FAVORS FROM CORRESPONDENTS.
One writes me as follows, in a journalistic hand from New York:
"I want to tell you a little new joke, if your publishers have not been beforehand and made it antique: A canvassar -- one of those individuals that sell 'compact concentration of solid wisdom' -- came across a Yankee divine, away in some interior hamlet of Massachusetts, and desired him to subscribe to a work entitled 'The Innocents Abroad.' The seller of wit, thinking that the minister might wish to know something of the contents of the work, pointed out several chapters bearing on the state of the church in Italy, and matters of religious and Biblical import. But all this did not induce the divine to purchase the work, though he was still undecided. At last he pointed to a woodcut of the tomb of Adam, and read the accompanying remarks thereto, of Mark Twain weeping and moralizing at the grave of his blood-relation Adam. 'What!' shouted the minister, 'if a man is silly enough to sit down and bawl at the tomb of Adam and call him a blood-relation, he deserves to be read by no one. No, sir! I don't want this book -- I wouldn't have it -- the great snivelling, overgrown calf!' "
