MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS 1901-1906

VOLUME V. 

By Mark Twain

ARRANGED WITH COMMENT BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE

XL. LETTERS OF 1901, CHIEFLY TO TWICHELL. MARK TWAIN AS A REFORMER. SUMMER AT SARANAC. ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT McKINLEY. 

 An editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal, early in 1901, said: "A remarkable transformation, or rather a development, has taken place in Mark Twain. The genial humorist of the earlier day is now a reformer of the vigorous kind, a sort of knight errant who does not hesitate to break a lance with either Church or State if he thinks them interposing on that broad highway over which he believes not a part but the whole of mankind has the privilege of passing in the onward march of the ages. "

 Mark Twain had begun "breaking the lance" very soon after his return from Europe. He did not believe that he could reform the world, but at least he need not withhold his protest against those things which stirred his wrath. He began by causing the arrest of a cabman who had not only overcharged but insulted him; he continued by writing openly against the American policy in the Philippines, the missionary propaganda which had resulted in the Chinese uprising and massacre, and against Tammany politics. Not all of his efforts were in the line of reform; he had become a sort of general spokesman which the public flocked to hear, whatever the subject. On the occasion of a Lincoln Birthday service at Carnegie Hall he was chosen to preside, and he was obliged to attend more dinners than were good for his health. His letters of this period were mainly written to his old friend Twichell, in Hartford. Howells, who lived in New York, he saw with considerable frequency. 

 In the letter which follows the medicine which Twichell was to take was Plasmon, an English proprietary remedy in which Mark Twain had invested--a panacea for all human ills which osteopathy could not reach. 

*****

To Rev. Joseph Twichell, in Hartford:

 14 W. 10TH ST. Jan. 23, '01. 

DEAR JOE, --Certainly. I used to take it in my coffee, but it settled tothe bottom in the form of mud, and I had to eat it with a spoon; soI dropped the custom and took my 2 teaspoonfuls in cold milk afterbreakfast. If we were out of milk I shoveled the dry powder into mymouth and washed it down with water. The only essential is to get itdown, the method is not important. 

No, blame it, I can't go to the Alumni dinner, Joe. It takes two days, and I can't spare the time. Moreover I preside at the Lincoln birthdaycelebration in Carnegie Hall Feb. 11, and I must not make two speechesso close together. Think of it--two old rebels functioning there--Ias President, and Watterson as Orator of the Day! Things have changedsomewhat in these 40 years, thank God. 

Look here--when you come down you must be our guest--we've got a roomyroom for you, and Livy will make trouble if you go elsewhere. Comestraight to 14 West 10th. 

Jan. 24. Livy says Amen to that; also, can you give us a day or two'snotice, so the room will be sure to be vacant?

I'm going to stick close to my desk for a month, now, hoping to write asmall book. 

 Ys Ever MARK

 The letter which follows is a fair sample of Mark Twain's private violence on a subject which, in public print, he could only treat effectively by preserving his good humor. When he found it necessary to boil over, as he did, now and then, for relief, he always found a willing audience in Twichell. The mention of his "Private Philosophy" refers to 'What Is Man?', privately published in 1906; reissued by his publishers in 1916. 

*****

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

 14 W. 10th Jan. 29, '01. 

DEAR JOE, --I'm not expecting anything but kicks for scoffing, and amexpecting a diminution of my bread and butter by it, but if Livy willlet me I will have my say. This nation is like all the others thathave been spewed upon the earth--ready to shout for any cause that willtickle its vanity or fill its pocket. What a hell of a heaven it willbe, when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!

I can't understand it! You are a public guide and teacher, Joe, and areunder a heavy responsibility to men, young and old; if you teach yourpeople--as you teach me--to hide their opinions when they believe theflag is being abused and dishonored, lest the utterance do them and apublisher a damage, how do you answer for it to your conscience? Youare sorry for me; in the fair way of give and take, I am willing to be alittle sorry for you. 

However, I seem to be going counter to my own Private Philosophy--whichLivy won't allow me to publish--because it would destroy me. But I hopeto see it in print before I die. I planned it 15 years ago, and wrote itin '98. I've often tried to read it to Livy, but she won't have it; itmakes her melancholy. The truth always has that effect on people. Wouldhave, anyway, if they ever got hold of a rag of it--Which they don't. 

You are supposing that I am supposing that I am moved by a LargePatriotism, and that I am distressed because our President has blunderedup to his neck in the Philippine mess; and that I am grieved becausethis great big ignorant nation, which doesn't know even the A B Cfacts of the Philippine episode, is in disgrace before the sarcasticworld--drop that idea! I care nothing for the rest--I am only distressedand troubled because I am befouled by these things. That is all. When Isearch myself away down deep, I find this out. Whatever a man feels orthinks or does, there is never any but one reason for it--and that is aselfish one. 

At great inconvenience, and expense of precious time I went to the chiefsynagogue the other night and talked in the interest of a charity schoolof poor Jew girls. I know--to the finest, shades--the selfish ends thatmoved me; but no one else suspects. I could give you the details if Ihad time. You would perceive how true they are. 

I've written another article; you better hurry down and help Livysquelch it. 

She's out pottering around somewhere, poor housekeeping slave; and Clarais in the hands of the osteopath, getting the bronchitis pulled andhauled out of her. It was a bad attack, and a little disquieting. Itcame day before yesterday, and she hasn't sat up till this afternoon. She is getting along satisfactorily, now. 

 Lots of love to you all. MARK

 Mark Twain's religion had to do chiefly with humanity in its present incarnation, and concerned itself very little with any possible measure of reward or punishment in some supposed court of the hereafter. Nevertheless, psychic investigation always interested him, and he was good-naturedly willing to explore, even hoping, perhaps, to be convinced that individuality continues beyond death. The letter which follows indicates his customary attitude in relation to spiritualistic research. The experiments here mentioned, however, were not satisfactory. 

*****

To Mrs. Charles McQuiston:

 DOBBS FERRY, N. Y. March 26, 1901. 

DEAR MRS. McQUISTON, --I have never had an experience which moved me tobelieve the living can communicate with the dead, but my wife and I haveexperimented in the matter when opportunity offered and shall continueto do so. 

I enclose a letter which came this morning--the second from the samesource. Mrs. K----is a Missourian, and lately she discovered, byaccident, that she was a remarkable hypnotiser. Her best subject is aMissouri girl, Miss White, who is to come here soon and sustain strictlyscientific tests before professors at Columbia University. Mrs. Clemensand I intend to be present. And we shall ask the pair to come to ourhouse to do whatever things they can do. Meantime, if you thought wellof it, you might write her and arrange a meeting, telling her it is bymy suggestion and that I gave you her address. 

Someone has told me that Mrs. Piper is discredited. I cannot be sure, but I think it was Mr. Myers, President of the London Psychical ResearchSociety--we heard of his death yesterday. He was a spiritualist. I amafraid he was a very easily convinced man. We visited two mediums whomhe and Andrew Lang considered quite wonderful, but they were quitetransparent frauds. 

Mrs. Clemens corrects me: One of those women was a fraud, the other nota fraud, but only an innocent, well-meaning, driveling vacancy. 

 Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. 

 In Mark Twain's Bermuda chapters entitled Idle Notes of an Idle Excursion he tells of an old sea captain, one Hurricane Jones, who explained biblical miracles in a practical, even if somewhat startling, fashion. In his story of the prophets of Baal, for instance, the old captain declared that the burning water was nothing more nor less than petroleum. Upon reading the "notes, " Professor Phelps of Yale wrote that the same method of explaining miracles had been offered by Sir Thomas Browne. 

 Perhaps it may be added that Captain Hurricane Jones also appears in Roughing It, as Captain Ned Blakely. 

*****

To Professor William Lyon Phelps;

 YALE UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, April 24, 1901. 

MY DEAR SIR, --I was not aware that old Sir Thomas had anticipated thatstory, and I am much obliged to you for furnishing me the paragraph. It is curious that the same idea should leave entered two heads so unlikeas the head of that wise old philosopher and that of Captain NedWakeman, a splendidly uncultured old sailor, but in his own opinion athinker by divine right. He was an old friend of mine of many years'standing; I made two or three voyages with him, and found him a darlingin many ways. The petroleum story was not told to me; he told it to JoeTwichell, who ran across him by accident on a sea voyage where I thinkthe two were the only passengers. A delicious pair, and admirably mated, they took to each other at once and became as thick as thieves. Joe waspassing under a fictitious name, and old Wakeman didn't suspect that hewas a parson; so he gave his profanity full swing, and he was a masterof that great art. You probably know Twichell, and will know that thatis a kind of refreshment which he is very capable of enjoying. 

 Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. 

 For the summer Clemens and his family found a comfortable lodge in the Adirondacks--a log cabin called "The Lair"--on Saranac Lake. Soon after his arrival there he received an invitation to attend the celebration of Missouri's eightieth anniversary. He sent the following letter:

*****

To Edward L. Dimmitt, in St. Louis:

 AMONG THE ADIRONDACK LAKES, July 19, 1901. 

DEAR MR. DIMMITT, --By an error in the plans, things go wrong end firstin this world, and much precious time is lost and matters of urgentimportance are fatally retarded. Invitations which a brisk young fellowshould get, and which would transport him with joy, are delayed andimpeded and obstructed until they are fifty years overdue when theyreach him. 

It has happened again in this case. 

When I was a boy in Missouri I was always on the lookout for invitationsbut they always miscarried and went wandering through the aisles oftime; and now they are arriving when I am old and rheumatic and can'ttravel and must lose my chance. 

I have lost a world of delight through this matter of delayinginvitations. Fifty years ago I would have gone eagerly across the worldto help celebrate anything that might turn up. IT would have made nodifference to me what it was, so that I was there and allowed a chanceto make a noise. 

The whole scheme of things is turned wrong end to. Life should beginwith age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth andits capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages. As things are now, when in youth a dollar would bring a hundred pleasures, you can't haveit. When you are old, you get it and there is nothing worth buying withit then. 

It's an epitome of life. The first half of it consists of the capacityto enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chancewithout the capacity. 

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. Iam approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is notime to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activitiesproper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities andinertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its wayand imminent as indicated above. 

Yours is a great and memorable occasion, and as a son of Missouri Ishould hold it a high privilege to be there and share your just pride inthe state's achievements; but I must deny myself the indulgence, whilethanking you earnestly for the prized honor you have done me in askingme to be present. 

 Very truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS. 

 In the foregoing Mark Twain touches upon one of his favorite fancies: that life should begin with old age and approach strong manhood, golden youth, to end at last with pampered and beloved babyhood. Possibly he contemplated writing a story with this idea as the theme, but He seems never to have done so. 

 The reader who has followed these letters may remember Yung Wing, who had charge of the Chinese educational mission in Hartford, and how Mark Twain, with Twichell, called on General Grant in behalf of the mission. Yung Wing, now returned to China, had conceived the idea of making an appeal to the Government of the United States for relief of his starving countrymen. 

*****

To J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

 AMPERSAND, N. Y. , July 28, '01. 

DEAR JOE, --As you say, it is impracticable--in my case, certainly. Forme to assist in an appeal to that Congress of land-thieves and liarswould be to bring derision upon it; and for me to assist in an appealfor cash to pass through the hands of those missionaries out there, of any denomination, Catholic or Protestant, wouldn't do at all. Theywouldn't handle money which I had soiled, and I wouldn't trust themwith it, anyway. They would devote it to the relief of suffering--Iknow that--but the sufferers selected would be converts. Themissionary-utterances exhibit no humane feeling toward the others, butin place of it a spirit of hate and hostility. And it is natural;the Bible forbids their presence there, their trade is unlawful, whyshouldn't their characters be of necessity in harmony with--but nevermind, let it go, it irritates me. 

Later. .. . I have been reading Yung Wing's letter again. It may be thathe is over-wrought by his sympathies, but it may not be so. There maybe other reasons why the missionaries are silent about the Shensi-2-yearfamine and cannibalism. It may be that there are so few Protestantconverts there that the missionaries are able to take care of them. That they are not likely to largely concern themselves about Catholicconverts and the others, is quite natural, I think. 

That crude way of appealing to this Government for help in a cause whichhas no money in it, and no politics, rises before me again in all itsadmirable innocence! Doesn't Yung Wing know us yet? However, he hasbeen absent since '96 or '97. We have gone to hell since then. Kossuthcouldn't raise 30 cents in Congress, now, if he were back with hismoving Magyar-Tale. 

I am on the front porch (lower one--main deck) of our little bijou of adwelling-house. The lake-edge (Lower Saranac) is so nearly under methat I can't see the shore, but only the water, small-pored withrain-splashes--for there is a heavy down-pour. It is charmingly likesitting snuggled up on a ship's deck with the stretching sea allaround--but very much more satisfactory, for at sea a rain-storm isdepressing, while here of course the effect engendered is just a deepsense of comfort and contentment. The heavy forest shuts us solidlyin on three sides there are no neighbors. There are beautiful littletan-colored impudent squirrels about. They take tea, 5 p. M. , (notinvited) at the table in the woods where Jean does my typewriting, andone of them has been brave enough to sit upon Jean's knee with his tailcurved over his back and munch his food. They come to dinner, 7 p. M. , on the front porch (not invited). They all have the onename--Blennerhasset, from Burr's friend--and none of them answers to itexcept when hungry. 

We have been here since June 21st. For a little while we had some warmdays--according to the family's estimate; I was hardly discommodedmyself. Otherwise the weather has been of the sort you are familiar within these regions: cool days and cool nights. We have heard of the hotwave every Wednesday, per the weekly paper--we allow no dailies tointrude. Last week through visitors also--the only ones we have had--Dr. Root and John Howells. 

We have the daily lake-swim; and all the tribe, servants included (butnot I) do a good deal of boating; sometimes with the guide, sometimeswithout him--Jean and Clara are competent with the oars. If we liveanother year, I hope we shall spend its summer in this house. 

We have taken the Appleton country seat, overlooking the Hudson, atRiverdale, 25 minutes from the Grand Central Station, for a year, beginning Oct. 1, with option for another year. We are obliged to beclose to New York for a year or two. 

Aug. 3rd. I go yachting a fortnight up north in a 20-knot boat 225 feetlong, with the owner, (Mr. Rogers), Tom Reid, Dr. Rice, Col. A. G. Paineand one or two others. Judge Howland would go, but can't get awayfrom engagements; Professor Sloane would go, but is in the grip of anillness. Come--will you go? If you can manage it, drop a post-card tome c/o H. H. Rogers, 26 Broadway. I shall be in New York a couple of daysbefore we sail--July 31 or Aug. 1, perhaps the latter, --and I think Ishall stop at the Hotel Grosvenor, cor. 10th St and 5th ave. 

We all send you and the Harmonies lots and gobs of love. 

 MARK

*****

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

 AMPERSAND, N. Y. , Aug. 28. 

DEAR JOE, --Just a word, to scoff at you, with your extravagantsuggestion that I read the biography of Phillips Brooks--the verydullest book that has been printed for a century. Joe, ten pages ofMrs. Cheney's masterly biography of her fathers--no, five pages ofit--contain more meat, more sense, more literature, more brilliancy, than that whole basketful of drowsy rubbish put together. Why, in thatdead atmosphere even Brooks himself is dull--he wearied me; oh how hewearied me!

We had a noble good time in the Yacht, and caught a Chinese missionaryand drowned him. 

 Love from us all to you all. MARK. 

 The assassination of President McKinley occurred September 6, 1901. Such an event would naturally stir Mark Twain to comment on human nature in general. His letter to Twichell is as individual as it is sound in philosophy. At what period of his own life, or under what circumstances, he made the long journey with tragic intent there is no means of knowing now. There is no other mention of it elsewhere in the records that survive him. 

*****

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

 AMPERSAND, Tuesday, (Sept. 10, 1901)

DEAR JOE, --It is another off day, but tomorrow I shall resume work to acertainty, and bid a long farewell to letter-scribbling. 

The news of the President looks decidedly hopeful, and we are all glad, and the household faces are much improved, as to cheerfulness. Oh, thetalk in the newspapers! Evidently the Human Race is the same old HumanRace. And how unjust, and unreflectingly discriminating, the talkersare. Under the unsettling effects of powerful emotion the talkers aresaying wild things, crazy things--they are out of themselves, and do notknow it; they are temporarily insane, yet with one voice theydeclare the assassin sane--a man who has been entertaining fiery andreason--debauching maggots in his head for weeks and months. Why, no oneis sane, straight along, year in and year out, and we all know it. Our insanities are of varying sorts, and express themselves in varyingforms--fortunately harmless forms as a rule--but in whatever formthey occur an immense upheaval of feeling can at any time topple usdistinctly over the sanity-line for a little while; and then if our formhappens to be of the murderous kind we must look out--and so must thespectator. 

This ass with the unpronounceable name was probably more insane thanusual this week or two back, and may get back upon his bearings by andby, but he was over the sanity-border when he shot the President. It ispossible that it has taken him the whole interval since the murder ofthe King of Italy to get insane enough to attempt the President's life. Without a doubt some thousands of men have been meditating the same actin the same interval, but new and strong interests have intervened anddiverted their over-excited minds long enough to give them a chance tosettle, and tranquilize, and get back upon a healthy level again. Everyextraordinary occurrence unsettles the heads of hundreds of thousandsof men for a few moments or hours or days. If there had been ten kingsaround when Humbert fell they would have been in great peril for a dayor more--and from men in whose presence they would have been quite safeafter the excess of their excitement had had an interval in which tocool down. I bought a revolver once and travelled twelve hundred milesto kill a man. He was away. He was gone a day. With nothing else to do, I had to stop and think--and did. Within an hour--within half of it--Iwas ashamed of myself--and felt unspeakably ridiculous. I do not knowwhat to call it if I was not insane. During a whole week my head was ina turmoil night and day fierce enough and exhausting enough to upset astronger reason than mine. 

All over the world, every day, there are some millions of men inthat condition temporarily. And in that time there is always amoment--perhaps only a single one when they would do murder if their manwas at hand. If the opportunity comes a shade too late, the chances arethat it has come permanently too late. Opportunity seldom comesexactly at the supreme moment. This saves a million lives a day in theworld--for sure. 

