You are correct, Amos, and I accept your criticism wholeheartedly. For even though my old friend Sam Clemens wrote

Who write the dramatic critiques for the second-rate papers? Why, a parcel of promoted shoemakers and apprentice apothecaries, who know just as much about good acting as I do about good farming and no more. Who review the books? People who never wrote one. Who do up the heavy leaders on finance? Parties who have had the largest opportunities for knowing nothing about it. Who criticise the Indian campaigns? Gentlemen who do not know a war-whoop from a wigwam, and who never have had to run a foot race with a tomahawk, or pluck arrows out of the several members of their families to build the evening camp-fire with. Who write the temperance appeals, and clamor about the flowing bowl? Folks who will never draw another sober breath till they do it in the grave.

I cannot fault what you said. Sam also wrote "Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place" because "Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand."

But I shall in the future endeavor to live by your wise precepts. Nuanced shall I be, nuances upon nuances shall flounder about in my writings. For though I admit to being the scion of a long tradition in American writing I shall eschew ad Califoriem remarks and limit myself to (probably vain) attempts to copy such wit as that of Pope, Swift, and Dryden.

Please forgive me for my past peccadilloes. I shall make whatever penance seems appropriate, tho' it be sackcloth and hot ashes.