“Young friend! I like that! You ought to see him now.”
It seemed startlingly strange to hear a person call you young. It was a brick out of a blue sky, and knocked me groggy for a moment. Ah me, the pathos of it is, that we were young then. And he—why, so was he, but he didn't know it. He didn't even know it 9 years later, when we saw him approaching and you warned me, saying, “Don't say anything about age—he has just turned fifty, and thinks he is old and broods over it.”
[Well, Clara did sing! And you wrote her a dear letter.]
Time to go to sleep.
Yours ever,
MARK.
To Daniel Kiefer:
[No date.]
DANL KIEFER ESQ. DEAR SIR,—I should be far from willing to have a political party named after me.
I would not be willing to belong to a party which allowed its members to have political aspirations or to push friends forward for political preferment.