No Ruler is ever slain but the tremendous details of it are ravenouslydevoured by a hundred thousand men whose minds dwell, unaware, near thetemporary-insanity frontier--and over they go, now! There is a day--twodays--three--during which no Ruler would be safe from perhaps the halfof them; and there is a single moment wherein he would not be safe fromany of them, no doubt. 

It may take this present shooting-case six months to breed anotherruler-tragedy, but it will breed it. There is at least one mindsomewhere which will brood, and wear, and decay itself to thekilling-point and produce that tragedy. 

Every negro burned at the stake unsettles the excitable brain ofanother one--I mean the inflaming details of his crime, and the luridtheatricality of his exit do it--and the duplicate crime follows; andthat begets a repetition, and that one another one and so on. Everylynching-account unsettles the brains of another set of excitable whitemen, and lights another pyre--115 lynchings last year, 102 inside of 8months this year; in ten years this will be habit, on these terms. 

Yes, the wild talk you see in the papers! And from men who are sane whennot upset by overwhelming excitement. A U. S. Senator-Cullom--wants thisBuffalo criminal lynched! It would breed other lynchings--of men who arenot dreaming of committing murders, now, and will commit none if Cullomwill keep quiet and not provide the exciting cause. 

And a District Attorney wants a law which shall punish with deathattempts upon a President's life--this, mind you, as a deterrent. Itwould have no effect--or the opposite one. The lunatic's mind-space isall occupied--as mine was--with the matter in hand; there is no roomin it for reflections upon what may happen to him. That comes after thecrime. 

It is the noise the attempt would make in the world that would breed thesubsequent attempts, by unsettling the rickety minds of men who envythe criminal his vast notoriety--his obscure name tongued by stupendousKings and Emperors--his picture printed everywhere, the trivialestdetails of his movements, what he eats, what he drinks; how he sleeps, what he says, cabled abroad over the whole globe at cost of fiftythousand dollars a day--and he only a lowly shoemaker yesterday!--likethe assassin of the President of France--in debt three francs to hislandlady, and insulted by her--and to-day she is proud to be able to sayshe knew him "as familiarly as you know your own brother, " and glad tostand till she drops and pour out columns and pages of her grandeur andher happiness upon the eager interviewer. 

Nothing will check the lynchings and ruler-murder but absolutesilence--the absence of pow-pow about them. How are you going to managethat? By gagging every witness and jamming him into a dungeon for life;by abolishing all newspapers; by exterminating all newspaper men; and byextinguishing God's most elegant invention, the Human Race. It is quitesimple, quite easy, and I hope you will take a day off and attend to it, Joe. I blow a kiss to you, and am

 Lovingly Yours, MARK. 

 When the Adirondack summer ended Clemens settled for the winter in the beautiful Appleton home at Riverdale-on-the-Hudson. It was a place of wide-spreading grass and shade-a house of ample room. They were established in it in time for Mark Twain to take an active interest in the New York elections and assist a ticket for good government to defeat Tammany Hall. 

XLI. LETTERS OF 1902. RIVERDALE. YORK HARBOR. ILLNESS OF MRS. CLEMENS

The year 1902 was an eventful one for Mark Twain. In April he receiveda degree of LL. D. From the University of Missouri and returned to hisnative State to accept it. This was his last journey to the MississippiRiver. During the summer Mrs. Clemens's health broke down and illnessesof one sort or another visited other members of the family. Amid so muchstress and anxiety Clemens had little time or inclination for work. He wrote not many letters and mainly somber ones. Once, by wayof diversion, he worked out the idea of a curious club--which heformed--its members to be young girls--girls for the most part whom hehad never seen. They were elected without their consent from among thosewho wrote to him without his consent, and it is not likely that any oneso chosen declined membership. One selection from his letters to theFrench member, Miss Helene Picard, of St. -Die, France, will explain theclub and present a side of Mask Twain somewhat different from that foundin most of his correspondence. 

*****

To Miss Picard, in St. -Die, France:

 RIVERDALE-ON-THE-HUDSON, February 22, 1902. 

DEAR MISS HELENE, --If you will let me call you so, considering that myhead is white and that I have grownup daughters. Your beautiful letterhas given me such deep pleasure! I will make bold to claim you for afriend and lock you up with the rest of my riches; for I am a miser whocounts his spoil every day and hoards it secretly and adds to it when hecan, and is grateful to see it grow. 

Some of that gold comes, like yourself, in a sealed package, and I can'tsee it and may never have the happiness; but I know its value withoutthat, and by what sum it increases my wealth. 

I have a Club, a private Club, which is all my own. I appoint theMembers myself, and they can't help themselves, because I don't allowthem to vote on their own appointment and I don't allow them to resign!They are all friends whom I have never seen (save one), but who havewritten friendly letters to me. 

By the laws of my Club there can be only one Member in each country, andthere can be no male Member but myself. Some day I may admit males, but I don't know--they are capricious and inharmonious, and their waysprovoke me a good deal. It is a matter which the Club shall decide. 

I have made four appointments in the past three or four months: Youas Member for France, a young Highland girl as Member for Scotland, aMohammedan girl as Member for Bengal, and a dear and bright youngniece of mine as Member for the United States--for I do not represent acountry myself, but am merely Member at Large for the Human Race. 

You must not try to resign, for the laws of the Club do not allow that. You must console yourself by remembering that you are in the best ofcompany; that nobody knows of your membership except myself--that noMember knows another's name, but only her country; that no taxes arelevied and no meetings held (but how dearly I should like to attendone!). 

One of my Members is a Princess of a royal house, another is thedaughter of a village book-seller on the continent of Europe. For theonly qualification for Membership is intellect and the spirit of goodwill; other distinctions, hereditary or acquired, do not count. 

May I send you the Constitution and Laws of the Club? I shall be sopleased if I may. It is a document which one of my daughters typewritesfor me when I need one for a new Member, and she would give her eyebrowsto know what it is all about, but I strangle her curiosity by saying:"There are much cheaper typewriters than you are, my dear, and ifyou try to pry into the sacred mysteries of this Club one of yourprosperities will perish sure. "

My favorite? It is "Joan of Arc. " My next is "Huckleberry Finn, " but thefamily's next is "The Prince and the Pauper. " (Yes, you are right--Iam a moralist in disguise; it gets me into heaps of trouble when I gothrashing around in political questions. )

I wish you every good fortune and happiness and I thank you so much foryour letter. 

 Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. 

 Early in the year Clemens paid a visit to Twichell in Hartford, and after one of their regular arguments on theology and the moral accountability of the human race, arguments that had been going on between them for more than thirty years--Twichell lent his visitor Freedom of the Will, by Jonathan Edwards, to read on the way home. The next letter was the result. 

*****

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

 RIVERDALE-ON-THE-HUDSON. Feb. '02. 

DEAR JOE, --"After compliments. "--[Meaning "What a good time you gaveme; what a happiness it was to be under your roof again; etc. , etc. "See opening sentence of all translations of letters passing between LordRoberts and Indian princes and rulers. ]--From Bridgeport to New York;thence to home; and continuously until near midnight I wallowed andreeked with Jonathan in his insane debauch; rose immediately refreshedand fine at 10 this morning, but with a strange and haunting sense ofhaving been on a three days' tear with a drunken lunatic. It is yearssince I have known these sensations. All through the book is the glazeof a resplendent intellect gone mad--a marvelous spectacle. No, not allthrough the book--the drunk does not come on till the last third, wherewhat I take to be Calvinism and its God begins to show up and shine redand hideous in the glow from the fires of hell, their only right andproper adornment. By God I was ashamed to be in such company. 

Jonathan seems to hold (as against the Arminian position) that the Man(or his Soul or his Will) never creates an impulse itself, but is movedto action by an impulse back of it. That's sound!

Also, that of two or more things offered it, it infallibly chooses theone which for the moment is most pleasing to ITSELF. Perfectly correct!An immense admission for a man not otherwise sane. 

Up to that point he could have written chapters III and IV of mysuppressed "Gospel. " But there we seem to separate. He seems to concedethe indisputable and unshakable dominion of Motive and Necessity (callthem what he may, these are exterior forces and not under the man'sauthority, guidance or even suggestion)--then he suddenly flies thelogic track and (to all seeming) makes the man and not these exteriorforces responsible to God for the man's thoughts, words and acts. It isfrank insanity. 

I think that when he concedes the autocratic dominion of Motive andNecessity he grants, a third position of mine--that a man's mind is amere machine--an automatic machine--which is handled entirely from theoutside, the man himself furnishing it absolutely nothing: not an ounceof its fuel, and not so much as a bare suggestion to that exteriorengineer as to what the machine shall do, nor how it shall do it norwhen. 

After that concession, it was time for him to get alarmed and shirk--forhe was pointing straight for the only rational and possible next-stationon that piece of road the irresponsibility of man to God. 

And so he shirked. Shirked, and arrived at this handsome result:

Man is commanded to do so-and-so. It has been ordained from thebeginning of time that some men shan't and others can't. 

These are to be blamed: let them be damned. 

I enjoy the Colonel very much, and shall enjoy the rest of him with anobscene delight. 

 Joe, the whole tribe shout love to you and yours! MARK. 

 We have not heard of Joe Goodman since the trying days of '90 and '91, when he was seeking to promote the fortunes of the type-setting machine. Goodman, meantime, who had in turn been miner, printer, publisher, and farmer; had been devoting his energies and genius to something entirely new: he had been translating the prehistoric Mayan inscriptions of Yucatan, and with such success that his work was elaborately published by an association of British scientists. In due time a copy of this publication came to Clemens, who was full of admiration of the great achievement. 

*****

To J. T. Goodman, in California:

 RIVERDALE-ON-THE-HUDSON, June 13, '02. 

DEAR JOE, --I am lost in reverence and admiration! It is now twenty-fourhours that I have been trying to cool down and contemplate with quietblood this extraordinary spectacle of energy, industry, perseverance, pluck, analytical genius, penetration, this irruption of thundersand fiery splendors from a fair and flowery mountain that nobody hadsupposed was a sleeping volcano, but I seem to be as excited as ever. Yesterday I read as much as half of the book, not understanding a wordbut enchanted nevertheless--partly by the wonder of it all, the study, the erudition, the incredible labor, the modesty, the dignity, themajestic exclusiveness of the field and its lofty remoteness from thingsand contacts sordid and mean and earthy, and partly by the grace andbeauty and limpidity of the book's unsurpassable English. Science, always great and worshipful, goes often in hodden grey, but you haveclothed her in garments meet for her high degree. 

You think you get "poor pay" for your twenty years? No, oh no. You havelived in a paradise of the intellect whose lightest joys were beyondthe reach of the longest purse in Christendom, you have had daily andnightly emancipation from the world's slaveries and gross interests, youhave received a bigger wage than any man in the land, you have dreamed asplendid dream and had it come true, and to-day you could not affordto trade fortunes with anybody--not even with another scientist, for hemust divide his spoil with his guild, whereas essentially the world youhave discovered is your own and must remain so. 

It is all just magnificent, Joe! And no one is prouder or gladder than

 Yours always MARK. 

 At York Harbor, Maine, where they had taken a cottage for the summer--a pretty place, with Howells not far distant, at Kittery Point--Mrs. Clemens's health gave way. This was at a period when telegraphic communication was far from reliable. The old-time Western Union had fallen from grace; its "system" no longer justified the best significance of that word. The new day of reorganization was coming, and it was time for it. Mark Twain's letter concerning the service at York Harbor would hardly be warranted today, but those who remember conditions of that earlier time will agree that it was justified then, and will appreciate its satire. 

*****

To the President of The Western Union, in New York:

 "THE PINES" YORK HARBOR, MAINE. 

DEAR SIR, --I desire to make a complaint, and I bring it to you, the headof the company, because by experience I know better than to carry it toa subordinate. 

I have been here a month and a half, and by testimony of friends, reinforced by personal experience I now feel qualified to claim as anestablished fact that the telegraphic service here is the worst in theworld except that Boston. 

These services are actually slower than was the New York and Hartfordservice in the days when I last complained to you--which was fifteenor eighteen years ago, when telegraphic time and train time between thementioned points was exactly the same, to-wit, three hours and a half. Six days ago--it was that raw day which provoked so much comment--mydaughter was on her way up from New York, and at noon she telegraphedme from New Haven asking that I meet her with a cloak at Portsmouth. Hertelegram reached me four hours and a quarter later--just 15 minutes toolate for me to catch my train and meet her. 

I judge that the telegram traveled about 200 miles. It is the besttelegraphic work I have seen since I have been here, and I am mentioningit in this place not as a complaint but as a compliment. I think acompliment ought always to precede a complaint, where one is possible, because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteousand gentle reception. 

Still, there is a detail or two connected with this matter which oughtperhaps to be mentioned. And now, having smoothed the way with thecompliment, I will venture them. The head corpse in the York Harboroffice sent me that telegram altho (1) he knew it would reach me toolate to be of any value; (2) also, that he was going to send it to meby his boy; (3) that the boy would not take the trolley and come the 2miles in 12 minutes, but would walk; (4) that he would be two hoursand a quarter on the road; (5) and that he would collect 25 cents fortransportation, for a telegram which the he knew to be worthless beforehe started it. From these data I infer that the Western Union owes me75 cents; that is to say, the amount paid for combined wire and landtransportation--a recoup provided for in the printed paragraph whichheads the telegraph-blank. 

By these humane and Christian stages we now arrive at the complaintproper. We have had a grave case of illness in the family, and arelative was coming some six hundred miles to help in the sick-roomduring the convalescing period. It was an anxious time, of course, and Iwrote and asked to be notified as to the hour of the expected arrivalof this relative in Boston or in York Harbor. Being afraid of thetelegraph--which I think ought not to be used in times of hurry andemergency--I asked that the desired message be brought to me by someswift method of transportation. By the milkman, if he was coming thisway. But there are always people who think they know more than you do, especially young people; so of course the young fellow in charge ofthis lady used the telegraph. And at Boston, of all places! Except YorkHarbor. 

The result was as usual; let me employ a statelier and exacter term, andsay, historical. 

The dispatch was handed to the h. C. Of the Boston office at 9 thismorning. It said, "Shall bring A. S. To you eleven forty-five thismorning. " The distance traveled by the dispatch is forty or fifty miles, I suppose, as the train-time is five minutes short of two hours, and thetrains are so slow that they can't give a W. U. Telegram two hours andtwenty minutes start and overtake it. 

As I have said, the dispatch was handed in at Boston at 9. The expectedvisitors left Boston at 9. 40, and reached my house at 12 noon, beatingthe telegram 2 solid hours, and 5 minutes over. 

The boy brought the telegram. It was bald-headed with age, but stilllegible. The boy was prostrate with travel and exposure, but stillalive, and I went out to condole with him and get his last wishes andsend for the ambulance. He was waiting to collect transportationbefore turning his passing spirit to less serious affairs. I found himstrangely intelligent, considering his condition and where he is gettinghis training. I asked him at what hour the telegram was handed to the h. C. In Boston. He answered brightly, that he didn't know. 

I examined the blank, and sure enough the wary Boston h. C. Hadthoughtfully concealed that statistic. I asked him at what hour it hadstarted from Boston. He answered up as brightly as ever, and said hedidn't know. 

I examined the blank, and sure enough the Boston h. C. Had left thatstatistic out in the cold, too. In fact it turned out to be an officialconcealment--no blank was provided for its exposure. And none requiredby the law, I suppose. "It is a good one-sided idea, " I remarked;"They can take your money and ship your telegram next year if they wantto--you've no redress. The law ought to extend the privilege to all ofus. "

The boy looked upon me coldly. 

I asked him when the telegram reached York Harbor. He pointed to somefigures following the signature at the bottom of the blank--"12. 14. " Isaid it was now 1. 45 and asked--

"Do you mean that it reached your morgue an hour and a half ago?"

He nodded assent. 

"It was at that time half an hour too late to be of any use to me, if Iwanted to go and meet my people--which was the case--for by the wordingof the message you can see that they were to arrive at the station at11. 45. Why did, your h. C. Send me this useless message? Can't he read?Is he dead?"

"It's the rules. "

"No, that does not account for it. Would he have sent it if it had beenthree years old, I in the meantime deceased, and he aware of it?"

The boy didn't know. 

"Because, you know, a rule which required him to forward to the cemeteryto-day a dispatch due three years ago, would be as good a rule as onewhich should require him to forward a telegram to me to-day which heknew had lost all its value an hour or two before he started it. The construction of such a rule would discredit an idiot; in fact anidiot--I mean a common ordinary Christian idiot, you understand--wouldbe ashamed of it, and for the sake of his reputation wouldn't make it. What do you think?"

He replied with much natural brilliancy that he wasn't paid forthinking. 

This gave me a better opinion of the commercial intelligence pervadinghis morgue than I had had before; it also softened my feelings towardhim, and also my tone, which had hitherto been tinged with bitterness. 

"Let bygones be bygones, " I said, gently, "we are all erring creatures, and mainly idiots, but God made us so and it is dangerous to criticise. "

 Sincerely S. L. CLEMENS. 

 One day there arrived from Europe a caller with a letter of introduction from Elizabeth, Queen of Rumania, better known as Carmen Sylva. The visitor was Madam Hartwig, formerly an American girl, returning now, because of reduced fortunes, to find profitable employment in her own land. Her husband, a man of high principle, had declined to take part in an "affair of honor, " as recognized by the Continental code; hence his ruin. Elizabeth of Rumania was one of the most loved and respected of European queens and an author of distinction. Mark Twain had known her in Vienna. Her letter to him and his own letter to the public (perhaps a second one, for its date is two years later) follow herewith. 

 From Carmen Sylva to Mark Twain:

 BUCAREST, May 9, 1902. 

HONORED MASTER, --If I venture to address you on behalf of a poor lady, who is stranded in Bucarest I hope not to be too disagreeable. 

Mrs. Hartwig left America at the age of fourteen in order to learn tosing which she has done thoroughly. Her husband had quite a brilliantsituation here till he refused to partake 'dans une afaire onereuse', so it seems. They haven't a penny and each of them must try to find aliving. She is very nice and pleasant and her school is so good that shemost certainly can give excellent singing lessons. 

I beg your pardon for being a bore to one I so deeply love and admire, to whom I owe days and days of forgetfulness of self and troubles andthe intensest of all joys: Hero-worship! People don't always realizewhat a happiness that is! God bless you for every beautiful thought youpoured into my tired heart and for every smile on a weary way!

 CARMEN SYLVA. 

