You think you get “poor pay” for your twenty years?  No, oh no.  You have lived in a paradise of the intellect whose lightest joys were beyond the reach of the longest purse in Christendom, you have had daily and nightly emancipation from the world’s slaveries and gross interests, you have received a bigger wage than any man in the land, you have dreamed a splendid dream and had it come true, and to-day you could not afford to trade fortunes with anybody—­not even with another scientist, for he must divide his spoil with his guild, whereas essentially the world you have discovered is your own and must remain so.

It is all just magnificent, Joe!  And no one is prouder or gladder than
               Yours always
                              mark.

At York Harbor, Maine, where they had taken a cottage for the summer—­a pretty place, with Howells not far distant, at Kittery Point—­Mrs. Clemens’s health gave way.  This was at a period when telegraphic communication was far from reliable.  The old-time Western Union had fallen from grace; its “system” no longer justified the best significance of that word.  The new day of reorganization was coming, and it was time for it.  Mark Twain’s letter concerning the service at York Harbor would hardly be warranted today, but those who remember conditions of that earlier time will agree that it was justified then, and will appreciate its satire.

To the President of The Western Union, in New York: 

“ThePines”
Yorkharbor, Maine. 
Dear sir,—­I desire to make a complaint, and I bring it to you, the head of the company, because by experience I know better than to carry it to a subordinate.

I have been here a month and a half, and by testimony of friends, reinforced by personal experience I now feel qualified to claim as an established fact that the telegraphic service here is the worst in the world except that Boston.

These services are actually slower than was the New York and Hartford service in the days when I last complained to you—­which was fifteen or eighteen years ago, when telegraphic time and train time between the mentioned points was exactly the same, to-wit, three hours and a half.  Six days ago—­it was that raw day which provoked so much comment—­my daughter was on her way up from New York, and at noon she telegraphed me from New Haven asking that I meet her with a cloak at Portsmouth.  Her telegram reached me four hours and a quarter later—­just 15 minutes too late for me to catch my train and meet her.

I judge that the telegram traveled about 200 miles.  It is the best telegraphic work I have seen since I have been here, and I am mentioning it in this place not as a complaint but as a compliment.  I think a compliment ought always to precede a complaint, where one is possible, because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous and gentle reception.