yielding with time, it had rather the stiffness and severity of age;
but for him it must have swung low like the sweet chariot of the
negro "spiritual" which I heard him sing with such fervor when those
wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way northward.

Howells's visit resulted in a new inspiration. Clemens started to write
him one night when he could not sleep, and had been reading the volume of
letters of James Russell Lowell. Then, next morning, he was seized with
the notion of writing a series of letters to such friends as Howells,
Twichell, and Rogers--letters not to be mailed, but to be laid away for
some future public. He wrote two of these immediately--to Howells and to
Twichell. The Howells letter (or letters, for it was really double) is
both pathetic and amusing. The first part ran:
3 in the morning, April 17, 1909.

My pen has gone dry and the ink is out of reach. Howells, did you
write me day-before-day-before yesterday or did I dream it? In my
mind's eye I most vividly see your hand-write on a square blue
envelope in the mail-pile. I have hunted the house over, but there
is no such letter. Was it an illusion?

I am reading Lowell's letters & smoking. I woke an hour ago & am
reading to keep from wasting the time. On page 305, Vol. I, I have
just margined a note:

"Young friend! I like that! You ought to see him now."

It seemed startlingly strange to hear a person call you young. It
was a brick out of a blue sky, & knocked me groggy for a moment. Ah
me, the pathos of it is that we were young then. And he--why, so
was he, but he didn't know it. He didn't even know it 9 years
later, when we saw him approaching and you warned me, saying:

"Don't say anything about age--he has just turned 50 & thinks he is
old, & broods over it."

Well, Clara did sing! And you wrote her a dear letter.

Time to go to sleep.

Yours ever,
MARK

The second letter, begun at 10 A.M., outlines the plan by which he is to
write on the subject uppermost in his mind without restraint, knowing
that the letter is not to be mailed.

. . .The scheme furnishes a definite target for each letter, & you
can choose the target that's going to be the most sympathetic for
what you are hungering & thirsting to say at that particular moment.
And y