Last year some high school teachers asked me to help a student with severe reading limitations, by reading the text of Huckleberry Finn onto cassette tapes for him. Knowing that I would stumble over words occasionally, or miss the correct emphasis and accenting, I recorded the readings directly into disk files, so I could repeat sentences that I had not rendered correctly, and then edit out the incorrect ones. After I copied those files to tape for the student, I converted the chapter readings to mp3 and put them on a free web site. http://home.hiwaay.net/~deec On the web site, I also included some selections of "character vignettes" and some brief speculations about what an authentic "Huck" voice would sound like -- i.e., a late teen's/early 20's first-person participant's voice. A few months later, just because I like them, I added a few selected readings from "Life on the Mississippi" and "Roughing It". So here is where the question for the scholars come in -- reading "Huck Finn" aloud was easy for me. The words flowed very conversationally, as if belonging to tales told at a campfire or at a traveler's inn table. But "Mississippi" and "Roughing" were much harder to read aloud. The sentences seemed long and stumble-y. They had writer's diction, not speaker's diction. Is the difference between the oral readability of "Huck Finn" and the other books a figment of my imagination, or an accident of my having an inborn river-rat timbre and cadence to my voice, or a consequence of Twain's successfully setting himself in the thought-and-conversation style of a teenager, or writing the other books with less passion, or what, or what, or what? I have seen some comments by Twain indicating that he did not like to perform staged readings of his books, which suggests that he was conscious of differences of style between his books and his lectures and after-dinner speeches. r dee colvett florence al