ussia from limit to limit with bereaved fathers and mothers
and brothers and sisters who secretly hate the perpetrator of this
prodigious crime and hunger and thirst for his life? Do you not believe
that if your wife or your child or your father was exiled to the mines
of Siberia for some trivial utterances wrung from a smarting spirit by
the Czar's intolerable tyranny, and you got a chance to kill him and did
not do it, that you would always be ashamed to be in your own society
the rest of your life? Suppose that that refined and lovely Russian lady
who was lately stripped bare before a brutal soldiery and whipped to
death by the Czar's hand in the person of the Czar's creature had been
your wife, or your daughter or your sister, and to-day the Czar should
pass within reach of your hand, how would you feel--and what would you
do? Consider, that all over vast Russia, from boundary to boundary,
a myriad of eyes filled with tears when that piteous news came, and
through those tears that myriad of eyes saw, not that poor lady, but
lost darlings of their own whose fate her fate brought back with new
access of grief out of a black and bitter past never to be forgotten or
forgiven.

If I am a Swinburnian--and clear to the marrow I am--I hold human nature
in sufficient honor to believe there are eighty million mute Russians
that are of the same stripe, and only one Russian family that isn't.

MARK TWAIN.

Type-setter matters were going badly. Clemens still had faith in
Jones, and he had lost no grain of faith in the machine. The money
situation, however, was troublesome. With an expensive
establishment, and work of one sort or another still to be done on
the machine, his income would not reach. Perhaps Goodman had
already given up hope, for he does not seem to have returned from
California after the next letter was written--a colorless letter
--in which we feel a note of resignation. The last few lines are
sufficient.

*****

To Joe T. Goodman, in California:

DEAR JOE,--...... I wish you could get a day off and make those two or
three Californians buy those privileges, for I'm going to need money
before long.

I don't know where the Senator is; but out on the Coast I reckon.

I guess we've got a perfect machine at last. We never break a type, now,
and the new device for enabling the operator to touch the last letters
a