ion
as a successful author and publisher--a man of wealth and revenues--had
penetrated even the dimness of the British Tax Offices. A formidable
envelope came, inclosing a letter from his London publishers and a very
large printed document all about the income tax which the Queen's
officers had levied upon his English royalties as the result of a report
that he had taken Buckenham Hall, Norwich, for a year, and was to become
an English resident. The matter amused and interested him. To Chatto &
Windus he wrote:

I will explain that all that about Buckenham Hall was an English
newspaper's mistake. I was not in England, and if I had been I
wouldn't have been at Buckenham Hall anyway, but Buckingham Palace,
or I would have endeavored to have found out the reason why . . .

But we won't resist. We'll pay as if I were really a resident. The
country that allows me copyright has a right to tax me.

Reflecting on the matter, Clemens decided to make literature of it. He
conceived the notion of writing an open letter to the Queen in the
character of a rambling, garrulous, but well-disposed countryman whose
idea was that her Majesty conducted all the business of the empire
herself. He began:

HARTFORD, November 6, 2887.

MADAM, You will remember that last May Mr. Edward Bright, the clerk
of the Inland Revenue Office, wrote me about a tax which he said was
due from me to the Government on books of mine published in London
--that is to say, an income tax on the royalties. I do not know Mr.
Bright, and it is embarrassing to me to correspond with strangers,
for I was raised in the country and have always lived there, the
early part in Marion County, Missouri, before the war, and this part
in Hartford County, Connecticut, near Bloomfield and about 8 miles
this side of Farmington, though some call it 9, which it is
impossible to be, for I have walked it many and many a time in
considerably under three hours, and General Hawley says he has done
it in two and a quarter, which is not likely; so it has seemed best
that I write your Majesty.

The letter proceeded to explain that he had never met her Majesty
personally, but that he once met her son, the Prince of Wales, in Oxford
Street, at the head of a procession, while he himself was on the top of
an omnibus. He thought the Prince would probably remember him on account
of a gray coat wit