supply material as needed. So he
was likely to run ashore any time. As for those other attempts--stories
"unavailable" for one reason or another--he was just as apt to
begin those as the better sort, for somehow he could never tell the
difference. That is one of the hall-marks of genius--the thing which
sharply differentiates genius from talent. Genius is likely to rate a
literary disaster as its best work. Talent rarely makes that mistake.

Among the abandoned literary undertakings of these early years of
authorship there is the beginning of what was doubtless intended to
become a book, "The Second Advent," a story which opens with a
very doubtful miraculous conception in Arkansas, and leads only to
grotesquery and literary disorder. There is another, "The Autobiography
of a Damn Fool," a burlesque on family history, hopelessly impossible;
yet he began it with vast enthusiasm and, until he allowed her to see
the manuscript, thought it especially good. "Livy wouldn't have it,"
he said, "so I gave it up." There is another, "The Mysterious Chamber,"
strong and fine in conception, vividly and intensely interesting; the
story of a young lover who is accidentally locked behind a secret door
in an old castle and cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down
into subterranean passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this
isolation for twenty years. The question of sustenance was the weak
point in the story. Clemens could invent no way of providing it, except
by means of a waste or conduit from the kitchen into which scraps of
meat, bread, and other items of garbage were thrown. This he thought
sufficient, but Mrs. Clemens did not highly regard such a literary
device. Clemens could think of no good way to improve upon it, so this
effort too was consigned to the penal colony, a set of pigeonholes kept
in his study. To Howells and others, when they came along, he would read
the discarded yarns, and they were delightful enough for such a purpose,
as delightful as the sketches which every artist has, turned face to the
wall.

"Captain Stormfield" lay under the ban for many a year, though never
entirely abandoned. This manuscript was even recommended for publication
by Howells, who has since admitted that it would not have done then; and
indeed, in its original, primitive nakedness it would hardly have done
even in this day of wider toleration.

It should be said here that there is not the least evidence (and
the manuscrip