S. L. CLEMENS.

Our Susie is still "Megalops." He gave her that name:

Can you spare a photograph of your father? We have none but the one
taken in a group with ourselves.

William Dean Howells, at the age of forty-five, reached what many
still regard his highest point of achievement in American realism.
His novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, which was running as a Century
serial during the summer of 1882, attracted wide attention, and upon
its issue in book form took first place among his published novels.
Mark Twain, to the end of his life, loved all that Howells wrote.
Once, long afterward, he said: "Most authors give us glimpses of a
radiant moon, but Howells's moon shines and sails all night long."
When the instalments of The Rise of Silas Lapham began to appear, he
overflowed in adjectives, the sincerity of which we need not doubt,
in view of his quite open criticisms of the author's reading
delivery.

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Belmont, Mass.:

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I am in a state of wild enthusiasm over this
July instalment of your story. It's perfectly dazzling--it's
masterly--incomparable. Yet I heard you read it--without losing my
balance. Well, the difference between your reading and your writing
is-remarkable. I mean, in the effects produced and the impression left
behind. Why, the one is to the other as is one of Joe Twichell's yarns
repeated by a somnambulist. Goodness gracious, you read me a chapter,
and it is a gentle, pearly dawn, with a sprinkle of faint stars in it;
but by and by I strike it in print, and shout to myself, "God bless us,
how has that pallid former spectacle been turned into these gorgeous
sunset splendors!"

Well, I don't care how much you read your truck to me, you can't
permanently damage it for me that way. It is always perfectly fresh and
dazzling when I come on it in the magazine. Of course I recognize the
form of it as being familiar--but that is all. That is, I remember it as
pyrotechnic figures which you set up before me, dead and cold, but
ready for the match--and now I see them touched off and all ablaze with
blinding fires. You can read, if you want to, but you don't read worth
a damn. I know you can read, because your readings of Cable and your
repeatings of the German doctor's remarks prove that.

That's the best drunk scene--because the truest--that I ever read. There
are touches in it that I ne