RIVERDALE, May 8,'03 (Mailed June, 1910).

DEAR BRANDER,--I'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dulness
since I broke into Sir Walter and lost my temper. I finished Guy
Mannering--that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows
jabbering around a single flesh-and-blood being--Dinmont; a book crazily
put together out of the very refuse of the romance-artist's stage
properties--finished it and took up Quentin Durward, and finished that.

It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living: it was like
withdrawing from the infant class in the College of journalism to sit
under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University.

I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward?

Yrs ever
MARK.

In 1903, preparations were going on for a great world's fair, to be
held in St. Louis, and among other features proposed was a World's
Literary Convention, with a week to be set apart in honor of Mark
Twain, and a special Mark Twain Day in it, on which the National
Association would hold grand services in honor of the distinguished
Missourian. A letter asking his consent to the plan brought the
following reply.

*****

To T. F. Gatts, of Missouri:

NEW YORK, May 30, 1903.

DEAR MR. GATTS,--It is indeed a high compliment which you offer me in
naming an association after me and in proposing the setting apart of a
Mark Twain day at the great St. Louis fair, but such compliments are
not proper for the living; they are proper and safe for the dead only. I
value the impulse which moves you to tender me these honors. I value it
as highly as any one can, and am grateful for it, but I should stand in
a sort of terror of the honors themselves. So long as we remain alive we
are not safe from doing things which, however righteously and honorably
intended, can wreck our repute and extinguish our friendships.

I hope that no society will be named for me while I am still alive, for
I might at some time or other do something which would cause its members
to regret having done me that honor. After I shall have joined the dead
I shall follow the customs of those people and be guilty of no conduct
that can wound any friend; but until that time shall come I shall be a
doubtful quantity like the rest of our race.