I have lain awake nights very often wondering if I dare ask you to write a story of an old horse that is finally given over to the bull-ring.  The story you would write would do more good than all the laws we are trying to have made and enforced for the prevention of cruelty to animals in Spain.  We would translate and circulate the story in that country.  I have wondered if you would ever write it.

    With most devoted homage,
                         Sincerely yours,
                                Minnie Maddern Fiske.

Clemens promptly replied: 

Dear Mrs. Fiske, I shall certainly write the story.  But I may not get it to suit me, in which case it will go in the fire.  Later I will try it again—­& yet again—­& again.  I am used to this.  It has taken me twelve years to write a short story—­the shortest one I ever wrote, I think. —­[Probably “The Death Disk:"]—­So do not be discouraged; I will stick to this one in the same way.

                  Sincerely yours,
                                   S. L. Clemens.

It was an inspiring subject, and he began work on it immediately.  Within a month from the time he received Mrs. Fiske’s letter he had written that pathetic, heartbreaking little story, “A Horse’s Tale,” and sent it to Harper’s Magazine for illustration.  In a letter written to Mr. Duneka at the time, he tells of his interest in the narrative, and adds: 

This strong interest is natural, for the heroine is my small daughter Susy, whom we lost.  It was not intentional—­it was a good while before I found it out, so I am sending you her picture to use —­& to reproduce with photographic exactness the unsurpassable expression & all.  May you find an artist who has lost an idol.

He explains how he had put in a good deal of work, with his secretary, on the orchestrelle to get the bugle-calls.

    We are to do these theatricals this evening with a couple of
    neighbors for audience, and then pass the hat.

It is not one of Mark Twain’s greatest stories, but its pathos brings the tears, and no one can read it without indignation toward the custom which it was intended to oppose.  When it was published, a year later, Mrs. Fiske sent him her grateful acknowledgments, and asked permission to have it printed for pamphlet circulation m Spain.

A number of more or less notable things happened in this, Mark Twain’s seventieth year.  There was some kind of a reunion going on in California, and he was variously invited to attend.  Robert Fulton, of Nevada, was appointed a committee of one to invite him to Reno for a great celebration which was to be held there.  Clemens replied that he remembered, as if it were but yesterday, when he had disembarked from the Overland stage in front of the Ormsby Hotel, in Carson City, and told how he would like to accept the invitation.