My dear Howells,—­My sense of disgrace does not abate.  It grows.  I see that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies, a list of humiliations that extends back to when I was seven years old, and which keep on persecuting me regardless of my repentances.

I feel that my misfortune has injured me all over the country; therefore it will be best that I retire from before the public at present.  It will hurt the Atlantic for me to appear in its pages now.  So it is my opinion, and my wife’s, that the telephone story had better be suppressed.  Will you return those proofs or revises to me, so that I can use the same on some future occasion?

It seems as if I must have been insane when I wrote that speech and saw no harm in it, no disrespect toward those men whom I reverenced so much.  And what shame I brought upon you, after what you said in introducing me!  It burns me like fire to think of it.

    The whole matter is a dreadful subject.  Let me drop it here—­at
    least on paper.

Penitently yours, mark

So, all in a moment, his world had come to an end—­as it seemed.  But Howells’s letter, which came rushing back by first mail, brought hope.

“It was a fatality,” Howells said.  “One of those sorrows into which a man walks with his eyes wide open, no one knows why.”

Howells assured him that Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes would so consider it, beyond doubt; that Charles Eliot Norton had already expressed himself exactly in the right spirit concerning it.  Howells declared that there was no intention of dropping Mark Twain’s work from the Atlantic.

You are not going to be floored by it; there is more justice than that even in this world.  Especially as regards me, just call the sore spot well.  I can say more, and with better heart, in praise of your good feeling (which was what I always liked in you), since this thing happened than I could before.

It was agreed that he should at once write a letter to Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes, and he did write, laying his heart bare to them.  Longfellow and Holmes answered in a fine spirit of kindliness, and Miss Emerson wrote for her father in the same tone.  Emerson had not been offended, for he had not heard the speech, having arrived even then at that stage of semi-oblivion as to immediate things which eventually so completely shut him away.  Longfellow’s letter made light of the whole matter.  The newspapers, he said, had caused all the mischief.

A bit of humor at a dinner-table talk is one thing; a report of it in the morning papers is another.  One needs the lamplight and the scenery.  These failing, what was meant in jest assumes a serious aspect.

    I do not believe that anybody was much hurt.  Certainly I was not,
    and Holmes tells me that he was not.  So I think you may dismiss the
    matter from your mind, without further remorse.