Mark Twain

Those Extraordinary Twins Mark Twain

, that it was two stories in one. It took me months to make that discovery. I carried the manuscript back and forth across the Atlantic two or three times, and read it and studied over it on shipboard; and at last I saw where the difficulty lay. I had no further trouble. I pulled one of the stories out by the roots, and left the other one--a kind of literary Caesarean operation. Would the reader care to know something about the story which I pulled out? He has been told many a time how the born-and-trained novelist works. Won't he let me round and complete his knowledge by telling him how the jack-leg does it? Originally the story was called "Those Extraordinary Twins." I meant to make it very short. I had seen a picture of a youthful Italian "freak" or "freaks" which was--or which were--on exhibition in our cities--a combination consisting of two heads and four arms joined to a single body and a single pair of legs--and I thought I would write an extravagantly fantastic little story with this