s and my old Captain.

The hypnotist thinks he has invented a new thing--suggestion. This is
very sad. I don't know where my captain got his kerosene idea. (It was
forty-one years ago, and he is long ago dead.) But I know that it
didn't originate in his head, but it was born from a suggestion from the
outside.

Yesterday a guest said, "How did you come to think of writing 'The
Prince and the Pauper?'" I didn't. The thought came to me from the
outside--suggested by that pleasant and picturesque little history-book,
Charlotte M. Yonge's "Little Duke," I doubt if Mrs. Burnett knows whence
came to her the suggestion to write "Little Lord Fauntleroy," but I
know; it came to her from reading "The Prince and the Pauper." In all my
life I have never originated an idea, and neither has she, nor anybody
else.

Man's mind is a clever machine, and can work up materials into ingenious
fancies and ideas, but it can't create the material; none but the gods
can do that. In Sweden I saw a vast machine receive a block of wood, and
turn it into marketable matches in two minutes. It could do everything
but make the wood. That is the kind of machine the human mind is. Maybe
this is not a large compliment, but it is all I can afford.....

Your friend and well-wisher
S. L. CLEMENS.

*****

To Mrs. H. H. Rogers, in Fair Hawn, Mass.:

REDDING, CONN, Aug. 12, 1908.

DEAR MRS. ROGERS, I believe I am the wellest man on the planet to-day,
and good for a trip to Fair Haven (which I discussed with the Captain
of the New Bedford boat, who pleasantly accosted me in the Grand Central
August 5) but the doctor came up from New York day before yesterday, and
gave positive orders that I must not stir from here before frost. It is
because I was threatened with a swoon, 10 or 12 days ago, and went
to New York a day or two later to attend my nephew's funeral and got
horribly exhausted by the heat and came back here and had a bilious
collapse. In 24 hours I was as sound as a nut again, but nobody believes
it but me.

This is a prodigiously satisfactory place, and I am so glad I don't have
to go back to the turmoil and rush of New York. The house stands high
and the horizons are wide, yet the seclusion is perfect. The nearest
public road is half a mile away, so there is nobody to look in, and I
don't have to wear clothes if I don't want to