 From Mark Twain to the Public:

 Nov. 16, '04. 

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN, --I desire to recommend Madame Hartwig tomy friends and the public as a teacher of singing and as aconcert-vocalist. She has lived for fifteen years at the court ofRoumania, and she brought with her to America an autograph letter inwhich her Majesty the Queen of Roumania cordially certified her to meas being an accomplished and gifted singer and teacher of singing, andexpressed a warm hope that her professional venture among us would meetwith success; through absence in Europe I have had no opportunityto test the validity of the Queen's judgment in the matter, but thatjudgment is the utterance of an entirely competent authority--the bestthat occupies a throne, and as good as any that sits elsewhere, as themusical world well knows--and therefore back it without hesitation, andendorse it with confidence. 

I will explain that the reason her Majesty tried to do her friend afriendly office through me instead of through someone else was, not thatI was particularly the right or best person for the office, but becauseI was not a stranger. It is true that I am a stranger to some of themonarchs--mainly through their neglect of their opportunities--butsuch is not the case in the present instance. The latter fact is a highcompliment to me, and perhaps I ought to conceal it. Some people would. 

 MARK TWAIN. 

 Mrs. Clemens's improvement was scarcely perceptible. It was not until October that they were able to remove her to Riverdale, and then only in a specially arranged invalid-car. At the end of the long journey she was carried to her room and did not leave it again for many months. 

*****

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

 RIVERDALE, N. Y. , Oct. 31, '02. 

DEAR JOE, --It is ten days since Susy [Twichell] wrote that you were laidup with a sprained shoulder, since which time we have had no news aboutit. I hope that no news is good news, according to the proverb; still, authoritative confirmation of it will be gladly received in this family, if some of you will furnish it. Moreover, I should like to know how andwhere it happened. In the pulpit, as like as not, otherwise you wouldnot be taking so much pains to conceal it. This is not a malicioussuggestion, and not a personally-invented one: you told me yourself, once, that you threw artificial power and impressiveness into places inyour sermons where needed, by "banging the bible"--(your own words. ) Youhave reached a time of life when it is not wise to take these risks. You would better jump around. We all have to change our methods as theinfirmities of age creep upon us. Jumping around will be impressive now, whereas before you were gray it would have excited remark. 

Poor Livy drags along drearily. It must be hard times for that turbulentspirit. It will be a long time before she is on her feet again. It isa most pathetic case. I wish I could transfer it to myself. Betweenripping and raging and smoking and reading, I could get a good deal of aholiday out of it. 

Clara runs the house smoothly and capably. She is discharging atrial-cook today and hiring another. 

 A power of love to you all! MARK. 

 Such was the state of Mrs. Clemens's health that visitors were excluded from the sick room, and even Clemens himself was allowed to see her no more than a few moments at a time. These brief, precious visits were the chief interests of his long days. Occasionally he was allowed to send her a few lines, reporting his occupations, and these she was sometimes permitted to answer. Only one of his notes has been preserved, written after a day, now rare, of literary effort. Its signature, the letter Y, stands for "Youth, " always her name for him. 

*****

To Mrs. Clemens:

DEAR HEART, --I've done another full day's work, and finished before 4. Ihave been reading and dozing since and would have had a real sleep afew minutes ago but for an incursion to bring me a couple of unimportantletters. I've stuck to the bed all day and am getting back my lostground. Next time I will be strictly careful and make my visit veryshort--just a kiss and a rush. Thank you for your dear, dear note; youwho are my own and only sweetheart. 

 Sleep well! Y. 

XLII. LETTERS OF 1903. TO VARIOUS PERSONS. HARD DAYS AT RIVERDALE. LASTSUMMER AT ELMIRA. THE RETURN TO ITALY. 

 The reader may perhaps recall that H. H. Rogers, some five or six years earlier, had taken charge of the fortunes of Helen Keller, making it possible for her to complete her education. Helen had now written her first book--a wonderful book--'The Story of My Life', and it had been successfully published. For a later generation it may be proper to explain that the Miss Sullivan, later Mrs. Macy, mentioned in the letter which follows, was the noble woman who had devoted her life to the enlightenment of this blind, dumb girl--had made it possible for her to speak and understand, and, indeed, to see with the eyes of luminous imagination. 

 The case of plagiarism mentioned in this letter is not now remembered, and does not matter, but it furnished a text for Mark Twain, whose remarks on the subject in general are eminently worth while. 

*****

To Helen Keller, in Wrentham, Mass. :

 RIVERDALE-ON-THE-HUDSON, ST. PATRICK'S DAY, '03. 

DEAR HELEN, --I must steal half a moment from my work to say how glad Iam to have your book, and how highly I value it, both for its own sakeand as a remembrances of an affectionate friendship which has subsistedbetween us for nine years without a break, and without a single act ofviolence that I can call to mind. I suppose there is nothing like it inheaven; and not likely to be, until we get there and show off. I oftenthink of it with longing, and how they'll say, "There they come--sitdown in front!" I am practicing with a tin halo. You do the same. I wasat Henry Rogers's last night, and of course we talked of you. He is notat all well; you will not like to hear that; but like you and me, he isjust as lovely as ever. 

I am charmed with your book-enchanted. You are a wonderful creature, the most wonderful in the world--you and your other half together--MissSullivan, I mean, for it took the pair of you to make a complete andperfect whole. How she stands out in her letters! her brilliancy, penetration, originality, wisdom, character, and the fine literarycompetencies of her pen--they are all there. 

Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesquewas that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in anyhuman utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, thesoul--let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actualand valuable material of all human utterances--is plagiarism. Forsubstantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciouslydrawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnererwith a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that heoriginated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about themanywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mentaland moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed incharacteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speechyou are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men--but we call ithis speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington'sbattle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others thatcontributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steamengine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any otherimportant thing--and the last man gets the credit and we forget theothers. He added his little mite--that is all he did. These objectlessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things thatproceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and thelesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that. 

Then why don't we unwittingly reproduce the phrasing of a story, as wellas the story itself? It can hardly happen--to the extent of fifty wordsexcept in the case of a child: its memory-tablet is not lumbered withimpressions, and the actual language can have graving-room there, andpreserve the language a year or two, but a grown person's memory-tabletis a palimpsest, with hardly a bare space upon which to engrave aphrase. It must be a very rare thing that a whole page gets so sharplyprinted upon a man's mind, by a single reading, that it will stay longenough to turn up some time or other and be mistaken by him for his own. No doubt we are constantly littering our literature with disconnectedsentences borrowed from books at some unremembered time and now imaginedto be our own, but that is about the most we can do. In 1866 I read Dr. Holmes's poems, in the Sandwich Islands. A year and a half later I stolehis dictation, without knowing it, and used it to dedicate my "InnocentsAbroad" with. Then years afterwards I was talking with Dr. Holmes aboutit. He was not an ignorant ass--no, not he: he was not a collection ofdecayed human turnips, like your "Plagiarism Court;" and so when I said, "I know now where I stole it, but whom did you steal it from, " he said, "I don't remember; I only know I stole it from somebody, because I havenever originated anything altogether myself, nor met anybody who had. "

To think of those solemn donkeys breaking a little child's heartwith their ignorant rubbish about plagiarism! I couldn't sleep forblaspheming about it last night. Why, their whole lives, their wholehistories, all their learning, all their thoughts, all their opinionswere one solid ruck of plagiarism, and they didn't know it andnever suspected it. A gang of dull and hoary pirates piously settingthemselves the task of disciplining and purifying a kitten that theythink they've caught filching a chop! Oh, dam--

But you finish it, dear, I am running short of vocabulary today. Everlovingly your friend, MARK. 

(Edited and modified by Clara Clemens, deputy to her mother, who formore than 7 months has been ill in bed and unable to exercise herofficial function. )

 The burden of the Clemens household had fallen almost entirely upon Clara Clemens. In addition to supervising its customary affairs, she also shouldered the responsibility of an unusual combination of misfortunes, for besides the critical condition of her mother, her sister, Jean Clemens, was down with pneumonia, no word of which must come to Mrs. Clemens. Certainly it was a difficult position. In some account of it, which he set down later, Clemens wrote: "It was fortunate for us all that Clara's reputation for truthfulness was so well established in her mother's mind. It was our daily protection from disaster. The mother never doubted Clara's word. Clara could tell her large improbabilities without exciting any suspicion, whereas if I tried to market even a small and simple one the case would have been different. I was never able to get a reputation like Clara's. "

 The accumulation of physical ailments in the Clemens home had somewhat modified Mark Twain's notion of medical practice. He was no longer radical; he had become eclectic. It is a good deal of a concession that he makes to Twichell, after those earlier letters from Sweden, in which osteopathy had been heralded as the anodyne for all human ills. 

*****

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

DEAR JOE, --Livy does really make a little progress these past 3 or4 days, progress which is visible to even the untrained eye. Thephysicians are doing good work with her, but my notion is, that no artof healing is the best for all ills. I should distribute the ailmentsaround: surgery cases to the surgeons; lupus to the actinic-rayspecialist; nervous prostration to the Christian Scientist; most ills tothe allopath and the homeopath; (in my own particular case) rheumatism, gout and bronchial attacks to the osteopathist. 

Mr. Rogers was to sail southward this morning--and here is this weather!I am sorry. I think it's a question if he gets away tomorrow. 

 Ys Ever MARK. 

 It was through J. Y. M. MacAlister, to whom the next letter is written, that Mark Twain had become associated with the Plasmon Company, which explains the reference to "shares. " He had seen much of MacAlister during the winter at Tedworth Square, and had grown fond of him. It is a characteristic letter, and one of interesting fact. 

*****

To J. Y. M. MacAlister, in London:

 RIVERDALE, NEW YORK. April, 7, '03. 

DEAR MACALISTER, --Yours arrived last night, and God knows I was glad toget it, for I was afraid I had blundered into an offence in some way andforfeited your friendship--a kind of blunder I have made so many timesin my life that I am always standing in a waiting and morbid dread ofits occurrence. 

Three days ago I was in condition--during one horribly long night--tosympathetically roast with you in your "hell of troubles. " During thatnight I was back again where I was in the black days when I was buriedunder a mountain of debt. I called the daughters to me in privatecouncil and paralysed them with the announcement, "Our outgo hasincreased in the past 8 months until our expenses are now 125 per cent. Greater than our income. "

It was a mistake. When I came down in the morning a gray and aged wreck, and went over the figures again, I found that in some unaccountable way(unaccountable to a business man but not to me) I had multiplied thetotals by 2. By God I dropped 75 years on the floor where I stood. 

Do you know it affected me as one is affected when he wakes out of ahideous dream and finds that it was only a dream. It was a great comfortand satisfaction to me to call the daughters to a private meeting of theBoard again and say, "You need not worry any more; our outgo is only athird more than our income; in a few months your mother will be out ofher bed and on her feet again--then we shall drop back to normal and beall right. "

Certainly there is a blistering and awful reality about a well-arrangedunreality. It is quite within the possibilities that two or three nightslike that night of mine could drive a man to suicide. He would refuseto examine the figures; they would revolt him so, and he could go to hisdeath unaware that there was nothing serious about them. I cannot getthat night out of my head, it was so vivid, so real, so ghastly. In anyother year of these 33 the relief would have been simple: go where youcan cut your cloth to fit your income. You can't do that when your wifecan't be moved, even from one room to the next. 

Clam spells the trained nurse afternoons; I am allowed to see Mrs. Clemens 20 minutes twice a day and write her two letters a day providedI put no news in them. No other person ever sees her except thephysician and now and then a nerve-specialist from New York. She sawthere was something the matter that morning, but she got no facts out ofme. But that is nothing--she hasn't had anything but lies for 8 months. A fact would give her a relapse. 

The doctor and a specialist met in conspiracy five days ago, andin their belief she will by and by come out of this as good as new, substantially. They ordered her to Italy for next winter--which seemsto indicate that by autumn she will be able to undertake the voyage. SoClara is writing a Florence friend to take a look round among the villasfor us in the regions near that city. It seems early to do this, butJoan Bergheim thought it would be wise. 

He and his wife lunched with us here yesterday. They have been abroad inHavana 4 months, and they sailed for England this morning. 

I am enclosing an order for half of my (your) Founders shares. You arenot to refuse them this time, though you have done it twice before. They are yours, not mine, and for your family's sake if not your own youcannot in these cloudy days renounce this property which is so clearlyyours and theirs. You have been generous long enough; be just, now toyourself. Mr. Rogers is off yachting for 5 or 6 weeks--I'll get themwhen he returns. The head of the house joins me in warmest greetings andremembrances to you and Mrs. MacAlister. 

 Ever yours, Mark. 

May 8. Great Scott! I never mailed this letter! I addressed it, put"Registered" on it--then left it lying unsealed on the arm of my chair, and rushed up to my bed quaking with a chill. I've never been out of thebed since--oh, bronchitis, rheumatism, two sets of teeth aching, land, I've had a dandy time for 4 weeks. And to-day--great guns, one of thevery worst!. .. 

I'm devilish sorry, and I do apologise--for although I am not as slowas you are about answering letters, as a rule, I see where I'm standingthis time. 

Two weeks ago Jean was taken down again--this time with measles, and Ihaven't been able to go to her and she hasn't been able to come to me. 

But Mrs. Clemens is making nice progress, and can stand alone a momentor two at a time. 

Now I'll post this. 

 MARK

 The two letters that follow, though written only a few days apart, were separated in their arrival by a period of seven years. The second letter was, in some way, mislaid and not mailed; and it was not until after the writer of it was dead that it was found and forwarded. 

 Mark Twain could never get up much enthusiasm for the writings of Scott. His praise of Quentin Durward is about the only approval he ever accorded to the works of the great romanticist. 

*****

To Brander Matthews, in New York:

 NEW YORK CITY, May 4, '03. 

DEAR BRANDER, --I haven't been out of my bed for four weeks, but--well, I have been reading, a good deal, and it occurs to me to ask you to sitdown, some time or other when you have 8 or 9 months to spare, and jotme down a certain few literary particulars for my help and elevation. Your time need not be thrown away, for at your further leisure you canmake Colombian lectures out of the results and do your students a goodturn. 

1. Are there in Sir Walter's novels passages done in goodEnglish--English which is neither slovenly or involved?

2. Are there passages whose English is not poor and thin andcommonplace, but is of a quality above that?

3. Are there passages which burn with real fire--not punk, fox-fire, make believe?

4. Has he heroes and heroines who are not cads and cadesses?

5. Has he personages whose acts and talk correspond with theircharacters as described by him?

6. Has he heroes and heroines whom the reader admires, admires, andknows why?

7. Has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages thatare humorous?

8. Does he ever chain the reader's interest, and make him reluctant tolay the book down?

9. Are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from admiringthe placid flood and flow of his own dilutions, ceases from beingartificial, and is for a time, long or short, recognizably sincere andin earnest?

10. Did he know how to write English, and didn't do it because he didn'twant to?

11. Did he use the right word only when he couldn't think of anotherone, or did he run so much to wrong because he didn't know the right onewhen he saw it?

13. Can you read him? and keep your respect for him? Of course a personcould in his day--an era of sentimentality and sloppy romantics--butland! can a body do it today?

Brander, I lie here dying, slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter. I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, and as far as chapter XIXof Guy Mannering, and I can no longer hold my head up nor take mynourishment. Lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy;and such wax figures and skeletons and spectres. Interest? Why, itis impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, thesemilk-and-water humbugs. And oh, the poverty of the invention! Notpoverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasonsfor them. Sir Walter usually gives himself away when he arranges for asituation--elaborates, and elaborates, and elaborates, till if you liveto get to it you don't believe in it when it happens. 

I can't find the rest of Rob Roy, I can't stand any more Mannering--Ido not know just what to do, but I will reflect, and not quit this greatstudy rashly. He was great, in his day, and to his proper audience; andso was God in Jewish times, for that matter, but why should eitherof them rank high now? And do they?--honest, now, do they? Dam'd if Ibelieve it. 

My, I wish I could see you and Leigh Hunt!

 Sincerely Yours S. L. CLEMENS. 

*****

To Brander Matthews, in New York:

 RIVERDALE, May 8, '03 (Mailed June, 1910). 

DEAR BRANDER, --I'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dulnesssince I broke into Sir Walter and lost my temper. I finished GuyMannering--that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadowsjabbering around a single flesh-and-blood being--Dinmont; a book crazilyput together out of the very refuse of the romance-artist's stageproperties--finished it and took up Quentin Durward, and finished that. 

It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living: it was likewithdrawing from the infant class in the College of journalism to situnder the lectures in English literature in Columbia University. 

I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward?

 Yrs ever MARK. 

 In 1903, preparations were going on for a great world's fair, to be held in St. Louis, and among other features proposed was a World's Literary Convention, with a week to be set apart in honor of Mark Twain, and a special Mark Twain Day in it, on which the National Association would hold grand services in honor of the distinguished Missourian. A letter asking his consent to the plan brought the following reply. 

*****

To T. F. Gatts, of Missouri:

 NEW YORK, May 30, 1903. 

DEAR MR. GATTS, --It is indeed a high compliment which you offer me innaming an association after me and in proposing the setting apart of aMark Twain day at the great St. Louis fair, but such compliments arenot proper for the living; they are proper and safe for the dead only. Ivalue the impulse which moves you to tender me these honors. I value itas highly as any one can, and am grateful for it, but I should stand ina sort of terror of the honors themselves. So long as we remain alive weare not safe from doing things which, however righteously and honorablyintended, can wreck our repute and extinguish our friendships. 

I hope that no society will be named for me while I am still alive, forI might at some time or other do something which would cause its membersto regret having done me that honor. After I shall have joined the deadI shall follow the customs of those people and be guilty of no conductthat can wound any friend; but until that time shall come I shall be adoubtful quantity like the rest of our race. 

 Very truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS. 

 The National Mark Twain Association did not surrender easily. Mr. Gatts wrote a second letter full of urgent appeal. If Mark Twain was tempted, we get no hint of it in his answer. 

*****

To T. F. Gatts, of Missouri:

 NEW YORK, June 8, 1903. 

