MARK TWAIN
The Lost Sweetheart
I was 22 when I met her and she 16. It was in a dream.
Go on with the story. Meetings extended over years.
Both are as young as ever, always. First time she jumps
across a brook ahead, and when I am about to follow a
steamboat rushes along and when it gets by she has
vanished and the brook is a mile wide. Put in such things.
Aug. 4, '98. Finished "My Platonic Sweetheart" a day
or so ago.
This was the story outlined as the Lost Sweet-
heart—a lovely dream fancy, published in Har-
per's Magazine two years after his death, and now
included in his collected works.
Aug. 7? '98. I think a few monarchs have died here
and there during the past year, I do not remember. It
made a great silence. Bismarck has been dead five or
six days now, but the reverberatings from that mighty
fall still go quaking and thundering around the planet,
If a king should jump overboard from a ship and save a
life, it would last in history ten thousand years. A sailor
who should jump over and save a ham would risk liis
life, be just as heroic and would be moved by the same
impulse.
For man to risk his life (and lose it) for the sake of a
friend, a child, a battalion, a king, a country, is no large
matter, it has been done a billion times, it is done every
day by firemen and by soldiers at #8 a month (1898).
For a God to take three days on a Cross out of a life of
eternal happiness and mastership of the universe is a
service which the least among us would be glad to do
upon the like terms. The world's population is 1,500,000,-
ooo; if the offer was made there would be 1,500,000,000
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