is a deep happiness
to me to know that when it comes to epistolary literature he can't sit
in the front seat along with me.

This reminds me--nine years ago, when we were living in Tedworth Square,
London, a report was cabled to the American journals that I was dying. I
was not the one. It was another Clemens, a cousin of mine,--Dr. J. Ross
Clemens, now of St. Louis--who was due to die but presently escaped, by
some chicanery or other characteristic of the tribe of Clemens. The
London representatives of the American papers began to flock in, with
American cables in their hands, to inquire into my condition. There was
nothing the matter with me, and each in his turn was astonished, and
disappointed, to find me reading and smoking in my study and worth next
to nothing as a text for transatlantic news. One of these men was a
gentle and kindly and grave and sympathetic Irishman, who hid his sorrow
the best he could, and tried to look glad, and told me that his paper,
the _Evening Sun_, had cabled him that it was reported in New York that
I was dead. What should he cable in reply? I said--

"Say the report is greatly exaggerated."

He never smiled, but went solemnly away and sent the cable in those
words. The remark hit the world pleasantly, and to this day it keeps
turning up, now and then, in the newspapers when people have occasion to
discount exaggerations.

The next man was also an Irishman. He had his New York cablegram in his
hand--from the New York _World_--and he was so evidently trying to get
around that cable with invented softnesses and palliations that my
curiosity was aroused and I wanted to see what it did really say. So
when occasion offered I slipped it out of his hand. It said,

"If Mark Twain dying send five hundred words. If dead send a thousand."

Now that old letter of mine sold yesterday for forty-three dollars. When
I am dead it will be worth eighty-six.

MARK TWAIN.

(_To be Continued._)

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

No. DC.

OCTOBER 5, 1906.

CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--III.

BY MARK TWAIN.

VI.

To-morrow will be the thirty-sixth anniversary of our marriage. My wife
passed from this life one year and eight months ago, in Florence, Italy,
after an unbroken illness of twenty-two months' duration.

I saw her first in the form of an ivory miniature in her brother
Charley's stateroom in the steamer