November 30th that year was Mark Twain's fiftieth birthday, an event

noticed by the newspapers generally, and especially observed by many

of his friends. Warner, Stockton and many others sent letters;

Andrew Lang contributed a fine poem; also Oliver Wendell. Holmes

--the latter by special request of Miss Gilder--for the Critic.

These attentions came as a sort of crowning happiness at the end of

a golden year. At no time in his life were Mark Twain's fortunes

and prospects brighter; he had a beautiful family and a perfect

home. Also, he had great prosperity. The reading-tour with Cable

had been a fine success. His latest book, The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn, had added largely to his fame and income.

The publication of the Grant Memoirs had been a dazzling triumph.

Mark Twain had become recognized, not only as America's most

distinguished author, but as its most envied publisher. And now,

with his fiftieth birthday, had come this laurel from Holmes, last

of the Brahmins, to add a touch of glory to all the rest. We feel

his exaltation in his note of acknowledgment.

To Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Boston:

DEAR MR. HOLMES,--I shall never be able to tell you the half of how proud

you have made me. If I could you would say you were nearly paid for the

trouble you took. And then the family: If I can convey the electrical

surprise and gratitude and exaltation of the wife and the children last

night, when they happened upon that Critic where I had, with artful

artlessness, spread it open and retired out of view to see what would

happen--well, it was great and fine and beautiful to see, and made me

feel as the victor feels when the shouting hosts march by; and if you

also could have seen it you would have said the account was squared. For

I have brought them up in your company, as in the company of a warm and

friendly and beneficent but far-distant sun; and so, for you to do this

thing was for the sun to send down out of the skies the miracle of a

special ray and transfigure me before their faces. I knew what that poem

would be to them; I knew it would raise me up to remote and shining

heights in their eyes, to very fellowship with the chambered Nautilus

itself, and that from that fellowship they could never more dissociate me

while they should live; and so I made sure to be by when the surprise

should come.

Charles Dudley Warner is charmed with the poem for its own felicitous

sake; and so indeed am I, but more because it has drawn the sting of my

fiftieth year; taken away the pain of it, the grief of it, the somehow

shame of it, and made me glad and proud it happened.

With reverence and affection,

Sincerely yours,

S. L. CLEMENS.

Holmes wrote with his own hand: "Did Miss Gilder tell you I had

twenty-three letters spread out for answer when her suggestion came

about your anniversary? I stopped my correspondence and made my

letters wait until the lines were done."

MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS 1886-1900

ARRANGED WITH COMMENT BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE

VOLUME IV.

XXVI

LETTERS, 1886-87. JANE CLEMENS'S ROMANCE. UNMAILED LETTERS, ETC.

When Clemens had been platforming with Cable and returned to

Hartford for his Christmas vacation, the Warner and Clemens families

had joined in preparing for him a surprise performance of The Prince

and the Pauper. The Clemens household was always given to

theatricals, and it was about this time that scenery and a stage

were prepared--mainly by the sculptor Gerhardt--for these home

performances, after which productions of The Prince and the Pauper

were given with considerable regularity to audiences consisting of

parents and invited friends. The subject is a fascinating one, but

it has been dwelt upon elsewhere.--[In Mark Twain: A Biography,

chaps. cliii and clx.]--We get a glimpse of one of these occasions

as well as of Mark Twain's financial progress in the next brief

note.

To W. D. Howells; in Boston:

Jan. 3, '86.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--The date set for the Prince and Pauper play is ten

days hence--Jan. 13. I hope you and Pilla can take a train that arrives

here during the day; the one that leaves Boston toward the end of the

afternoon would be a trifle late; the performance would have already

begun when you reached the house.

I'm out of the woods. On the last day of the year I had paid out

$182,000 on the Grant book and it was totally free from debt.

Yrs ever

MARK.

Mark Twain's mother was a woman of sturdy character and with a keen

sense of humor and tender sympathies. Her husband, John Marshall

Clemens, had been a man of high moral character, honored by all who

knew him, respected and apparently loved by his wife. No one would

ever have supposed that during all her years of marriage, and almost

to her death, she carried a secret romance that would only be told

at last in the weary disappointment of old age. It is a curious

story, and it came to light in this curious way:

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, May 19, '86.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--..... Here's a secret. A most curious and pathetic

romance, which has just come to light. Read these things, but don't

mention them. Last fall, my old mother--then 82--took a notion to attend

a convention of old settlers of the Mississippi Valley in an Iowa town.

My brother's wife was astonished; and represented to her the hardships

and fatigues of such a trip, and said my mother might possibly not even

survive them; and said there could be no possible interest for her in

such a meeting and such a crowd. But my mother insisted, and persisted;

and finally gained her point. They started; and all the way my mother

was young again with excitement, interest, eagerness, anticipation. They

reached the town and the hotel. My mother strode with the same eagerness

in her eye and her step, to the counter, and said:

"Is Dr. Barrett of St. Louis, here?"

"No. He was here, but he returned to St. Louis this morning."

"Will he come again?"

"No."

My mother turned away, the fire all gone from her, and said, "Let us go

home."

They went straight back to Keokuk. My mother sat silent and thinking for

many days--a thing which had never happened before. Then one day she

said:

"I will tell you a secret. When I was eighteen, a young medical student

named Barrett lived in Columbia (Ky.) eighteen miles away; and he used to

ride over to see me. This continued for some time. I loved him with my

whole heart, and I knew that he felt the same toward me, though no words

had been spoken. He was too bashful to speak--he could not do it.

Everybody supposed we were engaged--took it for granted we were--but we

were not. By and by there was to be a party in a neighboring town, and

he wrote my uncle telling him his feelings, and asking him to drive me

over in his buggy and let him (Barrett) drive me back, so that he might

have that opportunity to propose. My uncle should have done as he was

asked, without explaining anything to me; but instead, he read me the

letter; and then, of course, I could not go--and did not. He (Barrett)

left the country presently, and I, to stop the clacking tongues, and to

show him that I did not care, married, in a pet. In all these sixty-four

years I have not seen him since. I saw in a paper that he was going to

attend that Old Settlers' Convention. Only three hours before we reached

that hotel, he had been standing there!"

Since then, her memory is wholly faded out and gone; and now she writes

letters to the school-mates who had been dead forty years, and wonders

why they neglect her and do not answer.

Think of her carrying that pathetic burden in her old heart sixty-four

years, and no human being ever suspecting it!

Yrs ever,

MARK.

We do not get the idea from this letter that those two long ago

sweethearts quarreled, but Mark Twain once spoke of their having done so,

and there may have been a disagreement, assuming that there was a

subsequent meeting. It does not matter, now. In speaking of it, Mark

Twain once said: "It is as pathetic a romance as any that has crossed the

field of my personal experience in a long lifetime."--[When Mark Twain:

A Biography was written this letter had not come to light, and the matter

was stated there in accordance with Mark Twain's latest memory of it.]

Howells wrote: "After all, how poor and hackneyed all the inventions are

compared with the simple and stately facts. Who could have imagined such

a heart-break as that? Yet it went along with the fulfillment of

everyday duty and made no more noise than a grave under foot. I doubt if

fiction will ever get the knack of such things."

Jane Clemens now lived with her son Orion and his wife, in Keokuk, where

she was more contented than elsewhere. In these later days her memory

had become erratic, her realization of events about her uncertain, but

there were times when she was quite her former self, remembering clearly

and talking with her old-time gaiety of spirit. Mark Twain frequently

sent her playful letters to amuse her, letters full of such boyish gaiety

as had amused her long years before. The one that follows is a fair

example. It was written after a visit which Clemens and his family had

paid to Keokuk.

To Jane Clemens, in Keokuk:

ELMIRA, Aug. 7, '86.

DEAR MA,--I heard that Molly and Orion and Pamela had been sick, but I

see by your letter that they are much better now, or nearly well. When

we visited you a month ago, it seemed to us that your Keokuk weather was

pretty hot; Jean and Clara sat up in bed at Mrs. McElroy's and cried

about it, and so did I; but I judge by your letter that it has cooled

down, now, so that a person is comparatively comfortable, with his skin

off. Well it did need cooling; I remember that I burnt a hole in my

shirt, there, with some ice cream that fell on it; and Miss Jenkins told

me they never used a stove, but cooked their meals on a marble-topped

table in the drawing-room, just with the natural heat. If anybody else

had told me, I would not have believed it. I was told by the Bishop of

Keokuk that he did not allow crying at funerals, because it scalded the

furniture. If Miss Jenkins had told me that, I would have believed it.

This reminds me that you speak of Dr. Jenkins and his family as if they

were strangers to me. Indeed they are not. Don't you suppose I remember

gratefully how tender the doctor was with Jean when she hurt her arm, and

how quickly he got the pain out of the hurt, whereas I supposed it was

going to last at least an hour? No, I don't forget some things as easily

as I do others.

Yes, it was pretty hot weather. Now here, when a person is going to die,

he is always in a sweat about where he is going to; but in Keokuk of

course they don't care, because they are fixed for everything. It has

set me reflecting, it has taught me a lesson. By and by, when my health

fails, I am going to put all my affairs in order, and bid good-bye to my

friends here, and kill all the people I don't like, and go out to Keokuk

and prepare for death.

They are all well in this family, and we all send love.

Affly Your Son

SAM.

The ways of city officials and corporations are often past

understanding, and Mark Twain sometimes found it necessary to write

picturesque letters of protest. The following to a Hartford

lighting company is a fair example of these documents.

To a gas and electric-lighting company, in Hartford:

GENTLEMEN,--There are but two places in our whole street where lights

could be of any value, by any accident, and you have measured and

appointed your intervals so ingeniously as to leave each of those places

in the centre of a couple of hundred yards of solid darkness. When I

noticed that you were setting one of your lights in such a way that I

could almost see how to get into my gate at night, I suspected that it

was a piece of carelessness on the part of the workmen, and would be

corrected as soon as you should go around inspecting and find it out.

My judgment was right; it is always right, when you axe concerned. For

fifteen years, in spite of my prayers and tears, you persistently kept a

gas lamp exactly half way between my gates, so that I couldn't find

either of them after dark; and then furnished such execrable gas that I

had to hang a danger signal on the lamp post to keep teams from running

into it, nights. Now I suppose your present idea is, to leave us a

little more in the dark.

Don't mind us--out our way; we possess but one vote apiece, and no rights

which you are in any way bound to respect. Please take your electric

light and go to--but never mind, it is not for me to suggest; you will

probably find the way; and any way you can reasonably count on divine

assistance if you lose your bearings.

S. L. CLEMENS.

[Etext Editor's Note: Twain wrote another note to Hartford Gas and

Electric, which he may not have mailed and which Paine does not

include in these volumes:

"Gentleman:--Someday you are going to move me almost to the point

of irritation with your God-damned chuckle headed fashion of

turning off your God-damned gas without giving notice to your

God-damned parishioners--and you did it again last night--"

D.W.]

Frequently Clemens did not send letters of this sort after they were

written. Sometimes he realized the uselessness of such protest,

sometimes the mere writing of them had furnished the necessary

relief, and he put, the letter away, or into the wastebasket, and

wrote something more temperate, or nothing at all. A few such

letters here follow.

Clemens was all the time receiving application from people who

wished him to recommend one article or another; books, plays,

tobacco, and what not. They were generally persistent people,

unable to accept a polite or kindly denial. Once he set down some

remarks on this particular phase of correspondence. He wrote:

I

No doubt Mr. Edison has been offered a large interest in many and many an

electrical project, for the use of his name to float it withal. And no

doubt all men who have achieved for their names, in any line of activity

whatever, a sure market value, have been familiar with this sort of

solicitation. Reputation is a hall-mark: it can remove doubt from pure

silver, and it can also make the plated article pass for pure.

And so, people without a hall-mark of their own are always trying to get

the loan of somebody else's.

As a rule, that kind of a person sees only one side of the case. He sees

that his invention or his painting or his book is--apparently--a trifle

better than you yourself can do, therefore why shouldn't you be willing

to put your hall-mark on it? You will be giving the purchaser his full

money's worth; so who is hurt, and where is the harm? Besides, are you

not helping a struggling fellow-craftsman, and is it not your duty to do

that?

That side is plenty clear enough to him, but he can't and won't see the

other side, to-wit: that you are a rascal if you put your hall-mark upon

a thing which you did not produce yourself, howsoever good it may be.

How simple that is; and yet there are not two applicants in a hundred who

can, be made to see it.

