nclose your review to you, for you have evidently read and
corrected it, and so I judge you do not need it. About two days after
the Atlantic issues I mean to begin to send books to principal journals
and magazines.

I read the "Carnival of Crime" proof in New York when worn and witless
and so left some things unamended which I might possibly have altered
had I been at home. For instance, "I shall always address you in your
own S-n-i-v-e-l-i-n-g d-r-a-w-l, baby." I saw that you objected to
something there, but I did not understand what! Was it that it was too
personal? Should the language be altered?--or the hyphens taken out?
Won't you please fix it the way it ought to be, altering the language as
you choose, only making it bitter and contemptuous?

"Deuced" was not strong enough; so I met you halfway with "devilish."

Mrs. Clemens has returned from New York with dreadful sore throat, and
bones racked with rheumatism. She keeps her bed. "Aloha nui!" as the
Kanakas say. MARK.

Henry Irving once said to Mark Twain: "You made a mistake by not
adopting the stage as a profession. You would have made even a
greater actor than a writer."

Mark Twain would have made an actor, certainly, but not a very
tractable one. His appearance in Hartford in "The Loan of a Lover"
was a distinguished event, and his success complete, though he made
so many extemporaneous improvements on the lines of thick-headed
Peter Spuyk, that he kept the other actors guessing as to their
cues, and nearly broke up the performance. It was, of course, an
amateur benefit, though Augustin Daly promptly wrote, offering to
put it on for a long run.

The "skeleton novelette" mentioned in the next letter refers to a
plan concocted by Howells and Clemens, by which each of twelve
authors was to write a story, using the same plot, "blindfolded" as
to what the others had written. It was a regular "Mark Twain"
notion, and it is hard to-day to imagine Howells's continued
enthusiasm in it. Neither he nor Clemens gave up the idea for a
long time. It appears in their letters again and again, though
perhaps it was just as well for literature that it was never carried
out.

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

Apl. 22, 1876.

MY DEAR HOWELLS, You'll see per enclosed slip that I app