right into the study, damp from the breakfast table, and sail right in
and sail right on, the whole day long, without thought of running short
of stuff or words.

I wrote 4000 words to-day and I touch 3000 and upwards pretty often, and
don't fall below 1600 any working day. And when I get fagged out, I lie
abed a couple of days and read and smoke, and then go it again for 6 or
7 days. I have finished one small book, and am away along in a big 433
one that I half-finished two or three years ago. I expect to complete it
in a month or six weeks or two months more. And I shall like it, whether
anybody else does or not.

It's a kind of companion to Tom Sawyer. There's a raft episode from it
in second or third chapter of life on the Mississippi.....

I'm booming, these days--got health and spirits to waste--got an
overplus; and if I were at home, we would write a play. But we must do
it anyhow by and by.

We stay here till Sep. 10; then maybe a week at Indian Neck for sea air,
then home.

We are powerful glad you are all back; and send love according.

Yrs Ever
MARK

*****

To Onion Clemens and family, in Keokuk, Id.:

ELMIRA, July 22, '83.
Private.

DEAR MA AND ORION AND MOLLIE,--I don't know that I have anything new
to report, except that Livy is still gaining, and all the rest of us
flourishing. I haven't had such booming working-days for many years. I
am piling up manuscript in a really astonishing way. I believe I shall
complete, in two months, a book which I have been fooling over for 7
years. This summer it is no more trouble to me to write than it is to
lie.

Day before yesterday I felt slightly warned to knock off work for one
day. So I did it, and took the open air. Then I struck an idea for the
instruction of the children, and went to work and carried it out. It
took me all day. I measured off 817 feet of the road-way in our farm
grounds, with a foot-rule, and then divided it up among the English
reigns, from the Conqueror down to 1883, allowing one foot to the year.
I whittled out a basket of little pegs and drove one in the ground at
the beginning of each reign, and gave it that King's name--thus:

I measured all the reigns exactly as many feet to the reign as there
were years in it. You can look out over the grounds and see the little
pegs from the front door--some of them close together, like Rich