t the time I get back. Bother it all, I wanted to
astonish you with a chapter or two from Orion's latest book--not the
seventeen which he has begun in the last four months, but the one which
he began last week.

Last night, when I went to bed, Mrs. Clemens said, "George didn't take
the cat down to the cellar--Rosa says he has left it shut up in the
conservatory." So I went down to attend to Abner (the cat.) About 3 in
the morning Mrs. C. woke me and said, "I do believe I hear that cat
in the drawing-room--what did you do with him?" I answered up with the
confidence of a man who has managed to do the right thing for once, and
said "I opened the conservatory doors, took the library off the alarm,
and spread everything open, so that there wasn't any obstruction between
him and the cellar." Language wasn't capable of conveying this woman's
disgust. But the sense of what she said, was, "He couldn't have done any
harm in the conservatory--so you must go and make the entire house free
to him and the burglars, imagining that he will prefer the coal-bins to
the drawing-room. If you had had Mr. Howells to help you, I should have
admired but not been astonished, because I should know that together
you would be equal to it; but how you managed to contrive such a stately
blunder all by yourself, is what I cannot understand."

So, you see, even she knows how to appreciate our gifts.

Brisk times here.--Saturday, these things happened: Our neighbor
Chas. Smith was stricken with heart disease, and came near joining the
majority; my publisher, Bliss, ditto, ditto; a neighbor's child died;
neighbor Whitmore's sixth child added to his five other cases of
measles; neighbor Niles sent for, and responded; Susie Warner down,
abed; Mrs. George Warner threatened with death during several hours; her
son Frank, whilst imitating the marvels in Barnum's circus bills, thrown
from his aged horse and brought home insensible: Warner's friend Max
Yortzburgh, shot in the back by a locomotive and broken into 32 distinct
pieces and his life threatened; and Mrs. Clemens, after writing all
these cheerful things to Clara Spaulding, taken at midnight, and if the
doctor had not been pretty prompt the contemplated Clemens would have
called before his apartments were ready.

However, everybody is all right, now, except Yortzburg, and he is
mending--that is, he is being mended. I knocked off, during these
stirring times, and don't intend to go to work again til