DEAR MR. GATTS, --While I am deeply touched by the desire of my friendsof Hannibal to confer these great honors upon me, I must still forbearto accept them. Spontaneous and unpremeditated honors, like those whichcame to me at Hannibal, Columbia, St. Louis and at the village stationsall down the line, are beyond all price and are a treasure for lifein the memory, for they are a free gift out of the heart and theycome without solicitations; but I am a Missourian and so I shrink fromdistinctions which have to be arranged beforehand and with my privity, for I then became a party to my own exalting. I am humanly fondof honors that happen but chary of those that come by canvass andintention. With sincere thanks to you and your associates for this highcompliment which you have been minded to offer me, I am, Very truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS. 

 We have seen in the letter to MacAlister that Mark Twain's wife had been ordered to Italy and plans were in progress for an establishment there. By the end of June Mrs. Clemens was able to leave Riverdale, and she made the journey to Quarry Farm, Elmira, where they would remain until October, the month planned for their sailing. The house in Hartford had been sold; and a house which, prior to Mrs. Clemens's breakdown they had bought near Tarrytown (expecting to settle permanently on the Hudson) had been let. They were going to Europe for another indefinite period. 

 At Quarry Farm Mrs. Clemens continued to improve, and Clemens, once more able to work, occupied the study which Mrs. Crane had built for him thirty years before, and where Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and the Wandering Prince had been called into being. 

*****

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford, Conn. :

 QUARRY FARM, ELMIRA, N. Y. , July 21, '03. 

DEAR JOE, --That love-letter delighted Livy beyond any like utterancereceived by her these thirty years and more. I was going to answerit for her right away, and said so; but she reserved the privilege toherself. I judge she is accumulating Hot Stuff--as George Ade wouldsay. .. . 

Livy is coming along: eats well, sleeps some, is mostly very gay, notvery often depressed; spends all day on the porch, sleeps there a partof the night, makes excursions in carriage and in wheel-chair; and, in the matter of superintending everything and everybody, has resumedbusiness at the old stand. 

Did you ever go house-hunting 3, 000 miles away? It costs three months ofwriting and telegraphing to pull off a success. We finished 3 or 4 daysago, and took the Villa Papiniano (dam the name, I have to look at ita minutes after writing it, and then am always in doubt) for a yearby cable. Three miles outside of Florence, under Fiesole--a darlinglocation, and apparently a choice house, near Fiske. 

There's 7 in our gang. All women but me. It means trunks and things. But thanks be! To-day (this is private) comes a most handsome voluntarydocument with seals and escutcheons on it from the Italian Ambassador(who is a stranger to me) commanding the Customs people to keep theirhands off the Clemens's things. Now wasn't it lovely of him? And wasn'tit lovely of me to let Livy take a pencil and edit my answer and knock agood third of it out?

And that's a nice ship--the Irene! new--swift--13, 000 tons--rooms up inthe sky, open to sun and air--and all that. I was desperately troubledfor Livy--about the down-cellar cells in the ancient "Latin. "

The cubs are in Riverdale, yet; they come to us the first week inAugust. 

 With lots and lots of love to you all, MARK. 

 The arrangement for the Villa Papiniano was not completed, after all, and through a good friend, George Gregory Smith, a resident of Florence, the Villa Quarto, an ancient home of royalty, on the hills west of Florence, was engaged. Smith wrote that it was a very beautiful place with a south-eastern exposure, looking out toward Valombrosa and the Chianti Hills. It had extensive grounds and stables, and the annual rental for it all was two thousand dollars a year. It seemed an ideal place, in prospect, and there was great hope that Mrs. Clemens would find her health once more in the Italian climate which she loved. 

 Perhaps at this point, when Mark Twain is once more leaving America, we may offer two letters from strangers to him--letters of appreciation--such as he was constantly receiving from those among the thousands to whom he had given happiness. The first is from Samuel Merwin, one day to become a popular novelist, then in the hour of his beginnings. 

*****

To Mark Twain, from Samuel Merwin:

 PLAINFIELD, N. J. August 4, 1903. 

DEAR MR. CLEMENS, --For a good many years I have been struggling with thetemptation to write you and thank you for the work you have done; andto-day I seem to be yielding. 

During the past two years I have been reading through a group of writerswho seem to me to represent about the best we have--Sir Thomas Malory, Spenser, Shakespeare, Boswell, Carlyle, Le Sage. In thinking over oneand then another, and then all of them together, it was plain to seewhy they were great men and writers: each brought to his time some newblood, new ideas, --turned a new current into the stream. I supposethere have always been the careful, painstaking writers, the men who arealways taken so seriously by their fellow craftsmen. It seems to be theunconventional man who is so rare--I mean the honestly unconventionalman, who has to express himself in his own big way because theconventional way isn't big enough, because ne needs room and freedom. 

We have a group of the more or less conventional men now--men of dignityand literary position. But in spite of their influence and of all thework they have done, there isn't one of them to whom one can give one'sself up without reservation, not one whose ideas seem based on the deepfoundation of all true philosophy, --except Mark Twain. 

I hope this letter is not an impertinence. I have just been turningabout, with my head full of Spenser and Shakespeare and "Gil Blas, "looking for something in our own present day literature to which I couldsurrender myself as to those five gripping old writings. And nothingcould I find until I took up "Life on the Mississippi, " and "HuckleberryFinn, " and, just now, the "Connecticut Yankee. " It isn't the first timeI have read any of these three, and it's because I know it won't be thelast, because these books are the only ones written in my lifetime thatclaim my unreserved interest and admiration and, above all, my feelings, that I've felt I had to write this letter. 

I like to think that "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" will be lookedupon, fifty or a hundred years from now, as the picture of buoyant, dramatic, human American life. I feel, deep in my own heart, prettysure that they will be. They won't be looked on then as the work of a"humorist" any more than we think of Shakespeare as a humorist now. I don't mean by this to set up a comparison between Mark Twain andShakespeare: I don't feel competent to do it; and I'm not at all surethat it could be done until Mark Twain's work shall have its fair shareof historical perspective. But Shakespeare was a humorist and so, thankHeaven! is Mark Twain. And Shakespeare plunged deep into the deep, sadthings of life; and so, in a different way (but in a way that has morethan once brought tears to my eyes) has Mark Twain. But after all, it isn't because of any resemblance for anything that was ever beforewritten that Mark Twain's books strike in so deep: it's rather becausethey've brought something really new into our literature--new, yet oldas Adam and Eve and the Apple. And this achievement, the achievementof putting something into literature that was not there before, is, Ishould think, the most that any writer can ever hope to do. It is theone mark of distinction between the "lonesome" little group of big menand the vast herd of medium and small ones. Anyhow, this much I am sureof--to the young man who hopes, however feebly, to accomplish a littlesomething, someday, as a writer, the one inspiring example of our timeis Mark Twain. Very truly yours, SAMUEL MERWIN. 

Mark Twain once said he could live a month on a good compliment, andfrom his reply, we may believe this one to belong in, that class. 

*****

To Samuel Merwin, in Plainfield, N. J. :

 Aug. 16, '03. 

DEAR MR. MERWIN, --What you have said has given me deep pleasure--indeedI think no words could be said that could give me more. 

 Very sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. 

 The next "compliment" is from one who remains unknown, for she failed to sign her name in full. But it is a lovely letter, and loses nothing by the fact that the writer of it was willing to remain in obscurity. 

*****

To Mark Twain, from Margaret M----:

 PORTLAND, OREGON Aug. 18, 1903. 

MY DEAR, DEAR MARK TWAIN, --May a little girl write and tell you howdearly she loves and admires your writings? Well, I do and I want totell you your ownself. Don't think me too impertinent for indeed I don'tmean to be that! I have read everything of yours that I could get andparts that touch me I have read over and over again. They seem suchdear friends to me, so like real live human beings talking and laughing, working and suffering too! One cannot but feel that it is your own lifeand experience that you have painted. So do not wonder that you seem adear friend to me who has never even seen you. I often think of you assuch in my own thoughts. I wonder if you will laugh when I tell you Ihave made a hero of you? For when people seem very sordid and mean andstupid (and it seems as if everybody was) then the thought will comelike a little crumb of comfort "well, Mark Twain isn't anyway. " And itdoes really brighten me up. 

You see I have gotten an idea that you are a great, bright spiritof kindness and tenderness. One who can twist everybody's-even yourown-faults and absurdities into hearty laughs. Even the person mockedmust laugh! Oh, Dear! How often you have made me laugh! And yet as oftenyou have struck something infinite away down deep in my heart so that Iwant to cry while half laughing!

So this all means that I want to thank you and to tell you. "God alwayslove Mark Twain!" is often my wish. I dearly love to read books, and Inever tire of reading yours; they always have a charm for me. Good-bye, I am afraid I have not expressed what I feel. But at least I have tried. 

 Sincerely yours. MARGARET M. ----

 Clemens and family left Elmira October the 5th for New York City. They remained at the Hotel Grosvenor until their sailing date, October 24th. A few days earlier, Mr. Frank Doubleday sent a volume of Kipling's poems and de Blowitz's Memoirs for entertainment on the ship. Mark Twain's acknowledgment follows. 

*****

To F. N. Doubleday, in New York:

 THE GROSVENOR, October 12, '03. 

DEAR DOUBLEDAY, --The books came--ever so many thanks. I have beenreading "The Bell Buoy" and "The Old Men" over and over again--my customwith Kipling's work-and saving up the rest for other leisurely andluxurious meals. A bell-buoy is a deeply impressive fellow-being. Inthese many recent trips up and down the Sound in the Kanawha--[Mr. Rogers's yacht. ]--he has talked to me nightly, sometimes in his patheticand melancholy way, sometimes with his strenuous and urgent note, and Igot his meaning--now I have his words! No one but Kipling could do thisstrong and vivid thing. Some day I hope to hear the poem chanted orsung--with the bell-buoy breaking in, out of the distance. 

"The Old Men, " delicious, isn't it? And so comically true. I haven'tarrived there yet, but I suppose I am on the way. .. . 

 Yours ever, MARK. 

P. S. Your letter has arrived. It makes me proud and glad--what Kiplingsays. I hope Fate will fetch him to Florence while we are there. I wouldrather see him than any other man. 

We've let the Tarrytown house for a year. Man, you would never havebelieved a person could let a house in these times. That one's for sale, the Hartford one is sold. When we buy again may we--may I--be damned. .. . 

I've dipped into Blowitz and find him quaintly and curiouslyinteresting. I think he tells the straight truth, too. I knew him alittle, 23 years ago. 

 The appreciative word which Kipling had sent Doubleday was: "I love to think of the great and God-like Clemens. He is the biggest man you have on your side of the water by a damn sight, and don't you forget it. Cervantes was a relation of his. "

XLIII. LETTERS OF 1904. TO VARIOUS PERSONS. LIFE IN VILLA QUARTO. DEATHOF MRS. CLEMENS. THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 

 Mrs. Clemens stood the voyage to Italy very well and, in due time, the family were installed in the Villa Reale di Quarto, the picturesque old Palace of Cosimo, a spacious, luxurious place, even if not entirely cheerful or always comfortable during the changeable Tuscan winter. Congratulated in a letter from MacAlister in being in the midst of Florentine sunshine, he answered: "Florentine sunshine? Bless you, there isn't any. We have heavy fogs every morning, and rain all day. This house is not merely large, it is vast--therefore I think it must always lack the home feeling. "

 Neither was their landlady, the American wife of an Italian count, all that could be desired. From a letter to Twichell, however, we learn that Mark Twain's work was progressing well. 

*****

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

 VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE, Jan. 7, '04. 

DEAR JOE, --. .. I have had a handsome success, in one way, here. I leftNew York under a sort of half promise to furnish to the Harper magazines30, 000 words this year. Magazining is difficult work because every thirdpage represents 2 pages that you have put in the fire; (because youare nearly sure to start wrong twice) and so when you have finishedan article and are willing to let it go to print it represents only 10cents a word instead of 30. 

But this time I had the curious (and unprecedented) luck to start rightin each case. I turned out 37, 000 words in 25 working days; and thereason I think I started right every time is, that not only have Iapproved and accepted the several articles, but the court of last resort(Livy) has done the same. 

On many of the between-days I did some work, but only of an idle and notnecessarily necessary sort, since it will not see print until I amdead. I shall continue this (an hour per day) but the rest of the yearI expect to put in on a couple of long books (half-completed ones. ) Nomore magazine-work hanging over my head. 

This secluded and silent solitude this clean, soft air and thisenchanting view of Florence, the great valley and the snow-mountainsthat frame it are the right conditions for work. They are a persistentinspiration. To-day is very lovely; when the afternoon arrives therewill be a new picture every hour till dark, and each of them divine--orprogressing from divine to diviner and divinest. On this (second) floorClara's room commands the finest; she keeps a window ten feet high wideopen all the time and frames it in. I go in from time to time, every dayand trade sass for a look. The central detail is a distant and statelysnow-hump that rises above and behind blackforested hills, and itssloping vast buttresses, velvety and sun-polished with purple shadowsbetween, make the sort of picture we knew that time we walked inSwitzerland in the days of our youth. 

I wish I could show your letter to Livy--but she must wait a week or sofor it. I think I told you she had a prostrating week of tonsillitis amonth ago; she has remained very feeble ever since, and confined to thebed of course, but we allow ourselves to believe she will regain thelost ground in another month. Her physician is Professor Grocco--shecould not have a better. And she has a very good trained nurse. 

Love to all of you from all of us. And to all of our dear Hartfordfriends. 

 MARK

P. S. 3 days later. 

Livy is as remarkable as ever. The day I wrote you--that night, Imean--she had a bitter attack of gout or rheumatism occupying the wholeleft arm from shoulder to fingers, accompanied by fever. The painsracked her 50 or 60 hours; they have departed, now--and already she isplanning a trip to Egypt next fall, and a winter's sojourn there! Thisis life in her yet. 

You will be surprised that I was willing to do so muchmagazine-writing--a thing I have always been chary about--but I had goodreasons. Our expenses have been so prodigious for a year and a half, and are still so prodigious, that Livy was worrying altogether too muchabout them, and doing a very dangerous amount of lying awake on theiraccount. It was necessary to stop that, and it is now stopped. 

Yes, she is remarkable, Joe. Her rheumatic attack set me to cursing andswearing, without limit as to time or energy, but it merely concentratedher patience and her unconquerable fortitude. It is the differencebetween us. I can't count the different kinds of ailments which haveassaulted her in this fiendish year and a half--and I forgive none ofthem--but here she comes up again as bright and fresh and enterprisingas ever, and goes to planning about Egypt, with a hope and a confidencewhich are to me amazing. 

Clara is calling for me--we have to go into town and pay calls. 

 MARK. 

 In Florence, that winter, Clemens began dictating to his secretary some autobiographical chapters. This was the work which was "not to see print until I am dead. " He found it a pleasant, lazy occupation and wrote his delight in it to Howells in a letter which seems not to have survived. In his reply, Howells wrote: "You do stir me mightily with the hope of dictating and I will try it when I get the chance. But there is the tempermental difference. You are dramatic and unconscious; you count the thing more than yourself; I am cursed with consciousness to the core, and can't say myself out; I am always saying myself in, and setting myself above all that I say, as of more worth. Lately I have felt as if I were rotting with egotism. I don't admire myself; I am sick of myself; but I can't think of anything else. Here I am at it now, when I ought to be rejoicing with you at the blessing you have found. .. . I'd like, immensely, to read your autobiography. You always rather bewildered me by your veracity, and I fancy you may tell the truth about yourself. But all of it? The black truth which we all know of ourselves in our hearts, or only the whity-brown truth of the pericardium, or the nice, whitened truth of the shirtfront? Even you won't tell the black heart's--truth. The man who could do it would be famed to the last day the sun shone upon. "

 We gather from Mark Twain's answer that he was not deceiving himself in the matter of his confessions. 

*****

To W. D. Howells, in New York:

 VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE, March 14, '04. 

DEAR HOWELLS, --Yes, I set up the safeguards, in the first day'sdictating; taking this position: that an autobiography is the truest ofall books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of thetruth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, withhardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth isthere, between the lines, where the author is raking dust upon it, the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wilydiligences. 

The summer in England! you can't ask better luck than that. Then youwill run over to Florence; we shall all be hungry to see you-all. We arehunting for another villa, (this one is plenty large enough but has noroom in it) but even if we find it I am afraid it will be months beforewe can move Mrs. Clemens. Of course it will. But it comforts us to leton that we think otherwise, and these pretensions help to keep hopealive in her. 

 Good-bye, with love, Amen. Yours ever MARK. 

 News came of the death of Henry M. Stanley, one of Mark Twain's oldest friends. Clemens once said that he had met Stanley in St. Louis where he (Clemens) had delivered a lecture which Stanley had reported. In the following letter he fixes the date of their meeting as early in 1867, which would be immediately after Mark Twain's return from California, and just prior to the Quaker City excursion--a fact which is interesting only because it places the two men together when each was at the very beginning of a great career. 

*****

To Lady Stanley, in England:

 VILLA DI QUARTO, FIRENZE, May 11, '04. 

DEAR LADY STANLEY, --I have lost a dear and honored friend--how fastthey fall about me now, in my age! The world has lost a tried and provedhero. And you--what have you lost? It is beyond estimate--we who knowyou, and what he was to you, know that. How far he stretches across mylife! I knew him when his work was all before him five years before thegreat day that he wrote his name far-away up on the blue of the sky forthe world to see and applaud and remember; I have known him as friendand intimate ever since. It is 37 years. I have known no other friendand intimate so long, except John Hay--a friendship which dates from thesame year and the same half of it, the first half of 1867. I grieve withyou and with your family, dear Lady Stanley, it is all I can do; butthat I do out of my heart. It would be we, instead of I, if Mrs. Clemensknew, but in all these 20 months that she has lain a prisoner in her bedwe have hidden from her all things that could sadden her. Many a friendis gone whom she still asks about and still thinks is living. 

In deepest sympathy I beg the privilege of signing myself

 Your friend, S. L. CLEMENS. 

*****

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

 VILLA DI QUARTO, May 11, '04

DEAR JOE, --Yours has this moment arrived--just as I was finishing a noteto poor Lady Stanley. I believe the last country-house visit we paid inEngland was to Stanley's. Lord, how my friends and acquaintances fallabout me now, in my gray-headed days! Vereschagin, Mommsen, Dvorak, Lenbach, Jokai--all so recently, and now Stanley. I had known Stanley37 years. Goodness, who is it I haven't known! As a rule the necrologiesfind me personally interested--when they treat of old stagers. Generallywhen a man dies who is worth cabling, it happens that I have run acrosshim somewhere, some time or other. 

