Do you notice?  Nothing in the paragraph disturbed him but that one word.  It shows that that paragraph was most ably constructed for the deception it was intended to put upon the reader.  It was my intention that it should read plausibly, and it is now plain that it does; it was my intention that it should be emotional and touching, and you see yourself that it fetched this public instructor.  Alas! if I had but left that one treacherous word out I should have scored, scored everywhere, and the paragraph would have slidden through every reader’s sensibilities like oil and left not a suspicion behind.

The other sample inquiry is from a professor in a New England university.  It contains one naughty word (which I cannot bear to suppress), but he is not in the theological department, so it is no harm: 

    “Dear Mr. Clemens,—­’Far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus
    slept upon motionless wing.’

“It is not often I get a chance to read much periodical literature, but I have just gone through at this belated period, with much gratification and edification, your ’Double-Barrelled Detective Story.’

“But what in hell is an oesophagus?  I keep one myself, but it never sleeps in the air or anywhere else.  My profession is to deal with words, and oesophagus interested me the moment I lighted upon it.  But, as a companion of my youth used to say, ’I’ll be eternally, co-eternally cussed’ if I can make it out.  Is it a joke or am I an ignoramus?”

Between you and me, I was almost ashamed of having fooled that man, but for pride’s sake I was not going to say so.  I wrote and told him it was a joke—­and that is what I am now saying to my Springfield inquirer.  And I told him to carefully read the whole paragraph and he would find not a vestige of sense in any detail of it.  This also I recommend to my Springfield inquirer.

    I have confessed.  I am sorry—­partially.  I will not do so any
    more—­for the present.  Don’t ask me any more questions; let the
    oesophagus have a rest—­on his same old motionless wing.

He wrote Twichell that the story had been a six-day ‘tour de force’, twenty-five thousand words, and he adds: 

How long it takes a literary seed to sprout sometimes!  This seed was planted in your house many years ago when you sent me to bed with a book not heard of by me until then—­Sherlock Holmes . . . .  I’ve done a grist of writing here this summer, but not for publication soon, if ever.  I did write two satisfactory articles for early print, but I’ve burned one of them & have buried the other in my large box of posthumous stuff.  I’ve got stacks of literary remains piled up there.

Early in August Clemens went with H. H. Rogers in his yacht Kanawha on a cruise to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.  Rogers had made up a party, including ex-Speaker Reed, Dr. Rice, and Col.  A. G. Paine.  Young Harry Rogers also made one of the party.  Clemens kept a log of the cruise, certain entries of which convey something of its spirit.  On the 11th, at Yarmouth, he wrote: