Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/156

 MARK TWAIN

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 con tents 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^oo 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 character of the club and the orderly serenity and pleasantness of its quarters, and asked if I had never tried to acquire membership in it. I said I had not,

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