The newspaper custom of shooting a man in the back and then calling upon him to come out in a card and prove that he was not engaged in any infamy at the time is a good enough custom for those who think it justifiable.  Your correspondent is not stupid, I judge, but purely and simply malicious.  He knew there was not the shadow of a suggestion, from the beginning to the end of “A Curious Episode,” that the story was an invention; he knew he had no warrant for trying to persuade the public that I had stolen the narrative and was endeavoring to palm it off as a piece of literary invention; he also knew that he was asking his closing question with a base motive, else he would have asked it of me by letter, not spread it before the public.

I have never wronged you in any way, and I think you had no right to print that communication; no right, neither any excuse.  As to publicly answering that correspondent, I would as soon think of bandying words in public with any other prostitute.

The editor replied in a manly, frank acknowledgment of error.  He had not looked up the article itself in the Century before printing the communication.

    “Your letter has taught me a lesson,” he said.  “The blame belongs
    to me for not hunting up the proofs.  Please accept my apology.”

Mark Twain was likely to be peculiarly sensitive to printed innuendos.  Not always.  Sometimes he would only laugh at them or be wholly indifferent.  Indeed, in his later years, he seldom cared to read anything about himself, one way or the other, but at the time of which we are now writing—­the period of the early eighties—­he was alive to any comment of the press.  His strong sense of humor, and still stronger sense of human weakness, caused him to overlook many things which another might regard as an affront; but if the thing printed were merely an uncalled-for slur, an inexcusable imputation, he was inclined to rage and plan violence.  Sometimes he conceived retribution in the form of libel suits with heavy damages.  Sometimes he wrote blasting answers, which Mrs. Clemens would not let him print.

At one time he planned a biography of a certain editor who seemed to be making a deliberate personal campaign against his happiness.  Clemens had heard that offending items were being printed in this man’s paper; friends, reporting with customary exaggeration, declared that these sneers and brutalities appeared almost daily, so often as to cause general remark.

This was enough.  He promptly began to collect data—­damaging data —­relating to that editor’s past history.  He even set a man to work in England collecting information concerning his victim.  One of his notebooks contains the memoranda; a few items will show how terrific was to be the onslaught.