The sun beats down with a dead, blistering, relentless malignity; the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface—­it is absorbed before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature visible in any direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound, not a sigh, not a whisper, not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of bird; not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that dead air.

As for the humor of the book, it has been chiefly famous for that.  “Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral” has become a classic, and the purchase of the “Mexican Plug.”  But it is to no purpose to review the book here in detail.  We have already reviewed the life and environment out of which it grew.

Without doubt the story would have contained more of the poetic and contemplative, in which he was always at his best, if the subject itself, as in the Innocents, had lent itself oftener to this form of writing.  It was the lack of that halo perhaps which caused the new book never quite to rank with its great forerunner in public favor.  There could hardly be any other reason.  It presented a fresher theme; it abounded in humor; technically, it was better written; seemingly it had all the elements of popularity and of permanence.  It did, in fact, possess these qualities, but its sales, except during the earlier months of its canvass, never quite equaled those of The Innocents Abroad.

‘Roughing It’ was accepted by the public for just what it was and is, a great picture of the Overland Pioneer days—­a marvelous picture of frontier aspects at a time when the frontier itself, even with its hardships and its tragedies, was little more than a vast primal joke; when all frontiersmen were obliged to be laughing philosophers in order to survive the stress of its warfares.

A word here about this Western humor:  It is a distinct product.  It grew out of a distinct condition—­the battle with the frontier.  The fight was so desperate, to take it seriously was to surrender.  Women laughed that they might not weep; men, when they could no longer swear.  “Western humor” was the result.  It is the freshest, wildest humor in the world, but there is tragedy behind it.

‘Roughing It’ presented the picture of those early conditions with the startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which, in effect, it was.  It was not accurate history, even of the author’s own adventures.  It was true in its aspects, rather than in its details.  The greater artist disregards the truth of detail to render more strikingly a phase or a condition, to produce an atmosphere, to reconstruct a vanished time.  This was what Mark Twain did in ‘Roughing It’.  He told the story of overland travel and the frontier, for his own and future generations, in what is essentially a picaresque novel, a work of unperishing fiction, founded on fact.