When one receives an application of this sort, his first emotion is an

indignant sense of insult; his first deed is the penning of a sharp

answer. He blames nobody but that other person. That person is a very

base being; he must be; he would degrade himself for money, otherwise it

would not occur to him that you would do such a thing. But all the same,

that application has done its work, and taken you down in your own

estimation. You recognize that everybody hasn't as high an opinion of

you as you have of yourself; and in spite of you there ensues an interval

during which you are not, in your own estimation as fine a bird as you

were before.

However, being old and experienced, you do not mail your sharp letter,

but leave it lying a day. That saves you. For by that time you have

begun to reflect that you are a person who deals in exaggerations--and

exaggerations are lies. You meant yours to be playful, and thought you

made them unmistakably so. But you couldn't make them playfulnesses to a

man who has no sense of the playful and can see nothing but the serious

side of things. You rattle on quite playfully, and with measureless

extravagance, about how you wept at the tomb of Adam; and all in good

time you find to your astonishment that no end of people took you at your

word and believed you. And presently they find out that you were not in

earnest. They have been deceived; therefore, (as they argue--and there

is a sort of argument in it,) you are a deceiver. If you will deceive in

one way, why shouldn't you in another? So they apply for the use of your

trade-mark. You are amazed and affronted. You retort that you are not

that kind of person. Then they are amazed and affronted; and wonder

"since when?"

By this time you have got your bearings. You realize that perhaps there

is a little blame on both sides. You are in the right frame, now. So

you write a letter void of offense, declining. You mail this one; you

pigeon-hole the other.

That is, being old and experienced, you do, but early in your career, you

don't: you mail the first one.

II

An enthusiast who had a new system of musical notation, wrote to me and

suggested that a magazine article from me, contrasting the absurdities of

the old system with the simplicities of his new one, would be sure to

make a "rousing hit." He shouted and shouted over the marvels wrought by

his system, and quoted the handsome compliments which had been paid it by

famous musical people; but he forgot to tell me what his notation was

like, or what its simplicities consisted in. So I could not have written

the article if I had wanted to--which I didn't; because I hate strangers

with axes to grind. I wrote him a courteous note explaining how busy I

was--I always explain how busy I am--and casually drooped this remark:

"I judge the X-X notation to be a rational mode of representing music, in

place of the prevailing fashion, which was the invention of an idiot."

Next mail he asked permission to print that meaningless remark.

I answered, no--courteously, but still, no; explaining that I could not

afford to be placed in the attitude of trying to influence people with a

mere worthless guess. What a scorcher I got, next mail! Such irony!

such sarcasm, such caustic praise of my superhonorable loyalty to the

public! And withal, such compassion for my stupidity, too, in not being

able to understand my own language. I cannot remember the words of this

letter broadside, but there was about a page used up in turning this idea

round and round and exposing it in different lights.

Unmailed Answer:

DEAR SIR,--What is the trouble with you? If it is your viscera, you

cannot have them taken out and reorganized a moment too soon. I mean,

if they are inside. But if you are composed of them, that is another

matter. Is it your brain? But it could not be your brain. Possibly it

is your skull: you want to look out for that. Some people, when they get

an idea, it pries the structure apart. Your system of notation has got

in there, and couldn't find room, without a doubt that is what the

trouble is. Your skull was not made to put ideas in, it was made to

throw potatoes at.

Yours Truly.

Mailed Answer:

DEAR SIR,--Come, come--take a walk; you disturb the children.

Yours Truly.

There was a day, now happily nearly over, when certain newspapers made a

practice of inviting men distinguished in any walk of life to give their

time and effort without charge to express themselves on some subject of

the day, or perhaps they were asked to send their favorite passages in

prose or verse, with the reasons why. Such symposiums were "features"

that cost the newspapers only the writing of a number of letters,

stationery, and postage. To one such invitation Mark Twain wrote two

replies. They follow herewith:

Unmailed Answer:

DEAR SIR,--I have received your proposition--which you have imitated from

a pauper London periodical which had previously imitated the idea of this

sort of mendicancy from seventh-rate American journalism, where it

originated as a variation of the inexpensive "interview."

Why do you buy Associated Press dispatches? To make your paper the more

salable, you answer. But why don't you try to beg them? Why do you

discriminate? I can sell my stuff; why should I give it to you? Why

don't you ask me for a shirt? What is the difference between asking me

for the worth of a shirt and asking me for the shirt itself? Perhaps you

didn't know you were begging. I would not use that argument--it makes

the user a fool. The passage of poetry--or prose, if you will--which has

taken deepest root in my thought, and which I oftenest return to and

dwell upon with keenest no matter what, is this: That the proper place

for journalists who solicit literary charity is on the street corner with

their hats in their hands.

Mailed Answer:

DEAR SIR,--Your favor of recent date is received, but I am obliged by

press of work to decline.

The manager of a traveling theatrical company wrote that he had

taken the liberty of dramatizing Tom Sawyer, and would like also the

use of the author's name--the idea being to convey to the public

that it was a Mark Twain play. In return for this slight favor the

manager sent an invitation for Mark Twain to come and see the play

--to be present on the opening night, as it were, at his (the

manager's) expense. He added that if the play should be a go in the

cities there might be some "arrangement" of profits. Apparently

these inducements did not appeal to Mark Twain. The long unmailed

reply is the more interesting, but probably the briefer one that

follows it was quite as effective.

Unmailed Answer:

HARTFORD, Sept. 8, '87.

DEAR SIR,--And so it has got around to you, at last; and you also have

"taken the liberty." You are No. 1365. When 1364 sweeter and better

people, including the author, have "tried" to dramatize Tom Sawyer and

did not arrive, what sort of show do you suppose you stand? That is a

book, dear sir, which cannot be dramatized. One might as well try to

dramatize any other hymn. Tom Sawyer is simply a hymn, put into prose

form to give it a worldly air.

Why the pale doubt that flitteth dim and nebulous athwart the forecastle

of your third sentence? Have no fears. Your piece will be a Go.

It will go out the back door on the first night. They've all done it

--the 1364. So will 1365. Not one of us ever thought of the simple

device of half-soling himself with a stove-lid. Ah, what suffering a

little hindsight would have saved us. Treasure this hint.

How kind of you to invite me to the funeral. Go to; I have attended a

thousand of them. I have seen Tom Sawyer's remains in all the different

kinds of dramatic shrouds there are. You cannot start anything fresh.

Are you serious when you propose to pay my expence--if that is the

Susquehannian way of spelling it? And can you be aware that I charge a

hundred dollars a mile when I travel for pleasure? Do you realize that

it is 432 miles to Susquehanna? Would it be handy for you to send me the

$43,200 first, so I could be counting it as I come along; because

railroading is pretty dreary to a sensitive nature when there's nothing

sordid to buck at for Zeitvertreib.

Now as I understand it, dear and magnanimous 1365, you are going to

recreate Tom Sawyer dramatically, and then do me the compliment to put me

in the bills as father of this shady offspring. Sir, do you know that

this kind of a compliment has destroyed people before now? Listen.

Twenty-four years ago, I was strangely handsome. The remains of it are

still visible through the rifts of time. I was so handsome that human

activities ceased as if spellbound when I came in view, and even

inanimate things stopped to look--like locomotives, and district

messenger boys and so-on. In San Francisco, in the rainy season I was

often mistaken for fair weather. Upon one occasion I was traveling in

the Sonora region, and stopped for an hour's nooning, to rest my horse

and myself. All the town came out to look. The tribes of Indians

gathered to look. A Piute squaw named her baby for me,--a voluntary

compliment which pleased me greatly. Other attentions were paid me.

Last of all arrived the president and faculty of Sonora University and

offered me the post of Professor of Moral Culture and the Dogmatic

Humanities; which I accepted gratefully, and entered at once upon my

duties. But my name had pleased the Indians, and in the deadly kindness

of their hearts they went on naming their babies after me. I tried to

stop it, but the Indians could not understand why I should object to so

manifest a compliment. The thing grew and grew and spread and spread and

became exceedingly embarrassing. The University stood it a couple of

years; but then for the sake of the college they felt obliged to call a

halt, although I had the sympathy of the whole faculty. The president

himself said to me, "I am as sorry as I can be for you, and would still

hold out if there were any hope ahead; but you see how it is: there are a

hundred and thirty-two of them already, and fourteen precincts to hear

from. The circumstance has brought your name into most wide and

unfortunate renown. It causes much comment--I believe that that is not

an over-statement. Some of this comment is palliative, but some of it

--by patrons at a distance, who only know the statistics without the

explanation,--is offensive, and in some cases even violent. Nine

students have been called home. The trustees of the college have been

growing more and more uneasy all these last months--steadily along with

the implacable increase in your census--and I will not conceal from you

that more than once they have touched upon the expediency of a change in

the Professorship of Moral Culture. The coarsely sarcastic editorial in

yesterday's Alta, headed Give the Moral Acrobat a Rest--has brought

things to a crisis, and I am charged with the unpleasant duty of

receiving your resignation."

I know you only mean me a kindness, dear 1365, but it is a most deadly

mistake. Please do not name your Injun for me. Truly Yours.

Mailed Answer:

NEW YORK, Sept. 8. 1887.

DEAR SIR,--Necessarily I cannot assent to so strange a proposition. And

I think it but fair to warn you that if you put the piece on the stage,

you must take the legal consequences.

Yours respectfully,

S. L. CLEMENS.

Before the days of international copyright no American author's

books were pirated more freely by Canadian publishers than those of

Mark Twain. It was always a sore point with him that these books,

cheaply printed, found their way into the United States, and were

sold in competition with his better editions. The law on the

subject seemed to be rather hazy, and its various interpretations

exasperating. In the next unmailed letter Mark Twain relieves

himself to a misguided official. The letter is worth reading today,

if for no other reason, to show the absurdity of copyright

conditions which prevailed at that time.

Unmailed Letter to H. C. Christiancy, on book Piracy:

HARTFORD, Dec. 18, '87.

H. C. CHRISTIANCY, ESQ.

DEAR SIR,--As I understand it, the position of the U. S. Government is

this: If a person be captured on the border with counterfeit bonds in his

hands--bonds of the N. Y. Central Railway, for instance--the procedure in

his case shall be as follows:

1. If the N. Y. C. have not previously filed in the several police

offices along the border, proof of ownership of the originals of the

bonds, the government officials must collect a duty on the counterfeits,

and then let them go ahead and circulate in this country.

2. But if there is proof already on file, then the N. Y. C. may pay the

duty and take the counterfeits.

But in no case will the United States consent to go without its share of

the swag. It is delicious. The biggest and proudest government on earth

turned sneak-thief; collecting pennies on stolen property, and pocketing

them with a greasy and libidinous leer; going into partnership with

foreign thieves to rob its own children; and when the child escapes the

foreigner, descending to the abysmal baseness of hanging on and robbing

the infant all alone by itself! Dear sir, this is not any more

respectable than for a father to collect toll on the forced prostitution

of his own daughter; in fact it is the same thing. Upon these terms,

what is a U. S. custom house but a "fence?" That is all it is: a

legalized trader in stolen goods.

And this nasty law, this filthy law, this unspeakable law calls itself a

"regulation for the protection of owners of copyright!" Can sarcasm go

further than that? In what way does it protect them? Inspiration itself

could not furnish a rational answer to that question. Whom does it

protect, then? Nobody, as far as I can see, but the foreign thief

--sometimes--and his fellow-footpad the U. S. government, all the time.

What could the Central Company do with the counterfeit bonds after it had

bought them of the star spangled banner Master-thief? Sell them at a

dollar apiece and fetch down the market for the genuine hundred-dollar

bond? What could I do with that 20-cent copy of "Roughing It" which the

United States has collared on the border and is waiting to release to me

for cash in case I am willing to come down to its moral level and help

rob myself? Sell it at ten or fifteen cents--duty added--and destroy the

market for the original $3,50 book? Who ever did invent that law? I

would like to know the name of that immortal jackass.

Dear sir, I appreciate your courtesy in stretching your authority in the

desire to do me a kindness, and I sincerely thank you for it. But I have

no use for that book; and if I were even starving for it I would not pay

duty on in either to get it or suppress it. No doubt there are ways in

which I might consent to go into partnership with thieves and fences,

but this is not one of them. This one revolts the remains of my

self-respect; turns my stomach. I think I could companion with a

highwayman who carried a shot-gun and took many risks; yes, I think

I should like that if I were younger; but to go in with a big rich

government that robs paupers, and the widows and orphans of paupers and

takes no risk--why the thought just gags me.

