way, turning out
articles, essays, communications on every conceivable subject, mainly
with the idea of reform. There were many public and private abuses, and
he wanted to correct them all. He covered reams of paper with lurid
heresies--political, religious, civic--for most of which there was no
hope of publication.

Now and then he was allowed to speak out: An order from the Past-office
Department at Washington concerning the superscription of envelopes
seemed to him unwarranted. He assailed it, and directly the nation was
being entertained by a controversy between Mark Twain and the
Postmaster-General's private secretary, who subsequently receded from the
field. At another time, on the matter of postage rates he wrote a paper
which began: "Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a
member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

It is hardly necessary to add that the paper did not appear.

On the whole, Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to print,
and such of these papers as are preserved to-day form a curious
collection of human documents. Many of them could be printed to-day,
without distress to any one. The conditions that invited them are
changed; the heresies are not heresies any more. He may have had some
thought of their publication in later years, for once he wrote:

Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put
them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then
all that ink and labor are wasted because I can't print the result.
I have just finished an article of this kind, and it satisfies me
entirely. It does my weather-beaten soul good to read it, and
admire the trouble it would make for me and the family. I will
leave it behind and utter it from the grave. There is a free speech
there, and no harm to the family.

It is too late and too soon to print most of these things; too late to
print them for their salutary influence, too soon to print them as
literature.

He was interested in everything: in music, as little as he knew of it. He
had an ear for melody, a dramatic vision, and the poetic conception of
sound. Reading some lilting lyric, he could fancy the words marching to
melody, and would cast about among his friends for some one who could
supply a tuneful setting. Once he wrote to his friend the Rev. Dr.
Parker, who was a skilled musician, urging him to write a score for
Tennyson's "Bugle Song," outlin