I have just received this letter from Orion—take care of it, for it is worth preserving. I got as far as 9 pages in my answer to it, when Mrs. Clemens shut down on it, & said it was cruel, & made me send the money & simply wish his lectures 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 & 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 lectures, yet in one inking of his pen he has already swooped around the United States & 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, & your very greatest work would be lost to the world. I could write Orion’s simple biography, & make it effective, too, by merely stating the bald facts—& this I will do if he dies before I do; but you must put him into romance. This was the understanding you & I had the day I sailed.

Observe Orion’s career—that is, a little of it:

He has belonged to as many as five different religious denominations; last march he withdrew from deaconship in a Congregational Church & the superintendency of its Sunday School, in a speech in which he said that for many months he (I (it runs in my mind that he said 13 years,) he had been a confirmed infidel, & so felt it to be his duty to retire from his the flock.

2. After being a republican for years, he wanted me to buy him a democratic newspaper merely because his prophetic mind told him Tilden would be President—in which case he would be able to get an office for his services.

A few days before the Presidential election, he came out in a speech & publicly went over to the democrats; but at the last moment, he while voting for Tilden & 6 State democrats, he got prudently “hedged” by voting for 6 State republicans., also. He said it might make him safe, no matter who won.

The new convert was made one of the secretaries of a democratic meeting, & placed in the list of speakers. He wrote me jubilantly of what a ten-strike he was going to make with that speech. All right—but think of his innocent & pathetic candor in writing me something like this, a week later: “I was more diffident than I had expected to be, & this was increased by the silence with which I was received when I came forward; so I seemed unable to get the fire into my speech which I had calculated upon, & presently they began to get up & go out; & in a few minutes they all rose up & went.” away.”

How could a man uncover such a sore as that & show it to another? Not a word of complaint, you see—only a patient, sad surprise.

3. His next project was to write a burlesque upon Paradise Lost.

4. Then, learning that the Times was paying Harte $100 a column for stories, he concluded to write some for the same price. I w read his first one & persuaded him not to write any more.

4. Then he read proof in the N. Y. Eve. Post at $10 a week, & meekly observed that the foreman swore at him & ordered him around “like a steamboatⒶemendation mate.”

5. Being discharged from that post, he wanted to try agriculture—was sure he could make a fortune out of a chicken farm. I gave him $900 & he went to a ten-house village 2 miles above Keokuk on the river bank—this place was a railway station. He soon asked for money to buy a horse & light wagon,—because the trains did not run at church time on Sunday, & his wife found it rather far to walk.

At the For a long time I answered demands for “loans,” & by next mail always received his check for the interest due me to date. In the most guileless way he let it leak out that he did not underestimate the value of his custom to me, since it was not likely that any other customer of mine paid his interest quarterly, & thus enabled me to use my capital twice in 6 months instead of only once. But alas, when the debt at last reached $1500Ⓐemendation or $2500 (I have forgotten which,) the interest ate too formidably into his borrowings, & so he quietly ceased to pay it or speak of it. At the end of two years I found that the chicken farm had long ago been abandoned, & he had moved into Keokuk. Later, in one of his casual moments, he casually observed that his books had shown that there was no money in fattening a chicken on 65 cents worth of corn & then selling it for 50.

6. Finally, if I would lend him $500 a year (this for 2 years, (this was 4 or 5 years ago,) he knew he could make a success as a lawyer, & would prove it. This is the loan pension which we have just increased to $600. The first year his legal business brought him $5. It also brought him an unremunerative case where some villains were trying to chouse some negro orphans out of $700. He still has this case. He has waggled it around through various courts & made some booming speeches on it. The negro children have grown up & married off, now, I believe, & their litigated town-lot has been dug up & carted off by somebody—but Orion still infests the courts with his documents & makes the welkin ring with his venerable case. The second year, he didn’t make anything. The third, he made $6, & I made Bliss put a case in his hands—about half an hour’s work. Orion charged $50 for it—Bliss paid him $15. Thus four or five years of lawing has brought him $26, but this will doubtless be increased when he gets done lecturing & buys that “law library.” Meantime his office rent has been $60 5 a year, & he has stuck to that lair day by day as patiently as a spider.

7. Then he by & by conceived the idea of lecturing around America as “Mark Twain’s Brother”—that to be on the bills. Subject of proposed lecture, “On the Formation of Character.”

8. I protested, & he got on his war-paint, couched his lance, & ran a bold tilt against Total Abstinence & the Red Ribbon fanatics. It raised a fine stink among the virtuous Keokukians.

8. I wrote to encourage him in his good work, but I had let a mail intervene; so by the time my letter reached him he was already winning laurels as a Red Ribbon Howler.

9. Afterward he took a rabid part in a prayer meeting epidemic; dropped that to travesty Jules Verne; dropped that, in the middle of the last chapter, last March, to digest the matter of an infidel book which he proposed to write; & now he comes to the surface to rescue our “noble & beautiful religion” from the sacrilegious talons of Bob Ingersoll.

Now come! Don’t fool away this treasure which Providence has laid at your feet, but take it up & use it. One can let his imagination run riot in portraying Orion, for there is nothing so extravagant as to be out of character with him.

And then his wife is the only woman who could have so rounded & perfected Orion’s character. She was an a bald-headed old maid. & wore a wig She was poor & taboo; she wanted position & clothes, oh, so badly; she had the snaffle on this ass before he knew what he was about—for he was editor of a daily paper & a good catch. She is saturated to the marrow with the most malignant form of Presbyterianism,—that sort which considers the saving one’s own paltry soul the first & supreme end & object of life. So you see she has harried him into the church several times, & then made religion so intolerable to him with her prayings & Bible readings & her other & eternal pious clack-clack that it has had the effect of harrying him out of it again. He is a printer, but she won’t allow him to work at his trade because she can’t abide the thought of being a mechanic’s wife. She prefers to keep boarding-house & make him let on to be a lawyer. He wrote piteously once, how the governor or somebody gave a blow out, with a broad general invitations to lawyers & their wives to be present, & she made him go, & take her,—& it was the year that he didn’t have a case or make a cent, & those people all knew it. Moreover, he hadn’t any decent clothes, for she gobbles all the money & sla & buys closthes & new wigsⒶemendation for herself with it. The only way we can keep him from being ragged is to send him money distinctly for himself occasionally. Then he treats himself to something “for Sunday & weddings” & a pair of “bi-focal spectacles”—that is, if bi-focal spectacles happen to be the newest & freshest astonisher in the spectacle market. For he wouldn’t give a curse for a pair that hadn’t anything surprising about them. She won’t let him work at a trade, but in the privacy of the boarding-house she makes him get up in the cold gray dawns of winter & go from one lodger’s room to another (young fellows not half his age,—& theyⒶemendation pity him & protest, too,) & build the fires, & go down on his knees & bow his gray head & blow them, to save the parlor bellows from wear & tear. Orion is in his 54th year. He & she are two curses which are dovetailed together with marvelous exactness. She is such a vain, proud fool; he is so utterly devoid of pride. He is a curse to her, & she is a curse to him. And these two curses have been yoked fast together for five & twenty years! If Orion ever goes to hell, he will be likely to say, “I don’t think this place is much of an invention.” And if she ever goes to heaven, she will be likely to say, “I am disappointed; I did not think so many would be saved.”

Well,—good-bye, & a short life & a merry one be yours. Poor old Methuselah, how did he manage to stand it so long?