Oh, no, I shall never pay any duties on pirated books of mine. I am much

too respectable for that--yet awhile. But here--one thing that grovels

me is this: as far as I can discover--while freely granting that the

U. S. copyright laws are far and away the most idiotic that exist

anywhere on the face of the earth--they don't authorize the government to

admit pirated books into this country, toll or no toll. And so I think

that that regulation is the invention of one of those people--as a rule,

early stricken of God, intellectually--the departmental interpreters of

the laws, in Washington. They can always be depended on to take any

reasonably good law and interpret the common sense all out of it. They

can be depended on, every time, to defeat a good law, and make it

inoperative--yes, and utterly grotesque, too, mere matter for laughter

and derision. Take some of the decisions of the Post-office Department,

for instance--though I do not mean to suggest that that asylum is any

worse than the others for the breeding and nourishing of incredible

lunatics--I merely instance it because it happens to be the first to come

into my mind. Take that case of a few years ago where the P. M. General

suddenly issued an edict requiring you to add the name of the State after

Boston, New York, Chicago, &c, in your superscriptions, on pain of having

your letter stopped and forwarded to the dead-letter office; yes, and I

believe he required the county, too. He made one little concession in

favor of New York: you could say "New York City," and stop there; but if

you left off the "city," you must add "N. Y." to your "New York." Why,

it threw the business of the whole country into chaos and brought

commerce almost to a stand-still. Now think of that! When that man goes

to--to--well, wherever he is going to--we shan't want the microscopic

details of his address. I guess we can find him.

Well, as I was saying, I believe that this whole paltry and ridiculous

swindle is a pure creation of one of those cabbages that used to be at

the head of one of those Retreats down there--Departments, you know--and

that you will find it so, if you will look into it. And moreover--but

land, I reckon we are both tired by this time.

Truly Yours,

MARK TWAIN.

XXVII

MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS OF 1887. LITERARY ARTICLES. PEACEFUL DAYS AT THE

FARM. FAVORITE READING. APOLOGY TO MRS. CLEVELAND, ETC.

We have seen in the preceding chapter how unknown aspirants in one field

or another were always seeking to benefit by Mark Twain's reputation.

Once he remarked, "The symbol of the human race ought to be an ax; every

human being has one concealed about him somewhere." He declared when a

stranger called on him, or wrote to him, in nine cases out of ten he

could distinguish the gleam of the ax almost immediately. The following

letter is closely related to those of the foregoing chapter, only that

this one was mailed--not once, but many times, in some form adapted to

the specific applicant. It does not matter to whom it was originally

written, the name would not be recognized.

To Mrs. T. Concerning unearned credentials, etc.

HARTFORD, 1887.

MY DEAR MADAM,--It is an idea which many people have had, but it is of no

value. I have seen it tried out many and many a time. I have seen a

lady lecturer urged and urged upon the public in a lavishly complimentary

document signed by Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes and some others of

supreme celebrity, but--there was nothing in her and she failed. If

there had been any great merit in her she never would have needed those

men's help and (at her rather mature age,) would never have consented to

ask for it.

There is an unwritten law about human successes, and your sister must bow

to that law, she must submit to its requirements. In brief this law is:

1. No occupation without an apprenticeship.

2. No pay to the apprentice.

This law stands right in the way of the subaltern who wants to be a

General before he has smelt powder; and it stands (and should stand) in

everybody's way who applies for pay or position before he has served his

apprenticeship and proved himself. Your sister's course is perfectly

plain. Let her enclose this letter to Maj. J. B. Pond, and offer to

lecture a year for $10 a week and her expenses, the contract to be

annullable by him at any time, after a month's notice, but not annullable

by her at all. The second year, he to have her services, if he wants

them, at a trifle under the best price offered her by anybody else.

She can learn her trade in those two years, and then be entitled to

remuneration--but she can not learn it in any less time than that, unless

she is a human miracle.

Try it, and do not be afraid. It is the fair and right thing. If she

wins, she will win squarely and righteously, and never have to blush.

Truly yours,

S. L. CLEMENS.

Howells wrote, in February, offering to get a publisher to take the

Library of Humor off Mark Twain's hands. Howells had been paid

twenty-six hundred dollars for the work on it, and his conscience

hurt him when he reflected that the book might never be used. In

this letter he also refers to one of the disastrous inventions in

which Clemens had invested--a method of casting brass dies for

stamping book-covers and wall-paper. Howells's purpose was to

introduce something of the matter into his next story. Mark Twain's

reply gives us a light on this particular invention.

HARTFORD, Feb. 15, '87.

DEAR HOWELLS,--I was in New York five days ago, and Webster mentioned the

Library, and proposed to publish it a year or a year and half hence.

I have written him your proposition to-day. (The Library is part of the

property of the C. L. W. & Co. firm.)

I don't remember what that technical phrase was, but I think you will

find it in any Cyclopedia under the head of "Brass." The thing I best

remember is, that the self-styled "inventor" had a very ingenious way of

keeping me from seeing him apply his invention: the first appointment was

spoiled by his burning down the man's shop in which it was to be done,

the night before; the second was spoiled by his burning down his own shop

the night before. He unquestionably did both of these things. He really

had no invention; the whole project was a blackmailing swindle, and cost

me several thousand dollars.

The slip you sent me from the May "Study" has delighted Mrs. Clemens and

me to the marrow. To think that thing might be possible to many; but to

be brave enough to say it is possible to you only, I certainly believe.

The longer I live the clearer I perceive how unmatchable, how

unapproachable, a compliment one pays when he says of a man "he has the

courage (to utter) his convictions." Haven't you had reviewers talk Alps

to you, and then print potato hills?

I haven't as good an opinion of my work as you hold of it, but I've

always done what I could to secure and enlarge my good opinion of it.

I've always said to myself, "Everybody reads it and that's something--it

surely isn't pernicious, or the most acceptable people would get pretty

tired of it." And when a critic said by implication that it wasn't high

and fine, through the remark "High and fine literature is wine" I

retorted (confidentially, to myself,) "yes, high and fine literature is

wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water."

You didn't tell me to return that proof-slip, so I have pasted it into my

private scrap-book. None will see it there. With a thousand thanks.

Ys Ever

MARK.

Our next letter is an unmailed answer, but it does not belong with

the others, having been withheld for reasons of quite a different

sort. Jeanette Gilder, then of the Critic, was one of Mark Twain's

valued friends. In the comment which he made, when it was shown to

him twenty-two years later, he tells us why he thinks this letter

was not sent. The name, "Rest-and-be-Thankful," was the official

title given to the summer place at Elmira, but it was more often

known as "Quarry Farm."

To Jeannette Gilder (not mailed):

HARTFORD, May 14, '87.

MY DEAR MISS GILDER,--We shall spend the summer at the same old place-the

remote farm called "Rest-and-be-Thankful," on top of the hills three

miles from Elmira, N. Y. Your other question is harder to answer. It is

my habit to keep four or five books in process of erection all the time,

and every summer add a few courses of bricks to two or three of them; but

I cannot forecast which of the two or three it is going to be. It takes

seven years to complete a book by this method, but still it is a good

method: gives the public a rest. I have been accused of "rushing into

print" prematurely, moved thereto by greediness for money; but in truth

I have never done that. Do you care for trifles of information? (Well,

then, "Tom Sawyer" and "The Prince and the Pauper" were each on the

stocks two or three years, and "Old Times on the Mississippi" eight.)

One of my unfinished books has been on the stocks sixteen years; another

seventeen. This latter book could have been finished in a day, at any

time during the past five years. But as in the first of these two

narratives all the action takes place in Noah's ark, and as in the other

the action takes place in heaven, there seemed to be no hurry, and so I

have not hurried. Tales of stirring adventure in those localities do not

need to be rushed to publication lest they get stale by waiting. In

twenty-one years, with all my time at my free disposal I have written and

completed only eleven books, whereas with half the labor that a

journalist does I could have written sixty in that time. I do not

greatly mind being accused of a proclivity for rushing into print, but

at the same time I don't believe that the charge is really well founded.

Suppose I did write eleven books, have you nothing to be grateful for?

Go to---remember the forty-nine which I didn't write.

Truly Yours

S. L. CLEMENS.

Notes (added twenty-two years later):

Stormfield, April 30, 1909. It seems the letter was not sent. I

probably feared she might print it, and I couldn't find a way to say so

without running a risk of hurting her. No one would hurt Jeannette

Gilder purposely, and no one would want to run the risk of doing it

unintentionally. She is my neighbor, six miles away, now, and I must

ask her about this ancient letter.

I note with pride and pleasure that I told no untruths in my unsent

answer. I still have the habit of keeping unfinished books lying around

years and years, waiting. I have four or five novels on hand at present

in a half-finished condition, and it is more than three years since I

have looked at any of them. I have no intention of finishing them.

I could complete all of them in less than a year, if the impulse should

come powerfully upon me: Long, long ago money-necessity furnished that

impulse once, ("Following the Equator"), but mere desire for money has

never furnished it, so far as I remember. Not even money-necessity was

able to overcome me on a couple of occasions when perhaps I ought to have

allowed it to succeed. While I was a bankrupt and in debt two offers

were made me for weekly literary contributions to continue during a year,

and they would have made a debtless man of me, but I declined them, with

my wife's full approval, for I had known of no instance where a man had

pumped himself out once a week and failed to run "emptyings" before the

year was finished.

As to that "Noah's Ark" book, I began it in Edinburgh in 1873;--[This is

not quite correct. The "Noah's Ark" book was begun in Buffalo in 1870.]

I don't know where the manuscript is now. It was a Diary, which

professed to be the work of Shem, but wasn't. I began it again several

months ago, but only for recreation; I hadn't any intention of carrying

it to a finish

--or even to the end of the first chapter, in fact.

As to the book whose action "takes place in Heaven." That was a small

thing, ("Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.") It lay in my

pigeon-holes 40 years, then I took it out and printed it in Harper's

Monthly last year.

S. L. C.

In the next letter we get a pretty and peaceful picture of

"Rest-and-be-Thankful." These were Mark Twain's balmy days. The

financial drain of the type-machine was heavy but not yet exhausting, and

the prospect of vast returns from it seemed to grow brighter each day.

His publishing business, though less profitable, was still prosperous,

his family life was ideal. How gratefully, then, he could enter into the

peace of that "perfect day."

To Mrs. Orion Clemens, in Keokuk, Ia.:

ON THE HILL NEAR ELMIRA, July 10, '87.

DEAR MOLLIE,--This is a superb Sunday for weather--very cloudy, and the

thermometer as low as 65. The city in the valley is purple with shade,

as seen from up here at the study. The Cranes are reading and loafing in

the canvas-curtained summer-house 50 yards away on a higher (the highest)

point; the cats are loafing over at "Ellerslie" which is the children's

estate and dwellinghouse in their own private grounds (by deed from Susie

Crane) a hundred yards from the study, amongst the clover and young oaks

and willows. Livy is down at the house, but I shall now go and bring her

up to the Cranes to help us occupy the lounges and hammocks--whence a

great panorama of distant hill and valley and city is seeable. The

children have gone on a lark through the neighboring hills and woods.

It is a perfect day indeed.

With love to you all.

SAM.

Two days after this letter was written we get a hint of what was the

beginning of business trouble--that is to say, of the failing health of

Charles L. Webster. Webster was ambitious, nervous, and not robust.

He had overworked and was paying the penalty. His trouble was

neurasthenia, and he was presently obliged to retire altogether from the

business. The "Sam and Mary" mentioned were Samuel Moffet and his wife.

To Mrs. Pamela Moffett, in Fredonia, N. Y.

ELMIRA, July 12, '87

MY DEAR SISTER,--I had no idea that Charley's case was so serious.

I knew it was bad, and persistent, but I was not aware of the full size

of the matter.

I have just been writing to a friend in Hartford' who treated what I

imagine was a similar case surgically last fall, and produced a permanent

cure. If this is a like case, Charley must go to him.

If relief fails there, he must take the required rest, whether the

business can stand it or not.

It is most pleasant to hear such prosperous accounts of Sam and Mary,

I do not see how Sam could well be more advantageously fixed. He can

grow up with that paper, and achieve a successful life.

It is not all holiday here with Susie and Clara this time. They have to

put in some little time every day on their studies. Jean thinks she is

studying too, but I don't know what it is unless it is the horses; she

spends the day under their heels in the stables--and that is but a

continuation of her Hartford system of culture.

With love from us all to you all.

Affectionately

SAM.

Mark Twain had a few books that he read regularly every year or two.

Among these were 'Pepys's Diary', Suetonius's 'Lives of the Twelve

Caesars', and Thomas Carlyle's 'French Revolution'. He had a passion for

history, biography, and personal memoirs of any sort. In his early life

he had cared very little for poetry, but along in the middle eighties he

somehow acquired a taste for Browning and became absorbed in it.

