made me send the money and simply wish his lecture success. I said

I couldn't lose my 9 pages--so she said send them to you. But I will

acknowledge that I thought I was writing a very kind letter.

Now just look at this letter of Orion's. Did you ever see the

grotesquely absurd and the heart-breakingly pathetic more closely joined

together? Mrs. Clemens said "Raise his monthly pension." So I wrote to

Perkins to raise it a trifle.

Now only think of it! He still has 100 pages to write on his lecture,

yet in one inking of his pen he has already swooped around the United

States and invested the result!

You must put him in a book or a play right away. You are the only man

capable of doing it. You might die at any moment, and your very greatest

work would be lost to the world. I could write Orion's simple biography,

and make it effective, too, by merely stating the bald facts--and this I

will do if he dies before I do; but you must put him into romance. This

was the understanding you and I had the day I sailed.

Observe Orion's career--that is, a little of it: (1) He has belonged

to as many as five different religious denominations; last March

he withdrew from the deaconship in a Congregational Church and the

Superintendency of its Sunday School, in a speech in which he said that

for many months (it runs in my mind that he said 13 years,) he had been

a confirmed infidel, and so felt it to be his duty to retire from the

505

The Letters Of Mark Twain, Complete