greatest number, and,
consequently, I am encouraged to hope we shall. However, I shall be
ready, and happy, to afford you still further information upon the
subject, from time to time, as you may desire it and the Post-office
Department be enabled to furnish it to me.
"'Very truly, etc.,
"'MARK TWAIN,
"'For James W. N-----, U. S. Senator.'

"There--now what do you think of that?"

"Well, I don't know, sir. It--well, it appears to me--to be dubious
enough."

"Du--leave the house! I am a ruined man. Those Humboldt savages never
will forgive me for tangling their brains up with this inhuman letter.
I have lost the respect of the Methodist Church, the board of aldermen--"

"Well, I haven't anything to say about that, because I may have missed it
a little in their cases, but I was too many for the Baldwin's Ranch
people, General!"

"Leave the house! Leave it forever and forever, too."

I regarded that as a sort of covert intimation that my service could be
dispensed with, and so I resigned. I never will be a private secretary
to a senator again. You can't please that kind of people. They don't
know anything. They can't appreciate a party's efforts.

A FASHION ITEM--[Written about 1867.]

At General G----'s reception the other night, the most fashionably
dressed lady was Mrs. G. C. She wore a pink satin dress, plain in front
but with a good deal of rake to it--to the train, I mean; it was said to
be two or three yards long. One could see it creeping along the floor
some little time after the woman was gone. Mrs. C. wore also a white
bodice, cut bias, with Pompadour sleeves, flounced with ruches; low neck,
with the inside handkerchief not visible, with white kid gloves. She had
on a pearl necklace, which glinted lonely, high up the midst of that
barren waste of neck and shoulders. Her hair was frizzled into a tangled
chaparral, forward of her ears, aft it was drawn together, and compactly
bound and plaited into a stump like a pony's tail, and furthermore was
canted upward at a sharp angle, and ingeniously supported by a red velvet
crupper, whose forward extremity was made fast with a half-hitch around a
hairpin on the top of her head. Her whole top hamper was neat and
becoming. She had a beautiful complexion when she first came, but it
faded out by degrees in an unaccountab