The play written in collaboration with Bret Harte was called ‘Ah Sin,’ the name of the Heathen Chinee in ‘Plain Language from Truthful Jones.’ It was undertaken to enable Charles Parsloe, an actor now forgotten, to profit by the skill he had displayed in the small part of a Chinaman in Bret Harte’s earlier play, ‘Two Men of Sandy Bar,’ written for Stuart Robson, brought out in 1876 and withdrawn after a brief and inglorious career on the stage. Bret Harte did not know enough about playmaking to perceive that its failure had been due to its deficiency in that supporting skeleton of plot which is as necessary to a drama as the equally invisible steel-frame is to a skyscraper. But he was eager to try again, and he persuaded Mark to join him. Probably he had no need to be persuasive, since Mark had found his experience with the ‘Gilded Age’ exhilarating and profitable. Mark invited Harte to Hartford and they set to work. As I have always been curious about the secrets of collaboration, I asked Mark many years afterward, how they had gone about it. “Well,” he said, with his customary drawl, “Bret came to me at Hartford and we talked the whole thing out. Then Bret wrote the piece while I played billiards. Of course, I had to go over it and get the dialect right. Bret never did know anything about dialect.” Mr. Paine, to whom I transmitted this information, thinks that it is “scarcely a fair statement of the case,” since “both authors worked on the play and worked hard.” But while what Mark said to me may have been an over-statement, I doubt if it was a misstatement. The original suggestion had come from Harte; and the probability is that the major part of the story was his also. The two partners may have worked hard but I doubt if they worked as seriously at their playmaking as they were wont to do at their story-telling. The man of letters who is not primarily a man of theater, is prone to be somewhat contemptuous in his condescending to the drama. The play was produced in Washington in May, 1877, with Parsloe as Ah Sin. I saw it when it was brought to New York in the fall of 1877. From two of the foremost writers in America much was expected; and the result of their combined efforts was lamentably disappointing. It was unworthy of either of them, still more unworthy of both. All I can replevin from my dim recollections is a trial before Judge Lynch, which lit up the last act, and which I now recall as having more than a little of the energy and the vigor which I found afterward in the episode of the attempted lynching in ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ Mr. Paine tells me that the manuscript is still extant. Sooner or later it ought to be published, since nothing written by either Mark Twain or Bret Harte is negligible.