Then he said to the jury:  “Three melons were owing; they were collected from persons not proven to owe them:  this is theft; they were collected by compulsion:  this is extortion.  A melon was added for the widows and orphans.  It was owed by no one.  It is another theft, another extortion.  Return it whence it came, with the others.  It is not permissible here to apply to any purpose goods dishonestly obtained; not even to the feeding of widows and orphans, for this would be to put a shame upon charity and dishonor it.”

    He said it in open court, before everybody, and to me it did not
    seem very kind.

It was in the midst of the tumult that Clemens, perhaps feeling the need of sacred melody, wrote to Andrew Carnegie: 

Dear sir & friend,—­You seem to be in prosperity.  Could you lend an admirer $1.50 to buy a hymn-book with?  God will bless you.  I feel it; I know it.

N. B.—­If there should be other applications, this one not to count. 
                                Yours, mark.

P. S.-Don’t send the hymn-book; send the money; I want to make the selection myself.

Carnegie answered: 

    Nothing less than a two-dollar & a half hymn-book gilt will do for
    you.  Your place in the choir (celestial) demands that & you shall
    have it.

    There’s a new Gospel of Saint Mark in the North American which I
    like better than anything I’ve read for many a day.

I am willing to borrow a thousand dollars to distribute that sacred message in proper form, & if the author don’t object may I send that sum, when I can raise it, to the Anti-Imperialist League, Boston, to which I am a contributor, the only missionary work I am responsible for.

Just tell me you are willing & many thousands of the holy little missals will go forth.  This inimitable satire is to become a classic.  I count among my privileges in life that I know you, the author.

Perhaps a few more of the letters invited by Mark Twain’s criticism of missionary work in China may still be of interest to the reader:  Frederick T. Cook, of the Hospital Saturday and Sunday Association, wrote:  “I hail you as the Voltaire of America.  It is a noble distinction.  God bless you and see that you weary not in well-doing in this noblest, sublimest of crusades.”

Ministers were by no means all against him.  The associate pastor of the Every-day Church, in Boston, sent this line:  “I want to thank you for your matchless article in the current North American.  It must make converts of well-nigh all who read it.”

But a Boston school-teacher was angry.  “I have been reading the North American,” she wrote, “and I am filled with shame and remorse that I have dreamed of asking you to come to Boston to talk to the teachers.”

On the outside of the envelope Clemens made this pencil note: