d and all. But we cannot follow his curious fate further--that
would be a long story.

The false heir made a full confession and was sentenced to imprisonment
for life. But now a complication came up. The Percy Driscoll estate was
in such a crippled shape when its owner died that it could pay only sixty
percent of its great indebtedness, and was settled at that rate. But the
creditors came forward now, and complained that inasmuch as through an
error for which THEY were in no way to blame the false heir was not
inventoried at the time with the rest of the property, great wrong and
loss had thereby been inflicted upon them. They rightly claimed that
"Tom" was lawfully their property and had been so for eight years; that
they had already lost sufficiently in being deprived of his services
during that long period, and ought not to be required to add anything to
that loss; that if he had been delivered up to them in the first place,
they would have sold him and he could not have murdered Judge Driscoll;
therefore it was not that he had really committed the murder, the guilt
lay with the erroneous inventory. Everybody saw that there was reason in
this. Everybody granted that if "Tom" were white and free it would be
unquestionably right to punish him--it would be no loss to anybody; but
to shut up a valuable slave for life--that was quite another matter.

As soon as the Governor understood the case, he pardoned Tom at once, and
the creditors sold him down the river.

Author's Note to THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time
of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He
has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has
some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he
trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting
results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No--that is a thought
which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little
tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he
is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as
it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on
till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has
happened to me so many times.

And I have noticed another thing: that as the short tale grows into the
long tale, the or