Mark Twain, I say, instinctively wrote for children. It is true that he seems often to have believed that "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" could only be understood and appreciated by mature readers; certainly "Joan of Arc" was put forth as a historical romance for mature readers. But what do we find him saying while he is still at work on "Tom Sawyer"? "I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down to the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book is to be for boys and girls." And as for "Joan of Arc," with what did he associate it in his own mind? "I am writing," he says in a letter to a publishing friend, "a companion piece to 'The Prince and the Pauper,'" and this, added to the fact that he wrote it in constant, sympathetic consultation with his own children, is the best extrinsic proof of its real character. Written for children, then, more than half consciously, all these books were; and I will not except even "The Mysterious Stranger," permeated as it is with a mood that is purely adolescent, though an old man wrote it and few children probably have ever read it. Written for and written of children all these books were, for it is clear that the protagonists of "The Mysterious Stranger" are the boys through whose eyes the story unfolds itself and who taste its bitterness, and Joan of Arc, seen through the eyes of the Sieur de Conte, is a child also. And these, I say, were the books he wrote with love, with a happiness that sometimes seemed sacred to him. It was this happiness that haloed the tale of Joan, although Professor Phelps says that in 1904 he spoke of "Huckleberry Finn" as "undoubtedly his best book"; and that he had for "Tom Sawyer" a very special feeling is shown in a letter, one of those famous "unmailed" letters, written in 1887 to a theatrical manager who had dramatized the story and proposed to put it on the stage: "That is a book, dear sir, which cannot be dramatized. One might as well try to dramatize any other hymn. 'Tom Sawyer' is simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air." There were plays which he wrote with an exuberant gaiety; but that was the lusty fun of the man of action, the boy who enjoyed throwing sticks into a swift stream: it was not the happiness of the soul in process of delivering itself. That happiness, I say, sanctified these children's books alone--these books that suggest the green, luxuriant shoots clustering on the stump of some gigantic tree which has been felled close to the ground. CHAPTER VIII THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS "Joy with us is the monopoly of disreputable characters." ALEXANDER HARVEY.