By happy luck we get all these glad tidings on Christmas Eve—­just the time to enable us to celebrate the day with proper gaiety and enthusiasm.  Our spirits soar and we find we can even make jokes; taels I win, heads you lose.

He went on to score Ament, to compare the missionary policy in China to that of the Pawnee Indians, and to propose for him a monument —­subscriptions to be sent to the American Board.  He denounced the national policies in Africa, China, and the Philippines, and showed by the reports and by the private letters of soldiers home, how cruel and barbarous and fiendish had been the warfare made by those whose avowed purpose was to carry the blessed light of civilization and Gospel “to the benighted native”—­how in very truth these priceless blessings had been handed on the point of a bayonet to the “Person Sitting in Darkness.”

Mark Twain never wrote anything more scorching, more penetrating in its sarcasm, more fearful in its revelation of injustice and hypocrisy, than his article “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.”  He put aquafortis on all the raw places, and when it was finished he himself doubted the wisdom of printing it.  Howells, however, agreed that it should be published, and “it ought to be illustrated by Dan Beard,” he added, “with such pictures as he made for the Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but you’d better hang yourself afterward.”

Meeting Beard a few days later, Clemens mentioned the matter and said: 

“So if you make the pictures, you hang with me.”

But pictures were not required.  It was published in the North American Review for February, 1901, as the opening article; after which the cyclone.  Two storms moving in opposite directions produce a cyclone, and the storms immediately developed; one all for Mark Twain and his principles, the other all against him.  Every paper in England and America commented on it editorially, with bitter denunciations or with eager praise, according to their lights and convictions.

At 14 West Tenth Street letters, newspaper clippings, documents poured in by the bushel—­laudations, vituperations, denunciations, vindications; no such tumult ever occurred in a peaceful literary home.  It was really as if he had thrown a great missile into the human hive, one-half of which regarded it as a ball of honey and the remainder as a cobblestone.  Whatever other effect it may have had, it left no thinking person unawakened.

Clemens reveled in it.  W. A. Rogers, in Harper’s Weekly, caricatured him as Tom Sawyer in a snow fort, assailed by the shower of snowballs, “having the time of his life.”  Another artist, Fred Lewis, pictured him as Huck Finn with a gun.

The American Board was naturally disturbed.  The Ament clipping which Clemens had used had been public property for more than a month—­its authenticity never denied; but it was immediately denied now, and the cable kept hot with inquiries.