y invention, in this
small emergency. I shall never finish my five or six unfinished books,
for the reason that by forty years of slavery to the pen I have earned
my freedom. I detest the pen and I wouldn't use it again to sign the
death warrant of my dearest enemy.

[_Dictated, March 8, 1906._] For thirty years, I have received an
average of a dozen letters a year from strangers who remember me, or
whose fathers remember me as boy and young man. But these letters are
almost always disappointing. I have not known these strangers nor their
fathers. I have not heard of the names they mention; the reminiscences
to which they call attention have had no part in my experience; all of
which means that these strangers have been mistaking me for somebody
else. But at last I have the refreshment, this morning, of a letter from
a man who deals in names that were familiar to me in my boyhood. The
writer encloses a newspaper clipping which has been wandering through
the press for four or five weeks, and he wants to know if Capt Tonkray,
lately deceased, was (as stated in the clipping) the original of
"Huckleberry Finn."

I have replied that "Huckleberry Finn" was Frank F. As this inquirer
evidently knew the Hannibal of the forties, he will easily recall Frank.
Frank's father was at one time Town Drunkard, an exceedingly
well-defined and unofficial office of those days. He succeeded "General"
Gaines, and for a time he was sole and only incumbent of the office; but
afterward Jimmy Finn proved competency and disputed the place with him,
so we had two town drunkards at one time--and it made as much trouble in
that village as Christendom experienced in the fourteenth century when
there were two Popes at the same time.

In "Huckleberry Finn" I have drawn Frank exactly as he was. He was
ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as
ever any boy had. His liberties were totally unrestricted. He was the
only really independent person--boy or man--in the community, and by
consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy, and was envied by
all the rest of us. We liked him; we enjoyed his society. And as his
society was forbidden us by our parents, the prohibition trebled and
quadrupled its value, and therefore we sought and got more of his
society than of any other boy's. I heard, four years ago, that he was
Justice of the Peace in a remote village in the State of ----, and was a
good citizen and was greatly respe