it.  Yes, you know that, and confess it—­but what were you to do?  Where was your remedy?  Will anybody contend that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, Go, and be obeyed?

No, he cannot; that is certainly true.  Well, then, what is he to do?  I will explain by the suggestion contained in my opening paragraph.  During the nine hours he has written as many as forty- seven furious letters—­in his mind.  If he had put just one of them on paper it would have brought him relief, saved him eight hours of trouble, and given him an hour’s red-hot pleasure besides.

He is not to mail this letter; he understands that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no harm.  He is only writing it to get the bile out.  So to speak, he is a volcano:  imaging himself erupting does no good; he must open up his crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he would get relief.

    Before he has filled his first sheet sometimes the relief is there. 
    He degenerates into good-nature from that point.

Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one writes as many as three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a very angry one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot embers in it here and there.  He pigeonholes these and then does one of two things—­dismisses the whole matter from his mind or writes the proper sort of letter and mails it.

To this day I lose my balance and send an overwarm letter—­or more frequently telegram—­two or three times a year.  But that is better than doing it a hundred times a year, as I used to do years ago.  Perhaps I write about as many as ever, but I pigeonhole them.  They ought not to be thrown away.  Such a letter a year or so old is as good as a sermon to the maw who wrote it.  It makes him feel small and shabby, but—­well, that wears off.  Any sermon does; but the sermon does some little good, anyway.  An old cold letter like that makes you wonder how you could ever have got into such a rage about nothing.

The unmailed answers that were to accompany this introduction were plentiful enough and generally of a fervent sort.  One specimen will suffice.  It was written to the chairman of a hospital committee.

Dear sir,—­If I were Smithfield I would certainly go out and get behind something and blush.  According to your report, “the politicians are afraid to tax the people for the support” of so humane and necessary a thing as a hospital.  And do your “people” propose to stand that?—­at the hands of vermin officials whom the breath of their votes could blow out of official existence in a moment if they had the pluck to band themselves together and blow.  Oh, come, these are not “people”—­they are cowed school-boys with backbones made of boiled macaroni.  If you are not misreporting those “people” you are just in the right business