greatly pleased and asked:

"Who gets the extra one?"
"Widows and orphans."

"A good idea, too. Why didn't you take thirteen?"

"It would have been wrong; a crime, in fact-theft and extortion."

"What is the one-third extra--the odd melon--the same?"

It caused him to reflect. But there was no result.

The justice of the peace was a stern man. On the trial he found
fault with the scheme and required us to explain upon what we based
our strange conduct--as he called it. The understudy said:

"On the custom of the niggers. They all do it."--[The point had
been made by the board that it was the Chinese custom to make the
inhabitants of a village responsible for individual crimes; and
custom, likewise, to collect a third in excess of the damage, such
surplus having been applied to the support of widows and orphans of
the slain converts.]

The justice forgot his dignity and descended to sarcasm.

"Custom of the niggers! Are our morals so inadequate that we have
to borrow of niggers?"

Then he said to the jury: "Three melons were owing; they were
collected from persons not proven to owe them: this is theft; they
were collected by compulsion: this is extortion. A melon was added
for the widows and orphans. It was owed by no one. It is another
theft, another extortion. Return it whence it came, with the
others. It is not permissible here to apply to any purpose goods
dishonestly obtained; not even to the feeding of widows and orphans,
for this would be to put a shame upon charity and dishonor it."

He said it in open court, before everybody, and to me it did not
seem very kind.

It was in the midst of the tumult that Clemens, perhaps feeling the need
of sacred melody, wrote to Andrew Carnegie:

DEAR SIR & FRIEND,--You seem to be in prosperity. Could you lend an
admirer $1.50 to buy a hymn-book with? God will bless you. I feel it; I
know it.

N. B.--If there should be other applications, this one not to count.

Yours, MARK.

P. S.-Don't send the hymn-book; send the money; I want to make the
selection myself.

Carnegie answered:

Nothing less than a two-dollar & a half hymn-book gilt will do for
you. Your place in the choir (celestial) demands that & you shall
have it.

There's a new Gospel of Saint Mark in the North American which I
like better than anything I've read for ma