ERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XX.

BY MARK TWAIN.

[Sidenote: (1868.)]

[_Notes on "Innocents Abroad." Dictated in Florence, Italy, April,
1904._]--I will begin with a note upon the dedication. I wrote the book
in the months of March and April, 1868, in San Francisco. It was
published in August, 1869. Three years afterward Mr. Goodman, of
Virginia City, Nevada, on whose newspaper I had served ten years before,
came East, and we were walking down Broadway one day when he said: "How
did you come to steal Oliver Wendell Holmes's dedication and put it in
your book?"

I made a careless and inconsequential answer, for I supposed he was
joking. But he assured me that he was in earnest. He said: "I'm not
discussing the question of whether you stole it or didn't--for that is a
question that can be settled in the first bookstore we come to--I am
only asking you _how_ you came to steal it, for that is where my
curiosity is focalized."

I couldn't accommodate him with this information, as I hadn't it in
stock. I could have made oath that I had not stolen anything, therefore
my vanity was not hurt nor my spirit troubled. At bottom I supposed that
he had mistaken another book for mine, and was now getting himself into
an untenable place and preparing sorrow for himself and triumph for me.
We entered a bookstore and he asked for "The Innocents Abroad" and for
the dainty little blue and gold edition of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's
poems. He opened the books, exposed their dedications and said: "Read
them. It is plain that the author of the second one stole the first one,
isn't it?"

I was very much ashamed, and unspeakably astonished. We continued our
walk, but I was not able to throw any gleam of light upon that original
question of his. I could not remember ever having seen Dr. Holmes's
dedication. I knew the poems, but the dedication was new to me.

I did not get hold of the key to that secret until months afterward,
then it came in a curious way, and yet it was a natural way; for the
natural way provided by nature and the construction of the human mind
for the discovery of a forgotten event is to employ another forgotten
event for its resurrection.

[Sidenote: (1866.)]

I received a letter from the Rev. Dr. Rising, who had been rector of the
Episcopal church in Virginia City in my time, in which letter Dr. Rising
made reference to certain things which had happened to us in the
Sandwich Islands six years before; among thi