say it over again to make you understand.  This kind of thing goes on all the rest of the evening; nobody can interest you in anything; you are useless, a depressing influence, a burden.  You go to bed at last; but at three in the morning you are as wide awake as you were in the beginning.  Thus we see what you have been doing for nine hours—­on the outside.  But what were you doing on the inside?  You were writing letters—­in your mind.  And enjoying it, that is quite true; that is not to be denied.  You have been flaying your correspondent alive with your incorporeal pen; you have been braining him, disemboweling him, carving him into little bits, and then—­doing it all over again.  For nine hours.

It was wasted time, for you had no intention of putting any of this insanity on paper and mailing it.  Yes, you know that, and confess it—­but what were you to do?  Where was your remedy?  Will anybody contend that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, Go, and be obeyed?

No, he cannot; that is certainly true.  Well, then, what is he to do?  I will explain by the suggestion contained in my opening paragraph.  During the nine hours he has written as many as forty- seven furious letters—­in his mind.  If he had put just one of them on paper it would have brought him relief, saved him eight hours of trouble, and given him an hour’s red-hot pleasure besides.

He is not to mail this letter; he understands that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no harm.  He is only writing it to get the bile out.  So to speak, he is a volcano:  imaging himself erupting does no good; he must open up his crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he would get relief.

    Before he has filled his first sheet sometimes the relief is there. 
    He degenerates into good-nature from that point.

Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one writes as many as three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a very angry one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot embers in it here and there.  He pigeonholes these and then does one of two things—­dismisses the whole matter from his mind or writes the proper sort of letter and mails it.

To this day I lose my balance and send an overwarm letter—­or more frequently telegram—­two or three times a year.  But that is better than doing it a hundred times a year, as I used to do years ago.  Perhaps I write about as many as ever, but I pigeonhole them.  They ought not to be thrown away.  Such a letter a year or so old is as good as a sermon to the maw who wrote it.  It makes him feel small and shabby, but—­well, that wears off.  Any sermon does; but the sermon does some little good, anyway.  An old cold letter like that makes you wonder how you could ever have got into such a rage about nothing.

The unmailed answers that were to accompany this introduction were plentiful enough and generally of a fervent sort.  One specimen will suffice.  It was written to the chairman of a hospital committee.