g, because that would
look as if I thought it worth keeping, whereas it is only worth glancing
at and casting aside.

Will you please present my compliments to Mrs. De Winton and Mrs.
Mackenzie?--and I beg to make my sincere compliments to you, also, for
your infinite kindnesses to me. I did have a delightful time up there,
most certainly.

Truly yours
S. L. CLEMENS.

P. S. Although the introduction dates a year back, the book is only just
now issued. A good long delay.

S. L. C.

Howells, writing from Venice, in April, manifested special interest
in the play project: "Something that would run like Scheherazade,
for a thousand and one nights," so perhaps his book was going
better. He proposed that they devote the month of October to the
work, and inclosed a letter from Mallory, who owned not only a
religious paper, The Churchman, but also the Madison Square Theater,
and was anxious for a Howells play. Twenty years before Howells had
been Consul to Venice, and he wrote, now: "The idea of my being here
is benumbing and silencing. I feel like the Wandering Jew, or the
ghost of the Cardiff giant."

He returned to America in July. Clemens sent him word of welcome,
with glowing reports of his own undertakings. The story on which he
was piling up MS. was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, begun
seven years before at Quarry Farm. He had no great faith in it
then, and though he had taken it up again in 1880, his interest had
not lasted to its conclusion. This time, however, he was in the
proper spirit, and the story would be finished.

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

ELMIRA, July 20, '83.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--We are desperately glad you and your gang are home
again--may you never travel again, till you go aloft or alow. Charley
Clark has gone to the other side for a run--will be back in August. He
has been sick, and needed the trip very much.

Mrs. Clemens had a long and wasting spell of sickness last Spring,
but she is pulling up, now. The children are booming, and my health is
ridiculous, it's so robust, notwithstanding the newspaper misreports.

I haven't piled up MS so in years as I have done since we came here to
the farm three weeks and a half ago. Why, it's like old times, to step