What a wonderful thing it must have seemed in that time for a party of excursionists to have a ship all to themselves to go a-gipsying in from port to port of antiquity and romance!  The advertised celebrities did not go, none of them but Mark Twain, but no one minded, presently, for Mark Twain’s sayings and stories kept the company sufficiently entertained, and sometimes he would read aloud to his fellow-passengers from the newspaper letters he was writing, and invite comment and criticism.  That was entertainment for them, and it was good for him, for it gave him an immediate audience, always inspiring to an author.  Furthermore, the comments offered were often of the greatest value, especially suggestions from one Mrs. Fairbanks, of Cleveland, a middle-aged, cultured woman, herself a correspondent for her husband’s paper, the “Herald”.  It requires not many days for acquaintances to form on shipboard, and in due time a little group gathered regularly each afternoon to hear Mark Twain read what he had written of their day’s doings, though some of it he destroyed later because Mrs. Fairbanks thought it not his best.

All of the “pilgrims” mentioned in “The Innocents Abroad” were real persons.  “Dan” was Dan Slote, Mark Twain’s room-mate; the Doctor who confused the guides was Dr. A. Reeves Jackson, of Chicago; the poet Lariat was Bloodgood H. Cutter, an eccentric from Long Island; “Jack” was Jack Van Nostrand, of New Jersey; and “Moult” and “Blucher” and “Charlie” were likewise real, the last named being Charles J. Langdon, of Elmira, N. Y., a boy of eighteen, whose sister would one day become Mark Twain’s wife.

It has been said that Mark Twain first met Olivia Langdon on the “Quaker City,” but this is not quite true; he met only her picture—­the original was not on that ship.  Charlie Langdon, boy fashion, made a sort of hero of the brilliant man called Mark Twain, and one day in the Bay of Smyrna invited him to his cabin and exhibited his treasures, among them a dainty miniature of a sister at home, Olivia, a sweet, delicate creature whom the boy worshiped.

Samuel Clemens gazed long at the exquisite portrait and spoke of it reverently, for in the sweet face he seemed to find something spiritual.  Often after that he came to young Langdon’s cabin to look at the pictured countenance, in his heart dreaming of a day when he might learn to know its owner.

We need not follow in detail here the travels of the “pilgrims” and their adventures.  Most of them have been fully set down in “The Innocents Abroad,” and with not much elaboration, for plenty of amusing things were happening on a trip of that kind, and Mark Twain’s old note-books are full of the real incidents that we find changed but little in the book.  If the adventures of Jack, Dan, and the Doctor are embroidered here and there, the truth is always there, too.

Yet the old note-books have a very intimate interest of their own.  It is curious to be looking through them to-day, trying to realize that those penciled memoranda were the fresh first impressions that would presently grow into the world’s most delightful book of travel; that they were set down in the very midst of that historic little company that frolicked through Italy and climbed wearily the arid Syrian hills.