"Those Extraordinary Twins" was published as a short story, separate and distinct from its origins inside Twain's "The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson." As Twain explains, he extricated "Twins" from "Pudd'nhead" when he found, as he was writing, that he'd created a farce inside a tragedy. This is the excised farce, a story about Italian Siamese twins who completely take over a small Missouri town, splitting it down the middle with half supporting one head and the other, the other.