any
comment of the press. His strong sense of humor, and still stronger
sense of human weakness, caused him to overlook many things which another
might regard as an affront; but if the thing printed were merely an
uncalled-for slur, an inexcusable imputation, he was inclined to rage and
plan violence. Sometimes he conceived retribution in the form of libel
suits with heavy damages. Sometimes he wrote blasting answers, which
Mrs. Clemens would not let him print.

At one time he planned a biography of a certain editor who seemed to be
making a deliberate personal campaign against his happiness. Clemens had
heard that offending items were being printed in this man's paper;
friends, reporting with customary exaggeration, declared that these
sneers and brutalities appeared almost daily, so often as to cause
general remark.

This was enough. He promptly began to collect data--damaging data
--relating to that editor's past history. He even set a man to work in
England collecting information concerning his victim. One of his
notebooks contains the memoranda; a few items will show how terrific was
to be the onslaught.

When the naturalist finds a new kind of animal, he writes him up in
the interest of science. No matter if it is an unpleasant animal.
This is a new kind of animal, and in the cause of society must be
written up. He is the polecat of our species . . . . He is
purely and simply a Guiteau with the courage left out . . . .

Steel portraits of him as a sort of idiot, from infancy up--to a
dozen scattered through the book--all should resemble him.

But never mind the rest. When he had got thoroughly interested in his
project Mrs. Clemens, who had allowed the cyclone to wear itself out a
little with its own vehemence, suggested that perhaps it would be well to
have some one make an examination of the files of the paper and see just
what had been said of him. So he subscribed for the paper himself and
set a man to work on the back numbers. We will let him tell the
conclusion of the matter himself, in his report of it to Howells:

The result arrived from my New York man this morning. Oh, what a
pitiable wreck of high hopes! The "almost daily" assaults for two
months consist of (1) adverse criticism of P. & P. from an enraged
idiot in the London Athenaeum, (2) paragraphs from some indignant
Englishman in the Pall Mall Gazette, who pays me the vast compliment
of grav