nreflecting red.

He began that morning with some memories of the Comstock mine; then he
dropped back to his childhood, closing at last with some comment on
matters quite recent. How delightful it was--his quaint, unhurried
fashion of speech, the unconscious habits of his delicate hands, the play
of his features as his fancies and phrases passed through his mind and
were accepted or put aside. We were watching one of the great literary
creators of his time in the very process of his architecture. Time did
not count. When he finished, at last, we were all amazed to find that
more than two hours 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
short-hand dictation one can talk as if he were at his own dinner-table
always an 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, 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. But it was always
fascinating, and I felt myself the most fortunate biographer in the
world, as indeed I was.

It was not all smooth sailing, however. In the course of time I began to
realize that these marvelous dictated chapters were not altogether
history, but were often partly, or even entirely, imaginary. The creator
of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn had been embroidering old incidents or
inventing new ones too long to stick to history now, to be able to
separate the romance in his mind from the reality of the past. Also, his
memory of personal events had become inaccurate. He realized this, and
once said, in his whimsical, gentle way:

"When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened
or not; but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the
latter."

Yet it was his constant purpose to stick to fact, and especially did he
make no effort to put himself in a good light. Indeed, 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, and he would improve upon it and pile up
his sins, and sometimes the sins of others, without stint. Certainly the
dictations wer