Colonel Mulberry Sellers.
American Claimant
Of the
Great Earldom of Rossmore'
in the
Peerage of Great Britain."

Ys Ever
MARK.

Probably Mark Twain did not return to literary work reluctantly. He had
always enjoyed writing and felt now that he was equipped better than
ever for authorship, at least so far as material was concerned. There
exists a fragmentary copy of a letter to some unknown correspondent, in
which he recites his qualifications. It bears evidence of having been
written just at this time and is of unusual interest at this point.

*****

Fragment of Letter to -------, 1891:

.... I confine myself to life with which I am familiar when pretending
to portray life. But I confined myself to the boy-life out on the
Mississippi because that had a peculiar charm for me, and not because
I was not familiar with other phases of life. I was a soldier two weeks
once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted like a rat the whole
time. Familiar? My splendid Kipling himself hasn't a more
burnt-in, hard-baked, and unforgetable familiarity with that
death-on-the-pale-horse-with-hell-following-after, which is a raw
soldier's first fortnight in the field--and which, without any doubt, is
the most tremendous fortnight and the vividest he is ever going to see.

Yes, and I have shoveled silver tailings in a quartz-mill a couple of
weeks, and acquired the last possibilities of culture in that direction.
And I've done "pocket-mining" during three months in the one little
patch of ground in the whole globe where Nature conceals gold in
pockets--or did before we robbed all of those pockets and exhausted,
obliterated, annihilated the most curious freak Nature ever indulged in.
There are not thirty men left alive who, being told there was a pocket
hidden on the broad slope of a mountain, would know how to go and find
it, or have even the faintest idea of how to set about it; but I am one
of the possible 20 or 30 who possess the secret, and I could go and put
my hand on that hidden treasure with a most deadly precision.

And I've been a prospector, and know pay rock from poor when I find
it--just with a touch of the tongue. And I've been a silver miner and
know how to dig and shovel and drill an