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