against the force of
circumstances that drive a man. Suppose we took the next four and twenty
years of Tom Sawyer's life, and gave a little joggle to the
circumstances that controlled him. He would, logically and according to
the joggle, turn out a rip or an angel."

"Do you believe that, then?"

"I think so. Isn't it what you call Kismet?"

"Yes; but don't give him two joggles and show the result, because he
isn't your property any more. He belongs to us."

He laughed--a large, wholesome laugh--and this began a dissertation on
the rights of a man to do what he liked with his own creations, which
being a matter of purely professional interest, I will mercifully omit.

Returning to the big chair, he, speaking of truth and the like in
literature, said that an autobiography was the one work in which a man,
against his own will and in spite of his utmost striving to the
contrary, revealed himself in his true light to the world.

"A good deal of your life on the Mississippi is autobiographical, isn't
it?" I asked.

"As near as it can be--when a man is writing to a book and about
himself. But in genuine autobiography, I believe it is impossible for a
man to tell the truth about himself or to avoid impressing the reader
with the truth about himself.

"I made an experiment once. I got a friend of mine--a man painfully
given to speak the truth on all occasions--a man who wouldn't dream of
telling a lie--and I made him write his autobiography for his own
amusement and mine. He did it. The manuscript would have made an octavo
volume, but--good, honest man that he was--in every single detail of his
life that I knew about he turned out, on paper, a formidable liar. He
could not help himself.

"It is not in human nature to write the truth about itself. None the
less the reader gets a general impression from an autobiography whether
the man is a fraud or a good man. The reader can't give his reasons any
more than a man can explain why a woman struck him as being lovely when
he doesn't remember her hair, eyes, teeth, or figure. And the impression
that the reader gets is a correct one."

"Do you ever intend to write an autobiography?"

"If I do, it will be as other men have done--with the most earnest
desire to make myself out to be the better man in every little business
that has been to my discredit; and I shall fail, like the others, to
make my readers believe anything except the truth."

This naturally led to a discu