but often as I tried to make him own it, he denied having written
any such story; it is possible that I dreamed it, but I hope the MS.
will yet be found.

Howells did not dream it; but in one way his memory misled him. The
story was one which Clemens had heard in Hannibal, and he doubtless
related it in his vivid way. Howells, writing at a later time, quite
naturally included it among the several manuscripts which Clemens read
aloud to him. Clemens may have intended to write the tale, may even have
begun it, though this is unlikely. The incidents were too well known and
too notorious in his old home for fiction.

Among the stories that Clemens did show, or read, to Howells that summer
was "The Belated Passport," a strong, intensely interesting story with
what Howells in a letter calls a "goat's tail ending," perhaps meaning
that it stopped with a brief and sudden shake--with a joke, in fact,
altogether unimportant, and on the whole disappointing to the reader. A
far more notable literary work of that summer grew out of a true incident
which Howells related to Clemens as they sat chatting together on the
veranda overlooking the river one summer afternoon. It was a pathetic
episode in the life of some former occupants of The Pines--the tale of a
double illness in the household, where a righteous deception was carried
on during several weeks for the benefit of a life that was about to slip
away. Out of this grew the story, "Was it Heaven? or Hell?" a
heartbreaking history which probes the very depths of the human soul.
Next to "Hadleyburg," it is Mark Twain's greatest fictional sermon.

Clemens that summer wrote, or rather finished, his most pretentious poem.
One day at Riverdale, when Mrs. Clemens had been with him on the lawn,
they had remembered together the time when their family of little folks
had filled their lives so full, conjuring up dream-like glimpses of them
in the years of play and short frocks and hair-plaits down their backs.
It was pathetic, heart-wringing fancying; and later in the day Clemens
conceived and began the poem which now he brought to conclusion. It was
built on the idea of a mother who imagines her dead child still living,
and describes to any listener the pictures of her fancy. It is an
impressive piece of work; but the author, for some reason, did not offer
it for publication.--[This poem was completed on the anniversary of
Susy's death and is of considerable length. Some select