murdered," and fly toward her home
before we can utter a question-why, it brings the giant event home to
you, makes you a part of it and personally interested; it is as if your
neighbor Antony should come flying and say "Caesar is butchered--the
head of the world is fallen!"

Of course there is no talk but of this. The mourning is universal and
genuine, the consternation is stupefying. The Austrian Empire is being
draped with black. Vienna will be a spectacle to see, by next Saturday,
when the funeral cortege marches. We are invited to occupy a room in the
sumptuous new hotel (the "Krantz" where we are to live during the Fall
and Winter) and view it, and we shall go.

Speaking of Mrs. Leiter, there is a noble dame in Vienna, about whom
they retail similar slanders. She said in French--she is weak in
French--that she had been spending a Sunday afternoon in a gathering of
the "demimonde." Meaning the unknown land, that mercantile land,
that mysterious half-world which underlies the aristocracy. But these
Malaproperies are always inventions--they don't happen.

Yes, I wish we could have some talks; I'm full to the eye-lids. Had a
noble good one with Parker and Dunham--land, but we were grateful for
that visit!

Yours with all our loves.
MARK.

[Inclosed with the foregoing.]

Among the inadequate attempts to account for the assassination we must
concede high rank to the German Emperor's. He justly describes it as
a "deed unparalleled for ruthlessness," and then adds that it was
"ordained from above."

I think this verdict will not be popular "above." A man is either a
free agent or he isn't. If a man is a free agent, this prisoner is
responsible for what he has done; but if a man is not a free agent, if
the deed was ordained from above, there is no rational way of making
this prisoner even partially responsible for it, and the German court
cannot condemn him without manifestly committing a crime. Logic is
logic; and by disregarding its laws even Emperors as capable and acute
as William II can be beguiled into making charges which should not be
ventured upon except in the shelter of plenty of lightning-rods.

MARK.

The end of the year 1898 found Mark Twain once more in easy, even
luxurious, circumstances. The hard work and good fortune which had
enabled him to pay