A few days ago I wrote John Howells some strong and spontaneous praises of his work as architect of this houseⒺexplanatory note. I remember John as a little child, and it seems strange and uncanny, and impossible, that I have lived, and lived, and lived, and gone on continuously and persistently and perpetually living, until at last that child, chasing along in my wake, [begin page 252] has built a house for me and put a roof over my head. I can’t realize that this is that child. I knew the child well; and I also know that child as it looked at the advanced age of seven, when it and its father cameⒶtextual note down to Hartford once to stay a day or two with us, it must have been thirty years agoⒺexplanatory note. It was in the earliest years of our lost and lamented friend, the colored butler, GeorgeⒺexplanatory note. Howells and John were put into the chamber on the ground floor that was called the mahogany-room. John was up early and searching the place over, tiptoeing softly and eagerly around on excursions of discovery. He was unfamiliar with the colored race, but, being seven years old, he was of course acquainted with the “Arabian Nights.”Ⓐtextual note At a turn in his voyage he presently caught a glimpse of the dining roomⒶtextual note; then he fled to his father, woke him up and said in awed half-gasps,

“Get up, papa, the slave is setting the table.”

I meant to say my say to the architect in good and strong words and well put together, for in a letter received yesterday evening his father says:

I wish to quote still another paragraph from Howells’s letter:

Speaking of youth, I am reminded that with some frequency people say to me, “You wouldn’t look so young if you had the bald head proper to your time of life; how do you preserve that mop? How do you keep it from falling out?” I have to answer with a theory, for lack of adequately established knowledge. I tell them I think my hair remains with me because I keep it clean; keep it clean by thoroughly scouring it with soap and water every morning, then rinsing it well; then lathering it heavily, and rubbing off the lather with a coarse towel, a process which leaves a slight coating of oil upon each hair—oil derived from the soap. The cleansing and the oiling combined leave the hair soft and pliant and silky, and very pleasantly and comfortably wearable the whole day through; for although the hair becomes dirty again within ten hours, either in country or city, because there is so much microscopic dust floating in the air, it does not become dirty enough to be really raspy to the touch and delicately uncomfortable under twenty-four hours; yet it does become dirty enough in twenty-four hours to make the water cloudy when I wash it. Now then we arrive at a curious thing; the answer to my explanation always brings forth the same old unvarying and foolish remark, to wit—“Water ruins the hair because it rots the root of it.” The remark is not made in a doubtful tone but in a decided one—a tone which indicates that the speaker has examined the matter and knows all about it. Then I say, “How do you know this?”—and the confident speaker stands exposed; he doesn’t quite know what to say. If I ask him if he has ruined his own hair by wetting it it turns out that he doesn’t wet it often lest he rot the roots of it, therefore he is not [begin page 253] talking from his own experience; if I ask if he has personal knowledge of cases where the roots were rotted by wetting, it turns out that he hasn’t a single case of the kind to offer; when I hunt him remorselessly home he has to confess at last that “everybody says” water rots the roots of the hair. Strange—it is just like religion and politics! In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

It is an odd and curious and interesting ass, the human race. It is constantly washing its face, its eyes, its ears, its nose, its teeth, its mouth, its hands, its body, its feet, its hind legs, and it is thoroughly convinced that cleanliness is next to godliness, and that water is the noblest and surest of all preservers of health, and wholly undangerous, except in just one case—you mustn’t apply it to the hair! You must diligently protect the hair from cleanliness; you must carefully keep it filthy or you will lose it; everybody believes this, yet you can never find any human being who has tried it; you can never find a human being who knows it by personal experience, personal test, personal proof; you can never find a Christian who has acquired this valuable knowledge, this saving knowledge, by any process but the everlasting and all-sufficient “people say.” In all my seventy-two years and a half I have never come across such another ass as this human race is.

The more one examines this matter the more curious it becomes. Every man wets and soaps and scours his hands before he goes to dinner; he washes them before supper; he washes them before breakfast; he washes them before luncheon, and he knows, not by guesswork but by old experience, that in all these cases his hands are dirty and need the washing when he applies it. Does he suppose that his bared and unprotected hair, exposed exactly as his hands are exposed, is not gathering dirt all the time? Does he suppose it is remaining clean while his hands are getting constantly dirty? I am considered eccentric because I wear white clothes both winter and summer. I am eccentric, then, because I prefer to be clean in the matter of raiment—clean in a dirty world; absolutely the only cleanly-clothed human being in all Christendom north of the Tropics. And that is what I am. All clothing gets dirty in a single day—as dirty as one’s hands would get in that length of time if one washed them only once; a neglect which any lady or gentleman would scorn to be guilty of. All the Christian world wears dark colored clothes; after the first day’s wear they are dirty, and they continue to get dirtier and dirtier, day after day, and week after week, to the end of their service. Men look fine in their black dress-clothes at a banquet, but often those dress-suits are rather real estate than personal property; they carry so much soil that you could plant seeds in them and raise a crop.

However, when the human race has once acquired a superstition nothing short of death is ever likely to remove it. Annually, during many years, Mrs. Clemens was promptly cured of desperate attacks of that deadly disease, dysentery, by the pleasant method of substituting a slice of ripe, fresh watermelonⒶtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note for the powerful and poisonous drugs used—frequently ineffectually—by the physician. In no instance, in the long list, did the eating of a slice of watermelonⒶtextual note ever fail, in Mrs. Clemens’s case, to promptly [begin page 254] cure the dysentery and make her immune from it for another year; yet I have never been able to get a physician, or anybody else, to try it. During the Civil WarⒶtextual note any one caught bringing a watermelonⒶtextual note into a military camp down South, where the soldiers were dying in squads from dysentery, was sharply punished. Necessarily the prejudice against the watermelonⒶtextual note was founded upon theory, not experience, and it will probably take the medical fraternity several centuries to find out that the theory is theory only, and has no basis of experience to stand upon.