It was in her later life that Jane Clemens had developed this particular passion.  She would consult the morning paper for any notice of obsequies and attend those that were easy of access.  Watching the processions go by gave her a peculiar joy.  Mrs. Moffett and her daughter did go to Fredonia immediately following the wedding.  They found it residentially attractive, and rented a house before returning to St. Louis, a promptness that somewhat alarmed the old lady, who did not altogether fancy the idea of being suddenly set down in a strange house, in a strange land, even though it would be within hailing distance of Sam and his new wife.  Perhaps the Fredonia funerals were sufficiently numerous and attractive, for she soon became attached to the place, and entered into the spirit of the life there, joining its temperance crusades, and the like, with zest and enjoyment.

Onion remained in St. Louis, but when Bliss established a paper called The Publisher, and wanted an editor, he was chosen for the place, originally offered to his brother; the latter, writing to Onion, said: 

If you take the place with an air of perfect confidence in yourself, never once letting anything show in your bearing but a quiet, modest, entire, and perfect confidence in your ability to do pretty much anything in the world, Bliss will think you are the very man he needs; but don’t show any shadow of timidity or unsoldierly diffidence, for that sort of thing is fatal to advancement.

I warn you thus because you are naturally given to knocking your pot over in this way, when a little judicious conduct would make it boil.

LXXXI

SOME FURTHER LITERARY MATTERS

Meantime The Innocents Abroad had continued to prosper.  Its author ranked mainly as a humorist, but of such colossal proportions that his contemporaries had seemed to dwindle; the mighty note of the “Frog of Calaveras” had dwarfed a score of smaller peepers.  At the end of a year from its date of publication the book had sold up to 67,000 and was continuing at the rate of several thousand monthly.

“You are running it in staving, tiptop, first-class style,” Clemens wrote to Bliss.  “On the average ten people a day come and hunt me up to tell me I am a benefactor!  I guess that is a part of the program we didn’t expect, in the first place.”

Apparently the book appealed to readers of every grade.  One hundred and fifteen copies were in constant circulation at the Mercantile Library, in New York, while in the most remote cabins of America it was read and quoted.  Jack Van Nostrand, making a long horseback tour of Colorado, wrote: 

I stopped a week ago in a ranch but a hundred miles from nowhere.  The occupant had just two books:  the Bible and The Innocents Abroad—­the former in good repair.

Across the ocean the book had found no less favor, and was being translated into many and strange tongues.  By what seems now some veritable magic its author’s fame had become literally universal.  The consul at Hongkong, discussing English literature with a Chinese acquaintance, a mandarin, mentioned The Pilgrim’s Progress.