Last night, when I went to bed, Mrs. Clemens said, “George didn’t take the cat down to the cellar—­Rosa says he has left it shut up in the conservatory.”  So I went down to attend to Abner (the cat.) About 3 in the morning Mrs. C. woke me and said, “I do believe I hear that cat in the drawing-room—­what did you do with him?” I answered up with the confidence of a man who has managed to do the right thing for once, and said “I opened the conservatory doors, took the library off the alarm, and spread everything open, so that there wasn’t any obstruction between him and the cellar.”  Language wasn’t capable of conveying this woman’s disgust.  But the sense of what she said, was, “He couldn’t have done any harm in the conservatory—­so you must go and make the entire house free to him and the burglars, imagining that he will prefer the coal-bins to the drawing-room.  If you had had Mr. Howells to help you, I should have admired but not been astonished, because I should know that together you would be equal to it; but how you managed to contrive such a stately blunder all by yourself, is what I cannot understand.”

So, you see, even she knows how to appreciate our gifts.

Brisk times here.—­Saturday, these things happened:  Our neighbor Chas. Smith was stricken with heart disease, and came near joining the majority; my publisher, Bliss, ditto, ditto; a neighbor’s child died; neighbor Whitmore’s sixth child added to his five other cases of measles; neighbor Niles sent for, and responded; Susie Warner down, abed; Mrs. George Warner threatened with death during several hours; her son Frank, whilst imitating the marvels in Barnum’s circus bills, thrown from his aged horse and brought home insensible:  Warner’s friend Max Yortzburgh, shot in the back by a locomotive and broken into 32 distinct pieces and his life threatened; and Mrs. Clemens, after writing all these cheerful things to Clara Spaulding, taken at midnight, and if the doctor had not been pretty prompt the contemplated Clemens would have called before his apartments were ready.

However, everybody is all right, now, except Yortzburg, and he is mending—­that is, he is being mended.  I knocked off, during these stirring times, and don’t intend to go to work again till we go away for the Summer, 3 or 6 weeks hence.  So I am writing to you not because I have anything to say, but because you don’t have to answer and I need something to do this afternoon.....

I have a letter from a Congressman this morning, and he says Congress couldn’t be persuaded to bother about Canadian pirates at a time like this when all legislation must have a political and Presidential bearing, else Congress won’t look at it.  So have changed my mind and my course; I go north, to kill a pirate.  I must procure repose some way, else I cannot get down to work again.

Pray offer my most sincere and respectful approval to the President—­is approval the proper word?  I find it is the one I most value here in the household and seldomest get.