If it has failed because of the joint stipulation, put the blame there, and let us share it collectively.

I think our plan was a good one.  I do not doubt that Mr. Burton still approves of it, too.  I believe the objections come from other quarters, and not from him.  Mr. Twichell used the following words in last Sunday’s sermon, (if I remember correctly): 

“My hearers, the prophet Deuteronomy says this wise thing:  ’Though ye plan a goodly house for the poor, and plan it with wisdom, and do take off your coats and set to to build it, with high courage, yet shall the croaker presently come, and lift up his voice, (having his coat on,) and say, Verily this plan is not well planned—­and he will go his way; and the obstructionist will come, and lift up his voice, (having his coat on,) and say, Behold, this is but a sick plan—­and he will go his way; and the man that knows it all will come, and lift up his voice, (having his coat on,) and say, Lo, call they this a plan? then will he go his way; and the places which knew him once shall know him no more forever, because he was not, for God took him.  Now therefore I say unto you, Verily that house will not be budded.  And I say this also:  He that waiteth for all men to be satisfied with his plan, let him seek eternal life, for he shall need it.’”

This portion of Mr. Twichell’s sermon made a great impression upon me, and I was grieved that some one had not wakened me earlier so that I might have heard what went before.

S. L. Clemens.

Mr. Sykes (of the firm of Sykes & Newton, the Allen House Pharmacy) replied that he had read the letter to the committee and that it had set those gentlemen right who had not before understood the situation.  “If others were as ready to do their part as yourself our poor would not want assistance,” he said, in closing.

We come now to an incident which assumes the proportions of an episode-even of a catastrophe—­in Mark Twain’s career.  The disaster was due to a condition noted a few pages earlier—­the inability of genius to judge its own efforts.  The story has now become history —­printed history—­it having been sympathetically told by Howells in My Mark Twain, and more exhaustively, with a report of the speech that invited the lightning, in a former work by the present writer.

The speech was made at John Greenleaf Whittier’s seventieth birthday dinner, given by the Atlantic staff on the evening of December 17, 1877.  It was intended as a huge joke—­a joke that would shake the sides of these venerable Boston deities, Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, and the rest of that venerated group.  Clemens had been a favorite at the Atlantic lunches and dinners—­a speech by him always an event.  This time he decided to outdo himself.

     He did that, but not in the way he had intended.  To use one of his
     own metaphors, he stepped