get the dialect as
nearly right as possible.

We are in part of the new house. Goodness knows when we'll get in the
rest of it--full of workmen yet.

I worked a month at my play, and launched it in New York last Wednesday.
I believe it will go. The newspapers have been complimentary. It is
simply a setting for the one character, Col. Sellers--as a play I guess
it will not bear a critical assault in force.

The Warners are as charming as ever. They go shortly to the devil for a
year--(which is but a poetical way of saying they are going to afflict
themselves with the unsurpassable--(bad word) of travel for a spell.)
I believe they mean to go and see you, first-so they mean to start from
heaven to the other place; not from earth. How is that?

I think that is no slouch of a compliment--kind of a dim religious light
about it. I enjoy that sort of thing.

Yrs ever
MARK.

Raymond, in a letter to the Sun, stated that not "one line" of the
California dramatization had been used by Mark Twain, "except that
which was taken bodily from The Gilded Age." Clemens himself, in a
statement that he wrote for the Hartford Post, but suppressed,
probably at the request of his wife, gave a full history of the
play's origin, a matter of slight interest to-day.

Sellers on the stage proved a great success. The play had no
special merit as a literary composition, but the character of
Sellers delighted the public, and both author and actor were richly
repaid for their entertainment.

XIV. LETTERS 1874. MISSISSIPPI CHAPTERS. VISITS TO BOSTON. A JOKE ON
ALDRICH.

"Couldn't you send me some such story as that colored one
for our January number--that is, within a month?" wrote
Howells, at the end of September, and during the week
following Mark Twain struggled hard to comply, but without
result. When the month was nearly up he wrote:

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Oct. 23, 1874.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I have delayed thus long, hoping I might do something
for the January number and Mrs. Clemens has diligently persecuted me
day by day with urgings to go to work and do that something, but it's
no use--I find I can't. We are in such a state of weary and endless
confusion that my head won't go. So I give it up.