nd moved
me to forgive her for beheading the Scottish Mary, if she really did it,
which I now doubt; and with the quaintly and anciently clad young King
Harold Harefoot, of near nine hundred years ago, who came flying by on a
bicycle and smoking a pipe, but at once checked up and got off to shake
with me; and also I met a bishop who had lost his way because this was
the first time he had been inside the walls of Oxford for as much as
twelve hundred years or thereabouts. By this time I had grown so used to
the obliterated ages and their best-known people that if I had met Adam
I should not have been either surprised or embarrassed; and if he had
come in a racing automobile and a cloud of dust, with nothing on but his
fig-leaf, it would have seemed to me all right and harmonious.

MARK TWAIN.

(_To be Continued._)

CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XXIV.

BY MARK TWAIN.

_From Susy's Biography of Me_ [1885-6].

Mamma and papa have returned from Onteora and they have had a
delightful visit. Mr. Frank Stockton was down in Virginia and could
not reach Onteora in time, so they did not see him, and Mrs. Mary
Mapes Dodge was ill and couldn't go to Onteora, but Mrs. General
Custer was there, and mamma said that she was a very attractive,
sweet appearing woman.

[_Dictated October 9, 1906._] Onteora was situated high up in the
Catskill Mountains, in the centre of a far-reaching solitude. I do not
mean that the region was wholly uninhabited; there were farmhouses here
and there, at generous distances apart. Their occupants were descendants
of ancestors who had built the houses in Rip Van Winkle's time, or
earlier; and those ancestors were not more primitive than were this
posterity of theirs. The city people were as foreign and unfamiliar and
strange to them as monkeys would have been, and they would have
respected the monkeys as much as they respected these elegant
summer-resorters. The resorters were a puzzle to them, their ways were
so strange and their interests so trivial. They drove the resorters over
the mountain roads and listened in shamed surprise at their bursts of
enthusiasm over the scenery. The farmers had had that scenery on
exhibition from their mountain roosts all their lives, and had never
noticed anything remarkable about it. By way of an incident: a pair of
these primitives were overheard c