Page:Boys Life of Mark Twain.djvu/297

THE "YANKEE" stitch in them is a testimony of the affection which two of your loyalest friends bear you. Every single stitch cost us blood. I’ve got twice as many pores in me now as I used to have. . . . Do not wear these slippers in public, dear; it would only excite envy; and, as like as not, somebody would try to shoot you.

For five years Mark Twain had not published a book. Since the appearance of Huck Finn at the end of 1884 he had given the public only an occasional magazine story or article. His business struggle and the type-setter had consumed not only his fortune, but his time and energy. Now, at last, however, a book was ready. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court came from the press of Webster & Co. at the end of 1889, a handsome book, elaborately and strikingly illustrated by Dan Beard—a pretentious volume which Mark Twain really considered his last. "It’s my swan-song, my retirement from literature permanently," he wrote Howells, though certainly he was young, fifty-four, to have reached this conclusion.

The story of the Yankee—a fanciful narrative of a skilled Yankee mechanic swept backward through the centuries to the dim day of Arthur and his Round Table—is often grotesque enough in its humor, but under it all is Mark Twain’s great humanity in fierce and noble protest against unjust laws, the tyranny of an individual or of a ruling class oppression of any sort. As in The Prince and the Pauper, the wandering heir to the throne is brought in contact with cruel injustice and misery, so in the Yankee the king himself becomes one of a band of fettered slaves, 259