Aug. 3rd.  I go yachting a fortnight up north in a 20-knot boat 225 feet long, with the owner, (Mr. Rogers), Tom Reid, Dr. Rice, Col.  A. G. Paine and one or two others.  Judge Howland would go, but can’t get away from engagements; Professor Sloane would go, but is in the grip of an illness.  Come—­will you go?  If you can manage it, drop a post-card to me c/o H.H.  Rogers, 26 Broadway.  I shall be in New York a couple of days before we sail—­July 31 or Aug. 1, perhaps the latter,—­and I think I shall stop at the Hotel Grosvenor, cor. 10th St and 5th ave.

We all send you and the Harmonies lots and gobs of love. 
          
                                                  Mark

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford: 

Ampersand, N. Y., Aug. 28.  Dear Joe,—­Just a word, to scoff at you, with your extravagant suggestion that I read the biography of Phillips Brooks—­the very dullest book that has been printed for a century.  Joe, ten pages of Mrs. Cheney’s masterly biography of her fathers—­no, five pages of it—­contain more meat, more sense, more literature, more brilliancy, than that whole basketful of drowsy rubbish put together.  Why, in that dead atmosphere even Brooks himself is dull—­he wearied me; oh how he wearied me!

We had a noble good time in the Yacht, and caught a Chinese missionary
and drowned him. 
                    Love from us all to you all. 
          
                                        Mark.

The assassination of President McKinley occurred September 6, 1901.  Such an event would naturally stir Mark Twain to comment on human nature in general.  His letter to Twichell is as individual as it is sound in philosophy.  At what period of his own life, or under what circumstances, he made the long journey with tragic intent there is no means of knowing now.  There is no other mention of it elsewhere in the records that survive him.

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford: 

Ampersand, Tuesday, (Sept. 10, 1901) Dear Joe,—­It is another off day, but tomorrow I shall resume work to a certainty, and bid a long farewell to letter-scribbling.

The news of the President looks decidedly hopeful, and we are all glad, and the household faces are much improved, as to cheerfulness.  Oh, the talk in the newspapers!  Evidently the Human Race is the same old Human Race.  And how unjust, and unreflectingly discriminating, the talkers are.  Under the unsettling effects of powerful emotion the talkers are saying wild things, crazy things—­they are out of themselves, and do not know it; they are temporarily insane, yet with one voice they declare the assassin sane—­a man who has been entertaining fiery and reason —­debauching maggots in his head for weeks and months.  Why, no one is sane, straight along, year in and year out, and we all know it.  Our insanities are of varying sorts, and express themselves in varying forms —­fortunately harmless forms as a rule—­but in whatever form they occur an immense upheaval of feeling can at any time topple us distinctly over the sanity-line for a little while; and then if our form happens to be of the murderous kind we must look out—­and so must the spectator.