ch time, until the thread of history was almost impossible to
trace through the marvel of that fabric; and he would do the same for
another person just as willingly. Those vividly real personalities
that he marched and countermarched before us were the most convincing
creatures in the world; the most entertaining, the most excruciatingly
humorous, or wicked, or tragic; but, alas, they were not always safe to
include in a record that must bear a certain semblance to history. They
often disagreed in their performance, and even in their characters,
with the documents in the next room, as I learned by and by when those
records, disentangled, began to rebuild the structure of the years.

His gift of dramatization had been exercised too long to be
discarded now. The things he told of Mrs. Clemens and of Susy were
true--marvelously and beautifully true, in spirit and in aspect--and the
actual detail of these mattered little in such a record. The rest was
history only as 'Roughing It' is history, or the 'Tramp Abroad'; that
is to say, it was fictional history, with fact as a starting-point. In
a prefatory note to these volumes we have quoted Mark Twain's own lovely
and whimsical admission, made once when he realized his deviations:

"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."

At another time he paraphrased one of Josh Billings's sayings in the
remark: "It isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can
remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so."

I do not wish to say, by any means, that his so-called autobiography is
a mere fairy tale. It is far from that. It is amazingly truthful in
the character-picture it represents of the man himself. It is only not
reliable--and it is sometimes even unjust--as detailed history.
Yet, curiously enough, there were occasional chapters that were
photographically exact, and fitted precisely with the more positive,
if less picturesque, materials. It is also true that such chapters were
likely to be episodes intrinsically so perfect as to not require the
touch of art.

In the talks which we usually had, when the dictations were ended and
Miss Hobby had gone, I gathered much that was of still greater value.
Imagination was temporarily dispossessed, as it were, and, whether
expounding some theory or summarizing some event, he cared little
for literary effect, and only for