It is altogether the best boy story I ever read. It will be an immense
success, but I think you ought to treat it explicitly as a boy's story;
grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do, and if you should put it
forth as a story of boys' character from the grown-up point of view you
give the wrong key to it.
Viewed in the light of later events, there has never been any better literary opinion than that—none that has been more fully justified.
Clemens was delighted. He wrote concerning a point here and there, one inquiry referring to the use of a certain strong word. Howells's reply left no doubt:
I'd have that swearing out in an instant. I suppose I didn't notice
it because the location was so familiar to my Western sense, and so
exactly the thing Huck would say, but it won't do for children.
It was in the last chapter, where Huck relates to Tom the sorrows of reform and tells how they comb him “all to thunder.” In the original, “They comb me all to hell,” says Huck; which statement, one must agree, is more effective, more the thing Huck would be likely to say.
Clemens's acknowledgment of the correction was characteristic:
Mrs. Clemens received the mail this morning, and the next minute she
lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her
tongue, “Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?” Then I had
to miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to
her. Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape
with my scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go
a little one-sided?
The Clemens family did not go to Elmira that year. The children's health seemed to require the sea-shore, and in August they went to Bateman's Point, Rhode Island, where Clemens most of the time played tenpins in an alley that had gone to ruin. The balls would not stay on the track; the pins stood at inebriate angles. It reminded him of the old billiard-tables of Western mining-camps, and furnished the same uncertainty of play. It was his delight, after he had become accustomed to the eccentricities of the alley, to invite in a stranger and watch his suffering and his frantic effort to score.