The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Mark Twain [good summer reads .TXT] 📗

against the door post. He had been there since 7:30 and said he would cheerfully sit there till morning if I would give him the least hint of the letter’s contents. But I was wise and wary.

At the January meeting it was decided not to place Huck and Tom in the Children’s rooms along with “Little Nellie’s Silver Mine” and “Dotty Dimple at Home.” But the books have not been “restricted” in any sense whatever. They are placed on open shelves among the adult fiction, and any child is free to read adult fiction if he chooses.

I am looking forward with great eagerness to seeing and hearing you tomorrow night at the Waldorf. As I have a wild scheme for a national library for the blind, they have been generous enough to place a couple of boxes at my disposal. The “young lady” whom you mentioned in your letter⁠—the Sup’t of the Children’s Dep’t⁠—and several other B.P.L.’s, I hope will be present.

I am very sorry to have caused you so much annoyance through reporters, but be sure that I have said nothing nor will say anything to them about the contents of that letter. And please don’t you tell on me!

Yours very respectfully,

Asa Don Dickinson.

I saw him at the Waldorf the next night, where Choate and I made our public appeal in behalf of the blind, and found him to be a very pleasant and safe and satisfactory man.

Now that I have heard from France, I think the incident is closed⁠—for it had its brief run in England, two or three weeks ago, and in Germany also. When people let Huck Finn alone he goes peacefully along, damaging a few children here and there and yonder, but there will be plenty of children in heaven without those, so it is no great matter. It is only when well-meaning people expose him that he gets his real chance to do harm. Temporarily, then, he spreads havoc all around in the nurseries and no doubt does prodigious harm while he has his chance. By and by, let us hope, people that really have the best interests of the rising generation at heart will become wise and not stir Huck up.

Tuesday, April 10, 1906

Child’s letter about “Huckleberry Finn” being flung out of Concord Library⁠—Ambassador White’s autobiography⁠—Mr. Clemens’s version of the Fiske-Cornell episode⁠—Another example of his great scheme for finding employment for the unemployed⁠—This client wins the Fiske lawsuit.

When Huck Finn was flung out of the Concord Public Library twenty-one years ago, a number of letters of sympathy and indignation reached me⁠—mainly from children, I am obliged to admit⁠—and I kept some of them so that I might reread them now and then and apply them as a salve to my soreness. I have overhauled those ancient letters this morning and among them I find one from a little girl who resents that library’s treatment of Huck and then goes innocently along and gives me something more of a dig than even the library had done. She says:

I am eleven years old, and I live on a farm near Rockville, Maryland. Once this winter we had a boy to work for us named John. We lent him “Huck Finn” to read, and one night he let his clothes out of the window and left in the night. The last we heard from him he was out in Ohio; and father says if we had lent him “Tom Sawyer” to read he would not have stopped on this side of the ocean.

Bless her gentle heart, she was trying to cheer me up, and her effort is entitled to the praise which the country journalist conferred upon the Essex band after he had praised the whole Fourth of July celebration in detail, and had exhausted his stock of compliments. But he was obliged to lay something in the nature of a complimentary egg, and with a final heroic effort he brought forth this, “The Essex band done the best they could.”

I have been reading another chapter or two in Ambassador White’s autobiography, and I find the book charming, particularly where he talks about me. I find any book charming that talks about me. I am expecting this one of mine to do something in that line, and it is my purpose that it shall not lose sight of that subject long at a time. Mr. White was the first president of Cornell University, and he gives the university’s side of the Willard Fiske trouble. I stopped at that point. I didn’t read his version, for I want to give another version first, and as this version may conflict with his, I wish to set it down now before its complexion shall have a chance to undergo a change by coming in contact with his version.

This brings me back to another example of my great scheme for finding work for the unemployed. The famous Fiske-Cornell episode of a quarter of a century ago grew up in this way. About fifty years ago, when Willard Fiske was a poor and untaught and friendless boy of thirteen, he and Bayard Taylor took steerage passage in a sailing ship and crossed the ocean. They found their way to Iceland, and Willard Fiske remained there a year or two. He acquired the Norse languages and perfected himself in them. He also became an expert scholar in the literature of those languages. By and by he returned to America, and while still a very young man and hardly of age, he got a place as instructor in that kind of learning in the infant Cornell University. This seat of learning was at Ithaca, New York, and Mr. McGraw was a citizen of that little town. He had made a fortune in the electric telegraph, and it was his purpose to leave a large part of it to the university. He had a lovely young daughter, and she and young Fiske fell in love with each other. They