induction-talents together and hove the controversial lead myself:
always getting eight feet, eight-and-a-half, often nine, sometimes
even quarter-less-twain--as _I_ believed; but always "no bottom,"
as HE said.

I got the best of him only once. I prepared myself. I wrote out a
passage from Shakespeare--it may have been the very one I quoted a
while ago, I don't remember--and riddled it with his wild
steamboatful interlardings. When an unrisky opportunity offered,
one lovely summer day, when we had sounded and buoyed a tangled
patch of crossings known as Hell's Half Acre, and were aboard again
and he had sneaked the Pennsylvania triumphantly through it without
once scraping sand, and the A. T. Lacey had followed in our wake
and got stuck, and he was feeling good, I showed it to him. It
amused him. I asked him to fire it off: read it; read it, I
diplomatically added, as only he could read dramatic poetry. The
compliment touched him where he lived. He did read it; read it
with surpassing fire and spirit; read it as it will never be read
again; for HE knew how to put the right music into those thunderous
interlardings and make them seem a part of the text, make them
sound as if they were bursting from Shakespeare's own soul, each
one of them a golden inspiration and not to be left out without
damage to the massed and magnificent whole.

I waited a week, to let the incident fade; waited longer; waited
until he brought up for reasonings and vituperation my pet
position, my pet argument, the one which I was fondest of, the one
which I prized far above all others in my ammunition-wagon, to wit:
that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare's works, for the
reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with