Dear sir,—­If I were Smithfield I would certainly go out and get behind something and blush.  According to your report, “the politicians are afraid to tax the people for the support” of so humane and necessary a thing as a hospital.  And do your “people” propose to stand that?—­at the hands of vermin officials whom the breath of their votes could blow out of official existence in a moment if they had the pluck to band themselves together and blow.  Oh, come, these are not “people”—­they are cowed school-boys with backbones made of boiled macaroni.  If you are not misreporting those “people” you are just in the right business passing the mendicant hat for them.  Dear sir, communities where anything like citizenship exists are accustomed to hide their shames, but here we have one proposing to get up a great “exposition” of its dishonor and advertise it all it can.

    It has been eleven years since I wrote anything for one of those
    graveyards called a “Fair paper,” and so I have doubtless lost the
    knack of it somewhat; still I have done the best I could for you.

    This was from a burning heart and well deserved.  One may almost
    regret that he did not send it.

Once he received a letter intended for one Samuel Clements, of Elma, New York, announcing that the said Clements’s pension had been allowed.  But this was amusing.  When Clemens had forwarded the notice to its proper destination he could not resist sending this comment to the commissioner at Washington: 

Dear sir,—­I have not applied for a pension.  I have often wanted a pension—­often—­ever so often—­I may say, but in as much as the only military service I performed during the war was in the Confederate army, I have always felt a delicacy about asking you for it.  However, since you have suggested the thing yourself, I feel strengthened.  I haven’t any very pensionable diseases myself, but I can furnish a substitute—­a man who is just simply a chaos, a museum of all the different kinds of aches and pains, fractures, dislocations and malformations there are; a man who would regard “rheumatism and sore eyes” as mere recreation and refreshment after the serious occupations of his day.  If you grant me the pension, dear sir, please hand it to General Jos.  Hawley, United States Senator—­I mean hand him the certificate, not the money, and he will forward it to me.  You will observe by this postal-card which I inclose that he takes a friendly interest in the matter.  He thinks I’ve already got the pension, whereas I’ve only got the rheumatism; but didn’t want that—­I had that before.  I wish it were catching.  I know a man that I would load up with it pretty early.  Lord, but we all feel that way sometimes.  I’ve seen the day when but never mind that; you may be busy; just hand it to Hawley—­the certificate, you understand, is not transferable.

Clemens was in good standing at Washington during the Cleveland administration, and many letters came, asking him to use his influence with the President to obtain this or that favor.  He always declined, though once—­a few years later, in Europe—­when he learned that Frank Mason, consul-general at Frankfort, was about to be displaced, Clemens, of his own accord, wrote to Baby Ruth Cleveland about it.