say a softening word or two in defense of Huck’s character since you wish it, but really, in my opinion, it is no better than those of Solomon, David, & the rest of the sacred brotherhood.

If there is an unexpurgated in the Children’s Department, won’t you
please help that young woman remove Tom & Huck from that
questionable companionship?

                  Sincerely yours,
                                S. L. Clemens.

I shall not show your letter to any one-it is safe with me.

Mr. Dickinson naturally kept this letter from the public, though he read it aloud to the assembled librarians, and the fact of its existence and its character eventually leaked out.—­[It has been supplied to the writer by Mr. Dickinson, and is published here with his consent.]—­One of the librarians who had heard it mentioned it at a theater-party in hearing of an unrealized newspaper man.  This was near the end of the following March.

The “tip” was sufficient.  Telephone-bells began to jingle, and groups of newspaper men gathered simultaneously on Mr. Dickinson’s and on Mark Twain’s door-steps.  At a 21 Fifth Avenue you could hardly get in or out, for stepping on them.  The evening papers surmised details, and Huck and Tom had a perfectly fresh crop of advertising, not only in America, but in distant lands.  Dickinson wrote Clemens that he would not give out the letter without his authority, and Clemens replied: 

Be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove!  The newspaper boys want that letter—­don’t you let them get hold of it.  They say you refuse to allow them to see it without my consent.  Keep on refusing, and I’ll take care of this end of the line.

In a recent letter to the writer Mr. Dickinson states that Mark Twain’s solicitude was for the librarian, whom he was unwilling to involve in difficulties with his official superiors, and he adds: 

There may be some doubt as to whether Mark Twain was or was not a religious man, for there are many definitions of the word religion.  He was certainly a hater of conventions, had no patience with sanctimony and bibliolatry, and was perhaps irreverent.  But any one who reads carefully the description of the conflict in Huck’s soul, in regard to the betrayal of Jim, will credit the creator of the scene with deep and true moral feeling.

The reporters thinned out in the course of a few days when no result was forthcoming; but they were all back again presently when the Maxim Gorky fiasco came along.  The distinguished revolutionist, Tchaykoffsky, as a sort of advance agent for Gorky, had already called upon Clemens to enlist his sympathy in their mission, which was to secure funds in the cause of Russian emancipation.  Clemens gave his sympathy, and now promised his aid, though he did not hesitate to discourage the mission.  He said that American enthusiasm in such matters stopped well above their pockets, and that this revolutionary errand would fail.  Howells, too, was of this opinion.  In his account of the episode he says: