CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY .-- XXIV.
BY MARK TWAIN.
_From Susy's Biography of Me_ [1885-6].
Mamma and papa have returned from Onteora and they have had a delightful visit.

Mr.Frank Stockton was down in Virginia and could not reach Onteora in time, so they did not see him, and Mrs.Mary Mapes Dodge was ill and couldn't go to Onteora, but Mrs.General Custer was there, and mamma said that she was a very attractive, sweet appearing woman.
[_Dictated October 9, 1906._] Onteora was situated high up in the Catskill Mountains, in the centre of a far-reaching solitude.

I do not mean that the region was wholly uninhabited; there were farmhouses here and there, at generous distances apart.

Their occupants were descendants of ancestors who had built the houses in Rip Van Winkle's time, or earlier; and those ancestors were not more primitive than were this posterity of theirs.

The city people were as foreign and unfamiliar and strange to them as monkeys would have been, and they would have respected the monkeys as much as they respected these elegant summer-resorters.