This inference is corroborated by the similar plight of Pudd'nhead Wilson, the sardonic philosopher whom we should have identified with Mark Twain even if the latter had not repeatedly assured us that an author draws himself in all his characters, even if we did not know that Pudd'nhead's "calendar" was so far Mark Twain's own calendar that he continued it in two later books, "Following the Equator" and "A Double-Barrelled Detective Story." Pudd'nhead, in short, is simply another Edward J. Billings and the village folk treat him in just the same fashion. "For some years," says the author, "Wilson had been privately at work on a whimsical almanac, for his amusement--a calendar, with a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in ironical form; appended to each date, and the Judge thought that these quips and fancies of Wilson's were neatly turned and cute; so he carried a handful of them around one day, and read them to some of the chief citizens. But irony was not for those people; their mental vision was not focussed for it. They read those playful trifles in the solidest earnest and decided without hesitancy that if there ever had been any doubt that Dave Wilson was a pudd'nhead--which there hadn't--this revelation removed that doubt for good and all." And hear how the half-breed Tom Driscoll baits him before all the people in the square: "Dave's just an all-round genius--a genius of the first water, gentlemen; a great scientist running to seed here in this village, a prophet with the kind of honor that prophets generally get at home--for here they don't give shucks for his scientifics, and they call his skull a notion-factory--hey, Dave, ain't it so?... Come, Dave, show the gentlemen what an inspired Jack-at-all-science we've got in this town and don't know it." Is it possible to doubt that here, more than half consciously, Mark Twain was picturing the fate that had, in so real a sense, made a buffoon of him? Hardly, when we consider the vindictive delight with which he pictures Pudd'nhead out-manœuvring the village folk and triumphing over them in the end.