statistics”?  Now I don’t approve of dissipation, and I don’t indulge in it, either; but I haven’t a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices, and so I don’t want to hear from you any more.  I think you are the very same man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice of smoking cigars, and then came back, in my absence, with your reprehensible fireproof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor stove.

“Young author.”—­Yes, Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because the phosphorus in it makes brain.  So far you are correct.  But I cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat—­at least, not with certainty.  If the specimen composition you send is about your fair usual average, I should judge that perhaps a couple of whales would be all you would want for the present.  Not the largest kind, but simply good, middling-sized whales.

“Simon Wheeler,” Sonora.—­The following simple and touching remarks and accompanying poem have just come to hand from the rich gold-mining region of Sonora: 

To Mr. Mark Twain:  The within parson, which I have set to poetry under the name and style of “He Done His Level Best,” was one among the whitest men I ever see, and it ain’t every man that knowed him that can find it in his heart to say he’s glad the poor cuss is busted and gone home to the States.  He was here in an early day, and he was the handyest man about takin’ holt of anything that come along you most ever see, I judge.  He was a cheerful, stirnn’ cretur, always doin’ somethin’, and no man can say he ever see him do anything by halvers.  Preachin was his nateral gait, but he warn’t a man to lay back a twidle his thumbs because there didn’t happen to be nothin’ do in his own especial line—­no, sir, he was a man who would meander forth and stir up something for hisself.  His last acts was to go his pile on “Kings-and” (calkatin’ to fill, but which he didn’t fill), when there was a “flush” out agin him, and naterally, you see, he went under.  And so he was cleaned out as you may say, and he struck the home-trail, cheerful but flat broke.  I knowed this talonted man in Arkansaw, and if you would print this humbly tribute to his gorgis abilities, you would greatly obleege his onhappy friend.

                    Hedone his level best
                    Was he a mining on the flat—­
                    He done it with a zest;
                    Was he a leading of the choir—­
                    He done his level best.

                    If he’d a reg’lar task to do,
                    He never took no rest;
                    Or if ’twas off-and-on-the same—­
                    He done his level best.

                    If he was preachin’ on his beat,
                    He’d tramp from east to west,
                    And north to south-in cold and heat
                    He done his level best.