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you won't tell the black heart's--truth. The man who could do it
would be famed to the last day the sun shone upon."
We gather from Mark Twain's answer that he was not deceiving himself
in the matter of his confessions.
*
****
To W. D. Howells, in New York:
VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE,
March 14, '04.
DEAR HOWELLS,--Yes, I set up the safeguards, in the first day's
dictating; taking this position: that an autobiography is the truest of
all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the
truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with
hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is
there, between the lines, where the author is raking dust upon it,
the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily
diligences.
The summer in England! you can't ask better luck than that. Then you
will run over to Florence; we shall all be hungry to see you-all. We are
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