You ought not to say sarcastic things about my “fighting on the other side.”  General Grant did not act like that.  General Grant paid me compliments.  He bracketed me with Zenophon—­it is there in his Memoirs for anybody to read.  He said if all the confederate soldiers had followed my example and adopted my military arts he could never have caught enough of them in a bunch to inconvenience the Rebellion.  General Grant was a fair man, and recognized my worth; but you are prejudiced, and you have hurt my feelings. 
          But I have an affection for you, anyway. 
                                   Mark twain.

One of Mark Twain’s friends was Henniker-Heaton, the so-called “Father of Penny Postage” between England and America.  When, after long years of effort, he succeeded in getting the rate established, he at once bent his energies in the direction of cheap cable service and a letter from him came one day to Stormfield concerning his new plans.  This letter happened to be over-weight, which gave Mark Twain a chance for some amusing exaggerations at his expense.

To Henniker-Heaton, in London: 

Stormfield, Redding, Connecticut,
Jan. 18, 1909. 
Dear Henniker-Heaton,—­I do hope you will succeed to your heart’s desire in your cheap-cablegram campaign, and I feel sure you will.  Indeed your cheap-postage victory, achieved in spite of a quarter-century of determined opposition, is good and rational prophecy that you will.  Wireless, not being as yet imprisoned in a Chinese wall of private cash and high-placed and formidable influence, will come to your aid and make your new campaign briefer and easier than the other one was.

Now then, after uttering my serious word, am I privileged to be frivolous for a moment?  When you shall have achieved cheap telegraphy, are you going to employ it for just your own selfish profit and other people’s pecuniary damage, the way you are doing with your cheap postage?  You get letter-postage reduced to 2 cents an ounce, then you mail me a 4-ounce letter with a 2-cent stamp on it, and I have to pay the extra freight at this end of the line.  I return your envelope for inspection.  Look at it.  Stamped in one place is a vast “T,” and under it the figures “40,” and under those figures appears an “L,” a sinister and suspicious and mysterious L. In another place, stamped within a circle, in offensively large capitals, you find the words “Due 8 cents.”  Finally, in the midst of a desert space up nor-noreastard from that circle you find a figure “3” of quite unnecessarily aggressive and insolent magnitude—­and done with a blue pencil, so as to be as conspicuous as possible.  I inquired about these strange signs and symbols of the postman.  He said they were P. O. Department signals for his instruction.

“Instruction for what?”

“To get extra postage.”