this year; in ten years this will be habit, on these terms.

Yes, the wild talk you see in the papers! And from men who are sane when
not upset by overwhelming excitement. A U. S. Senator-Cullom--wants this
Buffalo criminal lynched! It would breed other lynchings--of men who are
not dreaming of committing murders, now, and will commit none if Cullom
will keep quiet and not provide the exciting cause.

And a District Attorney wants a law which shall punish with death
attempts upon a President's life--this, mind you, as a deterrent. It
would have no effect--or the opposite one. The lunatic's mind-space is
all occupied--as mine was--with the matter in hand; there is no room
in it for reflections upon what may happen to him. That comes after the
crime.

It is the noise the attempt would make in the world that would breed the
subsequent attempts, by unsettling the rickety minds of men who envy
the criminal his vast notoriety--his obscure name tongued by stupendous
Kings and Emperors--his picture printed everywhere, the trivialest
details of his movements, what he eats, what he drinks; how he sleeps,
what he says, cabled abroad over the whole globe at cost of fifty
thousand dollars a day--and he only a lowly shoemaker yesterday!--like
the assassin of the President of France--in debt three francs to his
landlady, and insulted by her--and to-day she is proud to be able to say
she knew him "as familiarly as you know your own brother," and glad to
stand till she drops and pour out columns and pages of her grandeur and
her happiness upon the eager interviewer.

Nothing will check the lynchings and ruler-murder but absolute
silence--the absence of pow-pow about them. How are you going to manage
that? By gagging every witness and jamming him into a dungeon for life;
by abolishing all newspapers; by exterminating all newspaper men; and by
extinguishing God's most elegant invention, the Human Race. It is quite
simple, quite easy, and I hope you will take a day off and attend to it,
Joe. I blow a kiss to you, and am

Lovingly Yours,
MARK.

When the Adirondack summer ended Clemens settled for the winter in
the beautiful Appleton home at Riverdale-on-the-Hudson. It was a
place of wide-spreading grass and shade-a house of ample room. They
were established in it in time for Mark Twain to take an active
interest in the Ne