Harvey also included the recollections of Hannibal, such as the story of “playing bear” from “Scraps from My Autobiography. From Chapter IX” (which Clemens had omitted from his plan for the Autobiography), the dreadful anticholera “Pain-Killer,” and Orion’s 3:00 A.M. call on a young lady. Harvey did not share Howells’s squeamishness about Orion climbing (by mistake) into bed with the “middle-aged maiden sisters” (as they were called in the North American Review text): he included that episode without apparent concern. He rejected material with less broad appeal, such as the death of Patrick McAleer (the Clemenses’ beloved coachman), and omitted Clemens’s excursions into political commentary—the massacre of the “rebellious” Moro people in the Philippines and the treatment of Mrs. Morris, who had been thrown out of the White House. Harvey’s penciled notations on the typescripts, such as “Begin,” “End,” and “Continue,” show that Clemens’s own participation in the selection process was probably much smaller than has previously been supposed.93

Since Harvey drew each Review installment from several different daily dictations, Hobby was now charged with creating yet another typescript to serve as printer’s copy, working “under high pressure” to get it ready in time for the first chapter of the series, in the issue slated for 1 September. This composite typescript, called TS3, was typed from the start with a carbon copy, and was paginated independently of the three other ongoing sequences.94 Hobby managed to complete two batches of TS3, of some two dozen pages each, in time for Clemens to revise them lightly and give them to Harvey when he left Dublin on 4 August. She immediately set to work typing a third large batch of TS3 (sixty-three pages), which Clemens agreed to send off “as soon as finished.” These three batches of TS3 were intended for installments 1–5 in the Review. Because TS2 had at that time been completed only through 12 February, Harvey also asked that the “copy of complete dictation beginning with Feb. 13 as it proceeds” be forwarded to him.95

Clemens soon revised and returned the proof for the first installment, first to Clara for her approval, and then to the Review editors. But no sooner had he done so than a new decision was made: an excerpt from the first half of “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It],” the text that he had just recently chosen to begin the Autobiography, would now lead off the series. It has not been discovered who made this late change, or why, but by the end of August Clemens had read galley proofs for this “Virginia-Clemens” installment, as he called it in a letter to Mary Rogers.96

The first issue of “Chapters from My Autobiography” appeared on 7 September, accompanied by a statement that would be repeated before each installment:

PREFATORY NOTE.—Mr. Clemens began to write his autobiography many years ago, and he continues to add to it day by day. It was his original intention to permit no publication of his memoirs until after his death; but, after leaving “Pier No. 70,” he concluded that a considerable portion might now suitably be given to the public. It is that portion, garnered from the quarter-million of words already written, which will appear in this REVIEW during the coming year. No part of the autobiography will be published in book form during the lifetime of the author.—EDITOR N.A.R.

In the “Editor’s Diary” section of the same issue Harvey “let go all holts,” as Clemens might say, in an announcement of the upcoming series:

The proverbial irony of fate was never more clearly marked than by the fact that the life of the world’s greatest humorist has consisted of a succession of personal tragedies. . . . But in his breast there lived a spirit which rose triumphant over all depressing emotions, and still continues, after half a century, to make joy for more millions of human beings the world over than any other now existing. An attempt, even by one accomplished in the art, to analyze the character of this unique human genius would be futile. Its phases are too multifarious. There is humor pre-eminent, wit unexcelled, philosophy rare, if uneven; repugnance, often violent, to wrong in any form; instinctive and invariable, though occasionally ill-timed, revolt against oppression of humanity whether by God or man; all supplemented by the reasonableness of a comrade, the kindliness of a friend, the devotion of a lover and the sweetness of a child. . . . It is a wonderful autobiography that he is writing,—wonderful, because of the variety of experiences it depicts, wonderful because of its truth, its sincerity, its frankness, its unhesitating and unrestricted human feeling. . .