Our marvelous latter-day statesmanship has invented universal suffrage.  That is the finest feather in our cap.  All that we require of a voter is that he shall be forked, wear pantaloons instead of petticoats, and bear a more or less humorous resemblance to the reported image of God.  He need not know anything whatever; he may be wholly useless and a cumberer of the earth; he may even be known to be a consummate scoundrel.  No matter.  While he can steer clear of the penitentiary his vote is as weighty as the vote of a president, a bishop, a college professor, a merchant prince.  We brag of our universal, unrestricted suffrage; but we are shams after all, for we restrict when we come to the women.

The Monday Evening Club was an organization which included the best minds of Hartford.  Dr. Horace Bushnell, Prof.  Calvin E. Stowe, and J. Hammond Trumbull founded it back in the sixties, and it included such men as Rev. Dr. Parker, Rev. Dr. Burton, Charles H. Clark, of the Courant, Warner, and Twichell, with others of their kind.  Clemens had been elected after his first sojourn in England (February, 1873), and had then read a paper on the “License of the Press.”  The club met alternate Mondays, from October to May.  There was one paper for each evening, and, after the usual fashion of such clubs, the reading was followed by discussion.  Members of that time agree that Mark Twain’s association with the club had a tendency to give it a life, or at least an exhilaration, which it had not previously known.  His papers were serious in their purpose he always preferred to be serious—­but they evidenced the magic gift which made whatever he touched turn to literary jewelry.

Psychic theories and phenomena always attracted Mark Twain.  In thought-transference, especially, he had a frank interest—­an interest awakened and kept alive by certain phenomena—­psychic manifestations we call them now.  In his association with Mrs. Clemens it not infrequently happened that one spoke the other’s thought, or perhaps a long-procrastinated letter to a friend would bring an answer as quickly as mailed; but these are things familiar to us all.  A more startling example of thought-communication developed at the time of which we are writing, an example which raised to a fever-point whatever interest he may have had in the subject before. (He was always having these vehement interests—­rages we may call them, for it would be inadequate to speak of them as fads, inasmuch as they tended in the direction of human enlightenment, or progress, or reform.)

Clemens one morning was lying in bed when, as he says, “suddenly a red-hot new idea came whistling down into my camp.”  The idea was that the time was ripe for a book that would tell the story of the Comstock-of the Nevada silver mines.  It seemed to him that the person best qualified for the work was his old friend William Wright—­Dan de Quille.  He had not heard from Dan, or of him,