to afford you still further information upon the subject, from time to time, as you may desire it and the Post-office Department be enabled to furnish it to me. 
                         “’Very truly, etc.,
“’Mark Twain,
“‘For James W. N-----, U. S. Senator.’

“There—­now what do you think of that?”

“Well, I don’t know, sir.  It—­well, it appears to me—­to be dubious enough.”

“Du—­leave the house!  I am a ruined man.  Those Humboldt savages never will forgive me for tangling their brains up with this inhuman letter.  I have lost the respect of the Methodist Church, the board of aldermen—­”

“Well, I haven’t anything to say about that, because I may have missed it a little in their cases, but I was too many for the Baldwin’s Ranch people, General!”

“Leave the house!  Leave it forever and forever, too.”

I regarded that as a sort of covert intimation that my service could be dispensed with, and so I resigned.  I never will be a private secretary to a senator again.  You can’t please that kind of people.  They don’t know anything.  They can’t appreciate a party’s efforts.

A Fashion item—­[Written about 1867.]

At General G——­’s reception the other night, the most fashionably dressed lady was Mrs. G. C. She wore a pink satin dress, plain in front but with a good deal of rake to it—­to the train, I mean; it was said to be two or three yards long.  One could see it creeping along the floor some little time after the woman was gone.  Mrs. C. wore also a white bodice, cut bias, with Pompadour sleeves, flounced with ruches; low neck, with the inside handkerchief not visible, with white kid gloves.  She had on a pearl necklace, which glinted lonely, high up the midst of that barren waste of neck and shoulders.  Her hair was frizzled into a tangled chaparral, forward of her ears, aft it was drawn together, and compactly bound and plaited into a stump like a pony’s tail, and furthermore was canted upward at a sharp angle, and ingeniously supported by a red velvet crupper, whose forward extremity was made fast with a half-hitch around a hairpin on the top of her head.  Her whole top hamper was neat and becoming.  She had a beautiful complexion when she first came, but it faded out by degrees in an unaccountable way.  However, it is not lost for good.  I found the most of it on my shoulder afterward. (I stood near the door when she squeezed out with the throng.) There were other ladies present, but I only took notes of one as a specimen.  I would gladly enlarge upon the subject were I able to do it justice.

RILEY-NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT

One of the best men in Washington—­or elsewhere—­is Riley, correspondent of one of the great San Francisco dailies.