As he stood on the railway platform waiting for the train, he told me howonce, fifty-five years before, as a boy of e The inclosed is not fancy, it is history; except that the little girl wasa passing stranger, and not kin to any of the parties. She had kissed his hand, he said, when they parted, for she had a severecold and would not wish to impart it to him; then happily she had saidgood night, and he had not seen her again. ryattractive young people--school-girls in particular, such as all throughhis life had appealed to Mark Twain.
It has taken me twelveyears to write a short story--the shortest one I ever wrote, I think. The bugle-call to breakfast. Indeed,the Defense of Harriet Shelly, with those early chapters of Joan atFlorence, maybe counted as the beginning for Mark Twain of a genuineliterary renaissance. He said: Is it your idea, then, that man is perfectly adapted to the conditionsof this planet? I began to qualify, rather weakly; but what I said did not matter.
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