f Reid. I meant to
wind up with this latter great work, and then dismiss the subject for
good.

Well, ever since then I have worked day and night making notes and
collecting and classifying material. I've got collectors at work in
England. I went to New York and sat three hours taking evidence while
a stenographer set it down. As my labors grew, so also grew my
fascination. Malice and malignity faded out of me--or maybe I drove them
out of me, knowing that a malignant book would hurt nobody but the fool
who wrote it. I got thoroughly in love with this work; for I saw that
I was going to write a book which the very devils and angels themselves
would delight to read, and which would draw disapproval from nobody
but the hero of it, (and Mrs. Clemens, who was bitter against the whole
thing.) One part of my plan was so delicious that I had to try my hand
on it right away, just for the luxury of it. I set about it, and sure
enough it panned out to admiration. I wrote that chapter most carefully,
and I couldn't find a fault with it. (It was not for the biography--no,
it belonged to an immediate and deadlier project.)

Well, five days ago, this thought came into my mind (from Mrs.
Clemens's): "Wouldn't it be well to make sure that the attacks have been
'almost daily'?--and to also make sure that their number and character
will justify me in doing what I am proposing to do?"

I at once set a man to work in New York to seek out and copy every
unpleasant reference which had been made to me in the Tribune from Nov.
1st to date. On my own part I began to watch the current numbers, for I
had subscribed for the paper.

The result arrived from my New York man this morning. O, what a pitiable
wreck of high hopes! The "almost daily" assaults, for two months,
consist of--1. Adverse criticism of P. & P. from an enraged idiot in the
London Atheneum; 2. Paragraph from some indignant Englishman in the Pall
Mall Gazette who pays me the vast compliment of gravely rebuking some
imaginary ass who has set me up in the neighborhood of Rabelais; 3.
A remark of the Tribune's about the Montreal dinner, touched with an
almost invisible satire; 4. A remark of the Tribune's about refusal
of Canadian copyright, not complimentary, but not necessarily
malicious--and of course adverse criticism which is not malicious is a
thing which none but fools irritate themselves about.

There--that is the prodigious bugaboo, in its entirety! Can you
conceive of a