THE TRAGEDY OF PUDD'NHEAD WILSON

by Mark Twain




A WHISPER TO THE READER

_There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can
be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless.
Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about
perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler
animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead
of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are
left in doubt._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

A person who is ignorant of legal matters is always liable to make
mistakes when he tries to photograph a court scene with his pen; and so I
was not willing to let the law chapters in this book go to press without
first subjecting them to rigid and exhausting revision and correction by
a trained barrister--if that is what they are called. These chapters are
right, now, in every detail, for they were rewritten under the immediate
eye of William Hicks, who studied law part of a while in southwest
Missouri thirty-five years ago and then came over here to Florence for
his health and is still helping for exercise and board in Macaroni
Vermicelli's horse-feed shed, which is up the back alley as you turn
around the corner out of the Piazza del Duomo just beyond the house where
that stone that Dante used to sit on six hundred years ago is let into
the wall when he let on to be watching them build Giotto's campanile and