er again be washed clean.
I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an
unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young
life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an
unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do
that and ever draw a clean, sweet breath again this side of the
grave. Ask that young lady--she will tell you so.

Most honestly do I wish that I could say a softening word or two in
defense of Huck's character since you wish it, but really, in my
opinion, it is no better than those of Solomon, David, & the rest of
the sacred brotherhood.

If there is an unexpurgated in the Children's Department, won't you
please help that young woman remove Tom & Huck from that
questionable companionship?

Sincerely yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.

I shall not show your letter to any one-it is safe with me.

Mr. Dickinson naturally kept this letter from the public, though he read
it aloud to the assembled librarians, and the fact of its existence
and its character eventually leaked out.--[It has been supplied to the
writer by Mr. Dickinson, and is published here with his consent.]--One
of the librarians who had heard it mentioned it at a theater-party in
hearing of an unrealized newspaper man. This was near the end of the
following March.

The "tip" was sufficient. Telephone-bells began to jingle, and groups
of newspaper men gathered simultaneously on Mr. Dickinson's and on Mark
Twain's door-steps. At a 21 Fifth Avenue you could hardly get in or out,
for stepping on them. The evening papers surmised details, and Huck and
Tom had a perfectly fresh crop of advertising, not only in America, but
in distant lands. Dickinson wrote Clemens that he would not give out the
letter without his authority, and Clemens replied:

Be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove! The newspaper boys want
that letter--don't you let them get hold of it. They say you refuse
to allow them to see it without my consent. Keep on refusing, and
I'll take care of this end of the line.

In a recent letter to the writer Mr. Dickinson states that Mark Twain's
solicitude was for the librarian, whom he was unwilling to involve in
difficulties with his official superiors, and he adds:

There may be some doubt as to whether Mark Twain was or was not a
religious man, for there