it saves me the labor of stating my own long-cherished opinions and
reflections and resentments by doing it lucidly and fervently and
irascibly for me.

There is one thing that always puzzles me: as inheritors of the mentality
of our reptile ancestors we have improved the inheritance by a thousand
grades; but in the matter of the morals which they left us we have gone
backward as many grades. That evolution is strange, and to me
unaccountable and unnatural. Necessarily we started equipped with their
perfect and blemishless morals; now we are wholly destitute; we have no
real, morals, but only artificial ones--morals created and preserved by
the forced suppression of natural and hellish instincts. Yet we are dull
enough to be vain of them. Certainly we are a sufficiently comical
invention, we humans.
Sincerely Yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.


Mark Twain's own books were always being excommunicated by some
librarian, and the matter never failed to invite the attention and
amusement of the press, and the indignation of many correspondents.
Usually the books were Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, the morals of which
were not regarded as wholly exemplary. But in 1907 a small library,
in a very small town, attained a day's national notoriety by putting
the ban on Eve's Diary, not so much on account of its text as for
the chaste and exquisite illustrations by Lester Ralph. When the
reporters came in a troop to learn about it, the author said: "I
believe this time the trouble is mainly with the pictures. I did
not draw them. I wish I had--they are so beautiful."