A Browning club assembled as often as once a week at the Clemens home in

Hartford to listen to his readings of the master. He was an impressive

reader, and he carefully prepared himself for these occasions, indicating

by graduated underscorings, the exact values he wished to give to words

and phrases. Those were memorable gatherings, and they must have

continued through at least two winters. It is one of the puzzling phases

of Mark Twain's character that, notwithstanding his passion for direct

and lucid expression, he should have found pleasure in the poems of

Robert Browning.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

ELMIRA, Aug. 22, '87.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man

while he sleeps. When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871,

I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it

differently being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and

environment (and Taine and St. Simon): and now I lay the book down once

more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--And not a pale,

characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat. Carlyle teaches no such gospel

so the change is in me--in my vision of the evidences.

People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did at

all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they can lie so.

It comes of practice, no doubt. They would not say that of Dickens's or

Scott's books. Nothing remains the same. When a man goes back to look

at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: there is no instance

of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination

call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its correct dimensions: the house hasn't

altered; this is the first time it has been in focus.

Well, that's loss. To have house and Bible shrink so, under the

disillusioning corrected angle, is loss-for a moment. But there are

compensations. You tilt the tube skyward and bring planets and comets

and corona flames a hundred and fifty thousand miles high into the field.

Which I see you have done, and found Tolstoi. I haven't got him in focus

yet, but I've got Browning . . . .

Ys Ever

MARK.

Mention has been made already of Mark Twain's tendency to

absentmindedness. He was always forgetting engagements, or getting

them wrong. Once he hurried to an afternoon party, and finding the

mistress of the house alone, sat down and talked to her comfortably

for an hour or two, not remembering his errand at all. It was only

when he reached home that he learned that the party had taken place

the week before. It was always dangerous for him to make

engagements, and he never seemed to profit by sorrowful experience.

We, however, may profit now by one of his amusing apologies.

To Mrs. Grover Cleveland, in Washington:

HARTFORD, Nov. 6, 1887.

MY DEAR MADAM,--I do not know how it is in the White House, but in this

house of ours whenever the minor half of the administration tries to run

itself without the help of the major half it gets aground. Last night

when I was offered the opportunity to assist you in the throwing open the

Warner brothers superb benefaction in Bridgeport to those fortunate

women, I naturally appreciated the honor done me, and promptly seized my

chance. I had an engagement, but the circumstances washed it out of my

mind. If I had only laid the matter before the major half of the

administration on the spot, there would have been no blunder; but I never

thought of that. So when I did lay it before her, later, I realized once

more that it will not do for the literary fraction of a combination to

try to manage affairs which properly belong in the office of the business

bulk of it. I suppose the President often acts just like that: goes and

makes an impossible promise, and you never find it out until it is next

to impossible to break it up and set things straight again. Well, that

is just our way, exactly-one half of the administration always busy

getting the family into trouble, and the other half busy getting it out

again. And so we do seem to be all pretty much alike, after all. The

fact is, I had forgotten that we were to have a dinner party on that

Bridgeport date--I thought it was the next day: which is a good deal of

an improvement for me, because I am more used to being behind a day or

two than ahead. But that is just the difference between one end of this

kind of an administration and the other end of it, as you have noticed,

yourself--the other end does not forget these things. Just so with a

funeral; if it is the man's funeral, he is most always there, of course

--but that is no credit to him, he wouldn't be there if you depended on

him to remember about it; whereas, if on the other hand--but I seem to

have got off from my line of argument somehow; never mind about the

funeral. Of course I am not meaning to say anything against funerals

--that is, as occasions--mere occasions--for as diversions I don't think

they amount to much But as I was saying--if you are not busy I will look

back and see what it was I was saying.

I don't seem to find the place; but anyway she was as sorry as ever

anybody could be that I could not go to Bridgeport, but there was no help

for it. And I, I have been not only sorry but very sincerely ashamed of

having made an engagement to go without first making sure that I could

keep it, and I do not know how to apologize enough for my heedless breach

of good manners.

With the sincerest respect,

S. L. CLEMENS.

Samuel Clemens was one of the very few authors to copyright a book

in England before the enactment of the international copyright law.

As early as 1872 he copyrighted 'Roughing It' in England, and

piratical publishers there respected his rights. Finally, in 1887,

the inland revenue office assessed him with income tax, which he

very willingly paid, instructing his London publishers, Chatto &

Windus, to pay on the full amount he had received from them. But

when the receipt for his taxes came it was nearly a yard square with

due postage of considerable amount. Then he wrote:

To Mr. Chatto, of Chatto & Windus, in London:

HARTFORD, Dec. 5, '87.

MY DEAR CHATTO,--Look here, I don't mind paying the tax, but don't you

let the Inland Revenue Office send me any more receipts for it, for the

postage is something perfectly demoralizing. If they feel obliged to

print a receipt on a horse-blanket, why don't they hire a ship and send

it over at their own expense?

Wasn't it good that they caught me out with an old book instead of a new

one? The tax on a new book would bankrupt a body. It was my purpose to

go to England next May and stay the rest of the year, but I've found that

tax office out just in time. My new book would issue in March, and they

would tax the sale in both countries. Come, we must get up a compromise

somehow. You go and work in on the good side of those revenue people and

get them to take the profits and give me the tax. Then I will come over

and we will divide the swag and have a good time.

I wish you to thank Mr. Christmas for me; but we won't resist. The

country that allows me copyright has a right to tax me.

Sincerely Yours

S. L. CLEMENS.

Another English tax assessment came that year, based on the report

that it was understood that he was going to become an English

resident, and had leased Buckenham Hall, Norwich, for a year.

Clemens wrote his publishers: "I will explain that all that about

Buckenham Hall was an English newspaper's mistake. I was not in

England, and if I had been I wouldn't have been at Buckenham Hall,

anyway, but at Buckingham Palace, or I would have endeavored to find

out the reason why." Clemens made literature out of this tax

experience. He wrote an open letter to Her Majesty Queen Victoria.

Such a letter has no place in this collection. It was published in

the "Drawer" of Harper's Magazine, December, 1887, and is now

included in the uniform edition of his works under the title of,

"A Petition to the Queen of England."

From the following letter, written at the end of the year, we gather

that the type-setter costs were beginning to make a difference in

the Clemens economies.

To Mrs. Moffett, in Fredonia:

HARTFORD, Dec. 18, '87.

DEAR PAMELA,--will you take this $15 and buy some candy or some other

trifle for yourself and Sam and his wife to remember that we remember

you, by?

If we weren't a little crowded this year by the typesetter, I'd send a

check large enough to buy a family Bible or some other useful thing like

that. However we go on and on, but the type-setter goes on forever--at

$3,000 a month; which is much more satisfactory than was the case the

first seventeen months, when the bill only averaged $2,000, and promised

to take a thousand years. We'll be through, now, in 3 or 4 months, I

reckon, and then the strain will let up and we can breathe freely once

more, whether success ensues or failure.

Even with a type-setter on hand we ought not to be in the least scrimped

--but it would take a long letter to explain why and who is to blame.

All the family send love to all of you and best Christmas wishes for your

prosperity.

Affectionately,

SAM.

XXVIII

LETTERS,1888. A YALE DEGREE. WORK ON "THE YANKEE." ON INTERVIEWING,

ETC.

Mark Twain received his first college degree when he was made Master

of Arts by Yale, in June, 1888. Editor of the Courant, Charles H.

Clarke, was selected to notify him of his new title. Clarke was an

old friend to whom Clemens could write familiarly.

To Charles H. Clarke, in Hartford:

ELMIRA, July 2, '88.

MY DEAR CHARLES,--Thanks for your thanks, and for your initiation

intentions. I shall be ready for you. I feel mighty proud of that

degree; in fact, I could squeeze the truth a little closer and say vain

of it. And why shouldn't I be?--I am the only literary animal of my

particular subspecies who has ever been given a degree by any College in

any age of the world, as far as I know.

Sincerely Yours

S. L. Clemens M. A.

Reply: Charles H. Clarke to S. L Clemens:

MY DEAR FRIEND, You are "the only literary animal of your particular

subspecies" in existence and you've no cause for humility in the fact.

Yale has done herself at least as much credit as she has done you, and

"Don't you forget it."

C. H. C.

With the exception of his brief return to the river in 1882. Mark

Twain had been twenty-seven years away from pilots and piloting.

Nevertheless, he always kept a tender place in his heart for the old

times and for old river comrades. Major "Jack" Downing had been a

Mississippi pilot of early days, but had long since retired from the

river to a comfortable life ashore, in an Ohio town. Clemens had

not heard from him for years when a letter came which invited the

following answer.

To Major "Jack" Downing, in Middleport Ohio:

ELMIRA, N. Y.[no month] 1888.

DEAR MAJOR,--And has it come to this that the dead rise up and speak?

For I supposed that you were dead, it has been so long since I heard your

name.

And how young you've grown! I was a mere boy when I knew you on the

river, where you had been piloting for 35 years, and now you are only a

year and a half older than I am! I mean to go to Hot Springs myself and

get 30 or 40 years knocked off my age. It's manifestly the place that

Ponce de Leon was striking for, but the poor fellow lost the trail.

Possibly I may see you, for I shall be in St. Louis a day or two in

November. I propose to go down the river and "note the changes" once

more before I make the long crossing, and perhaps you can come there.

Will you? I want to see all the boys that are left alive.

And so Grant Marsh, too, is flourishing yet? A mighty good fellow, and

smart too. When we were taking that wood flat down to the Chambers,

which was aground, I soon saw that I was a perfect lubber at piloting

such a thing. I saw that I could never hit the Chambers with it, so I

resigned in Marsh's favor, and he accomplished the task to my admiration.

We should all have gone to the mischief if I had remained in authority.

I always had good judgement, more judgement than talent, in fact.

No; the nom de plume did not originate in that way. Capt. Sellers used

the signature, "Mark Twain," himself, when he used to write up the

antiquities in the way of river reminiscences for the New Orleans

Picayune. He hated me for burlesquing them in an article in the True

Delta; so four years later when he died, I robbed the corpse--that is I

confiscated the nom de plume. I have published this vital fact 3,000

times now. But no matter, it is good practice; it is about the only fact

that I can tell the same way every time. Very glad, indeed, to hear from

you Major, and shall be gladder still to see you in November.

Truly yours,

S. L. CLEMENS.

He did not make the journey down the river planned for that year.

He had always hoped to make another steamboat trip with Bixby, but

one thing and another interfered and he did not go again.

Authors were always sending their books to Mark Twain to read, and

no busy man was ever more kindly disposed toward such offerings,

more generously considerate of the senders. Louis Pendleton was a

young unknown writer in 1888, but Clemens took time to read his

story carefully, and to write to him about it a letter that cost

precious time, thought, and effort. It must have rejoiced the young

man's heart to receive a letter like that, from one whom all young

authors held supreme.

To Louis Pendleton, in Georgia:

ELMIRA, N. Y., Aug. 4, '88.

MY DEAR SIR,--I found your letter an hour ago among some others which had

lain forgotten a couple of weeks, and I at once stole time enough to read

Ariadne. Stole is the right word, for the summer "Vacation" is the only

chance I get for work; so, no minute subtracted from work is borrowed, it

is stolen. But this time I do not repent. As a rule, people don't send

me books which I can thank them for, and so I say nothing--which looks

uncourteous. But I thank you. Ariadne is a beautiful and satisfying

story; and true, too--which is the best part of a story; or indeed of any

other thing. Even liars have to admit that, if they are intelligent

liars; I mean in their private [the word conscientious written but

erased] intervals. (I struck that word out because a man's private

thought can never be a lie; what he thinks, is to him the truth, always;

what he speaks--but these be platitudes.)

If you want me to pick some flaws--very well--but I do it unwillingly.

I notice one thing--which one may notice also in my books, and in all

books whether written by man or God: trifling carelessness of statement

or Expression. If I think that you meant that she took the lizard from

the water which she had drawn from the well, it is evidence--it is almost

proof--that your words were not as clear as they should have been. True,

it is only a trifling thing; but so is mist on a mirror. I would have

hung the pail on Ariadne's arm. You did not deceive me when you said

that she carried it under her arm, for I knew she didn't; still it was

not your right to mar my enjoyment of the graceful picture. If the pail

had been a portfolio, I wouldn't be making these remarks. The engraver

of a fine picture revises, and revises, and revises--and then revises,

and revises, and revises; and then repeats. And always the charm of that

picture grows, under his hand. It was good enough before--told its

story, and was beautiful. True: and a lovely girl is lovely, with

freckles; but she isn't at her level best with them.

This is not hypercriticism; you have had training enough to know that.

