Mark Twain, a Biography. Complete eBook

Albert Bigelow Paine
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,890 pages of information about Mark Twain, a Biography. Complete.

Mark Twain, a Biography. Complete eBook

Albert Bigelow Paine
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,890 pages of information about Mark Twain, a Biography. Complete.

The book does record one Munich event, though transferring it to Heilsbronn.  It is the incident of the finding of the lost sock in the vast bedroom.  It may interest the reader to compare what really happened, as set down in a letter to Twichell, with the story as written for publication: 

Last night I awoke at three this morning, and after raging to myself for two interminable hours I gave it up.  I rose, assumed a catlike stealthiness, to keep from waking Livy, and proceeded to dress in the pitch-dark.  Slowly but surely I got on garment after garment —­all down to one sock; I had one slipper on and the other in my hand.  Well, on my hands and knees I crept softly around, pawing and feeling and scooping along the carpet, and among chair-legs, for that missing sock, I kept that up, and still kept it up, and kept it up.  At first I only said to myself, “Blame that sock,” but that soon ceased to answer.  My expletives grew steadily stronger and stronger, and at last, when I found I was lost, I had to sit flat down on the floor and take hold of something to keep from lifting the roof off with the profane explosion that was trying to get out of me.  I could see the dim blur of the window, but of course it was in the wrong place and could give me no information as to where I was.  But I had one comfort—­I had not waked Livy; I believed I could find that sock in silence if the night lasted long enough.  So I started again and softly pawed all over the place, and sure enough, at the end of half an hour I laid my hand on the missing article.  I rose joyfully up and butted the washbowl and pitcher off the stand, and simply raised——­so to speak.  Livy screamed, then said, “Who is it?  What is the matter?” I said, “There ain’t anything the matter.  I’m hunting for my sock.”  She said, “Are you hunting for it with a club?”
I went in the parlor and lit the lamp, and gradually the fury subsided and the ridiculous features of the thing began to suggest themselves.  So I lay on the sofa with note-book and pencil, and transferred the adventure to our big room in the hotel at Heilsbronn, and got it on paper a good deal to my satisfaction.

He wrote with frequency to Howells, and sent him something for the magazine now and then:  the “Gambetta Duel” burlesque, which would make a chapter in the book later, and the story of “The Great Revolution in Pitcairn.”—­[Included in The Stolen White Elephant volume.  The “Pitcairn” and “Elephant” tales were originally chapters in ’A Tramp Abroad’; also the unpleasant “Coffin-box” yarn, which Howells rejected for the Atlantic and generally condemned, though for a time it remained a favorite with its author.]

Howells’s novel, ‘The Lady of the Aroostook’, was then running through the ‘Atlantic’, and in one of his letters Clemens expresses the general deep satisfaction of his household in that tale: 

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Mark Twain, a Biography. Complete from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.