ing him
how the jack-leg does it?

Originally the story was called "Those Extraordinary Twins." I meant to
make it very short. I had seen a picture of a youthful Italian "freak"
or "freaks" which was--or which were--on exhibition in our cities--a
combination consisting of two heads and four arms joined to a single body
and a single pair of legs--and I thought I would write an extravagantly
fantastic little story with this freak of nature for hero--or heroes
--a silly young miss for heroine, and two old ladies and two boys for the
minor parts. I lavishly elaborated these people and their doings, of
course. But the tale kept spreading along, and spreading along, and
other people got to intruding themselves and taking up more and more room
with their talk and their affairs. Among them came a stranger named
Pudd'nhead Wilson, and a woman named Roxana; and presently the doings of
these two pushed up into prominence a young fellow named Tom Driscoll,
whose proper place was away in the obscure background. Before the book
was half finished those three were taking things almost entirely into
their own hands and working the whole tale as a private venture of their
own--a tale which they had nothing at all to do with, by rights.

When the book was finished and I came to look around to see what had
become of the team I had originally started out with--Aunt Patsy Cooper,
Aunt Betsy Hale, the two boys, and Rowena the light-weight heroine--they
were nowhere to be seen; they had disappeared from the story some time or
other. I hunted about and found them found them stranded, idle,
forgotten, and permanently useless. It was very awkward. It was awkward
all around; but more particularly in the case of Rowena, because there
was a love-match on, between her and one of the twins that constituted
the freak, and I had worked it up to a blistering heat and thrown in a
quite dramatic love-quarrel, wherein Rowena scathingly denounced her
betrothed for getting drunk, and scoffed at his explanation of how it had
happened, and wouldn't listen to it, and had driven him from her in the
usual "forever" way; and now here she sat crying and broken-hearted; for
she had found that he had spoken only the truth; that it was not he, but
the other half of the freak, that had drunk the liquor that made him
drunk; that her half was a prohibitionist and had never drunk a drop in
his life, and, although tight as a brick three days in the week, was
wholl