I have lost a world of delight through this matter of delaying invitations.  Fifty years ago I would have gone eagerly across the world to help celebrate anything that might turn up.  It would have made no difference to me what it was, so that I was there and allowed a chance to make a noise.

The whole scheme of things is turned wrong end to.  Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.  As things are now, when in youth a dollar would bring a hundred pleasures, you can’t have it.  When you are old, you get it and there is nothing worth buying with it then.

It’s an epitome of life.  The first half of it consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along.  I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142.  This is no time to be flitting about the earth.  I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way and imminent as indicated above.

Yours is a great and memorable occasion, and as a son of Missouri I should hold it a high privilege to be there and share your just pride in the state’s achievements; but I must deny myself the indulgence, while thanking you earnestly for the prized honor you have done me in asking me to be present. 
                    Very truly yours,
                              S. L. Clemens.

In the foregoing Mark Twain touches upon one of his favorite fancies:  that life should begin with old age and approach strong manhood, golden youth, to end at last with pampered and beloved babyhood.  Possibly he contemplated writing a story with this idea as the theme, but He seems never to have done so.

The reader who has followed these letters may remember Yung Wing, who had charge of the Chinese educational mission in Hartford, and how Mark Twain, with Twichell, called on General Grant in behalf of the mission.  Yung Wing, now returned to China, had conceived the idea of making an appeal to the Government of the United States for relief of his starving countrymen.

To J. H. Twichell, in Hartford: 

Ampersand, N. Y., July 28, ’01.  Dear Joe,—­As you say, it is impracticable—­in my case, certainly.  For me to assist in an appeal to that Congress of land-thieves and liars would be to bring derision upon it; and for me to assist in an appeal for cash to pass through the hands of those missionaries out there, of any denomination, Catholic or Protestant, wouldn’t do at all.  They wouldn’t handle money which I had soiled, and I wouldn’t trust them with it, anyway.  They would devote it to the relief of suffering—­I know that—­but the sufferers selected would be converts.  The missionary-utterances exhibit no humane feeling toward the others, but in place of it a spirit of hate and hostility.  And it is natural; the Bible forbids their presence there, their trade is unlawful, why shouldn’t their characters be of necessity in harmony with—­but never mind, let it go, it irritates me.