Russian Roulette is a classic life-or-death game of chance; spin the barrel, pull the trigger, hope for the best. Our version is a little different, and significantly less fatal. Grab a book, notebook, album, movie–whatever–flip or skip to a random excerpt, and hope for a BANG.

Today’s Barrel is loaded with Twain, nearly 800 pages of him. Since I’m doing the spinning today, I’m making the rules. That means I can pull the trigger as many times as I like until I hear a loud noise. This bang was preceded by two clicks, if you were wondering. Enjoy.

Next week the baby died. Meantime I had spoken to Tom Hood and gained his sympathy. The young man had sent his manuscript to him, and the very day the child died the money for the manuscript came–three guineas. The young man came with a poor little strip of crape around his arm and thanked me, and said that nothing could have been more timely than that money, and that his poor little wife was grateful beyond words for the service I had rendered. He wept, and in fact Stoddard and I wept with him, which was but natural. Also Dolby wept. At least he wiped his eyes and wrung out his handkerchief, and sobbed stertorously and made other exaggerated shows of grief. Stoddard and I were ashamed of Dolby, and tried to make the young man understand that he meant no harm, it was only his way. The young man said sadly that he was not minding it, his grief was too deep for other hurts; that he was only thinking of the funeral…”

-Random Excerpt from The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1

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