e is at Bliss's grimly pursuing its appointed mission, slowly and
implacably rotting away another man's chances for salvation.

I have sent Bliss word not to donate it to a charity (though it is a
pity to fool away a chance to do a charity an ill turn,) but to let me
know when he has got his dose, because I've got another candidate for
damnation. You just wait a couple of weeks and if you don't see the
Type-Writer come tilting along toward Cambridge with an unsatisfied
appetite in its eye, I lose my guess.

Don't you be mad about this blunder, Howells--it only comes of a bad
memory, and the stupidity which is inseparable from true genius. Nothing
intentionally criminal in it.

Yrs ever
MARK.

It was November when Howells finally fell under the baleful
influence of the machine. He wrote:

"The typewriter came Wednesday night, and is already beginning to
have its effect on me. Of course, it doesn't work: if I can
persuade some of the letters to get up against the ribbon they won't
get down again without digital assistance. The treadle refuses to
have any part or parcel in the performance; and I don't know how to
get the roller to turn with the paper. Nevertheless I have begun
several letters to My d-a-r lemans, as it prefers to spell your
respected name, and I don't despair yet of sending you something in
its beautiful handwriting--after I've had a man out from the agent's
to put it in order. It's fascinating in the meantime, and it wastes
my time like an old friend."

The Clemens family remained in Hartford that summer, with the
exception of a brief season at Bateman's Point, R. I., near
Newport. By this time Mark Twain had taken up and finished the Tom
Sawyer story begun two years before. Naturally he wished Howells to
consider the MS.

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, July 5th, 1875.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I have finished the story and didn't take the chap
beyond boyhood. I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but
autobiographically--like Gil Blas. I perhaps made a mistake in not
writing it in the first person. If I went on, now, and took him into
manhood, he would just like like all the one-horse men in literature and
the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him.