“My Dear Mr. Clemens:
“A man’s biography auto always be written by himself. A disinterested party is liable to omit some of the facts. A personal history should above all things be truthful—devoid of fulsomeness, and embrace all the important events of its subject’s life, good or bad. Too many biographers lie like a patent medicine advertisement. This is to be regretted.
“My memory is too treacherous to write my own life anyhow. I have been informed that I was present on the occasion of my birth, but I haven’t the slightest recollection of it—as some one has previously remarked.
“I am older—am uglier—than I was two score years ago.
“Then, young ladies would chuck me under the chin and gushingly exclaim: “B’ess its purty ’ittle heart.”
“Now—they don’t.
“And I am rather glad of it, for the aforesaid young ladies must be nearly sixty years old now, and some of them wear glasses and decayed teeth. If I had time, dear reader, I could tell you how, in 1492, under the nom de plume of Christopher Columbus, I discovered America. This is a fact not generally known. Sometimes it seems like a wild, weird dream. You may have read something about the discovery. It was considered important at the time; but more than one person, no doubt, upon looking around and seeing the distressing amount of misery in America, and observing how bogus mining companies, policy shops, rowing matches, political corruption and other frauds flourish like a green baize, will regret that I ever discovered it.
“I have one wife.
“I could, if my other duties permitted, describe how, in 1773, I surrounded thirty-two wild Indians, and after a hand-to-hand conflict lasting seven hours, I killed twenty-four of the redskins, wounded sixteen, and took eleven prisoners. The remainder fled. Aside from being pierced by twenty-one arrows, I escaped without a scratch.
“And yet I was never made the hero of a dime novel! Probably because I didn’t wear long hair and a soft hat as big around as a cart wheel.