In reply to the posting by Harold Bush, I'd like to point out that the beginning of MT's friendship with Hay is discussed in the MTP edition of Roughing It, pp. 828-30. Mr. Bush expressed uncertainty about where he had previously seen the passage from the piece "John Hay," which was one of the dictations that MT made in Florence in 1904 and selected as part of his final version of the autobiography. The complete text of this dictation was published in Paine's 1924 edition. The version in the North American Review, however, omits a long passage in the middle about Hay and Horace Greeley, and three paragraphs at the end, where MT makes some interesting remarks about writing as opposed to dictation. The omitted section begins "Within the last eight or ten years I have made several attempts to do the autobiography in one way or another with a pen, but the result was not satisfactory" (p. 224 of the MTP edition). The new critical edition provides background information about the history of the text. The online textual apparatus (at marktwainproject.org) makes note of what was omitted from the NAR chapter (where it was paired with excerpts from two April 1906 dictations about MT's brother Orion). The textual commentary explains that when preparing the text for the magazine, MT wrote on the original typescript, "Of this instalment I have struck out more than 3 pages. Mark." Every revision that he made in the text is listed. In addition, the list of variants shows that a phrase in the typescript text--"instead of an ungrateful one" (224.17)--was omitted from the NAR proofs, and the same sentence was cut further before publication: the phrase "and would be President next year if we were a properly honest and grateful nation" (224.16–17) is not found at all in the NAR. The source of these revisions, which are not on any extant document, was probably someone at the NAR. Clemens himself made no revisions on this portion of the proofs. Harriet Smith