I have just finished an article of this kind, and it satisfies me
entirely. It does my weather-beaten soul good to read it, and
admire the trouble it would make for me and the family. I will
leave it behind and utter it from the grave. There is a free speech
there, and no harm to the family.

It is too late and too soon to print most of these things; too late
to print them for their salutary influence, too soon to print them as
literature.

He was interested in everything: in music, as little as he knew of it.
He had an ear for melody, a dramatic vision, and the poetic conception
of sound. Reading some lilting lyric, he could fancy the words marching
to melody, and would cast about among his friends for some one who
could supply a tuneful setting. Once he wrote to his friend the Rev.
Dr. Parker, who was a skilled musician, urging him to write a score for
Tennyson's "Bugle Song," outlining an attractive scheme for it which the
order of his fancy had formulated. Dr. Parker replied that the "Bugle
Song," often attempted, had been the despair of many musicians.

He was interested in business affairs. Already, before the European
trip, he had embarked in, and disembarked from, a number of pecuniary
ventures. He had not been satisfied with a strictly literary income. The
old tendency to speculative investment, acquired during those restless
mining days, always possessed him. There were no silver mines in the
East, no holes in the ground into which to empty money and effort; but
there were plenty of equivalents--inventions, stock companies, and the
like. He had begun by putting five thousand dollars into the American
Publishing Company; but that was a sound and profitable venture, and
deserves to be remembered for that reason.

Then a man came along with a patent steam generator which would save
ninety per cent. of the fuel energy, or some such amount, and Mark Twain
was early persuaded that it would revolutionize the steam manufactures
of the world; so he put in whatever bank surplus he had and bade it a
permanent good-by.

Following the steam generator came a steam pulley, a rather small
contrivance, but it succeeded in extracting thirty-two thousand dollars
from his bank account in a period of sixteen months.

By the time he had accumulated a fresh balance, a new method of marine
telegraphy was shown him, so he used it up on that, twenty-five thousand
dollars being the price of this adventure.

A