MARK TWAIN
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,--I venture to think that Mr. Aldington misses the real point of Mark Twain. I speak as an ignoramus, but it seems to me that he is in the authentic line of Lewis Carroll, and that his humour is of the very purest in its own kind. It is by his fun, his delicious absurdity, not his satire, that he will live. The man who wrote that the walls of an American hotel were so thin " you could hear a lady changing her mind through them," that " the report of his death was greatly exaggerated," that " the meek shall inherit the Earth " was spoken of the British, that (when about to visit Rudyard Kipling) he would come in suitable pomp, " riding upon my ayah," that an ancestor of his own " once attended an execu- tion and received injuries from which he died," &c., &c., &c., surely deserved well of mankind. But I am trenching on that most prickly of subjects—what constitutes humour, so I am,
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