As he does no more miracles, even his pals(s) fall away and disbelieve in him. When his fortunes and his miseries are at the worst, his papa arrives in state in a glory of hellfire and attended by a multitude of old-fashioned and showy fiends-and then everybody is at the boy-devil's feet at once and want to curry favor.

Little Satan, Jr., is also to perform tricks at jugglery shows, to try to win Mississippi raftsmen to Christ, and to take Tom and Huck to stay with him over Sunday in hell.11 The complete entry, with Mark Twain's working notes, shows that for the moment he had put the trial sequence of "Chronicle" aside and was making a fresh start in a mood of comedy. Whereas "Chronicle" is the first-person narrative of young Fischer, the six chapters of November and December 1898 are told by an omniscient narrator. Apparently, it was to be both an essay in the correction of ideas and a comedy set in the world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, whose boyhero would like to reform and save it.

The miraculous boy, now renamed 44, appears one winter morning in the St. Petersburg school and performs marvels by reading books at a glance and learning languages in minutes. With Tom and Huck on his side, he fights and puts down the school bully. The Hotchkiss family take him into their home, where he feeds and talks to the savage family cat. And, after saving Crazy Meadows and others from a blinding blizzard, he appears miraculously at a seance. Here the manuscript ends.

In the rest of the story, Twain's notes suggest that he intended to picture once more some of the life of his own I boyhood as a background for 44's tricks and miracles and reforms. But he also planned to introduce two serious actions. Forty-four was to fall in love with "Hellfire Hotchkiss" and to discover how tame, how "purely intellectual," was the happiness of hell compared to this mortal love. He was also to form an Anti-Moral-Sense Sundayschool and to print his own catechism with the aid of "slathers of little red . . . devils" specially brought up from hell. ("If Satan is around, and so much more intelligent and powerful than God, why doesn't lie write a Bible?" Twain wrote in his notebook in June 1898).12

Why Mark Twain let this story lapse after a moderately promising beginning when he had dozens of ideas for continuing it is problematical. Perhaps certain inherent contradictions within the character of 44 and in his projected actions proved too great for Twain to resolve. Apparently he wanted to make his stranger both a boy and an angel, both a companion to Tom and Huck and a Prometheus-figure who was to enlighten the citizens of St. Petersbur; concerning the damnable Moral Sense. The strain of this double purpose, only a little evident in "Chronicle," appears more clearly here.

Version D. "No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger," or "Print Shop" version, is a story of 530 manuscript pages, set like "Chronicle" in Austria, but in 1490, not long after the invention of printing. Late in 1902 Mark Twain altered the first chapter of his "Chronicle" manuscript to fit this new setting; but, intending to revise further, he left the linkages to his new version loose and imperfect. Father Adolf and Father Peter, for example, who are important in "Chronicle," play only minor roles in the new plot, and Marget and Wilhelm Mcidling never reappear. Between November 1902 and October 1903, while in Florence for his wife's health, Twain wrote chapters 2 through 7 or 8, which represent the trials of No. 44 as a printer's devil in a "mouldering" castle. Most of the printers abuse him, but Katrina, the cook, and Heinrich Stein, the master, openly support him, and August Feldner, the young narrator, secretly sympathizes with him. These chapters reach their climax when 44 masters the printing trade in a few hours, and, just as a major printing job is nearing completion, the compositors call a strike against the master.

Twain completed the next sequence, from chapters 8 or 9 through 25, in the first six months of 1904. In this stretch of narrative, 44 saves Stein from ruin with the help of the wandering jour printer Doangivadam and Katrina and August. He completes the Bible-printing contract by creating invisible Duplicates of the printing force (shades of Colonel Sellers as a scientist!), creates havoc in the castle by incarnating the Duplicates, and immolates himself before the entire group.