d home and fortunes during
the next ten or a dozen years. This was the type-setting machine
investment, which, in the end, all but wrecked Mark Twain's
finances. There is but a brief mention of it in the letter to
Orion, and the letter itself is not worth preserving, but as
references to the "machine" appear with increasing frequency, it
seems proper to record here its first mention. In the same letter
he suggests to his brother that he undertake an absolutely truthful
autobiography, a confession in which nothing is to be withheld. He
cites the value of Casanova's memories, and the confessions of
Rousseau. Of course, any literary suggestion from "Brother Sam" was
gospel to Orion, who began at once piling up manuscript at a great
rate.

Meantime, Mark Twain himself, having got 'A Tramp Abroad' on the
presses, was at work with enthusiasm on a story begun nearly three
years before at Quarry Farm-a story for children-its name, as he
called it then, "The Little Prince and The Little Pauper." He was
presently writing to Howells his delight in the new work.

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Mch. 11, '80.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--... I take so much pleasure in my story that I am loth
to hurry, not wanting to get it done. Did I ever tell you the plot
of it? It begins at 9 a.m., Jan. 27, 1547, seventeen and a half hours
before Henry VIII's death, by the swapping of clothes and place, between
the prince of Wales and a pauper boy of the same age and countenance
(and half as much learning and still more genius and imagination) and
after that, the rightful small King has a rough time among tramps and
ruffians in the country parts of Kent, whilst the small bogus King has a
gilded and worshipped and dreary and restrained and cussed time of it on
the throne--and this all goes on for three weeks--till the midst of the
coronation grandeurs in Westminster Abbey, Feb. 20, when the ragged true
King forces his way in but cannot prove his genuineness--until the bogus
King, by a remembered incident of the first day is able to prove it for
him--whereupon clothes are changed and the coronation proceeds under the
new and rightful conditions.

My idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of the
laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the King
himself and allow