printed in several countries, among them Japan. A sumptuous edition on
large paper, rough-edged, was made by Lieut. C. E. S. Wood at West Point
--an edition of 50 copies--and distributed among popes and kings and such
people. In England copies of that issue were worth twenty guineas when I
was there six years ago, and none to be had."


FROM THE DEPTHS

Mark Twain's irreverence should not be misinterpreted: it was an
irreverence which bubbled up from a deep, passionate insight into the
well-springs of human nature. In 1601, as in 'The Man That Corrupted
Hadleyburg,' and in 'The Mysterious Stranger,' he tore the masks off
human beings and left them cringing before the public view. With the
deftness of a master surgeon Clemens dealt with human emotions and
delighted in exposing human nature in the raw.

The spirit and the language of the Fireside Conversation were rooted deep
in Mark Twain's nature and in his life, as C. E. S. Wood, who printed
1601 at West Point, has pertinently observed,

"If I made a guess as to the intellectual ferment out of which 1601 rose
I would say that Mark's intellectual structure and subconscious graining
was from Anglo-Saxons as primitive as the common man of the Tudor period.
He came from the banks of the Mississippi--from the flatboatmen, pilots,
roustabouts, farmers and village folk of a rude, primitive people--as
Lincoln did.

"He was finished in the mining camps of the West among stage drivers,
gamblers and the men of '49. The simple roughness of a frontier people