Very sincerely yours,
ALLETTA F. DEAN.

Mark Twain to Miss Dean:

Don't you give that oesophagus away again or I'll never trust you
with another privacy!

So many wrote, that Clemens finally felt called upon to make
public confession, and as one searching letter had been mailed from
Springfield, Massachusetts, he made his reply through the Republican of
that city. After some opening comment he said:

I published a short story lately & it was in that that I put the
oesophagus. I will say privately that I expected it to bother some
people--in fact, that was the intention--but the harvest has been
larger than I was calculating upon. The oesophagus has gathered in
the guilty and the innocent alike, whereas I was only fishing for
the innocent--the innocent and confiding.

He quoted a letter from a schoolmaster in the Philippines who thought
the passage beautiful with the exception of the curious creature which
"slept upon motionless wings." Said Clemens:

Do you notice? Nothing in the paragraph disturbed him but that one
word. It shows that that paragraph was most ably constructed for
the deception it was intended to put upon the reader. It was my
intention that it should read plausibly, and it is now plain that it
does; it was my intention that it should be emotional and touching,
and you see yourself that it fetched this public instructor. Alas!
if I had but left that one treacherous word out I should have
scored, scored everywhere, and the paragraph would have slidden
through every reader's sensibilities like oil and left not a
suspicion behind.

The other sample inquiry is from a professor in a New England
university. It contains one naughty word (which I cannot bear to
suppress), but he is not in the theological department, so it is no
harm:

"DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--'Far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus
slept upon motionless wing.'

"It is not often I get a chance to read much periodical literature,
but I have just gone through at this belated period, with much
gratification and edification, your 'Double-Barrelled Detective
Story.'

"But what in hell is an oesophagus? I keep one myself, but it never
sleeps in the air or anywhere else. My profession is to deal with
words, and oesophagus interested me the moment I lighted upon it.