No. DCXVIII.
JULY 5, 1907.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.—XX.
BY MARK TWAIN.
(1868.)
[Notes on "Innocents Abroad." Dictated in Florence, Italy, April, 1904.]—I will begin with a note upon the dedication. I wrote the book in the months of March and April, 1868, in San Francisco. It was published in August, 1869. Three years afterward Mr. Goodman, of Virginia City, Nevada, on whose newspaper I had served ten years before, came East, and we were walking down Broadway one day when he said: "How did you come to steal Oliver Wendell Holmes's dedication and put it in your book?"
I made a careless and inconsequential answer, for I supposed he was joking. But he assured me that he was in earnest. He said: "I'm not discussing the question of whether you stole it or didn't—for that is a question that can be settled in the first bookstore we come to—I am only asking you how you came to steal it, for that is where my curiosity is focalized."