Quoting W. D. Howells:

"During the summer he spent at York Harbor I was only forty minutes
away at Kittery Point, and we saw each other often...He had a wide,
low cottage in a pine grove overlooking York River, and we used to
sit at a corner of the veranda farthest away from Mrs. Clemens's
window, where we could read our manuscripts to each other, and tell
our stories...He [Clemens] had taken a room in the house of a friend
and neighbor, a fisherman and boatman; there was a table where he
could write, and a bed where he could lie down and read; and there,
unless my memory has played me one of those constructive tricks...he
read me the first chapters of an admirable story. The scene was laid
in a Missouri town, and the characters such as he had known in
boyhood; but often as I tried to make him own it, he denied having
written any such story; it is possible that I dreamed it, but I hope
the MS. will yet be found." (My MT, p. 90)

Paine comments on this account: "Howells did not dream it; but in one
way his memory misled him. The story was one which Clemens had heard
in Hannibal, and he doubtless related it in his vivid way. Howells,
writing at a later time, quite naturally included it among the
several manuscripts which Clemens read aloud to him. Clemens may have
intended to write the tale, may even have begun it, though this is
unlikely. The incidents were too well known and too notorious in his
old home for fiction." (MT, A Biography, p. 1177)

I know Howells was pretty old when he wrote his memories of Twain in
1910 (age 73), but the trip to Maine took place when Howells was 65,
not thirty years previous.  I have a bunch of questions regarding
this passage, the first, of course, is: who's right, and does anyone
know if the MS. does exist and what it is about?

Beyond that I'm curious about Twain's time up in York-area, Maine.
His rental (The Pines) is reported as renovated, but still exiting
(http://www.perioddesignandrestoration.com/the_pines.html), but I'm
curious about what it was like before the face lift. Who was this
friend and fisherman? Paine met Twain "at the end of 1901" (p. 1257),
saw him again the following spring, then it was "more than three
years before I saw him again" (p.1258), so Paine wasn't there, and
what are the odds he spoke to Twain about this specific time before
he died and Howells wrote his recollection?

Curious.
Alex

Mr. Alex B. Effgen, M.A.
Boston University