said Dawson's and onward thence to Tomahawk, thus making the route
cheaper, easier of access to all who can get at it, and compassing
all the desirable objects so considered by others, and, therefore,
conferring the most good upon the greatest number, and,
consequently, I am encouraged to hope we shall. However, I shall be
ready, and happy, to afford you still further information upon the
subject, from time to time, as you may desire it and the Post-office
Department be enabled to furnish it to me.
"'Very truly, etc.,
"'MARK TWAIN,
"'For James W. N-----, U. S. Senator.'

"There--now what do you think of that?"

"Well, I don't know, sir. It--well, it appears to me--to be dubious
enough."

"Du--leave the house! I am a ruined man. Those Humboldt savages never
will forgive me for tangling their brains up with this inhuman letter.
I have lost the respect of the Methodist Church, the board of aldermen--"

"Well, I haven't anything to say about that, because I may have missed it
a little in their cases, but I was too many for the Baldwin's Ranch
people, General!"

"Leave the house! Leave it forever and forever, too."

I regarded that as a sort of covert intimation that my service could be
dispensed with, and so I resigned. I never will be a private secretary
to a senator again. You can't please that kind of people. They don't
know anything. They can't appreciate a party's efforts.

A FASHION ITEM--[Written about 1867.]

At General G----'s reception the other night, the most fashionably
dressed lady was Mrs. G. C. She wore a pink satin dress, plain in front
but with a good deal of rake to it--to the train, I mean; it was said to
be two or three yards long. One could see it creeping along the floor
some little time after the woman was gone. Mrs. C. wore also a white
bodice, cut bias, with Pompadour sleeves, flounced with ruches; low neck,
with the inside handkerchief not visible, with white kid gloves. She had
on a pearl necklace, which glinted lonely, high up the midst of that
barren waste of neck and shoulders. Her hair was frizzled into a tangled
chaparral, forward of her ears, aft it was drawn together, and compactly
bound and plaited into a stump like a pony's tail, and furthermore was
canted upward at a sharp angle, and ingeniously supported by a red