One of my Members is a Princess of a royal house, another is the daughter of a village book-seller on the continent of Europe.  For the only qualification for Membership is intellect and the spirit of good will; other distinctions, hereditary or acquired, do not count.

May I send you the Constitution and Laws of the Club?  I shall be so pleased if I may.  It is a document which one of my daughters typewrites for me when I need one for a new Member, and she would give her eyebrows to know what it is all about, but I strangle her curiosity by saying:  “There are much cheaper typewriters than you are, my dear, and if you try to pry into the sacred mysteries of this Club one of your prosperities will perish sure.”

My favorite?  It is “Joan of Arc.”  My next is “Huckleberry Finn,” but the family’s next is “The Prince and the Pauper.” (Yes, you are right —­I am a moralist in disguise; it gets me into heaps of trouble when I go thrashing around in political questions.)

I wish you every good fortune and happiness and I thank you so much for
your letter. 
                    Sincerely yours,
                              S. L. Clemens.

Early in the year Clemens paid a visit to Twichell in Hartford, and after one of their regular arguments on theology and the moral accountability of the human race, arguments that had been going on between them for more than thirty years—­Twichell lent his visitor Freedom of the Will, by Jonathan Edwards, to read on the way home.  The next letter was the result.

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford: 

Riverdale-on-the-Hudson. 
;
Feb. ’02. 
Dear Joe,—­“After compliments.”—­[Meaning “What a good time you gave me; what a happiness it was to be under your roof again; etc., etc.”  See opening sentence of all translations of letters passing between Lord Roberts and Indian princes and rulers.]—­From Bridgeport to New York; thence to home; and continuously until near midnight I wallowed and reeked with Jonathan in his insane debauch; rose immediately refreshed and fine at 10 this morning, but with a strange and haunting sense of having been on a three days’ tear with a drunken lunatic.  It is years since I have known these sensations.  All through the book is the glaze of a resplendent intellect gone mad—­a marvelous spectacle.  No, not all through the book—­the drunk does not come on till the last third, where what I take to be Calvinism and its God begins to show up and shine red and hideous in the glow from the fires of hell, their only right and proper adornment.  By God I was ashamed to be in such company.

Jonathan seems to hold (as against the Arminian position) that the Man (or his Soul or his Will) never creates an impulse itself, but is moved to action by an impulse back of it.  That’s sound!

Also, that of two or more things offered it, it infallibly chooses the one which for the moment is most pleasing to itself.  Perfectly correct!  An immense admission for a man not otherwise sane.