_Connecticut Yankee_ is a very spirited condemnation of virtually everything, but I'm interested in the kind of spirit. After all, the way "Mark Twain" persuades Hank Morgan to tell his tale is to ply him with Scotch -- "I also comforted him with a hot Scotch whisky; gave him another; then still another--hoping always for his story. After a fourth persuader, he drifted into it himself, in a quite simple and natural way." It has always seemed to me that delirium tremens explains much of the mess that is _CY_. Granted, Twain often prefaces his stories with a warning that the contents might be spirited, as when he says at the beginning of _Roughing It_ that "the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom," but the order of delirium in _Yankee_ is much higher. Is Hank that much tighter? Anyway, the relevance of all of this to our conversation is that Hank is something of a picaro in that he is an alcoholic bum who trashes the aristocracy from the gutter. But, to return to another question raised here awhile back, as a demented man, Hank spins a yarn that is neither realistic nor naturalistic. Yet obviously Twain had a substantial intellectual and moral investment in this book. Why, then, the frame's suggestion that Hank is a drunk? Gregg Camfield