A letter which he wrote to J. Howard Moore concerning his book The Universal Kinship was of this period, and seems to belong here.

Dear Mr. Moore, The book has furnished me several days of deep pleasure & satisfaction; it has compelled my gratitude at the same time, since it saves me the labor of stating my own long-cherished opinions & reflections & resentments by doing it lucidly & fervently & irascibly for me.

There is one thing that always puzzles me:  as inheritors of the mentality of our reptile ancestors we have improved the inheritance by a thousand grades; but in the matter of the morals which they left us we have gone backward as many grades.  That evolution is strange & to me unaccountable & unnatural.  Necessarily we started equipped with their perfect and blemishless morals; now we are wholly destitute; we have no real morals, but only artificial ones —­morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural & healthy instincts.  Yes, we are a sufficiently comical invention, we humans.

              Sincerely yours,
                                S. L. Clemens.

CCLIII

AN EVENING WITH HELEN KELLER

I recall two pleasant social events of that winter:  one a little party given at the Clemenses’ home on New-Year’s Eve, with charades and story-telling and music.  It was the music feature of this party that was distinctive; it was supplied by wire through an invention known as the telharmonium which, it was believed, would revolutionize musical entertainment in such places as hotels, and to some extent in private houses.  The music came over the regular telephone wire, and was delivered through a series of horns or megaphones—­similar to those used for phonographs—­the playing being done, meanwhile, by skilled performers at the central station.  Just why the telharmonium has not made good its promises of popularity I do not know.  Clemens was filled with enthusiasm over the idea.  He made a speech a little before midnight, in which he told how he had generally been enthusiastic about inventions which had turned out more or less well in about equal proportions.  He did not dwell on the failures, but he told how he had been the first to use a typewriter for manuscript work; how he had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen; how he had installed the first telephone ever used in a private house, and how the audience now would have a demonstration of the first telharmonium music so employed.  It was just about the stroke of midnight when he finished, and a moment later the horns began to play chimes and “Auld Lang Syne” and “America.”