The dictations thus begun continued steadily from week to week, and always with increasing charm.  We never knew what he was going to talk about, and it was seldom that he knew until the moment of beginning; then he went drifting among episodes, incidents, and periods in his irresponsible fashion; the fashion of table-conversation, as he said, the methodless method of the human mind.  It was always delightful, and always amusing, tragic, or instructive, and it was likely to be one of these at one instant, and another the next.  I felt myself the most fortunate biographer in the world, as undoubtedly I was, though not just in the way that I first imagined.

It was not for several weeks that I began to realize that these marvelous reminiscences bore only an atmospheric relation to history; that they were aspects of biography rather than its veritable narrative, and built largely—­sometimes wholly—­from an imagination that, with age, had dominated memory, creating details, even reversing them, yet with a perfect sincerity of purpose on the part of the narrator to set down the literal and unvarnished truth.  It was his constant effort to be frank and faithful to fact, to record, to confess, and to condemn without stint.  If you wanted to know the worst of Mark Twain you had only to ask him for it.  He would give it, to the last syllable—­worse than the worst, for his imagination would magnify it and adorn it with new iniquities, and if he gave it again, or a dozen times, he would improve upon it each time, until the thread of history was almost impossible to trace through the marvel of that fabric; and he would do the same for another person just as willingly.  Those vividly real personalities that he marched and countermarched before us were the most convincing creatures in the world; the most entertaining, the most excruciatingly humorous, or wicked, or tragic; but, alas, they were not always safe to include in a record that must bear a certain semblance to history.  They often disagreed in their performance, and even in their characters, with the documents in the next room, as I learned by and by when those records, disentangled, began to rebuild the structure of the years.

His gift of dramatization had been exercised too long to be discarded now.  The things he told of Mrs. Clemens and of Susy were true —­marvelously and beautifully true, in spirit and in aspect—­and the actual detail of these mattered little in such a record.  The rest was history only as ‘Roughing It’ is history, or the ‘Tramp Abroad’; that is to say, it was fictional history, with fact as a starting-point.  In a prefatory note to these volumes we have quoted Mark Twain’s own lovely and whimsical admission, made once when he realized his deviations: 

“When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter.”

At another time he paraphrased one of Josh Billings’s sayings in the remark:  “It isn’t so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so.”