printing which pretended to the eye that it was contemporaneous with the
pretended 'conversation.'

"I wrote Mark that for literary effect I thought there should be a
species of forgery, though of course there was no effort to actually
deceive a scholar. Mark answered that I might do as I liked;--that his
only object was to secure a number of copies, as the demand for it was
becoming burdensome, but he would be very grateful for any interest I
brought to the doing.

"Well, Tucker [foreman of the printing shop] and I soaked some handmade
linen paper in weak coffee, put it as a wet bundle into a warm room to
mildew, dried it to a dampness approved by Tucker and he printed the
'copy' on a hand press. I had special punches cut for such Elizabethan
abbreviations as the a, e, o and u, when followed by m or n--and for the
(commonly and stupidly pronounced ye).

"The only editing I did was as to the spelling and a few old English
words introduced. The spelling, if I remember correctly, is mine, but
the text is exactly as written by Mark. I wrote asking his view of
making the spelling of the period and he was enthusiastic--telling me to
do whatever I thought best and he was greatly pleased with the result."

Thus was printed in a de luxe edition of fifty copies the most curious
masterpiece of American humor, at one of America's most dignified
institutions, the United States Military Academy at West Point.

"1601 was so be-praised by the archaeological scholars of a quarter of a
century ago," wrote Clemens in his letter to Charles Orr, "that I was
rather inordinately vain of it. At that time it had been privately