For forty years his English has been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities—clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and enforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing—he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing world. _Sustained._ I intrench myself behind that protecting word. There are others who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, but only by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howell’s moon sails cloudless skies all night and all the nights. MISCELLANEOUS (1905–9) MAKING THE OYSTER You can’t make an oyster out of nothing, nor you can’t do it in a day. You’ve got to start with a vast variety of invertebrates, the belemnites, trilobites, jubusites, amalekites, and that sort of fry, and put them in to soak in a primary sea and observe and wait what will happen. Some of them will turn out a disappointment; the belemnites and the amalekites and such will be failures, and they will die out and become extinct in the course of the nineteen million years covered by the experiment; but all is not lost, for the jubusites will develop gradually into encrinites and stalactites and blatherskites, and one thing and another, as the mighty ages creep on and the periods pile their lofty crags in the primordial seas, and at last the first grand stages in the preparation of the world for man stands completed, the oyster is done. Now an oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a man has, so it is probable that this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen million years was a preparation for _him_. That would be just like an oyster, and, anyway, this one could not know at that early date that he was only an incident in the scheme, and that there was some more to the scheme yet. (Mark Twain—A Biography). THE FATALITY OF SEQUENCE When the first living atom found itself afloat on the great Laurentian sea the first act of that first atom led to the _second_ act of that first atom, and so on down through the succeeding ages of all life, until, if the steps could be traced, it would be shown that the first act of that first atom has led inevitably to the act of my standing in my dressing gown at this instant, talking to you. (Mark Twain—A Biography). LIFE’S TURNING POINT