onadnock. It
is a woody solitude. We have no near neighbors. We have neighbors
and I can see their houses scattered in the forest distances, for we
live on a hill. I am astonished to find that I have known 8 of
these 14 neighbors a long time; 10 years is the shortest; then seven
beginning with 25 years & running up to 37 years' friendship. It is
the most remarkable thing I ever heard of.

This letter was written in July, and he states in it that he has
turned out one hundred thousand words of a large manuscript.. It was
a fantastic tale entitled "3,000 Years among the Microbes," a sort of
scientific revel--or revelry--the autobiography of a microbe that
had been once a man, and through a failure in a biological experiment
transformed into a cholera germ when the experimenter was trying to
turn him into a bird. His habitat was the person of a disreputable
tramp named Blitzowski, a human continent of vast areas, with seething
microbic nations and fantastic life problems. It was a satire, of
course--Gulliver's Lilliput outdone--a sort of scientific, socialistic,
mathematical jamboree.

He tired of it before it reached completion, though not before it had
attained the proportions of a book of size. As a whole it would hardly
have added to his reputation, though it is not without fine and humorous
passages, and certainly not without interest. Its chief mission was to
divert him mentally that summer during, those days and nights when he
would otherwise have been alone and brooding upon his loneliness.--[For
extracts from "3,000 Years among the Microbes" see Appendix V, at the
end of this work.] MARK TWAIN'S SUGGESTED TITLE-PAGE FOR HIS MICROBE
BOOK:

3000 YEARS
AMONG THE MICROBES

By a Microbe

WITH NOTES
added by the same Hand
7000 years later

Translated from the Original
Microbic
by

Mark Twain

His inability to reproduce faces in his mind's eye he mourned as an
increasing calamity. Photographs were lifeless things, and when he tried
to conjure up the faces of his dead they seemed to drift farther out
of reach; but now and then kindly sleep brought to him something out of
that treasure-house where all our realities are kept for us fresh and
fair, perhaps for a day when we may claim the