(Semi spoiler) This is not a Mark Twain story that you want to listen to to be uplifted by (i.e. the Tom Sawyer / Huckleberry Finn tales.)

In this last show of the fine 1978 season, Robert Dryden plays a middle-aged Twain who was in Munich, Germany on some kind of (U.S. government?) business. He speaks in slightly halted German (listening to Dryden playing Missourian Twain speaking this language was a treat as the man made the whole character sound quite authentic) and meets up with a woman who wants him to meet her dying lodger.

Curiously, in this nation a third of a world away from where Samuel Clemens was then living (Connecticut) the man he meets asks him if he knows where Marianna, Arkansas is, and says that the two were "neighbors" of sorts (with only about 350 miles separating them "as the crow flies") when Twain was in Missouri. The dying man, between wheezes, wants to make sure that Twain will return to the Mississippi River which ran by both of their former hometowns, as he has a special favor to ask as a dying man.

The tale he tells is quite sad, and eventually involves a "dead house", where corpses awaiting burial have a ring put on their finger which is tied to a bell to ring in the event they should somehow re-awaken. Very powerful double entendre in the story title. 