Oh, say! Down by the Laurentian Library there's a marble image thathas been sitting on its pedestal some 450 Years, if my dates areright--Cosimo I. I've seen the back of it many a time, but not thefront; but yesterday I twisted my head around after we had driven by, and the profane exclamation burst from my mouth before I could think:"there's Chauncey Depew!"

I mean to get a photo of it--and use it if it confirms yesterday'sconviction. That's a very nice word from the Catholic Magazine and I amglad you sent it. I mean to show it to my priest--we are very fond ofhim. He is a stealing man, and is also learnedly scientific. He inventedthe thing which records the seismatic disturbances, for the peoples ofthe earth. And he's an astronomer and has an observatory of his own. 

Ah, many's the cry I have, over reflecting that maybe we could have hadYoung Harmony for Livy, and didn't have wit enough to think of it. 

Speaking of Livy reminds me that your inquiry arrives at a good time(unberufen) It has been weeks (I don't know how many!) since we couldhave said a hopeful word, but this morning Katy came the minute theday-nurse came on watch and said words of a strange and long-forgottensound: "Mr. Clemens, Mrs. Clemens is really and truly better!--anybodycan see it; she sees it herself; and last night at 9 o'clock she saidit. "

There--it is heart-warming, it is splendid, it is sublime; let usenjoy it, let us make the most of it today--and bet not a farthing ontomorrow. The tomorrows have nothing for us. Too many times they havebreathed the word of promise to our ear and broken it to our hope. Wetake no tomorrow's word any more. 

You've done a wonder, Joe: you've written a letter that can be sent into Livy--that doesn't often happen, when either a friend or a strangerwrites. You did whirl in a P. S. That wouldn't do, but you wrote it ona margin of a page in such a way that I was able to clip off the marginclear across both pages, and now Livy won't perceive that the sheetisn't the same size it used to was. It was about Aldrich's son, andI came near forgetting to remove it. It should have been written on aloose strip and enclosed. That son died on the 5th of March and Aldrichwrote me on the night before that his minutes were numbered. On the 18thLivy asked after that patient, and I was prepared, and able to give hera grateful surprise by telling her "the Aldriches are no longer uneasyabout him. "

I do wish I could have been present and heard Charley Clark. When hecan't light up a dark place nobody can. 

 With lots of love to you all. MARK. 

 Mrs. Clemens had her bad days and her good days-days when there seemed no ray of light, and others that seemed almost to promise recovery. The foregoing letter to Twichell, and the one which follows, to Richard Watson Gilder, reflect the hope and fear that daily and hourly alternated at Villa Quarto

*****

To Richard Watson Gilder, in New York:

 VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE, May 12, '04. 

DEAR GILDER, --A friend of ours (the Baroness de Nolda) was here thisafternoon and wanted a note of introduction to the Century, for she hassomething to sell to you in case you'll want to make her an offer afterseeing a sample of the goods. I said "With pleasure: get the goodsready, send the same to me, I will have Jean type-write them, then Iwill mail them to the Century and tonight I will write the note to Mr. Gilder and start it along. Also write me a letter embodying whatyou have been saying to me about the goods and your proposed plan ofarranging and explaining them, and I will forward that to Gilder too. "

As to the Baroness. She is a German; 30 years old; was married at 17;is very pretty-indeed I might say very pretty; has a lot of sons (5)running up from seven to 12 years old. Her husband is a Russian. Theylive half the time in Russia and the other half in Florence, and supplypopulation alternately to the one country and then to the other. Ofcourse it is a family that speaks languages. This occurs at theirtable--I know it by experience: It is Babel come again. The other day, when no guests were present to keep order, the tribes were all talkingat once, and 6 languages were being traded in; at last the littlest boylost his temper and screamed out at the top of his voice, with angrysobs: "Mais, vraiment, io non capisco gar nichts. "

The Baroness is a little afraid of her English, therefore she will writeher remarks in French--I said there's a plenty of translators in NewYork. Examine her samples and drop her a line. 

For two entire days, now, we have not been anxious about Mrs. Clemens(unberufen). After 20 months of bed-ridden solitude and bodily miseryshe all of a sudden ceases to be a pallid shrunken shadow, and looksbright and young and pretty. She remains what she always was, the mostwonderful creature of fortitude, patience, endurance and recuperativepower that ever was. But ah, dear, it won't last; this fiendish maladywill play new treacheries upon her, and I shall go back to my prayersagain--unutterable from any pulpit!

 With love to you and yours, S. L. C. 

May 13 10 A. M. I have just paid one of my pair of permitted 2 minutesvisits per day to the sick room. And found what I have learned toexpect--retrogression, and that pathetic something in the eye whichbetrays the secret of a waning hope. 

 The year of the World's Fair had come, and an invitation from Gov. Francis, of Missouri, came to Mark Twain in Florence, personally inviting him to attend the great celebration and carry off first prize. We may believe that Clemens felt little in the spirit of humor, but to such an invitation he must send a cheerful, even if disappointing, answer. 

*****

To Gov. Francis, of Missouri:

 VILLA DI QUARTO, FIRENZE, May 26, 1904. 

DEAR GOVERNOR FRANCIS, --It has been a dear wish of mine to exhibitmyself at the Great Fair and get a prize, but circumstances beyond mycontrol have interfered, and I must remain in Florence. Although Ihave never taken prizes anywhere else I used to take them at school inMissouri half a century ago, and I ought to be able to repeat, now, ifI could have a chance. I used to get the medal for good spelling, everyweek, and I could have had the medal for good conduct if there hadn'tbeen so much corruption in Missouri in those days; still, I got itseveral times by trading medals and giving boot. I am willing to giveboot now, if--however, those days are forever gone by in Missouri, and perhaps it is better so. Nothing ever stops the way it was in thischangeable world. Although I cannot be at the Fair, I am going to berepresented there anyway, by a portrait, by Professor Gelli. You willfind it excellent. Good judges here say it is better than the original. They say it has all the merits of the original and keeps still, besides. It sounds like flattery, but it is just true. 

I suppose you will get a prize, because you have created the mostprodigious and in all ways most wonderful Fair the planet has ever seen. Very well, you have indeed earned it: and with it the gratitude of theState and the nation. 

 Sincerely yours, MARK TWAIN

 It was only a few days after the foregoing was written that death entered Villa Quarto--unexpectedly at last--for with the first June days Mrs. Clemens had seemed really to improve. It was on Sunday, June 5th, that the end came. Clemens, with his daughter Jean, had returned from a long drive, during which they had visited a Villa with the thought of purchase. On their return they were told that their patient had been better that afternoon than for three months. Yet it was only a few hours later that she left them, so suddenly and quietly that even those near her did not at first realize that she was gone. 

*****

To W. D. Howells, in New York. 

 VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE, June 6, '94. [1904]

DEAR HOWELLS, --Last night at 9. 20 I entered Mrs. Clemens's room to saythe usual goodnight--and she was dead--tho' no one knew it. She had beencheerfully talking, a moment before. She was sitting up in bed--she hadnot lain down for months--and Katie and the nurse were supporting her. They supposed she had fainted, and they were holding the oxygen pipe toher mouth, expecting to revive her. I bent over her and looked in herface, and I think I spoke--I was surprised and troubled that she didnot notice me. Then we understood, and our hearts broke. How poor we aretoday!

But how thankful I am that her persecutions are ended. I would not callher back if I could. 

Today, treasured in her worn old Testament, I found a dear and gentleletter from you, dated Far Rockaway, Sept. 13, 1896, about our poorSusy's death. I am tired and old; I wish I were with Livy. 

I send my love-and hers-to you all. 

 S. L. C. 

 In a letter to Twichell he wrote: "How sweet she was in death; how young, how beautiful, how like her dear, girlish self cf thirty years ago; not a gray hair showing. "

 The family was now without plans for the future until they remembered the summer home of R. W. Gilder, at Tyringham, Massachusetts, and the possibility of finding lodgment for themselves in that secluded corner of New England. Clemens wrote without delay, as follows:

*****

To R. W. Gilder, in New York:

 VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE, June 7, '04. 

DEAR GILDER FAMILY, --I have been worrying and worrying to know what todo: at last I went to the girls with an idea: to ask the Gilders to getus shelter near their summer home. It was the first time they have notshaken their heads. So to-morrow I will cable to you and shall hope tobe in time. 

An hour ago the best heart that ever beat for me and mine went silentout of this house, and I am as one who wanders and has lost his way. Shewho is gone was our head, she was our hands. We are now trying to makeplans--we: we who have never made a plan before, nor ever needed to. Ifshe could speak to us she would make it all simple and easy with a word, and our perplexities would vanish away. If she had known she was near todeath she would have told us where to go and what to do: but she was notsuspecting, neither were we. (She had been chatting cheerfully a momentbefore, and in an instant she was gone from us and we did not know it. We were not alarmed, we did not know anything had happened. It was ablessed death--she passed away without knowing it. ) She was all ourriches and she is gone: she was our breath, she was our life and now weare nothing. 

We send you our love--and with it the love of you that was in her heartwhen she died. 

 S. L. CLEMENS. 

 Howells wrote his words of sympathy, adding: "The character which now remains a memory was one of the most perfect ever formed on the earth, " and again, after having received Clemens's letter: "I cannot speak of your wife's having kept that letter of mine where she did. You know how it must humiliate a man in his unworthiness to have anything of his so consecrated. She hallowed what she touched, far beyond priests. "

*****

To W. D. Howells, in New York:

 VILLA DI QUARTO, '04. June 12, 6 p. M. 

DEAR HOWELLS, --We have to sit and hold our hands and wait--in thesilence and solitude of this prodigious house; wait until June 25, thenwe go to Naples and sail in the Prince Oscar the 26th. There is aship 12 days earlier (but we came in that one. ) I see Clara twice aday--morning and evening--greeting--nothing more is allowed. She keepsher bed, and says nothing. She has not cried yet. I wish she could cry. It would break Livy's heart to see Clara. We excuse ourselves fromall the friends that call--though of course only intimates come. Intimates--but they are not the old old friends, the friends of the old, old times when we laughed. 

Shall we ever laugh again? If I could only see a dog that I knew inthe old times! and could put my arms around his neck and tell him all, everything, and ease my heart. 

Think--in 3 hours it will be a week!--and soon a month; and by and by ayear. How fast our dead fly from us. 

She loved you so, and was always as pleased as a child with any noticeyou took of her. 

Soon your wife will be with you, oh fortunate man! And John, whom minewas so fond of. The sight of him was such a delight to her. Lord, theold friends, how dear they are. 

 S. L. C. 

*****

To Rev. J. R. Twichell, in Hartford:

 VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE, June 18, '04. 

DEAR JOE, --It is 13 days. I am bewildered and must remain so for a timelonger. It was so sudden, so unexpected. Imagine a man worth a hundredmillions who finds himself suddenly penniless and fifty million in debtin his old age. 

I was richer than any other person in the world, and now I am thatpauper without peer. Some day I will tell you about it, not now. 

 MARK. 

 A tide of condolence flowed in from all parts of the world. It was impossible to answer all. Only a few who had been their closest friends received a written line, but the little printed acknowledgment which was returned was no mere formality. It was a heartfelt, personal word. 

 They arrived in America in July, and were accompanied by Twichell to Elmira, and on the 14th Mrs. Clemens was laid to rest by the side of Susy and little Langdon. R. W. Gilder had arranged for them to occupy, for the summer, a cottage on his place at Tyringham, in the Berkshire Hills. By November they were at the Grosvenor, in New York, preparing to establish themselves in a house which they had taken on the corner of Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue--Number 21. 

*****

To F. N. Doubleday, in New York:

DEAR DOUBLEDAY, --I did not know you were going to England: I would havefreighted you with such messages of homage and affection to Kipling. AndI would have pressed his hand, through you, for his sympathy with me inmy crushing loss, as expressed by him in his letter to Gilder. You knowmy feeling for Kipling and that it antedates that expression. 

I was glad that the boys came here to invite me to the house-warming andI think they understood why a man in the shadow of a calamity like minecould not go. 

It has taken three months to repair and renovate our house--corner of9th and 5th Avenue, but I shall be in it in io or 15 days hence. Muchof the furniture went into it today (from Hartford). We have not seenit for 13 years. Katy Leary, our old housekeeper, who has been in ourservice more than 24 years, cried when she told me about it to-day. Shesaid "I had forgotten it was so beautiful, and it brought Mrs. Clemensright back to me--in that old time when she was so young and lovely. "

Jean and my secretary and the servants whom we brought from Italybecause Mrs. Clemens liked them so well, are still keeping house in theBerkshire hills--and waiting. Clara (nervously wrecked by her mother'sdeath) is in the hands of a specialist in 69th St. , and I shall not beallowed to have any communication with her--even telephone--for a year. I am in this comfortable little hotel, and still in bed--for I dasn'tbudge till I'm safe from my pet devil, bronchitis. 

Isn't it pathetic? One hour and ten minutes before Mrs. Clemens diedI was saying to her "To-day, after five months search, I've found thevilla that will content you: to-morrow you will examine the plans andgive it your consent and I will buy it. " Her eyes danced with pleasure, for she longed for a home of her own. And there, on that morrow, she laywhite and cold. And unresponsive to my reverent caresses--a new thingto me and a new thing to her; that had not happened before in five andthirty years. 

I am coming to see you and Mrs. Doubleday by and bye. She loved andhonored Mrs. Doubleday and her work. 

 Always yours, MARK. 

 It was a presidential year and the air was thick with politics. Mark Twain was no longer actively interested in the political situation; he was only disheartened by the hollowness and pretense of office-seeking, and the methods of office-seekers in general. Grieved that Twichell should still pin his faith to any party when all parties were so obviously venal and time-serving, he wrote in outspoken and rather somber protest. 

*****

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

 THE GROSVENOR, Nov. 4, '04. 

Oh, dear! get out of that sewer--party politics--dear Joe. At leastwith your mouth. We hail only two men who could make speeches for theirparties and preserve their honor and their dignity. One of them is dead. Possibly there were four. I am sorry for John Hay; sorry and ashamed. And yet I know he couldn't help it. He wears the collar, and he had topay the penalty. Certainly he had no more desire to stand up beforea mob of confiding human incapables and debauch them than you had. Certainly he took no more real pleasure in distorting history, concealing facts, propagating immoralities, and appealing to the sordidside of human nature than did you; but he was his party's property, andhe had to climb away down and do it. 

It is interesting, wonderfully interesting--the miracles whichparty-politics can do with a man's mental and moral make-up. Lookat McKinley, Roosevelt, and yourself: in private life spotlessin character; honorable, honest, just, humane, generous; scorningtrickeries, treacheries, suppressions of the truth, mistranslations ofthe meanings of facts, the filching of credit earned by another, thecondoning of crime, the glorifying of base acts: in public politicallife the reverse of all this. 

McKinley was a silverite--you concealed it. Roosevelt was asilverite--you concealed it. Parker was a silverite--you publish it. Along with a shudder and a warning: "He was unsafe then. Is he any safernow?"

Joe, even I could be guilty of such a thing as that--if I were inparty-politics; I really believe it. 

Mr. Cleveland gave the country the gold standard; by implication youcredit the matter to the Republican party. 

By implication you prove the whole annual pension-scoop, concealing thefact that the bulk of the money goes to people who in no way deserve it. You imply that all the batteners upon this bribery-fund are Republicans. An indiscreet confession, since about half of them must have beenDemocrats before they were bought. 

You as good as praise Order 78. It is true you do not shout, and you donot linger, you only whisper and skip--still, what little you do in thematter is complimentary to the crime. 

It means, if it means anything, that our outlying properties will allbe given up by the Democrats, and our flag hauled down. All of them? Notonly the properties stolen by Mr. McKinley and Mr. Roosevelt, but theproperties honestly acquired? Joe, did you believe that hardy statementwhen you made it? Yet you made it, and there it stands in permanentprint. Now what moral law would suffer if we should give up the stolenones? But--

"You know our standard-bearer. He will maintain all that we havegained"--by whatever process. Land, I believe you!

By George, Joe, you are as handy at the game as if you had been intraining for it all your life. Your campaign Address is built from theground up upon the oldest and best models. There isn't a paragraph in itwhose facts or morals will wash--not even a sentence, I believe. 

But you will soon be out of this. You didn't want to do it--that issufficiently apparent, thanks be!--but you couldn't well get out of it. In a few days you will be out of it, and then you can fumigate yourselfand take up your legitimate work again and resume your clean andwholesome private character once more and be happy--and useful. 

I know I ought to hand you some guff, now, as propitiation and apologyfor these reproaches, but on the whole I believe I won't. 

I have inquired, and find that Mitsikuri does not arrive here untilto-morrow night. I shall watch out, and telephone again, for I greatlywant to see him. 

 Always Yours, MARK. 

P. S. --Nov, 4. I wish I could learn to remember that it is unjust anddishonorable to put blame upon the human race for any of its acts. For it did not make itself, it did not make its nature, it is merelya machine, it is moved wholly by outside influences, it has no hand increating the outside influences nor in choosing which of them it willwelcome or reject, its performance is wholly automatic, it has no moremastership nor authority over its mind than it has over its stomach, which receives material from the outside and does as it pleases withit, indifferent to it's proprietor's suggestions, even, let alone hiscommands; wherefore, whatever the machine does--so called crimes andinfamies included--is the personal act of its Maker, and He, solely, is responsible. I wish I could learn to pity the human race instead ofcensuring it and laughing at it; and I could, if the outside influencesof old habit were not so strong upon my machine. It vexes me to catchmyself praising the clean private citizen Roosevelt, and blaming thesoiled President Roosevelt, when I know that neither praise nor blameis due to him for any thought or word or deed of his, he being merely ahelpless and irresponsible coffee-mill ground by the hand of God. 

 Through a misunderstanding, Clemens, something more than a year earlier, had severed his connection with the Players' Club, of which he had been one of the charter members. Now, upon his return to New York, a number of his friends joined in an invitation to him to return. It was not exactly a letter they sent, but a bit of an old Scotch song--

 "To Mark Twain from The Clansmen. Will ye no come back again, Will ye no come back again? Better lo'ed ye canna be. Will ye no come back again?"

