Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/134

 MARK TWAIN

same time. The discovery of certain ways of apply ing steam was made in two or three countries in the same year. Is it not possible that inventors are con stantly and unwittingly stealing each other s ideas whilst they stand thousands of miles asunder?

Last spring a literary friend of mine, 1 who lived a hundred miles away, paid me a visit, and in the course of our talk he said he had made a discovery conceived an entirely new idea one which cer tainly had never been used in literature. He told me what it was. I handed him a manuscript, and said he would find substantially the same idea in that a manuscript which I had written a week before. The idea had been in my mind since the previous November; it had only entered his while I was putting it on paper, a week gone by. He had not yet written his; so he left it unwritten, and gracefully made over all his right and title in the idea to me.

The following statement, which I have clipped from a newspaper, is true. I had the facts from Mr. Howells s lips when the episode was new:

A remarkable story of a literary coincidence is told of Mr. Howells s Atlantic Monthly serial, &quot;Dr. Breen s Practice.&quot; A lady of Rochester, New York, contributed to the magazine after u Dr. Breen s Practice &quot; was in type, a short story which so much resembled Mr. Howells s that he felt it necessary to call upon her and explain the situation of affairs in order that no charge of plagiarism might be preferred against him. He showed her the proof-sheets of his story, and satisfied her that the similarity between her work and his was one of those strange coincidences which have from time to time occurred in the literary

world.

iW. D. Howells.

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