I have been following with interest the discussion about what Twain sounded like. Through the kindness of people on this list, I have been able to hear the Gillette recording, and have recently seen HH doing Twain. His speech cadence was MUCH faster and, I thought, differently inflected than the Gillette recording. If he used the same slow speech patterns as Gillette did, the show would have been much longer, or not contained nearly as much material. I have a recollection of Twain describing his own speech as being very slow ........ is it possibly in "Life on the Mississippi"? It strikes me that there was some passage in there about how slow the pilot teaching him the river found his speech to be, but I could be mistaken about that. I also have a recollection of something one of his daughters said of his speech on the lecture platform. It seems to me that her comment was about how much slower and more heavily accented his speech was when he gave lectures than when he spoke normally. I apologize for not looking up either of these examples, and I do intend to do it, but by the time I get that done, the discussion will have moved on. I thought, perhaps, someone out there would know. The comment by his daughter may have been in Ron Powers' biography, my first guess ....... or possibly in Clara's book. At least these are the first two places I am going to start looking. I have seen different references to Twain doing audio recordings, and even dictating one of his later books on a recording machine, but, sadly, none of those recordings apparently have survived. It's too bad, given the success he had as a lecturer, he must have been something to hear. Jerry Dean