Most of _The Mysterious Stranger_ is Twain's, and in spite of Duneka and Paine's effort to bowdlerize the piece, much of its power remains. Duneka and Pain were primarily interested, after all, in selling books; they were not such operators that they invented a whole new story and fobbed it off as Twain's. What they did do was find an ending from the third draft in order to give the book closure. Then, Duneka, a Roman Catholic, and Paine removed Twain's most obvious attacks on Roman Catholicism, in part by changing the villian from a notoriously corrupt priest to a necromancer. Granted that Twain did not create the character, most of his lines were penned by Twain. Paine and Duneka then commisioned etherial illustrations to round out a rather pretty book, and tried to hawk it on the christmas market as a boy's book, but so much of Twain's orignal remained, that it didn't sell particularly well as such. That, I suppose, is poetic justice, though so much of the real Twain remained in the story, that it found a new market later, with illustrations removed, in various collections of short stories as well as in Harper's uniform edition of Twain's works. Considering that Harper Collins continues to publish the bowdlerized version, our railing against it is not going to make it go away, especially if we overstate the case by calling Paine and Duneka the authors. Nor, I think, can we in good conscience say that any of the other editions is the version Twain intended, because he intended no version for public consumption. As he told Howells, he was writing to find solace after Susy's death, and he did not intend to publish private expressions of grief. So, Tom, what you have enjoyed is mostly Twain's, but you'll need to read "Chronicle of Young Satan" to get the full power of the story as Twain penned it. Gregg Camfield