hich she loved.

Perhaps at this point, when Mark Twain is once more leaving America,
we may offer two letters from strangers to him--letters of
appreciation--such as he was constantly receiving from those among
the thousands to whom he had given happiness. The first is from
Samuel Merwin, one day to become a popular novelist, then in the
hour of his beginnings.

*****

To Mark Twain, from Samuel Merwin:

PLAINFIELD, N. J.
August 4, 1903.

DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--For a good many years I have been struggling with the
temptation to write you and thank you for the work you have done; and
to-day I seem to be yielding.

During the past two years I have been reading through a group of writers
who seem to me to represent about the best we have--Sir Thomas Malory,
Spenser, Shakespeare, Boswell, Carlyle, Le Sage. In thinking over one
and then another, and then all of them together, it was plain to see
why they were great men and writers: each brought to his time some new
blood, new ideas,--turned a new current into the stream. I suppose
there have always been the careful, painstaking writers, the men who are
always taken so seriously by their fellow craftsmen. It seems to be the
unconventional man who is so rare--I mean the honestly unconventional
man, who has to express himself in his own big way because the
conventional way isn't big enough, because ne needs room and freedom.

We have a group of the more or less conventional men now--men of dignity
and literary position. But in spite of their influence and of all the
work they have done, there isn't one of them to whom one can give one's
self up without reservation, not one whose ideas seem based on the deep
foundation of all true philosophy,--except Mark Twain.

I hope this letter is not an impertinence. I have just been turning
about, with my head full of Spenser and Shakespeare and "Gil Blas,"
looking for something in our own present day literature to which I could
surrender myself as to those five gripping old writings. And nothing
could I find until I took up "Life on the Mississippi," and "Huckleberry
Finn," and, just now, the "Connecticut Yankee." It isn't the first time
I have read any of these three, and it's because I know it won't be the
last, because these books are the only ones written in my lifetime that
claim my un