ned at a vaguely defined time and in a more
prolonged and indefinitely continuous way."

"Why, doctor, it is pure nonsense; you know it yourself. Look here: If
I have had a had, or have wanted to have had a had, or was in a position
right then and there to have had a had that hadn't had any chance to go
out hadding on account of this foolish discrimination which lets one Had
go hadding in any kind of indefinite grammatical weather but restricts
the other one to definite and datable meteoric convulsions, and keeps it
pining around and watching the barometer all the time, and liable to
get sick through confinement and lack of exercise, and all that sort of
thing, why--why, the inhumanity of it is enough, let alone the
wanton superfluity and uselessness of any such a loafing consumptive
hospital-bird of a Had taking up room and cumbering the place for
nothing. These finical refinements revolt me; it is not right, it is not
honorable; it is constructive nepotism to keep in office a Had that is
so delicate it can't come out when the wind's in the nor'west--I won't
have this dude on the payroll. Cancel his exequator; and look here--"

"But you miss the point. It is like this. You see--"

"Never mind explaining, I don't care anything about it. Six Hads is
enough for me; anybody that needs twelve, let him subscribe; I don't
want any stock in a Had Trust. Knock out the Prolonged and Indefinitely
Continuous; four-fifths of it is water, anyway."

"But I beg you, podere! It is often quite indispensable in cases
where--"

"Pipe the next squad to the assault!"

But it was not to be; for at that moment the dull boom of the noon
gun floated up out of far-off Florence, followed by the usual softened
jangle of church-bells, Florentine and suburban, that bursts out in
murmurous response; by labor-union law the COLAZIONE (1) must stop; stop
promptly, stop instantly, stop definitely, like the chosen and best of
the breed of Hads.

1. Colazione is Italian for a collection, a meeting, a seance, a
sitting.--M.T.

A BURLESQUE BIOGRAPHY

Two or three persons having at different times intimated that if I would
write an autobiography they would read it when they got leisure, I yield
at last to this frenzied public demand and herewith tender my history.

Ours is a noble house, and stretches a long way back into antiquity.
The earliest ancestor the Twains have any record of was a friend of the
family by the name of Higgins.