st time of Joan of Arc, the
wondrous maid who led the French to victory. He had never heard of
her. He had read no history, nor had he had an active interest in
books. Studying there in the village street, reading the few lines of
the marvelous story of the Maid of Orleans, there was created in him
an interest that went with him throughout life.

He was by turn a printer, a pilot, a pioneer, a soldier, a miner, a
newspaper reporter, a lecturer, but at last he found his true place.
He became a writer and wrote books that continue to delight thousands
upon thousands of readers. His life went into his books. Just as he
drew upon his early days in Hannibal for the material in "Huckleberry
Finn" and The "Adventures of Tom Sawyer," so he used all of his
experiences. He wrote "Life Upon The Mississippi," a record of his
days as a pilot; "Roughing It," a story of a mining camp; "The Jumping
Frog," a western story that made his fame throughout the United
States; "Innocents Abroad," a tale of his experiences abroad, and
"The Life Of Joan Of Arc," a beautiful story that was always the
author's favorite.

During the last years of his life, Mark Twain passed the winters in
Bermuda and there he was, as ever, the friend of children. There was a
pretty, little girl at his hotel named Margaret, who was twelve years
old. She and Mr. Clemens went everywhere together and, on one
excursion, he found a beautiful, little shell. The two halves came
apart in his hand. He gave one of them to Margaret and said, "Now
dear, sometime or other in the future, I shall run across you
somewhere, and it may turn out that it is not you at all, but will be
some girl that only resembles you. I shall be saying to myself, 'I
know that this is Margaret by the look of her, but I don't know for
sure whether this is my Margaret or somebody else's;' but, no matter,
I can soon find out, for I shall take my half shell out of my packet
and say, 'I think you are my Margaret, but I am not certain; if you
are my Margaret you can produce the other half of the shell.'"

After that Margaret played the new game often and she tried to catch
him without his half of the shell, but Mark Twain writes, "I always
defeated that game, wherefore, she came to recognize, at last, that I
was not only old, but very smart."

Mark Twain had lived 74 years when the close of his life here came
April 20, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut. Once he wrote in one of his
humorous moments, "Let us