****

To Rudyard Kipling, in England:

August, 1895.

DEAR KIPLING,--It is reported that you are about to visit India. This
has moved me to journey to that far country in order that I may unload
from my conscience a debt long due to you. Years ago you came from India
to Elmira to visit me, as you said at the time. It has always been my
purpose to return that visit and that great compliment some day. I shall
arrive next January and you must be ready. I shall come riding my ayah
with his tusks adorned with silver bells and ribbons and escorted by
a troop of native howdahs richly clad and mounted upon a herd of wild
bungalows; and you must be on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I
shall be thirsty.

Affectionately,
S. L. CLEMENS.

Clemens, platforming in Australia, was too busy to write letters.
Everywhere he was welcomed by great audiences, and everywhere
lavishly entertained. He was beset by other carbuncles, but would
seem not to have been seriously delayed by them. A letter to his
old friend Twichell carries the story.

*****

To Rev. Jos. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

FRANK MOELLER'S MASONIC HOTEL,
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND,
November 29, '95.

DEAR JOE,--Your welcome letter of two months and five days ago has just
arrived, and finds me in bed with another carbuncle. It is No. 3. Not a
serious one this time. I lectured last night without inconvenience, but
the doctors thought best to forbid to-night's lecture. My second one
kept me in bed a week in Melbourne.

... We are all glad it is you who is to write the article, it delights
us all through.

I think it was a good stroke of luck that knocked me on my back here
at Napier, instead of some hotel in the centre of a noisy city. Here we
have the smooth and placidly-complaining sea at our door, with nothing
between us and it but 20 yards of shingle--and hardly a suggestion of
life in that space to mar it or make a noise. Away down here fifty-five
degrees south of the Equator this sea seems to murmur in an unfamiliar
tongue--a foreign tongue--tongue bred among the ice-fields of the
Antarctic--a murmur with a note of melancholy in it proper to the vast
unvisited solitudes it has come from. It was ver