am story was never completed. It was the same that he had
worked on in London, and perhaps again in Switzerland. It would be
tried at other times and in other forms, but it never seemed to
accommodate itself to a central idea, so that the good writing in it
eventually went to waste. The short story mentioned, "My Platonic
Sweetheart," a charming, idyllic tale, was not published during Mark
Twain's lifetime. Two years after his death it appeared in Harper's
Magazine.

The assassination of the Empress of Austria at Geneva was the
startling event of that summer. In a letter to Twichell Clemens
presents the tragedy in a few vivid paragraphs. Later he treated it
at some length in a magazine article which, very likely because of
personal relations with members of the Austrian court, he withheld
from print. It has since been included in a volume of essays, What
Is Man, etc.

*****

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

KALTENLEUTGEBEN, Sep. 13, '98.

DEAR JOE,--You are mistaken; people don't send us the magazines.
No--Harper, Century and McClure do; an example I should like to
recommend to other publishers. And so I thank you very much for
sending me Brander's article. When you say "I like Brander Matthews; he
impresses me as a man of parts and power," I back you, right up to
the hub--I feel the same way--. And when you say he has earned your
gratitude for cuffing me for my crimes against the Leather stockings and
the Vicar, I ain't making any objection. Dern your gratitude!

His article is as sound as a nut. Brander knows literature, and loves
it; he can talk about it and keep his temper; he can state his case so
lucidly and so fairly and so forcibly that you have to agree with him,
even when you don't agree with him; and he can discover and praise such
merits as a book has, even when they are half a dozen diamonds scattered
through an acre of mud. And so he has a right to be a critic.

To detail just the opposite of the above invoice is to describe me. I
haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I
hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden
me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I
have to stop every time I begin.

That good and unoffending lady the Empress is killed by a mad-man, and I
am living in the midst of world-