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 philosophy. Whatever his depth of despair, the quaint surprise of speech would come, and it would be so until his last day. By November he was at work on his book of travel, which he first thought of calling "Around the World." He went out not at all that winter, and the work progressed steadily, and was complete by the following May (1897). Meantime, during his trip around the world, Mark Twain's publishers had issued two volumes of his work—the Joan of Arc book, and another Tom Sawyer book, the latter volume combining two rather short stories, "Tom Sawyer Abroad," published serially in St. Nicholas, and "Tom Sawyer, Detective." The Joan of Arc book, the tenderest and most exquisite of all Mark Twain's work—a tale told with the deepest sympathy and the rarest delicacy—was dedicated by the author to his wife, as being the only piece of his writing which he considered worthy of this honor. He regarded it as his best book, and this was an opinion that did not change. Twelve years later—it was on his seventy-third birthday—he wrote as his final verdict, November 30, 1908:

I like the Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well, and, besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none.

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The public at first did not agree with the author's estimate, and the demand for the book was not 281