The warm light and luxury of this paragraph are factitious.  The careful reader will, note that its various accessories are ridiculously associated, and only the most careless reader will accept the oesophagus as a bird.  But it disturbed a great many admirers, and numerous letters of inquiry came wanting to know what it was all about.  Some suspected the joke and taunted him with it; one such correspondent wrote: 

My dear Mark Twain,—­Reading your “Double-Barrelled Detective Story” in the January Harper’s late one night I came to the paragraph where you so beautifully describe “a crisp and spicy morning in early October.”  I read along down the paragraph, conscious only of its woozy sound, until I brought up with a start against your oesophagus in the empty sky.  Then I read the paragraph again.  Oh, Mark Twain!  Mark Twain!  How could you do it?  Put a trap like that into the midst of a tragical story?  Do serenity and peace brood over you after you have done such a thing?

Who lit the lilacs, and which end up do they hang?  When did larches begin to flame, and who set out the pomegranates in that canyon?  What are deciduous flowers, and do they always “bloom in the fall, tra la”?

I have been making myself obnoxious to various people by demanding their opinion of that paragraph without telling them the name of the author.  They say, “Very well done.”  “The alliteration is so pretty.”  “What’s an oesophagus, a bird?” “What’s it all mean, anyway?” I tell them it means Mark Twain, and that an oesophagus is a kind of swallow.  Am I right?  Or is it a gull?  Or a gullet?

Hereafter if you must write such things won’t you please be so kind
as to label them? 
Very sincerely yours,
ALLETTA F. Dean.

Mark Twain to Miss Dean: 

Don’t you give that oesophagus away again or I’ll never trust you
with another privacy!

So many wrote, that Clemens finally felt called upon to make public confession, and as one searching letter had been mailed from Springfield, Massachusetts, he made his reply through the Republican of that city.  After some opening comment he said: 

I published a short story lately & it was in that that I put the oesophagus.  I will say privately that I expected it to bother some people—­in fact, that was the intention—­but the harvest has been larger than I was calculating upon.  The oesophagus has gathered in the guilty and the innocent alike, whereas I was only fishing for the innocent—­the innocent and confiding.

He quoted a letter from a schoolmaster in the Philippines who thought the passage beautiful with the exception of the curious creature which “slept upon motionless wings.”  Said Clemens: