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Clemens)

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Title: A Burlesque Autobiography

Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Release Date: April, 2002 [Etext #3175]
Posting Date: March 26, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BURLESQUE AUTOBIOGRAPHY ***

Produced by David Widger

A BURLESQUE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

and, FIRST ROMANCE

by Mark Twain

1871

Contents

BURLESQUE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

AWFUL, TERRIBLE MEDIEVAL ROMANCE

CHAPTER I. THE SECRET REVEALED.

CHAPTER II. FESTIVITY AND TEARS

CHAPTER III. THE PLOT THICKENS.

CHAPTER IV. THE AWFUL REVELATION.

CHAPTER V. THE FRIGHTFUL CATASTROPHE.

BURLESQUE AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

Two or three persons having at different times intimated that if I would
write an autobiography they would read it, when they got leisure, I
yield at last to this frenzied public demand, and herewith tender my
history:

Ours is a noble old house, and stretches a long way back into antiquity.
The earliest ancestor the Twains have any record of was a friend of the
family by the name of Higgins. This was in the eleventh century, when
our people were living in Aberdeen, county of Cork, England. Why it is
that our long line has ever since borne the maternal name (except when
one of them now and then took a playful refuge in an alias to avert
foolishness), instead of Higgins, is a mystery which none of us has ever
felt much desire to stir. It is a kind of vague, pretty romance, and we
leave it alone. All the old families do that way.

Arthour Twain was a man of considerable note--a solicitor on the highway
in William Rufus' time. At about the age of thirty he went to one of
those fine old English places of resort called Newgate, to see about
something, and never returned again. While there he died suddenly.

Augustus Twain, seems to have made something of a stir about the year
1160. He was as full of fun as he could be, and used to take his old
sabre and sharpen it up, and get in a convenient place on a dark night,
and stick it through people as they went by, to see them jump. He was a
born humorist. But he got to going