The negro children have grown up and married off, now, I believe, and their litigated town-lot has been dug up and carted off by somebody—­but Orion still infests the courts with his documents and makes the welkin ring with his venerable case.  The second year, he didn’t make anything.  The third he made $6, and I made Bliss put a case in his hands—­about half an hour’s work.  Orion charged $50 for it—­Bliss paid him $15.  Thus four or five years of slaving has brought him $26, but this will doubtless be increased when he gets done lecturing and buys that “law library.”  Meantime his office rent has been $60 a year, and he has stuck to that lair day by day as patiently as a spider.

8.  Then he by and by conceived the idea of lecturing around America as “Mark Twain’s Brother”—­that to be on the bills.  Subject of proposed lecture, “On the, Formation of Character.”

9.  I protested, and he got on his warpaint, couched his lance, and ran a bold tilt against total abstinence and the Red Ribbon fanatics.  It raised a fine row among the virtuous Keokukians.

10.  I wrote to encourage him in his good work, but I had let a mail intervene; so by the time my letter reached him he was already winning laurels as a Red Ribbon Howler.

11.  Afterward he took a rabid part in a prayer-meeting epidemic; dropped that to travesty Jules Verne; dropped that, in the middle of the last chapter, last March, to digest the matter of an infidel book which he proposed to write; and now he comes to the surface to rescue our “noble and beautiful religion” from the sacrilegious talons of Bob Ingersoll.

Now come!  Don’t fool away this treasure which Providence has laid at your feet, but take it up and use it.  One can let his imagination run riot in portraying Orion, for there is nothing so extravagant as to be out of character with him.

Well-good-bye, and a short life and a merry one be yours.  Poor old
Methusaleh, how did he manage to stand it so long? 
                                        Yrs ever,
          
                                        mark.

                             To Orion Clemens
       (Unsent and inclosed with the foregoing, to W. D. Howells): 

Munich, Feb. 9, (1879) My dear Bro.,—­Yours has just arrived.  I enclose a draft on Hartford for $25.  You will have abandoned the project you wanted it for, by the time it arrives,—­but no matter, apply it to your newer and present project, whatever it is.  You see I have an ineradicable faith in your unsteadfastness,—­but mind you, I didn’t invent that faith, you conferred it on me yourself.  But fire away, fire away!  I don’t see why a changeable man shouldn’t get as much enjoyment out of his changes, and transformations and transfigurations as a steadfast man gets out of standing still and pegging at the same old monotonous thing all the time.  That is to say, I don’t