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years." 88 The dream motif began to carry over into his fiction, notably "My Platonic Sweetheart." This sketch of the summer of 1898 tells of a recurrent dream of idyllic meetings between the narrator and his charming girl, both timelessly young, in settings ranging from Missouri to India and ancient Athens-each dream like "Mohammed's seventy-year dream, which began when he knocked his glass over, and ended in time for him to catch it before the water was spilled." 88 In many respects this sketch anticipates the love passages and the ending of "No. 44." Twain kept on trying variations based upon his dream donnee. He began three stories of family disaster, the first of them called "Which Was the Dream?," also in the summer of 1898.71 lie conceived of "a drama in the form of a dream" 71 which he mentioned in a speech in 1900, and a year or two later he jotted down the idea, "divorce of the McWilliamses on account of his dreamwife and family." 72

    This welter of ideas in notes and fragments, this effort made over
and over ag:iin to give form to the dream motif, began to cone clear
in the spring of 1904, not long before Twain either wrote or had
firmly in mind his last chapter; it was in these months that he probably wrote a note and he certainly wrote a letter couched in the language and imagery of the "Conclusion of the book." The note concerns "The intellectual & placid & sane-looking man whose foible is that life & God & the universe is a dream & he the only person in it-not a person, but a homeless & silly thought wandering forever in space." " The letter, dated 28 July, is in response to Twichell's question as to how life and the world had been looking to Clemens:

    (A part of each day-or night) as they have been looking to me
the past 7 years: as being NONEXISTENT. That is, that there is nothing. That there is no God and no universe; that there is only empty
space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless
and indestructible Thought. And that I am that thought. And God,
and the Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the
frantic imagination of that insane Thought.
    By this light, the absurdities that govern life and the universe lose
their absurdity and become natural, and a thing to be expected. It
reconciles everything, makes everything lucid and understandable:
a God who has no morals, yet blandly sets Himself up as Head
Sundayschool Superintendent of the Universe; Who has no idea
of mercy, justice, or honesty, yet obtusely imagines Himself the
inventor of those things; a human race that takes Him at His own
valuation, without examining the statistics; thinks itself intelligent,
yet hasn't any more evidence of it than had Jonathan Edwards in his
wildest moments-a race which did not make itself nor its vicious
nature, yet quaintly holds itself responsible for its acts.
    But-taken as unrealities; taken as the drunken dream of an idiot
Thought, drifting solitary and forlorn through the horizonless
eternities of empty Space, these monstrous sillinesses become proper
and acceptable, and lose their offensiveness.
    To this point in his letter, Clemens seems almost to merge himself
into the character of the "sane-looking man" with the foible, or of
44 revealing the truth to August. But, Clemens explains to his old
friend, the idea has become a part of him for seven years, for in that time he has been working on an unfinished story. He continues: "And so, a part of each day Livy is a dream, and has never existed. The rest of it she is real, and is gone. Then comes the ache and continues." He concludes: "How well she loved you and Harmony, as did I, and do I, also." " Unquestionably Clemens endowed 44 with his own questionings and grievances and griefs.

    It would be a mistake, however, to consider this letter unmixed autobiography. It is a moving document, written by Samuel Clemens, who suffers; it is equally