ement of his hands, the play of
his features as his fancies and phrases passed in mental review and
were accepted or waved aside. We were watching one of the great literary
creators of his time in the very process of his architecture. We
constituted about the most select audience in the world enjoying what
was, likely enough, its most remarkable entertainment. When he turned
at last and inquired the time we were all amazed that two hours and more
had slipped away.

"And how much I have enjoyed it!" he said. "It is the ideal plan for
this kind of work. Narrative writing is always disappointing. The moment
you pick up a pen you begin to lose the spontaneity of the personal
relation, which contains the very essence of interest. With shorthand
dictation one can talk as if he were at his own dinner-table--always a
most inspiring place. I expect to dictate all the rest of my life, if
you good people are willing to come and listen to it."

The dictations thus begun continued steadily from week to week, and
always with increasing charm. We never knew what he was going to talk
about, and it was seldom that he knew until the moment of beginning;
then he went drifting among episodes, incidents, and periods in his
irresponsible fashion; the fashion of table-conversation, as he said,
the methodless method of the human mind. It was always delightful, and
always amusing, tragic, or instructive, and it was likely to be one
of these at one instant, and another the next. I felt myself the most
fortunate biographer in the world, as undoubtedly I was, though not just
in the way that I first imagined.

It was not for several weeks that I began to realize that these
marvelous reminiscences bore only an atmospheric relation to history;
that they were aspects of biography rather than its veritable narrative,
and built largely--sometimes wholly--from an imagination that, with age,
had dominated memory, creating details, even reversing them, yet with a
perfect sincerity of purpose on the part of the narrator to set down the
literal and unvarnished truth. It was his constant effort to be frank
and faithful to fact, to record, to confess, and to condemn without
stint. If you wanted to know the worst of Mark Twain you had only to
ask him for it. He would give it, to the last syllable--worse than
the worst, for his imagination would magnify it and adorn it with new
iniquities, and if he gave it again, or a dozen times, he would improve
upon it ea