n's. No, there is a difference. I could read
his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It
seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.

Another thing: you grant that God and circumstances sinned against Poe,
but you also grant that he sinned against himself--a thing which he
couldn't do and didn't do.

It is lively up here now. I wish you could come.

Yrs ever,
MARK

*****

To W. D. Howells, in New York:

STORMFIELD, REDDING, CONNECTICUT,
3 in the morning, Apl. 17, '09.
[Written with pencil].

My pen has gone dry and the ink is out of reach. Howells, Did you write
me day-before-day before yesterday, or did I dream it? In my mind's
eye I most vividly see your hand-write on a square blue envelop in the
mailpile. I have hunted the house over, but there is no such letter. Was
it an illusion?

I am reading Lowell's letter, and smoking. I woke an hour ago and am
reading to keep from wasting the time. On page 305, vol. I. I have just
margined a note:

"Young friend! I like that! You ought to see him now."

It seemed startlingly strange to hear a person call you young. It was a
brick out of a blue sky, and knocked me groggy for a moment. Ah me, the
pathos of it is, that we were young then. And he--why, so was he, but
he didn't know it. He didn't even know it 9 years later, when we saw him
approaching and you warned me, saying, "Don't say anything about age--he
has just turned fifty, and thinks he is old and broods over it."

[Well, Clara did sing! And you wrote her a dear letter.]

Time to go to sleep.

Yours ever,
MARK.

*****

To Daniel Kiefer:

[No date.]

DANL KIEFER ESQ. DEAR SIR,--I should be far from willing to have a
political party named after me.

I would not be willing to belong to a party which allowed its members
to have political aspirations or to push friends forward for political
preferment.

Yours very truly,
S. L. CLEMENS.

The copyright extension, for which the author had been working so
long, was granted by Congress in 1909, largely as the r