just what to do, but I will reflect, and not quit this great
study rashly. He was great, in his day, and to his proper audience; and
so was God in Jewish times, for that matter, but why should either
of them rank high now? And do they?--honest, now, do they? Dam'd if I
believe it.

My, I wish I could see you and Leigh Hunt!

Sincerely Yours
S. L. CLEMENS.

*****

To Brander Matthews, in New York:

RIVERDALE, May 8,'03 (Mailed June, 1910).

DEAR BRANDER,--I'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dulness
since I broke into Sir Walter and lost my temper. I finished Guy
Mannering--that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows
jabbering around a single flesh-and-blood being--Dinmont; a book crazily
put together out of the very refuse of the romance-artist's stage
properties--finished it and took up Quentin Durward, and finished that.

It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living: it was like
withdrawing from the infant class in the College of journalism to sit
under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University.

I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward?

Yrs ever
MARK.

In 1903, preparations were going on for a great world's fair, to be
held in St. Louis, and among other features proposed was a World's
Literary Convention, with a week to be set apart in honor of Mark
Twain, and a special Mark Twain Day in it, on which the National
Association would hold grand services in honor of the distinguished
Missourian. A letter asking his consent to the plan brought the
following reply.

*****

To T. F. Gatts, of Missouri:

NEW YORK, May 30, 1903.

DEAR MR. GATTS,--It is indeed a high compliment which you offer me in
naming an association after me and in proposing the setting apart of a
Mark Twain day at the great St. Louis fair, but such compliments are
not proper for the living; they are proper and safe for the dead only. I
value the impulse which moves you to tender me these honors. I value it
as highly as any one can, and am grateful for it, but I should stand in
a sort of terror of the honors themselves. So long as we remain alive we
are not safe from doing things which, however righteously an