getting into better and more flexible shape every
day. Papers are now being drawn which will greatly simplify the raising
of capital; I shall be in supreme command; it will not be necessary for
the capitalist to arrive at terms with anybody but me. I don't want to
dicker with anybody but Jones. I know him; that is to say, I want to
dicker with you, and through you with Jones. Try to see if you can't be
here by the 15th of January.

The machine was as perfect as a watch when we took her apart the other
day; but when she goes together again the 15th of January we expect her
to be perfecter than a watch.

Joe, I want you to sell some royalties to the boys out there, if you
can, for I want to be financially strong when we go to New York. You
know the machine, and you appreciate its future enormous career better
than any man I know. At the lowest conceivable estimate (2,000 machines
a year,) we shall sell 34,000 in the life of the patent--17 years.

All the family send love to you--and they mean it, or they wouldn't say
it.

Yours ever
MARK.

The Yankee had come from the press, and Howells had praised it in
the "Editor's Study" in Harper's Magazine. He had given it his
highest commendation, and it seems that his opinion of it did not
change with time. "Of all fanciful schemes of fiction it pleases me
most," he in one place declared, and again referred to it as
"a greatly imagined and symmetrically developed tale."

In more than one letter to Goodman, Clemens had urged him to come
East without delay. "Take the train, Joe, and come along," he wrote
early in December. And we judge from the following that Joe had
decided to come.

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Dec. 23, '89.

DEAR HOWELLS,--The magazine came last night, and the Study notice is
just great. The satisfaction it affords us could not be more prodigious
if the book deserved every word of it; and maybe it does; I hope it
does, though of course I can't realize it and believe it. But I am your
grateful servant, anyway and always.

I am going to read to the Cadets at West Point Jan. 11. I go from here
to New York the 9th, and up to the Point the 11th. Can't you go with me?
It's great fun. I'm going to read the passages in the "Yankee" in which
the Yankee's West Point cadet