Mark Twain was writing few letters these days to any one but Howells, yet in November he sent one to an old friend of his youth, Burrough, the literary chair-maker who had roomed with him in the days when he had been setting type for the St. Louis Evening News.

To Mr. Burrough, of St. Louis: 

Hartford, Nov. 1, 1876.  My dear Burroughs,—­As you describe me I can picture myself as I was 20 years ago.  The portrait is correct.  You think I have grown some; upon my word there was room for it.  You have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug.... imagining that he is remodeling the world and is entirely capable of doing it right.  Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle-headedness—­and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all.  That is what I was at 19 and 20; and that is what the average Southerner is at 60 today.  Northerners, too, of a certain grade.  It is of children like this that voters are made.  And such is the primal source of our government!  A man hardly knows whether to swear or cry over it.

I think I comprehend the position there—­perfect freedom to vote just as you choose, provided you choose to vote as other people think—­social ostracism, otherwise.  The same thing exists here, among the Irish.  An Irish Republican is a pariah among his people.  Yet that race find fault with the same spirit in Know-Nothingism.

Fortunately a good deal of experience of men enabled me to choose my residence wisely.  I live in the freest corner of the country.  There are no social disabilities between me and my Democratic personal friends.  We break the bread and eat the salt of hospitality freely together and never dream of such a thing as offering impertinent interference in each other’s political opinions.

Don’t you ever come to New York again and not run up here to see me.  I Suppose we were away for the summer when you were East; but no matter, you could have telegraphed and found out.  We were at Elmira N. Y. and right on your road, and could have given you a good time if you had allowed us the chance.

Yes, Will Bowen and I have exchanged letters now and then for several years, but I suspect that I made him mad with my last—­shortly after you saw him in St. Louis, I judge.  There is one thing which I can’t stand and won’t stand, from many people.  That is sham sentimentality—­the kind a school-girl puts into her graduating composition; the sort that makes up the Original Poetry column of a country newspaper; the rot that deals in the “happy days of yore,” the “sweet yet melancholy past,” with its “blighted hopes” and its “vanished dreams” and all that sort of drivel.  Will’s were always of this stamp.  I stood it years.  When I get a letter like that from a grown man and he a widower with a family, it gives me the stomach ache.  And I just told Will Bowen so, last summer.