ng around, diligently. Joe conceived the idea of
getting some talk out of him. Now that never would have occurred to me.
So he dropped in under the man's elbow, dogged him patiently around,
prodding him with questions and getting irritated snarls in return which
would have finished me early--but at last one of Joe's random shafts
drove the centre of that giant's sympathies somehow, and fetched him.
The fountains of his great deep were broken up, and he rained a flood of
personal history that was unspeakably entertaining.

Among other things it turned out that he had been a Turkish (native)
colonel, and had fought all through the Crimean war--and so, for the
first time, Joe got a picture of the Charge of the Six Hundred that made
him see the living spectacle, the flash of flag and tongue-flame, the
rolling smoke, and hear the booming of the guns; and for the first time
also, he heard the reasons for that wild charge delivered from the mouth
of a master, and realized that nobody had "blundered," but that a cold,
logical, military brain had perceived this one and sole way to win
an already lost battle, and so gave the command and did achieve the
victory.

And mind you Joe was able to come up here, days afterwards, and
reproduce that giant's picturesque and admirable history. But dern him,
he can't write it--which is all wrong, and not as it should be.

And he has gone and raked up the MS autobiography (written in 1848,)
of Mrs. Phebe Brown, (author of "I Love to Steal a While Away,") who
educated Yung Wing in her family when he was a little boy; and I came
near not getting to bed at all, last night, on account of the lurid
fascinations of it. Why in the nation it has never got into print, I
can't understand.

But, by jings! the postman will be here in a minute; so, congratulations
upon your mending health, and gratitude that it is mending; and love to
you all.

Yrs Ever
MARK.

Don't answer--I spare the sick.

XXII. LETTERS, 1882, MAINLY TO HOWELLS. WASTED FURY. OLD SCENES
REVISITED. THE MISSISSIPPI BOOK.

A man of Mark Twain's profession and prominence must necessarily be
the subject of much newspaper comment. Jest, compliment, criticism
--none of these things disturbed him, as a rule. He was pleased
that his books should receive favorable notices by men whose opinion
he respected, but he was not grieved by adverse e