find that I've been at it, off & on, nearly two hours for 155 days
since January 9. To be exact, I've dictated 75 hours in 80 days &
loafed 75 days. I've added 60,000 words in the month that I've been
here; which indicates that I've dictated during 20 days of that
time--40 hours, at an average of 1,500 words an hour. It's a
plenty, & I'm satisfied.

There's a good deal of "fat." I've dictated (from January 9)
210,000 words, & the "fat" adds about 50,000 more.

The "fat" is old pigeonholed things of the years gone by which I or
editors didn't das't to print. For instance, I am dumping in the
little old book which I read to you in Hartford about 30 years ago &
which you said "publish & ask Dean Stanley to furnish an
introduction; he'll do it" (Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven).
It reads quite to suit me without altering a word now that it isn't
to see print until I am dead.

To-morrow I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs &
assigns burned alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D.
2006--which I judge they won't. There'll be lots of such chapters
if I live 3 or 4 years longer. The edition of A.D. 2006 will make a
stir when it comes out. I shall be hovering around taking notice,
along with other dead pals. You are invited.

The chapter which was to invite death at the stake for his successors was
naturally one of religious heresies a violent attack on the orthodox,
scriptural God, but really an expression of the highest reverence for the
God which, as he said, had created the earth and sky and the music of the
constellations. Mark Twain once expressed himself concerning reverence
and the lack of it:

"I was never consciously and purposely irreverent in my life, yet one
person or another is always charging me with a lack of reverence.
Reverence for what--for whom? Who is to decide what ought to command my
reverence--my neighbor or I? I think I ought to do the electing myself.
The Mohammedan reveres Mohammed--it is his privilege; the Christian
doesn't--apparently that is his privilege; the account is square enough.
They haven't any right to complain of the other, yet they do complain of
each other, and that is where the unfairness comes in. Each says that
the other is irreverent, and both are mistaken, for manifestly you can't
have reverence for a thing that doesn't command it. If you could do that
you could diges