proprietors of the 'Alta California' supplied him with the funds
necessary to enable him to become one of the passengers on the steamer
_Quaker City_, which had been chartered to take a select party on what
is now known as the Mediterranean trip. The weekly letters, in which he
set forth what befell him on this journey, were printed in the 'Alta'
Sunday after Sunday, and were copied freely by the other Californian
papers. These letters served as the foundation of a book published in
1869 and called the 'Innocents Abroad,' a book which instantly brought
to the author celebrity and cash.

Both of these valuable aids to ambition were increased by his next step,
his appearance on the lecture platform. Noah Brooks, who was present at
his first attempt, has recorded that Mark Twain's "method as a lecturer
was distinctly unique and novel. His slow, deliberate drawl, the anxious
and perturbed expression of his visage, the apparently painful effort
with which he framed his sentences, the surprize that spread over his
face when the audience roared with delight or rapturously applauded the
finer passages of his word-painting, were unlike anything of the kind
they had ever known." In the many years since that first appearance the
method has not changed, altho it has probably matured. Mark Twain is one
of the most effective of platform-speakers and one of the most artistic,
with an art of his own which is very individual and very elaborate in
spite of its seeming simplicity.

Altho he succeeded abundantly as a lecturer, and altho he was the author
of the most widely-circulated book of the decade, Mark Twain still
thought of himself only as a journalist; and when he gave up the West
for the East, he became an editor of the 'Buffalo Express,' in which he
had bought an interest. In 1870 he married; and it is perhaps not
indiscreet to remark that his was another of those happy unions of which