This is a story of a sober kind, picturing life in a little town of Missouri, half a century ago. The principal incidents relate to a slave of mixed blood and her almost pure white son, whom she substitutes for her master's baby. The slave by birth grows up in wealth and luxury, but turns out a peculiarly mean scoundrel, and perpetrating a crime, meets with due justice. The science of fingerprints is practically illustrated in detecting the fraud. The title character is the village atheist, whose maxims doubtless express much of the author's own disillusion.

Reproduction of the original: Those Extraordinary Twins by Mark Twain

A leading expert on twins delves into the stories behind her research to reveal the profound joys and real-life traumas of 12 remarkable sets of twins, triplets, and quadruplets. Segal unravels these moving stories with an eye for the challenges that life as a twin (or triplet or quadruplet) can pose to parents, friends, and spouses, as well as the twins themselves.

A person who is ignorant of legal matters is always liable to make mistakes when he tries to photograph a court scene with his pen; and so I was not willing to let the law chapters in this book go to press without first subjecting them to rigid and exhausting revision and correction by a trained barrister-if that is what they are called. These chapters are right, now, in every detail, for they were rewritten under the immediate eye of William Hicks, who studied law part of a while in southwest Missouri thirty-five years ago and then came over here to Florence for his health and is still helping for exercise and board in Macaroni Vermicelli's horse-feed shed, which is up the back alley as you turn around the corner out of the Piazza del Duomo just beyond the house where that stone that Dante used to sit on six hundred years ago is let into the wall when he let on to be watching them build Giotto's campanile and yet always got tired looking as Beatrice passed along on her way to get a chunk of chestnut cake to defend herself with in case of a Ghibelline outbreak before she got to school, at the same old stand where they sell the same old cake to this day and it is just as light and good as it was then, too, and this is not flattery, far from it. He was a little rusty on his law, but he rubbed up for this book, and those two or three legal chapters are right and straight, now. He told me so himself.

Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) is a novel by American writer Mark Twain.Its central intrigue revolves around two boys--one, born into slavery,the other,white,born to be the master of the house.The two boys,who look similar,are switched at infancy.Each grows into the other's social role.Originally part of the Pudd'nhead Wilson book, Twain realised during the writing process that the twins were taking a backseat to characters such as Pudd'nhead Wilson,Roxy,and Tom Driscoll.As a result,he took them out and gave them their own short story. He explains all this in the Introduction to this book.

Mark Twain's ‘Those Extraordinary Twins’ follows conjoined twins, Luigi and Angelo. While the former is something of a sensualist, often drinking to excess and constantly wreathed in cigarette smoke, the latter, Angelo, is much more conservative, loathing cigarettes and, despite being teetotal, enduring the hangovers his brother doesn’t. When they visit a small village, Twain explores the reaction of the inhabitants and the twins’ reaction towards them. A short story, ‘Those Extraordinary Twins’ is a perfect mix of humour and seriousness, and it takes an intriguing glance at how people interact with one another. This short story is a perfect read for fans of Mark Twain or for anyone who is simply looking for something quick and fun. Mark Twain is the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, (1835-1910). He was an American humourist, lecturer, journalist, and novelist who acquired international fame for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. Twain transcended the apparent limitations of his origins to become a popular public figure and one of America’s most beloved writers. So many of Mark Twain's stories have been made into films that it is impossible to name them all. The most popular ones are "The Adventures of Huck Finn" (1993), starring Elijah Wood, "Tom Sawyer" (1973), starring Jodie Foster, and "The Prince and the Pauper" (1990), produced by Walt Disney animation.

Presents facsimile first editions of Twain's works that include all original illustrations. Each volume contains introductions by literary heavyweights including Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Cynthia Ozick, Gore Vidal, George Plimpton, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Walter Mosley, among others.