NewYork, Oct. 26, 1900. 
Dear Mr. Baxter,—­It was a great pleasure to me to renew the other days with you, and there was a pathetic pleasure in seeing Hartford and the house again; but I realize that if we ever enter the house again to live, our hearts will break.  I am not sure that we shall ever be strong enough to endure that strain. 
Sincerely yours,
S. L. Clemens.

Mr. and Mrs. Rogers wished to have them in their neighborhood, but the houses there were not suitable, or were too expensive.  Through Mr. Frank Doubleday they eventually found, at 14 West Tenth Street, a large residence handsomely furnished, and this they engaged for the winter.  “We were lucky to get this big house furnished,” he wrote MacAlister in London.  “There was not another one in town procurable that would answer us, but this one is all right—­space enough in it for several families, the rooms all old-fashioned, great size.”

The little note that follows shows that Mark Twain had not entirely
forgotten the days of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.

To a Neighbor on West Tenth Street, New York: 

Nov. 30.  Dear madam,—­I know I ought to respect my duty and perform it, but I am weak and faithless where boys are concerned, and I can’t help secretly approving pretty bad and noisy ones, though I do object to the kind that ring door-bells.  My family try to get me to stop the boys from holding conventions on the front steps, but I basely shirk out of it, because I think the boys enjoy it.

My wife has been complaining to me this evening about the boys on the front steps and under compulsion I have made some promises.  But I am very forgetful, now that I am old, and my sense of duty is getting spongy. 
                    Very truly yours,
                                   S. L. Clemens.

MARK TWAIN’S LETTERS 1901-1906

ARRANGED WITH COMMENT BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE

VOLUME V.

XL

Letters of 1901, chiefly to Twichell.  Mark twain as A reformer.  Summer at Saranac.  Assassination of president McKINLEY

An editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal, early in 1901, said:  “A remarkable transformation, or rather a development, has taken place in Mark Twain.  The genial humorist of the earlier day is now a reformer of the vigorous kind, a sort of knight errant who does not hesitate to break a lance with either Church or State if he thinks them interposing on that broad highway over which he believes not a part but the whole of mankind has the privilege of passing in the onward march of the ages.”