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amusing fancy, rather than a letter, but it deserves place here.
*
****
To Mrs. Clemens---intended for Howells, Aldrich, etc.
BOSTON, Nov. 16, 1935. [1874]
DEAR LIVY, You observe I still call this beloved old place by the name
it had when I was young. Limerick! It is enough to make a body sick.
The gentlemen-in-waiting stare to see me sit here telegraphing this
letter to you, and no doubt they are smiling in their sleeves. But let
them! The slow old fashions are good enough for me, thank God, and I
will none other. When I see one of these modern fools sit absorbed,
holding the end of a telegraph wire in his hand, and reflect that a
thousand miles away there is another fool hitched to the other end of
it, it makes me frantic with rage; and then am I more implacably fixed
and resolved than ever, to continue taking twenty minutes to telegraph
you what I communicate in ten sends by the new way if I would so debase
myself. And when I see a whole silent, solemn drawing-room full of
idiots sitting with their hands on each other's foreheads "communing," I
tug the white hairs from my head and curse till my asthma brings me the
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