Fortunately a good deal of experience of men enabled me to choose my residence wisely.  I live in the freest corner of the country.  There are no social disabilities between me and my Democratic personal friends.  We break the bread and eat the salt of hospitality freely together and never dream of such a thing as offering impertinent interference in each other’s political opinions.

Don’t you ever come to New York again and not run up here to see me.  I Suppose we were away for the summer when you were East; but no matter, you could have telegraphed and found out.  We were at Elmira N. Y. and right on your road, and could have given you a good time if you had allowed us the chance.

Yes, Will Bowen and I have exchanged letters now and then for several years, but I suspect that I made him mad with my last—­shortly after you saw him in St. Louis, I judge.  There is one thing which I can’t stand and won’t stand, from many people.  That is sham sentimentality—­the kind a school-girl puts into her graduating composition; the sort that makes up the Original Poetry column of a country newspaper; the rot that deals in the “happy days of yore,” the “sweet yet melancholy past,” with its “blighted hopes” and its “vanished dreams” and all that sort of drivel.  Will’s were always of this stamp.  I stood it years.  When I get a letter like that from a grown man and he a widower with a family, it gives me the stomach ache.  And I just told Will Bowen so, last summer.  I told him to stop being 16 at 40; told him to stop drooling about the sweet yet melancholy past, and take a pill.  I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is the past—­can’t be restored.  Well, I exaggerated some of these truths a little—­but only a little—­but my idea was to kill his sham sentimentality once and forever, and so make a good fellow of him again.  I went to the unheard-of trouble of re-writing the letter and saying the same harsh things softly, so as to sugarcoat the anguish and make it a little more endurable and I asked him to write and thank me honestly for doing him the best and kindliest favor that any friend ever had done him —­but he hasn’t done it yet.  Maybe he will, sometime.  I am grateful to God that I got that letter off before he was married (I get that news from you) else he would just have slobbered all over me and drowned me when that event happened.

I enclose photograph for the young ladies.  I will remark that I do not wear seal-skin for grandeur, but because I found, when I used to lecture in the winter, that nothing else was able to keep a man warm sometimes, in these high latitudes.  I wish you had sent pictures of yourself and family—­I’ll trade picture for picture with you, straight through, if you are commercially inclined. 
                    Your old friend,
                              SAML L. Clemens.

XVII.