citizen of yours in Buffalo a good many
months, a good while ago, and during those months you burst suddenly
into a mighty fame, out of a previous long-continued and no doubt proper
obscurity--but I was a nobody, and you wouldn't notice me nor have
anything to do with me. But now that I have become somebody, you have
changed your style, and you come here to shake hands with me and be
sociable. How do you explain this kind of conduct?"

"Oh," I said, "it is very simple, your Excellency. In Buffalo you were
nothing but a sheriff. I was in society. I couldn't afford to associate
with sheriffs. But you are a Governor now, and you are on your way to
the Presidency. It is a great difference, and it makes you worth while."

There appeared to be about sixteen doors to that spacious room. From
each door a young man now emerged, and the sixteen lined up and moved
forward and stood in front of the Governor with an aspect of respectful
expectancy in their attitude. No one spoke for a moment. Then the
Governor said:

"You are dismissed, gentlemen. Your services are not required. Mr.
Clemens is sitting on the bells."

There was a cluster of sixteen bell buttons on the corner of the table;
my proportions at that end of me were just right to enable me to cover
the whole of that nest, and that is how I came to hatch out those
sixteen clerks.

In accordance with the suggestion made in Gilder's letter recently
received I have written the following note to ex-President Cleveland
upon his sixty-ninth birthday:

HONORED SIR:--

Your patriotic virtues have won for you the homage of half the
nation and the enmity of the other half. This places your character
as a citizen upon a summit as high as Washington's. The verdict is
unanimous and unassailable. The votes of both sides are necessary
in cases like these, and the votes of the one side are quite as
valuable as are the votes of the other. Where the votes are all in
a man's favor the verdict is against him. It is sand, and history
will wash it away. But the verdict for you is rock, and will stand.

S. L. CLEMENS.

As of date March 18, 1906....

In a diary which Mrs. Clemens kept for a little while, a great many
years ago, I find various mentions of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who
was a near neighbor of ours in Hartford, with no fences between. And in
those days she made