A grab-bag of miscellaneous Twainings, not all of them "stories" as advertsied. There's a lot of filler here, like the unfunny essay on the pay of American diplomats, and the title story is a somewhat laboured morality tale that promises much but wears out its welcome. But there are also two absolute classics: My Debut as a Literary Person and A Double-Barrelled Detective Story. The first of these recounts Twain's writing of 43 Days in an Open Boat, his second-hand reporting of the incredible survival of 15 men from the Hornet following its burning in the Pacific. It's really just Twain's original newspaper story bolstered by excerpts from the logs of the captain and two passengers, but what a story! A Double-Barrelled Detective Story, meanwhile, is simply a side-splitting send-up of Sherlock Holmes (featuring the Great Detective himself, far from home in a tiny Montana mining town, and his nephew, Fetlock Jones), with a frame story about a boy with the nose of a bloodhound. Twain's parody of purple prose cracked me up when I read it while waiting for a bus:

It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God.

It seems there are several different collections published under this title so your mileage may, as they say, vary. ( )

of the several stories, two bring a constant smile to my face: "travels with a reformer" and the Austrian legislature pieces (4 of them). Not his best, but certainly a needed asset to any library. ( )