So much concerning exactness of statement. In that other not-small

matter--selection of the exact single word--you are hard to catch.

Still, I should hold that Mrs. Walker considered that there was no

occasion for concealment; that "motive" implied a deeper mental search

than she expended on the matter; that it doesn't reflect the attitude of

her mind with precision. Is this hypercriticism? I shan't dispute it.

I only say, that if Mrs. Walker didn't go so far as to have a motive, I

had to suggest that when a word is so near the right one that a body

can't quite tell whether it is or isn't, it's good politics to strike it

out and go for the Thesaurus. That's all. Motive may stand; but you

have allowed a snake to scream, and I will not concede that that was the

best word.

I do not apologize for saying these things, for they are not said in the

speck-hunting spirit, but in the spirit of want-to-help-if-I-can. They

would be useful to me if said to me once a month, they may be useful to

you, said once.

I save the other stories for my real vacation--which is nine months long,

to my sorrow. I thank you again.

Truly Yours

S. L. CLEMENS.

In the next letter we get a sidelight on the type-setting machine,

the Frankenstein monster that was draining their substance and

holding out false hopes of relief and golden return. The program

here outlined was one that would continue for several years yet,

with the end always in sight, but never quite attained.

To Orion Clemens, in Keokuk, Ia.:

Oct. 3, '88.

Private.

Saturday 29th, by a closely calculated estimate, there were 85 days' work

to do on the machine.

We can use 4 men, but not constantly. If they could work constantly it

would complete the machine in 21 days, of course. They will all be on

hand and under wages, and each will get in all the work there is

opportunity for, but by how much they can reduce the 85 days toward the

21 days, nobody can tell.

To-day I pay Pratt & Whitney $10,000. This squares back indebtedness and

everything to date. They began about May or April or March 1886--along

there somewhere, and have always kept from a dozen to two dozen

master-hands on the machine.

That outgo is done; 4 men for a month or two will close up that leak and

caulk it. Work on the patents is also kind of drawing toward a

conclusion.

Love to you both. All well here.

And give our love to Ma if she can get the idea.

SAM.

Mark Twain that year was working pretty steadily on 'The Yankee at

King Arthur's Court', a book which he had begun two years before.

He had published nothing since the Huck Finn story, and his company

was badly in need of a new book by an author of distinction. Also

it was highly desirable to earn money for himself; wherefore he set

to work to finish the Yankee story. He had worked pretty steadily

that summer in his Elmira study, but on his return to Hartford found

a good deal of confusion in the house, so went over to Twichell's,

where carpenter work was in progress. He seems to have worked there

successfully, though what improvement of conditions he found in that

numerous, lively household, over those at home it would be difficult

to say.

To Theodore W. Crane, at Quarry Farm, Elmira, N. Y.

Friday, Oct.,5, '88.

DEAR THEO,--I am here in Twichell's house at work, with the noise of the

children and an army of carpenters to help. Of course they don't help,

but neither do they hinder. It's like a boiler-factory for racket, and

in nailing a wooden ceiling onto the room under me the hammering tickles

my feet amazingly sometimes, and jars my table a good deal; but I never

am conscious of the racket at all, and I move my feet into position of

relief without knowing when I do it. I began here Monday morning, and

have done eighty pages since. I was so tired last night that I thought I

would lie abed and rest, to-day; but I couldn't resist. I mean to try to

knock off tomorrow, but it's doubtful if I do. I want to finish the day

the machine finishes, and a week ago the closest calculations for that

indicated Oct. 22--but experience teaches me that their calculations will

miss fire, as usual.

The other day the children were projecting a purchase, Livy and I to

furnish the money--a dollar and a half. Jean discouraged the idea. She

said: "We haven't got any money. Children, if you would think, you would

remember the machine isn't done."

It's billiards to-night. I wish you were here.

With love to you both

S. L. C.

P. S. I got it all wrong. It wasn't the children, it was Marie. She

wanted a box of blacking, for the children's shoes. Jean reproved her

--and said:

"Why, Marie, you mustn't ask for things now. The machine isn't done."

S. L. C.

The letter that follows is to another of his old pilot friends, one

who was also a schoolmate, Will Bowen, of Hannibal. There is today

no means of knowing the occasion upon which this letter was written,

but it does not matter; it is the letter itself that is of chief

value.

To Will Bowen, in Hannibal, Mo.:

HARTFORD, Nov 4, '88.

DEAR WILL,--I received your letter yesterday evening, just as I was

starting out of town to attend a wedding, and so my mind was privately

busy, all the evening, in the midst of the maelstrom of chat and chaff

and laughter, with the sort of reflections which create themselves,

examine themselves, and continue themselves, unaffected by surroundings

--unaffected, that is understood, by the surroundings, but not

uninfluenced by them. Here was the near presence of the two supreme

events of life: marriage, which is the beginning of life, and death which

is the end of it. I found myself seeking chances to shirk into corners

where I might think, undisturbed; and the most I got out of my thought,

was this: both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises

happiness, doubtless the other assures it. A long procession of people

filed through my mind--people whom you and I knew so many years ago--so

many centuries ago, it seems like-and these ancient dead marched to the

soft marriage music of a band concealed in some remote room of the house;

and the contented music and the dreaming shades seemed in right accord

with each other, and fitting. Nobody else knew that a procession of the

dead was passing though this noisy swarm of the living, but there it was,

and to me there was nothing uncanny about it; Rio, they were welcome

faces to me. I would have liked to bring up every creature we knew in

those days--even the dumb animals--it would be bathing in the fabled

Fountain of Youth.

We all feel your deep trouble with you; and we would hope, if we might,

but your words deny us that privilege. To die one's self is a thing that

must be easy, and of light consequence, but to lose a part of one's self

--well, we know how deep that pang goes, we who have suffered that

disaster, received that wound which cannot heal.

Sincerely your friend

S. L. CLEMENS.

His next is of quite a different nature. Evidently the typesetting

conditions had alarmed Orion, and he was undertaking some economies

with a view of retrenchment. Orion was always reducing economy to

science. Once, at an earlier date, he recorded that he had figured

his personal living expenses down to sixty cents a week, but

inasmuch as he was then, by his own confession, unable to earn the

sixty cents, this particular economy was wasted. Orion was a trial,

certainly, and the explosion that follows was not without excuse.

Furthermore, it was not as bad as it sounds. Mark Twain's rages

always had an element of humor in them, a fact which no one more

than Orion himself would appreciate. He preserved this letter,

quietly noting on the envelope, "Letter from Sam, about ma's nurse."

Letter to Orion Clemens, in Keokuk, Iowa:

NOV. 29, '88.

Jesus Christ!--It is perilous to write such a man. You can go crazy on

less material than anybody that ever lived. What in hell has produced

all these maniacal imaginings? You told me you had hired an attendant

for ma. Now hire one instantly, and stop this nonsense of wearing Mollie

and yourself out trying to do that nursing yourselves. Hire the

attendant, and tell me her cost so that I can instruct Webster & Co. to

add it every month to what they already send. Don't fool away any more

time about this. And don't write me any more damned rot about "storms,"

and inability to pay trivial sums of money and--and--hell and damnation!

You see I've read only the first page of your letter; I wouldn't read the

rest for a million dollars.

Yr

SAM.

P. S. Don't imagine that I have lost my temper, because I swear. I

swear all day, but I do not lose my temper. And don't imagine that I am

on my way to the poorhouse, for I am not; or that I am uneasy, for I am

not; or that I am uncomfortable or unhappy--for I never am. I don't know

what it is to be unhappy or uneasy; and I am not going to try to learn

how, at this late day.

SAM.

Few men were ever interviewed oftener than Mark Twain, yet he never

welcomed interviewers and was seldom satisfied with them. "What I

say in an interview loses it character in print," he often remarked,

"all its life and personality. The reporter realizes this himself,

and tries to improve upon me, but he doesn't help matters any."

Edward W. Bok, before he became editor of the Ladies Home Journal,

was conducting a weekly syndicate column under the title of "Bok's

Literary Leaves." It usually consisted of news and gossip of

writers, comment, etc., literary odds and ends, and occasional

interviews with distinguished authors. He went up to Hartford one

day to interview Mark Twain. The result seemed satisfactory to Bok,

but wishing to be certain that it would be satisfactory to Clemens,

he sent him a copy for approval. The interview was not returned;

in the place of it came a letter-not altogether disappointing, as

the reader may believe.

To Edward W. Bok, in New York:

MY DEAR MR. BOK,--No, no. It is like most interviews, pure twaddle and

valueless.

For several quite plain and simple reasons, an "interview" must, as a

rule, be an absurdity, and chiefly for this reason--It is an attempt to

use a boat on land or a wagon on water, to speak figuratively. Spoken

speech is one thing, written speech is quite another. Print is the

proper vehicle for the latter, but it isn't for the former. The moment

"talk" is put into print you recognize that it is not what it was when

you heard it; you perceive that an immense something has disappeared from

it. That is its soul. You have nothing but a dead carcass left on your

hands. Color, play of feature, the varying modulations of the voice, the

laugh, the smile, the informing inflections, everything that gave that

body warmth, grace, friendliness and charm and commended it to your

affections--or, at least, to your tolerance--is gone and nothing is left

but a pallid, stiff and repulsive cadaver.

Such is "talk" almost invariably, as you see it lying in state in an

"interview". The interviewer seldom tries to tell one how a thing was

said; he merely puts in the naked remark and stops there. When one

writes for print his methods are very different. He follows forms which

have but little resemblance to conversation, but they make the reader

understand what the writer is trying to convey. And when the writer is

making a story and finds it necessary to report some of the talk of his

characters observe how cautiously and anxiously he goes at that risky and

difficult thing. "If he had dared to say that thing in my presence,"

said Alfred, "taking a mock heroic attitude, and casting an arch glance

upon the company, blood would have flowed."

"If he had dared to say that thing in my presence," said Hawkwood, with

that in his eye which caused more than one heart in that guilty

assemblage to quake, "blood would have flowed."

"If he had dared to say that thing in my presence," said the paltry

blusterer, with valor on his tongue and pallor on his lips, "blood would

have flowed."

So painfully aware is the novelist that naked talk in print conveys no

meaning that he loads, and often overloads, almost every utterance of his

characters with explanations and interpretations. It is a loud

confession that print is a poor vehicle for "talk"; it is a recognition

that uninterpreted talk in print would result in confusion to the reader,

not instruction.

Now, in your interview, you have certainly been most accurate; you have

set down the sentences I uttered as I said them. But you have not a word

of explanation; what my manner was at several points is not indicated.

Therefore, no reader can possibly know where I was in earnest and where I

was joking; or whether I was joking altogether or in earnest altogether.

Such a report of a conversation has no value. It can convey many

meanings to the reader, but never the right one. To add interpretations

which would convey the right meaning is a something which would require

--what? An art so high and fine and difficult that no possessor of it

would ever be allowed to waste it on interviews.

No; spare the reader, and spare me; leave the whole interview out; it is

rubbish. I wouldn't talk in my sleep if I couldn't talk better than

that.

If you wish to print anything print this letter; it may have some value,

for it may explain to a reader here and there why it is that in

interviews, as a rule, men seem to talk like anybody but themselves.

Very sincerely yours,

MARK TWAIN.

XXIX

LETTERS, 1889. THE MACHINE. DEATH OF MR. CRANE.

CONCLUSION OF THE YANKEE

In January, 1889, Clemens believed, after his long seven years of

waiting, fruition had come in the matter of the type machine. Paige, the

inventor, seemed at last to have given it its finishing touches. The

mechanical marvel that had cost so much time, mental stress, and a

fortune in money, stood complete, responsive to the human will and touch

--the latest, and one of the greatest, wonders of the world. To George

Standring, a London printer and publisher, Clemens wrote: "The machine is

finished!" and added, "This is by far the most marvelous invention ever

contrived by man. And it is not a thing of rags and patches; it is made

of massive steel, and will last a century."

In his fever of enthusiasm on that day when he had actually seen it in

operation, he wrote a number of exuberant letters. They were more or

less duplicates, but as the one to his brother is of fuller detail and

more intimate than the others, it has been selected for preservation

here.

To Orion Clemens, in Keokuk:

HARTFORD, Jan. 5, '89.

DEAR ORION,--At 12.20 this afternoon a line of movable types was spaced

and justified by machinery, for the first time in the history of the

world! And I was there to see. It was done automatically--instantly

--perfectly. This is indeed the first line of movable types that ever

was perfectly spaced and perfectly justified on this earth.

This was the last function that remained to be tested--and so by long

odds the most amazing and extraordinary invention ever born of the brain

of man stands completed and perfect. Livy is down stairs celebrating.

