I didn’t know what to do with her.  I was as sorry for her as anybody could be, but the campaign was over, the book was finished, she was sidetracked, and there was no possible way of crowding her in, anywhere.  I could not leave her there, of course; it would not do.  After spreading her out so, and making such a to-do over her affairs, it would be absolutely necessary to account to the reader for her.  I thought and thought and studied and studied; but I arrived at nothing.  I finally saw plainly that there was really no way but one—­I must simply give her the grand bounce.  It grieved me to do it, for after associating with her so much I had come to kind of like her after a fashion, notwithstanding she was such an ass and said such stupid irritating things and was so nauseatingly sentimental.  Still it had to be done.  So, at the top of Chapter XVII, I put in a “Calendar” remark concerning July Fourth, and began the chapter with this statistic: 

“Rowena went out in the back yard after supper to see the fireworks and fell down the well and got drowned.”

It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn’t notice it, because I changed the subject right away to something else.  Anyway it loosened up Rowena from where she was stuck and got her out of the way, and that was the main thing.  It seemed a prompt good way of weeding out people that had got stalled, and a plenty good enough way for those others; so I hunted up the two boys and said “they went out back one night to stone the cat and fell down the well and got drowned.”  Next I searched around and found old Aunt Patsy Cooper and Aunt Betsy Hale where they were aground, and said “they went out back one night to visit the sick and fell down the well and got drowned.”  I was going to drown some of the others, but I gave up the idea, partly because I believed that if I kept that up it would arouse attention, and perhaps sympathy with those people, and partly because it was not a large well and would not hold any more anyway.

Still the story was unsatisfactory.  Here was a set of new characters who were become inordinately prominent and who persisted in remaining so to the end; and back yonder was an older set who made a large noise and a great to-do for a little while and then suddenly played out utterly and fell down the well.  There was a radical defect somewhere, and I must search it out and cure it.

The defect turned out to be the one already spoken of—­two stories in one, a farce and a tragedy.  So I pulled out the farce and left the tragedy.  This left the original team in, but only as mere names, not as characters.  Their prominence was wholly gone; they were not even worth drowning; so I removed that detail.  Also I took those twins apart and made two separate men of them.  They had no occasion to have foreign names now, but it was too much trouble to remove them all through, so I left them christened as they were and made no explanation.