hem as my fellow-humorists, I taking
third place, as becomes one who was not born to modesty, but by
diligence & hard work is acquiring it.
MARK.

There was still another form, brief and expressive:

DEAR COLONEL,--No, this is a love-feast; when you call a lodge of sorrow
send for me. MARK.

Clemens's war sentiment was given the widest newspaper circulation, and
brought him many letters, most of them applauding his words. Charles
Francis Adams wrote him:

It attracted my attention because it so exactly expresses the views
I have myself all along entertained.

And this was the gist of most of the expressed sentiments which came to
him.

Clemens wrote a number of things that summer, among them a little essay
entitled, "The Privilege of the Grave"--that is to say, free speech. He
was looking forward, he said, to the time when he should inherit that
privilege, when some of the things he had said, written and laid away,
could be published without damage to his friends or family. An article
entitled, "Interpreting the Deity," he counted as among the things to be
uttered when he had entered into that last great privilege. It is an
article on the reading of signs and auguries in all ages to discover the
intentions of the Almighty, with historical examples of God's judgments
and vindications. Here is a fair specimen. It refers to the chronicle
of Henry Huntington:

All through this book Henry exhibits his familiarity with the
intentions of God and with the reasons for the intentions.
Sometimes very often, in fact--the act follows the intention after
such a wide interval of time that one wonders how Henry could fit
one act out of a hundred to one intention, and get the thing right
every time, when there was such abundant choice among acts and
intentions. Sometimes a man offends the Deity with a crime, and is
punished for it thirty years later; meantime he has committed a
million other crimes: no matter, Henry can pick out the one that
brought the worms. Worms were generally used in those days for the
slaying of particularly wicked people. This has gone out now, but
in the old times it was a favorite. It always indicated a case of
"wrath." For instance:

"The just God avenging Robert Fitzhildebrand's perfidity, a worm
grew in his vitals which, gradually gnawing its way through his