But it's a cunning devil, is that machine!--and knows more than any man

that ever lived. You shall see. We made the test in this way. We set

up a lot of random letters in a stick--three-fourths of a line; then

filled out the line with quads representing 14 spaces, each space to be

35/1000 of an inch thick. Then we threw aside the quads and put the

letters into the machine and formed them into 15 two-letter words,

leaving the words separated by two-inch vacancies. Then we started up

the machine slowly, by hand, and fastened our eyes on the space-selecting

pins. The first pin-block projected its third pin as the first word came

traveling along the race-way; second block did the same; but the third

block projected its second pin!

"Oh, hell! stop the machine--something wrong--it's going to set a

30/1000 space!"

General consternation. "A foreign substance has got into the spacing

plates." This from the head mathematician.

"Yes, that is the trouble," assented the foreman.

Paige examined. "No--look in, and you can see that there's nothing of

the kind." Further examination. "Now I know what it is--what it must

be: one of those plates projects and binds. It's too bad--the first

test is a failure." A pause. "Well, boys, no use to cry. Get to work

--take the machine down.--No--Hold on! don't touch a thing! Go right

ahead! We are fools, the machine isn't. The machine knows what it's

about. There is a speck of dirt on one of those types, and the machine

is putting in a thinner space to allow for it!"

That was just it. The machine went right ahead, spaced the line,

justified it to a hair, and shoved it into the galley complete and

perfect! We took it out and examined it with a glass. You could not

tell by your eye that the third space was thinner than the others, but

the glass and the calipers showed the difference. Paige had always said

that the machine would measure invisible particles of dirt and allow for

them, but even he had forgotten that vast fact for the moment.

All the witnesses made written record of the immense historical birth

--the first justification of a line of movable type by machinery--and

also set down the hour and the minute. Nobody had drank anything, and

yet everybody seemed drunk. Well-dizzy, stupefied, stunned.

All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly

into commonplace contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle.

Telephones, telegraphs, locomotives, cotton gins, sewing machines,

Babbage calculators, jacquard looms, perfecting presses, Arkwright's

frames--all mere toys, simplicities! The Paige Compositor marches alone

and far in the lead of human inventions.

In two or three weeks we shall work the stiffness out of her joints and

have her performing as smoothly and softly as human muscles, and then we

shall speak out the big secret and let the world come and gaze.

Return me this letter when you have read it.

SAM.

Judge of the elation which such a letter would produce in Keokuk!

Yet it was no greater than that which existed in Hartford--for a

time.

Then further delays. Before the machine got "the stiffness out of

her joints" that "cunning devil" manifested a tendency to break the

types, and Paige, who was never happier than when he was pulling

things to pieces and making improvements, had the type-setter apart

again and the day of complete triumph was postponed.

There was sadness at the Elmira farm that spring. Theodore Crane,

who had long been in poor health, seemed to grow daily worse. In

February he had paid a visit to Hartford and saw the machine in

operation, but by the end of May his condition was very serious.

Remembering his keen sense of humor, Clemens reported to him

cheering and amusing incidents.

To Mrs. Theodore Crane. in Elmira, N. Y.:

HARTFORD, May 28, '89.

Susie dear, I want you to tell this to Theodore. You know how

absent-minded Twichell is, and how desolate his face is when he is in

that frame. At such times, he passes the word with a friend on the

street and is not aware of the meeting at all. Twice in a week, our

Clara had this latter experience with him within the past month. But the

second instance was too much for her, and she woke him up, in his tracks,

with a reproach. She said:

"Uncle Joe, why do you always look as if you were just going down into

the grave, when you meet a person on the street?"--and then went on to

reveal to him the funereal spectacle which he presented on such

occasions. Well, she has met Twichell three times since then, and would

swim the Connecticut to avoid meeting him the fourth. As soon as he

sights her, no matter how public the place nor how far off she is, he

makes a bound into the air, heaves arms and legs into all sorts of

frantic gestures of delight, and so comes prancing, skipping and

pirouetting for her like a drunken Indian entering heaven.

With a full invoice of love from us all to you and Theodore.

S. L. C.

The reference in the next to the "closing sentence" in a letter

written by Howells to Clemens about this time, refers to a

heart-broken utterance of the former concerning his daughter

Winnie, who had died some time before. She had been a gentle

talented girl, but never of robust health. Her death had followed

a long period of gradual decline.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Judy 13, '89.

DEAR HOWELLS,--I came on from Elmira a day or two ago, where I left a

house of mourning. Mr. Crane died, after ten months of pain and two

whole days of dying, at the farm on the hill, the 3rd inst: A man who had

always hoped for a swift death. Mrs. Crane and Mrs. Clemens and the

children were in a gloom which brought back to me the days of nineteen

years ago, when Mr. Langdon died. It is heart-breaking to see Mrs.

Crane. Many a time, in the past ten days, the sight of her has reminded

me, with a pang, of the desolation which uttered itself in the closing

sentence of your last letter to me. I do see that there is an argument

against suicide: the grief of the worshipers left behind; the awful

famine in their hearts, these are too costly terms for the release.

I shall be here ten days yet, and all alone: nobody in the house but the

servants. Can't Mrs. Howells spare you to me? Can't you come and stay

with me? The house is cool and pleasant; your work will not be

interrupted; we will keep to ourselves and let the rest of the world do

the same; you can have your choice of three bedrooms, and you will find

the Children's schoolroom (which was built for my study,) the perfection

of a retired and silent den for work. There isn't a fly or a mosquito on

the estate. Come--say you will.

With kindest regards to Mrs. Howells, and Pilla and John,

Yours Ever

MARK.

Howells was more hopeful. He wrote: "I read something in a strange book,

The Physical Theory of Another Life, that consoles a little; namely, we

see and feel the power of Deity in such fullness that we ought to infer

the infinite justice and Goodness which we do not see or feel." And a

few days later, he wrote: "I would rather see and talk with you than any

other man in the world outside my own blood."

A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court was brought to an end that

year and given to the artist and printer. Dan Beard was selected for the

drawings, and was given a free hand, as the next letter shows.

To Fred J. Hall, Manager Charles L. Webster & Co.:

[Charles L. Webster, owing to poor health, had by this time retired

from the firm.]

ELMIRA, July 20, '89.

DEAR MR. HALL,--Upon reflection--thus: tell Beard to obey his own

inspiration, and when he sees a picture in his mind put that picture on

paper, be it humorous or be it serious. I want his genius to be wholly

unhampered, I shan't have fears as to the result. They will be better

pictures than if I mixed in and tried to give him points on his own

trade.

Send this note and he'll understand.

Yr

S. L. C.

Clemens had made a good choice in selecting Beard for the

illustrations. He was well qualified for the work, and being of a

socialistic turn of mind put his whole soul into it. When the

drawings were completed, Clemens wrote: "Hold me under permanent

obligations. What luck it was to find you! There are hundreds of

artists that could illustrate any other book of mine, but there was

only one who could illustrate this one. Yes, it was a fortunate

hour that I went netting for lightning bugs and caught a meteor.

Live forever!"

Clemens, of course, was anxious for Howells to read The Yankee, and

Mrs. Clemens particularly so. Her eyes were giving her trouble that

summer, so that she could not read the MS. for herself, and she had

grave doubts as to some of its chapters. It may be said here that

the book to-day might have been better if Mrs. Clemens had been able

to read it. Howells was a peerless critic, but the revolutionary

subject-matter of the book so delighted him that he was perhaps

somewhat blinded to its literary defects. However, this is

premature. Howells did not at once see the story. He had promised

to come to Hartford, but wrote that trivial matters had made his

visit impossible. From the next letter we get the situation at this

time. The "Mr. Church" mentioned was Frederick S. Church, the

well-known artist.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

ELMIRA, July 24, '89.

DEAR HOWELLS,--I, too, was as sorry as I could be; yes, and desperately

disappointed. I even did a heroic thing: shipped my book off to New York

lest I should forget hospitality and embitter your visit with it. Not

that I think you wouldn't like to read it, for I think you would; but not

on a holiday that's not the time. I see how you were situated--another

familiarity of Providence and wholly wanton intrusion--and of course we

could not help ourselves. Well, just think of it: a while ago, while

Providence's attention was absorbed in disordering some time-tables so as

to break up a trip of mine to Mr. Church's on the Hudson, that Johnstown

dam got loose. I swear I was afraid to pray, for fear I should laugh.

Well, I'm not going to despair; we'll manage a meet yet.

I expect to go to Hartford again in August and maybe remain till I have

to come back here and fetch the family. And, along there in August, some

time, you let on that you are going to Mexico, and I will let on that I

am going to Spitzbergen, and then under cover of this clever stratagem we

will glide from the trains at Worcester and have a time. I have noticed

that Providence is indifferent about Mexico and Spitzbergen.

Ys Ever

MARK.

Possibly Mark Twain was not particularly anxious that Howells should

see his MS., fearing that he might lay a ruthless hand on some of

his more violent fulminations and wild fancies. However this may

be, further postponement was soon at an end. Mrs. Clemens's eyes

troubled her and would not permit her to read, so she requested that

the Yankee be passed upon by soberminded critics, such as Howells

and Edmund Clarence Stedman. Howells wrote that even if he hadn't

wanted to read the book for its own sake, or for the author's sake,

he would still want to do it for Mrs. Clemens's. Whereupon the

proofs were started in his direction.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

ELMIRA, Aug. 24, '89.

DEAR HOWELLS,--If you should be moved to speak of my book in the Study,

I shall be glad and proud--and the sooner it gets in, the better for the

book; though I don't suppose you can get it in earlier than the November

number--why, no, you can't get it in till a month later than that. Well,

anyway I don't think I'll send out any other press copy--except perhaps

to Stedman. I'm not writing for those parties who miscall themselves

critics, and I don't care to have them paw the book at all. It's my

swan-song, my retirement from literature permanently, and I wish to pass

to the cemetery unclodded.

I judge that the proofs have begun to reach you about this time, as I had

some (though not revises,) this morning. I'm sure I'm going to be

charmed with Beard's pictures. Observe his nice take-off of Middle-Age

art-dinner-table scene.

Ys sincerely

MARK.

Howells's approval of the Yankee came almost in the form of exultant

shouts, one after reading each batch of proof. First he wrote:

"It's charming, original, wonderful! good in fancy and sound to the

core in morals." And again, "It's a mighty great book, and it makes

my heart burn with wrath. It seems God did not forget to put a soul

into you. He shuts most literary men off with a brain, merely."

Then, a few days later: "The book is glorious--simply noble; what

masses of virgin truth never touched in print before!" and, finally,

"Last night I read your last chapter. As Stedman says of the whole

book, it's titanic."

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Sept. 22, '89.

DEAR HOWELLS,--It is immensely good of you to grind through that stuff

for me; but it gives peace to Mrs. Clemens's soul; and I am as grateful

to you as a body can be. I am glad you approve of what I say about the

French Revolution. Few people will. It is odd that even to this day

Americans still observe that immortal benefaction through English and

other monarchical eyes, and have no shred of an opinion about it that

they didn't get at second-hand.

Next to the 4th of July and its results, it was the noblest and the

holiest thing and the most precious that ever happened in this earth.

And its gracious work is not done yet--not anywhere in the remote

neighborhood of it.

Don't trouble to send me all the proofs; send me the pages with your

corrections on them, and waste-basket the rest. We issue the book

Dec. 10; consequently a notice that appears Dec. 20 will be just in good

time.

I am waiting to see your Study set a fashion in criticism. When that

happens--as please God it must--consider that if you lived three

centuries you couldn't do a more valuable work for this country, or a

humaner.

As a rule a critic's dissent merely enrages, and so does no good; but by

the new art which you use, your dissent must be as welcome as your

approval, and as valuable. I do not know what the secret of it is,

unless it is your attitude--man courteously reasoning with man and

brother, in place of the worn and wearisome critical attitude of all this

long time--superior being lecturing a boy.

Well, my book is written--let it go. But if it were only to write over

again there wouldn't be so many things left out. They burn in me; and

they keep multiplying and multiplying; but now they can't ever be said.

And besides, they would require a library--and a pen warmed up in hell.

Ys Ever

MARK.

The type-setting machine began to loom large in the background.

Clemens believed it perfected by this time. Paige had got it

together again and it was running steadily--or approximately so

--setting type at a marvelous speed and with perfect accuracy. In

time an expert operator would be able to set as high as eight

thousand ems per hour, or about ten times as much as a good

compositor could set and distribute by hand. Those who saw it were

convinced--most of them--that the type-setting problem was solved by

this great mechanical miracle. If there were any who doubted, it

was because of its marvelously minute accuracy which the others only

admired. Such accuracy, it was sometimes whispered, required

absolutely perfect adjustment, and what would happen when the great

inventor--"the poet in steel," as Clemens once called him--was no

longer at hand to supervise and to correct the slightest variation.

