You have asked me a question, and I have answered it seriously and sincerely.  You have put in Buddha—­a god, with a following, at one time, greater than Jesus ever had:  a god with perhaps a little better evidence of his godship than that which is offered for Jesus’s.  How then, in fairness, can you leave Jesus out?  And if you put him in, how can you logically leave Satan out?  Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is the lightning that does the work. 
                              Very truly yours,
                                        S. L. Clemens.

The “Children’s Theatre” of the next letter was an institution of the New York East Side in which Mark Twain was deeply interested.  The children were most, if not all, of Hebrew parentage, and the performances they gave, under the direction of Alice M. Herts, were really remarkable.  It seemed a pity that lack of funds should have brought this excellent educational venture to an untimely end.

The following letter was in reply to one inclosing a newspaper
clipping reporting a performance of The Prince and the Pauper, given
by Chicago school children.

                       To Mrs. Hookway, in Chicago: 
                                                  Sept., 1908. 
Dear Mrs. Hookway,—­Although I am full of the spirit of work this morning, a rarity with me lately—­I must steal a moment or two for a word in person:  for I have been reading the eloquent account in the Record-Herald and am pleasurably stirred, to my deepest deeps.  The reading brings vividly back to me my pet and pride.  The Children’s Theatre of the East side, New York.  And it supports and re-affirms what I have so often and strenuously said in public that a children’s theatre is easily the most valuable adjunct that any educational institution for the young can have, and that no otherwise good school is complete without it.

It is much the most effective teacher of morals and promoter of good conduct that the ingenuity of man has yet devised, for the reason that its lessons are not taught wearily by book and by dreary homily, but by visible and enthusing action; and they go straight to the heart, which is the rightest of right places for them.  Book morals often get no further than the intellect, if they even get that far on their spectral and shadowy pilgrimage:  but when they travel from a Children’s Theatre they do not stop permanently at that halfway house, but go on home.

The children’s theatre is the only teacher of morals and conduct and high ideals that never bores the pupil, but always leaves him sorry when the lesson is over.  And as for history, no other teacher is for a moment comparable to it:  no other can make the dead heroes of the world rise up and shake the dust of the ages from their bones and live and move and breathe and speak and be real to the looker and listener:  no other can make the study of the lives and times of the illustrious dead a delight, a splendid interest, a passion; and no other can paint a history-lesson in colors that will stay, and stay, and never fade.