ething
which would require--what? An art so high and fine and difficult that no
possessor of it would ever be allowed to waste it on interviews.

"No; spare the reader and spare me; leave the whole interview out; it is
rubbish. I wouldn't talk in my sleep if I couldn't talk better than
that.

"If you wish to print anything, print this letter; it may have some
value, for it may explain to a reader here and there why it is that in
interviews as a rule men seem to talk like anybody but themselves.

"Sincerely yours,

"MARK TWAIN."

The Harpers had asked Bok to write a book descriptive of his
autograph-letter collection, and he had consented. The propitious
moment, however, never came in his busy life. One day he mentioned the
fact to Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes and the poet said: "Let me write
the introduction for it." Bok, of course, eagerly accepted, and within a
few days he received the following, which, with the book, never reached
publication:

"How many autograph writers have had occasion to say with the Scotch
trespasser climbing his neighbor's wall, when asked where he was going
Bok again!'

"Edward Bok has persevered like the widow in scripture, and the most
obdurate subjects of his quest have found it for their interest to give
in, lest by his continual coming he should weary them. We forgive him;
almost admire him for his pertinacity; only let him have no imitators.
The tax he has levied must not be imposed a second time.

"An autograph of a distinguished personage means more to an imaginative
person than a prosaic looker-on dreams of. Along these lines ran the
consciousness and the guiding will of Napoleon, or Washington, of Milton
or Goethe.

"His breath warmed the sheet of paper which you have before you. The
microscope will show you the trail of flattened particles left by the
tesselated epidermis of his hand as it swept along the manuscript. Nay,
if we had but the right developing fluid to flow over it, the surface of
the sheet would offer you his photograph as the light pictured it at the
instant of writing.

"Look at Mr. Bok's collection with such thoughts, ...and you will cease
to wonder at his pertinacity and applaud the conquests of his
enthusiasm.

"Oliver Wendell Holmes."

Whenever biographers of the New England school of writers have come to
write of John Greenleaf Whittier, they have been puzzled as to the
scanty number of letters and private papers left by the poet. This
letter,