These three books of travel are like all other books of travel in that they relate in the first person what the author went forth to see.  Autobiographic also are ‘Roughing It’ and ‘Life on the Mississippi,’ and they have always seemed to me better books than the more widely circulated travels.  They are better because they are the result of a more intimate knowledge of the material dealt with.  Every traveler is of necessity but a bird of passage; he is a mere carpet-bagger; his acquaintance with the countries he visits is external only; and this acquaintanceship is made only when he is a full-grown man.  But Mark Twain’s knowledge of the Mississippi was acquired in his youth; it was not purchased with a price; it was his birthright; and it was internal and complete.  And his knowledge of the mining-camp was achieved in early manhood when the mind is open and sensitive to every new impression.  There is in both these books a fidelity to the inner truth, a certainty of touch, a sweep of vision, not to be found in the three books of travels.  For my own part I have long thought that Mark Twain could securely rest his right to survive as an author on those opening chapters in ‘Life on the Mississippi’ in which he makes clear the difficulties, the seeming impossibilities, that fronted those who wisht to learn the river.  These chapters are bold and brilliant; and they picture for us forever a period and a set of conditions, singularly interesting and splendidly varied, that otherwise would have had to forego all adequate record.

III

It is highly probable that when an author reveals the power of evoking views of places and of calling up portraits of people such as Mark Twain showed in ‘Life on the Mississippi,’ and when he has the masculine grasp of reality Mark Twain made evident in ‘Roughing It,’ he must needs sooner or later turn from mere fact to avowed fiction and become a story-teller.  The long stories which Mark Twain has written fall into two divisions,—­first, those of which the scene is laid in the present, in reality, and mostly in the Mississippi Valley, and second, those of which the scene is laid in the past, in fantasy mostly, and in Europe.

As my own liking is a little less for the latter group, there is no need for me now to linger over them.  In writing these tales of the past Mark Twain was making up stories in his head; personally I prefer the tales of his in which he has his foot firm on reality.  The ’Prince and the Pauper’ has the essence of boyhood in it; it has variety and vigor; it has abundant humor and plentiful pathos; and yet I for one would give the whole of it for the single chapter in which Tom Sawyer lets the contract for white-washing his aunt’s fence.