writing from the grave," he notes in later life, regarding some manuscripts that are not to be published until after his death. "On these terms only can a man be approximately frank. He cannot be straightly and unqualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it." When he wrote "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," "Pudd'nhead Wilson," "The American Claimant," "Those Extraordinary Twins," he was frank without knowing it. He, the unconscious artist, who, when he wrote his Autobiography, found that he was unable to tell the truth about himself, has conducted us unawares in these writings into the penetralia of his soul. Let us note, prefatorily, that in each case Mark Twain was peculiarly, for the time being, free of his censorship. That he wrote at least the first draft of "Captain Stormfield" in reckless disregard of it is proved by the fact that for forty years he did not dare to publish the book at all but kept it locked away in his safe. As for "The American Claimant," "Pudd'nhead Wilson," and "Those Extraordinary Twins," he wrote them at the time of the failure of the Paige Typesetting Machine. Shortly before, he had been on the dizziest pinnacle of worldly expectation. Calculating what his returns from the machine were going to be, he had "covered pages," according to Mr. Paine, "with figures that never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion mark." Then, suddenly, reduced to virtual bankruptcy, he found himself once more dependent upon authorship for a living. He had passed, in short, through a profound nervous and emotional cataclysm: "so disturbed were his affairs, so disordered was everything," we are told, "that sometimes he felt himself as one walking amid unrealities." At such times, we know, the bars of the spirit fall down; people commit all sorts of aberrations, "go off the handle," as we say; the moral habits of a lifetime give way and man becomes more or less an irresponsible animal. In Mark Twain's case, at least, the result was a violent effort on the part of his suppressed self to assert its supremacy in a propitious moment when that other self, the business man, had proved abysmally weak. That is why these books that marked his return to literature appear to have the quality of nightmares. He has told us in the preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins" that the story had originally been a part of "Pudd'nhead Wilson": he had seen a picture of an Italian monstrosity like the Siamese Twins and had meant to write an extravagant farce about them; but, he adds, "the story changed itself from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it--a most embarrassing circumstance." Eventually, he realized that it was "not one story but two stories tangled together" that he was trying to tell, so he removed the twins from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and printed the two tales separately. That alone shows us the confusion of his mind, the confusion revealed