The profile is Jewish. The eyes, small and keen, are almost entirely hidden by thick bushy eyebrows; the well-shaped head is covered with thick bushy hair. A few yards off, Mark Twain's head looks like a crow's nest. The voice is drawling and has a decidedly nasal tone. When he slowly gets on his feet to speak, "tosses his frontlet to the sky," twists his head sidewise, frowning all the while, you little guess that in a few moments this man will convulse you with laughter.
Truly nothing could be more droll than Mark Twain's manner of telling an anecdote. His jokes, which he seems to twirl out from under his ears, make straight for your sides, tickle them unmercifully, and set you twisting on your chair.
Mark Twain has amassed a considerable fortune, not—as he says himself—in writing his own books, but in publishing those of other people.[7] If there had been an international copyright between England and America, Mark Twain would have made a considerable fortune without going into business.
This writer excels specially in accounts of travels. He will not give you deep thoughts or serious information. He is a charming guide, who makes you see the comic side of the life he describes, who will pilot you wherever there is something for his keen observation to glean. His caricatures are so perfectly hit off that you recognise the original immediately.
This man of merriment is, it appears, also a deep student of serious things. His father was long anxious to have him write a life of Christ, and if he has never complied with his parent's wish, it is only from a feeling that a volume of the kind, coming from his pen, might not be read with the reverence such a subject demands.
Mark Twain inhabits a delightful cottage in Hartford, in the State of Connecticut.
CHAPTER XVII.
Boisterous Humour and Horseplay Wit.—A Dinner at the Clover Club of Philadelphia.—Other "Gridiron" Clubs.
