are lazy
about comparing, (which I most certainly am), I can make you a complete
set of what the authorities say, and of what this amazing novelist says
that they say."

Ah, do it for me! Then I will attempt the article, and (if I succeed
in doing it to my satisfaction,) will publish it. It is long since I
touched a pen (3 1/2 years), and I was intending to continue this happy
holiday to the gallows, but--there are things that could beguile me to
break this blessed Sabbath.

Yours very sincerely,
S. L. CLEMENS.

Certainly it is an interesting fact that an Englishman--one of the
race that burned Joan--should feel moved to defend her memory
against the top-heavy perversions of a distinguished French author.

But Lang seems never to have sent the notes. The copying would have
been a tremendous task, and perhaps he never found the time for it.
We may regret to-day that he did not, for Mark Twain's article on
the French author's Joan would have been at least unique.

Samuel Clemens could never accustom himself to the loss of his wife.
From the time of her death, marriage-which had brought him his
greatest joy in life-presented itself to him always with the thought
of bereavement, waiting somewhere just behind. The news of an
approaching wedding saddened him and there was nearly always a
somber tinge in his congratulations, of which the following to a
dear friend is an example:

*****

To Father Fitz-Simon, in Washington:

June 5, '08.

DEAR FATHER FITZ-SIMON,--Marriage--yes, it is the supreme felicity of
life, I concede it. And it is also the supreme tragedy of life. The
deeper the love the surer the tragedy. And the more disconsolating when
it comes.

And so I congratulate you. Not perfunctorily, not lukewarmly, but with
a fervency and fire that no word in the dictionary is strong enough to
convey. And in the same breath and with the same depth and sincerity,
I grieve for you. Not for both of you and not for the one that shall
go first, but for the one that is fated to be left behind. For that one
there is no recompense.--For that one no recompense is possible.

There are times--thousands of times--when I can expose the half of my
mind, and conceal the other half, but in the matter of the tragedy of
marriage I feel too deeply for