now & ever, Amen."

(After a pause.) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it,
speak!--the messenger of the Most High waits."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It was believed, afterward, that the man was a lunatic, because
there was no sense in what he said.

To Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the "War Prayer,"
stating that he had read it to his daughter Jean, and others, who had
told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege.

"Still you--are going to publish it, are you not?"

Clemens, pacing up and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers,
shook his head.

"No," he said, "I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men
can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead."

He did not care to invite the public verdict that he was a lunatic, or
even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions and traditions and
conclusions of mankind. To Twichell he wrote, playfully but sincerely:

Am I honest? I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. For
seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I ought
to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other difficult
duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one. Yes, even I
am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is.
We are certainly all honest in one or several ways--every man in the
world--though I have a reason to think I am the only one whose blacklist
runs so light. Sometimes I feel lonely enough in this lofty solitude.

It was his Gospel he referred to as his unpublished book, his doctrine of
Selfishness, and of Man the irresponsible Machine. To Twichell he
pretended to favor war, which he declared, to his mind, was one of the
very best methods known of diminishing the human race.

What a life it is!--this one! Everything we try to do, somebody intrudes
& obstructs it. After years of thought & labor I have arrived within one
little bit of a step of perfecting my invention for exhausting the oxygen
in the globe's air during a stretch of two minutes, & of course along
comes an obstructor who is inventing something to protect human life.
Damn such a world anyway.

He generally wrote Twichell when he had things to say that were outside
of the pale of print. He was sure of an attentive audience of one, and
the audience, whether it agreed with him or not, would at least
unde