spread it
before the public.

I have never wronged you in any way, and I think you had no right to
print that communication; no right, neither any excuse. As to
publicly answering that correspondent, I would as soon think of
bandying words in public with any other prostitute.

The editor replied in a manly, frank acknowledgment of error. He had
not looked up the article itself in the Century before printing the
communication.

"Your letter has taught me a lesson," he said. "The blame belongs
to me for not hunting up the proofs. Please accept my apology."

Mark Twain was likely to be peculiarly sensitive to printed innuendos.
Not always. Sometimes he would only laugh at them or be wholly
indifferent. Indeed, in his later years, he seldom cared to read
anything about himself, one way or the other, but at the time of which
we are now writing--the period of the early eighties--he was alive to
any comment of the press. His strong sense of humor, and still stronger
sense of human weakness, caused him to overlook many things which
another might regard as an affront; but if the thing printed were merely
an uncalled-for slur, an inexcusable imputation, he was inclined to rage
and plan violence. Sometimes he conceived retribution in the form of
libel suits with heavy damages. Sometimes he wrote blasting answers,
which Mrs. Clemens would not let him print.

At one time he planned a biography of a certain editor who seemed to be
making a deliberate personal campaign against his happiness. Clemens
had heard that offending items were being printed in this man's paper;
friends, reporting with customary exaggeration, declared that these
sneers and brutalities appeared almost daily, so often as to cause
general remark.

This was enough. He promptly began to collect data--damaging
data--relating to that editor's past history. He even set a man to work
in England collecting information concerning his victim. One of his
notebooks contains the memoranda; a few items will show how terrific was
to be the onslaught.

When the naturalist finds a new kind of animal, he writes him up in
the interest of science. No matter if it is an unpleasant animal.
This is a new kind of animal, and in the cause of society must be
written up. He is the polecat of our species.... He is
purely and simply a Guiteau with the courage left out....

Steel portraits of him as a sort of idiot, from infancy up