I am new to this list, and although I checked recent archives, I apologize in advance if this is a subject that has been discussed here in the past. I am also rather knew to Twain, a graduate student returning to school after many years, with very little English background (I was trained in science and business). So with those caveats, I would like to raise an issue about _The Mysterious Stranger_. I have been researching the validity of the published version of this work and have found, of course that we have preserved something that Twain never intended the public to see. The commonly available text is something of a fraud, a severely edited version of a piece Twain began and discarded, combined with an editor's bridge paragraph, and a closing chapter lifted from yet another unpublished (and unfinished) work. The preserved text even includes a wizard character from another version of the story who was awarded a number of negative character traits and grafted into the published text as a way to deflect Christian uproar over the dishonesty and lechery attributed by Twain to one of the priests. Should, then, _The Mysterious Stranger_ be taught in college classes as a text by Mark Twain? And can we make valid inferences about his mental state or his writing abilities in his final years from such a bastardized text? Jim Steele