s eager and
grateful acceptance now, he wrote: "It is all perfectly true
about the generosity, unless I am going to read your proofs
from one of the shabby motives which I always find at the
bottom of my soul if I examine it." A characteristic
utterance, though we may be permitted to believe that his
shabby motives were fewer and less shabby than those of
mankind in general.

The proofs which Howells was reading pleased him mightily.
Once, during the summer, he wrote: "if I had written half as
good a book as Huck Finn I shouldn't ask anything better
than to read the proofs; even as it is, I don't, so send
them on; they will always find me somewhere."

This was the summer of the Blaine-Cleveland campaign. Mark
Twain, in company with many other leading men, had
mugwumped, and was supporting Cleveland. From the next
letter we gather something of the aspects of that memorable
campaign, which was one of scandal and vituperation. We
learn, too, that the young sculptor, Karl Gerhardt, having
completed a three years' study in Paris, had returned to
America a qualified artist.

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

ELMIRA, Aug. 21, '84.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--This presidential campaign is too delicious for
anything. Isn't human nature the most consummate sham and lie that was
ever invented? Isn't man a creature to be ashamed of in pretty much all
his aspects? Man, "know thyself "--and then thou wilt despise thyself,
to a dead moral certainty. Take three quite good specimens--Hawley,
Warner, and Charley Clark. Even I do not loathe Blaine more than they
do; yet Hawley is howling for Blaine, Warner and Clark are eating their
daily crow in the paper for him, and all three will vote for him. O
Stultification, where is thy sting, O slave where is thy hickory!

I suppose you heard how a marble monument for which St. Gaudens
was pecuniarily responsible, burned down in Hartford the other day,
uninsured--for who in the world would ever think of insuring a marble
shaft in a cemetery against a fire?--and left St. Gauden out of pocket
$15,000.

It was a bad day for artists. Gerhardt finished my bust that day, and
the work was pronounced admirable by all the kin and friends; but in
putting it in plaster (or rather taking it out) next day it got ruined.
It was four or five weeks h