ot expect to be entertained by you, nor do I want you to
expect me to entertain you and your friends to-night, for I decline to
keep the engagement."

Now, I could fill a book on America with reminiscences of this sort,
adding a few chapters on bosses and boodlers, on New York 'chronique
scandaleuse', on the tenement houses of the large cities, on the
gambling-hells of Denver, and the dens of San Francisco, and what not!
[But not even your nasty article on my country, Mark, will make me do
it.]--We should not think it kind. No matter how much we might have
associated with kings and nobilities, we should not think it right to
crush her with it and make her ashamed of her lowlier walk in life; for
we have a saying, "Who humiliates my mother includes his own."

Do I seriously imagine you to be the author of that strange letter,
M. Bourget? Indeed I do not. I believe it to have been surreptitiously
inserted by your amanuensis when your back was turned. I think he did it
with a good motive, expecting it to add force and piquancy to your
article, but it does not reflect your nature, and I know it will grieve
you when you see it. I also think he interlarded many other things which
you will disapprove of when you see them. I am certain that all the
harsh names discharged at me come from him, not you. No doubt you could
have proved me entitled to them with as little trouble as it has cost him
to do it, but it would have been your disposition to hunt game of a
higher quality.

Why, I even doubt if it is you who furnish me all that excellent
information about Balzac and those others.--["Now the style of M.
Bourget and many other French writers is apparently a closed letter to
Mark Twain; but let us leave that alone. Has he read Erckmann-Chatrian,
Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Edmond About, Cherbuliez, Renan? Has he read
Gustave Droz's 'Monsieur, Madame, et Bebe', and those books which leave
for a long time a perfume about you? Has he read the novels of Alexandre
Dumas, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and Balzac? Has he read Victor Hugo's
'Les Miserables' and 'Notre Dame de Paris'? Has he read or heard the
plays of Sandeau, Augier, Dumas, and Sardou, the works of those Titans of
modern literature, whose names will be household words all over the world
for hundreds of years to come? He has read La Terre--this kind-hearted,
refined humorist! When Mark Twain visits a garden does he smell the
violets, the roses, the jasmine, or the