My father, an old man, has been prevailed upon to read Roughing It (his usual amusement being found in theology), and after one evening spent with the book he declared:  “I am frightened.  It cannot be safe for a man at my time of life to laugh so much.”

What heaps of letters, by the way, remain from this time, and how curious some of them are!  Many of them are requests of one sort or another, chiefly for money—­one woman asking for a single day’s income, conservatively estimated at five thousand dollars.  Clemens seldom answered an unwarranted letter; but at one time he began a series of unmailed answers—­that is to say, answers in which he had let himself go merely to relieve his feelings and to restore his spiritual balance.  He prepared an introduction for this series.  In it he said: 

. . .  You receive a letter.  You read it.  It will be tolerably sure to produce one of three results:  1, pleasure; 2, displeasure; 3, indifference.  I do not need to say anything about Nos. 1 & 3; everybody knows what to do with those breeds of letters; it is breed No. 2 that I am after.  It is the one that is loaded up with trouble.

When you get an exasperating letter what happens?  If you are young you answer it promptly, instantly—­and mail the thing you have written.  At forty what do you do?  By that time you have found out that a letter written in a passion is a mistake in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred; that it usually wrongs two persons, and always wrongs one—­yourself.  You have grown weary of wronging yourself and repenting; so you manacle, you fetter, you log-chain the frantic impulse to write a pulverizing answer.  You will wait a day or die.  But in the mean time what do you do?  Why, if it is about dinner- time, you sit at table in a deep abstraction all through the meal; you try to throw it off and help do the talking; you get a start three or four times, but conversation dies on your lips every time —­your mind isn’t on it; your heart isn’t in it.  You give up, and subside into a bottomless deep of silence, permanently; people must speak to you two or three times to get your attention, and then 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