got them from Dr. Peake. Even this great
shot did no damage. She said Dr. Peake's evidence was better than mine,
and he had said in plain words that it was impossible for me to have
heard about those things. Dear, dear, what a grotesque and unthinkable
situation: a confessed swindler convicted of honesty and condemned to
acquittal by circumstantial evidence furnished by the swindled!

I realised, with shame and with impotent vexation, that I was defeated
all along the line. I had but one card left, but it was a formidable
one. I played it--and stood from under. It seemed ignoble to demolish
her fortress, after she had defended it so valiantly; but the defeated
know not mercy. I played that matter card. It was the pin-sticking. I
said, solemnly--

"I give you my honor, a pin was never stuck into me without causing me
cruel pain."

She only said--

"It is thirty-five years. I believe you do think that, _now_, but I was
there, and I know better. You never winced."

She was so calm! and I was so far from it, so nearly frantic.

"Oh, my goodness!" I said, "let me _show_ you that I am speaking the
truth. Here is my arm; drive a pin into it--drive it to the head--I
shall not wince."

She only shook her gray head and said, with simplicity and conviction--

"You are a man, now, and could dissemble the hurt; but you were only a
child then, and could not have done it."

And so the lie which I played upon her in my youth remained with her as
an unchallengeable truth to the day of her death. Carlyle said "a lie
cannot live." It shows that he did not know how to tell them. If I had
taken out a life policy on this one the premiums would have bankrupted
me ages ago.

MARK TWAIN.

(_To be Continued._)

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

No. DCVII.

JANUARY 18, 1907.

CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--X.

BY MARK TWAIN.

[Sidenote: (1825.)]

[Sidenote: (1837.)]

[_Dictated March 28, 1906._] Orion Clemens was born in Jamestown,
Fentress County, Tennessee, in 1825. He was the family's first-born, and
antedated me ten years. Between him and me came a sister, Margaret, who
died, aged ten, in 1837, in that village of Florida, Missouri, where I
was born; and Pamela, mother of Samuel E. Moffett, who was an invalid
all her life and died in the neighborhood of New York a year ago, aged
about seventy-five. Her character was without blemish, and she