Huckleberry Fiend Read Online Free Page A

insert. Clemens had numbered it “81 A-l,” the “A,” I supposed, meaning exactly what it does now—“add” or “addition.” The add ran sixty of those tiny pages, and the next numbered page was 160. The first sentence began like this: “They swarmed up the street towards Sherburn’s house…”
    Before I went home, I tried to read the story, but, frankly, I was too excited. Its whole name was “1002: An Oriental Tale,” and it purported to be Scheherazade’s version of a lost manuscript. A good idea, but I honestly can’t say whether I agree with Linda that it’s the worst thing the great man wrote. I wondered if, up in the Mark Twain Project, new editors had to take a few months to inure themselves to handling such things. It had been different in my own living room when I didn’t really know what I had. Here, I just couldn’t calm down.
    I managed to read enough pages— and also to look at enough of the facsimile— to give me an idea. On these, as on the pages I had at home, the author had changed very little. On the typescript of the Oriental Tale, which Linda had also sent, he had changed a lot more.
    After turning in the materials, I gave Linda a call. “Paul!” Her voice was pleased, no doubt about it. “I enjoyed our talk.”
    “Me too. You were nice to give me so much time.”
    “Nonsense. I felt badly it couldn’t have been longer. Maybe we could continue later.”
    I realized with surprise that this had suddenly become a full-blown flirtation. And why not? I wasn’t a bad-looking guy, for a bearded and bespectacled bear. And I suppose I had been looking at her in rather an interested manner. “I’d like that,” I said. “Maybe we could have coffee. Meanwhile, though, I’ve got another question. Did Twain make a lot of revisions on the printer’s typescript?”
    “Absolutely. That’s why the typescripts are so important to scholars.”
    “So the hypothetical Huck Finn holograph ought to be slightly different from the book as we know it.”
    “Oh, yes.”
    All I had to do was compare— but my copy of the book had burned with my house. “Say, Linda,” I said. “I need a new copy of Huck. Which edition should I get?”
    “Ours, of course.”
    “The new one, you mean. But aren’t there several other UC Press editions?”
    “There is no other edition.” She spoke severely.
    “What about the 100th Anniversary Edition?” This was quite a famous one, launched with much fanfare.
    She made a noise that sounded oddly like a snort. “Little-known fact: They left the last line off.”
    Heading for the bookstore, it occurred to me I was learning lots of little-known facts. I couldn’t even imagine how a university press had managed to leave the last line off of any book. Yet there it was. The Mark Twain Library edition (the one Linda called “ours”) had it, the other one didn’t: “The End, Yours Truly Huck Finn.” Sold.
    Comparing book with manuscript, I was rewarded on the very first page, where Huck tells part of the plot of Tom Sawyer and then says: “Now the way the book winds up, is this: Tom and me found the money the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich.”
    In manuscript, the sentence read like this: “The way the book ends up is this: Tom and me found the gold the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich.” The author had added the “now,” changed “ends” to “winds,” and “gold” to “money.”
    I read on. And found many more discrepancies. And was convinced: If this wasn’t the real thing, I was the King’s Camelopard.

CHAPTER 3
    I started to understand the appeal of collecting. What a thrill to have these papers in my house, knowing that the great man’s thoughts had come out of his head and down his arm and out of his pen and spilled onto them!
    I was consumed suddenly by the same compulsion Booker had felt— to get this thing back to where it belonged. Unfortunately there was only one person I knew about who was likely to know