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<h1> THE TRAGEDY <br/> OF <br/><br/> PUDD'NHEAD WILSON </h1>
<h2> by Mark Twain </h2>
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<p><SPAN name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"></SPAN> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<h2> A WHISPER TO THE READER </h2>
<p><i>There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can<br/>
be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless.<br/>
Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about<br/>
perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler<br/>
animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead<br/>
of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are<br/>
left in doubt.</i> —Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar<br/></p>
<p>A person who is ignorant of legal matters is always liable to make
mistakes when he tries to photograph a court scene with his pen; and so I
was not willing to let the law chapters in this book go to press without
first subjecting them to rigid and exhausting revision and correction by a
trained barrister—if that is what they are called. These chapters
are right, now, in every detail, for they were rewritten under the
immediate eye of William Hicks, who studied law part of a while in
southwest Missouri thirty-five years ago and then came over here to
Florence for his health and is still helping for exercise and board in
Macaroni Vermicelli's horse-feed shed, which is up the back alley as you
turn around the corner out of the Piazza del Duomo just beyond the house
where that stone that Dante used to sit on six hundred years ago is let
into the wall when he let on to be watching them build Giotto's campanile
and yet always got tired looking as Beatrice passed along on her way to
get a chunk of chestnut cake to defend herself with in case of a
Ghibelline outbreak before she got to school, at the same old stand where
they sell the same old cake to this day and it is just as light and good
as it was then, too, and this is not flattery, far from it. He was a
little rusty on his law, but he rubbed up for this book, and those two or
three legal chapters are right and straight, now. He told me so himself.</p>
<p>Given under my hand this second day of January, 1893, at the Villa
Viviani, village of Settignano, three miles back of Florence, on the hills—the
same certainly affording the most charming view to be found on this
planet, and with it the most dreamlike and enchanting sunsets to be found
in any planet or even in any solar system—and given, too, in the
swell room of the house, with the busts of Cerretani senators and other
grandees of this line looking approvingly down upon me, as they used to
look down upon Dante, and mutely asking me to adopt them into my family,
which I do with pleasure, for my remotest ancestors are but spring
chickens compared with these robed and stately antiques, and it will be a
great and satisfying lift for me, that six hundred years will.</p>
<p>Mark Twain.</p>
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