 Those who signed it were David Monroe, of the North American Review; Robert Reid, the painter, and about thirty others of the Round Table Group, so called because its members were accustomed to lunching at a large round table in a bay window of the Player dining-room. Mark Twain's reply was prompt and heartfelt. He wrote:

*****

To Robt. Reid and the Others:

WELL-BELOVED, --Surely those lovely verses went to Prince Charley'sheart, if he had one, and certainly they have gone to mine. I shallbe glad and proud to come back again after such a moving and beautifulcompliment as this from comrades whom I have loved so long. I hope youcan poll the necessary vote; I know you will try, at any rate. It willbe many months before I can foregather with you, for this black borderis not perfunctory, not a convention; it symbolizes the loss of onewhose memory is the only thing I worship. 

It is not necessary for me to thank you--and words could not deliverwhat I feel, anyway. I will put the contents of your envelope in thesmall casket where I keep the things which have become sacred to me. 

 S. L. C. 

A year later, Mark Twain did "come back again, " as an honorary lifemember, and was given a dinner of welcome by those who had signed thelines urging his return. 

XLIV. LETTERS OF 1905. TO TWICHELL, MR. DUNEKA AND OTHERS. POLITICS ANDHUMANITY. A SUMMER AT DUBLIN. MARK TWAIN AT 70. 

 In 1884 Mark Twain had abandoned the Republican Party to vote for Cleveland. He believed the party had become corrupt, and to his last day it was hard for him to see anything good in Republican policies or performance. He was a personal friend of Theodore Roosevelt's but, as we have seen in a former letter, Roosevelt the politician rarely found favor in his eyes. With or without justification, most of the President's political acts invited his caustic sarcasm and unsparing condemnation. Another letter to Twichell of this time affords a fair example. 

*****

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

 Feb. 16, '05. 

DEAR JOE, --I knew I had in me somewhere a definite feeling about thePresident if I could only find the words to define it with. Here theyare, to a hair--from Leonard Jerome: "For twenty years I have lovedRoosevelt the man and hated Roosevelt the statesman and politician. "

It's mighty good. Every time, in 25 years, that I have met Roosevelt theman, a wave of welcome has streaked through me with the hand-grip; butwhenever (as a rule) I meet Roosevelt the statesman and politician, Ifind him destitute of morals and not respectworthy. It is plain thatwhere his political self and his party self are concerned he has nothingresembling a conscience; that under those inspirations he is naivelyindifferent to the restraints of duty and even unaware of them; readyto kick the Constitution into the back yard whenever it gets in the way;and whenever he smells a vote, not only willing but eager to buy it, give extravagant rates for it and pay the bill not out of his own pocketor the party's, but out of the nation's, by cold pillage. As per Order78 and the appropriation of the Indian trust funds. 

But Roosevelt is excusable--I recognize it and (ought to) concede it. We are all insane, each in his own way, and with insanity goesirresponsibility. Theodore the man is sane; in fairness we ought tokeep in mind that Theodore, as statesman and politician, is insane andirresponsible. 

Do not throw these enlightenments aside, but study them, let them raiseyou to higher planes and make you better. You taught me in my callowdays, let me pay back the debt now in my old age out of a thesaurus withwisdom smelted from the golden ores of experience. 

 Ever yours for sweetness and light MARK. 

 The next letter to Twichell takes up politics and humanity in general, in a manner complimentary to neither. Mark Twain was never really a pessimist, but he had pessimistic intervals, such as come to most of us in life's later years, and at such times he let himself go without stint concerning "the damned human race, " as he called it, usually with a manifest sense of indignation that he should be a member of it. In much of his later writing --A Mysterious Stranger for example--he said his say with but small restraint, and certainly in his purely intellectual moments he was likely to be a pessimist of the most extreme type, capably damning the race and the inventor of it. Yet, at heart, no man loved his kind more genuinely, or with deeper compassion, than Mark Twain, perhaps for its very weaknesses. It was only that he had intervals --frequent intervals, and rather long ones--when he did not admire it, and was still more doubtful as to the ways of providence. 

*****

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

 March 14, '05. 

DEAR JOE, --I have a Puddn'head maxim:

"When a man is a pessimist before 48 he knows too much; if he is anoptimist after it, he knows too little. "

It is with contentment, therefore, that I reflect that I am better andwiser than you. Joe, you seem to be dealing in "bulks, " now; the "bulk"of the farmers and U. S. Senators are "honest. " As regards purchase andsale with money? Who doubts it? Is that the only measure of honesty?Aren't there a dozen kinds of honesty which can't be measured by themoney-standard? Treason is treason--and there's more than one form ofit; the money-form is but one of them. When a person is disloyal to anyconfessed duty, he is plainly and simply dishonest, and knows it; knowsit, and is privately troubled about it and not proud of himself. Judgedby this standard--and who will challenge the validity of it?--thereisn't an honest man in Connecticut, nor in the Senate, nor anywhereelse. I do not even except myself, this time. 

Am I finding fault with you and the rest of the populace? No--I assureyou I am not. For I know the human race's limitations, and this makes itmy duty--my pleasant duty--to be fair to it. Each person in it is honestin one or several ways, but no member of it is honest in all the waysrequired by--by what? By his own standard. Outside of that, as I look atit, there is no obligation upon him. 

Am I honest? I give you my word of honor (private) I am not. For sevenyears I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I oughtto publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other difficultduties which I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one. Yes, even Iam dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is. We are certainly all honest in one or several ways--every man in theworld--though I have reason to think I am the only one whose black-listruns so light. Sometimes I feel lonely enough in this lofty solitude. 

Yes, oh, yes, I am not overlooking the "steady progress from age to ageof the coming of the kingdom of God and righteousness. " "From age toage"--yes, it describes that giddy gait. I (and the rocks) will not liveto see it arrive, but that is all right--it will arrive, it surely will. But you ought not to be always ironically apologizing for the Deity. If that thing is going to arrive, it is inferable that He wants it toarrive; and so it is not quite kind of you, and it hurts me, to see youflinging sarcasms at the gait of it. And yet it would not be fair inme not to admit that the sarcasms are deserved. When the Deity wantsa thing, and after working at it for "ages and ages" can't show even ashade of progress toward its accomplishment, we--well, we don't laugh, but it is only because we dasn't. The source of "righteousness"--is inthe heart? Yes. And engineered and directed by the brain? Yes. Well, history and tradition testify that the heart is just about what it wasin the beginning; it has undergone no shade of change. Its good and evilimpulses and their consequences are the same today that they were in OldBible times, in Egyptian times, in Greek times, in Middle Age times, inTwentieth Century times. There has been no change. 

Meantime, the brain has undergone no change. It is what it always was. There are a few good brains and a multitude of poor ones. It was so inOld Bible times and in all other times--Greek, Roman, Middle Ages andTwentieth Century. Among the savages--all the savages--the average brainis as competent as the average brain here or elsewhere. I will prove itto you, some time, if you like. And there are great brains among them, too. I will prove that also, if you like. 

Well, the 19th century made progress--the first progress after "agesand ages"--colossal progress. In what? Materialities. Prodigiousacquisitions were made in things which add to the comfort of many andmake life harder for as many more. But the addition to righteousness? Isthat discoverable? I think not. The materialities were not invented inthe interest of righteousness; that there is more righteousness in theworld because of them than there, was before, is hardly demonstrable, I think. In Europe and America, there is a vast change (due to them)in ideals--do you admire it? All Europe and all America, are feverishlyscrambling for money. Money is the supreme ideal--all others take tenthplace with the great bulk of the nations named. Money-lust has alwaysexisted, but not in the history of the world was it ever a craze, amadness, until your time and mine. This lust has rotted these nations;it has made them hard, sordid, ungentle, dishonest, oppressive. 

Did England rise against the infamy of the Boer war? No--rose in favorof it. Did America rise against the infamy of the Phillipine war?No--rose in favor of it. Did Russia rise against the infamy of thepresent war? No--sat still and said nothing. Has the Kingdom of Godadvanced in Russia since the beginning of time?

Or in Europe and America, considering the vast backward step of themoney-lust? Or anywhere else? If there has been any progresstoward righteousness since the early days of Creation--which, in myineradicable honesty, I am obliged to doubt--I think we must confine itto ten per cent of the populations of Christendom, (but leaving, Russia, Spain and South America entirely out. ) This gives us 320, 000, 000 to drawthe ten per cent from. That is to say, 32, 000, 000 have advanced towardrighteousness and the Kingdom of God since the "ages and ages" havebeen flying along, the Deity sitting up there admiring. Well, you seeit leaves 1, 200, 000, 000 out of the race. They stand just where they havealways stood; there has been no change. 

N. B. No charge for these informations. Do come down soon, Joe. 

 With love, MARK. 

 St. Clair McKelway, of The Brooklyn Eagle, narrowly escaped injuries in a railway accident, and received the following. Clemens and McKelway were old friends. 

*****

To St. Clair McKelway, in Brooklyn:

 21 FIFTH AVE. Sunday Morning. April 30, 1905. 

DEAR McKELWAY, Your innumerable friends are grateful, most grateful. 

As I understand the telegrams, the engineer of your train had never seena locomotive before. Very well, then, I am once more glad that there isan Ever-watchful Providence to foresee possible results and send Ogdensand McIntyres along to save our friends. 

The Government's Official report, showing that our railways killedtwelve hundred persons last year and injured sixty thousand convinces methat under present conditions one Providence is not enough toproperly and efficiently take care of our railroad business. But it ischaracteristically American--always trying to get along short-handed andsave wages. 

I am helping your family congratulate themselves, and am your friend asalways. 

 S. L. CLEMENS. 

 Clemens did not spend any more summers at Quarry Farm. All its associations were beautiful and tender, but they could only sadden him. The life there had been as of another world, sunlit, idyllic, now forever vanished. For the summer of 1905 he leased the Copley Green house at Dublin, New Hampshire, where there was a Boston colony of writing and artistic folk, including many of his long-time friends. Among them was Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who wrote a hearty letter of welcome when he heard the news. Clemens replied in kind. 

*****

To Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in Boston:

 21 FIFTH AVE. Sunday, March 26, 1905. 

DEAR COL. HIGGINSON, --I early learned that you would be my neighbor inthe Summer and I rejoiced, recognizing in you and your family a largeasset. I hope for frequent intercourse between the two households. Ishall have my youngest daughter with me. The other one will go from therest-cure in this city to the rest-cure in Norfolk Conn and we shall notsee her before autumn. We have not seen her since the middle of October. 

Jean (the youngest daughter) went to Dublin and saw the house and cameback charmed with it. I know the Thayers of old--manifestly there is nolack of attractions up there. Mrs. Thayer and I were shipmates in a wildexcursion perilously near 40 years ago. 

You say you "send with this" the story. Then it should be here but itisn't, when I send a thing with another thing, the other thing goes butthe thing doesn't, I find it later--still on the premises. Will you lookit up now and send it?

Aldrich was here half an hour ago, like a breeze from over the fields, with the fragrance still upon his spirit. I am tired of waiting for thatman to get old. 

 Sincerely yours, S. L. C. 

 Mark Twain was in his seventieth year, old neither in mind nor body, but willing to take life more quietly, to refrain from travel and gay events. A sort of pioneers' reunion was to be held on the Pacific Coast, and a letter from Robert Fulton, of Reno, Nevada, invited Clemens to attend. He did not go, but he sent a letter that we may believe was the next best thing to those who heard it read. 

*****

To Robert Fulton, in Reno, Nevada:

 IN THE MOUNTAINS, May 24, 1905. 

DEAR MR. FULTON, --I remember, as if it were yesterday, that when Idisembarked from the overland stage in front of the Ormsby in CarsonCity in August, 1861, I was not expecting to be asked to come again. I was tired, discouraged, white with alkali dust, and did not knowanybody; and if you had said then, "Cheer up, desolate stranger, don'tbe down-hearted--pass on, and come again in 1905, " you cannot thinkhow grateful I would have been and how gladly I would have closed thecontract. Although I was not expecting to be invited, I was watchingout for it, and was hurt and disappointed when you started to ask me andchanged it to, "How soon are you going away?"

But you have made it all right, now, the wound is closed. And so I thankyou sincerely for the invitation; and with you, all Reno, and if I werea few years younger I would accept it, and promptly. I would go. I wouldlet somebody else do the oration, but, as for me, I would talk--justtalk. I would renew my youth; and talk--and talk--and talk--and havethe time of my life! I would march the unforgotten and unforgettableantiques by, and name their names, and give them reverentHailand-farewell as they passed: Goodman, McCarthy, Gillis, Curry, Baldwin, Winters, Howard, Nye, Stewart; Neely Johnson, Hal Clayton, North, Root, --and my brother, upon whom be peace!--and then thedesperadoes, who made life a joy and the "Slaughter-house" a preciouspossession: Sam Brown, Farmer Pete, Bill Mayfield, Six-fingered Jake, Jack Williams and the rest of the crimson discipleship--and so on and soon. Believe me, I would start a resurrection it would do you more goodto look at than the next one will, if you go on the way you are doingnow. 

Those were the days! those old ones. They will come no more. Youth willcome no more. They were so full to the brim with the wine of life; therehave been no others like them. It chokes me up to think of them. Wouldyou like me to come out there and cry? It would not beseem my whitehead. 

Good-bye. I drink to you all. Have a good time--and take an old man'sblessing. 

 MARK TWAIN. 

 A few days later he was writing to H. H. Bancroft, of San Francisco, who had invited him for a visit in event of his coming to the Coast. Henry James had just been there for a week and it was hoped that Howells would soon follow. 

*****

To H. H. Bancroft, in San Francisco:

 UP IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, May 27, 1905. 

DEAR MR. BANCROFT, --I thank you sincerely for the tempting hospitalitieswhich you offer me, but I have to deny myself, for my wandering days areover, and it is my desire and purpose to sit by the fire the rest ofmy remnant of life and indulge myself with the pleasure and repose ofwork--work uninterrupted and unmarred by duties or excursions. 

A man who like me, is going to strike 70 on the 30th of next Novemberhas no business to be flitting around the way Howells does--thatshameless old fictitious butter fly. (But if he comes, don't tell himI said it, for it would hurt him and I wouldn't brush a flake of powderfrom his wing for anything. I only say it in envy of his indestructibleyouth, anyway. Howells will be 88 in October. ) With thanks again, Sincerely yours, S. L. C. 

 Clemens found that the air of the New Hampshire hills agreed with him and stimulated him to work. He began an entirely new version of The Mysterious Stranger, of which he already had a bulky and nearly finished manuscript, written in Vienna. He wrote several hundred pages of an extravaganza entitled, Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes, and then, having got his superabundant vitality reduced (it was likely to expend itself in these weird mental exploits), he settled down one day and wrote that really tender and beautiful idyl, Eve's Diary, which he had begun, or at least planned, the previous summer at Tyringham. In a letter to Mr. Frederick A. Duneka, general manager of Harper & Brothers, he tells something of the manner of the story; also his revised opinion of Adam's Diary, written in '93, and originally published as a souvenir of Niagara Falls. 

*****

To Frederick A. Duneka, in New York:

 DUBLIN, July 16, '05. 

DEAR MR. DUNEKA, --I wrote Eve's Diary, she using Adam's Diary as her(unwitting and unconscious) text, of course, since to use any other textwould have been an imbecility--then I took Adam's Diary and read it. It turned my stomach. It was not literature; yet it had been literatureonce--before I sold it to be degraded to an advertisement of the BuffaloFair. I was going to write and ask you to melt the plates and put it outof print. 

But this morning I examined it without temper, and saw that if Iabolished the advertisement it would be literature again. 

So I have done it. I have struck out 700 words and inserted 5 MS pagesof new matter (650 words), and now Adam's Diary is dam good--sixty timesas good as it ever was before. 

I believe it is as good as Eve's Diary now--no, it's not quite thatgood, I guess, but it is good enough to go in the same cover with Eve's. I'm sure of that. 

I hate to have the old Adam go out any more--don't put it on the pressesagain, let's put the new one in place of it; and next Xmas, let us bindAdam and Eve in one cover. They score points against each other--so, ifnot bound together, some of the points would not be perceived. .. .. 

P. S. Please send another Adam's Diary, so that I can make 2 revisedcopies. Eve's Diary is Eve's love-Story, but we will not name it that. 

 Yrs ever, MARK. 

 The peace-making at Portsmouth between Japan and Russia was not satisfactory to Mark Twain, who had fondly hoped there would be no peace until, as he said, "Russian liberty was safe. One more battle would have abolished the waiting chains of millions upon millions of unborn Russians and I wish it could have been fought. " He set down an expression of his feelings for the Associated Press, and it invited many letters. Charles Francis Adams wrote, "It attracted my attention because it so exactly expresses the views I have myself all along entertained. "

 Clemens was invited by Colonel George Harvey to dine with the Russian emissaries, Baron Rosen and Sergius Witte. He declined, but his telegram so pleased Witte that he asked permission to publish it, and announced that he would show it to the Czar. 

 Telegram. To Col. George Harvey, in New York:

TO COLONEL HARVEY, --I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be morethan glad of this opportunity to meet the illustrious magicians whocame here equipped with nothing but a pen, and with it have divided thehonors of the war with the sword. It is fair to presume that in thirtycenturies history will not get done admiring these men who attemptedwhat the world regarded as impossible and achieved it. 

 Witte would not have cared to show the Czar the telegram in its original form, which follows. 

 Telegram (unsent). To Col. George Harvey, in New York:

TO COLONEL HARVEY, --I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be morethan glad of this opportunity to meet those illustrious magicianswho with the pen have annulled, obliterated, and abolished every highachievement of the Japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a tremendouswar into a gay and blithesome comedy. If I may, let me in all respectand honor salute them as my fellow-humorists, I taking third place, asbecomes one who was not born to modesty, but by diligence and hard workis acquiring it. MARK. 

 Nor still another unsent form, perhaps more characteristic than either of the foregoing. 

 Telegram (unsent). To Col. George Harvey, in New York:

DEAR COLONEL, --No, this is a love-feast; when you call a lodge of sorrowsend for me. 

 MARK. 

*****

To Mrs. Crane, Quarry Farm:

 DUBLIN, Sept. 24, '05. 

