days of "authors' readings," and Clemens and Howells
not infrequently assisted at these functions, usually given as
benefits of one kind or another. From the next letter, written
following an entertainment given for the Longfellow memorial, we
gather that Mark Twain's opinion of Howells's reading was steadily
improving.

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, May 5, '85.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--.... Who taught you to read? Observation and thought,
I guess. And practice at the Tavern Club?--yes; and that was the best
teaching of all:

Well, you sent even your daintiest and most delicate and fleeting points
home to that audience--absolute proof of good reading. But you couldn't
read worth a damn a few years ago. I do not say this to flatter. It is
true I looked around for you when I was leaving, but you had already
gone.

Alas, Osgood has failed at last. It was easy to see that he was on the
very verge of it a year ago, and it was also easy to see that he
was still on the verge of it a month or two ago; but I continued to
hope--but not expect that he would pull through. The Library of Humor is
at his dwelling house, and he will hand it to you whenever you want it.

To save it from any possibility of getting mixed up in the failure,
perhaps you had better send down and get it. I told him, the other day,
that an order of any kind from you would be his sufficient warrant for
its delivery to you.

In two days General Grant has dictated 50 pages of foolscap, and thus
the Wilderness and Appomattox stand for all time in his own words. This
makes the second volume of his book as valuable as the first.

He looks mighty well, these latter days.

Yrs Ever
MARK.

"I am exceedingly glad," wrote Howells, "that you approve of my
reading, for it gives me some hope that I may do something on the
platform next winter.... but I would never read within a hundred
miles of you, if I could help it. You simply straddled down to the
footlights and took that house up in the hollow of your hand and
tickled it."

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

ELMIRA, July 21, 1885.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--You are really my only author; I am restricted to you,
I wouldn't give a damn for the rest.

I bo