MARK TWAIN'S LATEST.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3232, 8 November 1881, Page 4

MARK TWAIN'S LATEST.

Mark Twain, in a letter to Josh Billines. remonstrates with him follows :—" It does seem to me that you speli worse every day. Sometimes your orthography makes me frantic. It is out of all reasons that a man, seventy-five yi-ars of age, should spell as you do. Why do you not attend a night school ? You might at least get the hang •>f the easy words. I am sending you a primer by this mail which I know will help you, if you study ifc hard. Now is the most favorable time yon have had in seventy years, now that you are just entering your second childhood. It ought to come really easy to you. Many people believe that in the dominion of natural history you stand without a peer. There iz only two men in the world who make any blunders, and they are vu and me, my friend. It is acknowledged on all sides that you have thrown new light on the mule and also on other birds of the same family; that you have ably augmented the world's admiration of the splendid plumage of the kangaroo—or possibly it might have been the cockatoo—but I know it was one of these bivalves, or the other ; that you have uplifted the hornet and given him his just place among the flora of our country ; and that you have aroused an interest never felt before in every fur-bearing animal from the occult rhinoceros clear down to the domestic cow of the present geologic period. These researches ought not to die, but what can you expect ? Yale University desires to use them as text books of the natural history department of that institution, 7)ut they cannot stand the spelling.—You will take kindly what I am saying; I only wish to make you understand that-even the profoundest science must perish and be lost to fcJ>e world when ifc is couched in such inhuman orthography as yours. Even the very first word in your annual is an atrocity ; * Allminax' is no way to build that word, lean speli better than that with my left hand."