Susy dear, I have had a lovely dream. Livy, dressed in black, wassitting up in my bed (here) at my right and looking as young and sweetas she used to do when she was in health. She said: "what is the name ofyour sweet sister?" I said, "Pamela. " "Oh, yes, that is it, I thought itwas--" (naming a name which has escaped me) "Won't you write it down forme?" I reached eagerly for a pen and pad--laid my hands upon both--thensaid to myself, "It is only a dream, " and turned back sorrowfully andthere she was, still. The conviction flamed through me that our lamenteddisaster was a dream, and this a reality. I said, "How blessed it is, how blessed it is, it was all a dream, only a dream!" She only smiledand did not ask what dream I meant, which surprised me. She leaned herhead against mine and I kept saying, "I was perfectly sure it was adream, I never would have believed it wasn't. "

I think she said several things, but if so they are gone from my memory. I woke and did not know I had been dreaming. She was gone. I wonderedhow she could go without my knowing it, but I did not spend any thoughtupon that, I was too busy thinking of how vivid and real was the dreamthat we had lost her and how unspeakably blessed it was to find that itwas not true and that she was still ours and with us. 

 S. L. C. 

 One day that summer Mark Twain received a letter from the actress, Minnie Maddern Fiske, asking him to write something that would aid her in her crusade against bull-fighting. The idea appealed to him; he replied at once. 

*****

To Mrs. Fiske:

DEAR MRS. FISKE, --I shall certainly write the story. But I may not getit to suit me, in which case it will go in the fire. Later I will tryagain--and yet again--and again. I am used to this. It has taken metwelve years to write a short story--the shortest one I ever wrote, Ithink. --[Probably "The Death Disk. "]--So do not be discouraged; I willstick to this one in the same way. Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. 

 He did not delay in his beginning, and a few weeks later was sending word to his publisher about it. 

*****

To Frederick A. Duneka, in New York:

 Oct. 2, '05. 

DEAR MR. DUNEKA, --I have just finished a short story which I "greatlyadmire, " and so will you--"A Horse's Tale"--about 15, 000 words, ata rough guess. It has good fun in it, and several characters, and islively. I shall finish revising it in a few days or more, then Jean willtype it. 

Don't you think you can get it into the Jan. And Feb. Numbers and issueit as a dollar booklet just after the middle of Jan. When you issue theFeb. Number?

It ought to be ably illustrated. 

Why not sell simultaneous rights, for this once, to the Ladies' HomeJournal or Collier's, or both, and recoup yourself?--for I would liketo get it to classes that can't afford Harper's. Although it doesn'tpreach, there's a sermon concealed in it. 

 Yr sincerely, MARK. 

 Five days later he added some rather interesting facts concerning the new story. 

*****

To F. A. Duneka, in New York:

 Oct. 7, 1906. ['05]

DEAR MR. DUNEKA, --. .. I've made a poor guess as to number of words. I think there must be 20, 000. My usual page of MS. Contains about 130words; but when I am deeply interested in my work and dead to everythingelse, my hand-writing shrinks and shrinks until there's a great dealmore than 130 on a page--oh, yes, a deal more. Well, I discover, thismorning, that this tale is written in that small hand. 

This strong interest is natural, for the heroine is my daughter, Susy, whom we lost. It was not intentional--it was a good while before I foundit out. 

So I am sending you her picture to use--and to reproduce withphotographic exactness the unsurpassable expression and all. May youfind an artist who has lost an idol!

Take as good care of the picture as you can and restore it to me when Icome. 

I hope you will illustrate this tale considerably. Not humorouspictures. No. When they are good (or bad) one's humor gets no chance toplay surprises on the reader. A humorous subject illustrated seriouslyis all right, but a humorous artist is no fit person for such work. Yousee, the humorous writer pretends to absolute seriousness (when heknows his trade) then for an artist--to step in and give his calculatedgravity all away with a funny picture--oh, my land! It gives me the drygripes just to think of it. It would be just about up to the averagecomic artist's intellectual level to make a funny picture of the horsekicking the lungs out of a trader. Hang it, the remark is funny--becausethe horse is not aware of it but the fact is not humorous, it is tragicand it is no subject for a humorous picture. 

Could I be allowed to sit in judgment upon the pictures before they areaccepted--at least those in which Cathy may figure?

This is not essential. It is but a suggestion, and it is herebywithdrawn, if it would be troublesome or cause delay. 

I hope you will reproduce the cat-pile, full page. And save the photofor me in as good condition as possible. When Susy and Clara were littletots those cats had their profoundest worship, and there is no duplicateof this picture. These cats all had thundering names, or inappropriateones--furnished by the children with my help. One was named BuffaloBill. 

Are you interested in coincidences?

After discovering, about the middle of the book, that Cathy was SusyClemens, I put her picture with my MS. , to be reproduced. After the bookwas finished it was discovered that Susy had a dim model of Soldier Boyin her arms; I had forgotten all about that toy. 

Then I examined the cat-picture and laid it with the MS. Forintroduction; but it was not until yesterday that I remembered that oneof the cats was named Buffalo Bill. 

 Sincerely yours, MARK. 

 The reference in this letter to shrinkage of his hand-writing with the increasing intensity of his interest, and the consequent addition of the number of words to the page, recalls another fact, noted by Mr. Duneka, viz. : that because of his terse Anglo-Saxon diction, Mark Twain could put more words on a magazine page than any other writer. It is hardly necessary to add that he got more force into what he put on the page for the same reason. 

 There was always a run of reporters at Mark Twain's New York home. His opinion was sought for on every matter of public interest, and whatever happened to him in particular was considered good for at least half a column of copy, with his name as a catch-line at the top. When it was learned that he was to spend the summer in New Hampshire, the reporters had all wanted to find out about it. Now that the summer was ending, they began to want to know how he had liked it, what work he had done and what were his plans for another year. As they frequently applied to his publishers for these details it was finally suggested to him that he write a letter furnishing the required information. His reply, handed to Mr. Duneka, who was visiting him at the moment, is full of interest. 

 Mem. For Mr. Duneka:

 DUBLIN, Oct. 9, 1905. 

. .. As to the other matters, here are the details. 

Yes, I have tried a number of summer homes, here and in Europe together. 

Each of these homes had charms of its own; charms and delights of itsown, and some of them--even in Europe had comforts. Several of them hadconveniences, too. They all had a "view. "

It is my conviction that there should always be some water in a view--alake or a river, but not the ocean, if you are down on its level. Ithink that when you are down on its level it seldom inflames you with anecstasy which you could not get out of a sand-flat. It is like being onboard ship, over again; indeed it is worse than that, for there's threemonths of it. On board ship one tires of the aspects in a couple ofdays, and quits looking. The same vast circle of heaving humps is spreadaround you all the time, with you in the centre of it and never gainingan inch on the horizon, so far as you can see; for variety, a flightof flying-fish, mornings; a flock of porpoises throwing summersaultsafternoons; a remote whale spouting, Sundays; occasional phosphorescenteffects, nights; every other day a streak of black smoke trailing alongunder the horizon; on the one single red letter day, the illustriousiceberg. I have seen that iceberg thirty-four times in thirty-sevenvoyages; it is always the same shape, it is always the same size, italways throws up the same old flash when the sun strikes it; you may setit on any New York door-step of a June morning and light it up with amirror-flash; and I will engage to recognize it. It is artificial, andit is provided and anchored out by the steamer companies. I used to likethe sea, but I was young then, and could easily get excited over anykind of monotony, and keep it up till the monotonies ran out, if it wasa fortnight. 

Last January, when we were beginning to inquire about a home for thissummer, I remembered that Abbott Thayer had said, three years before, that the New Hampshire highlands was a good place. He was right--it wasa good place. Any place that is good for an artist in paint is goodfor an artist in morals and ink. Brush is here, too; so is Col. T. W. Higginson; so is Raphael Pumpelly; so is Mr. Secretary Hitchcock; so isHenderson; so is Learned; so is Summer; so is Franklin MacVeigh; so isJoseph L. Smith; so is Henry Copley Greene, when I am not occupyinghis house, which I am doing this season. Paint, literature, science, statesmanship, history, professorship, law, morals, --these are allrepresented here, yet crime is substantially unknown. 

The summer homes of these refugees are sprinkled, a mile apart, amongthe forest-clad hills, with access to each other by firm smooth countryroads which are so embowered in dense foliage that it is always twilightin there, and comfortable. The forests are spider-webbed with these goodroads, they go everywhere; but for the help of the guide-boards, thestranger would not arrive anywhere. 

The village--Dublin--is bunched together in its own place, but a goodtelephone service makes its markets handy to all those outliars. Ihave spelt it that way to be witty. The village executes orders on, theBoston plan--promptness and courtesy. 

The summer homes are high-perched, as a rule, and have contentingoutlooks. The house we occupy has one. Monadnock, a soaring double hump, rises into the sky at its left elbow--that is to say, it is close athand. From the base of the long slant of the mountain the valley spreadsaway to the circling frame of the hills, and beyond the frame thebillowy sweep of remote great ranges rises to view and flows, fold uponfold, wave upon wave, soft and blue and unwordly, to the horizon fiftymiles away. In these October days Monadnock and the valley and itsframing hills make an inspiring picture to look at, for they aresumptuously splashed and mottled and be-torched from sky-line tosky-line with the richest dyes the autumn can furnish; and when they lieflaming in the full drench of the mid-afternoon sun, the sight affectsthe spectator physically, it stirs his blood like military music. 

These summer homes are commodious, well built, and well furnished--factswhich sufficiently indicate that the owners built them to live inthemselves. They have furnaces and wood fireplaces, and the rest ofthe comforts and conveniences of a city home, and can be comfortablyoccupied all the year round. 

We cannot have this house next season, but I have secured Mrs. Upton'shouse which is over in the law and science quarter, two or three milesfrom here, and about the same distance from the art, literary, andscholastic groups. The science and law quarter has needed improving, this good while. 

The nearest railway-station is distant something like an hour's drive;it is three hours from there to Boston, over a branch line. You can goto New York in six hours per branch lines if you change cars every timeyou think of it, but it is better to go to Boston and stop over and takethe trunk line next day, then you do not get lost. 

It is claimed that the atmosphere of the New Hampshire highlands isexceptionally bracing and stimulating, and a fine aid to hard andcontinuous work. It is a just claim, I think. I came in May, and wrought35 successive days without a break. It is possible that I could not havedone it elsewhere. I do not know; I have not had any disposition to tryit, before. I think I got the disposition out of the atmosphere, thistime. I feel quite sure, in fact, that that is where it came from. 

I am ashamed to confess what an intolerable pile of manuscript I groundout in the 35 days, therefore I will keep the number of words to myself. I wrote the first half of a long tale--"The Adventures of a Microbe"and put it away for a finish next summer, and started another longtale--"The Mysterious Stranger;" I wrote the first half of it and putit with the other for a finish next summer. I stopped, then. I was nottired, but I had no books on hand that needed finishing this year exceptone that was seven years old. After a little I took that one up andfinished it. Not for publication, but to have it ready for revision nextsummer. 

Since I stopped work I have had a two months' holiday. The summer hasbeen my working time for 35 years; to have a holiday in it (in America)is new for me. I have not broken it, except to write "Eve's Diary" and"A Horse's Tale"--short things occupying the mill 12 days. 

This year our summer is 6 months long and ends with November and theflight home to New York, but next year we hope and expect to stretch itanother month and end it the first of December. 

 [No signature. ]

 The fact that he was a persistent smoker was widely known, and many friends and admirers of Mark Twain sent him cigars, most of which he could not use, because they were too good. He did not care for Havana cigars, but smoked the fragrant, inexpensive domestic tobacco with plenty of "pep" in it, as we say today. Now and then he had an opportunity to head off some liberal friend, who wrote asking permission to contribute to his cigar collection, as instance the following. 

*****

To Rev. L. M. Powers, in Haverhill, Mass. :

 Nov. 9, 1905. 

DEAR MR. POWERS, --I should accept your hospitable offer at once but forthe fact I couldn't do it and remain honest. That is to say if I allowedyou to send me what you believe to be good cigars it would distinctlymean that I meant to smoke them, whereas I should do nothing of thekind. I know a good cigar better than you do, for I have had 60 yearsexperience. 

No, that is not what I mean; I mean I know a bad cigar better thananybody else; I judge by the price only; if it costs above 5 cents Iknow it to be either foreign or half-foreign, and unsmokeable. By me Ihave many boxes of Havana cigars, of all prices from 20 cts apiece up to1. 66 apiece; I bought none of them, they were all presents, they are anaccumulation of several years. I have never smoked one of them and nevershall, I work them off on the visitor. You shall have a chance when youcome. 

Pessimists are born not made; optimists are born not made; but no manis born either pessimist wholly or optimist wholly, perhaps; he ispessimistic along certain lines and optimistic along certain others. That is my case. 

 Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. 

 In spite of all the fine photographs that were made of him, there recurred constantly among those sent him to be autographed a print of one which, years before, Sarony had made and placed on public sale. It was a good photograph, mechanically and even artistically, but it did not please Mark Twain. Whenever he saw it he recalled Sarony with bitterness and severity. Once he received an inquiry concerning it, and thus feelingly expressed himself. 

*****

To Mr. Row (no address):

 21 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, November 14, 1905. 

DEAR MR. ROW, --That alleged portrait has a private history. Sarony wasas much of an enthusiast about wild animals as he was about photography;and when Du Chaillu brought the first Gorilla to this country in 1819he came to me in a fever of excitement and asked me if my father was ofrecord and authentic. I said he was; then Sarony, without any abatementof his excitement asked if my grandfather also was of record andauthentic. I said he was. Then Sarony, with still rising excitementand with joy added to it, said he had found my great grandfather in theperson of the gorilla, and had recognized him at once by his resemblanceto me. I was deeply hurt but did not reveal this, because I knew Saxonymeant no offense for the gorilla had not done him any harm, and he wasnot a man who would say an unkind thing about a gorilla wantonly. I wentwith him to inspect the ancestor, and examined him from several pointsof view, without being able to detect anything more than a passingresemblance. "Wait, " said Sarony with confidence, "let me show you. "He borrowed my overcoat--and put it on the gorilla. The result wassurprising. I saw that the gorilla while not looking distinctly like mewas exactly what my great grand father would have looked like if I hadhad one. Sarong photographed the creature in that overcoat, and spreadthe picture about the world. It has remained spread about the world eversince. It turns up every week in some newspaper somewhere or other. Itis not my favorite, but to my exasperation it is everybody else's. Doyou think you could get it suppressed for me? I will pay the limit. 

 Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. 

 The year 1905 closed triumphantly for Mark Twain. The great "Seventieth Birthday" dinner planned by Colonel George Harvey is remembered to-day as the most notable festival occasion in New York literary history. Other dinners and ovations followed. At seventy he had returned to the world, more beloved, more honored than ever before. 

XLV. LETTERS, 1906, TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE FAREWELL LECTURE. A SECONDSUMMER IN DUBLIN. BILLIARDS AND COPYRIGHT. 

 MARK TWAIN at "Pier Seventy, " as he called it, paused to look backward and to record some memoirs of his long, eventful past. The Autobiography dictations begun in Florence were resumed, and daily he traveled back, recalling long-ago scenes and all-but-forgotten places. He was not without reminders. Now and again there came some message that brought back the old days--the Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn days--or the romance of the river that he never recalled other than with tenderness and a tone of regret that it was gone. An invitation to the golden wedding of two ancient friends moved and saddened him, and his answer to it conveys about all the story of life. 

*****

To Mr. And Mrs. Gordon:

 21 FIFTH AVENUE, Jan. 24, '06. 

DEAR GORDONS, --I have just received your golden-wedding "At Home" andam trying to adjust my focus to it and realize how much it means. It isinconceivable! With a simple sweep it carries me back over a stretch oftime measurable only in astronomical terms and geological periods. Itbrings before me Mrs. Gordon, young, round-limbed, handsome; andwith her the Youngbloods and their two babies, and Laura Wright, thatunspoiled little maid, that fresh flower of the woods and the prairies. Forty-eight years ago!

Life was a fairy-tale, then, it is a tragedy now. When I was 43 and JohnHay 41 he said life was a tragedy after 40, and I disputed it. Threeyears ago he asked me to testify again: I counted my graves, and therewas nothing for me to say. 

I am old; I recognize it but I don't realize it. I wonder if a personever really ceases to feel young--I mean, for a whole day at a time. Mylove to you both, and to all of us that are left. 

 MARK. 

 Though he used very little liquor of any kind, it was Mark Twain's custom to keep a bottle of Scotch whiskey with his collection of pipes and cigars and tobacco on a little table by his bed-side. During restless nights he found a small quantity of it conducive to sleep. Andrew Carnegie, learning of this custom, made it his business to supply Scotch of his own special importation. The first case came, direct from Scotland. When it arrived Clemens sent this characteristic acknowledgment. 

*****

To Andrew Carnegie, in Scotland:

 21 FIFTH AVE. Feb. 10, '06. 

DEAR ST. ANDREW, --The whisky arrived in due course from over the water;last week one bottle of it was extracted from the wood and inserted intome, on the instalment plan, with this result: that I believe it to bethe best, smoothest whisky now on the planet. Thanks, oh, thanks: I havediscarded Peruna. 

Hoping that you three are well and happy and will be coming back beforethe winter sets in. 

 I am, Sincerely yours, MARK. 

 It must have been a small bottle to be consumed by him in a week, or perhaps he had able assistance. The next brief line refers to the manuscript of his article, "Saint Joan of Arc, " presented to the museum at Rouen. 

*****

To Edward E. Clarke:

 21 FIFTH AVE. , Feb. , 1906. 

DEAR SIR, --I have found the original manuscript and with great pleasureI transmit it herewith, also a printed copy. 

It is a matter of great pride to me to have any word of mine concerningthe world's supremest heroine honored by a place in that Museum. 

 Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. 

 The series of letters which follows was prepared by Mark Twain and General Fred Grant, mainly with a view of advertising the lecture that Clemens had agreed to deliver for the benefit of the Robert Fulton Monument Association. It was, in fact, to be Mark Twain's "farewell lecture, " and the association had really proposed to pay him a thousand dollars for it. The exchange of these letters, however, was never made outside of Mark Twain's bed-room. Propped against the pillows, pen in hand, with General Grant beside him, they arranged the series with the idea of publication. Later the plan was discarded, so that this pleasant foolery appears here for the first, time. 

 PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL

 (Correspondence)

 Telegram

 Army Headquarters (date)MARK TWAIN, New York, --Would you consider a proposal to talk at CarnegieHall for the benefit of the Robert Fulton Monument Association, of whichyou are a Vice President, for a fee of a thousand dollars?

