CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY .-- XXV.
BY MARK TWAIN.
_January 11, 1906._ Answer to a letter received this morning: DEAR MRS.

H.,--I am forever your debtor for reminding me of that curious passage in my life.

During the first year or two after it happened, I could not bear to think of it.

My pain and shame were so intense, and my sense of having been an imbecile so settled, established and confirmed, that I drove the episode entirely from my mind--and so all these twenty-eight or twenty-nine years I have lived in the conviction that my performance of that time was coarse, vulgar and destitute of humor.

But your suggestion that you and your family found humor in it twenty-eight years ago moved me to look into the matter.