To Mrs. Hookway, in Chicago:

Sept., 1908.

DEAR MRS. HOOKWAY,--Although I am full of the spirit of work this

morning, a rarity with me lately--I must steal a moment or two for a

word in person: for I have been reading the eloquent account in the

Record-Herald and am pleasurably stirred, to my deepest deeps. The

reading brings vividly back to me my pet and pride. The Children's

Theatre of the East side, New York. And it supports and re-affirms what

I have so often and strenuously said in public that a children's theatre

is easily the most valuable adjunct that any educational institution

for the young can have, and that no otherwise good school is complete

without it.

It is much the most effective teacher of morals and promoter of good

conduct that the ingenuity of man has yet devised, for the reason that

its lessons are not taught wearily by book and by dreary homily, but by

visible and enthusing action; and they go straight to the heart, which

is the rightest of right places for them. Book morals often get no

further than the intellect, if they even get that far on their spectral

and shadowy pilgrimage: but when they travel from a Children's Theatre

they do not stop permanently at that halfway house, but go on home.

1216

The Letters Of Mark Twain, Complete