appreciated, as his acknowledgment clearly shows.

****

To Mr. J. Howard Moore:

Feb. 2, '07.

DEAR MR. MOORE, The book has furnished me several days of deep

pleasure

and satisfaction; it has compelled my gratitude at the same time, since

it saves me the labor of stating my own long-cherished opinions and

reflections and resentments by doing it lucidly and fervently and

irascibly for me.

There is one thing that always puzzles me: as inheritors of the

mentality of our reptile ancestors we have improved the inheritance by

a thousand grades; but in the matter of the morals which they left us we

have gone backward as many grades. That evolution is strange, and to me

unaccountable and unnatural. Necessarily we started equipped with their

perfect and blemishless morals; now we are wholly destitute; we have no

real, morals, but only artificial ones--morals created and preserved by

the forced suppression of natural and hellish instincts. Yet we are

dull enough to be vain of them. Certainly we are a sufficiently comical

1192

The Letters Of Mark Twain, Complete