The reader may surmise that the finished story—­the highly regarded story—­was ‘The Prince and the Pauper’.  The other tale—­the unfinished and less considered one was ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’.  Nobody appears to have been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly, the publisher.

The publisher was not the American Company.  Elisha Bliss, after long ill health, had died that fall, and this fact, in connection with a growing dissatisfaction over the earlier contracts, had induced Clemens to listen to offers from other makers of books.  The revelation made by the “half-profit” returns from A Tramp Abroad meant to him, simply that the profits had not been fairly apportioned, and he was accordingly hostile.  To Orion he wrote that, had Bliss lived, he would have remained with the company and made it reimburse him for his losses, but that as matters stood he would sever the long connection.  It seemed a pity, later, that he did this, but the break was bound to come.  Clemens was not a business man, and Bliss was not a philanthropist.  He was, in fact, a shrewd, capable publisher, who made as good a contract as he could; yet he was square in his dealings, and the contract which Clemens held most bitterly against him—­that of ’Roughing It’—­had been made in good faith and in accordance with the conditions, of that period.  In most of the later contracts Clemens himself had named his royalties, and it was not in human nature—­business human nature—­for Bliss to encourage the size of these percentages.  If one wished to draw a strictly moral conclusion from the situation, one might say that it would have been better for the American Publishing Company, knowing Mark Twain, voluntarily to have allowed him half profits, which was the spirit of his old understanding even if not the letter of it, rather than to have waited till he demanded it and then to lose him by the result.  Perhaps that would be also a proper business deduction; only, as a rule, business morals are regulated by the contract, and the contract is regulated by the necessities and the urgency of demand.

Never mind.  Mark Twain revised ‘The Prince and the Pauper’, sent it to Howells, who approved of it mightily (though with reservations as to certain chapters), and gave it to James R. Osgood, who was grateful and agreed to make it into a book upon which no expense for illustration or manufacture should be spared.  It was to be a sort of partnership arrangement as between author and publisher, and large returns were anticipated.

Among the many letters which Clemens was just then writing to Howells one was dated “Xmas Eve.”  It closes with the customary pleasantries and the final line: 

“But it is growing dark.  Merry Christmas to all of you!”