But no such breath of doubt came to Mark Twain; he believed the

machine as reliable as a constellation.

But now there was need of capital to manufacture and market the

wonder. Clemens, casting about in his mind, remembered Senator

Jones, of Nevada, a man of great wealth, and his old friend, Joe

Goodman, of Nevada, in whom Jones had unlimited confidence. He

wrote to Goodman, and in this letter we get a pretty full exposition

of the whole matter as it stood in the fall of 1889. We note in

this communication that Clemens says that he has been at the machine

three years and seven months, but this was only the period during

which he had spent the regular monthly sum of three thousand

dollars. His interest in the invention had begun as far back as

1880.

To Joseph T. Goodman, in Nevada:

Private. HARTFORD, Oct. 7, '89.

DEAR JOE,-I had a letter from Aleck Badlam day before yesterday,

and in answering him I mentioned a matter which I asked him to consider

a secret except to you and John McComb,--[This is Col. McComb, of the

Alta-California, who had sent Mark Twain on the Quaker City

excursion]--as I am not ready yet to get into the newspapers.

I have come near writing you about this matter several times, but it

wasn't ripe, and I waited. It is ripe, now. It is a type-setting

machine which I undertook to build for the inventor (for a consideration).

I have been at it three years and seven months without losing a day, at a

cost of $3,000 a month, and in so private a way that Hartford has known

nothing about it. Indeed only a dozen men have known of the matter.

I have reported progress from time to time to the proprietors of the

N. Y. Sun, Herald, Times, World, Harper Brothers and John F. Trow; also

to the proprietors of the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe. Three

years ago I asked all these people to squelch their frantic desire to

load up their offices with the Mergenthaler (N. Y. Tribune) machine, and

wait for mine and then choose between the two. They have waited--with no

very gaudy patience--but still they have waited; and I could prove to

them to-day that they have not lost anything by it. But I reserve the

proof for the present--except in the case of the N. Y. Herald; I sent an

invitation there the other day--a courtesy due a paper which ordered

$240,000 worth of our machines long ago when it was still in a crude

condition. The Herald has ordered its foreman to come up here next

Thursday; but that is the only invitation which will go out for some

time yet.

The machine was finished several weeks ago, and has been running ever

since in the machine shop. It is a magnificent creature of steel, all of

Pratt & Whitney's super-best workmanship, and as nicely adjusted and as

accurate as a watch. In construction it is as elaborate and complex as

that machine which it ranks next to, by every right--Man--and in

performance it is as simple and sure.

Anybody can set type on it who can read--and can do it after only 15

minutes' instruction. The operator does not need to leave his seat at

the keyboard; for the reason that he is not required to do anything but

strike the keys and set type--merely one function; the spacing,

justifying, emptying into the galley, and distributing of dead matter is

all done by the machine without anybody's help--four functions.

The ease with which a cub can learn is surprising. Day before yesterday

I saw our newest cub set, perfectly space and perfectly justify 2,150 ems

of solid nonpareil in an hour and distribute the like amount in the same

hour--and six hours previously he had never seen the machine or its

keyboard. It was a good hour's work for 3-year veterans on the other

type-setting machines to do. We have 3 cubs. The dean of the trio is a

school youth of 18. Yesterday morning he had been an apprentice on the

machine 16 working days (8-hour days); and we speeded him to see what he

could do in an hour. In the hour he set 5,900 ems solid nonpareil, and

the machine perfectly spaced and justified it, and of course distributed

the like amount in the same hour. Considering that a good fair

compositor sets 700 and distributes 700 in the one hour, this boy did the

work of about 8 x a compositors in that hour. This fact sends all other

type-setting machines a thousand miles to the rear, and the best of them

will never be heard of again after we publicly exhibit in New York.

We shall put on 3 more cubs. We have one school boy and two compositors,

now,--and we think of putting on a type writer, a stenographer, and

perhaps a shoemaker, to show that no special gifts or training are

required with this machine. We shall train these beginners two or three

months--or until some one of them gets up to 7,000 an hour--then we will

show up in New York and run the machine 24 hours a day 7 days in the

week, for several months--to prove that this is a machine which will

never get out of order or cause delay, and can stand anything an anvil

can stand. You know there is no other typesetting machine that can run

two hours on a stretch without causing trouble and delay with its

incurable caprices.

We own the whole field--every inch of it--and nothing can dislodge us.

Now then, above is my preachment, and here follows the reason and purpose

of it. I want you to run over here, roost over the machine a week and

satisfy yourself, and then go to John P. Jones or to whom you please, and

sell me a hundred thousand dollars' worth of this property and take ten

per cent in cash or the "property" for your trouble--the latter, if you

are wise, because the price I ask is a long way short of the value.

What I call "property" is this. A small part of my ownership consists of

a royalty of $500 on every machine marketed under the American patents.

My selling-terms are, a permanent royalty of one dollar on every

American-marketed machine for a thousand dollars cash to me in hand paid.

We shan't market any fewer than 5,000 machines in 15 years--a return of

fifteen thousand dollars for one thousand. A royalty is better than

stock, in one way--it must be paid, every six months, rain or shine; it

is a debt, and must be paid before dividends are declared. By and by,

when we become a stock company I shall buy these royalties back for stock

if I can get them for anything like reasonable terms.

I have never borrowed a penny to use on the machine, and never sold a

penny's worth of the property until the machine was entirely finished and

proven by the severest tests to be what she started out to be--perfect,

permanent, and occupying the position, as regards all kindred machines,

which the City of Paris occupies as regards the canvas-backs of the

mercantile marine.

It is my purpose to sell two hundred dollars of my royalties at the above

price during the next two months and keep the other $300.

Mrs. Clemens begs Mrs. Goodman to come with you, and asks pardon for not

writing the message herself--which would be a pathetically-welcome

spectacle to me; for I have been her amanuensis for 8 months, now, since

her eyes failed her. Yours as always

MARK.

While this letter with its amazing contents is on its way to

astonish Joe Goodman, we will consider one of quite a different,

but equally characteristic sort. We may assume that Mark Twain's

sister Pamela had been visiting him in Hartford and was now making

a visit in Keokuk.

To Mrs. Moffett, in Keokuk:

HARTFORD, Oct 9, '89.

DEAR PAMELA,--An hour after you left I was suddenly struck with a

realizing sense of the utter chuckle-headedness of that notion of mine:

to send your trunk after you. Land! it was idiotic. None but a lunatic

would, separate himself from his baggage.

Well, I am soulfully glad the baggage fetcher saved me from consummating

my insane inspiration. I met him on the street in the afternoon and paid

him again. I shall pay him several times more, as opportunity offers.

I declined the invitation to banquet with the visiting South American

Congress, in a polite note explaining that I had to go to New York today.

I conveyed the note privately to Patrick; he got the envelope soiled,

and asked Livy to put on a clean one. That is why I am going to the

banquet; also why I have disinvited the boys I thought I was going to

punch billiards with, upstairs to-night.

Patrick is one of the injudiciousest people I ever struck. And I am the

other.

Your Brother

SAM.

The Yankee was now ready for publication, and advance sheets were

already in the reviewers' hands. Just at this moment the Brazilian

monarchy crumbled, and Clemens was moved to write Sylvester Baxter,

of the Boston Herald, a letter which is of special interest in its

prophecy of the new day, the dawn of which was even nearer than he

suspected.

DEAR MR. BAXTER, Another throne has gone down, and I swim in oceans of

satisfaction. I wish I might live fifty years longer; I believe I should

see the thrones of Europe selling at auction for old iron. I believe I

should really see the end of what is surely the grotesquest of all the

swindles ever invented by man-monarchy. It is enough to make a graven

image laugh, to see apparently rational people, away down here in this

wholesome and merciless slaughter-day for shams, still mouthing empty

reverence for those moss-backed frauds and scoundrelisms, hereditary

kingship and so-called "nobility." It is enough to make the monarchs and

nobles themselves laugh--and in private they do; there can be no question

about that. I think there is only one funnier thing, and that is the

spectacle of these bastard Americans--these Hamersleys and Huntingtons

and such--offering cash, encumbered by themselves, for rotten carcases

and stolen titles. When our great brethren the disenslaved Brazilians

frame their Declaration of Independence, I hope they will insert this

missing link: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all monarchs

are usurpers, and descendants of usurpers; for the reason that no throne

was ever set up in this world by the will, freely exercised, of the only

body possessing the legitimate right to set it up--the numerical mass of

the nation."

You already have the advance sheets of my forthcoming book in your hands.

If you will turn to about the five hundredth page, you will find a state

paper of my Connecticut Yankee in which he announces the dissolution of

King Arthur's monarchy and proclaims the English Republic. Compare it

with the state paper which announces the downfall of the Brazilian

monarchy and proclaims the Republic of the United States of Brazil, and

stand by to defend the Yankee from plagiarism. There is merely a

resemblance of ideas, nothing more. The Yankee's proclamation was

already in print a week ago. This is merely one of those odd

coincidences which are always turning up. Come, protect the Yank from

that cheapest and easiest of all charges--plagiarism. Otherwise, you

see, he will have to protect himself by charging approximate and

indefinite plagiarism upon the official servants of our majestic twin

down yonder, and then there might be war, or some similar annoyance.

Have you noticed the rumor that the Portuguese throne is unsteady, and

that the Portuguese slaves are getting restive? Also, that the head

slave-driver of Europe, Alexander III, has so reduced his usual monthly

order for chains that the Russian foundries are running on only half time

now? Also that other rumor that English nobility acquired an added

stench the other day--and had to ship it to India and the continent

because there wasn't any more room for it at home? Things are working.

By and by there is going to be an emigration, may be. Of course we shall

make no preparation; we never do. In a few years from now we shall have

nothing but played-out kings and dukes on the police, and driving the

horse-cars, and whitewashing fences, and in fact overcrowding all the

avenues of unskilled labor; and then we shall wish, when it is too late,

that we had taken common and reasonable precautions and drowned them at

Castle Garden.

There followed at this time a number of letters to Goodman, but as

there is much of a sameness in them, we need not print them all.

Clemens, in fact, kept the mails warm with letters bulging with

schemes for capitalization, and promising vast wealth to all

concerned. When the letters did not go fast enough he sent

telegrams. In one of the letters Goodman is promised "five hundred

thousand dollars out of the profits before we get anything

ourselves." One thing we gather from these letters is that Paige

has taken the machine apart again, never satisfied with its

perfection, or perhaps getting a hint that certain of its

perfections were not permanent. A letter at the end of November

seems worth preserving here.

To Joseph T. Goodman, in California:

HARTFORD, Nov. 29, '89.

DEAR JOE, Things are getting into better and more flexible shape every

day. Papers are now being drawn which will greatly simplify the raising

of capital; I shall be in supreme command; it will not be necessary for

the capitalist to arrive at terms with anybody but me. I don't want to

dicker with anybody but Jones. I know him; that is to say, I want to

dicker with you, and through you with Jones. Try to see if you can't be

here by the 15th of January.

The machine was as perfect as a watch when we took her apart the other

day; but when she goes together again the 15th of January we expect her

to be perfecter than a watch.

Joe, I want you to sell some royalties to the boys out there, if you can,

for I want to be financially strong when we go to New York. You know the

machine, and you appreciate its future enormous career better than any

man I know. At the lowest conceivable estimate (2,000 machines a year,)

we shall sell 34,000 in the life of the patent--17 years.

All the family send love to you--and they mean it, or they wouldn't say

it.

Yours ever

MARK.

The Yankee had come from the press, and Howells had praised it in

the "Editor's Study" in Harper's Magazine. He had given it his

highest commendation, and it seems that his opinion of it did not

change with time. "Of all fanciful schemes of fiction it pleases me

most," he in one place declared, and again referred to it as

"a greatly imagined and symmetrically developed tale."

In more than one letter to Goodman, Clemens had urged him to come

East without delay. "Take the train, Joe, and come along," he wrote

early in December. And we judge from the following that Joe had

decided to come.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Dec. 23, '89.

DEAR HOWELLS,--The magazine came last night, and the Study notice is just

great. The satisfaction it affords us could not be more prodigious if

the book deserved every word of it; and maybe it does; I hope it does,

though of course I can't realize it and believe it. But I am your

grateful servant, anyway and always.

I am going to read to the Cadets at West Point Jan. 11. I go from here

to New York the 9th, and up to the Point the 11th. Can't you go with me?

