Some of those later postings reminded me of a few things. Twain's famous letter to the Hartford gas company is similar to the letter to Howells, in jest. Twain admired creative cursing, and once admonished Livy when she repeated some of his cursing back to him in an effort to show him how bad it was to curse. All she got for her trouble was a critique of her lack of proper inflection by a husband who could not stop laughing. It might be productive to get the Twain World CD and do some word searches of "ass" "damn" etc and see what turns up and in what context. Twain's description of guys falling on their asses (donkeys) in Innocents Abroad is a gem. But when all is said and done I suspect the cursing reflected in his writings is just a pale reflection of his personal "oral tradition." I have two books that he annotated for use in his lectures and recitations, and in one of them he has changed the printed phrase in "Journalism in Tennessee" that reads something like "braying insect" to "braying jack-ass" for his reading. Of course, insects don't bray, so it is clear that he was not merely changing the text, but actually restoring his original text that had been cleansed for publication --and he was perfectly happy to say "jack-ass" in a public reading. The recordings that Whitmore cited in the 1920s were probably the now lost wax cylinders dictated for American Claimant (at least the number is about right). Twain walked in on opera star Nellie Melba while she was recording, stood in the door and made some jokey apology, and then stepped out. That one seems to be lost, as well as one of a speech he gave, plus the Edison recordings (the Edison film survives, of course). It is not clear which recording of his voice survived in the collection destroyed in WW2. The Gillette recording exists in the Yale Historical Sound Collection, and I think I've heard it played for tourists at either the Boyhood Home in Hannibal or the MTM in Hartford. I have an ancient cassette copy of the Gillette recording but no way to reproduce it. Kevin Mac Donnell Austin TX