Now come!  Don’t fool away this treasure which Providence has laid at your feet, but take it up and use it.  One can let his imagination run riot in portraying Orion, for there is nothing so extravagant as to be out of character with him.

Well-good-bye, and a short life and a merry one be yours.  Poor old
Methusaleh, how did he manage to stand it so long? 
                                        Yrs ever,
          
                                        Mark.

                             To Orion Clemens
       (Unsent and inclosed with the foregoing, to W. D. Howells): 

Munich, Feb. 9, (1879) My dear Bro.,—­Yours has just arrived.  I enclose a draft on Hartford for $25.  You will have abandoned the project you wanted it for, by the time it arrives,—­but no matter, apply it to your newer and present project, whatever it is.  You see I have an ineradicable faith in your unsteadfastness,—­but mind you, I didn’t invent that faith, you conferred it on me yourself.  But fire away, fire away!  I don’t see why a changeable man shouldn’t get as much enjoyment out of his changes, and transformations and transfigurations as a steadfast man gets out of standing still and pegging at the same old monotonous thing all the time.  That is to say, I don’t see why a kaleidoscope shouldn’t enjoy itself as much as a telescope, nor a grindstone have as good a time as a whetstone, nor a barometer as good a time as a yardstick.  I don’t feel like girding at you any more about fickleness of purpose, because I recognize and realize at last that it is incurable; but before I learned to accept this truth, each new weekly project of yours possessed the power of throwing me into the most exhausting and helpless convulsions of profanity.  But fire away, now!  Your magic has lost its might.  I am able to view your inspirations dispassionately and judicially, now, and say “This one or that one or the other one is not up to your average flight, or is above it, or below it.”

And so, without passion, or prejudice, or bias of any kind, I sit in judgment upon your lecture project, and say it was up to your average, it was indeed above it, for it had possibilities in it, and even practical ones.  While I was not sorry you abandoned it, I should not be sorry if you had stuck to it and given it a trial.  But on the whole you did the wise thing to lay it aside, I think, because a lecture is a most easy thing to fail in; and at your time of life, and in your own town, such a failure would make a deep and cruel wound in your heart and in your pride.  It was decidedly unwise in you to think for a moment of coming before a community who knew you, with such a course of lectures; because Keokuk is not unaware that you have been a Swedenborgian, a Presbyterian, a Congregationalist, and a Methodist (on probation), and that just a year ago you were an infidel.  If Keokuk had gone to your lecture course, it would