Another thing:  you grant that God and circumstances sinned against Poe, but you also grant that he sinned against himself—­a thing which he couldn’t do and didn’t do.

It is lively up here now.  I wish you could come. 
                                   Yrs ever,
          
                                   Mark

To W. D. Howells, in New York: 

Stormfield, Redding, Connecticut,
3 in the morning, Apl. 17, ’09.
[Written with pencil]. 
My pen has gone dry and the ink is out of reach.  Howells, Did you write me day-before-day before yesterday, or did I dream it?  In my mind’s eye I most vividly see your hand-write on a square blue envelop in the mailpile.  I have hunted the house over, but there is no such letter.  Was it an illusion?

I am reading Lowell’s letter, and smoking.  I woke an hour ago and am reading to keep from wasting the time.  On page 305, vol.  I. I have just margined a note: 

“Young friend!  I like that!  You ought to see him now.”

It seemed startlingly strange to hear a person call you young.  It was a brick out of a blue sky, and knocked me groggy for a moment.  Ah me, the pathos of it is, that we were young then.  And he—­why, so was he, but he didn’t know it.  He didn’t even know it 9 years later, when we saw him approaching and you warned me, saying, “Don’t say anything about age—­he has just turned fifty, and thinks he is old and broods over it.”

[Well, Clara did sing!  And you wrote her a dear letter.]

Time to go to sleep. 
                         Yours ever,
          
                              Mark.

To Daniel Kiefer: 

[No date.] DANL Kiefer ESQ.  Dear sir,—­I should be far from willing to have a political party named after me.

I would not be willing to belong to a party which allowed its members to
have political aspirations or to push friends forward for political
preferment. 
                    Yours very truly,
                                   S. L. Clemens.

The copyright extension, for which the author had been working so long, was granted by Congress in 1909, largely as the result of that afternoon in Washington when Mark Twain had “received” in “Uncle Joe” Cannon’s private room, and preached the gospel of copyright until the daylight faded and the rest of the Capitol grew still.  Champ Clark was the last to linger that day and they had talked far into the dusk.  Clark was powerful, and had fathered the bill.  Now he wrote to know if it was satisfactory.

To Champ Clark, in Washington: 

Stormfield, Redding, Conn., June 5, ’09.  Dear Champ Clark—­Is the new copyright law acceptable to me?  Emphatically, yes!  Clark, it is the only sane, and clearly defined, and just and righteous copyright law that has ever existed in the United States.  Whosoever will compare it with its predecessors will have no trouble in arriving at that decision.