A HELPLESS SITUATION

Once or twice a year I get a letter of a certain pattern, a pattern that never materially changes, in form and substance, yet I cannot get used to that letter—­it always astonishes me.  It affects me as the locomotive always affects me:  I saw to myself, “I have seen you a thousand times, you always look the same way, yet you are always a wonder, and you are always impossible; to contrive you is clearly beyond human genius—­you can’t exist, you don’t exist, yet here you are!”

I have a letter of that kind by me, a very old one.  I yearn to print it, and where is the harm?  The writer of it is dead years ago, no doubt, and if I conceal her name and address—­her this-world address —­I am sure her shade will not mind.  And with it I wish to print the answer which I wrote at the time but probably did not send.  If it went—­which is not likely—­it went in the form of a copy, for I find the original still here, pigeonholed with the said letter.  To that kind of letters we all write answers which we do not send, fearing to hurt where we have no desire to hurt; I have done it many a time, and this is doubtless a case of the sort.

THE LETTER

X------, California, June 3, 1879.

Mr. S. L. Clemens, Hartford, Conn.: 

Dear Sir,—­You will doubtless be surprised to know who has presumed to write and ask a favor of you.  Let your memory go back to your days in the Humboldt mines—­’62-’63.  You will remember, you and Clagett and Oliver and the old blacksmith Tillou lived in a lean-to which was half-way up the gulch, and there were six log cabins in the camp —­strung pretty well separated up the gulch from its mouth at the desert to where the last claim was, at the divide.  The lean-to you lived in was the one with a canvas roof that the cow fell down through one night, as told about by you in ROUGHING it—­my uncle Simmons remembers it very well.  He lived in the principal cabin, half-way up the divide, along with Dixon and Parker and Smith.  It had two rooms, one for kitchen and the other for bunks, and was the only one that had.  You and your party were there on the great night, the time they had dried-apple-pie, Uncle Simmons often speaks of it.  It seems curious that dried-apple-pie should have seemed such a great thing, but it was, and it shows how far Humboldt was out of the world and difficult to get to, and how slim the regular bill of fare was.  Sixteen years ago—­it is a long time.  I was a little girl then, only fourteen.  I never saw you, I lived in Washoe.  But Uncle Simmons ran across you every now and then, all during those weeks that you and party were there working your claim which was like the rest.  The camp played out long and long ago, there wasn’t silver enough in it to make a button.  You never saw my husband, but he was there after you left, and