pictures for it--some
of them very dainty. Poor devil, what a genius he has and how he does
murder it with rum. He takes a book of mine, and without suggestion from
anybody builds no end of pictures just from his reading of it.

There was never a man in the world so grateful to another as I was to
you day before yesterday, when I sat down (in still rather wretched
health) to set myself to the dreary and hateful task of making final
revision of Tom Sawyer, and discovered, upon opening the package of MS
that your pencil marks were scattered all along. This was splendid, and
swept away all labor. Instead of reading the MS, I simply hunted out the
pencil marks and made the emendations which they suggested. I reduced
the boy battle to a curt paragraph; I finally concluded to cut the
Sunday school speech down to the first two sentences, leaving no
suggestion of satire, since the book is to be for boys and girls; I
tamed the various obscenities until I judged that they no longer carried
offense. So, at a single sitting I began and finished a revision which
I had supposed would occupy 3 or 4. days and leave me mentally and
physically fagged out at the end. I was careful not to inflict the MS
upon you until I had thoroughly and painstakingly revised it. Therefore,
the only faults left were those that would discover themselves to
others, not me--and these you had pointed out.

There was one expression which perhaps you overlooked. When Huck is
complaining to Tom of the rigorous system in vogue at the widow's, he
says the servants harass him with all manner of compulsory decencies,
and he winds up by saying: "and they comb me all to hell." (No
exclamation point.) Long ago, when I read that to Mrs. Clemens, she made
no comment; another time I created occasion to read that chapter to her
aunt and her mother (both sensitive and loyal subjects of the kingdom
of heaven, so to speak) and they let it pass. I was glad, for it was the
most natural remark in the world for that boy to make (and he had been
allowed few privileges of speech in the book;) when I saw that you, too,
had let it go without protest, I was glad, and afraid; too--afraid you
hadn't observed it. Did you? And did you question the propriety of it?
Since the book is now professedly and confessedly a boy's and girl's
hook, that darn word bothers me some, nights, but it never did until I
had ceased to regard the volume as being for adults.

Don't bother to answer now, (fo