inexpertness of the dramatist in favor of the delicious humor and the compelling veracity with which the chief character was presented. So universal was this type and so broadly recognizable its traits that there were few towns wherein the play was presented in which some one did not accost the actor who impersonated the ever-hopeful schemer to declare: “I’m the original of Sellers! Didn’t Mark ever tell you? Well, he took the Colonel from me!” Encouraged by the welcome accorded to this first attempt at fiction, Mark Twain turned to the days of his boyhood and wrote _Tom Sawyer_, published in 1875. He also collected his sketches, scattered here and there in newspapers and magazines. Toward the end of the ’seventies he went to Europe again with his family; and the result of this journey is recorded in _A Tramp Abroad_, published in 1880. Another volume of sketches, _The Stolen White Elephant_, was put forth in 1882; and in the same year Mark Twain first came forward as a historical novelist--if _The Prince and the Pauper_ can fairly be called a historical novel. The year after, he sent forth the volume describing his _Life on the Mississippi_; and in 1884 he followed this with the story in which that life has been crystallized forever, _Huckleberry Finn_, the finest of his books, the deepest in its insight, and the widest in its appeal.