d round and exposing it in different lights.

Unmailed Answer:

DEAR SIR,--What is the trouble with you? If it is your viscera, you
cannot have them taken out and reorganized a moment too soon. I mean,
if they are inside. But if you are composed of them, that is another
matter. Is it your brain? But it could not be your brain. Possibly it is
your skull: you want to look out for that. Some people, when they get an
idea, it pries the structure apart. Your system of notation has got in
there, and couldn't find room, without a doubt that is what the trouble
is. Your skull was not made to put ideas in, it was made to throw
potatoes at.

Yours Truly.

Mailed Answer:

DEAR SIR,--Come, come--take a walk; you disturb the children.

Yours Truly.

There was a day, now happily nearly over, when certain newspapers made a
practice of inviting men distinguished in any walk of life to give their
time and effort without charge to express themselves on some subject of
the day, or perhaps they were asked to send their favorite passages in
prose or verse, with the reasons why. Such symposiums were "features"
that cost the newspapers only the writing of a number of letters,
stationery, and postage. To one such invitation Mark Twain wrote two
replies. They follow herewith:

Unmailed Answer:

DEAR SIR,--I have received your proposition--which you have imitated
from a pauper London periodical which had previously imitated the idea
of this sort of mendicancy from seventh-rate American journalism, where
it originated as a variation of the inexpensive "interview."

Why do you buy Associated Press dispatches? To make your paper the
more salable, you answer. But why don't you try to beg them? Why do
you discriminate? I can sell my stuff; why should I give it to you? Why
don't you ask me for a shirt? What is the difference between asking me
for the worth of a shirt and asking me for the shirt itself? Perhaps you
didn't know you were begging. I would not use that argument--it makes
the user a fool. The passage of poetry--or prose, if you will--which
has taken deepest root in my thought, and which I oftenest return to and
dwell upon with keenest no matter what, is this: That the proper place
for journalists who solicit literary charity is on the street corner
with their hats in their hands.