be invented.  Fancy is not needed to give variety to the history of the Chinaman’s sojourn in America.  Plain fact is amply sufficient.”  The letters show how the supposed Chinese writer of them had set out for America, believing it to be a land whose government was based on the principle that all men are created equal, and treated accordingly; how, upon arriving in San Francisco, he was kicked and bruised and beaten, and set upon by dogs, flung into jail, tried and condemned without witnesses, his own race not being allowed to testify against Americans—­Irish-Americans—­in the San Francisco court.  They are scathing, powerful letters, and one cannot read them, even in this day of improved conditions, without feeling the hot waves of resentment and indignation which Mark Twain must have felt when he penned them.

Reverend Mr. Talmage was not the only divine to receive attention in the “Memoranda.”  The Reverend Mr. Sabine, of New York, who had declined to hold a church burial service for the old actor, George Holland, came in for the most caustic as well as the most artistic stricture of the entire series.  It deserves preservation to-day, not only for its literary value, but because no finer defense of the drama, no more searching sermon on self-righteousness, has ever been put into concrete form. —­["The Indignity Put Upon the Remains of Gorge Holland by the Rev. Mr. Sabine”; Galaxy for February, 1871.  The reader will find it complete under Appendix J, at the end of last volume.]

The “Little Church Around the Corner” on Twenty-ninth Street received that happy title from this incident.

“There is a little church around the corner that will, perhaps, permit the service,” Mr. Sabine had said to Holland’s friends.

The little church did permit the service, and there was conferred upon it the new name, which it still bears.  It has sheltered a long line of actor folk and their friends since then, earning thereby reverence, gratitude, and immortal memory.—­[Church of the Transfiguration.  Memorial services were held there for Joseph Jefferson; and a memorial window, by John La Farge, has been placed there in memory of Edwin Booth.]

Of the Galaxy contributions a number are preserved in Sketches New and Old.  “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper” is one of the best of these —­an excellent example of Mark Twain’s more extravagant style of humor.  It is perennially delightful; in France it has been dramatized, and is still played.

A successful Galaxy feature, also preserved in the Sketches, was the “Burlesque Map of Paris,” reprinted from the Express.  The Franco-Prussian War was in progress, and this travesty was particularly timely.  It creates only a smile of amusement to-day, but it was all fresh and delightful then.  Schuyler Colfax, by this time Vice-President, wrote to him:  “I have had the heartiest possible laugh over it, and so have all my family.  You are a wicked, conscienceless wag, who ought to be punished severely.”