As the greatest compliment that could be paid a writer would be the assumption that the material contained in this little volume was the product of that writer’s ingenuity or imagination, it seems needless for the compiler to state that every line is just what it purports to be,—bona fide answers to questions asked in the public schools.

Mark Twain, with his inimitable drollery, comments in the Century Magazine for April, 1887, upon English as She is Taught. Even this master of English humor acknowledges his inability to comprehend how such success in the literature of fun could be attained, not only without effort or intention, but through heroic struggles to set forth hard facts and sober statistics. That the English public may have the benefit of Mark Twain’s comments, his paper is, with his consent, here reprinted in its complete form. Although this involves a certain amount of repetition—comment and illustration being too intricately blended to separate—it is a repetition or rÉsumÉ of the best things in the book, such as the wise reader will hardly grumble at.