No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger

An unfinished novella that Mark Twain worked on periodically from roughly 1890 until his death in 1910. The body of the work is a serious social commentary addressing Twain’s ideas of the Moral Sense and the ”damned human race.” Published posthumously in 1916 by Twain’s biographer Albert Bigelow Paine. Show Excerpt roubled, there was no occasion for us to be afraid of an angel, and he liked us, anyway. He went on chatting as simply and unaffectedly as ever; and while he talked he made a crowd of little men and women the size of your finger, and they went diligently to work and cleared and leveled off a space a couple of yards square in the grass and began to build a cunning little castle in it, the women mixing the mortar and carrying it up the scaffoldings in pails on their heads, just as our work-women have always done, and the men laying the courses of masonry–five hundred of these toy people swarming briskly about and working diligently and wiping the sweat off their faces as natural as life. In the absorbing interest of watching those five hundred little people make the castle grow step by step and course by course, and take shape and symmetry, that feeling and awe soon passed away and we were quite comfortable and at home again. We asked if we might make some people, and he said yes, and told Seppi to make some c