oncluded his relations with
the Galaxy. In a brief valedictory he gave his reasons:

I have now written for the Galaxy a year. For the last eight
months, with hardly an interval, I have had for my fellows and
comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the sick! During
these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle and
malignantly threatened two others. All this I have experienced, yet
all the time have been under contract to furnish "humorous" matter,
once a month, for this magazine. I am speaking the exact truth in
the above details. Please to put yourself in my place and
contemplate the grisly grotesqueness of the situation. I think that
some of the "humor" I have written during this period could have
been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the solemnity
of the occasion.

The "Memoranda" will cease permanently with this issue of the
magazine. To be a pirate on a low salary, and with no share in the
profits of the business, used to be my idea of an uncomfortable
occupation, but I have other views now. To be a monthly humorist in
a cheerless time is drearier.

Without doubt he felt a glad relief in being rid of this recurrent,
imperative demand. He wrote to Orion that he had told the Galaxy people
he would not write another article, long or short, for less than $500,
and preferred not to do it at all.

The Galaxy department and the work on the Express were Mark
Twain's farewell to journalism; for the "Memoranda" was essentially
journalistic, almost as much so, and as liberally, as his old-time
Enterprise position. Apparently he wrote with absolute freedom,
unhampered by editorial policy or restriction. The result was not always
pleasant, and it was not always refined. We may be certain that it was
because of Mrs. Clemens's heavy burdens that year, and her consequent
inability to exert a beneficent censorship, that more than one--more
than a dozen--of the "Memoranda" contributions were permitted to see the
light of print.

As a whole, the literary result of Mark Twain's Buffalo period does
not reach the high standard of The Innocents Abroad. It was a
retrogression--in some measure a return to his earlier form. It had been
done under pressure, under heavy stress of mind, as he said. Also there
was another reason; neither the subject treated nor the environment of
labor had afforded that lofty inspiration which