I had come to kind of like her after a fashion, notwithstanding
things and was so nauseatingly sentimental. Still it had to be done. So
at the top of Chapter XVII I put a "Calendar" remark concerning July the
Fourth, and began the chapter with this statistic:

"Rowena went out in the backyard after supper to see the fireworks and
fell down the well and got drowned."

It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn't notice it,
because I changed the subject right away to something else. Anyway it
loosened up Rowena from where she was stuck and got her out of the way,
and that was the main thing. It seemed a prompt good way of weeding out
people that had got stalled, and a plenty good enough way for those
others; so I hunted up the two boys and said, "They went out back one
night to stone the cat and fell down the well and got drowned." Next I
searched around and found old Aunt Patsy and Aunt Betsy Hale where they
were around, and said, "They went out back one night to visit the sick
and fell down the well and got drowned." I was going to drown some
others, but I gave up the idea, partly because I believed that if I kept
that up it would arouse attention, and perhaps sympathy with those people,
and partly because it was not a large well and would not hold any more
anyway.

Still the story was unsatisfactory. Here was a set of new characters who
were become inordinately prominent and who persisted in remaining so to
the end; and back yonder was an older set who made a large noise and a
great to-do for a little while and then suddenly played out utterly and
fell down the well. There was a radical defect somewhere, and I must
search it out and cure it.

The defect turned out to be the one already spoken of--two stories in
one, a farce and a tragedy. So I pulled out the farce and left the
tragedy. This left the original team in, but only as mere names, not as
characters. Their prominence was wholly gone; they were not even worth
drowning; so I removed that detail. Also I took the twins apart and made
two separate men of them. They had no occasion to have foreign names now,
but it was too much trouble to remove them all through, so I left them
christened as they were and made no explanation.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS

by Mark Twain

A man who is born with the novel-writing gift ha