"DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--It is so long since Archibald Forbes and I
spent that pleasant afternoon in your comfortable house at
Hartford that you have probably quite forgotten the occasion."

In the course of his letter this occurs:

"I am willing to give you" [here he named the terms which he
had given Stanley] "for an antipodean tour to last, say, three
months."

Here was the single essential detail of my letter answered three days
after I had mailed my inquiry. I might have saved myself the trouble and
the postage--and a few years ago I would have done that very thing, for I
would have argued that my sudden and strong impulse to write and ask some
questions of a stranger on the under side of the globe meant that the
impulse came from that stranger, and that he would answer my questions of
his own motion if I would let him alone.

Mr. Smythe's letter probably passed under my nose on its way to lose
three weeks traveling to America and back, and gave me a whiff of its
contents as it went along. Letters often act like that. Instead of the
thought coming to you in an instant from Australia, the (apparently)
unsentient letter imparts it to you as it glides invisibly past your
elbow in the mail-bag.

Next incident. In the following month--March--I was in America. I spent
a Sunday at Irvington-on-the-Hudson with Mr. John Brisben Walker, of the
Cosmopolitan magazine. We came into New York next morning, and went to
the Century Club for luncheon. He said some praiseful things about the