It's great fun. I'm going to read the passages in the "Yankee" in which

the Yankee's West Point cadets figure--and shall covertly work in a

lecture on aristocracy to those boys. I am to be the guest of the

Superintendent, but if you will go I will shake him and we will go to the

hotel. He is a splendid fellow, and I know him well enough to take that

liberty.

And won't you give me a day or two's visit toward the end of January?

For two reasons: the machine will be at work again by that time, and we

want to hear the rest of the dream-story; Mrs. Clemens keeps speaking

about it and hankering for it. And we can have Joe Goodman on hand again

by that time, and I want you to get to know him thoroughly. It's well

worth it. I am going to run up and stay over night with you as soon as I

can get a chance.

We are in the full rush of the holidays now, and an awful rush it is,

too. You ought to have been here the other day, to make that day perfect

and complete. All alone I managed to inflict agonies on Mrs: Clemens,

whereas I was expecting nothing but praises. I made a party call the day

after the party--and called the lady down from breakfast to receive it.

I then left there and called on a new bride, who received me in her

dressing-gown; and as things went pretty well, I stayed to luncheon.

The error here was, that the appointed reception-hour was 3 in the

afternoon, and not at the bride's house but at her aunt's in another part

of the town. However, as I meant well, none of these disasters

distressed me.

Yrs ever

MARK.

The Yankee did not find a very hearty welcome in England. English

readers did not fancy any burlesque of their Arthurian tales, or

American strictures on their institutions. Mark Twain's publishers

had feared this, and asked that the story be especially edited for

the English edition. Clemens, however, would not listen to any

suggestions of the sort.

To Messrs. Chatto & Windus, in London, Eng.:

GENTLEMEN,--Concerning The Yankee, I have already revised the story

twice; and it has been read critically by W. D. Howells and Edmund

Clarence Stedman, and my wife has caused me to strike out several

passages that have been brought to her attention, and to soften others.

Furthermore, I have read chapters of the book in public where Englishmen

were present and have profited by their suggestions.

Now, mind you, I have taken all this pains because I wanted to say a

Yankee mechanic's say against monarchy and its several natural props,

and yet make a book which you would be willing to print exactly as it

comes to you, without altering a word.

We are spoken of (by Englishmen) as a thin-skinned people. It is you who

are thin-skinned. An Englishman may write with the most brutal frankness

about any man or institution among us and we republish him without

dreaming of altering a line or a word. But England cannot stand that

kind of a book written about herself. It is England that is

thin-skinned. It causeth me to smile when I read the modifications of my

language which have been made in my English editions to fit them for the

sensitive English palate.

Now, as I say, I have taken laborious pains to so trim this book of

offense that you might not lack the nerve to print it just as it stands.

I am going to get the proofs to you just as early as I can. I want you

to read it carefully. If you can publish it without altering a single

word, go ahead. Otherwise, please hand it to J. R. Osgood in time for

him to have it published at my expense.

This is important, for the reason that the book was not written for

America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done their

sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to

me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good

intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level of

manhood in turn.

Very truly yours,

S. L. CLEMENS.

The English nation, at least a considerable portion of it, did not wish

to be "pried up to a higher level of manhood" by a Connecticut Yankee.

The papers pretty generally denounced the book as coarse; in fact, a

vulgar travesty. Some of the critics concluded that England, after all,

had made a mistake in admiring Mark Twain. Clemens stood this for a time

and then seems to have decided that something should be done. One of the

foremost of English critics was his friend and admirer; he would state

the case to him fully and invite his assistance.

To Andrew Lang, in London:

[First page missing.]

1889

They vote but do not print. The head tells you pretty promptly whether

the food is satisfactory or not; and everybody hears, and thinks the

whole man has spoken. It is a delusion. Only his taste and his smell

have been heard from--important, both, in a way, but these do not build

up the man; and preserve his life and fortify it.

The little child is permitted to label its drawings "This is a cow this

is a horse," and so on. This protects the child. It saves it from the

sorrow and wrong of hearing its cows and its horses criticized as

kangaroos and work benches. A man who is white-washing a fence is doing

a useful thing, so also is the man who is adorning a rich man's house

with costly frescoes; and all of us are sane enough to judge these

performances by standards proper to each. Now, then, to be fair, an

author ought to be allowed to put upon his book an explanatory line:

"This is written for the Head;" "This is written for the Belly and the

Members." And the critic ought to hold himself in honor bound to put

away from him his ancient habit of judging all books by one standard, and

thenceforth follow a fairer course.

The critic assumes, every time, that if a book doesn't meet the

cultivated-class standard, it isn't valuable. Let us apply his law all

around: for if it is sound in the case of novels, narratives, pictures,

and such things, it is certainly sound and applicable to all the steps

which lead up to culture and make culture possible. It condemns the

spelling book, for a spelling book is of no use to a person of culture;

it condemns all school books and all schools which lie between the

child's primer and Greek, and between the infant school and the

university; it condemns all the rounds of art which lie between the cheap

terra cotta groups and the Venus de Medici, and between the chromo and

the Transfiguration; it requires Whitcomb Riley to sing no more till he

can sing like Shakespeare, and it forbids all amateur music and will

grant its sanction to nothing below the "classic."

Is this an extravagant statement? No, it is a mere statement of fact.

It is the fact itself that is extravagant and grotesque. And what is the

result? This--and it is sufficiently curious: the critic has actually

imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by Raphael is

more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a chromo; and the

august opera than the hurdy-gurdy and the villagers' singing society; and

Homer than the little everybody's-poet whose rhymes are in all mouths

today and will be in nobody's mouth next generation; and the Latin

classics than Kipling's far-reaching bugle-note; and Jonathan Edwards

than the Salvation Army; and the Venus de Medici than the plaster-cast

peddler; the superstition, in a word, that the vast and awful comet that

trails its cold lustre through the remote abysses of space once a century

and interests and instructs a cultivated handful of astronomers is worth

more to the world than the sun which warms and cheers all the nations

every day and makes the crops to grow.

If a critic should start a religion it would not have any object but to

convert angels: and they wouldn't need it. The thin top crust of

humanity--the cultivated--are worth pacifying, worth pleasing, worth

coddling, worth nourishing and preserving with dainties and delicacies,

it is true; but to be caterer to that little faction is no very dignified

or valuable occupation, it seems to me; it is merely feeding the

over-fed, and there must be small satisfaction in that. It is not that

little minority who are already saved that are best worth trying to

uplift, I should think, but the mighty mass of the uncultivated who are

underneath. That mass will never see the Old Masters--that sight is for

the few; but the chromo maker can lift them all one step upward toward

appreciation of art; they cannot have the opera, but the hurdy-gurdy and

the singing class lift them a little way toward that far light; they will

never know Homer, but the passing rhymester of their day leaves them

higher than he found them; they may never even hear of the Latin

classics, but they will strike step with Kipling's drum-beat, and they

will march; for all Jonathan Edwards's help they would die in their

slums, but the Salvation Army will beguile some of them up to pure air

and a cleaner life; they know no sculpture, the Venus is not even a name

to them, but they are a grade higher in the scale of civilization by the

ministrations of the plaster-cast than they were before it took its place

upon then mantel and made it beautiful to their unexacting eyes.

Indeed I have been misjudged, from the very first. I have never tried in

even one single instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes.

I was not equipped for it, either by native gifts or training. And I

never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger

game--the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them,

but have done my best to entertain them. To simply amuse them would have

satisfied my dearest ambition at any time; for they could get instruction

elsewhere, and I had two chances to help to the teacher's one: for

amusement is a good preparation for study and a good healer of fatigue

after it. My audience is dumb, it has no voice in print, and so I cannot

know whether I have won its approbation or only got its censure.

Yes, you see, I have always catered for the Belly and the Members, but

have been served like the others--criticized from the culture-standard

--to my sorrow and pain; because, honestly, I never cared what became of

the cultured classes; they could go to the theatre and the opera--they

had no use for me and the melodeon.

And now at last I arrive at my object and tender my petition, making

supplication to this effect: that the critics adopt a rule recognizing

the Belly and the Members, and formulate a standard whereby work done for

them shall be judged. Help me, Mr. Lang; no voice can reach further than

yours in a case of this kind, or carry greater weight of authority.

Lang's reply was an article in the Illustrated London News on "The

Art of Mark Twain." Lang had no admiration to express for the

Yankee, which he confessed he had not cared to read, but he

glorified Huck Finn to the highest. "I can never forget, nor be

ungrateful for the exquisite pleasure with which I read Huckleberry

Finn for the first time, years ago," he wrote; "I read it again last

night, deserting Kenilworth for Huck. I never laid it down till I

had finished it."

Lang closed his article by referring to the story of Huck as the

"great American novel which had escaped the eyes of those who

watched to see this new planet swim into their ken."

LETTERS, 1890, CHIEFLY TO JOS. T. GOODMAN. THE GREAT MACHINE ENTERPRISE

Dr. John Brown's son, whom Mark Twain and his wife had known in 1873

as "Jock," sent copies of Dr. John Brown and His Sister Isabella, by

E. T. McLaren. It was a gift appreciated in the Clemens home.

To Mr. John Brown, in Edinburgh, Scotland:

HARTFORD, Feby 11, 1890.

DEAR MR. BROWN,--Both copies came, and we are reading and re-reading the

one, and lending the other, to old time adorers of "Rab and his Friends."

It is an exquisite book; the perfection of literary workmanship. It says

in every line, "Don't look at me, look at him"--and one tries to be good

and obey; but the charm of the painter is so strong that one can't keep

his entire attention on the developing portrait, but must steal

side-glimpses of the artist, and try to divine the trick of her

felicitous brush. In this book the doctor lives and moves just as he

was. He was the most extensive slave-holder of his time, and the

kindest; and yet he died without setting one of his bondmen free.

We all send our very, very kindest regards.

Sincerely yours

S. L. CLEMENS.

If Mark Twain had been less interested in the type-setting machine

he might possibly have found a profit that winter in the old Sellers

play, which he had written with Howells seven years before. The

play had eventually been produced at the Lyceum Theatre in New York,

with A. P. Burbank in the leading role, and Clemens and Howells as

financial backers. But it was a losing investment, nor did it pay

any better when Clemens finally sent Burbank with it on the road.

Now, however, James A. Herne, a well-known actor and playwright,

became interested in the idea, after a discussion of the matter with

Howells, and there seemed a probability that with changes made under

Herne's advisement the play might be made sensible and successful.

But Mark Twain's greater interest was now all in the type-machine,

and certainly he had no money to put into any other venture. His

next letter to Goodman is illuminating--the urgency of his need for

funds opposed to that conscientiousness which was one of the most

positive forces of Mark Twain's body spiritual. The Mr. Arnot of

this letter was an Elmira capitalist.

To Jos. T. Goodman, in California:

HARTFORD, March 31, '90.

DEAR JOE,--If you were here, I should say, "Get you to Washington and beg

Senator Jones to take the chances and put up about ten or "--no, I

wouldn't. The money would burn a hole in my pocket and get away from me

if the furnisher of it were proceeding upon merely your judgment and mine

and without other evidence. It is too much of a responsibility.

But I am in as close a place to-day as ever I was; $3,000 due for the

last month's machine-expenses, and the purse empty. I notified Mr. Arnot

a month ago that I should want $5,000 to-day, and his check arrived last

night; but I sent it back to him, because when he bought of me on the 9th

of December I said that I would not draw upon him for 3 months, and that

before that date Senator Jones would have examined the machine and

approved, or done the other thing. If Jones should arrive here a week or

ten days from now (as he expects to do,) and should not approve, and

shouldn't buy any royalties, my deal with Arnot would not be

symmetrically square, and then how could I refund? The surest way was to

return his check.

I have talked with the madam, and here is the result. I will go down to

the factory and notify Paige that I will scrape together $6,000 to meet

the March and April expenses, and will retire on the 30th of April and

return the assignment to him if in the meantime I have not found

financial relief.

It is very rough; for the machine does at last seem perfect, and just a

bird to go! I think she's going to be good for 8,000 ems an hour in the

hands of a good ordinary man after a solid year's practice. I may be in

error, but I most solidly believe it.

There's an improved Mergenthaler in New York; Paige and Davis and I

watched it two whole afternoons.

With the love of us all,

MARK.

Arnot wrote Clemens urging him to accept the check for five thousand

dollars in this moment of need. Clemens was probably as sorely

tempted to compromise with his conscience as he had ever been in his

life, but his resolution field firm.

To M. H. Arnot, in Elmira, N. Y.:

MR. M. H. ARNOT