 F. D. GRANT, President, Fulton Monument Association. 

 Telegraphic Answer:

MAJOR-GENERAL F. D. GRANT, Army Headquarters, --I shall be glad to do it, but I must stipulate that you keep the thousand dollars and add it tothe Monument fund as my contribution. 

 CLEMENS. 

Letters:

DEAR MR. CLEMENS, --You have the thanks of the Association, and theterms shall be as you say. But why give all of it? Why not reserve aportion--why should you do this work wholly without compensation?

 Truly yours FRED. D. GRANT. 

MAJOR GENERAL GRANT, Army Headquarters. 

DEAR GENERAL, --Because I stopped talking for pay a good many years ago, and I could not resume the habit now without a great deal of personaldiscomfort. I love to hear myself talk, because I get so muchinstruction and moral upheaval out of it, but I lose the bulk of thisjoy when I charge for it. Let the terms stand. 

General, if I have your approval, I wish to use this good occasion toretire permanently from the platform. 

 Truly yours S. L. CLEMENS. 

DEAR MR. CLEMENS, --Certainly. But as an old friend, permit me to say, Don't do that. Why should you?--you are not old yet. 

 Yours truly, FRED D. GRANT. 

DEAR GENERAL, --I mean the pay-platform; I shan't retire from thegratis-platform until after I am dead and courtesy requires me to keepstill and not disturb the others. 

What shall I talk about? My idea is this: to instruct the audience aboutRobert Fulton, and. .. . Tell me--was that his real name, or was it hisnom de plume? However, never mind, it is not important--I can skip it, and the house will think I knew all about it, but forgot. Could you findout for me if he was one of the Signers of the Declaration, and whichone? But if it is any trouble, let it alone, I can skip it. Was he outwith Paul Jones? Will you ask Horace Porter? And ask him if he broughtboth of them home. These will be very interesting facts, if they can beestablished. But never mind, don't trouble Porter, I can establish themanyway. The way I look at it, they are historical gems--gems of the veryfirst water. 

Well, that is my idea, as I have said: first, excite the audience witha spoonful of information about Fulton, then quiet down with a barrelof illustration drawn by memory from my books--and if you don't sayanything the house will think they never heard of it before, becausepeople don't really read your books, they only say they do, to keepyou from feeling bad. Next, excite the house with another spoonfulof Fultonian fact, then tranquilize them again with another barrel ofillustration. And so on and so on, all through the evening; and if youare discreet and don't tell them the illustrations don't illustrateanything, they won't notice it and I will send them home aswell-informed about Robert Fulton as I am myself. Don't be afraid; Iknow all about audiences, they believe everything you say, except whenyou are telling the truth. 

 Truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS. 

P. S. Mark all the advertisements "Private and Confidential, " otherwisethe people will not read them. 

 M. T. 

DEAR MR. CLEMENS, --How long shall you talk? I ask in order that we maybe able to say when carriages may be called. 

 Very Truly yours, HUGH GORDON MILLER, Secretary. 

DEAR MR. MILLER, --I cannot say for sure. It is my custom to keep ontalking till I get the audience cowed. Sometimes it takes an hour andfifteen minutes, sometimes I can do it in an hour. 

 Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. 

Mem. My charge is 2 boxes free. Not the choicest--sell the choicest, andgive me any 6-seat boxes you please. 

 S. L. C. 

I want Fred Grant (in uniform) on the stage; also the rest of theofficials of the Association; also other distinguished people--all theattractions we can get. Also, a seat for Mr. Albert Bigelow Paine, whomay be useful to me if he is near me and on the front. 

 S. L. C. 

 The seat chosen for the writer of these notes was to be at the front of the stage in order that the lecturer might lean over now and then and pretend to be asking information concerning Fulton. I was not entirely happy in the thought of this showy honor, and breathed more freely when this plan was abandoned and the part assigned to General Grant. 

 The lecture was given in Carnegie Hall, which had been gayly decorated for the occasion. The house was more than filled, and a great sum of money was realized for the fund. 

 It was that spring that Gorky and Tchaikowski, the Russian revolutionists, came to America hoping to arouse interest in their cause. The idea of the overthrow of the Russian dynasty was pleasant to Mark Twain. Few things would have given him greater comfort than to have known that a little more than ten years would see the downfall of Russian imperialism. The letter which follows was a reply to an invitation from Tchaikowski, urging him to speak at one of the meetings. 

DEAR MR. TCHAIKOWSKI, --I thank you for the honor of the invitation, but I am not able to accept it, because on Thursday evening I shall bepresiding at a meeting whose object is to find remunerative work forcertain classes of our blind who would gladly support themselves if theyhad the opportunity. 

My sympathies are with the Russian revolution, of course. It goeswithout saying. I hope it will succeed, and now that I have talked withyou I take heart to believe it will. Government by falsified promises;by lies, by treacheries, and by the butcher-knife for the aggrandizementof a single family of drones and its idle and vicious kin has been bornequite long enough in Russia, I should think, and it is to be hoped thatthe roused nation, now rising in its strength, will presently put anend to it and set up the republic in its place. Some of us, even of thewhite headed, may live to see the blessed day when Czars and Grand Dukeswill be as scarce there as I trust they are in heaven. 

 Most sincerely yours, MARK TWAIN. 

 There came another summer at Dublin, New Hampshire, this time in the fine Upton residence on the other slope of Monadnock, a place of equally beautiful surroundings, and an even more extended view. Clemens was at this time working steadily on his so-called Autobiography, which was not that, in fact, but a series of remarkable chapters, reminiscent, reflective, commentative, written without any particular sequence as to time or subject-matter. He dictated these chapters to a stenographer, usually in the open air, sitting in a comfortable rocker or pacing up and down the long veranda that faced a vast expanse of wooded slope and lake and distant blue mountains. It became one of the happiest occupations of his later years. 

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Maine:

 DUBLIN, Sunday, June 17, '06. 

DEAR HOWELLS, --. .. .. The dictating goes lazily and pleasantly on. Withintervals. I find that I have been at it, off and on, nearly two hours aday for 155 days, since Jan. 9. To be exact I've dictated 75 hours in 80days and loafed 75 days. I've added 60, 000 words in the month that I'vebeen here; which indicates that I've dictated during 20 days of thattime--40 hours, at an average of 1, 500 words an hour. It's a plenty, andI am satisfied. 

There's a good deal of "fat" I've dictated, (from Jan. 9) 210, 000 words, and the "fat" adds about 50, 000 more. 

The "fat" is old pigeon-holed things, of the years gone by, which I oreditors didn't das't to print. For instance, I am dumping in the littleold book which I read to you in Hartford about 30 years ago and whichyou said "publish--and ask Dean Stanley to furnish an introduction;he'll do it. " ("Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. ") It reads quiteto suit me, without altering a word, now that it isn't to see printuntil I am dead. 

To-morrow I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs andassigns burnt alive if they venture to print it this side of 2006A. D. --which I judge they won't. There'll be lots of such chapters if Ilive 3 or 4 years longer. The edition of A. D. 2006 will make a stir whenit comes out. I shall be hovering around taking notice, along with otherdead pals. You are invited. 

 MARK. 

 His tendency to estimate the measure of the work he was doing, and had completed, must have clung to him from his old printer days. 

 The chapter which was to get his heirs and assigns burned alive was on the orthodox God, and there was more than one such chapter. In the next letter he refers to two exquisite poems by Howells, and the writer of these notes recalls his wonderful reading of them aloud. 'In Our Town' was a collection of short stories then recently issued by William Allen White. Howells had recommended them. 

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Maine:

 21 FIFTH AVE. , Tuesday Eve. 

DEAR HOWELLS, --It is lovely of you to say those beautiful things--Idon't know how to thank you enough. But I love you, that I know. 

I read "After the Wedding" aloud and we felt all the pain of it andthe truth. It was very moving and very beautiful--would have beenover-comingly moving, at times, but for the haltings and pausescompelled by the difficulties of MS--these were a protection, in thatthey furnished me time to brace up my voice, and get a new start. Jeanwanted to keep the MS for another reading-aloud, and for "keeps, " too, Isuspected, but I said it would be safest to write you about it. 

I like "In Our Town, " particularly that Colonel, of the Lookout MountainOration, and very particularly pages 212-16. I wrote and told White so. 

After "After the Wedding" I read "The Mother" aloud and sounded itshuman deeps with your deep-sea lead. I had not read it before, since itwas first published. 

I have been dictating some fearful things, for 4 successivemornings--for no eye but yours to see until I have been dead acentury--if then. But I got them out of my system, where they had beenfestering for years--and that was the main thing. I feel better, now. 

I came down today on business--from house to house in 12 1/2 hours, andexpected to arrive dead, but am neither tired nor sleepy. 

 Yours as always MARK. 

*****

To William Allen White, in Emporia, Kans. :

 DUBLIN, NEW HAMPSHIRE, June 24, 1906. 

DEAR MR. WHITE, --Howells told me that "In Our Town" was a charming book, and indeed it is. All of it is delightful when read one's self, partsof it can score finely when subjected to the most exacting of tests--thereading aloud. Pages 197 and 216 are of that grade. I have tried thema couple of times on the family, and pages 212 and 216 are qualifiedto fetch any house of any country, caste or color, endowed with thoseriches which are denied to no nation on the planet--humor and feeling. 

Talk again--the country is listening. 

 Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. 

 Witter Bynner, the poet, was one of the editors of McClure's Magazine at this time, but was trying to muster the courage to give up routine work for verse-making and the possibility of poverty. Clemens was fond of Bynner and believed in his work. He did not advise him, however, to break away entirely from a salaried position--at least not immediately; but one day Bynner did so, and reported the step he had taken, with some doubt as to the answer he would receive. 

*****

To Witter Bynner, in New York:

 DUBLIN, Oct. 5, 1906. 

DEAR POET, --You have certainly done right for several good reasons; atleast, of them, I can name two:

1. With your reputation you can have your freedom and yet earn yourliving. 2. If you fall short of succeeding to your wish, your reputationwill provide you another job. And so in high approval I suppress thescolding and give you the saintly and fatherly pat instead. 

 MARK TWAIN. 

 On another occasion, when Bynner had written a poem to Clara Clemens, her father pretended great indignation that the first poem written by Bynner to any one in his household should not be to him, and threatened revenge. At dinner shortly after he produced from his pocket a slip of paper on which he had set down what he said was "his only poem. " He read the lines that follow:

 "Of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: It might have been. Ah, say not so! as life grows longer, leaner, thinner, We recognize, O God, it might have Bynner!"

 He returned to New York in October and soon after was presented by Mrs. H. H. Rogers with a handsome billiard-table. 

 He had a passion for the game, but had played comparatively little since the old Hartford days of fifteen years before, when a group of his friends used to assemble on Friday nights in the room at the top of the house for long, strenuous games and much hilarity. Now the old fever all came back; the fascinations of the game superseded even his interest in the daily dictations. 

*****

To Mrs. H. H. Rogers, in New York:

 21 FIFTH AVENUE, Monday, Nov. , 1906. 

DEAR MRS. ROGERS, --The billiard table is better than the doctors. It isdriving out the heartburn in a most promising way. I have a billiardiston the premises, and I walk not less than ten miles every day with thecue in my hand. And the walking is not the whole of the exercise, northe most health-giving part of it, I think. Through the multitude of thepositions and attitudes it brings into play every muscle in the body andexercises them all. 

The games begin right after luncheon, daily, and continue untilmidnight, with 2 hours' intermission for dinner and music. And so it is9 hours' exercise per day, and 10 or 12 on Sunday. Yesterday and lastnight it was 12--and I slept until 8 this morning without waking. The billiard table, as a Sabbath breaker can beat any coal-breaker inPennsylvania, and give it 30 in, the game. If Mr. Rogers will take todaily billiards he can do without doctors and the massageur, I think. 

We are really going to build a house on my farm, an hour and a half fromNew York. It is decided. It is to be built by contract, and is to comewithin $25, 000. 

 With love and many thanks. S. L. C. 

P. S. Clara is in the sanitarium--till January 28 when her westernconcert tour will begin. She is getting to be a mighty competent singer. You must know Clara better; she is one of the very finest and completestand most satisfactory characters I have ever met. Others knew it before, but I have always been busy with other matters. 

 The "billiardist on the premises" was the writer of these notes, who, earlier in the year, had become his biographer, and, in the course of time, his daily companion and friend. The farm mentioned was one which he had bought at Redding, Connecticut, where, later, he built the house known as "Stormfield. "

 Henry Mills Alden, for nearly forty years editor of Harper's Magazine, arrived at his seventieth birthday on November 11th that year, and Harper & Brothers had arranged to give him a great dinner in the offices of Franklin Square, where, for half a century, he had been an active force. Mark Twain, threatened with a cold, and knowing the dinner would be strenuous, did not feel able to attend, so wrote a letter which, if found suitable, could be read at the gathering. 

*****

To Mr. Henry Alden:

ALDEN, --dear and ancient friend--it is a solemn moment. You have nowreached the age of discretion. You have been a long time arriving. Manyyears ago you docked me on an article because the subject was too old;later, you docked me on an article because the subject was too new;later still, you docked me on an article because the subject was betwixtand between. Once, when I wrote a Letter to Queen Victoria, you did notput it in the respectable part of the Magazine, but interred it in thatpotter's field, the Editor's Drawer. As a result, she never answered it. How often we recall, with regret, that Napoleon once shot at a magazineeditor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember, withcharity, that his intentions were good. 

You will reform, now, Alden. You will cease from these economies, andyou will be discharged. But in your retirement you will carry with youthe admiration and earnest good wishes of the oppressed and toilingscribes. This will be better than bread. Let this console you when thebread fails. 

You will carry with you another thing, too--the affection of thescribes; for they all love you in spite of your crimes. For you bear akind heart in your breast, and the sweet and winning spirit that charmsaway all hostilities and animosities, and makes of your enemy yourfriend and keeps him so. You have reigned over us thirty-six years, and, please God, you shall reign another thirty-six--"and peace to Mahmoud onhis golden throne!"

 Always yours MARK

 A copyright bill was coming up in Washington and a delegation of authors went down to work for it. Clemens was not the head of the delegation, but he was the most prominent member of it, as well as the most useful. He invited the writer to accompany him, and elsewhere I have told in detail the story of that excursion, --[See Mark Twain; A Biography, chap. Ccli, ]--which need be but briefly touched upon here. 

 His work was mainly done aside from that of the delegation. They had him scheduled for a speech, however, which he made without notes and with scarcely any preparation. Meantime he had applied to Speaker Cannon for permission to allow him on the floor of the House, where he could buttonhole the Congressmen. He was not eligible to the floor without having received the thanks of Congress, hence the following letter:

*****

To Hon. Joseph Cannon, House of Representatives:

 Dec. 7, 1906. 

DEAR UNCLE JOSEPH, --Please get me the thanks of the Congress--not nextweek but right away. It is very necessary. Do accomplish this foryour affectionate old friend right away; by persuasion, if you can, byviolence if you must, for it is imperatively necessary that I get onthe floor for two or three hours and talk to the members, man by man, in behalf of the support, encouragement and protection of one of thenation's most valuable assets and industries--its literature. I havearguments with me, also a barrel, with liquid in it. 

Give me a chance. Get me the thanks of Congress. Don't wait forothers; there isn't time. I have stayed away and let Congress alonefor seventy-one years and I am entitled to thanks. Congress knows itperfectly well and I have long felt hurt that this quite proper andearned expression of gratitude has been merely felt by the House andnever publicly uttered. Send me an order on the Sergeant-at-Arms quick. When shall I come? With love and a benediction. 

 MARK TWAIN. 

 This was mainly a joke. Mark Twain did not expect any "thanks, " but he did hope for access to the floor, which once, in an earlier day, had been accorded him. We drove to the Capitol and he delivered his letter to "Uncle Joe" by hand. "Uncle Joe" could not give him the privilege of the floor; the rules had become more stringent. He declared they would hang him if he did such a thing. He added that he had a private room down-stairs, where Mark Twain might establish headquarters, and that he would assign his colored servant, Neal, of long acquaintanceship with many of the members, to pass the word that Mark Twain was receiving. 

 The result was a great success. All that afternoon members of Congress poured into the Speaker's room and, in an atmosphere blue with tobacco smoke, Mark Twain talked the gospel of copyright to his heart's content. 

 The bill did not come up for passage that session, but Mark Twain lived to see his afternoon's lobbying bring a return. In 1909, Champ Clark, and those others who had gathered around him that afternoon, passed a measure that added fourteen years to the copyright term. 

 The next letter refers to a proposed lobby of quite a different sort. 

*****

To Helen Keller, in Wrentham, Mass. :

 21 FIFTH AVENUE, Dec. 23, '06. 

DEAR HELEN KELLER, --. .. You say, "As a reformer, you know that ideasmust be driven home again and again. "

Yes, I know it; and by old experience I know that speeches and documentsand public meetings are a pretty poor and lame way of accomplishing it. Last year I proposed a sane way--one which I had practiced with successfor a quarter of a century--but I wasn't expecting it to get anyattention, and it didn't. 

Give me a battalion of 200 winsome young girls and matrons, and let metell them what to do and how to do it, and I will be responsible forshining results. If I could mass them on the stage in front of theaudience and instruct them there, I could make a public meeting takehold of itself and do something really valuable for once. Not thatthe real instruction would be done there, for it wouldn't; it would bepreviously done privately, and merely repeated there. 

But it isn't going to happen--the good old way will be stuck to:there'll be a public meeting: with music, and prayer, and a wearyingreport, and a verbal description of the marvels the blind can do, and17 speeches--then the call upon all present who are still alive, tocontribute. This hoary program was invented in the idiot asylum, andwill never be changed. Its function is to breed hostility to goodcauses. 

Some day somebody will recruit my 200--my dear beguilesome Knights ofthe Golden Fleece--and you will see them make good their ominous name. 

Mind, we must meet! not in the grim and ghastly air of the platform, mayhap, but by the friendly fire--here at 21. 

 Affectionately your friend, S. L. CLEMENS. 

 They did meet somewhat later that winter in the friendly parlors of No. 21, and friends gathered in to meet the marvelous blind girl and to pay tribute to Miss Sullivan (Mrs. Macy) for her almost incredible achievement.