Well, ever since then I have worked day and night making notes and collecting and classifying material.  I’ve got collectors at work in England.  I went to New York and sat three hours taking evidence while a stenographer set it down.  As my labors grew, so also grew my fascination.  Malice and malignity faded out of me—­or maybe I drove them out of me, knowing that a malignant book would hurt nobody but the fool who wrote it.  I got thoroughly in love with this work; for I saw that I was going to write a book which the very devils and angels themselves would delight to read, and which would draw disapproval from nobody but the hero of it, (and Mrs. Clemens, who was bitter against the whole thing.) One part of my plan was so delicious that I had to try my hand on it right away, just for the luxury of it.  I set about it, and sure enough it panned out to admiration.  I wrote that chapter most carefully, and I couldn’t find a fault with it. (It was not for the biography—­no, it belonged to an immediate and deadlier project.)

Well, five days ago, this thought came into my mind (from Mrs. Clemens’s):  “Wouldn’t it be well to make sure that the attacks have been ’almost daily’?—­and to also make sure that their number and character will justify me in doing what I am proposing to do?”

I at once set a man to work in New York to seek out and copy every unpleasant reference which had been made to me in the Tribune from Nov. 1st to date.  On my own part I began to watch the current numbers, for I had subscribed for the paper.

The result arrived from my New York man this morning.  O, what a pitiable wreck of high hopes!  The “almost daily” assaults, for two months, consist of—­1.  Adverse criticism of P. & P. from an enraged idiot in the London Atheneum; 2.  Paragraph from some indignant Englishman in the Pall Mall Gazette who pays me the vast compliment of gravely rebuking some imaginary ass who has set me up in the neighborhood of Rabelais; 3.  A remark of the Tribune’s about the Montreal dinner, touched with an almost invisible satire; 4.  A remark of the Tribune’s about refusal of Canadian copyright, not complimentary, but not necessarily malicious—­and of course adverse criticism which is not malicious is a thing which none but fools irritate themselves about.

There—­that is the prodigious bugaboo, in its entirety!  Can you conceive of a man’s getting himself into a sweat over so diminutive a provocation?  I am sure I can’t.  What the devil can those friends of mine have been thinking about, to spread these 3 or 4 harmless things out into two months of daily sneers and affronts?  The whole offense, boiled down, amounts to just this:  one uncourteous remark of the Tribune about my book—­not me between Nov. 1 and Dec. 20; and a couple of foreign criticisms (of my writings, not me,) between Nov. 1 and Jan. 26!  If I can’t stand that amount of friction, I certainly need reconstruction.  Further boiled down, this vast outpouring of malice amounts to simply this:  one jest from the Tribune (one can make nothing more serious than that out of it.) One jest—­and that is all; for the foreign criticisms do not count, they being matters of news, and proper for publication in anybody’s newspaper.