ill hear a
crash and see the scalps fly. He has none of my diffidence. He
knows all about these nominees, and if he don't he will let on to in
such a natural way as to deceive the most critical. He knows
everything--he knows more than Webster's Unabridged and the American
Encyclopedia--but whether he knows anything about a subject or not
he is perfectly willing to discuss it. When he gets back he will
tell you all about these candidates as serenely as if he had been
acquainted with them a hundred years, though, speaking
confidentially, I doubt if he ever heard of any of them till to-day.
I am right well satisfied it is a good, sound, sensible ticket, and
a ticket to win; but wait till he comes.

In the mean time I go for George William Curtis and take the
chances.
MARK TWAIN.

He had become what Mr. Howells calls entirely "desouthernized" by this
time. From having been of slaveholding stock, and a Confederate soldier,
he had become a most positive Republican, a rampant abolitionist--had
there been anything left to abolish. His sympathy had been always with
the oppressed, and he had now become their defender. His work on the
paper revealed this more and more. He wrote fewer sketches and more
editorials, and the editorials were likely to be either savage assaults
upon some human abuse, or fierce espousals of the weak. They were
fearless, scathing, terrific. Of some farmers of Cohocton, who had taken
the law into their own hands to punish a couple whom they believed to be
a detriment to the community, he wrote:

"The men who did that deed are capable of doing any low, sneaking,
cowardly villainy that could be invented in perdition. They are the very
bastards of the devil."

He appended a full list of their names, and added:

"If the farmers of Cohocton are of this complexion, what on earth must a
Cohocton rough be like?"

But all this happened a long time ago, and we need not detail those
various old interests and labors here. It is enough to say that Mark
Twain on the Express was what he had been from the beginning, and would
be to the end--the zealous champion of justice and liberty; violent
and sometimes wrong in his viewpoint, but never less than fearless and
sincere. Invariably he was for the oppressed. He had a natural instinct
for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the under dog.

Among the best of his editorial cont