Mark Twain quote about his father's surprising maturation (antedating attrib circa 1915) (req paper verification)

[Garson O'Toole]

Many thanks to Victor Steinbok and Ken Hirsch. Here is a full-text
accessible 1922 citation.

Citation: 1922, Pathways to God by Alexander Converse Purdy, The
Womans Press, New York.

Mark Twain says that at seventeen he could scarcely endure his father,
the old gentleman was so ignorant; at twenty he noticed that his
father said a sensible thing occasionally; at twenty-five he was
astonished at the improvement his father had made in the last eight
years.

http://books.google.com/books?id=llRGAAAAYAAJ&
http://books.google.com/books?id=llRGAAAAYAAJ&q=Twain#v=snippet&q=Twain&f=false

Ken Hirsch commented "I was just working on this last night! Is this
just a coincidence or is there some reason that escapes me?"

There might be some hidden organization principal of Jungian
synchronicity in the universe, but that is not at the top of my list
of hypotheses. Here is a quotidian causal chain.

Last night in the work "Eat's, Shoots and Leaves" I came across the
following quote attributed to Twain: "There is no such thing as 'the
Queen's English'. The property has gone into the hands of a joint
stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!" I wondered if this
brilliant quote was really Twainian and determined that it did appear
in "Following the Equator". During this exercise the contested Twain
quote about sons and fathers caught my eye, and I thought I might be
able to improve the 1937 cite, so I performed some searches. The
results were shared with the ADS list in the hope that others would
find them interesting. I also hoped for verification on paper of the
oldest circa 1916 cite.

Ken Hirsch said:
> Are people on ADS-L interested in this kind of thing? I come across an
> interesting find once a month or so. I could post it here. Now that I think
> about it, though, I could use my user page on wikiquote to post interesting
> finds. I haven't found a use for it before.

I do not know. The fantastic Barry Popik presents his discoveries
off-list at his website. I have considered doing the same with my
infrequent discoveries. However, a common repository or small
collection of websites would ease coordination and reduce duplicated
efforts. Can Wikiquote function as this repository for quotes?

The whole situation is odd. The best references for words and quotes
are not openly accessible on the web. Inaccurate information
predominates in the major online quote databases. Financial support
mechanisms for well edited information are uncertain during this
transitional time.

Garson

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