Connecticut"--which reminds me that today's Tribune says there
will be a startling article in the current Atlantic, in which a being
which is tangible bud invisible will figure-exactly the case with
the sketch of mine which I am talking about! However, mine can lie
unpublished a year or two as well as not--though I wish that contributor
of yours had not interfered with his coincidence of heroes.

But what I am coming at, is this: won't you and Mrs. Howells come down
Saturday the 22nd and remain to the Club on Monday night? We always have
a rattling good time at the Club and we do want you to come, ever so
much. Will you? Now say you will. Mrs. Clemens and I are persuading
ourselves that you twain will come.

My volume of sketches is doing very well, considering the times;
received my quarterly statement today from Bliss, by which I perceive
that 20,000 copies have been sold--or rather, 20,000 had been sold 3
weeks ago; a lot more, by this time, no doubt.

I am on the sick list again--and was, day before yesterday--but on the
whole I am getting along.

Yrs ever
MARK

Howells wrote that he could not come down to the club meeting,
adding that sickness was "quite out of character" for Mark Twain,
and hardly fair on a man who had made so many other people feel
well. He closed by urging that Bliss "hurry out" 'Tom Sawyer.'
"That boy is going to make a prodigious hit." Clemens answered:

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Boston.

HARTFORD, Jan. 18, '76.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Thanks, and ever so many, for the good opinion of 'Tom
Sawyer.' Williams has made about 300 rattling 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 re