Mark Twain was falsely accused of plagiarism, not for the last time during his career, in the spring of 1870. Such a charge, leveled in the wake of his literary success with The Innocents Abroad, would have been serious had it been true. Three humorous sketches about the death by spanking of a boy with nitroglycerin-soaked trousers, one of them by Mark Twain, circulated in the American periodical press in 1869–1870. This convergence of comic anecdotes soon devolved into a snarl of misunderstandings.
The original, unsigned sketch appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle for 4 November 1869:
An old lady residing in the lower part of the city recently had occasion to spank her little boy for some youthful indiscretion. He had been playing about the wharves, and in his juvenile perambulations had sat on a leaky can of nitro-glycerine, the consequences of which was that the first smack...
